City of Tranquil Light

by Bo Caldwell

  The church was growing quickly, and as the wholesale market was available to us only on Sundays, the church rented two houses nearby, the larger one to serve as the church’s office and meeting rooms and the smaller one as a residence for Katherine and me. When we had been with the church for a year, a second minister joined us, a Chinese-American preacher who spoke Cantonese, which allowed us to reach a much larger portion of the city’s Chinese community. As the church continued to grow and the 9:30 service became better attended, we added additional ones and learned to make use of every bit of space. Sunday school classes met in the rental house, on the stairs or in the kitchen when necessary, and, on one rainy day, inside of a school bus. The church took a new name—First Chinese Church of Los Angeles—and a few years later, when we needed still larger quarters, we were able to purchase an old warehouse nearby and convert it into a meeting hall that could hold three hundred worshippers.

  The people at First Chinese Church captured my heart from the morning we met. Because we knew where they were from, we knew them; we knew what they had left and what their customs were and what made them laugh, and to an extent we knew their pasts. I began to see that if we could not grow old in China, perhaps we could grow old with Chinese friends. And with family: for the first time in our adult lives, we had relatives nearby. Although Edward and Naomi Geisler and their older son, Paul, were still in China, the Geislers’ second son, John, and their daughter, Madeleine, had settled in Southern California. John practiced medicine in Ventura, and Madeleine and her husband and children lived in Sierra Madre, a small town east of Pasadena in the San Gabriel foothills. Our nephew and niece were kind to us to a fault; they visited often and included us in their family celebrations, and we shared any news we had from their parents and brother. To be able to know as adults the children we’d known in China was a gift I had not foreseen. It seemed a gift for them as well; we were stand-in parents and grandparents, and we knew firsthand what others never could: their lives in China.

  The joy I derived from our work in Los Angeles surprised me, as did the ease of our lives, and I felt a tightness within me unravel for the first time in decades. It had to do with Katherine; I had not realized until I stopped worrying about her how concerned I had been in China. Her improved physical health in Los Angeles led me to believe that she felt the same about me. She gained weight and for the first time in her life the angles of her face softened and her body grew round and even a little plump. She slept soundly through the night, sometimes not waking until nine in the morning, formerly unheard of in our married life.

  June 23, 1939

  Late last night a woman from our church appeared on our doorstep. She was very distraught, and when Will brought her inside and she had calmed down a bit, she confessed that she had stolen a pair of shoes from Woolworth’s. The shoes were for her daughter, who wants to be, as she said, an up-to-date American-not-Chinese girl. The daughter had seen the shoes at Woolworth’s a few days earlier and wanted them desperately, and when the woman had seen them again that day she had thought of her daughter, a good and dutiful girl. The woman didn’t have enough money for them, and in that reckless moment she took them. She regretted it as soon as she was outside of the store, but was too afraid to go inside and right her wrong. Instead she hurried home and told her daughter she was ill, then hid the shoes in her closet and locked herself in her bedroom for the afternoon, crying, certain that the police were going to appear on her doorstep any moment. Only after several hours had passed and it was dark did she risk venturing outside and coming to us.

  Will and I listened to her story, and I saw the kindness in Will’s expression. When she finished, he spoke to her in simple English—as she is from the south of China, we don’t understand her Cantonese nor she our Mandarin. “What you did was wrong,” he said gently, “but your reason was your love of your daughter.” He began to speak to her of faith and of asking for God’s help, instead of relying on our own flawed solutions when faced with need. He said he could see that she felt truly remorseful, and as he was concerned that if she confessed to the store she might be prosecuted, he worked out a plan with her so that she could keep the shoes and pay for them anonymously. An imperfect solution, he said, but perhaps the right one. She listened to him gratefully and agreed to his plan.

  As Will spoke, I sat next to the woman on our sofa. I had made tea, and I stroked her back as she spoke, trying to calm her, for I felt her turmoil and wanted to ease her pain. In China, I helped to alleviate physical suffering; here the people suffer not so much from those ailments (though some do, and I have found myself acting as unofficial nurse) as from those of the heart. They are homesick and displaced; with their minds and hearts still in China or Hong Kong or Formosa, they work at adapting to their new lives and American ways with a determination that awes and moves me.

  They have a great friend in Will, for I know he feels the same at times. I see a sadness and a sense of loss in him, despite his efforts to hide them. I know if it were not for me he would return to China, and I ache for him. He borrows the same book from the library over and over again and pores over it, rereading the author’s descriptions of life in China at the beginning of this century. I see the wistfulness and longing on his face as he reads then pauses to gaze out the window at our tidy American garden. Sometimes at the church when he is speaking in Mandarin he becomes more youthful before my eyes.

  I see as never before that he would do anything for me. He already has; he’s left China.

  In June of 1941, our telephone rang late in the night. This was not unusual; our congregation felt the liberty to call when they needed help, whatever the hour. The caller that night was not a member of our church but our niece, Madeleine, who had herself just received the sad news she was relaying to us: her mother had passed away three days earlier. It had taken that long for Edward to send word halfway around the world from their home in the far northwest of China to southern California. Madeleine knew little of the circumstances of Naomi’s death beyond the fact that she had died in her sleep.

  For the next few days Katherine waited anxiously for more information about her sister’s passing, from Madeleine or even from Edward himself. What she received instead was completely unexpected and unlikely: a letter from Naomi, written four months before her death.

  February 12, 1941

  Meine liebe Katherine,

  You must be wondering whether your older sister has forgotten how to write a letter or whether she is just plain negligent. The truth is that I have sat down to write to you many times, but with the postal service as disrupted as it is due to the war, the likelihood of a letter making its way to you in faraway California has seemed so slight that I have given up before I started. So yesterday when a doctor passing through our town said he was traveling to Shanghai and would be willing to deliver my letter to someone leaving for the U.S., my heart leapt. I will send this off with many prayers and hope it finds its way into your hands.

  We have moved farther west to escape the Japanese occupation and are now in the mountains of the southern part of Kansu province. Our surroundings are remote, to say the least. I see a wolf lurking about now and then, and our home is primitive—two rooms with an earthen floor, straw on wooden boards for a bed, oiled paper for windowpanes—with an assembly hall elsewhere. Edward says the house is so small that he must step outside to change his mind, and that is just about right. Some would say we are moving backward: our lives are becoming less comfortable rather than more so, and I will admit to you that this undertaking has been more difficult than we expected. I feel older than my sixty-two years; breathing is often difficult and I am nearly always cold and uncomfortable in one way or another, all of which have caused this visiting doctor to believe I have a weak heart that is strained by the higher altitude here. Perhaps he is right, or perhaps I am simply fatigued. Whatever the case, I am at peace. My life has been fuller than I ever could have dreamed: to serve in China for forty years! I know our children are wel
l and grounded in the faith, and I love Edward even more as we get older. His zeal increases with his age, and we are keeping on keeping on. Please pray for him, Katherine. He is not so young either.

  There is but one thorn in my side: that you are not here. When you and Will came to China I imagined the two of us growing into stout old ladies together. That is not to be, but I thank God for the years we shared this continent. It is a great blessing to have a sister, and a greater blessing still when she is a sister in Christ.

  Last week we had a feast, and I thought of you so. Some departing soldiers of one army or another—bless them, whoever they are—had hidden then forgotten a stash of delicacies in the assembly hall, which they used as a barracks. Time passed and along came Edward, taking the last few pieces of wood the soldiers had stored in the cellar and finding underneath them treasures we’ve not seen in decades: coffee, sugar, condensed milk, and chocolate. Chocolate, Katherine! When Edward burst in on me with it all, we laughed like children, and I wished you were here so that I could share it with you. As a youngster you took such pleasure in even the smallest of treats I would bring you—a flower, a scrap of cloth, a fresh pencil, a sweet. You would hold your treasure so carefully and stare at it with such awe that I wished I could bring you something every day of the year. I would have if I could.

  The doctor is waiting for my letter, and as patience does not seem to be one of his gifts, I must close. Embrace my sweet Madeleine and John for me when you see them, and forgive my brevity, little sister. But you have always known what is in my heart without my having to speak it. You are with me always, dear Katherine, as I am with you.

  In Christ Jesus, our dear Lord,

  Your Naomi

  July 30, 1941

  When I learned of Naomi’s passing, I was tormented by questions I could not answer. I wanted desperately to know her state of mind, and whether she had been in pain, and if she had been unwell. Then her letter arrived, and in her peace I found my own. While her absence leaves a great chasm in my life, there is also a strange kind of relief; when I wake in the night and think of her, I am no longer afraid of the illnesses and accidents that might befall her. I know she is safe and at peace, and that I will see her again, in Paradise.

  But there is sadness nonetheless. Each new loss makes the pain of earlier losses fresh again, and I have thought often of Lily’s death. I’ve also recalled how Naomi comforted me, and I have tried to do the same for Madeleine, who is bereft without her mother on this earth. I sit with her and stroke her hair while she cries, I listen to her, and I tell her what I have learned, which is that we grieve deeply because we have loved deeply, and that we do heal. As she dries her tears, Madeleine thanks me, but when I leave her, I know it is I who should be thanking her. In consoling her I am consoled, and my sister feels as close as my breath.

  Pastor Yee, the Cantonese-speaking pastor who joined our church six years after we did, was a truly wise man, a strong Christian with a Buddhist’s calm acceptance of both the world as it is and God’s will. I learned a great deal from him. At one of our first meetings together, as I explained my ideas about how the church might continue to grow and thrive, Pastor Yee listened patiently without saying a word. When I finished, he still did not speak. Somewhat annoyed, I asked for his thoughts on my exciting and (to my mind) forward-thinking plans. He smiled kindly and held his hand out to me, palm up, fingers open and relaxed. “Pastor Kiehn,” he said, “I have learned to hold my plans like so, with an open palm. This reminds me that they are my ideas, not God’s. For when I begin to think that my thoughts and God’s are one and the same, I sense amusement from my Lord.”

  I smiled too, for I suspected God had smiled over many of my plans. My plans for old age, for example, and for the quiet decades Katherine and I would spend together as we aged gracefully side by side. These were my plans, not His, as I was to learn.

  When we had been at First Chinese Church for ten years, Pastor Yee’s wife took me aside one Sunday after church and carefully asked if Mrs. Kiehn was feeling all right. Had she been ill lately? I said no, but that she was perhaps tired, and I cut the conversation short, for it was one I did not want to have.

  That Katherine was failing no one knew better than I. The changes had begun so slowly that they were at first easy to ignore. At times she seemed disoriented and she struggled over small decisions such as what to wear or what to eat. She had begun to repeat things to me, sometimes in the space of several minutes, and she was becoming quieter and more withdrawn around others, whether because she couldn’t hear them or because she couldn’t follow the conversation I didn’t know. She tired more easily, but when I encouraged her to get more rest, she bristled at my concern.

  For some months I didn’t worry about any of this; or, more accurately, I didn’t let myself dwell on it. Because I did not want to know what I knew, I told myself that age and fatigue accounted for the changes I was seeing. I could certainly feel myself getting older, and I decided Katherine was probably seeing the same sorts of odd behaviors in me. But as time passed, I had more trouble believing my watered-down reasoning. Then Katherine’s sixtieth birthday came and, with it, the end of my denial.

  To supplement our income, I worked as a gardener on the days I was not needed by the church. I enjoyed this work a great deal and found it strengthened me physically and encouraged me spiritually. I had worked outside all my life, first on the farm and later in China, and continuing to do so gave my life continuity. I pruned trees, shaped hedges, picked oranges, and weeded and mowed lawns, on Mondays at the Presbyterian Church down the street from us and on Saturdays for an elderly woman who lived in a large home surrounded by beautiful grounds, a bus ride from our home in Altadena.

  Mrs. Henley was a lifelong Episcopalian and the well-to-do widow of an insurance executive, and she let me know when she hired me that she considered gardening to be beneath the pastor of a church. She said surely there was more fitting work for a man with my experience, and she often asked how much longer I would need to continue with it and seemed embarrassed when she paid me on the last Saturday of each month. I ignored her concerns; Katherine and I needed the extra income and I was grateful for the work, particularly during wartime. Because of my fluency in Mandarin, I had been asked by the government to assist in translation relating to the war effort, but my Mennonite background had made me a pacifist and I declined. I had never so much as carried a firearm, and assisting the military in any way did not seem that far removed.

  The second Saturday of November of 1944 was Katherine’s sixtieth birthday. As I gardened that day I was glum; I had no gift for her and no money to buy one. In China we had lived from hand to mouth because we wanted as much money as possible to go into our work; the less we spent on ourselves, the more we were able to spend on those around us. In the United States we found ourselves still living hand to mouth, for although our salary was adequate there was still much need around us and our day-to-day living was more expensive than we had ever known. We accepted these things and for the most part weren’t bothered by them.

  Because we had paid our rent and utilities the day before, I had no money on that Saturday, and I would not have any for another week. This wasn’t the first time in our marriage I had been unable to buy Katherine a present; in thirty-six years of marriage she had received precious few gifts at all and even fewer of any value. She had always made it clear that she didn’t care about possessions, but the thought of going home empty-handed that day grieved me nevertheless.

  I was so downcast as I pruned the roses and trimmed the bottlebrush and bougainvillea that I didn’t notice Mrs. Henley standing in the driveway until she spoke.

  “Pastor Kiehn,” she said solemnly.

  I turned away from the bougainvillea. “Mrs. Henley?”

  She seemed to evaluate me and said, “You are not yourself today.”

  Her comment startled me, though it shouldn’t have. She was very observant, and I was often aware of her watching me work from the ba
y windows on the south side of the house. “I suppose I’m not,” I said.

  “Is there a reason?” she asked.

  I hesitated. Mrs. Henley had the ability to see through half-truths, and in the past when I had not been completely forthcoming with her, she had found me out immediately. I did not repeat my mistake. “Today is Mrs. Kiehn’s birthday and I am short on funds,” I said.

  Mrs. Henley looked pained, and for a moment I was afraid she was going to offer to pay me early, which I didn’t want, though it wouldn’t have mattered anyway; it was late Saturday afternoon, and the stores had all closed. She smoothed her hands over her skirt, a habit she had when giving instructions, and said, “Then you must make do with what you have.” She gestured to the garden behind me. “Take what you like, Pastor. Cut every flower, if you want. All women love flowers; surely Mrs. Kiehn is no exception.”

  Mrs. Henley stared out at the garden. I followed her gaze and saw blue and green hydrangeas, orange birds of paradise, red bottlebrush, and pink camellias. Along the lawn were coral roses, white hibiscus, fuschia gerbera daisies, and yellow chrysanthemums. For a moment I felt my pride take an interest in the proceedings, wanting to turn down Mrs. Henley’s offer, but I ignored it. “That would be wonderful,” I said. “Thank you.”

  She waved my words away and went inside.

  I turned back to my work, and when it was done I took the pruning shears and several sheets of newspaper from the gardening shed and began to gather flowers in Mrs. Henley’s beautiful garden for my beautiful wife. When I had wrapped it all in the newspaper, the enormous bouquet looked like a small shrub and was so large I had to hold it in both arms. As I was leaving the yard, I glanced up at the bay window and saw Mrs. Henley at her post, watching me. I held the bouquet out toward her, and she smiled and nodded her approval.

  I hugged the flowers awkwardly to me as I rode the bus home, and when I got off at my stop and started toward our house, I saw Katherine waiting for me in our front yard half a block away, something that didn’t surprise me, for while she didn’t care about expensive gifts, she had always loved any kind of party or celebration. As I walked toward her, my heart beat like that of a young man newly in love, and when she began to walk toward me and to see what I held, she smiled as if she felt the same.