by Jennifer Lin
Zhan Aimei had been a bright student. Since she had shown promise, the missionaries sent her to a bigger and better boarding school for high school girls in Fuzhou. After graduation, she followed a path laid out for her by returning to Funing to teach at the school she had attended as a child. Training more Chinese teachers was a vital part of the mission system of schools. The other was molding girls into proper brides for boys who would become Chinese catechists. The mission teachers considered it a failure if a Christian convert married a nonbeliever. But most of the country girls already were betrothed by the time they arrived at the school. The fate of some was sealed in infancy; in the business of marriage, the younger the bride, the less a groom’s family had to pay.
Zhan Aimei, coming from humble roots, had no engagement plans. The missionaries played matchmaker and thought the young teacher would make a fine wife for one of Dr. Taylor’s assistants, Lin Dao’an. With much joy and relief for the Funing Christians, they wed in 1893 and celebrated with a banquet at a dining hall. In keeping with custom, Chinese women sat in one room, men in another, and the foreigners in a third. The bridegroom himself waited on the missionary ladies, scurrying in and out of the kitchen with steaming bowls of food that he placed in the center of the table. After seven courses, the young teachers told him they’d had plenty.
Lin Dao’an looked perplexed. “We’re not even halfway finished,” he protested. “We have thirty dishes!”
The ladies looked at one another, smiled gamely, and picked up their chopsticks.
On Christmas Day a year later, all the Christians of Funing filled the chapel, which smelled of fresh pine. The day before, schoolgirls had climbed into the hills to cut branches to decorate the church. A young English lady showed them how to bend the branches into wreaths, which were placed inside the church. Girls hung lanterns from the ceiling and made strings of paper roses in red and pink to drape across the pulpit. They traced big Chinese characters on red paper, cut them out, and pasted them on white cloth. The banner was hung above the altar: “Glory to God in the highest and on Earth, peace and goodwill toward men.”
At 11:00 a.m., schoolgirls sang in Chinese, “Hark! The herald angels sing.” The benches of the chapel were filled. But behind the curtain, in the seats saved for women, Zhan Aimei was absent. A murmur rippled among the Chinese wives.
Did you hear? Lin Dao’an and his wife who married just the year before? They have a child, a son, born just now.
It was Christmas morning, 1894.
The couple named their firstborn Lin Pu-chi.
• 3 •
Firstborn
Fuzhou, 1907
On a Monday morning during the Spring Festival heralding the Year of the Goat in 1907, Lin Dao’an left his home with his eldest son in tow. Dr. Lin was a man on a mission, weaving in and out of the crowds in Nantai, his long queue swinging back and forth like a metronome. His son Lin Pu-chi, tall and lanky at twelve, followed behind, his gaze fixed on his father’s back.
Occasionally the doctor would nod to a passerby he recognized, if not by name then by medical history. He had settled in Fuzhou a few years earlier, after more than five years working with his mentor, Dr. Taylor. He had helped the missionary to open and run a new hospital in the southern coastal city of Xinghua. But his health was poor, and with a growing family, Dr. Lin decided to return to the city of his youth. He took a position as the head Chinese assistant of another well-known Scotsman, Thomas Rennie, who ran the main port hospital in Fuzhou. Dr. Rennie was renowned in the province for his medical skills and cut a striking figure on the streets of Nantai, riding his dappled gray mare to call on patients. Once, on a visit to a CMS school, the Scotsman noticed from across the room a girl with a tiny white speck on her cheek. He whispered to the teacher. The child was brought to him. His suspicion was confirmed; the child had leprosy. Sadly, she had to be removed from the classroom and sent to a settlement for lepers outside the West Gate of the walled city, where she died soon after.
Dr. Lin and his son, arriving at the gate of a foreign home, bounded up the front stairs to a second-floor veranda. A tall, mustached Irishman stood among a group of Chinese boys and men.
“Oh, Dr. Lin,” the middle-aged cleric enthused, with surprise and relief in his voice. “Thank you for bringing your son.”
With his thick Irish brogue coloring his Chinese, the cleric was sometimes difficult for the doctor to understand. But his command of the local dialect was beside the point. What brought Dr. Lin racing to his house this morning was the man’s offer to teach his son the Queen’s English.
Just the day before, Dr. Rennie had told Dr. Lin about the Irishman, the Reverend William S. Pakenham-Walsh, who was looking for students for a new school. Pakenham-Walsh had been in China for ten years, teaching in a variety of capacities: at a school for Chinese boys; theology classes for church assistants; even religious training at a home for lepers. While the Anglican mission already had a boys’ high school, this new venture would be unique. English would not be merely the subject of a class; it would be the language of instruction for all courses.
That was all Dr. Lin needed to hear. Then and there he determined that the eldest of his five boys, Lin Pu-chi, would enroll. Many Chinese had little patience for foreign evangelists. But Dr. Lin, who had grown up among them, saw their system of education as superior. He believed the missionaries, with their schools and hospitals and ideas, were agents of change at a time when China desperately needed help.
The century had started violently, with the antiforeign Boxer Uprising in North China. In 1900, a sect of self-described warriors, abetted by the xenophobic empress dowager, slaughtered hundreds of foreigners and tens of thousands of Chinese Christians before falling to an eight-nation military force in Beijing. China’s defeat only amplified the cry for reform. Men like Dr. Lin believed that the Western world was not to be feared or disregarded; China had much to learn from others. The doctor wanted his son in the vanguard of that transformation.
On his veranda, Pakenham-Walsh was explaining his plans to the assembled fathers and boys, some as young as Lin Pu-chi, others in their late teens.
“We wouldn’t be here today if I hadn’t said hello to this lad last Saturday,” Pakenham-Walsh said, gesturing to one of the older teens.
Pakenham-Walsh had been walking by the English cemetery when he bumped into a former student named Li.
“Where are you going?” Pakenham-Walsh had inquired.
“I’m on my way to the American school to sign up as a student.”
Pakenham-Walsh was stunned. The teen had already graduated from the Anglican school for boys and was now qualified to return to his village as a teacher.
“What happened?” Pakenham-Walsh needed to know.
“Teacher,” the former student answered, “you do not understand. I’m young. I want to get on and I can’t if I don’t know English. If your mission won’t teach me, I’m forced to go to an American school.”
The student was right.
For years now, the most senior cleric in the Anglican mission—the seventy-five-year-old Wolfe, who had spent more than half his life in Fuzhou and was now an archdeacon—resisted introducing English into the curriculum. He thought it was a waste of time. What the mission needed, Wolfe argued, was to train Chinese boys to help with evangelizing. For that, all they needed was their mother tongue. Leave the English to others.
The Americans had no such reservations.
“Do you know of any others who are leaving our schools?” Pakenham-Walsh asked.
The teen sheepishly nodded.
Pakenham-Walsh recognized that this was serious. If the English missionaries lost graduates to their American counterparts, all the time and effort that they were putting into their own schools would be for naught. Mission schools were feeders for the church, shaping not only teachers and catechists but also future members.
&nb
sp; “When do you start at the American school?”
“Thursday.”
Pakenham-Walsh made him an offer: “Hold off on enrolling, and bring the others to my house on Monday. I will start a school to teach you English,” he said. The student agreed.
Now all Pakenham-Walsh had to do was persuade the CMS leaders that this was a good idea. He was blunt. He told his peers that in the eyes of the Chinese—and himself—the Anglican mission “was half asleep.” Enrollment in its schools was declining, and the quality of its students, quite frankly, “diminishing.” Wolfe, naturally, voiced his doubts. But the other missionaries sided with the younger man, albeit with certain conditions: Pakenham-Walsh had to recruit at least ten students; they had to pay tuition; and the venture had to pose no extra burden to the financially strained mission.
“Walsh,” the cantankerous Wolfe needled, “you will never get ten boys in our mission to enter your school.”
At Pakenham-Walsh’s home that Monday, the doctor’s son made nine.
But time was running out, and Pakenham-Walsh had no tenth student or even the prospect of one. He had promised the boys that if he couldn’t fill a class, they would be free to go to the American school, which started in three days. The Irishman despaired. Wolfe’s words kept him awake at night.
Thursday morning arrived, his enrollment stuck at nine, when his house servant announced a visitor at the gate. A Chinese pastor whom Pakenham-Walsh knew well had arrived with his very young son, no more than eight and too young for the school.
“Here is my son,” Pastor Ding Ing-ong told him. “I will lend him to you. But when you get a real tenth boy, please return him to me.”
The local pastor wanted Pakenham-Walsh to succeed. “The time is soon coming,” Ding told his friend, “when a Chinese man will not be looked upon as an educated man unless he knows English.”
And so it began: St. Mark’s Anglo-Chinese School.
Analects and English
Throughout China, a rush was on to build schools. The catalyst was an edict from the empress dowager on September 2, 1905, ending more than one thousand years of the imperial examination system. It was an act of apparent enlightenment spurred by fear: the Qing Empire was lagging behind other nations economically and militarily. Even the small island kingdom of Japan was modernizing and adopting Western science and technology. If China was going to catch up, some in the imperial court argued, it needed to change, starting with its educational system.
In Chinese society, there was no greater rank than scholar. It opened doors to official jobs, status, and respect. The road to scholarship for a young man began—and just as often ended—at a literary examination hall. Only elite cities had halls, where would-be scholars endured grueling tests. The one in Fuzhou sprawled over more than fifty acres just outside the North Gate. There, candidates for imperial degrees passed under a gateway with characters that read: For the empire, pray for good men.
Teenagers sitting for the first time and old men trying again and again took the examination and subjected themselves to nothing less than a kind of voluntary incarceration. Each candidate brought bedding, food, a pitcher of water, and a chamber pot to his “cell,” a tiny chamber only three feet deep, four feet wide, and eight feet high, roofed but open at the front. Rows and rows of cells—enough to accommodate twelve thousand scholars—were lined one next to another. If typhoon winds brought downpours, or if the sun beat down, it didn’t matter. The scholars had to write on. It wasn’t unusual for candidates to die from exposure—or stress.
Rigid though it was, the examination system allowed anyone to advance in society based on intellect alone. Even a farmer’s son, tutored in the books of Confucius, could sit for the imperial exam, and if he passed, possibly rule a city. But the exams were narrowly focused on knowledge of the nine books of Confucianism, called the Four Books and Five Classics. There was no testing on science or mathematics. Instead, candidates were given many questions and had three days to write a total of three eight-part essays and one poem. They also had to provide recommendations on an actual issue, addressing the eternal question, What would Confucius do? When the empress issued her edict in 1905, scholars at some examination centers were in the midst of their tests. They had to put down their pens and go home.
For Lin Pu-chi, his first taste of modern learning was reciting English words in a ramshackle house by the edge of a rice paddy. The makeshift school was the best Pakenham-Walsh could do on such short notice. The boys met for class on the first floor and slept on the second. When floods came, putting the classroom under a foot of water, everyone headed upstairs to the dormitory for lessons.
The first class of ten was a comical hodgepodge of ability and ages. Several students were little boys who hadn’t stopped growing; the oldest student had whiskers, a wife, and a baby but desperately wanted to learn English and convinced Pakenham-Walsh to give him a spot. The “faculty” consisted of a Chinese assistant, Pakenham-Walsh, and his wife, Gertrude, who had sailed to China a year before her future husband. She and her sister, a physician, were part of a wave of adventuresome single women who traveled to China for the challenge and intrigue of missionary work. At St. Mark’s, Gertrude treated all the boys with the gentleness, patience, and intuition of a mother. In Chinese schools, it was unusual for boys to even encounter women, let alone be taught by them. With no teachers to spare in the Anglican mission, her presence was a lesson in modernity for the students.
It was left to the minister’s wife to introduce the students to English. Like toddlers, they started by learning their ABCs. With this new language, Lin Pu-chi had to wrap his tongue around different sounds. The soft “th” of a simple word like “the” was not familiar to him. And what was the meaning of “the” anyway? An article of speech? Useless, he privately groused. Lin Pu-chi kept putting tones where there were none. A word in the Fuzhou dialect had a different meaning, depending on which of eight tones were applied. Rising? Falling? Low? High? Quick? Long? Heavy? Light? Different tone, different word entirely. Pronouns, meanwhile, confounded Lin Pu-chi. Chinese had no gender-specific words. He kept using “she” for the reverend and “he” for his wife. But Lin Pu-chi delighted in hearing English words pronounced with proper form and inflection. He realized he liked the sound of his English voice.
Word of the school spread. More boys began showing up, and Pastor Ding got his young son back. Some of the new students traveled great distances from villages to attend the school. It pained Pakenham-Walsh to have to turn anyone away, but space was tight.
At the end of the first term, Pakenham-Walsh attended a tennis party at a foreigner’s home. At courtside, Archdeacon Wolfe took a seat next to him. The elder Irishman, with his long white beard and brusque manner, knew he intimidated everyone around him. But Pakenham-Walsh had been secretly hoping for this moment.
“Walsh, how many boys have you got?” Wolfe gruffly asked.
“Thirty,” the schoolmaster succinctly replied with obvious pride.
Standing to get up, the older man put his hand on his shoulder. “Walsh,” he said, “you’ll get hundreds.”
Thirty soon became seventy. Pakenham-Walsh found a bigger building to rent only a hundred yards from the existing CMS high school, which taught boys in Chinese. Those students were being trained for meager-paying jobs as village teachers or religious assistants. For them, a command of scripture was more important than fluency in English. But the St. Mark’s students were subtly taught from the start that they were special, even a cut above. Pakenham-Walsh encouraged them to think about advancing to one of the many universities in China started by American missionaries. Their prospects were brighter. British managers at the postal service and customs office needed English-speaking clerks, who could earn two hundred dollars a month, compared to the sixteen-dollars-a-month salary of a village teacher. The boys at the CMS high school knew that this pay discrepancy put them at the lower end of a
caste system. It rankled them. But at least in sports, they had a level playing field. Team athletics were not part of the Chinese experience. It would be inconceivable for a traditional Chinese tutor, drilling his charges in the ideas and sayings from the Analects of Confucius, to worry about whether they did their morning calisthenics. But the two CMS boys’ schools lived by the British credo of “strong body, strong mind” and could play out their rivalry in matches of soccer or basketball, even field hockey. Far from the nearest sports equipment vendor, a Chinese carpenter fashioned hockey sticks for the boys by bending the soft roots of bamboo trees.
Lin Pu-chi, who was somewhat on the frail side, was no one’s first choice when picking teams. Although hopelessly nearsighted, he liked to play billiards and had a modicum of success with tennis. But this didn’t mean he wasn’t competitive; his drive to win played out in the classroom. Words became his sport. For training, he read the Encyclopaedia Britannica and memorized pages of the Oxford English Dictionary.
When Pakenham-Walsh suggested a debate contest, Lin Pu-chi prepared with intensity. The topic: Would railways benefit China? This was an issue preoccupying the entire country. In the early twentieth century, China was woefully behind other nations in developing a national rail system; Fujian Province did not have one mile of railroad. The conservative Qing rulers placed no value in railways and did not recognize how a modern transportation system could help the kingdom. Instead, the court fretted that trains could make the interior vulnerable to attacks, or worse: the thundering locomotives could disrupt the delicate feng shui of the countryside. In 1888, a reformer in the Qing court presented the empress dowager with a gift of a miniature train from Germany for her to ride in her garden. Instead of a steam engine, eunuchs pulled the six cars over tracks in the Forbidden City. It worked. She came around.
