by Jennifer Lin
When the pair stepped off a coastal steamer from the south, they entered the disorienting, grasping, gritty maw of Shanghai. Their hometown of Fuzhou was a treaty port like Shanghai, but there the similarity ended. Nearly half of all the trade in China passed through Shanghai, the capital not only for manufacturing but also for finance and shipping.
Long before the arrival of foreigners, Shanghai was a trading hub on the banks of the Huangpu River near where the Yangtze River enters the East China Sea. Junks carrying tea, silk, and cotton docked at the old city, fortified behind a wall to keep out Japanese pirates. In 1844, after the ratification of the Treaty of Nanjing, a mere fifty foreigners lived in Shanghai. But the race was on to carve up the area. The British were first, staking out a sparsely populated stretch of the Huangpu for a settlement that would be independent of Chinese law. Next came the French, who created a separate concession, as well as Americans, who later combined their holdings with the British to form an “International Settlement.” By 1915, the foreign population included people from more than thirty nations, with Japanese residents representing the largest group (7,397), followed by British (5,521), Portuguese (1,352), American (1,448), German (1,425), and French (608) nationals. But for all its Western veneer, manners, and architecture, Shanghai remained a Chinese city: it had a foreign population in 1915 of close to twenty-one thousand people and about a million and a half Chinese residents, some of whom lived in foreign concessions.
The Bund, just a footpath by the river’s edge a century earlier, now stood like a crowded trophy case, with each European-style building representing profits from global trade. All that China craved, as well as all that it offered, passed through the hands of Shanghai traders: silk and cotton, tobacco, chemicals, oil, coal, and, always, opium. Number 27 on the Bund was the Ewo Building, home to the foreign taipans of Jardine, Matheson & Co., Ltd., the trading house from the British colony of Hong Kong that reaped its fortune packing the pipes of addicts with “foreign mud.” It stored chests of opium grown and processed in India in floating wharves moored on the Huangpu.
Along the Bund were hotels with rooftop terraces for tea and social clubs such as the Shanghai Club, with its legendary 111-foot Long Bar. At the north end, on the other side of Suzhou Creek, the Astor House Hotel reigned as a hub of expatriate social life, with a banquet hall for five hundred and hot water in every room. Trumpeted as the best hotel in Asia, it welcomed dignitaries and celebrities the likes of former Olympian Jim Thorpe, who, as an outfielder for the New York Giants, came to town in 1913 for exhibition games against the Chicago White Stockings.
St. John’s University was in the Huxi neighborhood, located west of the International Settlement about five miles from the Bund. Wealth and poverty lived cheek by jowl in the area, with the villas of tycoons on some blocks and shantytown hovels for mill workers on others. One of the mansions belonged to a British property developer, who decided to give his fifty-acre garden to the Shanghai Municipal Council, the settlement’s governing body of British and American men. The council created an urban oasis with expansive beds of roses and peonies, hothouses, undulating paths, stately trees, manicured lawns, and a bandshell. Jessfield Park opened to the public in 1914—but only the public that was not Chinese. A sign with nine rules, posted at each entrance, gave notice that Jessfield Park was “reserved exclusively for the foreign community.” Also barred were horses, dogs, and vehicles of any kind, including bicycles. Another “foreigners only” park on the Bund had a tenth rule: Chinese nannies watching foreign children were not permitted to occupy chairs during band performances. They had to stand.
The entrance to St. John’s was just across the street from the northern entrance to Jessfield Park. To get to the university from the waterfront, travelers like Lin Pu-chi would have ventured by electric tram along Nanjing Road, the city’s busiest shopping corridor jammed with rickshaws, bicycles, horse-drawn carriages, and motorcars. Signs in windows urged shoppers to buy “patriotic” consumer goods—locally made clothing to replace hard-to-find imports. With the European continent embroiled in the First World War, shipments to Shanghai had dropped off sharply, leaving local mills and factories to fill the vacuum.
On the eve of classes at St. John’s starting in September 1915, hundreds of young men passed through the wrought-iron gates of the forty-five-acre campus, which jutted like a bent elbow into Suzhou Creek. Students arriving by rickshaw alighted on Jessfield Road in a neighborhood with a candy store, pawnshop, and cluster of tenements that housed laborers who worked in mills making silk, cotton, flour, and oil. Those from nearby farm villages pushed their belongings in wheelbarrows, while more cosmopolitan classmates pedaled onto campus, flaunting their wealth and privilege from the seats of expensive bicycles.
Only eight years earlier, Lin Pu-chi was attending a one-room school run by an Irishman and his wife in a wooden house on the edge of a Fuzhou rice paddy. Now he was matriculating in a university with two hundred students and forty professors with doctorates from Harvard, Cornell, Yale, Princeton, Penn, and Columbia. St. John’s was started by missionaries with the Episcopal Church in the United States. An architect from Newark, New Jersey, designed the quadrangle of buildings, brick structures that blended Western design with Chinese flourishes such as tile roofs with swooping eaves. One of the newest additions was the $22,000 Anniversary Hall with the Low Library and its collection of 8,600 English and 5,000 Chinese books.
St. John’s was not simply run like an American university; it was an American university. In 1905, the American Episcopal Church registered the school in the District of Columbia, allowing graduates to easily pursue advanced degrees in the United States. Students celebrated Thanksgiving Day as well as the birthday of Confucius. They studied constitutional law, American history—from the American Revolution through the Civil War—and the industrial and political rise of the United States as a world power. China’s history, too, was examined through a Western lens, with a class on foreign relations focusing on the years from 1834 to 1860—the beginning and end of the Opium Wars.
The history of St. John’s dated back to 1879, when a missionary sent by the Episcopal Church in America started a school for boys that later would expand into the university. The founder was a linguistic genius with the Old Testament name of Samuel Isaac Joseph Schereschewsky, a Lithuanian Jew who studied to be a rabbi before immigrating to the United States, converting to Christianity, and entering a seminary in New York. A polyglot fluent in Yiddish, Polish, Russian, and German, the Reverend Schereschewsky singlehandedly translated the Bible into Chinese. At the urging of Western merchants in China, St. John’s added English to its curriculum and, in 1905, switched to teaching all classes in the language of commerce. Most students were scions from China’s burgeoning merchant class, coming from families as far away as Hong Kong and even the US territory of Hawaii. Their parents expected them to build business careers or, short of that, run the government.
The bar for admission was set high. Students had to pass an English grammar test as well as demonstrate their understanding of English literature. They were expected to be able to analyze great works such as Silas Marner by George Eliot or Pilgrim’s Progress by John Bunyan. Proficiency in Chinese language and literature was also required, but the study of the Confucian classics was not why someone enrolled at St. John’s. A student could flunk Chinese year after year and still graduate with a St. John’s diploma. Eventually, it became so difficult to attract students to study classical Chinese literature and philosophy that the courses became optional. Undergraduates still had to spend two hours a week practicing translation of Chinese to English and vice versa. But the required six hours of Chinese studies could be substituted with only three hours of French or German.
In 1915, Lin Pu-chi plunged into his course work, studying the poetry of Wordsworth, Pope, and Milton, and taking classes in German, political science, European history, metaphysics, and religious instruction. Outside the cla
ssroom, his peers tutored him in fashion and trends. Lin Pu-chi promptly added to his wardrobe a Western-cut suit, purchased from one of the tailors who catered to St. John’s students, such as “Mr. Goodcut” on Burkill Road in the International Settlement. Lin Pu-chi started wearing leather shoes instead of black felt slippers and followed the seasonal rotation of hats, going with a gray felt fedora in cool months and a straw boater for warm weather.
A new acquaintance who lived in his dormitory was a young, single alumnus who taught sociology and was an assistant chaplain. The thirty-year-old Y. Y. Tsu had recently returned from graduate school in the United States. Lin Pu-chi and other students enjoyed hearing his tales of New York City—taking the Ninth Avenue Elevated Railway from the downtown Episcopal seminary to classes uptown at Columbia University; frequenting the ghetto known as “Chinatown”; combing bookstores and buying for a half dollar a rare Chinese-language copy of the New Testament dating back a half century. Y. Y. Tsu also told them about meeting the pastor of the First Chinese Presbyterian Church in midtown and his American wife of Dutch descent. Sun Yat-sen often stayed with the couple during his trips to New York. But of more interest to Y. Y. Tsu was their charming third daughter, Caroline, who would later become his bride.
In the culture-blending world of St. John’s, the university president, the Reverend Dr. Francis Lister Hawks Pott, was the inverse of Y. Y. Tsu. Raised in Manhattan, Dr. Pott shocked the missionary community by flouting convention and marrying a Chinese woman, the daughter of the first Chinese priest ordained by the Episcopal mission. Dr. Pott, who became president in 1888, often could be seen strolling around campus in a floor-length Chinese gown instead of his clerical collar.
Pott, also a Columbia man, brought to St. John’s the American tradition of sports to foster camaraderie and community in college. He was the antithesis of the aloof headmaster and treated his students as if he were a coach, ascribing as he did to the principle of a strong mind in a strong body. At 7:15 a.m. every morning, students had to do fifteen minutes of exercises with dumbbells, and on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, all but the seniors and juniors ran through a battery of military drills.
Students took a ferry dubbed “the Ark” to athletic fields on the other side of Suzhou Creek from the main campus. At their disposal were a soccer field, nine clay and grass tennis courts, and a quarter-mile cinder track. St. John’s athletes taunted their crosstown rivals at Nanyang University by calling themselves “the Ever Victorious.” Matches between the two schools drew thousands of spectators who waved school pennants and sang school fight songs. Male cheerleaders belted out a favorite chant:
Bon chicka bon! Bon chicka bon!
Bon, chicka-ricka-recka.
Bon, bon, bon!
Wa-hu-wa! Wa-hu-wa! St. John’s, St. John’s!
Rah! Rah rah!
Pott also wanted St. John’s students to embrace “America’s pastime” and promoted baseball as a major sport, even displaying his own prowess on the diamond by playing first base during the annual faculty-student game to celebrate the Chinese Mid-Autumn Festival. While baseball never matched soccer or tennis in popularity, the St. John’s squad had standouts from Hawaii, who grew up playing the game and gave the university an edge over the three other American schools in Shanghai with teams.
The bookish Lin Pu-chi lacked prowess on the playing field. He enjoyed tennis, but his game was unexceptional. Instead, he focused his competitive energy on the Literary and Debating Society. No one at his alma mater back in Fuzhou could match his wits in oration. He brandished words like a fencer’s saber, a skill he displayed proudly when he arrived at St. John’s. But after the first few meetings of the debate club, Lin Pu-chi came to an unsettling realization.
For the first time, he was no longer the smartest one in the room.
The Two Lins
This other man could write.
He published long essays for the St. John’s Echo newspaper, which he edited, often with a barbed pen. In one piece, he took aim at classmates who put on airs by sprinkling English words into their Chinese conversations just because they could. “What other earthly reason, I ask, than the poor childish love for show can cause a student to put an ‘although,’ a ‘so far,’ and an ‘all right’ in the midst of a Shanghai talk with Shanghai friends?” He thought they sounded as ridiculous as an Englishman attempting to pronounce with his Oxbridge accent the name of China’s president, Yuan Shikai.
This other man could talk.
He spoke clearly with graceful gestures, never stiffly. His arguments flowed logically, escorting his audience to a conclusion that could only be accepted as the undeniable truth. Extemporaneously, he was even better, nimbly moving among quick thoughts and finding the weak spot in his opponent’s position.
Most of all, this other man could think.
He was a senior theology student and won every award for writing and debate that the university had to offer. Nonetheless, he was ridden with doubt and later would describe St. John’s as part of the “protective shell of Christianity,” which, while educating him, was also cutting him off from Chinese philosophy, folklore, and the stream of thought of his country. It embarrassed him that his calligraphy was poor, the telltale mark of an uncultivated man. “I had been cheated of my national heritage,” he would later observe. “That was what a good Puritan education could do to a Chinese boy.”
This man also was named Lin. He also came from Fujian Province. The son of a Christian pastor, he also was considering joining the ministry.
Lin Pu-chi studied him for months. He deconstructed his essays in the Echo. He watched him debate. He analyzed his delivery.
He would finally get his chance to test his mettle and intellect against the “other Lin”—twenty-year-old Lin Yutang—during Christmas recess and the annual oration contest, a highlight of the university calendar.
At dusk on Christmas Eve, the campus twinkled with strings of electric lights and hundreds of colorful lanterns dangling from wires on either side of the long entrance driveway. Bursting firecrackers ushered in the night, which began with a ten-course feast for students in the dining halls.
Outside the gates of St. John’s, it was an ordinary Friday night in the village of Caojiadu. Workers made their way home for bowls of rice after long days in the silk and cotton mills along Suzhou Creek. But inside Alumni Hall, more than six hundred people—university men, teens in the St. John’s preparatory school, and guests—were transported to a holiday celebration like any found in America.
On one side of the stage stood a freshly cut pine tree with burning tapers and dangling glass ornaments. On the other were banks of flowers in yellow and red. Across the top of the black curtain were the words A Merry Christmas cut from white cotton cloth. No Christmas would be complete without an appearance of Santa Claus, and a student dressed with a white cotton beard and padded belly made his grand entry, pulling gifts out of his bag for young boys from the surrounding neighborhood.
The drama club staged two plays about love and marriage, followed by the glee club serenading students with carols and songs like “Hail! Smiling Morn.” Between acts, musicians on harmonica and violin performed Christmas selections. No one seemed to mind that the program went on for more than three hours, concluding just before midnight.
Christmas Day broke warm and bright. After chapel service, Lin Pu-chi retreated to his room to polish his speech and wait four days until the oratorical competition.
At 8:00 p.m. on December 29, the seats in the Alumni Hall auditorium again filled with students. In the front row sat three judges, invited from outside the university community to ensure impartiality. A professor introduced them: Mahlon Fay Perkins, the young deputy US consul and a Harvard man; J. W. Crofoot, with the Seventh-Day Baptist Mission in nearby Wuxi; and S. K. Tsao, the first Chinese secretary of the local YMCA.
Only three students competed for the top honor, one fr
om each class. All spoke in English on the theme of China’s future. Four years after the downfall of the Qing dynasty, the entire country was on edge. Any hope of an independent, progressive China was dashed by the stunning power grab of President Yuan, who proposed creating a new constitutional monarchy. Ever the shrewd political manipulator, the military veteran offered himself up as the next emperor.
A sophomore spoke first on “Nation and Nobility.” Next up was the junior class representative. Lin Pu-chi’s topic was “The True Greatness of a Nation.” In his wire-framed glasses and center-parted hair, he was the picture of the modern scholar. When he spoke, his sentences were complex and layered, requiring the concentration of his listeners. His voice was loud and strong, but his delivery somewhat stilted. He addressed the situation in Beijing. Compared to the violent revolutions in America and France, China had made a quick break from imperial rule. Now was the time, he said, to give the new government a chance to solidify before the country backpedaled into a monarchy.
“We are living in a century and in a civilization under which absolutism is no longer tolerable,” Lin Pu-chi intoned. “Although the mass of the Chinese people cannot be entitled to the full rights of democracy, they have awakened to a consciousness that autocracy is a thing of the past.”
His countrymen would not be led around like “the cattle and horses of an almighty monarch.” The republican government must be given a chance. “It is childish to be too optimistic,” he told the audience, “but it is impious to be pessimistic.”
He took his seat. The last competitor, senior Lin Yutang, rose to speak on “China’s Call for Men.”
“Every day we hear our elders say to us, ‘You are the hope of China.’ And our foreign friends and the whole world say to us, ‘You are the hope of China.’”
