Shanghai Faithful

by Jennifer Lin

  Don’t be flattered, he told his classmates. That phrase was actually a plea for help—“a howl from the Valley of Death.”

  “Fellow young men, realize when you hear this line again that the situation is a dangerous situation, and the call a desperate call, and be serious about it.”

  China’s biggest problem lies with its citizens, he asserted. “It matters not whether you have a monarchy or a republic in a country of robbers, assassins, selfish intriguers and political swindlers. Before the Revolution of 1911 people thought that a republic would save China, and now that a Republic has been established and set on running, they say that a monarchy would better serve her. Well, will a monarchy then save China? The fact is, republic or monarchy, both have more or less failed and both must fail, when the officials are corrupt and debased. It is all a question of men. Men, men, able men, strong men, honest men, are alone China’s hope.”

  His words made the audience squirm.

  “Examine yourselves and find there the answer to the question. For as I said before, you are the last hope of China, you, and you alone, hold the fate of China in your hands, and it is all up to you to save and uplift China, or to send her along her line of destruction.”

  The judges huddled and conferred in whispers. But the decision was obvious.

  Perkins from the US consulate rose to announce the winner. He said the speeches were free from the common fault of Chinese speakers of misusing difficult words of the English vocabulary. “The winning speech,” the diplomat said, “excelled in all around character, having the best combination of material, an exquisite choice of words and phrases and the best way of presentation.”

  “And the winner is Lin . . .” Perkins announced, pausing a few seconds for extra suspense.

  “Yutang!”

  The audience cheered as the victor stood to shake the hands of judges and accept the oratory medal for the second time in his university career. With a pinched smile, Lin Pu-chi offered congratulations.

  Double Ten

  The wheel of China’s leadership turned again by the time Lin Pu-chi entered his senior year in September 1916. Yuan Shikai, who had crowned himself the Hongxian Emperor, had died from kidney failure the previous June and was replaced by his vice president, another military man, named Li Yuanhong. Expectations were low for this political survivor who had been marginalized and isolated by President Yuan, but he was the best alternative at the moment. Away from Beijing, provincial governors filled the power void at the center by exerting their own authority politically and militarily. Some warlords declared their outright independence.

  The precarious Republic of China marked the fifth anniversary of the Wuchang Uprising on October 10, 1916. On “Double Ten Day,” the entire student body of St. John’s gathered at dusk in front of Moore Memorial Church in the heart of the city to join a procession of students from all over Shanghai. In a nod to their status in the city’s social order, the senior men of St. John’s stood at the front, leading a parade of 2,500 young men and women behind two brass bands. Lin Pu-chi and his classmates held paper lanterns as they proudly passed local and foreign onlookers cheering them from sidewalks.

  Everywhere people looked, they saw the five-color republican flag—hanging from lampposts, decorating shop windows, draping trams, even covering the hoods of motorcars. All the ships in the Huangpu, including US Navy vessels, fluttered with banners from bow to stern in honor of the day.

  Students marched south on Honan Road under a canopy of giant flags. Behind them in a second procession were one thousand workers from the largest printing house in Asia, the Commercial Press, who trailed a brass band and fife and drum corps playing the Scottish classic “Auld Lang Syne.”

  Lin Pu-chi honored President Li with a National Day editorial in the Echo, penned as a plaintive poem:

  Since that momentous day five years have passed,

  Again the nation’s eyes are turned to thee,

  The state to reconstruct, the plan to cast

  For true reforms; this now we yearn to see.

  With the start of a new academic year, Lin Pu-chi stepped out of the shadow of Lin Yutang and into many of his predecessor’s campus roles. He became president of the campus debate society and was voted by his classmates onto the staff of the Echo. The other editors elected him as their chief. Lin Pu-chi freely experimented with his English writing. He covered news, dabbled in satire, editorialized about politics, tried literary criticism, and explained folktales. The results were varied but the effort constant.

  At St. John’s University, Lin Pu-chi was elected editor in chief of the St. John’s Echo for the 1916–1917 academic year. This staff photograph appeared in the student publication. Lin Pu-chi sits in front, arms crossed, second from the right. Courtesy of St. John’s Echo, Yale Divinity School Library.

  His first news story took him to the jetty in front of the Maritime Custom House on the Bund. On the second Saturday in September, he watched as almost a hundred of China’s best and brightest, including fifteen women, climbed the gangplank of the SS China. Graduates of colleges across China, they were all bound for San Francisco by way of Yokohama and Honolulu and heading to elite US universities on government scholarships, a legacy of the Boxer Uprising. The United States, instead of taking taels of silver from the defeated Qing Empire after the conflict in 1900, agreed to have the Chinese government cover its indemnity by underwriting the cost of sending students to the United States for graduate study. Chinese students competed for scholarships covered by the indemnity fund.

  Watching the students waving from the deck, Lin Pu-chi imagined being in their place. In his article, he asked his readers to imagine what it would be like to leave your homeland for five years or more. What emotion, what reflection would be going through your mind? There was no doubt that in the United States they could get a broader liberal education, better than anything available in China. But he compared China to a parent who bids farewell to a child with a blessing yet expects loyalty and faithful service in return.

  He wished that on foreign shores “their memory and fealty for their beloved Republic might still remain with ever-accumulating intensity. The nation cherishes no small hope in this group of young men and women.”

  Commencement

  With thirty-six graduates, the class of 1917 was the largest in the history of St. John’s. They joined an elite fraternity. Alumni were serving as ambassadors to Germany, the United States, and England. They managed steel mills and railways. They were university presidents and college deans; judges and surgeons; church rectors and directors of the YMCA in China.

  Class Day exercises on the eve of graduation showcased the melting pot that was St. John’s. Students performed scenes from A Midsummer Night’s Dream, sketches adapted from Les Miserables, and an original play in Chinese. A Hawaiian student sang a Polynesian tune while playing the ukelele. Others followed with a selection of songs on Chinese instruments and a banjo number.

  Delivering the day’s keynote address was a senior known as the class’s own Cicero, the great Roman orator. For the last time in his college career, Lin Pu-chi held the attention of his peers who were about to go forth with a Western education that would open doors all over the country. With everyone’s focus on the future, Lin Pu-chi used the occasion to look into the past, deep into the past, and made a plea for a renaissance in the study of classical Chinese literature. Among the Shanghai literati in 1917, it was more fashionable to quote the women talking of Michelangelo in T. S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” than the quiet night imagery of the great Tang dynasty poet Li Po.

  That was the problem with progress, Lin Pu-chi said; it made people forget what came before, making them lose touch with their culture and traditions. “Literature reveals the thought, sentiment, imagination, and will of the people from whom it springs,” he said. “It is the outcome of the entire past life of
a nation and it molds the thoughts of succeeding generations.” When the old system of learning in China was replaced, interest in the classics waned as a fascination with all things Western gained. “It is impossible to push back these influences as it is to stop the stars in their courses,” he told his peers. But “we owe it to posterity to preserve our literature. . . . It is part of our patriotism, a part of our spirit of nationality. We should guard against the scientific current . . . being strong enough to sweep away the zest for literature and homage paid to it.”

  The rain held back on the Saturday of commencement, but the heat of the June afternoon hung heavy as guests assembled in seats on the south lawn. Men donned straw hats, while women opened black umbrellas for shade.

  At 5:00 p.m., the ceremony began with a procession of the student body, the graduating class, alumni, faculty, and the guests of honor: the American consul-general and Shanghai’s Chinese commissioner of foreign affairs. Professors sat on a platform against a backdrop of giant replicas of the US and Chinese flags, plus the university crest and the numbers “1917” made out of flowers.

  After an opening prayer, Pott handed out academic and athletic prizes. Twice, Lin Pu-chi climbed the red-carpeted steps to receive individual awards—the gold medal for fiction for his short story “The Tragedy of the Jade Ring,” and the gold medal for best English essay for “An Estimate of Yuan Shikai.” A third time, he joined two other seniors in accepting a sterling silver cup, engraved with their names, for winning the interclass English debate.

  The sky was beginning to darken by the time Dr. Pott got to the presentation of diplomas. “A degree of the bachelor of arts is awarded to the following,” the headmaster read. “Lin Pu-chi, with honors.”

  In his black robe and mortarboard, the twenty-two-year-old shook the president’s hand and returned to his seat to watch the others. Two classmates were going to work for the Episcopal mission in other cities. Three had jobs with businesses, including Nanyang Iron Works, while another found employment with a hospital. His classmate from Fuzhou who started with him had accepted a faculty post teaching English at their alma mater, Trinity College.

  But Lin Pu-chi was not returning to Fuzhou. He had plans that would take him far from China. He was anxious to take the next step and to act on the ideals of national service and duty that he had written about so frequently during his years at St. John’s.

  It was his moment, his time, and if everything went as he imagined, he would not see his family for many years to come.

  • 5 •

  A Modern Man

  Aboard the SS Nanking, 1918

  Heavy smoke poured from the twin stacks of SS Nanking, leaving smudges in a cloudless Pacific sky. From the rear deck, passengers watched porpoises leaping in and out of the ship’s wake, a welcome diversion from the tedium of onboard life. Even more entertaining for the bored and weary were the schools of flying fish skimming over the water, wings outspread, tails wriggling in a frantic escape from underwater danger.

  The Nanking left Shanghai on August 14, 1918, headed east to Yokohama, Japan, and now was steaming toward Honolulu, the halfway point of a three-week voyage.

  Lin Pu-chi had never been out of China or on a ship this grand. Foreigners were nothing new to him. He came from Shanghai, after all, and knew their customs and manners. But this was the first time he was in such close quarters with so many Americans. They were merchants and missionaries, diplomats and teachers, all returning home after adventures in the Far East.

  The owners of the Nanking—Chinese entrepreneurs from San Francisco—promised “Passenger Service of Unusual Excellence.” Days passed slowly after morning calisthenics taught by some of the “Y” men onboard—athletic missionaries with the YMCA. Travelers played shuffleboard or practiced putting on an artificial golf green. For fun, mothers and children competed in tug-of-war matches or wheelbarrow races.

  After dinner, waiters pushed back the tables to make room for the ship’s band. Ladies dragged their husbands to the dance floor for a fox-trot or waltz. On other evenings, Chinese acrobats entertained guests with contortions and stunts, or a magician dazzled them with sleight-of-hand tricks.

  The Nanking was a veritable ship of scholars. The manifest listed 594 passengers, of whom 149 were Chinese men and women, most in their twenties, heading to graduate schools in the United States for the fall semester. They were China’s best and brightest, graduates of top colleges, bound for elite universities in the United States to study engineering, finance, medicine, law, political science, mining, agriculture, sociology, philosophy, and literature. A majority had scholarships from the Chinese government’s indemnity fund, which underwrote graduate study in the United States as part of a financial deal to cover US losses after the Boxer Uprising in 1900.

  When the ship pulled into Honolulu Harbor, passengers had less than a day to explore. For the Americans, surfers riding waves on Waikiki Beach were a source of fascination. But for the students, the city was hallowed ground: this was where the heroic revolutionary Sun Yat-sen was educated as a teenager. The missionary-run Iolani School, his alma mater, held more interest to them.

  The final destination of twenty-three-year-old Lin Pu-chi would be Philadelphia. After graduating from St. John’s in 1917, he had spent a year teaching English at the university’s high school before leaving for the States with a full scholarship from the Episcopal Church to attend its seminary. If all went according to plan, he would spend six years, maybe more, studying abroad.

  In their well-cut suits and straw boaters, the students from cosmopolitan centers like Shanghai or Tianjin carried themselves with confidence. But for many others, the voyage was their first awkward encounter with Western ways. Suppertime, in particular, was cause for anxiety. Some Chinese passengers had never eaten with a knife and fork. The taste of butter and milk was nauseating, steaks were too big and bloody, and cakes and pies were cloyingly sweet. And if the cutlery was confounding, the folded napkin on a dinner plate was an utter mystery. Where did it go? Placed over their forearms like the waiters serving them their meals? And why did foreigners insist on ruining tea? They added lemon to make it sour and then sugar to make it sweet.

  The dinner conversation was more satisfying. Eager to flaunt their knowledge, students dissected the pitiful state of Chinese politics over plates of striped bass with lemon butter sauce. They deconstructed the fiction of Lu Xun or the journalism of Liang Qichao over slices of blackberry pie. Lu Xun taught this generation how to write in the everyday spoken language of people, while Liang Qichao showed them how newspapers and periodicals could spread political ideas and foster patriotism.

  In the ship’s dining room, Lin Pu-chi noticed a familiar face, the younger sister of his St. John’s friend, Y. Y. Tsu. Her name was Tsu Lan-tsung, and she was heading to Ann Arbor to enroll at the University of Michigan. She had attended high school at St. Mary’s Hall on the campus of St. John’s. In snatches of conversation, Lin Pu-chi found out that she would be studying literature and medicine. He was interested in her—such a voracious learner!—but he held back. He bowed to propriety. It would not be correct to spend so much time in the private company of a pretty single woman. Social custom in China still left the matter of selecting partners to parents, and rumor had it that she was already spoken for.

  The inevitability of arranged marriages weighed on the minds of many of the scholars on the Nanking. One of the students, Xu Zhimo, was twenty-one and already a father, married off by his parents at eighteen to a seventeen-year-old girl. Each of the students could recite the examples of filial piety that were the bedrock of Confucian thought. Social order dictated that children defer to the judgment of parents. Yet the graduates were leaving their homeland to travel to the other side of the world in the name of modernity. They wanted knowledge to make China stronger and to save the country from disintegrating. But as their minds changed and evolved through education, what would become of
their hearts? Would they ever be free to decide for themselves whom they married?

  The narrative of his life would not be for Lin Pu-chi alone to write. So he did what came naturally: he began to write a story that he could control. It would be a love story. It opened in the Jiangsu mansion of a scholar-official with a headstrong nineteen-year-old daughter, Ah-Tsu, who pined to study in the United States. Her parents had arranged her marriage to a student whom she had never met but who was already studying engineering at an American college. Her conservative father, Mr. Faung, objected to the idea of her studying abroad, but her mother pressed the matter for her.

  As Lin Pu-chi wrote, using the precise English he had studied for years:

  “I can’t see any sense,” said Mr. Faung in a peremptory tone of voice, “for a girl of nineteen to go to a foreign country. It’s entirely a different country, her people, her manners and customs are all different from our own.”

  “Yes, it’s all true,” replied Mrs. Faung, “but you know Ah-Tsu is such a persistent girl. She won’t give up an idea when she has determined to bring it to completion. Moreover, she goes for education.”

  “Education? You women can’t fool me. I know what education is. The teachings of our saints are good enough for me, and for anybody. What do I care for a smattering of astronomy or geography or arithmetic? That’s all for fashion.”

  “No, Mr. Faung, you are certainly biased here. Our saints certainly have very good teachings. But we live in the twentieth century, and in an age of science; modern education is of more material importance.”

  “What has that to do with girls?”

  “Girls ought to be educated too; if for no one else, she ought to be educated for her husband and children. If you love your daughter, won’t you care for her future happiness?”