Shanghai Faithful

by Jennifer Lin

The father relented. In his short story, Lin Pu-chi had Ah-Tsu sail to America on a steamer like the Nanking among men and women like the author and his shipmates.

  Beautiful Country

  From the deck of the Nanking, America seemed a vision, and here it was, coming into view. Burnt yellow hills flanked the gateway to San Francisco Bay.

  On September 4, 1918, Lin Pu-chi and the other sea-weary scholars stepped onto American soil. At the wharf in San Francisco, a band of Chinese students from the University of California in Berkeley greeted them with signs and Chinese flags. At the time, there were about 1,500 students from China studying in the United States, mostly at Ivy League institutions or midwestern universities such as Michigan but also at a smattering of private colleges such as Beloit in Wisconsin and Lehigh in Pennsylvania.

  The students had no problem entering the country. They were spared the brutal interrogations that awaited Chinese passengers who intended to live in the United States. The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 had put tight controls on Chinese immigration and effectively legalized racial discrimination on the grounds that the influx of people from China was disruptive.

  The Berkeley students ushered the newcomers across the bay to the train station in Oakland. Lin Pu-chi caught the Pacific Limited to Chicago that left every afternoon at 1:30 p.m. He marveled at the constantly changing landscape—the unbroken farmland in California; the mighty Wasatch Mountains near Ogden, Utah; the heaving cattle stockyards of Omaha, Nebraska; the manmade peaks of the Chicago skyline.

  Railroads had fascinated Lin Pu-chi from the time he was a schoolboy in Fuzhou. The strength of nations was undergirded by rails of steel, which was precisely China’s problem. It lacked a cohesive national rail network. Too many of its railways were controlled by foreign investors, reducing China to the status of an economic protectorate. Lin Pu-chi could not imagine traveling by train from one end of China to the other. But in the United States, he had done just that in a mere five days, changing trains once in Chicago and again in Pittsburgh.

  Less than a month after leaving Shanghai, Lin Pu-chi arrived at the Broad Street Station across the street from Philadelphia’s elegant city hall tower, the tallest building in the country at 548 feet, topped with a bronze statue of city founder William Penn.

  He stepped off the Pennsylvania Railroad car and into the night, just as an invisible assassin was infiltrating the city.

  Spanish Lady

  Home for Lin Pu-chi in Philadelphia was a three-story brick townhouse in a genteel section of the old city. The Episcopal Church had rented the entire property at 901 Clinton Street as temporary quarters for seminarians. It had recently sold its seminary on the west side of the Schuylkill River and planned to build a new one. But construction was put on hold because of the lack of laborers due to the First World War.

  The war effort consumed Philadelphia. Even before Congress voted to declare war against Germany on April 10, 1917, factories and shipyards in the city were supplying American allies with ammunition, helmets, locomotive engines, and trucks. The work in Philadelphia became a magnet for immigrants fleeing conflict in Europe and African Americans fleeing Jim Crow laws in the South. The Frankford Arsenal made one hundred thousand artillery shells a month; the Ford Motor Company’s factory on North Broad Street pressed forty thousand steel helmets a day. Tens of thousands of men worked in the dozen shipyards along the Delaware River, building submarines, destroyers, cargo ships, and gunboats.

  Buoyed by patriotic fervor, the city erected a twenty-nine-foot-tall plaster replica of the Statue of Liberty and placed it on a two-story wooden pedestal in front of city hall. At its unveiling in the spring of 1918, more than a thousand schoolgirls dressed as Lady Liberty paraded down Broad Street.

  In the weeks before Lin Pu-chi arrived, hopes were rising that World War I would soon come to a victorious end as Allied troops began their final advance on German positions. A corps of female volunteers in the city had planned a colossal parade to drum up interest in a fourth round of war bond sales. John Philip Sousa and his band did their part by performing “Liberty Loan” concerts amid the roller coaster and carousel of Willow Grove Park. War, however, was not the only news making headlines. The Shubert family of Broadway fame opened a new theater on South Broad Street on August 26. The premiere show was the British hit musical Chu Chin Chow, featuring actor Tyrone Power Sr. as a Baghdad chieftain up to no good disguised—in yellowface—as a Chinese merchant.

  In late August a deadly influenza virus, most likely originating in China, began to sicken people in Europe and Africa. No one paid much notice when a sailor who arrived at the Philadelphia Navy Yard after a stop in Boston showed signs of influenza. No one panicked on September 18, when eight hundred sailors fell ill the next day. Health officials in Philadelphia assured the public that the sickness was confined to military personnel.

  On September 28, the Liberty Loan parade on Broad Street went off as planned. More than two hundred thousand people crammed both sides of South Broad Street, cheering as thousands of marchers—many wearing gauze masks—passed them. Crowds watched soldiers with bayonet rifles and tanks pulling cannons, oblivious to any coughing and sneezing among onlookers.

  A week after the parade, the city had 636 cases of Spanish influenza and 139 deaths. In four days, the death toll almost doubled. The city shut churches, schools, and theaters to prevent the spreading of germs in crowded spaces.

  By the third week in October, the death toll in Philadelphia, a city of 1.7 million, hit 4,500. Hospitals and morgues could not keep pace. Bodies were piled on sidewalks. A streetcar factory shifted to assembling coffins. Police stations became makeshift emergency rooms. At a Catholic cemetery on the outskirts of Philadelphia, seminarians worked into the night digging mass graves. By November, the “Spanish Lady” had killed more than twelve thousand Philadelphians, the worst death toll in the country.

  From his window on Clinton Street, Lin Pu-chi could see the sick waiting to enter Pennsylvania Hospital, which took up the entire block just on the other side of Ninth Street. Scientists at the hospital had taken cultures from sick sailors and determined that the virus was the same Spanish flu ravaging Europe and other American cities. Lin Pu-chi had to don an “influenza mask” from the Philadelphia Red Cross every time he ventured outside to explore his new neighborhood.

  The great influx of workers to Philadelphia factories and shipyards left most sections of the city overcrowded and unsanitary. But tree-lined Clinton Street maintained an air of understated Quaker gentility. Even animals had it good. On the sidewalk at Ninth and Clinton Streets was a stone water trough for horses with the inscription, “A merciful man is merciful to his beast.”

  Lin Pu-chi could walk six blocks to the east and find himself at the front door of Independence Hall. If he traveled ten blocks to the west, he arrived at city hall. North on Ninth Street took him to the retail emporiums of Market Street, great palaces of spending named after merchant princes like John Wanamaker and his archrivals, the Strawbridge and Clothier families. Farther north at Race Street was the block-long Chinatown, home mostly to single men from Canton who worked in restaurants and spoke a different dialect, unintelligible to most of the Chinese students.

  On November 1—All Saints’ Day—Lin Pu-chi officially became a student of the Divinity School of the Protestant Episcopal Church in Philadelphia. The dean of the seminary, the Reverend George Bartlett, led an evening service in the living room of the Clinton Street residence for the matriculating students, all three of them. Enrollment was down sharply due to men shipping off to the western front of the war. In a leather registration book, Lin Pu-chi signed his name in English script and Chinese characters. His two classmates were a man from nearby Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, and a Japanese graduate of Waseda University in Tokyo.

  Lin Pu-chi split his time between Clinton Street and the University of Pennsylvania in West Philadelphia. Penn automatically accepted div
inity students into its graduate program, and Lin Pu-chi seized the opportunity to enroll.

  At the seminary, which held classes in a parish house at nearby St. Andrew’s Church, Lin Pu-chi took classes in canon law, Hebrew prophets, and the history of world religions. Miss Blaylock, the elocution instructor, taught him how to be more effective from the pulpit—how to modulate the tone of his voice, how to control his breathing, how to sound out English vowels and consonants. At Penn’s ivy-covered College Hall, he delved into ethics, economic theory, and modern philosophers. His adviser was Dr. Edgar Arthur Singer Jr., who was trained as a civil engineer before becoming a philosopher with a special interest in the emerging field of psychology.

  If his course load was heavy, Lin Pu-chi wanted it that way. Partly it was raw ambition. But partly it was from a sense of duty and guilt. Every Chinese child was brought up studying the Analects of Confucius and taught, “While your parents are alive, do not journey afar.” Every minute that he violated that rule had to be a minute of purpose.

  On November 8, Lin Pu-chi caught the number thirteen streetcar on Walnut Street, crossed the Schuylkill, and got off at Thirty-Ninth Street to walk two blocks south to the International Students’ House.

  The local branch of the Chinese Students’ Alliance was holding its first meeting of the school year in a new clubhouse for foreign students, located in a former mansion on Spruce Street. One of the founders of the International House at Penn was the Reverend A. Waldo Stevenson, who came up with the idea for a center after a chance encounter with a group of Chinese students in 1908. Stevenson was dismayed to learn that he was the first American to befriend them. The minister and his wife began inviting foreign students into their home and eventually partnered with the university’s Christian Association to buy the mansion and start the International House.

  At the Friday night gathering, the influenza scourge was all that anyone could discuss. There were only thirty-two Chinese students studying at Philadelphia schools, and three of them—all Penn medical students—had been called into the trenches of the flu pandemic. Because of the war, more than a quarter of the city’s physicians were serving in the military.

  At the meeting, the students learned that one of the medical students, K. H. Li, a St. John’s alumnus from Suzhou, had been dispatched to help at an emergency hospital. He contracted the virus and had to be hospitalized for three weeks. Another friend of many of the Chinese students, Dr. C. W. Low, was returning from the home of a stricken family when the ambulance transporting him crashed. He was thrown from the vehicle and suffered a deep cut on his face.

  As one of the newest members of the club with the freshest news from home, Lin Pu-chi was invited to share his thoughts at the meeting. The others were particularly keen to hear his take on political developments back in China.

  It was a precarious time, a transition period, he told the students, some of whom had not been home in many years. The world stood on the threshold of peace, but China remained divided by hostility between the warlord-backed government in the North and allies of Sun Yat-sen and the Kuomintang in the South. It was less a geographic divide than an ideological one, pitting a conservative wing of the government against a more progressive one, between old ideas and new ones. But the stakes were nothing less than China’s ability to remain an independent nation. The most baneful policy of the country was conservatism, he believed. The so-called official party was miserably under the fetters of the past and failing to keep pace with the march of progress of the rest of the world.

  Three days after the club’s meeting—at the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month of 1918—the war ended with the signing of the armistice between the Allies and Germany in the northern French town of Compiegne. Newspaper headlines screamed End of the War! In Philadelphia, cheering throngs jammed the blocks around city hall and Independence Hall. Lin Pu-chi witnessed peace in the making. But like other Chinese students, his attention shifted to his homeland. China had entered the war hoping to regain concessions controlled by Germany in the province of Shandong. Would that finally happen?

  The Shandong Question

  The afternoon sun was just beginning to soften as the New York Central left Grand Central Terminal en route to Albany.

  The train steamed north, and the Hudson River widened to more than a mile across at Tappan Zee—the Dutch word for “sea.” The mighty Hudson, or the North River as locals called it, was an estuary, with salt water pushing at high tide as far upriver as Troy.

  Lin Pu-chi set his book down to stare out the window. Forested shoulders of land heaved into view, reminding him of the mountains along the Min River back home but on a scale that was breathtaking. He was again struck by the immensity of the countryside and the striking absence of people. The train passed through villages with intriguing names that evoked Dutch settlements and Mohican history—Ossining, Peekskill—and over small rivers like Wappinger Creek and the Casperkill. He recalled reading a story by an American author who had lived here, Washington Irving, about a hermit with the funny name of Rip Van Winkle, who fell asleep for twenty years. He awoke to find his gun rusted and his country entirely changed—gone was King George, and in his place, President George Washington. When Lin Pu-chi had read the story in English, he had recognized the Chinese legend of “Lankeshan Ji,” or “The Rotten Axe Handle”—the same story, but about a woodchopper. Lin Pu-chi wondered how different China would be after his time spent abroad.

  It was almost a year to the day since he had arrived in Philadelphia. Everything was going as planned. His academic record at the seminary was so strong that the school awarded him a hundred-dollar prize. He knew where the money had to go: he sent it to his mentor in Fuzhou, the Reverend William Pakenham-Walsh. He asked his teacher to use the funds for St. Mark’s School of Trinity College. He would later write to him, “The teaching of English was a minor thing in that little school, but the purpose manifested of leading young Chinese to better and higher things was the all important thing.”

  With the start of a new semester only weeks away, Lin Pu-chi was making his first trip outside of Philadelphia. His destination was Troy, New York, where Chinese students on the East Coast were gathering for the annual meeting of the Chinese Students’ Alliance. The host college this year was the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, a respected engineering school with many Chinese alumni.

  Lin Pu-chi half expected some notice from his peers once he got to the conference. In the previous issue of the alliance’s magazine, editors awarded him second prize in a fiction contest for “The Comedy of Ignorance.” This was the short story he had started while en route to Philadelphia, the love story about a headstrong young woman, Faung Ah-tsu, who convinced her father to send her to America to study. For all of his cerebral coursework and pondering of the great moral questions of the day, he could not resist writing a Cinderella ending to the saga of Ah-Tsu.

  In the story he crafted, Ah-Tsu ended up at the same university as her fiancé, Dyau. In America, she followed the fashion and adopted an English name, introducing herself as “Sophia” Faung. Dyau noticed that she bore a slight resemblance to the photograph of his betrothed in China, but he did not connect one to the other. Sophia, for her part, did not share her true identity. They met at gatherings of Chinese students, went sightseeing and shopping, and studied together. Dyau professed his love for Sophia, ignoring the ties that bound him to someone else back home.

  Two years passed. Dyau was working for a US railway company when he received a telegram from home: his father was seriously ill and he must return immediately. Dyau was his only son, and the dying man longed to see him married and settled before he passed away. The news sent Dyau into a panic. Should he return and marry someone he’d never met? How could he discard his true love, Sophia?

  “And yet,” Lin Pu-chi wrote, “it was necessary that he should return; his sense of filial obligation compelled him to his father’s death-b
ed.”

  The doorbell rang. Dyau was face to face with Sophia. She had news, too. Her father had also sent a telegram, instructing her to return home—for she was the Faung Ah-Tsu who was arranged to become his wife. They embraced, their hearts intertwined for eternity.

  The story left readers with an ending that many of them thought unimaginable—that the hand of fate could lead them to a marriage based on love.

  Troy was a small enough city—population 70,000—that the arrival of 150 Chinese students was big news. If Troy residents had any contact with someone Chinese, it was the launderer ironing their shirts or the waiter serving them American-style chop suey.

  As the Troy Times prepared its readers on the eve of the conference, “Many of the students have a far better grasp of the English language than the average American student, and they are keen tennis and golf players.” The paper even noted that Rensselaer’s football team had a second-string quarterback who was Chinese.

  Merchants hung Chinese flags in their store windows. Churches and the YMCA opened their doors, and prominent families held dinners and lawn parties for the visitors. City fathers were eager to show off Troy’s manufacturing might to the Chinese students, who were just as eager for a close-up look at legendary American industrial ingenuity. A hundred Chinese students hopped on trolleys to travel across the Hudson to tour the US Army’s Watervliet Arsenal. A colonel showed them workshops making heavy field equipment and guns. Another afternoon, after students saw workers making precision instruments at W. & L. E. Gurley Co., the widow of a former company president had them over to her mansion for tea.

  All of the attendees at the conference knew what it felt like to be the only Chinese person in a classroom or on a streetcar or in a dining hall. The meeting gave them ten days to escape those feelings of isolation and to imagine, if only for a short while, that they were back home.

  Like true Americans, they bonded over sports. Students came to the conference armed with college pennants from their alma maters in China as well as from their US schools. Old rivalries between universities like St. John’s and Nanyang transformed into new ones. Harvard men challenged Yale rivals in tennis. But it was the Cornell athletes at the conference who hammered challengers not only on the courts but also in track and field.