Shanghai Faithful

by Jennifer Lin

  One night, a student from Columbia donned his varsity wrestling uniform to demonstrate the sport with a freshman teammate, who was also Chinese. It was an odd sight compared to the martial arts of China. Afterward, the gymnasium was cleared and turned into a dance floor. That’s when the intercollegiate competition really heated up: there was only 1 woman for every 10 men among the 150 attendees.

  But there was more to the gathering than bonhomie on the athletic field and flirtation on the dance floor. There was work to be done, a call for this privileged generation of overseas students to return home and continue the fight for a free, independent China.

  The first speaker at the conference set the tone. Quo Tai-chi—Penn class of 1911, Phi Beta Kappa in political science—was just back from the debacle of the peace conference in Paris, where he had served as a technical adviser to the Chinese delegation. China, he told the students, was locked in a battle for survival.

  Japan had pulled a fast one on China, he said. With the defeat of Germany, China expected to reclaim German concessions in Shandong. But Japan wanted to replace Germany and had finagled the secret support of Great Britain, France, and Italy. In a quid pro quo, Japan had traded its naval support during the war for the right to take over German concessions in Shandong afterward, particularly the port of Qingdao.

  Quo Tai-chi and the other delegates learned of the secret deal only when they arrived in Paris. President Wilson, who had promised to stand with China, capitulated on April 30 and, in order to move the peace process along, did not block Japan. Beijing students by the thousands took to the streets, marching in protest to the foreign legation on May 4, 1919. But the backlash in China had little effect. The Treaty of Versailles was signed on June 28—without the signatures of Chinese negotiators.

  “The Shandong settlement by the peace conference in Japan’s favor amounts to a moral and legal sanction by the civilized world of Japan’s policy of aggression and despoliation in China,” Quo said. “It is not only a glaring injustice to China, but an outrage against the present worldwide awakening spirit of democracy for which Young China is fighting.”

  Students cheered him with thunderous applause.

  On the last day of the conference, the members needed to elect new officers. It was a small exercise in the democratic process of voting as well as a bit of a popularity contest. Getting the most votes for chairman was a Harvard-Penn-Indiana man from St. John’s. In a nod to modernity, his vice chairman was a Radcliffe woman from Fujian. And rounding out the slate as secretary was another St. John’s alumnus, Lin Pu-chi.

  With the election, Lin Pu-chi joined the inner circle of leaders of the eight-hundred-member eastern branch of the alliance. In the closing hours of the conference, they had one final act of business. They drafted a protest letter to the Foreign Relations Committee of the United States Senate, declaring that the Shandong deal “violates the principles of justice and equity for which the Great War has been fought and won, and upon which the future stability of world peace rests.”

  Lin Pu-chi and the others appealed to the moral leadership of the United States. Americans, they wrote, “will not tolerate such an outrageous act of international brigandage” and will push to alter the Shandong decision to restore “all political and economic rights and privilege once enjoyed by Germany absolutely and unconditionally to their rightful sovereign owner, the Republic of China.”

  The patriots had spoken.

  Piety

  The Western Union messenger rang the doorbell at 901 Clinton Street.

  “Telegram for Mr. P. C. Lin,” he told the housekeeper.

  Later that day, when Lin Pu-chi returned home from the library, he saw the telegram addressed to him on a table in the foyer.

  In an instant, he knew it could be from only one place.

  His heart pounded. He ripped open the letter and frantically read the message:

  Your brother will marry later this year.

  Return home.

  Made arrangements for your marriage.

  Father

  His hands shook. He read the words again and again.

  His brother was the third son, Lin Buying. The second son had died at a young age. Lin Buying also graduated from Trinity College but went to work for the postal service in Fuzhou instead of going to St. John’s. Chinese custom dictated that if Lin Buying wanted to marry, he could not do so until the eldest son—Lin Pu-chi—was married.

  In the back of his mind, Lin Pu-chi always knew that the day would come when his parents arranged his marriage. But this wasn’t his plan. This wasn’t supposed to happen now. His graduate studies were going well, but it would take many more years to earn his doctorates from Penn and the seminary. He had scarcely started. How could he return now?

  And besides, there was no reason, no logic to this insistence that the oldest son had to marry first. Why did it matter? This was just an old-fashioned way of thinking. He was a modern man.

  His mind raced. He thought of ways to explain this to his father. Should he send a letter right away? Should he spell out for him why this was not a good idea? If he wanted to serve the church in China, he needed to get the most out of his study at the seminary. And if he wanted to serve China, he needed to drink up as much as he could from his professors at Penn.

  That was rational. That was logical. A summons home was not.

  But was his father asking him to return or telling him? And if it was an order, could he defy him? Was he prepared to break from Confucian convention and let his individual desires guide him?

  There could be only one way.

  The weather was warm with a light breeze on the first of Lin Pu-chi’s two graduation days. On May 27, 1920, Dean Bartlett handed him and four others their seminary diplomas at a service at St. Andrew’s Church.

  In 1920, Lin Pu-chi graduated from the Divinity School of the Protestant Episcopal Church in Philadelphia. He stands in the back row, second from the right. Source: Class Photos, RG-7, Student Records, Box 5, The Archives of The Divinity School of the Protestant Episcopal Church in Philadelphia, at Episcopal Divinity School, Cambridge, MA. Used with permission.

  Some received doctorates. With his studies cut short, Lin Pu-chi had earned enough credits for only a bachelor’s degree of sacred theology. For the second year in a row, the dean awarded Lin Pu-chi a prize of one hundred dollars for academic excellence.

  Twenty days later, Lin Pu-chi walked down the aisle of the Metropolitan Opera House on North Broad Street for the 164th commencement of the University of Pennsylvania. He received a master of philosophy.

  Back at 901 Clinton, he packed up his books in boxes to ship to China via the American Express Company. Lugging his leather suitcase, he walked to the Broad Street Station to catch the Pennsylvania Railroad’s Day Express to Pittsburgh, the first leg of his long journey home.

  • 6 •

  Second Daughter

  Fuzhou, 1920

  Even with her door shut, Ni Guizhen could hear her father’s voice raised at her mother.

  “It’s your daughter’s wedding,” he implored from another room. “How can you not be here?”

  “Your sister can handle everything,” her mother answered. “I’m needed in Fuqing.”

  Inside her room, Ni Guizhen did not try to hold back her tears. She did not want to get married. And now, as the days counted down to December 20, 1920, she faced the prospect of standing at the altar to marry a virtual stranger without her mother in the front pew. Making the situation even harder to accept, it was Ni Guizhen’s mother who had pushed for this union in the first place. Her husband and the father of Lin Pu-chi had served together on the board of directors of the YMCA, and she had her eye on his eldest son, the student in the United States. When a go-between suggested a marriage, she accepted wholeheartedly.

  The bride’s mother, whose name was Lin Heping (but not rel
ated to the groom), had never bowed to the opinion of others and was not about to start. Her decision to miss her daughter’s wedding had been abrupt. Only in the past few months had she embraced a new desire to spread her Christian beliefs. To her delight, she found that she was much in demand among missionaries. A few weeks before the wedding, an American woman had invited her to give a series of talks about her faith at a school in Fuqing, a coastal city to the south. Foreigners depended on local women like Lin Heping, who understood the Bible and could act as cultural conduits to other wives and girls who were inquiring about Christian beliefs. Women did not mix freely with men in proper Chinese society, making a female approach necessary. On top of that, though missionaries had been around for seventy years, it was more effective to have Chinese believers rather than foreigners conveying the religious message.

  Lin Heping viewed the invitation as a test, coinciding as it did with her daughter’s wedding. It pitted her spiritual devotion against her maternal responsibility, a choice of one love over another.

  Short and stout with her weight approaching two hundred pounds, Lin He-ping ruled her household and marriage by intimidation. She craved social status and nurtured her reputation as the wife of a senior official in the maritime customs office. Her meek husband gave her wide berth.

  For all her imperious manners, Lin Heping was not born into a high station in life. She was the daughter of peasants who could not afford to feed another mouth—another female mouth. Out of desperation, her father sold her to a merchant in the city. The man gave the girl to his concubine, who could not have children and wanted a child to coddle. Only girls were sold, never precious boys, and so the concubine gained a daughter.

  Following Chinese tradition, the woman began to bind Lin Heping’s feet when she was six. The child resisted and wailed each time the cloth wrappings were tightened. That same year, the merchant became stricken with an illness that defied traditional Chinese treatments. A colleague from his business asked members of his Methodist Episcopal church to pray for the man’s recovery. The merchant rebounded and, convinced that the faith of the Christians had saved his life, decided to convert. To prove his commitment, he threw out the Kitchen God in his home and other traditional wooden idols.

  The conversion of the family had a profound impact on Lin Heping’s upbringing. Her parents sent her to a mission school run by a Methodist missionary from West Virginia. Julia Bonafield, the principal, had a strict rule: no girls with bound feet allowed. “Bound feet should be looked upon as a mark of heathenism and should not be tolerated in a Christian school,” Miss Bonafield wrote in a letter to the Chinese Recorder, a missionary magazine. Lin Heping’s mother heeded her admonition and unbound her daughter’s feet.

  When Lin Heping was sixteen, she asked Miss Bonafield to write a letter to her contacts in America. She told the school principal of her deep desire to travel to the States and follow in the footsteps of the famous Dr. Xu of Fuzhou. Every Christian girl in Fuzhou had read about the remarkable achievement of Dr. Xu. The physician Xu Jinhong was a missionary success story, touted from church to church. In 1884, her parents, who were converts, broke with tradition and not only educated their daughter but also accepted the suggestion of a missionary to let her continue her education overseas. It was such a novelty at the time for Chinese students to study in America, let alone young women, that the New York Times reported on her arrival in Delaware, Ohio, to enroll at Ohio Wesleyan University. After four years at the school, she moved to Philadelphia to attend the Women’s Medical College of Pennsylvania. Dr. Xu returned home and managed a missionary hospital in Fuzhou, treating women and children and training other Chinese women as nurses.

  Miss Bonafield did reach out to her colleagues in the United States about the prospects for Lin Heping, and she received an encouraging reply. If her student could handle the language and maintain good grades, it might be possible for her to enter medical school. With that, Lin Heping urged her father to send her to Shanghai, where the Methodist missionaries ran the more academically rigorous McTyeire Home and School for Girls. She reasoned that she could better hone her language proficiency at a better school.

  Even as a seventeen-year-old, Lin Heping could be persuasive. Her father yielded to her wishes, and Lin Heping left for Shanghai with another girl from her school, the daughter of a local pastor, who also wanted to become a doctor. In 1897, McTyeire was in its infancy with only two dozen students, mostly girls from affluent families. One of her classmates was Song Qingling, who would later become the wife of the revolutionary Dr. Sun Yat-sen. Lin Heping’s mother, however, worried about losing her daughter to the modern world and leaving China. So when a matchmaker came to her home to inquire about a marriage between her daughter and the son of a local pastor, the concubine eagerly endorsed the idea. Lin Heping’s father acquiesced, preferring harmony under his roof over honoring his daughter’s wishes.

  The news of their decision, delivered in a letter to McTyeire, shattered Lin Heping. “I knew that useless girls planned to get married, but others could be independent and become teachers, doctors and important people,” she wrote many years later. “Me? Finished—go and get married!”

  When she returned home, her parents gave her a photo of her betrothed. “My ambition had come to nothing. I had no alternative,” she said. “Within me was born a hatred of my mother. I regarded her as the one who ruined my future.”

  But for all her bitterness, for all her thwarted ambition, she felt no compunction about doing the same thing many years later to her second daughter, Ni Guizhen.

  New Path

  At the start of her eighteenth year, Ni Guizhen was going to school in Shanghai and was happy, blissfully happy.

  She was thriving as a student at the McTyeire School, the same mission school attended by her mother. When she left home, she felt liberated. She was dispensable as a second daughter—or as she was viewed by her tradition-bound mother, a second disappointment. Though China had entered the modern era, ancient customs still cemented families. Boys were coveted; girls endured. When Lin Heping gave birth to her second daughter in 1902, she feared that she was cursed like her husband’s sister, who had produced nothing but girls—six of them! When she delivered her third child, her husband was the first to see the newborn. He whispered in his wife’s ear, “It’s true! It is a son, thank God.” They named him Ni Shuzu. As their family grew, he remained the sun with everyone else mere planets.

  Ni Guizhen grew up knowing she was not the answer to her mother’s prayers but rather the reason for them. She had a plain, round face, and absent the attention of her vain mother, she found contentment at school.

  She loved everything about McTyeire. She loved her teachers, adventuresome Methodist Episcopal women from states like Georgia and Tennessee, who had been teaching Chinese girls since 1892. There was Miss Smith, who taught her how to play the piano, and Miss Clairborne, who showed her how to use a microscope in biology class.

  She loved the idyllic campus, sequestered in the western part of Shanghai behind a tall wall that looked like the undulating spine of a dragon. She loved the magnolia tree by the front gate, transplanted from the American South to China, and the constant parade of flowers on campus—white peach blossoms, lavender wisteria, pink cosmos, and cardinal-red geraniums. She loved playing croquet on the manicured lawn, singing in the school choir, and tending a botany class garden with beans, strawberries, asparagus, blackberries, lettuce, and mustard greens.

  She loved that she could dream at McTyeire. Even girls could have aspirations, and hers was to leave China for the United States and become a physician. Like her mother before her, Ni Guizhen wanted to be like Dr. Xu, a virtuous woman with purpose. At McTyeire, she focused on science as she polished her English language skills.

  The school song was her anthem.

  Near the yellow Yangtze River

  In the heart of old Shanghai,

  There’s
a school for China’s daughters

  Bringing truth and freedom nigh.

  May she live and grow forever,

  Scatter knowledge far and near,

  Till all China learns the lessons

  That we learn at old McTyeire.

  Everything was going as planned until the day the principal called her to the office and handed her a letter from her mother. The note said her marriage had been arranged and she must cut short her studies to return home.

  Just like that, Ni Guizhen’s dream ended. She would not graduate from high school, not travel to America, not study medicine. What she wanted from life did not matter; her parents had made the decision for her.

  Ni Guizhen silently raged against her fate but mostly against her mother. She could not understand how her mother could do this to her.

  How could she allow history to repeat itself in such a cruel way?

  Force of Nature

  The religious transformation of Lin Heping in the year before her daughter’s wedding had been nothing short of startling. If someone had to describe Lin Heping—the old Lin Heping, the one before 1920—you would hear words such as “forceful,” “imperious,” “striving,” “stubborn,” “overbearing,” “headstrong,” and “opinionated.” The phrase “exemplary Christian” would not have been among the descriptions.

  She spent her days at the mahjong table, gossiping and gambling with her friends. She draped herself in fine silk and velvet and flaunted her valuable jade rings and pendants. Given a choice between a service at church and the latest Hollywood movie at the cinema, she had no trouble choosing Charlie Chaplin or Rudolph Valentino ahead of the apostles. She could be downright rude if a local pastor made the mistake of coming to her home and interrupting her gambling to ask for a church contribution from the family. “Sit down here,” she would say mockingly. “Let’s see what my winnings amount to. If I win plenty, I’ll give God some!”