Shanghai Faithful

by Jennifer Lin

  Erudite and ambitious, Lin Pu-chi eagerly shared his thoughts, sometimes bluntly, on the pages of the Chinese Recorder, a Protestant magazine published in Shanghai and circulated to missionaries throughout the country.

  Lin Pu-chi’s first job in Fuzhou was on the faculty of the Union Theological Seminary, pictured here around 1920. The Reverend Lin Pu-chi represented the Anglican Church and sits in the front, second from the left. Courtesy of Yale Divinity School Library.

  His barbed opinions could rankle foreign readers. When editors sent a survey to Chinese theologians, asking them among other questions whether they wanted missionaries in their country, he replied yes but added with emphasis, “the right kind of missionary.” China didn’t need missionaries who were ensconced in spacious compounds with maids and cooks, protected by treaty law and isolated from the very people they were trying to help. The people, he wrote, needed missionaries who choose a life of self-denial and sacrifice to “entirely work for the advancement of God’s Kingdom and not for the prestige of their nations; those who can sympathize with the people among whom they work, who are humble enough to see their viewpoints, to share their aspirations.”

  What Chinese Christians sought were advisers, not rulers who overstayed their welcome. “The missionaries are a valuable asset to the Chinese Church but we need not attach undue importance to them,” Lin Pu-chi wrote in the magazine.

  Another time, he challenged missionaries who objected to demonstrations every year on May 9 to mark the “Day of Humiliation.” It was the anniversary of China’s acceptance in 1915 of an ultimatum from Japan to cede to it control of Manchuria and German concessions in Shandong Province. Many mission schools banned students from protesting, saying it fed hatred and animosity. Lin Pu-chi openly disagreed. He argued that the actions of Japan constituted a crime of international proportions. “And no Christian, if his religion is worth anything, should or can tolerate . . . a crime,” he wrote in the Chinese Recorder.

  The Beatitudes, he acknowledged, may teach Christians that “Blessed are the peacemakers.” His rebuttal: “It is a very different thing to refuse to assert one’s national rights, or to be so shamefully servile as to accept any treatment, however vile, accorded another nation. The Christian Church should take an active part in the keeping of the Ninth of May, ‘Lest we forget!’”

  Missionaries would get a blunt warning about the depths of the antipathy toward foreigners in the spring of 1925.

  On May 15, 1925, the foreman of a Japanese cotton mill in Shanghai shot and killed a Chinese worker during a labor strike. Protesters marched into the heart of the International Settlement in Shanghai on May 30. They rushed a police station run by the Shanghai Municipal Council near busy Nanjing Road. A British inspector ordered them to halt. He counted to ten before commanding Sikh and Chinese officers to fire into the surging crowd. Forty-four shots from automatic pistols killed eleven and wounded twenty demonstrators.

  In Fuzhou, as many as ten thousand people—some with signs saying “Exterminate Foreigners”—protested in sympathy for the victims of the “May Thirtieth Incident.” Residents launched a boycott and stopped buying everything from British American Tobacco cigarettes to coal imported from the Japanese colony of Formosa. The newly formed Fujian Student Union, whose ranks included Chinese Communist Party activists, terrorized local employees of foreign firms. A mob attacked a deliveryman with the British-run Asiatic Petroleum Company and cut off his left ear with a pair of scissors.

  The protests in Fuzhou shifted in the summer toward mission schools. The Student Union pledged to prevent them from opening in the fall and, in particular, vowed to destroy the most prominent British school in the city, Trinity College. Provocateurs sent anonymous letters to parents of students and teachers, warning them of an attack if they dared to return.

  On August 30, 1925, as a violent typhoon buffeted the coast of Fujian, nine leaders of the Anglican Church—all Chinese—huddled for an emergency meeting on the fate of Trinity College. They were taking matters into their own hands. The highest-ranking Chinese cleric in Fujian, Archdeacon Ding Ing-ong, had called the meeting. The older man spoke no English, so Lin Pu-chi took notes. He later drafted a letter to the missionary in charge of Trinity College, relaying the group’s concerns and trying to impress on him how this political storm was different.

  “The fact that there is an element of patriotism gives weight to the attacks,” Lin Pu-chi cautioned in English. “And no doubt the recent attempt to overthrow British schools is different in nature from former attacks.”

  In spelling out options, the group recommended that the three foreign principals who ran the primary and two middle schools step aside and allow Chinese men to take their places. The foreign staff complied and then went a step further by naming a new executive committee to run Trinity, made up of a Chinese majority of directors. The president of the college, the Reverend W. P. W. Williams, also offered to resign. But in the end, he remained because he felt there was no qualified Chinese candidate to replace him.

  On October 2, Williams sent a coded telegram to London: TRINITY REOPENS UNDER CHINESE MANAGEMENT.

  Orphans and Radicals

  Lin Pu-chi could mark the passage of time by his rise through the ranks of the Anglican community: ordination as deacon in 1921 and priest in 1922; selection as cathedral dean in 1924.

  For his wife, time was measured through the lives of her children. After the disappointment of their arranged marriage, both assumed the roles expected of them in a Confucian society. Their relationship was amicable and respectful, with children coming at a regular interval. Lin Pu-chi was preoccupied with his career and professional duties, leaving the household and family to his wife.

  Ni Guizhen bore their first child—a daughter—almost nine months to the day after their wedding. Another daughter arrived the next year, but the baby did not survive, a victim of dysentery, which took the lives of many children in the teeming, unsanitary city. Two healthy sons followed in quick succession in 1924 and 1925.

  The couple lived on Nantai Island, a place that in some neighborhoods felt more foreign than Chinese. The Western community was tiny compared with Shanghai’s, numbering in the hundreds rather than the thousands. But the foreign presence—all the consulates, banks, trading firms, shipping lines, and social clubs—was concentrated in one place. A British man could spend the morning at the office, play an afternoon game of field hockey on the grounds of the racecourse, and then relax in a leather chair at the Fuzhou Club with the latest London edition of the Times and a whiskey and soda. At night, he might bump into a visitor such as the British author W. Somerset Maugham, staying at the Brand Hotel on the waterfront.

  Lin Pu-chi knew every corner and alley of the neighborhood, as did his wife. Both had grown up there: the young priest near his father’s hospital and Ni Guizhen near her father’s waterfront office for the customs service.

  The couple now shared a brick house with Lin Pu-chi’s widowed mother and his younger brother, the postal clerk. It was a stately building, three stories tall, designed by an American architect out of gratitude for the good medical care he had received from the late Dr. Lin, who died in 1922 of tuberculosis.

  In the fall of 1926, Ni Guizhen was pregnant for a fifth time when the mood in the city turned dark. Newspapers told of the movement of troops from the south toward Fuzhou. It was part of the unfinished revolution of Sun Yat-sen. Since the debacle a decade earlier, when the first president tried unsuccessfully to reinstate a monarchy, the country lacked an effective central government. China, a republic in name only, was carved into districts controlled by warlords with private armies.

  Loyalists of Sun Yat-sen and his Nationalist or Kuomintang Party were backed into a corner, operating from a base in the southern city of Canton. The revolutionary statesman had died in 1925, but in one of his last acts, he negotiated a tenuous military coalition between Nationalists and the
Chinese Communist Party. Chiang Kai-shek, the Nationalists’ military man, vowed to carry on the fight to unify China once and for all. In the summer of 1926, he headed north with a combined army.

  This map depicts Fuzhou in 1927 and shows Christian landmarks and locations that were relevant to the life of Lin Pu-chi. Courtesy of Sterling Chen.

  The Northern Expedition, as it was known, faced little resistance. When coalition forces reached Fuzhou in December 1926, most of the fifty thousand soldiers under the nominal control of a local warlord scattered without a fight. Many were former bandits and mercenaries with little loyalty and much hatred for the warlord. When a Nationalist commander marched into Fuzhou, these soldiers simply did an about-face and traded in one uniform for another.

  By the time the Lin family gathered to celebrate the thirty-second birthday of Lin Pu-chi on Christmas Day in 1926, Nationalist forces controlled Fuzhou. Overnight, the city was ablaze with flags for the victors—a blue background with a white sun. Some students set up soapboxes to extol like preachers the late Sun Yat-sen’s three principles of the people: nationalism, democracy, and socialism. Local newspapers carried editorials on the topic; one explained that this was Abraham Lincoln’s theory in Chinese terms.

  The Northern Expedition pushed into the next province but left behind in Fuzhou some of the Soviet advisers who had been helping behind the scenes. The young Soviet Union was the only country willing to help the Nationalists with funding and military and political assistance. Masters of propaganda, they were intent on advancing a socialist agenda in China and began organizing workers into unions. The Fujian Students Union, with its anti-Christian members, gladly worked with the Soviets against foreigners and Christians. Young provocateurs plastered posters against Christians and brazenly sauntered through the streets, swinging crude homemade bombs from ropes. They staked out mission schools and other properties, skulking in the shadows and setting up surveillance.

  One group of students planted themselves outside the compound of an orphanage run by Dominican nuns from Spain. When a Chinese worker left the compound carrying two baskets balanced over his shoulder, they demanded to know what was inside.

  The man nervously answered, “Fish.”

  Someone lifted a cloth to inspect the baskets, detonating an explosion of rage among onlookers.

  What they saw was the sad evidence of the Chinese preference for boys. Newborn girls who perished from malnutrition or illness or who simply weren’t wanted by their parents often ended up in the “baby tower,” found among the gravesites outside the city walls. It was a conical stone structure, slightly taller than a man, with an opening at the top where someone could drop a baby—dead or alive. Towers like this were built to help poor people who could not afford the expense of funerals. They were not supposed to be used for living children, but it happened. At the tower’s base were baskets with strings, left behind by bearers after they lowered newborns into the putrid pile. Another way to dispose of girls was in the river. City dwellers tried to discourage the practice. On the waterfront in Nantai stood a stone with the chiseled message: “Little girls are not to be drowned here.”

  Peasants came to know, however, that the Dominican nuns at the Holy Childhood Orphanage in Fuzhou would pay for their girls—twenty cents per baby. The government discouraged such transactions, but the sisters viewed it as an act of mercy. The mother superior felt payment would encourage parents to make the effort to turn over their daughters to them. The Spanish sisters supported hundreds of orphans by making lace embroidery, a skill they, in turn, passed on to their wards. In a little chapel with a statue of the Blessed Virgin Mary, they also taught the girls how to recite the rosary.

  The Spanish nuns accepted five to twelve babies a day. They arrived in deplorable condition and after being washed and clothed were quickly baptized. All too often the children were moments from death. For practical reasons, the sisters waited a few days until there were several corpses before giving the deceased a proper blessing and burial outside the orphanage.

  The worker who was accosted by students was on his way to bury babies. As soon as the crowd discovered his cargo, they stormed the compound, where they found even more corpses, some stored outdoors and crawling with rats.

  Rioters tore apart the dormitories, playrooms, and classrooms. When they were finished, they moved across the street and ransacked the church and the rectory for Dominican priests. The violence started at 4:00 p.m. and ended six hours later. The Spanish nuns fled with as many girls as possible, escaping the city aboard a British steamer.

  Protesters had what they needed. They put some of the tiny corpses on display in front of a local court and hung posters with images of babies being boiled. They passed out leaflets with the message: “Do you realize the dark purposes of the Christian religion? Are your hearts not moved by their cruel acts?”

  The destruction of the orphanage was on a Friday—January 14, 1927. The following Sunday, Lin Pu-chi traveled by rickshaw across the Bridge of Ten Thousand Ages to a small Chinese chapel near the old city. With him were his wife and their daughter, five-year-old Martha; the younger toddler boys stayed at home with a nanny. The pastor of the church, founded by American missionaries, had invited him to be a guest speaker at that day’s service.

  The day was bright and clear, and the pews were filled mostly with girls from the Wen Shan Girls’ School across the street, one of the oldest mission schools in the city. The students sang joyfully, their sweet voices filling the chapel.

  After the service, a pair of sisters from Rhode Island invited the Lin family over for dinner. Betty and Mary Cushman had been sent to China by a mission organization for the Congregational churches. The pastor and his wife were easy guests. Lin Pu-chi spoke English effortlessly, and Ni Guizhen, from her years at the McTyeire School, could follow along. It was well known among American missionaries that Lin Pu-chi had studied in Philadelphia. The sisters’ elder brother, a sailor, had died in that city in September 1918, a victim of the Spanish flu pandemic.

  As they finished their meal, the nephew of a Chinese teacher burst into their house, shouting. The big Methodist Episcopal church in the city was being looted by a mob. Betty tried to calm him. Then three girls charged into the compound with another breathless warning. Their school, the Anglo-Chinese Girls’ School a few blocks away near the South Gate of the old city, was under attack. Rioters were ripping apart their campus and had seized two British teachers. The attackers used knives to tear the dresses off the women’s bodies, took off their shoes and stockings, and sent them barefoot into the streets in only their undergarments.

  Betty received more reports of destruction. Looters were targeting mission buildings all over the city: schools, hospitals, a YMCA, and homes. Student demonstrators egged them on, riding up and down the streets in cars and shouting through megaphones, “This is the day to overthrow Christianity!”

  “What should we do?” Betty anxiously asked her sister. Their students were on the edge of panic. Without a telephone at the school, Mary agreed to run for help from the American consulate across the river in Nantai. Someone else from the school slipped out the back to reach Nationalist soldiers, billeted at a nearby temple.

  Protesters kept pounding on the front gate, but the gateman refused to let anyone inside. At 4:00 p.m, he opened the door just a crack, thinking an officer from the temple had arrived to help them. More than thirty men—not the troops—forced their way inside.

  Betty stood outside her house, arms folded, a forced smile on her face. The trespassers circled her, quizzically studying her and three other American teachers. Lin Pu-chi, his wife, and their daughter stayed out of sight. The men spoke Mandarin—evidently northerners. Betty felt there was nothing she could do but stand there, praying that the nearby soldiers would come to their rescue. She kept the mob at bay with sheer friendliness and calm.

  “Are you French?” someone asked in Mand
arin.

  “No, no, American,” answered another teacher who spoke the northern dialect.

  “Meiguo,” Betty repeated, mimicking her friend, for she spoke only the Fuzhou dialect.

  After ten minutes, more rioters from the streets began pushing their way inside and racing up the walkway toward the campus. Now there were more than a hundred men eyeing the tall brick school building and missionary homes. Someone clapped his hands and yelled, “Let’s go!”

  Ni Guizhen raced down the steps of the Cushmans’ home and held out her arms, trying to halt the advancing men. She pleaded with them to do no harm. Just then, twenty uniformed guards with bayoneted rifles marched into the compound. They pushed the mob back through the gate and onto the street.

  The officer in charge posted guards at every gate and plastered a sign on the front door: “No foreigners here, just Chinese students and teachers.”

  Lin Pu-chi hurried with his wife and daughter back to their home in Nantai. The officers ordered Betty and Mary to stay indoors. The American women went to bed with their clothes on that night. Outside their window, a hundred troops encamped in the schoolyard.

  The next day, the US consul in Fuzhou, Ernest B. Price, surveyed the damage. He no longer trusted Chinese officials to keep Americans safe. Even though the Wen Shan School had been spared, authorities had not stopped the systematic looting elsewhere. Indeed, some of the culprits were renegade soldiers wearing the KMT military insignia. At 3:00 a.m. on January 18, Price sent a telegram to the legation in Beijing and circulated a letter to all Americans in Fuzhou, urging women and children to evacuate. “We are now in a lull before the storm which may break at any time upon us,” Price warned American residents.

  Later that week, Betty and Mary Cushman boarded the destroyer USS Pillsbury bound for Manila. Fewer than a hundred Americans remained in Fuzhou.