Shanghai Faithful

by Jennifer Lin

“The pageant. You know, Miss America,” the intern told him.

  “Miss Who?”

  It seemed the whole city was ramping up for the Miss America pageant. Interns from the hospital had to work at the pageant as emergency medics in case a contestant in heels twisted her ankle or fell off the runway. The local newspaper ran stories every day about the arrival of contestants and cheesecake photos of them chasing the waves or posing on the Boardwalk.

  On September 10, spectators filled the cavernous Boardwalk Hall, including one new arrival from Shanghai, whose friends gave him the best seat in the house. In his white tunic, Paul was posted at the foot of the long runway and told to help any damsel who might slip and fall face-first into the potted ferns. A giant “Miss America” banner hung over the stage. As the curtains were pulled back, a stream of contestants in evening gowns began parading down the runway. They weren’t wearing the body-hugging silk dresses preferred by Shanghai beauties. Instead they looked like big bells, swishing back and forth with each stride. Paul was agog. There were brunettes, blonds, even a redhead. They came from states he never heard of: North Dakota, Arkansas. Next came the swimsuit competition. Just how this was a competition, he wasn’t sure. He averted his eyes as the long-legged ladies pivoted past him in tight suits and heels. Fifteen women went on to the talent portion of the pageant. Miss Arizona recited Shakespeare, acting out the potion scene from Romeo and Juliet. Stagehands rolled out a giant glass tank of water for Miss Indiana, who dove in and performed a water ballet routine.

  One of the last ones up was Miss Montana. The curtain parted, and she came trotting out dressed as a cowgirl, astride a golden palomino horse. Halfway across the stage, the animal stumbled, reared up over the judge’s table, and nearly fell into the orchestra pit.

  The audience gasped.

  Paul lurched forward.

  But Miss Montana steadied her horse and trotted off with a plastered smile and a tip of her cowgirl hat. That would be the last year animals were allowed to perform at the Miss America pageant. In the end, Miss Arizona, Jacque Mercer, was crowned the winner. As she made her victory walk down the runway, Paul gazed up as Miss America in her rhinestone tiara and fake-fur-lined vermilion cape waved at the audience—and him.

  Dragon Seed

  The year passed quickly. After Atlantic City, Paul transferred to Hartford Hospital for a residency in surgery, moving a step closer to his goal of becoming the second neurosurgeon in China. Hartford was a far cry from Atlantic City. With more than twice the people, the Connecticut capital was more intense and the hospital environment more competitive. This was a larger teaching hospital, drawing medical students and physicians with Ivy League credentials. A young urologist and Harvard man took a liking to the awkward resident from Shanghai and invited him home to his family’s bayside vacation house in Old Saybrook, Connecticut, for the weekend.

  More than a decade older than Paul, Dr. Robert Hepburn was a Yankee blueblood and a legacy at Hartford Hospital: his father also was a urologist. Robert explained to Paul that he had more than a passing interest in Shanghai. After the Second World War, he had served on the naval hospital ship Repose, which had anchored in the Huangpu River for six months. The eight-hundred-bed ship served as the base hospital for the Seventh Fleet and the British Far Eastern Fleet.

  “I think my older sister would enjoy meeting you,” Robert explained on the hour-long drive to the family home. “She just made a movie about China.”

  As they turned down a long driveway leading to the waterfront house, Paul soon realized that this was no family cottage. The seventeen-room, three-story, white brick house faced a lawn that led to a private beach, where the arms of two rock jetties formed a secluded bathing area. When they arrived, Robert’s sister was already out golfing at the nine-hole Fenwick Golf Course, which ran past the house. Robert grabbed his clubs for a quick nine, with Paul tagging along to watch. Back at the house after the round, they were sitting in the kitchen when Robert’s sister came through the door. Wrapped in a thick terry robe after a swim in the frigid sound, she gave her brother a kiss on the cheek and immediately joined them at the kitchen table.

  “Paul, this is my sister Katharine,” Robert said.

  The introduction hit him like a thunderbolt. Dr. Hepburn. Katharine Hepburn. My sister the actress. Why hadn’t he noticed the family resemblance? Bob had the same long, thin nose as his forty-three-year-old sister. Even in Shanghai, with its many movie houses, Katharine Hepburn was a big name. At the moment, she was between movies, having just finished Adam’s Rib and before the release of The African Queen.

  “Ah, my brother told me all about you,” the actress began, tilting her sharp chin upward. “You’re from Shanghai, aren’t you? I made a movie about China. One of Pearl Buck’s novels. Dragon Seed. Do you know Pearl Buck?”

  “Of course,” Paul replied. “Even in China, Pearl Buck is very famous. Her parents were missionaries. Where did you film in China?”

  “Oh, not in China. Good god,” Katharine chuckled. “We filmed on a back lot in Hollywood. Built a set to look like a village.”

  “Did you play a missionary?”

  “Missionary? No, no, I played the lead, a peasant named Jade,” she said. “The movie was set in 1937. The story goes that none of the village men want to fight the Japanese. But Jade isn’t afraid. She’s headstrong and . . .”

  As Katharine went on about the movie, Paul had a hard time processing what she was saying. She plays a Chinese peasant? He looked at her square face, her high cheekbones and pointed chin, her wavy brown hair. Why would anyone think that she looks Chinese? He tried to picture her as a farmer with indigo trousers rolled up, planting rice seedlings with an infant strapped to her back. A comical thought crossed his mind: What if a Chinese studio was making a movie about, say, the Civil War, and cast only Chinese actors and actresses? What would Americans make of that?

  “Was it very horrible?” Katharine asked Paul, who hadn’t heard a word she said.

  “I’m sorry, was what horrible?”

  “The Japanese. Shanghai. During the war?”

  Both Katharine and Robert looked intently at Paul, waiting for his answer. One had played an avenging Chinese peasant against Japanese occupiers; the other had patched up wounded American soldiers during the Pacific conflict.

  “It was bad, but not as bad as you might think,” Paul tried to explain. “Shanghai was isolated in a way.”

  Sensing their confusion, he went on, “It was hard for us, don’t get me wrong. But the Japanese didn’t destroy Shanghai. They lived there, too. Other places had it a lot worse. But my family, we were okay. I still went to school. My father worked.”

  Paul went on to tell his hosts about his flight from Shanghai just days before the PLA took the city.

  “And how are things now?” the movie star wanted to know.

  The question seemed to stump Paul. He paused, thinking of his father’s regular letters and the paucity of any details.

  “I really don’t know,” Paul replied somewhat sheepishly. “I’ve been here more than a year and I can’t tell you what’s happening to my family. I’m not sure they know either.”

  IV

  New Order

  • 12 •

  American Wolves

  Shanghai, 1950

  When he said good-bye to his sons in Hong Kong, Lin Pu-chi insisted on one thing: “You must write to us every month.” He expected the letters to be written in English, the language of their adopted country, and free of misspellings or grammatical errors. In a typical exchange, he once admonished Paul: “You wrote, ‘My saliva was drowling.’ There’s no such word as drowling.” Lin Pu-chi wanted to know about their new lives, about their professors and colleagues, about girlfriends if there were any, about their progress in medicine. But in his own replies to them, he established a pattern of keeping things superficial. With Paul working as a sur
gical resident in Hartford and Jim now with a hospital in Washington, DC, he told them only what they needed to know, never burdening them with the many matters that were racking him.

  A year after the founding of the People’s Republic of China, no one could predict what would happen to Christians under the new regime of Chairman Mao Zedong and Premier Zhou Enlai. The country’s new leaders promised freedom of religious belief for Christians, Muslims, and Buddhists. But would that work in a political system controlled by avowed atheists? How much would the arm of government intrude into churches? And more important, would freedom of faith extend to freedom of conscience?

  On the eve of the Communist victory in 1949, Lin Pu-chi had calmed the readers of the Chinese Churchman by quoting from Isaiah, “In repentance and rest is your salvation, in quietness and trust is your strength.” China had endured a century of unrelenting warfare, he wrote in an editorial. The bloodshed stretched from the Opium Wars to the Taiping Rebellion; invasions by British, French, and Japanese forces; the Boxer Uprising; the Northern Expedition; eight years of Sino-Japanese fighting; and finally, the civil war between Nationalists and Communists.

  “In times like these, heart-gripping terror is inevitable as the future looks ever so bleak,” he told readers. His advice: be still, be quiet, reflect on the words of Isaiah, and put your trust in God.

  Lin Pu-chi remained guardedly hopeful about the future. To cower would be useless. To flee to Hong Kong or Taiwan was no guarantee of true comfort and stability. He said as much in a letter to his friend, Bishop Y. Y. Tsu. In the summer of 1950, the older man was in Hong Kong, debating whether he should take the next steamer to Shanghai. It was a dilemma facing many Chinese, particularly those with Western ties, money, education, status, and options beyond China. Bishop Tsu had been traveling in North America, attending a conference of the World Council of Churches in Toronto and visiting his university-age children in New Hampshire, Connecticut, and California. While transiting in Hong Kong, some foreign friends, concerned about shifting political winds, advised him not to return to Shanghai.

  But the bishop felt bound by duty. When he received the letter from Lin Pu-chi, encouraging him to come back, it sealed his decision.

  The fact that Lin Pu-chi had been favorably disposed to the new situation did not mean that he was a supporter of the Chinese Communist Party. But like many people who had weathered decades of turmoil and humiliation at the hands of Japan, he held a deep, abiding sense of pride for his country. As a Chinese Christian, too, he saw this moment in history as a unique opportunity for the church to finally stand on its own without the help of foreign missionaries and their faraway boards. It was a growing sentiment, this notion of a love of the motherland—aiguo—coexisting with a love of church—aijiao.

  Lin Pu-chi made his thoughts known to an audience beyond his immediate circle of Anglican colleagues in the Sheng Kung Hui. He added his name with eighteen other prominent Chinese Christians to an open letter to foreign mission boards, published soon after the founding of the People’s Republic of China in October 1949. The widely circulated document was a public declaration that the missionary era was over and its legacy, entangled as it was with the history of imperialism in China, would be contested. Lin Pu-chi was the only Anglican priest to sign the statement. He and the others stated that this new era was a “milestone,” signaling the end of a century of struggle against exploitation and feudalistic oppression. They added:

  Much of Western culture that has been introduced in recent years will be re-examined and shorn of its undesirable elements. Out of this will be born a new China, radically different from the China of old.

  There was no need, they declared, for Christians to reexamine their faith. Their beliefs would endure. But the role of missionaries would be greatly limited. Lin Pu-chi and other coauthors acknowledged that they could not remain aloof from the political environment. Neither could the Chinese church expect to emerge from this historical moment unaffected. “It will suffer a purge and many of the withered branches will be amputated,” the group wrote. “But we believe it will emerge stronger and purer in quality, a more fitting witness to the gospel of Christ.”

  Lin Pu-chi shared an office with Bishop Tsu in the Hongkou section of Shanghai. His main task was handling the minutiae of the regime change, the endless forms to fill and inventory of church property and personnel to complete. Under socialism, schools and hospitals run by the church were now national assets and had to be turned over to the state.

  At home in Shanghai, Lin Pu-chi wrote in a small office off the kitchen. This photograph was taken in the early 1950s. Courtesy of Lin Family Collection.

  The bishop’s return to Shanghai in the fall of 1950 came at a time of worsening relations between China and the United States over the conflict in the Korean peninsula. The communist regime in North Korea had dispatched troops across the thirty-eighth parallel on June 25, 1950, to attack the pro-Western South Korean government in Seoul. Chinese “volunteers” supported northern troops, while General Douglas A. MacArthur of the United States led United Nations forces in pushing the northern troops back to the Yalu River and the border with China. The United States would refer to the conflict as the Korean War, but in China, it was dubbed the “War to Resist America and Aid Korea.”

  At the Sheng Kung Hui national office, police often made unannounced visits, questioning Lin Pu-chi and others about the comings and goings of visitors, particularly foreigners. The anti-American rhetoric became so bombastic that the last of the missionaries packed up and left before they were kicked out.

  For Bishop Tsu, it quickly became clear that he had made the wrong decision. Even if he wanted to stay, there was no way his wife could ever return. She was a US citizen, the daughter of a Chinese-American pastor from New York City’s Chinatown. The couple had met four decades earlier when Bishop Tsu was a graduate student in the United States. In the summer of 1950, after traveling with her husband, she had stayed behind in the States. Now, with guns drawn over Korea, the bishop felt as if the political situation had forced his hand. He would turn sixty-five years old on December 18, 1950, and realized that it would be best for him to retire and leave China.

  Since they were young men, Bishop Tsu had been Lin Pu-chi’s adviser and confidant. He was close to the Lin family, too, and had given his younger friend some money to cover his sons’ passage out of China before the fall of Shanghai in the spring of 1949. The bishop had even scouted out hospitals in America where the Lin sons might continue their medical training, approaching physicians he met in his travels across the United States about internships for them.

  Fittingly for the friends, their last occasion together was at St. John’s University, where they had first met as professor and student thirty-five years earlier. On November 30, 1950, members of the Anglican and Episcopal community gathered in the university chapel to mark two occasions: the retirement of Bishop Tsu as well as the consecration of a new bishop who would work in Sichuan Province. At a luncheon afterward, Lin Pu-chi and the others presented Bishop Tsu with a silk-bound book of essays, eulogizing his four decades in the church. Everyone had signed it, including all the bishops. In leaving, Bishop Tsu relinquished his title as general secretary of the national office to Lin Pu-chi.

  On December 13, 1950, the older man boarded a cargo ship in Hong Kong, the SS President Pierce, bound for Los Angeles.

  Christian Manifesto

  Premier Zhou had warned the Christian community—in 1949, numbering one million Protestants and three million Roman Catholics—to clean house on their own and rid churches of “imperialistic and feudalistic influences.” Some leaders in the Protestant community, disposed to working with the new government, heeded those words and advocated for a new paradigm for the church in China. They drew up a “Christian Manifesto” and urged others to publicly sign on, pledging to terminate ties with overseas missions and support the new regime. This emerging mo
vement, dubbed by its leaders as the “Three-Self Reform Movement,” envisioned a Christian community that would be “self-governing, self-supporting and self-propagating”—in real terms, free of foreign involvement of any kind in the fate, finances, or future growth of Christianity in China.

  In April 1951, Zhou summoned more than 150 Protestant leaders from around China to Beijing for a high-level meeting with officials in charge of religious matters. Among them was the brother-in-law of Lin Pu-chi, Watchman Nee, who was invited as an observer. Even though he was not affiliated with any denominational church, the Little Flock, with more than seventy thousand people spread across the country, represented a significant portion of China’s Protestant population.

  The meeting was ostensibly to examine how Christian groups would sever their ties with foreign mission boards. For the first two days—April 17 and 18—the gathering followed that agenda. But the next two days devolved into a mass denunciation of seven men: three missionaries and four Chinese Christians.

  This was a deliberate attempt to remold ideas and create a united front of Protestants, free of denominational divisions and with a clear demarcation between “patriotic” Chinese Christians and recalcitrant allies of America. Eighteen delegates took turns making “vehement denunciations” against the seven men, none of whom were present. In each case, someone close to the target—a friend or colleague—led the charge. The westerners were decried as “imperialist agents under the cloak of religion.”

  Frank Price was a China-born Presbyterian with the YMCA who had the misfortune of now being a former close adviser to the Nationalist pariah Chiang Kai-shek.

  Edward Lockwood was another YMCA man, accused of being a “missionary spy” for thirty years in the southern city of Canton.

  Timothy Richard was an unexpected target. He had been dead for thirty-six years. The Baptist educator from Wales founded the Christian Literature Society, which translated religious books into Chinese, now criticized as intellectual poison.