by Jennifer Lin
But the one section that caught everyone’s attention was the photograph of a naked woman, shot from the head down. This was allegedly the camerawork of Watchman Nee. The evidence included a film projector that he bought in London in 1938, purportedly to view X-rated movies, and ninety-three copies of pornographic books and magazines.
Watchman Nee during a visit to England in 1938. Even as a young man, he was well known in Christian circles outside China. Courtesy of Angus Kinnear family collection.
Tim had to avert his eyes. He hurried out of the exhibit, unconvinced one way or another and mulling over a thought that everyone understood: If the government says you’re wrong, you’re wrong.
Verdict
It had all come to this: a trial before the People’s High Court on June 21, 1956. About one hundred people filled the courtroom, located in the heart of Shanghai near the Bund. All the observers were handpicked and included government officials, church representatives, leaders of the Three-Self Movement, and a dozen members from the Christian Assembly on Nanyang Road.
Absent was anyone from the defendant’s family. Charity, who had been at the top of a “wanted” list of Little Flock members, refused to testify against her husband or write a confession. She was detained before the trial.
One of the Little Flock observers was a young medical student, Xu Meili, whose denunciation of Watchman Nee at the Tian Chan Theater was reprinted in the Liberation Daily. As bailiffs escorted Watchman Nee into the courtroom, she thought he looked neat, healthy, and calm.
A judge read each charge while a court officer showed Watchman Nee the corresponding evidence, spread out on a table in front of him. He answered questions promptly in a voice that was low. “From the very beginning to the end, all of his answers were ‘Yes’ without hesitancy,” Xu Meili would later observe. “His attitude was submissive, yet without any expression of shame.”
After five hours, Watchman Nee rose from his seat for the reading of the sentence. The judge declared him guilty of counterrevolutionary crimes and imposed a fifteen-year sentence to be served at the Tilanqiao Prison, a notorious turn-of-the-century penitentiary built by the British in the city’s Hongkou section.
The next time members of the Nanyang Road assembly met for Sunday service, elders of the congregation reported on the trial and proposed the excommunication of Watchman Nee. The assembly endorsed the decision and sent an announcement to Little Flock groups all across the country. It stated, “We represent all brothers and sisters of the Shanghai Christian Assembly to support the sentence of the government heartily!”
In his attic study, Lin Pu-chi began composing his June letter to Paul and Sylvia in Philadelphia.
“It is now a full seven years since Paul and Jim left us, and it is hard to realize how quickly time has elapsed,” he wrote. “Aunt Mary sent mother another nice birthday gift, which was gratefully received.”
Tim’s wife was pregnant but suffering from morning sickness. Lin Pu-chi added that Paul’s mother, too, was showing some signs of improving health. Ni Guizhen could now sit up on the sofa for a few hours at a time. “As I told you before,” he explained, “her problems began with over-exertion at Tim’s wedding time.”
Overexertion. Yes, that was one way of putting it. Best to leave out mention of the police search for weapons a month after the wedding.
He dipped his pen into an inkwell. “Then in February, mental strain made her bedridden for a prolonged time.”
There was no way to tell Paul about her complete physical collapse in the face of the public shaming and excommunication of her brother, now sequestered in a prison cell. Maybe he could put it in medical terms?
Lin Pu-chi explained to his son that an internal medicine specialist, a friend of Martha’s from the hospital, stopped by the house to check on Ni Guizhen. The doctor diagnosed her problem as neurasthenia. The symptoms were fatigue, anxiety, headaches, heart palpitations, and high blood pressure.
The Chinese term for the condition was shenjin shuairuo—literally “nerve weakness.” A psychiatrist in the West might call it a nervous breakdown.
Lin Pu-chi’s letter in English filled one side of the thin sheet of airmail stationery. Now his wife, still bedridden, took the paper and dipped the pen in an inkwell. In the seven years since her sons had left for America, Ni Guizhen had never written directly to them, leaving the task to her husband. Propped up in bed, she began to fill the other side with precise Chinese characters, starting with the term of endearment, Naung naung die, “Little brother,” the family’s pet name for Paul.
“I often miss you and Junmin, especially when I am ill. These years I have really understood how deep the feeling could be when a mother misses her sons who are afar. Although I never wrote to you by myself in the past, my silence tells how my heart misses you.”
She explained to Paul that her health had been deteriorating for the past decade. Whenever she became too stressed or “used too much brainpower,” she told him her heart seemed to tighten and her body became motionless. In the past three years, her memory and comprehension, even her eyesight, worsened. Lately, she could not tolerate sunlight, and even sitting in a dark room with her eyes shut was uncomfortable.
“You once said, ‘Mom, you have always been too stressed.’ I know indeed that it is the reason.” The culprits, she explained, were “troublesome” household chores. She hoped his wife Sylvia, caring for their two young daughters, did not feel the same life pressures as she did.
She concluded, “I look up to God for His mercy to improve my health.”
• 14 •
Prelude
Shanghai, 1957
The only way to survive Shanghai in the summer was to escape Shanghai in the summer. Lin Pu-chi lived by those words. Though he’d grown up in the furnace of Fuzhou, the older he got, the less tolerance he had for the spirit-draining heat of his adopted city.
In July 1957, after a week of near hundred-degree temperatures, Lin Pu-chi packed his leather suitcase and boarded a river steamer with his wife and granddaughter for a three-day journey on the Yangtze River to the port of Jiujiang, then onward and upward by bus to the mountain retreat of Lushan.
All of the distractions at home receded from his mind as they traveled a tortuous, narrow road, the bus climbing and twisting, rising one thousand feet . . . two thousand feet . . . three thousand feet . . . making tighter turns, more turns, until they arrived at a settlement of stone cottages set in the pines. A cool breeze greeted them, bringing a veil of mist as light as white chiffon wafting across a plaza. Lin Pu-chi breathed steadily, easily, and deeply. He summoned the words of the great poet Li Po: Let me reach those sublime hills, where peace comes to the quiet heart.
Lushan was twenty degrees cooler than Shanghai. Since the start of the century, homesick missionaries waited out the summer in the mountains, fleeing not only the mosquitoes and heat in crowded cities but also deadly maladies such as malaria and cholera that arrived in hot months. They built hundreds of villas around one particular peak called Guling, which sounded a lot like “cooling” to their Western ears (a missionary retreat near Fuzhou had a similar name in English but different Chinese characters). They passed the summer gossiping over hands of bridge at clubs, watching their children splash in chlorinated pools, and singing “Rock of Ages” in chapels with stained-glass windows. In the 1930s, Chiang Kai-shek used Lushan as the summer capital of his Nationalist government and moved with his wife to a stone villa, built in 1903 by an English lady who gave the house to the couple as a wedding present. Later, when Chairman Mao took up residence in the same place, he bellowed, “Chiang, here I come,” as he passed through the front door.
Home for the next three months for Lin Pu-chi and his wife was a few rented rooms at 132 Pine Tree Road, a stone-block guesthouse with black shutters on wide windows. After all she had been through in the past year—her brother’s trial, the s
plintering of the Little Flock, her health—Ni Guizhen, who was fifty-five, needed time away from Shanghai to recuperate. “Mother can sleep better, feels stronger and can walk more,” the sixty-two-year-old Lin Pu-chi wrote to Paul and Sylvia, thanking them for the “birthday gift” that made the trip possible.
Their days were quiet, with time for reading and naps. Lin Pu-chi brought along the classic novel Hong Lou Meng, or Dreams of the Red Chamber, written 200 years earlier and divided into 4 volumes and 120 chapters. He rationed one chapter a day, spending an hour immersed in the epic tale of love and family. The guesthouse had a cafeteria on the first floor that served simple fare like rice porridge with pickled vegetables for breakfast. The old couple, however, fretted about Julia’s thin frame. They feared she wasn’t eating well. Lin Pu-chi knew another retired pastor who vacationed in Lushan, and every morning, he hiked with Julia to his friend’s cottage, where the friend prepared scrambled eggs for breakfast.
Among the couple’s visitors from Shanghai that summer were Watchman Nee’s wife and his brother George, a chemist. Charity’s health, both physical and mental, was frail. She had been detained for a year for refusing to testify against her husband at his trial and needed the diversion of Lushan as keenly as her sister-in-law did. One day, everyone piled into a hired car and drove from morning until night, seeing one sight after another: overlooks into dark valleys, peaks with names like “Five Old Men,” placid lakes, thundering waterfalls, and a quiet Buddhist temple. Ni Guizhen felt so reinvigorated that she stopped taking her sleeping pills and sedatives. Lin Pu-chi promised her they would return every summer if they could.
Nine-year-old Julia enjoyed having her grandparents all to herself. Her grandfather, more relaxed than she had ever seen him, delighted in taking her to explore one of his favorite places: a grotto dedicated to a legendary Daoist figure, Lü Dongbin. He was one of the “Eight Immortals” in the Daoist tradition. Many religious topics intrigued Lin Pu-chi, but from the time he was a student, he was fascinated by the stories of the immortals. The Buddhist path led to nirvana; Christians believed in the resurrection; and Daoism held that man could enter everlasting life. Lü Dongbin was a leader among immortals, or genies. Julia listened intently as her grandfather explained that Lü was a magistrate and scholar from Jiangxi whose sword had supernatural power that he wielded to slay dragons and tigers, ridding the empire of evil.
“See those characters in the stone? Shi lu,” Lin Pu-chi asked his granddaughter, leading her to the entrance of the cave. “It means ‘way of the genies.’”
Lin Pu-chi and his wife alternated between granddaughters on Lushan vacations. Julia accompanied them in 1957, and Terri (shown here) joined the couple in 1958. Courtesy of Lin Family Collection.
The grotto was two stories tall at its mouth and almost fifty feet deep. Ferns draped the rock walls by the entrance. Inside, water trickled down stone, collecting in a pool by an altar. A glass of springwater was thought to have healing power.
As a university student four decades earlier in Shanghai, Lin Pu-chi sought out Daoist priests to question them about the half-human, half-divine immortals. He pored through books on the subject and composed a twenty-page essay in English on the most famous eight genies, which the prestigious Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society published in 1918.
“But what are genies?” Julia wanted to know.
“They are happiness,” her grandfather explained simply. “They are free from the material world and have drunk the elixir of immortality. They possess wonderful art and perform enviable feats of strength. They drive in chariots of clouds, they mount dragons and storks, they live in palaces of pearl and jade, and they sleep in shady grottoes, like this one.”
In the midday sun, Lin Pu-chi unbuttoned his shirt as he and Julia hiked farther up a path. The heat was getting to him. He needed to rest and sat on big rock. He leaned all the way back, closed his eyes, and stretched his arms wide against the smooth, flat surface. Julia looked at him quizzically. Then he began to sing—not hum, but sing with abandon, bellowing an Anglican hymn in English.
Julia was mortified. Other sightseers averted their eyes as they passed him, wondering whether this old man with his shirt undone, lying on a rock and singing with his eyes closed, might be losing his mind.
But this was not a daft man. This was a happy man. He had no job back home, no church flock to tend. His heart was weak, his blood pressure high, and his mood prone to days of deep sadness. But Lushan invigorated him; the mountains lifted his soul.
And just for a moment, resting in the sublime hills, he felt peace come to his quiet heart.
Geese and Rabbits
In 1958, Martha moved with her husband and two girls into her parents’ house on Lane 170, their longtang off Jiaozhou Road. They had been living nearby with her in-laws, but Lin Pu-chi asked his daughter to return home. He was fearful that the government could decide at any moment that he had too much space and assign strangers to move into spare rooms in the house. It was not unfounded paranoia but natural anxiety in the new China.
The communist leaders had just launched a new five-year plan in 1958 called the Great Leap Forward. In the countryside, farm families were consolidated into massive communes, tilling fields as units, sharing their meals in canteens, and collectively raising their babies and toddlers in nurseries. Now Chairman Mao urged peasants to contribute to the industrial development of the country while still feeding its 650 million people. In his mind, China was in a race to catch up with the Soviet Union and the United States. He measured success in steel ingots and expected everyone to chip in, gathering metal household objects and other scrap to melt in makeshift “backyard furnaces.” Even the urban families in Lane 170 were called on to do their part. They tore down the wrought-iron fences that used to mark off each front yard and contributed the metal to feed the nation’s steelmaking obsession—or to at least meet their quota.
The lunacy of this became clear by 1959. With farmers paying so much attention to collecting scrap metal, they ignored their fields. Local officials lied about their harvests yet still had to make mandatory contributions of grain to the national food coffers. Starving peasants foraged like animals for food, eating bark and boiling weeds. No one called it what it was—an avoidable famine, caused by Mao’s irrational zeal to ramp up China’s industrial output. And since no one could admit that the emperor wore no clothes, the country euphemistically called this period of universal suffering Sannian ziran zaihai, or “three years of natural disasters.”
A metropolis like Shanghai was not exempt. People with distended bellies, a telltale sign of malnourishment, could be spotted on the streets. Meat at the dinner table was a rare treat. Food was tightly rationed. Every ten days, each person was allocated an ounce of sugar, an ounce of oil, three ounces of pork, and a nutritional biscuit.
The Lin family ate regular meals of balls of dough made of nothing but flour and water, boiled and then tossed with drops of oil and cabbage leaves in a scalding wok. The dish was bland and chewy but filling. Once in a while, they ate yams or rice porridge, but if the family wanted meat, they had to hunt for it on the black market, offering cash under the table to a farmer for a live rabbit or goose. The smell of the simmering stew made neighbors envious.
For the Lin grandchildren, there was no better entertainment than watching their uncle trying to kill a goose for dinner. Julia and Terri would hang out a second-floor bedroom window and watch Tim chase his quarry in the walled area by the back door near the kitchen. One time, he grabbed a goose by its neck, held it on the ground, and brought down the cleaver like a guillotine—but not forcefully enough to actually sever the animal’s head. Blood splattered everywhere as the flailing goose tried to fly away with its head hanging on by a thread. From their perch a safe distance away, the sisters squealed.
The family could afford meat only because of the remittances from the sons in America. But Paul and Jim had
no way of knowing that their money was helping; Lin Pu-chi’s monthly letters were interrupted from 1960 to 1962, most likely intercepted by public security agents. Famine was embarrassing; what happened in China would stay behind the bamboo curtain.
The world of Lin Pu-chi and his wife was shrinking with each passing year. They no longer left the house for services on Sunday. At the start of the Great Leap Forward, the religious affairs bureau of the government consolidated churches in order to free up property for industrial purposes. The number of churches in Shanghai plummeted from 150 to 20. The Nanyang Road assembly hall ceased to operate and became a factory for making wool scarves. Members of the Little Flock scattered, with some joining official “Three-Self” churches but more following the way of Ni Guizhen. She preferred to pray in the privacy of her home, sharing fellowship with her sister-in-law Charity and one or two trusted friends.
The sisters-in-law shared another routine. Every few months, they took a bus toward the Bund, crossed Suzhou Creek at the old Garden Bridge, and headed into Hongkou District. In a neighborhood that used to include Shanghai’s Jewish ghetto, they disembarked in front of a walled complex and passed through a tall, square, black iron gate—the first of two metal doors leading to the “City of the Damned,” the turn-of-the-century Tilanqiao Prison.
In 1903, British administrators in Shanghai opened the monstrous jail, the largest in Asia. It could hold as many as ten thousand inmates housed in two thousand cells spread over ten buildings. The execution room had a trapdoor where the corpses of prisoners who were hanged dropped directly into the prison morgue. Armed soldiers in towers kept watch over the complex, which included a jailhouse printing press and sweatshops that cranked out prison-made clothing, toy dolls, and wristwatches.
