Shanghai Faithful

by Jennifer Lin

  I knew that Martha, who at the time was ninety, was a steadfast Christian. I wanted to know: when she heard the news in 1979 that the doors of churches would reopen, did she immediately return?

  “No,” she replied. Martha was by nature taciturn, but her succinct answer still caught me off guard. She went on to explain that it wasn’t until she moved from Shanghai to Australia that she resumed an active and open practice of her faith. Every Monday, she joined a group of followers of Watchman Nee in Sydney. I pressed her on why she had waited a decade.

  “Fear,” she replied.

  Martha continued. She and her husband, John, who had been tormented by Red Guards and held in captivity for almost a year, did not trust the authorities enough to expose themselves with such a public return to church. Instead of joining an approved congregation or reconnecting with an unofficial house church in Shanghai, they kept their spiritual life confined to the privacy of their home.

  The trauma that the family experienced, beginning well before the Cultural Revolution, explained why one by one, everyone in the house on Jiaozhou Road left China. They were pushed by harsh treatment as much as pulled by new opportunities.

  Julia was first to go. In May 1980, she and her husband, Victor, relocated to Chicago, where he studied business at Roosevelt University. Their son, then four, stayed behind in Shanghai with Martha and did not join them until just before his eleventh birthday in 1987. Julia studied piano at the American Conservatory of Music in Chicago, followed by postgraduate work at Indiana University. As a teenager, Julia had lost critical years of training during the ten-year Cultural Revolution, which derailed her dream of a solo career. In Chicago, she built a successful business as a tutor who was popular among Chinese immigrant parents and also worked as the music director of a large Protestant church, performing and recording Christian music on the side. She told me that once, when she was at a piano competition with some of her students, she recognized another piano teacher, a woman from Shanghai who had been in her conservatory class. This woman was one of the classmates who smashed her hand with a Ping-Pong paddle as punishment for playing classical music during the Cultural Revolution. I was shocked by the story. If it were me, I would have created a scene and loudly faced my nemesis. But Julia, a gentle and forgiving soul, did not dwell on the episode. She was startled to see a ghost from her past but did not confront her. She moved on.

  Our cousin Kaikai, Tim and Emma’s oldest, was next to leave. In Shanghai, Kaikai made and repaired rattan furniture for a state-run store that sold household items and kitchenware. He had a special skill, however, that would serve him well in the future: He enjoyed sewing and was good at it. After the Cultural Revolution, young people put away their Mao suits and craved contemporary styles. Kaikai made his friends copies of fashionable clothes that he found in Hong Kong magazines, outfits like a Levi’s-inspired jean jacket paired with flared trousers. In 1981, when he was twenty-five, he bought a ticket for Los Angeles and landed in the States with fifty dollars in his wallet. After bouncing from job to job, including hotel handyman and rattan repairman, he parlayed his sewing skills into a clothing business. At first, he took on contract work for other manufacturers but then started to design and make his own line—KK 88, a women’s sportswear label with pieces selling for $100 to $300 at boutiques and department stores like Nordstrom. By age fifty, Kaikai was financially secure enough to live the American dream: he retired early and spent his days traveling the world with his wife. On his Chinese-language blog, he shares photos of everything from emperor penguins on the beach in the Falkland Islands to castles in the Rhine Valley. When last I looked, he had more than nine million views.

  After Kaikai settled in Los Angeles, his parents, Tim and Emma, left Shanghai for California, and were followed by their daughter, Lin Yu, and her husband, who opened a clinic for Chinese medicine in San Jose. Lin Yu shared her brother’s entrepreneurial zeal and became a distributor of a Japanese-made massage chair. She and her husband bought a vast home in the hills outside the city. Tim and Emma lived nearby.

  In 1987, Martha moved to Australia, where her husband had relatives. Their daughter Terri and granddaughter Jean joined them. Terri, the barefoot doctor whose education was interrupted by the Cultural Revolution, divorced her husband in the early 1980s. When she got to Australia, she earned a degree in accounting at the age of forty-two and worked for several years in Sydney. But in the 1990s, she realized that China offered her better career choices. China was evolving from the sick patient of Asia into a forceful economic superpower, and foreign companies needed people like Terri who could navigate both China and the Western business world.

  In 1999, while working for a joint venture, Terri Sun visited the village in northeastern China where she lived for seven years as a “barefoot doctor.” Here, she is greeted by a villager who remembers her. Courtesy of Jennifer Lin.

  When I was posted in Beijing in the 1990s for the Inquirer, Terri worked for a foreign joint venture that made auto parts in Changchun, China’s Motor City in the northeastern part of the country. She lived in a luxury hotel whose doormen wore mink fur hats. In a twist of fate, her apartment was an hour’s drive from the old mud-walled house where she spent seven years as a “sent-down” youth living with peasants during the Cultural Revolution. Terri’s career took her all over Asia. She lived for several years at a time in China, Japan, Taiwan, and South Korea before returning to China in 2008 to handle finances for an American multinational that had a factory in the southern city of Shenzhen. A few years later, Terri decided to slow down and returned to Australia to start her own business as a China consultant.

  The last ones in the family to leave China were my grandparents Ni Guizhen and Lin Pu-chi.

  My grandmother died in 1971 and my grandfather in 1973. Their cremated remains were buried at the nearest cemetery, sixty miles west of Shanghai in Suzhou. But in August 2002, my Uncle Tim dug up their graves, placed their bones in plastic bags, and wrapped everything in red cloth. He had his reasons. Their gravesite suffered from neglect and was overgrown with bushes and weeds. Tim was getting old and would be making fewer and fewer trips to China. With no family left in Shanghai, there would be no one visiting their graves to maintain the site.

  I was visiting Los Angeles in 2004 when Kaikai took me to see our grandparents’ new burial site at Forest Lawn Cemetery in the city of Glendale. The pastor and his wife were interred at the Cemetery of the Stars, joining in eternity the likes of Walt Disney, W. C. Fields, Nat “King” Cole, George Burns, and Gracie Allen. Their urns were stored in a marble niche in the Columbarium of Courage, just past a bronze plaque in memory of baseball Hall of Famer Casey Stengel and a giant mosaic of the signing of the Declaration of Independence.

  In life, Lin Pu-chi never visited Los Angeles; Ni Guizhen never set foot in the United States. But in death, they rest in a meticulously manicured memorial park near the interchange of the Glendale Freeway and Interstate 5.

  The last time I was inside the old Lin home in Shanghai, Terri joined me. It was a few months before the 2008 Beijing Olympics, and I was doing a story about her for the Inquirer. I wrote in the newspaper that the real story of China’s progress was told not through the billion-dollar stadiums in Beijing but through the lives of people like Terri. In her lifetime, she went from being a hospital janitor to earning more money than I could ever imagine as an executive for a multinational business. Like so many of her generation, she was impatient to make up for lost time.

  At the back entrance of House 19, we knocked at the door, and one of the tenants, who recognized Terri and knew the Lin family, invited us inside for a look. Two families now occupied the house. We climbed the narrow staircase to the top floor. The place smelled of mildew, just as it had during my first visit. No one lived in the attic, and the woman fumbled for a key on her chain to open the door.

  The dusty alcove below the slanting eaves was where Terri used to sleep
with her mother and older sister. Some of the family’s furniture, relics from the past, remained. Off to one side stood an old dressing table with a smoky mirror. In a corner were two antique leather trunks, which our grandmother had taken with her from Fuzhou, decades ago.

  “This still looks the same,” Terri commented, her eyes darting around the room.

  I could tell she was uncomfortable, anxious. Memories resided here, bad ones. She bent to show me a sliding wood panel, painted aqua and smudged with decades of dirt and dust. It led to a crawl space. She explained that when mobs ransacked the house—Red Guards from schools and factories, public security squads, you name it, there were so many over the years—they would throw open the panels and search for anything incriminating. I took pictures and we left.

  I heard my grandfather’s voice only once—during the phone call in 1973 when I was fourteen. I said little more than hello. But there were many times when I felt like he was talking directly to me through his writing. Just days before I had to send the final draft of this manuscript to the publisher, a graduate student in Hong Kong, who was familiar with my research, sent me an article dated February 3, 1932, that Lin Pu-chi had written for the Chinese-language Faith Newspaper, or Xinyi Bao. My grandfather told readers that the study of China’s church history was “indispensable” because “every society and every nation must use the past as a mirror.” But he lamented the paucity of books on the Chinese church, adding that materials that could be used to compile a history were scattered and incomplete. Missionaries did a good job of chronicling their experiences. But the task of sorting out China’s church history, he noted, would be difficult, requiring “sufficient time to devote to searching for materials and editing them.”

  It has taken me just shy of four decades to reach this point in the telling of my family’s story. The one who showed me the way was Lin Pu-chi. A prolific writer with a restless mind, he left a paper trail for me to follow, starting from when he was a teenager until his final years. I found a piece he wrote as a student at Trinity College for an English essay contest. I read articles from his days as a college editor at St. John’s University; his sermons as a priest at St. Peter’s Church; dozens of essays in Chinese and English in church periodicals; even short stories about love and marriage that he penned as a young university man. And always, I went back to his letters, my guideposts into the past. It was odd how I found clues about him where earlier I had seen none. One was a photograph he sent us, a portrait of him wearing the white tunic and black tippet or scarf of an Anglican priest. With his owlish wire-frame glasses and coal black hair parted to the side, he looks straight into the lens of the camera. He wrote “Christmas 1956” in black ink at the bottom. His birthday fell on December 25, and most years he marked the occasion by posing for a birthday photograph. Only now did I see the picture for what it was. The faint smile, the unflinching gaze: this was the face of quiet defiance. It was taken in a year that began with the public vilification of his brother-in-law Watchman Nee—the denunciation meeting at the Shanghai opera house, the newspaper articles attacking the Little Flock, the arrest of coworkers, the unbearable pressure on his wife to condemn her brother—and ended with his own loss of position in his church. Not viewed as revolutionary enough, he was shunted aside from any position of influence or responsibility in the reconstituted church under communism. He stood outside the inner circle and preached only when he was asked to fill in for others. But in that Shanghai photographer’s studio, he posed for the camera, Bible held high in his left hand, in full Anglican dress, uncowed.

  Almost every year, Lin Pu-chi had his photograph taken on his birthday on Christmas Day. This one from 1956 reveals a quiet defiance. When it was taken, he had been shunted aside from his duties within the church. Courtesy of Lin Family Collection.

  I want to ask my grandfather a question: why did he never tell his children about being seized by an anti-Christian mob in his hometown of Fuzhou in 1927? I only learned about the incident in a book on Fuzhou Protestants by Ryan Dunch, a professor at the University of Alberta and expert on Christianity in China. After researching the matter and finding multiple references in articles from the era, diplomatic dispatches, and missionary letters, all applauding how the young pastor comported himself under unimaginable pressure, I viewed the episode as a proud moment for Lin Pu-chi as well as a cautionary example of the dangers faced by Chinese Christians in their contact with foreigners. But with his own family, he chose not to make it part of his narrative. He did, however, tell his mentor about it. In his memoir, published in 1935, the Reverend William S. Pakenham-Walsh wrote about his twenty years in China and quoted from a long letter my grandfather had sent him, reminiscing about the early days of Trinity College in Fuzhou but also describing the attack. The older missionary described the mob violence in his memoir. Lin Pu-chi’s children never read this book or even knew of its existence until I told them about it. If not for happenstance, any memory of the episode within the family would have disappeared when Lin Pu-chi died in 1973.

  I have a question for my grandmother, too. Like my father, when he heard about her suffering for the first time in 1979, I felt the same urge to go back in time to protect her from harm. If she were here today, I would ask her why she didn’t capitulate when neighbors forced her to kneel and renounce her brother Watchman Nee. Or when interrogators took her behind closed doors and roughed her up. As I listened to one person after another recount the abuse against her, I wanted to whisper in her ear and say, It’s okay. Spare yourself. Lie if you must. In your heart, you will know it’s not true. But she didn’t; she wouldn’t. She held firm. Her devotion to her brother and her religious beliefs was unwavering.

  But it was in these lingering questions that I found my answers. When Mao Zedong stood on the rostrum of the Forbidden City on October 1, 1949, to proclaim the creation of the People’s Republic of China, there was reason to think this was the death of religion. The Chinese Communist Party was composed of avowed atheists, and Christianity was seen as a foreign religion that would wither away.

  When churches reopened in 1979, again the skeptics said nothing would come of it. Even before liberation, the number of Chinese people who were Protestant or Catholic was very small, no more than 1 percent of the population. The roots of Christianity were shallow. The religion had not been Sinified.

  And this was where the skeptics were wrong. In very different ways, Lin Pu-chi and Watchman Nee built a religious foundation that would prove to be sturdy enough to support the religious revival in China today. But equally as important was the conviction of believers like my grandparents. It cannot be measured by surveys. It cannot be calculated. It must be witnessed. After all that they had been through, after the physical abuse and mental torment, after the accusations, humiliation, and betrayal, Lin Pu-chi and Ni Guizhen never let go of their beliefs.

  To the end, the family in Shanghai remained faithful.

  September 2016

  Doylestown, Pennsylvania

  Acknowledgments

  My father, Paul M. Lin, M.D., called this project my “obsession,” and he was right. It began with my first stories about China—a two-part series written in 1979 while I was a summer intern for the Bucks County Courier Times—and ends with the publication of this book.

  None of this would have been possible without the cooperation of my family in Shanghai, who endured my endless questioning and graciously provided answers to everything, even if it meant revisiting traumatic episodes from the past. I am thankful to my aunt Martha Sun and her daughters—Terri Sun and Julia Tsien—for their patience and generosity. They sat for multiple lengthy interviews over the course of many years and also located old photographs, translated materials, pointed me to other sources, and responded to hundreds of e-mail queries. My cousin Terri and I had our first long interview in 1986. We sat and talked every night for a week in her living room in Shanghai, beginning a conversation that b
asically has never ended. She joined me on many reporting expeditions in China: to the Lin ancestral hall in Fujian, to the gravesite of Watchman Nee in Suzhou, to the village where she lived as a barefoot doctor, and to the old house in Shanghai.

  Her sister, Julia, also opened up her world to me and in 2007 allowed my son, Karl, to make a documentary about her life as a pianist during the Cultural Revolution. Julia’s husband, Victor, our translator during the family’s 1979 visit, continued to help me with translation over the years. At key points in my reporting, my cousins who are the children of Uncle Tim and Aunt Emma came to my aid. In 2004, Kaikai took me to our grandparents’ new burial site in Los Angeles and in 2015 traveled with my daughter, Cory, and me to Fuzhou to see family landmarks. His sister, Lin Yu, supplied photographs and critical documents and arranged Skype interviews with her parents in San Jose. On my grandmother’s side of the family, Sam Nee of Hong Kong gave me as much time as I needed to help me understand Watchman Nee. He also showed me places in Fuzhou from our shared past.

  The deeper I got into my research, the more interested and engaged my father became. He enjoyed our interviews and thrilled every time I found a new photograph of his father or discovered some long-ago article, like the love story that Lin Pu-chi wrote in 1919 as a seminary student. When my father retired, he took all of the handwritten letters from Lin Pu-chi—which my mother, Sylvia Lin, had the foresight to save—and transcribed them on the computer, making it easier for me to study and deconstruct them later on. Meanwhile, his brother, Jim, who lived in Tampa, contributed his keen memory and uncanny eye for details. After one interview, he sent me a follow-up note, describing the bedraggled European refugee who came to the house to beg for food in the 1930s. A writer of narrative nonfiction craves images like that. A long-ago neighbor of the Lin family, Boling Dong, whose house was in the same lane in Shanghai, also provided me with vivid details from the 1960s.