Ruth, a Portrait: The Story of Ruth Bell Graham

by Patricia Cornwell

  It was too far in years and memories, not miles. Where she had grown up was a lost civilization, a place devoid of her parents and the missionaries she had loved, perhaps destitute of the faith they had sacrificed their lives to carry there. It was possible, however, that Ruth might find remnants, whispering sounds of her past and the solitary dream of the Christian career that she had left behind. Ruth wasn’t sure she could face any of it.

  The next day, June 9, the day before her fifty-third birthday, she boarded a plane to Bangkok, passing over Vietnam shortly after takeoff. Tears in the thick layer of clouds revealed a land pockmarked by shell craters and charred tree trunks. Life had not changed so much from the days of bandits and the Long March. Two and a half hours after takeoff she landed and caught a Swissair flight to Geneva, where she was to speak to a group of women in Lausanne. Donald Hoke, a retired missionary whom Ruth had known since her college days, and his wife, Martha, were there setting up the International Congress on World Evangelization. Hoke persuaded Ruth to visit the Chinese consul in Geneva to again ask permission to travel to Qingjiang.

  The Chinese consul lived in a large old house in a quiet section of the city. Trees bordered the narrow, winding streets, and most of the homes were surrounded by walls or hedges. Crumpled paper and other bits of trash fluttered over the gravel drive around the consulate like tumbleweeds in a forgotten town. On the morning of June 12, Hoke and Ruth were greeted at the door by a short, unsmiling houseboy who eyed Ruth with suspicion when she told him she had an appointment with the consul. The houseboy shut the door in the visitors’ faces and conferred with people inside. Several minutes later the door was again opened, this time by an older Chinese man dressed in cloth shoes, ill-fitting dark gray cotton trousers, and a pale gray rumpled shirt that bulged over his corpulent middle. His unshaven face was impassive as Ruth briefly explained her mission.

  With a slight nod he turned and led them through the entrance hall, around a corner, and into a reception room with pale gray walls, several tapestries, and a few Chinese objets d’art. Draped across one wall was a scroll bearing Chairman Mao’s sayings. The savory odor of cooked cabbage and garlic permeated the airless rooms. Ruth and Hoke seated themselves in Chinese chairs with plush red cushions. They were soon joined by a young Chinese woman, dressed in the familiar comrade’s garb of loose gray trousers and jacket. The pink collar of a Western-style blouse peeked out at her neck, and her short black hair was parted low on one side and fastened with a barrette. She was silent throughout the conversation, her eyes passing back and forth between the consul and Hoke, and never focusing on Ruth.

  “My father had the honor of serving the people of China for twenty-five years as a doctor of medicine,” Ruth explained. “He is in his seventy-ninth year and not well, and if possible, we would like to return home for a visit. This would be a strictly private and personal pilgrimage, not to Shanghai or Beijing but to Qingjiang, Jiangsu.”

  “How long ago did you leave China?” the consul asked Ruth.

  “Thirty-six years ago,” she replied.

  “There should be no difficulty,” he said. “When do you wish to go?”

  “Perhaps sometime within the year?” she queried.

  He left the room and returned with forms which he advised, with a faint smile, that Ruth and her father should complete and mail to a committee in New York. On June 18, Ruth flew home and asked Dr. Bell to return with her to China. Despite his wife’s frantic disapproval and his own failing health, he eagerly embraced the plan. Ruth gave him the form, which he never completed because soon afterward it mysteriously disappeared. Two months later he died. After his wife died the following year, the form was found among her belongings, where she had hidden it.

  Two years of loss and change and silence passed. There was no response to Ruth’s requests. With renewed interest she read histories of China and analyses of what had happened to the culture, the people, and their faith since the 1949 Communist takeover. Her concern for the Chinese people became an avocation, a subject she frequently impressed upon those she talked with.

  “It’s the oldest continuous civilization in the world,” she would say. “It’s the third largest country in the world. And it has by far the world’s biggest population. We cannot ignore it.” In later years, she often mentioned a symbol that was of great importance to her, the Chinese character for “ten” superimposed over the Chinese character for “four.” It meant the tenth for the fourth, an encouragement to people to set aside the tenth day of each month to pray for a fourth of the earth’s people.

  In the fall of 1975 Ruth and Billy returned to Hong Kong and Taiwan for crusades. The urge to return to her birthplace grew. She was asked to address a large group of women in the Great Hall in Taipei, Taiwan, October 29. “While I was growing up,” she wrote at the time, “I planned to return to China to preach and to teach the Gospel. God had other plans. Now the committee has me scheduled to address a group of women (they hope many unbelievers) and I, accustomed to raising children and teaching an American college Sunday school class, am faced with a slight fulfillment of my childhood dream. And I am asking God to give the right message, anoint it that someone might be converted to Christ who may someday go back to China and carry the Gospel of Christ as I have longed to do.”

  The Wednesday of the talk arrived. Dressed in tweed, she entered an auditorium filled with brightly attired Chinese women. For a week Ruth had labored fruitlessly on the speech, wanting it to be the best ever and paralyzed by the personal symbolism of the occasion. The harder she tried, the less productive she became. Days passed and she produced nothing. Amid tiers of expectant faces she now mounted the podium. She had no notes, no prepared talk, her dream dissolving into a nightmare. Through an interpreter, she extemporaneously told of her parents’ mission work and her own childhood in China, closing with a description of Wang Nai Nai, her Chinese nanny.

  “Her Christian life had such an impact on us children,” she said. “She taught herself how to read the Bible after becoming a Christian, and she loved the old hymn There Is a Fountain Filled with Blood.” Only after we were grown were we told the evil life she had lived before becoming a Christian. She and her husband were engaged in the Chinese version of white slave traffic, procuring young girls for sale in Shanghai.

  “Then I understood why she so loved that old hymn, especially the last verse: The dying thief rejoiced to see / That fountain in his day / And there may I, though vile as he, / Wash all my sins away.’ ”

  An elderly woman hurried forward afterward and hugged Ruth. “I too Qingjiang person,” she said with glowing eyes. Ruth held the woman’s hand as they walked along an aisle and kissed her at the exit. “Such a small link,” she wrote that night, “and it leaves one speechless.”

  The first week in November Ruth flew to Hong Kong. On Sunday, November 9, she addressed another group of women, reliving the horror of mounting the platform with no prepared speech. Afterward she wrote, “A year ago today Mother was buried. Perhaps it was significant that today at 3:00 I spoke to two thousand mostly Chinese women in the largest Baptist church in Hong Kong. I never had a harder time speaking. It was as if I had spiritual laryngitis.”

  Three days later she was out of bed at 6:30 A.M. to catch the hydrofoil to Macao. There was a bleak, unassuming memorial somewhere on that six-square-mile province, and it called to her. In a tiny Spartan cemetery filled with plain stone markers, weathered and covered with moss, she found the grave of Robert Morrison, the father of Protestant mission work in China. A Presbyterian minister, he had arrived in Guangzhou in 1809 and died there twenty-seven years later, after translating the New Testament and a dictionary into Chinese and making but ten converts. His wife and child were buried with him.

  One man had sacrificed so much for what seemed so little. Ten converts. One would have been enough, at least to Ruth. “The popular thing today is to criticize the early missionaries who went to China and point out their many mistakes,” she wrote that nigh
t. “Even Robert Morrison. I thought about this as I stood beside his grave. At least they went. They went, carrying with them the Living Word and the written Word. And the gates of hell have not prevailed against it.”

  Her last evening in Hong Kong, November 16, shortly before midnight, she sat in her hotel room alone. Billy had left for the United States earlier that day. She would fly to Korea the next day to visit her sister Virginia, a missionary. Like the shadow of the Guangdong Mountains on the mainland, the past seemed within reach but was untouchable. She was drawn to the patch of earth where her parents had worked and where she had played as a child. Those seventeen years in Qingjiang had shaped her more than anything that had happened to her since. They were her fabric. She could take the regular tours to China, as thousands of sightseers had, but that would bring her no closer to the place of her birth, which was on no tourist route. In any event, she doubted that anything from her early years remained. This is perhaps the closest I will ever get to the land of my childhood, she decided.

  Through the cool darkness of her room, she moved to the window and drew back the draperies for a last look at the Hong Kong harbor. Boat shadows gently bobbed in the glow of lamps along the dock. A seaworn junk silently glided past, its wide sails round with breeze.

  Montreat, January 1980. Billy pushed the lighted button on his telephone and picked up the receiver. He was greeted by the familiar voice of Richard Nixon. The former president was preparing to leave for another visit to the People’s Republic of China.

  “Is there anything I can do for you?” Nixon asked him at the end of the conversation.

  “Yes,” Billy replied, “I think Ruth should go back to her birthplace.”

  “It’s no problem,” Nixon replied. “I’ll arrange for it when I’m in China.”

  Nixon kept his promise, and without delay Ruth received word that the Chinese-American Friendship Association would officially receive her and the other immediate members of the Nelson Bell family. They would be given a special tour of their old home. Aside from the tediousness of completing numerous applications and writing letters, the plans for the trip went smoothly until the day before Ruth was to leave in the spring of 1980.

  Billy decided he wanted movie producer Irwin Yeaworth to travel with the party and film the event. Yeaworth, who had produced many secular films, including actor Steve McQueen’s first movie, The Blob, had worked for Billy in the past. Again, Nixon’s name was needed to gain clearance, but he was somewhere in Germany and even his daughter Julie didn’t know how to reach him. Finally, several days before the party was scheduled to meet in Tokyo, Yeaworth managed to obtain permission to travel with the group.

  Ruth, her two sisters, and her brother left from different locations for the long pilgrimage home. Yeaworth hastily packed his bags and rushed to join them as their chronicler. On April 29, 1980, Ruth met her older sister, Rosa Bell Montgomery, in Los Angeles. Rosa was married to Don Montgomery, an engineer at the Atomic Research Laboratory in Los Alamos, a small, isolated city on the Pajarito Plateau of New Mexico. Rosa had lived in the arid climate of New Mexico since first arriving there with tuberculosis almost forty years earlier.

  The next day, the two sisters flew to Honolulu and were reunited with their brother Clayton Bell, senior minister of the Highland Park Presbyterian Church in Dallas, Texas, one of the largest Presbyterian churches in the country. At forty-eight he bore a striking resemblance to the young Nelson Bell, though he was much taller and heavier. On May 6, the three arrived in Tokyo, where they were joined by their younger sister, Virginia Bell Sommerville, married to a university professor in Korea, where they had been Presbyterian missionaries for more than twenty years.

  It was a rare and happy family reunion made even more unusual by its purpose. The next day, May 7, the family landed in Beijing at 2:10 in the afternoon. They were greeted by members of the Chinese-American Friendship Association and introduced to their government companion, Yao Jin Rong, a linguist who had been in charge of the U.S. press corps during Richard Nixon’s 1972 visit. Yao would be their companion for the next fourteen days, a subtle reminder that the Bell children were semi-official guests of the government. They were to travel in tan limousines with filmy curtained windows and be treated to excellent food and accommodations. “Things were scrubbed as they’d never been before because of Nixon,” Yeaworth recalled.

  Their first afternoon in Beijing, May 8, they had tea with Madame Soong Ching-ling, the widow of Sun Yat-sen, the father of the Republic of China. It was a bit of historical irony that Madame Soong and her sister Soong Mei-ling had spent a summer in Montreat in 1912 while in America attending school. They stayed at a lodge next door to the house the Bells would live in some thirty years later. When the Communists drove the Nationalists off the mainland in 1949, Soong Mei-ling, who had married Nationalist leader Chiang Kaishek, followed her husband to Taiwan, and Soong Ching-ling stayed behind.

  Madame Soong, ninety, without a wrinkle on porcelain skin, spoke impeccable English. The visitors stayed for an hour in the old one-story gray brick house enclosed in rings of courtyards. Madame Soong spoke of her sister and their American friends, and about the social organizations she aided, such as the Children’s Palace, which trained exceptional children.

  Ruth and her family stayed in Beijing two days, touring the usual places—a primary school, the imperial palaces in the Forbidden City which had been converted into museums, a cotton textile mill, and a factory commune. They wandered through the Ming Tombs, and along the Great Wall where Ruth, whose arthritic left hip caused her pain when she walked, cheerfully slid down the steel railing, heedless of the masses swarming through the wide thoroughfare. Over her navy turtleneck sweater, she wore a gold cross. It attracted attention.

  “Do you wear this cross as a symbol or a decoration?” one young man stopped on the Great Wall and asked her in broken English.

  “As a symbol,” she replied, smiling.

  “Of Christian?” he asked. “Do you believe in Christian?”

  After six days of touring, the Bell children were to fulfill the purpose of their trip halfway around the world. On Tuesday, May 13, early in the morning, they were driven toward Qingjiang. It was a clear day and the limousines thrummed along a two-lane road, their drivers honking frequently, swerving through crowds of bicyclists, pedicabs, pedestrians, and horse-drawn wagons. Beekeepers had set up shop beneath blooming locust trees on either side of the packed-clay thoroughfares. Bamboo cages swung by the sides of old men walking their birds. Scattered throughout the noisy throng were guards wearing green caps with the familiar red star above the bill.

  Brother and sisters traveled through small villages, and the sights became more familiar as they passed mud-walled cottages with thatched roofs, a lone water buffalo loitering over a murky pond, drab walls and shops, and landscapes splashed with brilliant red, pink, and yellow azaleas and roses. Eyes followed the limousines, the people wondering about the important passengers. When the cars stopped at one point, the party was immediately surrounded. The Chinese laughed in delight when Rosa spoke Mandarin, and they beamed when Ruth soothed a frightened little girl by producing a tiny stuffed koala from her luggage and presenting it to her.

  They approached Qingjiang from the west, and Ruth knew they were almost home when they crossed a bridge over the Grand Canal. The water and the junks and sampans looked as they had when she was a girl. But there were no children frolicking in the murky water, no women washing rice on the banks. Years ago, the first sight upon entering the city had been the chimney of the Qingjiang mint. It was gone. The corrugated red tin roofs of the mission compound arched above the skyline were not to be found. Now there were smokestacks, and billboards advertising Coca-Cola. Sidewalks were as wide as streets used to be. The ancient city gate and the wall where the heads of criminals had once been impaled were no longer.

  The limousines passed through an arch of sycamore trees and parked at the Qingjiang Guest House, a two-story building with privat
e rooms, hot water, electricity, and flush toilets. After a sumptuous lunch, the Bell family returned to the cars. A black limousine joined them and led them toward their old home. “This,” Ruth recorded at the time, “was really an embarrassing way to arrive home as we would have so loved to walk in like ordinary folks.”

  The ancient mud wall on top of which Ruth once had walked, heading to school each morning, was gone, replaced by a wide road. Gone also was the foreign cemetery where her baby brother Nelson Jr. had been buried. They passed a gray brick wall to Ruth’s right and then a building. After a hard right turn through wide gates, the cars halted. The house Ruth had been raised in stood before them, ravaged and sad like the face of a forgotten old woman. A red banner had been draped above its front porch: “AMERICAN FRIENDS, YOU ARE WARMLY WELCOMED BY THE PEOPLE LIVING IN YOUR BIRTHPLACE.”

  It seemed so much smaller. The yard, once spacious enough for a tennis court, was a balding scar between the house and the lot next door where the James Woodses had lived. Where Ruth had grown up was shutterless and chimneyless, and the old tin roof had been replaced with artificial gray tile. Drainpipes were orange with rust, and the brick wrought-work balustrade that had once surrounded the downstairs porch had crumbled and now littered the backyard.

  Their house wore the death mask of neglect. Inside paint-peeled frames, the windows gaped like empty eye sockets. The door to the central gable that once had led to the sleeping porch had vanished, leaving a wide orifice frozen into a yawn. What Ruth saw sadly symbolized much more than the demise of her parents and the passing of time in her own life. The scene before her seemed a dismal monument to an age that had been completely obliterated. There were no more missionaries. Most Chinese were too young even to remember the courageous foreigners who had carried the promise of salvation and Western culture across the world to share. Ruth wondered if the missionaries, many of whom had died there, had left no more than this.