City of Tranquil Light

by Bo Caldwell

  In July of 1926, Chiang Kai-shek, the leader of the Kuomintang, launched the Northern Expedition, a military campaign whose goal was to unify China. Southern troops were sent north to Peking to conquer the northern warlords and establish the Kuomintang as the country’s central government. Laborers were promised that the new government would mean higher wages and better living conditions, and as nationalistic feelings spread, so did hostility toward foreigners, who were viewed as opportunists who threatened China’s culture and way of life and profited at the people’s expense.

  While this characterization was certainly true of many foreigners, it wasn’t true of all of us, but we nevertheless became the enemy, and there were soon reports of violence against foreigners and their property. American and British missionaries were particularly denounced as agents of capitalistic countries, and as hostility toward them—us—grew, mission boards began to advise their workers to leave the interior for the port cities. The American Consulate followed with its own warnings. In Kuang P’ing Ch’eng, we soon began receiving telegrams that became increasingly ominous in tone, stating that those who remained in China did so out of personal choice and at great risk.

  And so the exodus began, with each week bringing news of more foreigners leaving the interior. The first to go were the elderly and those in poor health, then those whose furloughs were due soon, or who had young families, or who simply did not find it in their hearts to stay. Some went to the coast and hoped to wait things out there; others returned to their home countries for good. I did not blame those who left; I understood their desire for safety and for relief from the physical and emotional hardship of our lives. We were all worn down.

  By the summer of 1927 the majority of the American and British missionaries were gone. I could not have said exactly how many had left because keeping track so disheartened me that I stopped doing it. Of the fifteen Mennonite missionaries who had been in China at the start of the decade, six of us remained: Katherine and myself, Edward and Naomi Geisler, and Jacob and Agnes Schmidt, the young married couple Edward had recruited and brought to China when we came. For Katherine and myself, the decision to stay wasn’t difficult. It wasn’t even a decision, really; we never talked about leaving. I suspect Katherine felt as I did, that even if we had been tempted to leave for our own safety, we could not have deserted those who looked to us for protection. Our Chinese community saw our decision as evidence of our faith.

  With the southern army’s move north during the spring and summer of 1927, the provinces of Hunan and Shantung became a battleground. The army controlling a particular area changed so frequently that during the next four years of civil war some cities would change hands ten times. Travel became even more difficult than usual, as the trenches the soldiers dug cut deep into the roads, causing them to flood during heavy rains. Prices rose almost daily; the cost of a week’s supply of wood, charcoal, vegetables, and wheat was soon what a peasant earned in a month. Communication with the rest of the country was severely disrupted by the fighting. We saw no mail trucks for months at a time, and a wire to a city sixty miles away took five days to get there, a wire to the coast twenty days or more. A rare message from Edward Geisler in Ch’eng An Fu said only, TROUBLE THERE? TROUBLE HERE.

  As anti-foreign sentiment spread, people in Kuang P’ing Ch’eng changed toward us. We had by then lived there for nearly twenty years, but we were suddenly suspect, and I felt a new hostility when I made my way through the city. Women clutched their children close to them as I approached, and men scowled at me then turned their backs.

  The war grew nearer to Kuang P’ing Ch’eng, and we grew accustomed to the sight of long lines of exhausted northern soldiers, wounded and bandaged. The officers were followed by single lines of burden bearers, civilians forced to carry supplies, struggling under the weight of their loads and tied together with a rope around their necks or waists. Northern troops began to camp out in our compound, coming and going as the battle lines changed, causing the compound to resemble a barracks more than a mission station. Soldiers slept in our clinic, the orphanage, and the first floor of our home, wandered in and out of worship services, and pocketed whatever caught their eye—canned fruit, tools, blankets, hairbrushes, toothbrushes, cooking utensils—seemingly unaware that they were taking what wasn’t theirs. Many of them were boys, really, no more than seventeen, and the burden bearers were as young as ten. But given the fact that they did us no harm, we considered ourselves fortunate. As Edward said, we bought it cheap.

  In November the southern army took Ch’eng An Fu and Shin Sheng Chou to the south and began moving toward Kuang P’ing Ch’eng. When the fighting reached the city’s outer suburbs in early December, the northern soldiers in our compound were ordered to battle, and many people in the city and the surrounding area began to flee the southern army, which was greatly feared; while the northern troops were far from loved, they were the enemy we knew. People who chose not to leave the area sought safety at our compound, and the soldiers had no sooner left than we were inundated with refugees: men, women, children, and infants, along with chickens, dogs, furniture, boxes, and baskets stuffed with personal belongings. Once again we had more than two hundred people staying on our grounds, along with thirty-seven patients in the clinic, forty-one children in the orphanage, and our ragged staff of seven.

  That winter was the coldest in memory. We slept in our clothes, bundled up in coats and anything else we could find. Food was scarce, and with the freezing weather and the threat of war the city’s poverty became more desperate. Soldiers took whatever scraps of food people had; peasants scrounged in the barren fields for anything possibly edible, while beggars froze in the snow.

  January 2, 1928

  We are at war; we hear gunfire and cannon, we taste gunpowder, and Kuang P’ing Ch’eng has become a city of the wounded. Teams of men bring the fallen from the battlefields on wagons and carts to the city square, where we attempt to care for them. There is so much suffering I cannot take it in; many of the men have lain on the battlefield for several days after being shot, stabbed, or mutilated and are barely alive by the time they are brought to us. Those with a chance of recovering are taken to the yamen, where the magistrate has given over one of the large halls as a clinic, while those whom we know will not live—and these are many—remain in the square, where at least they are not alone as they die. Will arranges for the bodies to be carried out of the city in the middle of the night and buried in the darkness. Some days it seems we save almost no one.

  While there is an abundance of suffering, we are short of everything else: help, funds, food, supplies, hope. We’ve hired women in the city to scrub the dead or wounded soldiers’ worn uniforms until they nearly fall apart, then iron them to kill the vermin that survive the laundering’s strong soap and heavy rubbing. We are short of medical supplies—bandages, dressings, sutures, medications—partly because of the great need but also because the war has so disrupted transportation that we receive only a few of our orders. When we began caring for the wounded, I tore strips of white cloth into bandages, but we used those up in two days. I have found horrifying ways to economize; we salvage the used bandages from the living and the dead, wash them in great tubs of water that becomes instantly red, then use the bandages again. We are short of anesthetics, and I must reserve our limited supply for those who will live, no matter how intense the pain of the dying. It is as simple and harsh an equation as that, and although it nearly makes me ill, there is nothing to be done.

  Almost nothing. In times such as these one must be flexible, and for those who are too injured or ill to recover I have looked no further than our own backyard for something to relieve the pain of passing from this life to the next. I give them opium. Mo Yun arranges its procurement from a man whose name I do not know and whom I have seen only from afar. He looks like an ordinary beggar, except that around his neck he wears, of all things, a long string of pearls. Every ten days or so he delivers to Mo Yun a small package containing se
veral dozen opium pills. These I dole out carefully to our dying, not to hasten death but to lessen the pain that accompanies it. I have read of the liberal use of opium pills as an anesthetic for pain during the American Civil War, and I see no reason why the soldiers in China’s Civil War should not be afforded the same relief sixty years later. If I had syringes of morphine or unlimited chloroform or ether, I would gladly use any or all of them, but whatever I have must go to those who might live. What I have for our dying is small black opium pills, and giving them to these brutalized men so their deaths become less agonizing is the kindest and holiest act I can perform, and one that I cannot imagine God disapproving of.

  I’m less sure of what Will would think, so he is unaware of this practice and I have no intention of telling him. I don’t think he could stomach it or, if he did, it would take too great a toll on him. He is a principled man who finds compromise painful, and it’s better that he doesn’t know, for if it got out that Westerners, not to mention missionaries, were purchasing opium even for use as an anesthetic, we would most certainly lose the trust we have so carefully cultivated for nearly twenty years and be sent packing by both the Mission Board and the magistrate. This thought terrifies me, but when I begin to question my decision I have only to look at these men dying their awful slow deaths to be sure of the rightness of my course. Many are missing arms and legs; most have been gruesomely stabbed or shot and have lost too much blood to survive. And so I move quietly from one man to the next, offering the blessings of opium and faith and thanking God for both.

  Early each morning before going to the city square I went first to a large locked elmwood cabinet in the upstairs of our home to load wicker baskets with medicines, antiseptic, bandages, and other medical supplies. With so many people in the compound we felt it necessary to secure what was most valuable—our medical supplies and our cash—so the cabinet in our bedroom had become our dispensary and our safe. One morning, chilled through and slow with fatigue, I stopped short when I reached the cabinet and could only stare stupidly ahead, trying to make sense of what I saw. The two halves of the round brass medallion that had held the lock to the cabinet doors had been neatly removed and now lay on the floor in front of me, the lock still in place. Next to them were the small brass pins that had fixed the medallion to the doors. Rather than breaking the lock, someone had simply removed it.

  I was furious at what I could only guess was a cruel joke. With more maimed soldiers being brought to us each day, we couldn’t afford to lose any of the meager supplies we had, and the thought that we had been robbed made my fists clench. But when I opened the cabinet doors to survey the damage, I received my second surprise of the morning. Instead of the ransacked mess I expected, I found everything intact; nothing had been taken. Rather, the cabinet was more crammed than it had been the day before. Boxes filled its shelves, and the printed names made my heart beat faster: Montgomery Ward; Sears, Roebuck and Co.; Parke-Davis; Burroughs-Welcome; Red Cross; China Mennonite Missionary Society. I began to open them and found dozens of rolls of gauze bandages and adhesive tape, tubes of ointment and bottles of powders and pills—more supplies than we had ever received at once. I felt richer than I would have if the cabinet had been stuffed with cash and I laughed out loud. On top of it all was my battered old pith helmet, which I had not seen since my stay with my bandit chief.

  It was freezing outside but I put my pith helmet on anyway, hoping our anonymous benefactor was Hsiao Lao himself and that he would understand my thanks. I had heard many rumors about him over the years. Some said his men had disbanded after the death of his son, some said he had lost his mind, others said he had moved to the remote west of China and lived there in seclusion. I had come to accept that his fate was a mystery I was not to know, but as I went about my duties that day, I watched eagerly for a glimpse of him.

  Six days later we received bad news we had expected. On a late afternoon in the second week of January, Lao Chang, our gatekeeper, came running from the compound gate to the house to repeat what he had just been told by those fleeing the city: except for a garrison of one hundred soldiers within the city, the northern army had fled to the northeast and scattered into the countryside, leaving Kuang P’ing Ch’eng and its suburbs unprotected. The southern army had surrounded the city and the commander had offered the northern soldiers full amnesty if they surrendered immediately. His offer was rejected, and the southern army was now attacking the city with all its force. The city itself was in chaos; during the night scores of residents had fled through North Gate, and now all four gates were locked. The magistrate had stayed in the city out of loyalty, and residents had volunteered to fight alongside the northern troops, arming themselves with whatever they had—ancient guns, homemade swords, large rocks.

  Despite being greatly outnumbered and lacking in weapons and experience, the northern army dug in for the siege and the battle was fierce. Southern soldiers who tried to scale the walls were beaten back and slaughtered; those who tried to dig under the city wall were buried alive when their tunnels caved in. The sounds of gunfire and cannon continued through that night, so loud that at times it seemed the fighting was on the other side of our compound wall. An hour before dawn, Lao Chang came running to the house again. Katherine and I were upstairs, unable to sleep and settling for rest. We hurried downstairs when we heard Lao Chang’s steps, not needing to dress as we were still in our clothes, and found him with Chung Hao in the kitchen. Lao Chang turned to us as soon as we came into the room and told us what he knew: during the night the southern army had breached the city wall and taken control of the city. Their desire for vengeance was great: captured northern soldiers were tied to trees and burned alive or tortured until they revealed the whereabouts of their commander, who had managed to throw himself from the city wall before the southern troops arrived at his hiding place. The southern officer still sent soldiers to retrieve the body so that it could be shot and hung from the east tower, a cigarette stuck in his mouth. Many of the southern officers were new and inexperienced, and the soldiers under their command, trigger-happy and drunk with victory, were now hunting down any remaining northern soldiers hiding in the city and shooting them on the spot. It was rumored that once the southern army had killed every remaining northern soldier in the city they intended to come to the compound to kill every foreigner they found.

  Lao Chang paused and looked at Chung Hao as if prompting him. Chung Hao stared at me evenly and said, “Mu shih, you and Kung Mei Li—”

  I did not let him finish. “No,” I said, for I knew he was going to urge us to leave the area for safety elsewhere, and this we would not consider. “We will not leave.”

  It was just getting light out, and we knew the army would soon be at our gates. Lao Chang set off immediately to wake everyone on our grounds and direct them to the large meeting room downstairs, just as we had during the bandit attacks. A few days earlier we had boarded up the windows and moved the benches against the walls to afford us as much space as possible. I had woken in the night in panic several times that week, thinking that gathering those in our care in one room with boarded-up windows would do little to slow an army. But it was the only plan I had.

  Lao Chang and his son ran from building to building in the freezing air and hurried everyone into the worship hall: half-asleep children who were shivering and confused, exhausted refugees, the patients who were able to walk. Then the two of them returned to the clinic with a few of the older orphan boys and carried those who were unable to walk. The hall was soon filled with people. Mo Yun attended to the sick, making them as comfortable as she could and talking softly with them while Katherine gathered the children in the far corner of the room, where she settled them on straw mats on the floor. She gave them blankets to share and began handing out small pieces of the luxury she had saved for this day: one dozen Hershey bars sent to us by a Sunday school class in Oklahoma City whose members had read of our work. The chocolate had the effect she had hoped for: as the children tast
ed it they grew silent, mesmerized by the cool dark squares.

  Chung Hao and I brought in the provisions we had set aside in the cellar—jars of water, canned fruit and cheese, dried beef, and a dozen large tins of crackers. When we had carried everything in and stacked it along the long north wall, I stood in the doorway for a moment to take stock of our progress. I had expected to be surrounded by confusion and fear and noise, but as I stood there the room grew silent and my heart ached, for I looked at a roomful of people who stared at me with utter trust.

  “We’ll be all right,” I said, as much to myself as to them. “Everything will be all right.”

  Chung Hao and I ran to the other buildings to be sure that everyone had come to the hall, and when we were certain of this, we made ready to close the hall’s double doors. We were about to do this when Chung Hao said, “We must speak to you,” and he motioned for me to follow him to the kitchen, where I found the leaders of our church: Mo Yun and our four evangelists and three Bible women, their expressions somber but calm. They all looked at Chung Hao, who began to speak.

  “Mu shih,” he said, “we have given our situation much thought and prayer, and we have decided that when the southern army comes we, the leaders of our church, should be the first to die.”

  I was overcome by what he said as well as what he left unsaid; they were proposing that they die with Katherine and me.

  Chung Hao continued. “It will make it easier for the others,” he said gently.

  As the others nodded in agreement, I found myself unable to speak for a moment. Finally I said, “My brothers and sisters, we would be honored to die with you.” With those words, I felt an unexpected peace come over me; it seemed to enter the kitchen like an unseen guest, and the others’ expressions told me that they felt it as well.