Shanghai Faithful
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Shanghai Faithful
Praise for Shanghai Faithful
“In revealing the truth of how her family helped spread Christianity in China, Jennifer Lin weaves a captivating, poignant story about the nature and power of belief. This epic study shows the high price that can be paid by those who insist on holding fast to faith and family at a time when everything is at risk.”
—Jeff Gammage, author of China Ghosts: My Daughter’s Journey to America, My Passage to Fatherhood
“Jennifer Lin’s Shanghai Faithful is an extraordinary story about a family in a rapidly changing world. Its wide-ranging narrative links family members on two continents and covers more than a century of tumultuous change. Lin’s research is meticulous and combines archival precision, sophisticated historiographical framing, and memorable storytelling. I will surely be assigning Shanghai Faithful in my own teaching, because its story brings to life a remarkable era in Chinese, American, and global history.”
—Robert André LaFleur, Beloit College
“This engrossing book offers rich insights on faith and loyalty in a Christian family in Shanghai. Jennifer Lin’s compelling narrative, often immensely emotional, will be of great interest for anyone who wishes to know about the everyday struggles of Chinese Christians as they endured persecution and suffering during the most hostile years of Mao’s rule.”
—Joseph Tse-Hei Lee, Pace University
“Capturing the epic sweep of a turbulent Chinese century through a personal lens, Jennifer Lin tells a poignant, riveting, and deeply researched tale of her family’s journey of faith, from the nineteenth-century Chinese villager who first encountered Western missionaries to the twentieth-century Christian leaders—one working within the system and one pushing for something new. Persecuted under Communist rule, each left a mark still felt in China today, where ever more people seek something to believe in.”
—Mary Kay Magistad, creator and host of “Whose Century Is It?” podcast, former NPR and PRI China correspondent
Shanghai Faithful
Betrayal and Forgiveness in a Chinese Christian Family
Jennifer Lin
ROWMAN & LITTLEFIELD
Lanham • Boulder • New York • London
Published by Rowman & Littlefield
A wholly owned subsidiary of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc.
4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706
www.rowman.com
Unit A, Whitacre Mews, 26-34 Stannary Street, London SE11 4AB, United Kingdom
Copyright © 2017 by Jennifer Lin
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Available
ISBN 978-1-4422-5693-4 (cloth : alk. paper)
ISBN 978-1-4422-5694-1 (electronic : alk. paper)
™ The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.
Printed in the United States of America
To my father,
Paul M. Lin
Contents
Contents
List of Characters
Note on Spellings and Reporting
Introduction
Prologue
Part I: Foreign Ghosts
1 Cook
2 Doctor
3 Firstborn
Part II: Patriots
4 Light and Truth
5 A Modern Man
6 Second Daughter
7 Running Dog
8 Alma Mater
Part III: A House Divided
9 Watchman Nee
10 Island of Shanghai
11 Bund to Boardwalk
Part IV: New Order
12 American Wolves
13 Missing
14 Prelude
Part V: Bad Elements
15 Lane 170
16 Yellow Music
17 Barefoot Doctor
18 Passages
19 Father, Hello!
20 Lost
Part VI: Revival
21 Faith
Epilogue
Acknowledgments
Notes
Bibliography
List of Characters
Lin Family (Shanghai)
Lin Pu-chi
My grandfather
Lin Buji 林步基
Ni Guizhen
My grandmother
Ni Guizhen 倪规箴
Martha
Aunt
Lin Maozhi 林茂芝
Jim
First uncle
Lin Junmin 林俊民
Tim
Second uncle
Lin Tingmin 林挺民
Paul
Father
Lin Baomin 林保民
Sylvia
Mother
John Sun
Martha’s husband
Sun Yuguang 孙毓光
Emma
Tim’s wife
Hu Yimei 胡苡梅
Julia
Martha’s eldest daughter
Sun Zhongling 孙钟玲
Terri
Martha’s second daughter
Sun Tianlin 孙天霖
Kaikai
Tim’s son
Lin Kai 林愷
Lin Yu
Tim’s daughter
Lin Yu 林愉
Lin family (Fujian)
Old Lin
First convert; great-great-grandfather
Lin Yongbiao 林永标
Lin Dao’an
Great-grandfather
Lin Dao’an 林叨安
Zhan Aimei
Great-grandmother
Zhan Aimei 詹爱美
Ni Family
Watchman Nee
Brother of Ni Guizhen
Ni Tuosheng 倪柝声
Charity Chang
Wife of Watchman Nee
Zhang Pinhui 张品惠
Lin Heping
Mother of Watchman Nee
Lin Heping 林和平
Uncle George
Brother of Ni Guizhen
Ni Huaizu 倪怀祖
Note on Spellings and Reporting
The spelling of Chinese names and places can be a knotty dilemma. In most cases, I use the modern pinyin spelling. But since this is a family memoir, I have made some exceptions. With my father, aunts, uncles, and cousins, I use their Christian names. This is how I knew them. And for people who had public identities before 1949, I default to the old Wade-Giles spelling or the most recognizable version of their names. For instance, I use Watchman Nee instead of Ni Tuosheng and Lin Pu-chi instead of Lin Buji. Also with some cities, where the modern version is vastly different from the one used in missionary times, I use the older version or the more familiar spelling in the local dialect, so, for example, I use Funing instead of Xiapu in Fujian Province.
This is a work of nonfiction. All quotes were gleaned from primary sources or through the recollections of relatives. In order to tell this history as a story, I have re-created scenes based on my understanding of events, which I explain in more detail in the notes at the end of this book.
Introduction
I had never seen my father like this, and it frightened me.
His face was ashen and blank, his eyes puffy and bloodshot from a night without sleep. He stood beside me on the second-floor balcony of his childhood home in old Shanghai in what used to be his parents’ bedroom. It was the first morning of my first full day in China—June 18, 1979—and I listened as he recounted for me what he had learned only hours before from an elderly uncle. His words came out mechanically, as if he were running the information through his brain again, still struggling to grasp the meaning. In that moment on the porch, I began to feel that everything I knew about his family had been a façade carefully constructed to obscure the truth by the relatives I had met for the first time only the night before.
One of those people was no longer there; my grandfather—my dad’s father—had died six years earlier. He had been our window into the house on Jiaozhou Road. Every month, without fail, he wrote to us in Philadelphia with an update on family life. He reported on everyone’s health. He recounted a trip to the mountains, a visit to the zoo, a morning stroll in the park. He quoted a Tang dynasty poet or a verse from St. Paul. He described the bowl of noodles he had for his birthday and the blooming rosebush outside the front door. Sometimes he tucked black-and-white photographs of family members into the folds of the blue airmail letters. With impeccable English, he often ended his notes with reassuring words: “We are all well as usual. Do not worry about us.”
And we didn’t. A world away, I lived in a large, loud household in the suburbs of Philadelphia with four sisters, a brother, our parents, and our Nana from my mother’s Italian side of the family. We had a sprawling house with a pool and a lush lawn that was big enough for pickup softball games. My mother, a nurse, put her career aside to raise her brood and shuttle us in our red Ford station wagon from swim practice to ballet and piano lessons. She was from a rowhouse neighborhood in Camden, New Jersey, that was bedrock Italian. In 1952, when Dr. Lin, who worked on the same floor at Temple Hospital as Nurse Spina, pulled up to her stoop for their first date, neighbors craned their necks from windows for a glimpse of “the Chinaman.” Their wedding a year later was the talk of Fourth Street.
With the Vietnam War playing in the background of my childhood, I was indifferent to my Chinese heritage. I wanted nothing more than to look like my best friend, an auburn-haired Irish girl whose four sisters presented a stark contrast to the mongrel look of my four sisters and me. My mother was the face of the family at our Catholic school and church. She provided some links to her husband’s homeland at the dinner table, cooking daily servings of rice in a tin pot he bought when he first arrived from Shanghai. After Mass on Christmas Eve, she served Peking duck along with her traditional beef stroganoff. But my busy father, a neurosurgeon, had neither the time nor interest to properly introduce us to Chinese ways. Every now and then, he would make a comment about his family’s religious life. His father, he told us, had been an Anglican priest who had studied as a young man at a seminary right here in Philadelphia. And he mentioned that another relative—an uncle with the curious name of Watchman Nee—was a Christian leader as popular in his time as the Reverend Billy Graham. That’s all I knew and all I cared to know. My mother had a firm hand on our Catholic upbringing. My Protestant roots in China would remain an exotic curiosity.
But when I was twenty and a college student, President Carter normalized diplomatic relations with “Red China.” The era of the Cultural Revolution had ended in 1976, and China was beginning to recover from decades of isolation. Beneath all the formal State Department language was this: families like ours would be permitted to visit. Up until then, we could communicate only through letters. Now my father would be able to return home to see the brother and sister who stayed behind. His parents by then were deceased, as was Watchman Nee. Only two of my sisters and I could make the trip; the others were tied up with school or jobs. It would have been awkward for my mother to join us. We planned to stay in my father’s childhood home in the old International Settlement, and the Chinese government permitted that privilege only to “overseas Chinese” and their children, not “foreigners” such as my mother. The bamboo curtain had been pulled back, but not all the way.
We arrived on the tarmac of the Hongqiao Airport in Shanghai on a blazing hot June afternoon. For the relatives who welcomed us, it had been a mere three years since the end of the Cultural Revolution, the dark decade when Red Guards attacked anyone with educational status, religious background, and Western ties.
The first moments of the reunion were all sweetness and smiles. In the airport reception area, under the gaze of an avuncular Chairman Mao smiling down on us from a giant mural, my father melted into the embrace of his older sister. A tinier version of him, she had an easy smile and a girlish demeanor for a woman in her fifties. Best for us, she spoke English. Like my father, she had graduated from the medical school of St. John’s University, run by American missionaries, and had recently retired as an obstetrician.
At the airport, our entourage split up into two borrowed vans that picked their way down a bike-choked road. Cousins who had been only faces in photographs came to life with names and personalities. To make it easier for us, they let us refer to them by their Western names. Maozhi was Aunt Martha. Her daughters Tianlin and Zhongling were Terri and Julia. Rice paddies and squat brick buildings gave way to tree-shaded avenues with storefronts that looked like they belonged in Paris of the 1930s. What few cars were on the road were antiques from decades ago. The streetscape, too, flashed by in black and white, with everyone wearing white short-sleeved shirts and dark pants.
On June 17, 1979, at the Hongqiao Airport in Shanghai, Martha Sun welcomed her younger brother Paul to Shanghai. They had not seen each other for thirty years. Courtesy of Jennifer Lin.
The family lived in House 19 on Lane 170 on Jiaozhou Road. It was a narrow, three-story brick house sandwiched among identical dwellings along a common walkway. In another era, British neighbors would have called it a “terraced house.” Entering through a rear door off a damp alley, we climbed a winding staircase to my uncle’s third-story bedroom, which doubled as the family’s catchall living space. It had a musty smell. I felt like I had entered a time capsule. In the stairwell was an old-style wall phone with a separate mouthpiece and receiver. Next to an armchair with a lace antimacassar was a mirrored, wooden armoire from the 1940s. I noticed that the tiny tiled bathroom with a proper Western, sit-down toilet was also the kitchen, equipped with a single gas burner that straddled the width of a claw-footed, cast iron tub. There was no refrigerator. Food was stored in a cabinet in the tight stairwell.
Everyone jammed inside the main room. Neighbors who heard what was going on stood in the doorway, straining to glimpse the foreigners. My father held court for hours, filling the g
ap of thirty years and answering a battery of questions. His Shanghai dialect was rusty. We relied on Julia’s husband, an English teacher named Victor, to translate for us. Who looks most like your Italian wife? How big is your house? Do you have a car? How many? Scanning the room, I tried to match names with faces. The eldest cousin, Julia, was polite and demure and, we were told, worked as a pianist for a theatrical troupe. Her younger sister, Terri, cradled a newborn and said little.
My father was still talking when I retreated to my aunt’s room a floor below and climbed into her bed, exhausted from our trip but happy to see my father home.
That first morning, blaring patriotic music from a loudspeaker mounted on a pole in the alley woke me. The energetic voice of a young woman roused the neighborhood. I didn’t understand a word, but it was obvious this was our wake-up call, and I got dressed. Outside, bike bells thrummed like cicadas. A stream of cyclists already choked Jiaozhou Road. In the distance, the baritone moan of ships on the Huangpu River joined the morning chorus. Standing on the balcony off the bedroom, I could peer into the lives of families on the other side of the alleyway, or longtang. A woman plopped dumplings into a wok of sizzling oil. An older man in a white undershirt stood on his balcony, swinging his arms like a windmill for exercise.
That was when I heard my father coming down the steps and turned to see him approaching me on the balcony. His words that morning would stay with me forever: “My god, this is so depressing.”
He explained. After my sisters and I had turned in for the night, he stayed up talking to his Uncle George, the younger brother of Watchman Nee. George asked him in a hushed voice, “Do you have any idea what happened to us?”