by Jennifer Lin
The uncle proceeded to tell him about the madness of the Cultural Revolution, when good people committed sadistic acts to curry favor with rebels and to protect themselves. My grandmother, his older sister, had it the worst. She was brutalized again and again for not disowning her brother, Watchman Nee, who had been branded an enemy of the people. Many times, her tormentors dragged her from her home, forced her to kneel on the pavement, and pressured her to denounce him.
The constant humiliation and physical torture, this uncle told my father, had hastened her death. But the family’s hardships began long before the Cultural Revolution started in 1966. Did my father know that his father, Lin Pu-chi, had been pushed out of his church work in the 1950s? Did he know that Watchman Nee had been sentenced to prison in 1956 after a trial, public shaming in the press, and the arrest of his “counterrevolutionary clique”?
The answer, sadly, was that my father had been clueless. Of course, we had read about the destructive Cultural Revolution, a decade of anarchy and struggle, when friends betrayed friends and children turned on their parents. And we knew that Watchman Nee had been sentenced in 1956 as a counterrevolutionary. But what we didn’t understand—what I didn’t sense until that trip—was how the political drama of the era had played out within the walls of this very house. We had been assured time and again by my grandfather that everything was fine. “Do not worry,” he wrote to us. “All’s well.” Now as I thought back to the faces that surrounded us the previous night, I wondered: Who were the victims? Who the collaborators?
During our two-week stay, my father tried to draw more details from his siblings but failed at every turn. No one wanted to talk; George alone revealed the truth, but even then only fragments. Fear kept their voices in a tight vise. They had been targeted once before; no one could assure them it wouldn’t happen again. My father didn’t press it. Instead, he vacillated between enjoying the here and now and brooding over disturbing scenes from the past that played out in his mind. It was as if an uninvited guest kept showing up as we went sightseeing from the Bund in Shanghai to the Forbidden City in Beijing. One moment, we would be sitting around a big table, laughing, enjoying a banquet, and listening to stories from long ago. The next moment, my father would drift off, anguished over thoughts of his mother in pain and his inability to help her.
When we returned to Philadelphia, my father seemed to take what he had learned, place it in a box, and put it somewhere far away. Maybe it was his temperament and training as a brain surgeon: assess, intervene, cure. Next patient. There was no way he could undo the past, so he would not dwell on it. He moved on. My reaction was different. Maybe it had something to do with the way I was wired. I was emerging as the reporter I wanted to be, and I couldn’t let go. I had read the last page of a mystery and needed to read all the preceding chapters. I wanted to know: What happened to them and why?
For the next three decades, I worked for a newspaper in Philadelphia. As a reporter, I learned how to talk to people and to peel back layers on complex issues. I parachuted into breaking news events all over the world—from Lower Manhattan after 9/11 to protests in the streets of Jakarta. Investigative work taught me how to drill into a topic like a miner until I reached the core of truth. But of all the subjects I took on, of all the events I covered, there was the story I could not shake, the one right in front me, the story of my family in China.
My grandfather and Watchman Nee both devoted their lives to nurturing the growth of Christianity in China. My grandmother was so devout that she clung to her Christian beliefs even in the face of unspeakable torment. All of them paid dearly for their choices. But the story of the family didn’t begin there. My grandparents and Watchman Nee were third-generation Christians. Who came before them? What were their experiences? And why, in a culture steeped in the teachings of Confucianism and Daoism, did they embrace the ideas of “foreign ghosts” from a world away?
The questions that disturbed me after that first morning in Shanghai in 1979 only led to more, pushing me deeper into the past. Over the passage of many years, I returned to my relatives, coaxing them gently to tell me what they knew. I pored through the records, letters, and memoirs of missionaries and learned that Lin Pu-chi’s troubles did not start in 1966 with the closing of churches or even in 1950, when the new Communist regime began to exert its control over all religions. My grandfather felt the harsh sting of China’s innate distrust of foreign influences from his earliest days as a young minister in Fuzhou.
Lin Pu-chi had been born into his faith, but what about those who came before him? In missionary archives in England, I unearthed records about his father—my great-grandfather—who had been trained as a doctor by a British missionary and worked with him in a small hospital, treating opium addicts. But he was not the first convert—that man came a generation earlier and was a simple fisherman from a bayside village on the coast of Fujian. At the Lin Ancestral Hall in the town of Erdu, my branch of the Lin clan kept genealogical records in a thick book called a jiapu. There, I found fragments of information about the fisherman’s life.
As I mined the past, I returned again and again to a thick folder with every airmail letter from my grandfather, composed in flawless English, starting on May 12, 1953, a month before my parents’ wedding. My Italian mother had saved each letter, written in neat handwriting on pale blue airmail stationery. I have deconstructed every sentence, trying to discern what he was trying to tell us—or not.
After three decades, I can finally fill in what he had left out.
I came to understand that the journey of our family over five generations was the very story of the rise of Christianity in China, a saga of hardship and hope, of pain and perseverance that started when a fisherman from Fujian heard the ideas of strangers and did not turn away.
Prologue
Shanghai, 1956
Ihe Tian Chan Theater was the most glamorous in all of China when it opened in 1926, its double doors a gateway to the dramatic, stylized world of Peking opera, an art form that had bloomed in the emperor’s court more than a century earlier and become a national treasure. An opera star, it was said, had not arrived until he set foot on the stage of the Tian Chan Theater before the vast house of three thousand. The brilliant costumes, the evening dress of patrons, the art deco ornamentation of the lobby—all of this coalesced under the bright lights of Jazz Age Shanghai into a spectacle that dazzled even Western visitors.
On the cold afternoon of January 30, 1956, armed guards stood at each entrance. A sullen line of people, clad in padded gray and blue cotton coats, filed through the doors. They were Christians, summoned by the Communist government to the theater just off the new People’s Square in the city’s center. They had been identified as followers of the teachings of Watchman Nee, and they were about to learn what it meant to be an enemy of the people in the People’s Republic of China.
On this Monday afternoon there would indeed be a performance—a carefully scripted “political struggle meeting.” The target was not present. Watchman Nee sat in isolation in a concrete cell in the Number One Detention Center of the Shanghai police. He had been in custody for four years, following his arrest on a train en route to the northeastern city of Shenyang.
It was chilly inside the theater. Watchman Nee’s followers, called the “Little Flock” by outsiders, filled every seat. Most of them went to the same Christian assembly hall on nearby Nanyang Road, including the preacher’s frail, sickly older sister, Ni Guizhen. Seated in the first row were sober-faced representatives from other religious groups—Protestant clerics, seminary students, an Anglican bishop, a Catholic priest, and a Buddhist monk. Onstage were a dozen party officials and prosecutors, who sat under a banner with Chinese characters that read: “Down with the counterrevolutionary clique of Watchman Nee.”
The head of the Shanghai Bureau of Religious Affairs stood and approached a microphone. For the first time since the arrest of Watchman Nee,
the government would reveal its case against him. The bureau chief told the audience that prosecutors had accumulated an overwhelming file of evidence—2,296 pages of confessions, documents, testimonies, and photographs—to prove that Watchman Nee tried “to supersede revolution with evangelism.”
In the seven years since the dawn of Communist China, the new regime had asserted control over nearly all churches, mosques, temples, and religious groups. Some, however, resisted joining the new party-approved “patriotic” Protestant movement. Among them were Watchman Nee and many who followed his religious teachings.
Next up onstage was the head of the Shanghai Public Security Bureau, the omnipotent agency that kept tabs on all of the city’s residents. He had an announcement. Late the night before, several elders with the Nanyang Road assembly had been arrested at their homes and sent to the bureau for further interrogation. They were, he declared, members of Watchman Nee’s “counterrevolutionary gang.”
The thousands in the audience listened, stunned and mute. Bodies froze and minds raced. The official was talking about respected associates and confidants of Watchman Nee. No one dared react: There were no cries, no gasps, no movement. Had there been, officials of the Religious Affairs Bureau seated at either end of each row were there to take note.
Prosecutors next laid out their case for imprisoning Watchman Nee. They did not scrutinize his religious teachings or Christian beliefs. They went after his character.
Act I: he was a spy.
Watchman Nee, an official recited, fed information to enemies in the United States Air Force and the Chinese Nationalist Party about Liberation Army troop movements during the civil war. He concocted an insidious plot to infect the troops in Jiangsu with a parasitic worm by dropping snails into their water supply from Lake Tai—and then withholding the materials for a curative drug. He encouraged the Nationalists to target attacks on water and electric plants, a strategy that had succeeded in Shanghai.
Act II: he was an economic criminal.
The pharmaceutical factory that he ran with his brother—the China Biological and Chemical Laboratories—evaded taxes, bribed officials, and dodged foreign-exchange rules.
Act III: he was “a dissolute vagabond of corrupt and indulgent living.”
Watchman Nee was accused of forcing himself on young women; taking nude photos and movies as licentious mementoes; and frequenting prostitutes, including one particular “White Russian” refugee.
The meeting went on for hours. A handful of his followers took to the stage to vent emotions of anger and betrayal about their spiritual leader. Some shouted, “We will smash the reactionary clique of Watchman Nee!”
Finally, it was the vice mayor’s turn. Religion, the Communist leader told the audience, should not be used as a cover to spread poison against the country and people. He urged the men and women in the Little Flock not to be afraid to wash their dirty linen in public.
“This struggle has just begun,” Xu Jiangguo encouraged. “We will not draw back until we have completed it victoriously and rooted out every counterrevolutionary hidden within the Little Flock.”
On cue, the audience was prompted to repeat, “We will smash the reactionary clique of Watchman Nee!”
Lin Pu-chi and his wife outside their Shanghai home in the early 1950s. Courtesy of Lin Family Collection.
Weeks later, Lin Pu-chi sat at his desk in the attic of his home on Jiaozhou Road in the International Settlement. The quiet house was drafty. It had been a mild winter, but just a week before, the first snow of the year dusted the city. The sixty-one-year-old wrapped a wool scarf around his neck. Lin Pu-chi was an ordained Anglican priest, a Western-trained educator, and a respected editor. But in this new China, he had no church duties and preached only intermittently, filling in for others when they were busy or went out of town. He passed his days looking after his granddaughters.
Lin Pu-chi reached inside his desk for a sheet of airmail stationery, dipped his pen into a well of blue ink, and dated the letter March 24, 1956. It had been an uncharacteristic lapse of two months since he last wrote to his youngest son and daughter-in-law in the United States.
So much had happened. He paused, thinking how to begin. He wanted to tell his son that his mother, Watchman Nee’s older sister Ni Guizhen, lay motionless in her bed with the curtains drawn. He wished he could explain how after the rally at the theater, she endured further “accusation sessions” with other members of the Little Flock. And how the Liberation Daily, the most influential Communist newspaper in Shanghai, had attacked his uncle Watchman Nee for three days with front-page articles, editorials, testimonials, and a scathing political cartoon showing him siphoning gold and money from obedient followers. The caption read: “Abandon the family. Give it all out. Give up your job.”
Lin Pu-chi knew that once he placed his letter in the mailbox, it would be reopened and reviewed by agents with the Public Security Bureau. His youngest son had become an American citizen, and since the Korean War, the United States was China’s number one enemy. Anything he had to say to his son would be scrutinized.
Telling the truth, confiding his fear and anger, was not an option. Instead, Lin Pu-chi did what was expected. He pulled the curtain down on their lives. In effortless English, he asked about Paul’s two young daughters and marveled at how the eldest was already starting to talk. He mentioned that Paul’s sister had used money he had sent the family to buy fabric for sewing dresses for her daughters. He thanked his son and daughter-in-law for the card they sent for his wedding anniversary on March 4 but remarked how the day passed quietly as his wife was not feeling well. Not quite knowing the words to describe her traumatized state of mind, he obliquely referred to her condition as “brain storm.”
In closing, he wrote:
I wish I had a long telescope and could look across the ocean and see how you all are faring! But I can see with my mind’s eyes just as well.
Love from,
Mom & Dad
I
Foreign Ghosts
• 1 •
Cook
Fujian Province, Mid-1800s
On New Year’s Day in 1847, the schooner Petrel arrived at the mouth of the Min River and sailed upstream toward the port of Fuzhou, carrying opium from India and a missionary from Connecticut.
The Petrel was well suited for the voyage, fast across the open sea, quick and nimble along the coast and in the shallow rivers. Seamen who required speed and agility as well as a large cargo hold—slavers, privateers, fishermen—favored the double-mast schooner with its trapezoidal sails. The Petrel was laden with wooden chests packed tightly with heavy balls of dried, hardened opium from India. She had set sail from Hong Kong, four hundred miles to the southwest, racing up the coast through the Taiwan Strait to the mouth of the Min, where she slowed her pace as she headed west into the interior.
The river soon narrowed into a gorge named Five Tiger Gate, less than a half-mile across, with towering cliffs on either side and riven with spectacular cascades. The ship handled this passage well and then negotiated the growing cluster of Chinese junks that gathered alongside in hopeful expectation of business. As the river widened again, the landscape took on spectacular dimensions that reminded Europeans of the Rhine, Americans of the Hudson. Presently a pagoda came into view, a white tower of some 120 feet atop a hill on an island. This was Pagoda Anchorage, the schooner’s destination. The captain dropped anchor in the deep water.
The next day, Stephen Johnson of Griswold, Connecticut, climbed into a smaller sampan and traveled another ten miles upstream to the port of Fuzhou. Johnson stayed for a few weeks at the house of the opium skipper before setting up his own residence and establishing the first Protestant mission in Fuzhou. He viewed this city of seven hundred thousand with the fervor of a revivalist, determined to convert China’s millions one soul at a time on behalf of the equally optimistic New Eng
land churches that had sent him.
His arrival as a passenger on an opium schooner was an inauspicious way for a man of the cloth to make his entrance. Johnson, however, had no other way to get to Fuzhou. It was either sail on the Petrel or not at all. The port had been officially opened to foreigners and trade only three years before, in 1844, and profiteers selling opium and buying tea provided the only transport from the new British colony of Hong Kong. Johnson was keenly aware of the destructive and demoralizing influence of the opium trade. As he wrote to his supporters back home, “Not less than one half of the male population in this city are more or less enslaved to the use of opium, an appalling and melancholy fact!”
Three years after Johnson’s arrival, a pair of British missionaries from the Church Missionary Society (CMS)—the Reverends Robert David Jackson and William Welton, also a physician—established the first Anglican mission in Fuzhou. They didn’t have to rely on an opium captain; in Hong Kong, they chartered a lorcha, a smaller vessel with the bat-wing sails of a Chinese junk and a Portuguese-style hull. The Americans may have gotten to Fuzhou first, but the British missionaries did them one better. Through diplomatic channels, they were able to find rooms to rent in a Daoist temple on Black Stone Hill inside the walled city, the beating heart of Fuzhou. The other missionaries had to live outside the gates of the oldest neighborhood.
But in another way, the British were just like the Americans before them. Both were met with open hostility as interlopers who had forced their way into China in the wake of gunboats and a battle over opium. It didn’t help that in the early years, the only way missionaries could exchange money without making a trip all the way back to Hong Kong was by calling on an opium skipper to cash a bank check for Mexican-minted silver dollars that were used in China at the time. Chinese cynics noticed: a missionary visits an opium schooner and returns with bags of cash. How could he not be complicit? But the missionaries in Fuzhou accepted the taint of their connection to the opium traders as the price of a toehold in China.