Shanghai Faithful

by Jennifer Lin

  When Taylor settled in Funing in 1882, his first challenge was finding a building to rent for a hospital. The very concept of a hospital was met with deep-set resistance. The Chinese believed that a person’s spirit stayed behind after death. Nobody wanted to lease a property to this foreigner and his army of spirits. If a property owner rented to him, who would ever want to live again in a house overrun with the ghosts of dead patients? Taylor was forced to use a small spare room in the chapel for his dispensary. On Easter Monday in 1883, he opened his door to villagers.

  He quickly felt deep suspicion among residents of the walled city.

  “We were thought to be spies, to be agents of some political organization that was to overthrow the present dynasty! To be buyers of tea! To be sellers of opium!” the doctor recounted.

  His medicine, rumormongers warned, was enhanced with human eyeballs and kneecaps and had the power to cause people to become followers of Christianity. When the doctor offered a cup of tea to a guest, it was often declined for fear of instant conversion. Taylor saw the hesitation and concluded that only through medical success— and patients in high places—could he overcome his doubters.

  Taylor sensed an opportunity when a military officer asked him for help. The man was gaunt and pallid, and the doctor quickly recognized the symptoms. The “angel of death,” as missionaries called opium, was pulling him away. The officer told Taylor that he’d heard foreign physicians had ways to break opium addiction that traditional Chinese doctors lacked. Taylor was forthright in his warning: There was no easy cure. Withdrawal from the grip of opium would be a violent process, the doctor cautioned. He must prepare for an extended stay to break the habit all at once, not gradually.

  First the military man had to put aside his pipe. If he was caught sneaking a stash of opium—in the folds of his sleeves, between his toes, or woven into his braided queue—he was out. No exceptions. The officer agreed, and treatment began. The first two days were the toughest: explosive diarrhea, uncontrolled vomiting, even spontaneous ejaculations. His stomach and bowels felt like they had turned to ice. Worse, he was awake through it all. Taylor administered doses of chloral hydrate to put him to sleep; it would allow the officer to escape inevitable thoughts of suicide. For the aches that racked his body, the doctor offered a tonic of quinine.

  The man ate very little during the first days, only a little rice porridge. He took eggs and juice a day or so later. By the tenth day, the pain was gone. His craving for opium eased. He was eating and sleeping on his own and restless to go home.

  The cured officer was not one for a quiet thank-you. He expressed his gratitude in a distinctly public, military way. A brass band played as a flag bearer carried through the streets of Funing a silk banner declaring the wondrous works of the foreign physician. The procession ended at the hospital, where the banner was hung—an eye-catching endorsement from an influential man. Perhaps this, Taylor thought, would end the rumors and reassure the local citizens.

  “Do not you Englishmen bring us this opium?”

  The question was asked time and again. Taylor could not escape the truth in it or the embarrassment it caused. At his hospital, two out of three patients were addicts. Missionaries, disgusted by the opium trade, wrote home to friends and family that the hospital only mirrored the rest of the city. Every village in the area had at least two or three opium dens, where addicts could easily smoke away half their wages. A wealthy person could indulge his habit in the privacy of home. Even if he was in a stupor, he could depend on his trusty servants to feed and bathe him, even change his clothes. A military officer, too, could hide his addiction by having an assistant cover for him. But pity the coolie who carried a sedan chair for a living or loaded boats at the docks. He retreated to the darkness of a filthy opium den. And there, with dozens of other addicts who rotated all day long on bug-infested daybeds, he could escape the hardship of life in an opium haze.

  Smoke opium long enough, and your body stops absorbing food. You waste away. You stop caring. You stop living. In this desperate state, some patients listened a little more closely to the message of missionaries. And if Jesus could not save them, there was always suicide. Women who were tethered to the pipe, in particular, felt so trapped that they viewed death as the only alternative. They swallowed large doses of opium extract at night, knowing that by the time they were discovered in the morning, it would be too late. Taylor could try to pump a patient’s stomach or induce vomiting with sulfate of zinc. But if a woman was unconscious or couldn’t be forced to vomit, it was useless. The angel of death would take her away.

  Some were better than others at hiding their addictions. Another British cleric in Funing, the Reverend Hugh M. Eyton-Jones, received a rare invitation to dine with the highest-ranking government official in the district. To be a guest of the mandarin in charge of the entire prefecture of Funing indicated great progress for the mission. As servants placed dishes on the table, Eyton-Jones took the opportunity to ask the official directly about the opium epidemic.

  “It is bad,” the man replied soberly. “It’s a waste of life, of time, and of money.” It was clear the official had given the topic much thought, and he went on to speculate on how it might be fought. “If the foreign import were stopped, we could control the use inland,” he noted, “as the native-grown opium is so much milder than the foreign.”

  After dinner, the men adjourned to an anteroom in the official’s quarters, known as his yamen. Eyton-Jones assumed they were settling in for more conversation, but the missionary’s Chinese servant appeared restless and anxious. He paced the room. Soon he brought in their traveling lamp, signaling that it was time to go.

  “Why were you rushing to get me out of there?” an irritated Eyton-Jones asked his servant when they arrived home.

  “Could you not see?” the servant replied. It was so obvious to him: the official could not sit still; he was fidgeting constantly. The man explained to his British employer: “The hour for his opium smoking had come and he was most uncomfortable.”

  The missionary stared in disbelief. His servant leaned in closer and said in a low, disgusted voice, “All of them were opium eaters.”

  The opium pipe, Eyton-Jones would later lament to his colleagues in London, “becomes a rod of iron, and the smoker a slave.”

  Medical Men

  When Lin Dao’an arrived in Funing, the hospital was established, respected, and growing. From a spare room in the chapel, Taylor and his staff of trainees and nurses could treat sixty men and women at any given time in a compound of buildings. With his new students, Taylor was not about to have anything—or anyone—ruin the reputation of the medical mission. At the start of training, the doctor issued a stern warning. If any student was found stealing bottles of medicine from the dispensary, he was finished.

  “For the first year,” he told them, “you are simply on trial. At the end of six months, I will let you know if you can stay or not until the end of the year.”

  Word of the hospital had spread throughout the coastal area, and people traveled great distances for treatment. Each year, the staff treated as many as five hundred inpatients and more than four thousand outpatients. Village patients, accustomed to pigs eating slop in the courtyards of their homes, found the hospital startlingly sterile. It had a private section for paying patients; separate rooms for examinations, operations, and recovery; and a classroom and quarters for medical students. For the foreign staff, however, this was primitive medicine. Patients slept on beds that were boards resting on wooden sawhorses and covered themselves from the night chill with thick quilts. Their families followed them to the hospital to provide meals. And if the efforts of the medical staff were failing, they hurriedly carried their relatives back home. The Chinese dreaded the thought of taking a last breath away from home. The hospital even had a “dying room” that could be completely shut off from the rest of the facility. That way, any patient who took a su
dden turn for the worse could be quickly sequestered so as not to alarm other patients.

  A map of coastal China with a close-up of Fujian Province marking the location of Erdu, home of the Lin ancestral home; the port of Fuzhou, and the town of Funing, a center for Irish missionaries. Courtesy of Sterling Chen.

  Taylor treated his trainees as if he were mentoring men at his alma mater in Edinburgh. Lin Dao’an and the others studied physiology, anatomy, and surgical techniques, mostly using textbooks that Taylor had translated into a Romanized version of the local dialect. Like British students, they consulted Heath’s Student’s Guide to Surgical Diagnosis as well as Fenwick’s Medical Diagnosis and Treatment. They learned how to suture a cut, something that never failed to awe local patients. They dressed wounds using rolls of bandages made from the old calico dresses that mission ladies cut into strips. They lanced boils, removed cataracts, and set broken bones.

  A portrait of Lin Dao’an, who was trained by missionaries as a doctor. Courtesy of Lin Family Collection.

  When a new patient arrived at the hospital, Taylor would let one of his students present a diagnosis, and then he would critique his assessment. Every day it was something different: pinkeye that could cause blindness; fevers from malaria and typhoid; the chronic bronchitis and asthma of opium smokers. The most pathetic patients were those afflicted by the bacteria causing leprosy. And unlike students in Edinburgh who might hear about elephantiasis in a class on tropical diseases, Lin Dao’an saw it firsthand—patients with legs swollen to grotesque proportions because of a parasitic worm.

  The molding of young doctors went beyond the clinic. Taylor mixed passages from the Gospels of John or Matthew into his class time. And during off hours, he introduced his students to his other passion: tennis. The Irishman was not about to give up his game, even in China. Within the hospital compound, where his house also was located, he had a house servant build a court, using a fishing net strung between two wooden poles. One day, the doctor invited his students over to try their hand at the game with some of the newly arrived unmarried British ladies who were studying Chinese in Funing before being posted to remote mission stations.

  Lin Dao’an, wearing his loose, ankle-length tunic, was paired with the daughter of a vicar from Birmingham, Elsie Marshall. Flailing about, he tried to imitate his skillful mentor but kept tripping on his long robe as he ran to swat the ball in felt slippers. Lin Dao’an had no clue how to play the game or how to run, for that matter.

  Elsie tried not to laugh. “It was a curious experience playing tennis with a Chinaman,” she wrote home to her family in England. “I believe the literary men think it degrading to run.”

  While Taylor tended to the sick, his wife, Christiana, circulated with recovering patients and their families in the hospital courtyard. One or two Chinese Christian men assisted her. She handled the women; they handled the men. Christiana was the first foreign woman ever to pass through the city gates of Funing. As she made her rounds, she told patients Gospel stories. Over cups of tea and bowls of peanuts, she might pass on a little prayer, jotted on the back of a Christmas card she’d received from home. The Chinese catechists might share with patients a book of rhymes explaining Christianity or teach them a favorite hymn, such as “Rock of Ages.”

  All around the hospital, the tenets of Christian faith were on display. Military officer or beggar boy, all patients were treated the same by the hospital staff. Lepers, who had no hope of recovery, received equal compassion from doctors and nurses. So when the Chinese catechist quoted from the Bible—“Come unto me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest”—the patients and their families could see that these were not mere words.

  The missionaries raised nonreligious matters with the locals. The foreigners found the crippling practice of binding women’s feet barbaric and cruel. Nurses winced as they changed bandages on young feet being molded into three-inch human hooves. Christiana tried to persuade Chinese wives to free their feet and those of their daughters. With converts, she would reason: would Jesus want you to distort your body and cause such pain, all for the sexual titillation of men?

  One woman who was led into the hospital on tiny feet could barely see. The doctors performed successful cataract surgery. During her recovery, the woman listened to Christiana’s reasoning. When the woman returned home, her neighbors were so shocked and excited that the nearly blind woman could see that they didn’t notice her feet. They were unbound.

  A Good Wife

  The interior of the small Anglican chapel in Funing felt like a barn. Made of rough-hewn wood, the open space had small windows with no glass. The baptismal font was a big bowl. Women sat in the rear of the chapel behind a screen. Chinese custom forbade them from having direct contact with men other than their relatives. In the city of ten thousand, the little congregation attracted one hundred or so people on Sundays—some simply curious and inquiring, others baptized or about to be. With so few members, there were no strangers among the small band of foreign and Chinese Christians. Lin Dao’an could not help but notice the petite Chinese teacher who played “Jesus Loves Me” on the little pump organ during services.

  You could read the lineage of Zhan Aimei in her face. Her full lips and dark skin suggested generations of farmers who never knew the luxury of a rich man’s home. Zhan Aimei was the youngest of four, born in 1874 in a tiny village deep in the mountains west of Ningde. She was given a name that meant love and beauty. Zhan Aimei lived a simple life, learning how to tend to household chores as well as how to plant crops and care for barnyard animals. Her life would have begun and ended in the tiny hamlet of Meiyu. But when she became a teenager, her path took a remarkable turn: her parents decided to send her to a missionary school in Funing.

  A girl born into a poor peasant family faced a precarious future. Just feeding her would have been a struggle. A few years after the birth of Zhan Aimei, China faced one of the worst famines in its long history. Between 1876 and 1878, an estimated thirteen million Chinese starved to death. Missionary women wrote home to sisters and mothers about tragic examples of desperate parents abandoning their daughters, or worse. One British woman in Fujian theorized that in some parts of the province, three out of every four female newborns were victims of “infanticide.”

  Many poor fathers agreed to send their daughters off to missionary schools less out of a zeal for education than mere indifference. If these foreigners wanted to support their daughters, feed them, care for them, maybe even find them husbands, so be it. One desperate father sent his daughter to the mission school in Funing only to withdraw her when a better opportunity came around: he sold her for sixty dollars to work as an indentured servant for an official.

  Missionary women traveled from town to town trying to recruit students for the mission schools. Chinese women led cloistered lives, unable by custom to leave their homes. Dr. Taylor’s wife, Christiana, would call on former patients under the pretense of checking on their health. While her husband believed that the way to a man’s soul was through his health, she knew that the way into a woman’s home was through her children. On visits, she tried to persuade mothers to send their daughters to the boarding school in Funing. “If we can get the children,” Christiana wrote in a dispatch to supporters back home, “we have every hope of getting the mothers. If we can reach the mothers and children, we shall reach the fathers. There are exceptions, but women can rule here in their own way.”

  When Zhan Aimei arrived as an adolescent at the boarding school in Funing, it had about two dozen girls. Mornings were for scriptures, afternoons for practicing Chinese characters and studying a map of the world, and the time after that for mending clothes, knitting and needlework, cooking and cleaning. The students would, after all, become wives one day. In another break from Chinese tradition, British teachers put girls through daily exercises with calisthenics and drills to keep them fit.

 
For a farm girl like Zhan Aimei, the world opened up inside the classroom.

  “Can blood really run up and down your leg?” an incredulous student asked during a session on the human body.

  Teachers told the girls about cities beyond the borders of the Middle Kingdom. They passed around a magazine, The Church Missionary Gleaner, with articles about converts in Bombay and West Africa and drawings of chapels in the American West and Madagascar. Sometimes, the missionaries would hang a sheet on the wall and light a candle behind a “magic lantern” slide projector. The walls of the simple classroom were suddenly filled with astonishing scenes from England—a cityscape of impossibly large buildings; a mechanical trolley on a city street; a massive steam locomotive. In this part of China, where trains were unknown, the idea of traveling faster than a donkey was too fantastic for the girls to imagine.

  The education of the girls wasn’t limited to books. For the students, as young as seven and as old as twenty, the women from England and Ireland were odd birds to study. A Chinese girl wore a loose-fitting, embroidered tunic made from indigo cotton that breathed in damp, hot weather. Her raven hair was slicked back with tea oil, braided into a long queue, and tied with red thread. Her earlobes were pierced for hoops or dangling earrings made of tin.

  Her teacher, in contrast, wore a heavy long woolen skirt cinched so tight at the waist that the girls wondered how she could breathe. Her only jewelry was a cameo brooch, pinned at the high neck of her cotton blouse. Her hair was so wavy that tendrils fell around her face. And the green Wellington rubber boots she sometimes wore on her big feet to hike in the hills seemed more fit for a farmer than an educated woman.