by Jennifer Lin
Lin Pu-chi fell easily into his new role as the dean of the cathedral. It suited his intellectual temperament with its balance of church and educational responsibilities. On Sundays, he oversaw religious services in the cross-shaped nave, and on weekdays, he supervised a primary school in classrooms on the ground floor. Two mornings a week, he left the cathedral and sailed downstream to the FCU campus. The new Chinese president of the university, Lin Ching-jun, a youthful returned student who had studied at Oberlin, Harvard, Columbia, and Drew Theological Seminary, had asked Lin Pu-chi to teach theology. Lin Pu-chi readily agreed. He already was a member of the university’s board of managers, representing the Anglican community, one of four missions jointly running the Protestant university. The invitation to teach was another attempt by local Christians to raise the Chinese profile of their schools.
Lin Pu-chi was named dean of Christ Church Cathedral in Fuzhou, pictured here in 1927. Courtesy of Church Mission Society Archives, Cadbury Research Library, University of Birmingham.
Every day at 11:30 a.m., youngsters at the cathedral school attended morning chapel and listened to Bible stories told by their teachers. Sometimes, Lin Pu-chi invited guests to speak. On the first anniversary of the cathedral, an Australian physics professor from FCU gave a demonstration of one of the man-made wonders of the world: electricity. All the children from the cathedral school, plus students from three other Anglican schools in the neighborhood, filled a hall in the cathedral to see how electricity could light a room or power a motor. Afterward, everyone posed for photographs to mark the big day.
Lin Pu-chi was immersed in the day-to-day life of the cathedral. But in the fall of 1928, the board of managers of Trinity asked him to relinquish his post as dean to take over as president of the college. Both the cathedral and Trinity were controlled by the diocesan synod for Fujian Province. Another time, such an assignment would have been an honor. But Lin Pu-chi had been at the cathedral for little more than a year, enjoyed the work, and did not want to leave. He respectfully declined. Bishop Hind asked a second time. Lin Pu-chi was caught in the enduring Confucian dilemma of duty versus ambition. If he declined again, it would be nothing less than canonical disobedience—as severe an offense as a son refusing the request of his father. Again, he had no real choice.
This photo of Lin Pu-chi, surrounded by students in Fuzhou, was published in a 1935 memoir by his mentor, the Reverend W. S. Pakenham-Walsh. Courtesy of W. S. Pakenham-Walsh, Twenty Years in China.
Lin Pu-chi cut short his tenure at Christ Church Cathedral and returned to Nantai as the first Chinese president of Trinity College.
Banyan Trees and Lychee Nuts
The Lin boys could not believe their good fortune. Their father’s new job came with a new house, and not just any house. This was the former Russian consulate, a stately residence befitting a top diplomat in a major port city. The Russians sold it to missionaries from Dublin University in 1912, and the Irishmen used the property to create the Trinity campus.
After years of sharing a house with siblings and in-laws, Lin Pu-chi and his wife, Ni Guizhen, had more room than they could use. The two-story square residence was situated at the top of a tree-lined walkway. Its stucco walls were a pale shade of ochre, and it featured tall Palladian windows, a front portico, and a small balcony above the entrance. The first floor had a commodious parlor on one side, a formal dining room on the other, and a grand staircase leading to separate bedrooms for the couple and their children.
What Ni Guizhen liked most about her new home was the piano in the parlor. She played every night, often hymns that her children knew and could sing with her. She taught her eight-year-old daughter how to play; Martha showed true promise. She was a quiet, studious type, content to stay indoors and practice her scales. But her rambunctious brothers had the run of the campus. The two eldest, ages five and four, loved clambering up the branches of a giant banyan tree next to the house or gorging themselves on lychee fruit that they picked by the armful from trees on campus. The youngest son, only two, was too small to keep up with them and clung to his mother’s skirt.
Lin Pu-chi could not pass through the gates of Trinity College without feeling waves of nostalgia. His mentor—the Irishman who had taught him English as a twelve-year-old—was the founder of Trinity. In the heart of campus stood a four-story brick tower with a brass bell from Dublin, erected in memory of the Reverend William S. Pakenham-Walsh after he retired in 1919 and sailed home. Lin Pu-chi was still in Philadelphia at the time. Teacher and student never met again. But every time Lin Pu-chi looked up at the bell tower, he was reminded of the legacy that had been entrusted to him.
Not everyone in the Trinity community was happy about his appointment. A faction of teachers and students bristled under his leadership. Their objections stemmed from old rivalries that divided the campus along lines of class and social standing. Trinity could be split into two castes. The upper one included the boys in the Anglo-Chinese School. They mainly came from Fuzhou and paid considerable tuition to be taught in English. Their education gave them ample options in life. They could continue to university, enter business, or become a clerk for the postal service or international telegraph company, which needed bilingual staff. The lower caste included students in the Middle School. They came mostly from villages, were too poor to pay for tuition, and were taught in Chinese. They were destined for low-paying jobs as teachers in mission schools or religious instructors in the field. It rankled them that they were made to feel beneath the boys in the Anglo-Chinese School, who mocked their peasant roots by calling them digua, or sweet potatoes. And it wasn’t just the Middle School students who felt inferior; many of the Chinese teachers on the faculty, who were graduates of the school, shared their resentment.
While missionary supporters saw Lin Pu-chi as someone who was strong enough to pull all the schools together, the Middle School saw him as a polarizing figure. He was one of them, and some students felt that their principal, the Reverend Huang Yangying, had been passed over for the top job. Huang was older than Lin Pu-chi and came from a more humble background. He grew up in a village, graduated from the Middle School, and studied at the local seminary before joining the faculty to teach mathematics and scriptures. Students took their dissatisfaction with Lin Pu-chi straight to Bishop Hind, but he stood by the appointment.
One by one, teachers in the Middle School resigned, including Huang, who left Fuzhou for the British colony of Malaya. The Reverend E. M. Norton, a faculty member and onetime principal at Trinity, tried to bridge the rift. He explained with exasperation the dilemma to the CMS office in London: “I did all I could to get the teachers to stay on, but failed—not one of them would serve under Mr. Lin. I need not remind you that he is an old Anglo-Chinese school boy.”
Lin Pu-chi scrambled to replace the teachers, but the new hires were universally seen as inferior to their predecessors in scholarship, teaching ability, and class management. Norton wrote: “This, plus the critical attitude of the boys, provided material for an explosion.”
Explode it did. One night in May, Williams was making his evening rounds in the dormitory of the Middle School. As was his custom, he patrolled the hallway, telling students to turn out the lights. When he peered inside one room, he was aghast at what he saw: three teenagers sitting on a bed, naked from the waist down. The flustered priest accused them of indecency. The students claimed they were merely darning their underpants, which was why they had taken them off in the first place.
The next morning, Williams told Lin Pu-chi to expel the boys. He complied. The students were accused of “immorality” and thrown out of school. The other roommates protested, calling the punishment too harsh. Neither Williams nor Lin Pu-chi backed down. News of the expulsions rocked the Middle School. In a gesture of solidarity, all of the classmates of the accused held a sit-down in their classroom, refusing to study or even move from their desks. Williams called for their
expulsion, too.
Three days later, ten students from the Middle School appealed to the administration for leniency. Sympathetic teachers lent their support to the students to no avail. Not to be cowed, students circulated a protest petition and began organizing a demonstration. They would exploit the expulsion of the students as yet another example of the imperious ways of foreigners and their Chinese minions.
On May 17, the Lin children and their mother left the big house on the hill for the safety of a relative’s home. A brother-in-law on the Ni side of the family, meanwhile, lurked in the street by Trinity. He had a switchblade and pistol in his pocket if anyone tried to harm Lin Pu-chi.
Outside the locked front gates of Trinity, as many as three hundred protesters shouted slogans and held banners. The mob included students and teachers from the Middle School plus anti-Christian agitators from town. Their jeers echoed through the campus.
Down with the imperialist running dog Lin Pu-chi!
Down with British imperialist Williams!
Williams get out of China!
Police were summoned to guard the gates. Demonstrators took their protest to the city, marching in two lines to deliver petitions to the provincial offices of the education commissioner and the ruling Nationalist Party. Along the way, they passed out pamphlets denouncing Trinity and its leaders.
The following day, the city’s main Chinese newspaper ran a front-page article under the headline “Great Tempest: Trinity’s Anti-imperialist Student Movement.” Editors published the full text of the protesters’ leaflet.
It was happening all over again for Lin Pu-chi—“running dog” taunts, threats, angry mobs, verbal assaults. His mentor in Ireland, the Reverend Pakenham-Walsh, would later describe him as a “marked man” for the anti-Christian movement stirring up students. The hostility toward him, which first flared in 1927, showed no signs of abating. Lin Pu-chi did not help the situation. Just as he was resolute in his faith, he stubbornly resisted any challenge by those he viewed as misguided. His critics saw this as arrogance; he would have called it certitude.
The board of managers of Trinity, chaired by Lin Pu-chi and including Chinese and Western staff, held an emergency meeting. They acted decisively. On May 29, they voted to shut down the Middle School and send students home. The provincial government was not happy with the decision, and an official with the education commission criticized Lin Pu-chi for his handling of the situation.
But the damage from the incident was irrevocable. Families received letters over the summer announcing that the Middle School would not reopen for the fall semester. Instead of maintaining warring schools, the board of managers decided that Trinity would be better off with only one—the Anglo-Chinese School. If the diocesan synod needed teachers and religious instructors to fill their mission schools and chapels, the supply would have to come from those students.
In his report to the CMS headquarters in England, Lin Pu-chi explained: “The board of managers had several long and very careful discussions . . . and on July 11 they decided that the department should be closed in the autumn. . . . The students, some seventy of them, were given letters of transfer to other institutions in the province and elsewhere. How things would develop eventually remains to be seen, but we are confident that the managers would have the best interests of this college and the Church in view of whatever action they may adopt, and that nothing but good would come out of the sad turmoil.”
A Chinese Church
When classes resumed in the fall of 1929, the reorganized Anglo-Chinese School had 192 students and the primary school an additional 191. “Things went on without a hitch,” Lin Pu-chi assured the CMS office. “Our anticipated fears and troubles vanished like mist.”
On the surface, life did go on. Interest in the school remained strong, with more boys applying than could be admitted. Trinity had twenty-six teachers and no trouble recruiting new ones from mission universities such as St. John’s. There was much to commend on the part of students, too. Lin Pu-chi reported to England that senior boys were teaching laborers who worked on campus how to read and write. Other students joined a citywide health campaign, sweeping roads with brooms and clearing fetid ditches around campus.
But the troubles at Trinity did not “vanish like the mist.” Instead, Lin Pu-chi was racked with doubt. He had returned from Philadelphia a decade earlier with high aspirations, both spiritual and professional. He saw himself as being in the vanguard of a great transformation of China. The quest for truth, he wrote in 1924, was central to man’s search for meaning. In an English-language article in the Chinese Recorder, he explained:
Says Christ, who is the Truth, “The truth shall make you free.” China as the oldest existing nation in the world has contributed her quota of truth, which her ancient sages and heroes discovered. But in no era of her prolonged history did she need, nay, hunger for more truth than she does at present. She craves for new, practical truths in relation to every phase of her national existence. In arts, in science, in government, and in all civic problems, she craves for the right principles.
He said his generation was eagerly searching for spiritual guidance as well, and it fell to the church to show them the way. But how? On this, he echoed the sentiments of the times, the feeling that China as a nation needed to stand on its own and control its destiny. Over the millennium, he wrote, China had been very capable of absorbing alien cultures. Lin Pu-chi cited as an example Buddhism, which was introduced from India two thousand years earlier and transformed into a virtually indigenous religion. “The Chinese have given Buddhist literature a Chinese vocabulary, a Chinese style, and a Chinese presentation,” he wrote. “Chinese accretions of thought have become part and parcel of the original Indian religion, and have been made her own. The whole system has been ‘Sinified.’”
In his article for the missionary magazine, he asked why Christianity couldn’t be “Sinified”:
This has in recent years become a household phrase. It means that the Chinese Church will ultimately take over all evangelistic, medical, educational, financial and administrative responsibilities. In the matter of architecture, liturgy, polity, theology, literature and various other things, there may be modifications and alterations to suit the Chinese psychology and usage. And not until then will Christianity in China become “Chinese.” But he greatly errs who thinks that a “Sinified Church” will be so much transformed as to be totally different from the rest of Christianity in this world. There will still be traces of former connections. Continental Christianity, English Christianity, American Christianity will all leave indelible marks upon Chinese Christianity.
He had been thirty when he wrote those words. Now he was thirty-five and feeling ineffective, toiling in a job that was not of his own choosing. More than half the students at Trinity did not come from Christian families. The hope, indeed the mission of the school, was to lead them to the church through the teaching of scripture and exposure to Christian ideals. But in his first three terms, only one student had elected to be baptized. “It may be that the recent anti-Christian movement in China has a deterring effect upon the progress of the Church in general,” Lin Pu-chi explained with great understatement to the CMS office in London.
Lin Pu-chi felt thwarted in his work. Even though Fuzhou had close to a million people, the foreign settlement in Nantai where he lived and worked was small and confining. Try as he might, he could not shake the stigma of being a lackey for foreigners, even though he was the one pushing and prodding missionaries from the inside to make the church more Chinese. He felt trapped and exposed in Nantai. In this current environment, he was like a carp swimming in a barrel. Whenever anti-Christian critics needed a target, he was an easy shot.
He tendered his resignation but was turned down.
Shanghai Brother
In the spring of 1930, Lin Pu-chi had to make an emergency trip to Shanghai with his wife, Ni Guizhen, whose health
needed immediate attention. She suffered from endometritis, an inflammation of the lining of the uterus. Doctors in Fuzhou advised her to have a hysterectomy and suggested she have it done in Shanghai. The medical school of St. John’s ran a top hospital for women and children, St. Elizabeth’s. Ni Guizhen had given birth to five children in the span of seven years, one of whom did not survive past infancy. Her mother had nine children, her mother-in-law ten. But Ni Guizhen’s childbearing days were over.
On May 9, 1930, the couple boarded a coastal steamer and headed north to Shanghai, a city both of them loved from their school days, Lin Pu-chi at St. John’s and Ni Guizhen at the McTyeire School. Back in Shanghai, the couple was able to reconnect with Ni Guizhen’s younger brother, Watchman Nee. From the hospital, Lin Pu-chi had to walk only a few blocks to visit his brother-in-law, who lived on a lane off Hardoon Road in the center of the International Settlement.
The fitful political unrest across the nation made headlines. But a quieter, spiritual hunger was evident among many young Chinese—a yearning that was fed by popular Christians like Watchman Nee, who operated outside the zone of mission churches. Watchman Nee had a personality that drew people in. Tall and handsome with a sonorous voice that was not loud but soothing, he felt established churches, with their foreign ancestry and traditions, were too removed from the experience of most Chinese converts. He sought a simpler form of worship, separate from denominational groups, and his appeal was strong.
This troubled clerics such as Bishop Hind, who warned that such independent evangelists were starting what amounted to new Christian communions. They were fostering disunity, the bishop cautioned. Lin Pu-chi had to agree that there was much about his brother-in-law that was unorthodox. But he privately held an abiding respect for the younger man. Watchman Nee was only twenty-seven and already had written his magnum opus, The Spiritual Man. It was not a textbook but a chronicle of his religious pilgrimage and an attempt to lead Christians to the innermost core of their spiritual being. Like Lin Pu-chi, Watchman Nee was trying to quench man’s eternal thirst for truth. But unlike his Anglican brother-in-law, Watchman Nee was drawing followers by the thousands in Shanghai and beyond. Lin Pu-chi, on the other hand, struggled to find even one student at Trinity to baptize into the Anglican church.