Shanghai Faithful

by Jennifer Lin

  Ni Guizhen’s surgery went well, and a month later the couple returned to Fuzhou. Lin Pu-chi went back to work, but a change had come over him. He knew he was at a crossroad in his life. He could stay at Trinity and try to battle the unrelenting anti-Christian forces aligned against him. Or he could leave Fuzhou and maybe return to Shanghai in search of more meaningful work.

  At the end of the fall term in 1930, he submitted his resignation. This time, Bishop Hind accepted.

  Before Lin Pu-chi departed Fuzhou, the entire family posed for this 1931 portrait. Rev. Lin, wearing his clerical collar, stands behind his mother, who is seated in the second row. The author’s father, Paul Lin, stands in the second row, the second child from the right. Courtesy of Lin Family Collection.

  Lin Pu-chi told the bishop that he would seek new work outside of Fujian. Temporarily, his friends at FCU had found him an assignment as an interpreter. A fact-finding team of Christian laymen from America was visiting China to appraise the work and efficacy of missionaries at the request of philanthropist John D. Rockefeller Jr. The anti-Christian hostility was raising deep questions among American churches about the value and direction of missionaries not only in China but also around the world. The group would visit FCU, and Lin Pu-chi would serve as a translator during their stay. After that, he was unsure of his family’s next move. He told Bishop Hind that he eventually hoped to find a position on the faculty of St. John’s.

  “In many ways I am sorry that we were not able to keep him in the diocese,” Bishop Hind wrote to the CMS office. “But I am not sure that he was wrong in thinking that it would be better for him to leave us for awhile. He has had to encounter many difficulties and opposition in his work and is consequently rather unpopular with certain people. He may not always have acted in the wisest possible way, but he has been in some very tight corners.”

  III

  A House Divided

  • 9 •

  Watchman Nee

  Shanghai, 1932

  The rector rushed from room to room. At any hour, St. Peter’s Church in the International Settlement of Shanghai could start to receive an onslaught of people fleeing for their lives. The clergyman directed volunteers as they carried bedding into classrooms and cleaned out a janitor’s closet for use as a makeshift washroom. Men rearranged pews in the sanctuary and made room for more people in the parish house. They carried crates of vegetables and burlap sacks of rice into the kitchen. Women sorted through a pile of donated coats, sweaters, pants, hats, scarves, and other winter clothing.

  It was January 28, 1932. Pastor Yu Ensi, who had been at St. Peter’s for only four months, knew he had to act quickly and decisively. The clock was ticking: at 6:00 p.m., Japan would “take necessary steps” if the Chinese mayor of Shanghai did not apologize for anti-Japanese provocations. St. Peter’s was a safe haven, neutral territory inside the International Settlement. But the rest of the sprawling city was vulnerable to attack by Japanese marines. To the north of St. Peter’s, in Hongkou Park on the opposite side of Suzhou Creek, more than two thousand Japanese soldiers waited for orders. Their presence already had sown panic. Chinese men, pulling wheelbarrows and rickshaws piled with belongings and topped with children, pleaded to get through checkpoints into the International Settlement before the deadline.

  The city had been bracing itself for four months. It was back on September 18 that relations between China and Japan ruptured with an explosion in northeastern China, known as Manchuria to outsiders. A bomb damaged a Japanese-owned railway, prompting Japan to invade the territory and establish the puppet state of Manchukuo. Since the so-called Mukden Incident, anti-Japanese sentiment had spread throughout China, whose citizens boycotted Japanese products. On January 18, a Chinese mob in Shanghai attacked five Japanese monks, killing one. A Japanese gang retaliated by burning down a Chinese factory and stabbing a constable to death.

  Japan then issued its ultimatum. It demanded an official apology for the attack on the monks; punishment for the assailants; compensation for the victims; and the suppression of anti-Japanese organizations and activities. In case anyone thought this was a bluff, the Japanese navy positioned a dozen gunboats and an aircraft carrier on the Huangpu River. The flagship Ataka tied up at the dock next to the Japanese consulate. British and American troops assumed positions to defend the International Settlement.

  With preparations at St. Peter’s complete, Pastor Yu put his daughter on a train for Hangzhou, where she could wait out the situation with family there. His wife stayed at the church while Yu returned to their home in the Chinese Zhabei District. He bolted the door and waited.

  That afternoon at 1:50 p.m., radios crackled with a news flash: the mayor of Shanghai had accepted the demands. That night, Pastor Yu and most of the city went to bed thinking a crisis had been averted.

  At 11:10 p.m., under a moonless sky, an elite unit of Japanese marines bowed to the east, toward their emperor in Tokyo, and yelled “Banzai!” A Japanese admiral had been tipped off that Chinese troops still were massed in the Zhabei area. Columns of Japanese soldiers, on foot and in trucks, advanced through deserted streets, firing flares to light the way. Searchlights mounted on armored cars picked out Chinese snipers on rooftops or in alleys. Residents behind closed doors would hear the crack of a sniper’s rifle followed by the drumming of machine-gun fire. On the Huangpu, Japanese seaplanes on the deck of the aircraft carrier roared to life and rose into the night sky. The planes wheeled toward carefully selected targets: factories, cotton mills, certain houses, shops, cinemas, a railway station—even the sprawling Commercial Press with its inventory of six hundred thousand books. The bombing began.

  Pastor Yu’s house rocked from the explosions. He crept out his front door but ducked back inside as gunshots ricocheted off the walls.

  Urban warfare dragged on in Zhabei, street by street, for weeks. From the eerie safety of the International Settlement, expatriates sipped martinis at rooftop restaurants and lifted binoculars to get a closer look at the fires destroying Chinese neighborhoods after bombardments from Japanese planes. By mid-February, Japanese forces had essentially taken over the city. Down at street level, Japanese soldiers at checkpoints pointed bayonets at the chests of Chinese refugees, who were searched for weapons before being allowed to pass into the city’s foreign zones.

  Five weeks after the fighting began, Pastor Yu was able to make his way back to St. Peter’s. When he arrived on March 5, he found 226 refugees—45 men, 119 women, and 62 children—crammed inside the church compound. At night, the sanctuary became a dormitory, end to end with bedrolls. Most of the refugees were from sister churches around Shanghai, mostly Anglican as well as some Presbyterian and Baptist congregations. They came from the other side of Suzhou Creek and from nearby cities that had been drawn into the conflict—such as Wusong, fifteen miles downstream, where Japanese gunships had fired at close range into a Chinese fort.

  Pastor Yu organized volunteers. One committee handled sanitation; another helped with the children. A medical team inoculated everyone against the spread of diseases such as cholera. Pregnant refugees overwhelmed St. Elizabeth’s Hospital next door. Triple the usual number of newborns filled the nursery; when cribs ran out, nurses placed bookcases flat on the floor and placed babies inside the shelf space.

  China’s appeals to the League of Nations led to a ceasefire on May 5. The members of St. Peter’s raised $1,369.69 to help families return to their homes or find new places to live.

  Pastor Yu returned to the spiritual needs of his congregation, organizing Sunday services, weekday classes and meetings, and prayer services in five locations. The church’s strong social mission also demanded his time and attention. An assistant priest was clearly needed.

  Pastor Yu had someone in mind: a cleric from Fuzhou who shared their belief that the future of the church depended on shifting responsibility from foreign missionaries to Chinese Christians. The rec
tor knew him from Kaifeng, where he had replaced Yu as headmaster of a small Anglican school. The pastor sent a message: Would this priest be interested in joining them in Shanghai?

  The Lin boys fidgeted and fussed in their seats on the train to the city. Their parents passed out hard-boiled eggs to keep them quiet. The boys were eight, seven, and five. Their eleven-year-old sister did everything in her power to ignore them, keeping her eyes fixed on the expanse of flat farmland flashing past her window.

  Kaifeng had not been a good fit for Lin Pu-chi, and he had welcomed the invitation to join St. Peter’s. When he left Fuzhou in 1931, he had expected to join the faculty of his alma mater, St. John’s University in Shanghai. But with the world economy collapsing, the position never materialized. The post at St. Andrew’s was the best he could do. Remote, flat, and dusty, the ancient city of Kaifeng—the country’s capital a thousand years earlier—was strafed by Gobi Desert winds in the winter. Once, when the youngest of the boys stepped outside to urinate, a frigid gust was so strong that it blew him off the back porch.

  Lin Pu-chi’s ambitions were too large for Kaifeng. In Fuzhou, he held important positions with the largest Anglican diocese; in Kaifeng, he ran a school for one of the smallest. Confident and exacting, he was critical of the work of those around him, which made him unpopular with coworkers.

  But St. Peter’s in Shanghai—now that was exceptional, like few other churches in China. The American Episcopal Church built the church in 1898, but the parish became independent of the foreign mission in 1914. This absence of missionary ties appealed to Lin Pu-chi. Since his days as a young priest in Fuzhou, he had advocated for a thoroughly Chinese or Sinified church. Here was one of the few parishes actually doing it. It was self-governing and self-supporting and engaged in its own evangelizing. Less well known was that some of its members had communist leanings, which they kept private. The previous rector, the Reverend Dong Jianwu, had secretly joined the Chinese Communist Party, and during the war with Japan, he hid confidential party documents under the altar of St. Peter’s as well as under floorboards in the choir’s changing room and parish house.

  Lin Pu-chi would draw no salary from St. Peter’s. Instead, like Pastor Yu, he found work as an assistant headmaster for a public school for Chinese boys operated by the Shanghai Municipal Council (SMC), the governing body of the International Settlement. Pastor Yu had a similar job at another SMC secondary school. The secular position paid Lin Pu-chi more than twice what he could earn at a mission school.

  In September, the Lin family moved into a new home in Wing On Terrace, a development of identical brick houses packed tightly on a curving longtang, or lane, only as wide as a car. The Hong Kong millionaires who owned the giant Wing On Department Store on Nanjing Road in the International Settlement built the homes and rented out many of the units to their employees. The neighborhood was drab and utilitarian, consisting of four parallel lanes of about two hundred houses with electricity and running water but no flush toilets. Because Lin Pu-chi earned enough money through his school job, the family could afford to hire a cook and an ayi, or “housekeeper.”

  Only four months after the ceasefire with the Japanese, Lin Pu-chi had moved his family into the heart of Little Tokyo. Around the corner from their home loomed the Japanese garrison, a modern, concrete building with a courtyard where from dawn to dusk passersby heard menacing shouts and grunts coming from soldiers running drills. Japan, like Britain and the United States, kept troops stationed in Shanghai for the defense of the settlement. The Lin boys tittered to see Japanese officers walking naked from their barracks to a bathhouse across the street. But it made their father uneasy to live next door to the masterminds of Yi Erba, or One-Two-Eight, as the January 28 attack had become known.

  A few blocks west of the family’s home, the Zhabei District lay in ruins. Pastor Yu had lost everything—his house, furniture, and clothing. Lin Pu-chi’s indignation was further piqued every day when he went to work at the Public School for Chinese Boys on Haskell Road in Hongkou. A wall topped with barbed wire and bolstered with sandbags stretched across the far end of the street, a glaring line of demarcation between the unscathed Japanese enclave and the destroyed Chinese side.

  The Lin brothers in Shanghai around 1937. Left to right, Paul, Jim, and Tim. Courtesy of Lin Family Collection.

  Lin Pu-chi had been at St. Peter’s for only a month when he decided to use the Sunday pulpit to rouse the congregation. It was October 9, the eve of National Day in 1932. With his wife and children sitting in a pew before him, he delivered a sermon on “National Day in a Time of National Crisis.” This was not a sermon about turning the other cheek. It was more a call to action, backed by a belief that God was on their side.

  This crisis, he said, was cause for heartache. “We, all without exception citizens of the Republic of China, take Japan’s invasion of three provinces in the Northeast as an occasion of great shame,” Lin Pu-chi told the crowd of three hundred. “We must inure ourselves for future trials, and we swear that one day we will wipe out this humiliation.”

  Stay optimistic and positive, Lin Pu-chi encouraged in a strong, firm voice. “Many believe that Manchuria has already been completely forfeited to Japan. I believe this is a major misconception. If we four hundred million Chinese do not allow Manchuria to be lost, then who can take it? If we maintain a spirit that we will ‘stage a comeback,’ how can we say that Manchuria will not be again part of China? We Christians, on this National Day with nothing to celebrate, still have one thing worthy of celebration. We believe God is just and is the advocate of justice.”

  It was his gift to them, a reminder of the righteousness of God.

  Headmaster Lin

  The Lin children felt they had arrived in another country the first time the family strolled along Shanghai’s Bund, the fabled promenade on the western bank of the Huangpu River. They tilted their heads back to see the tops of the grand granite buildings. They paused at the Hongkong and Shanghai Bank, where a pair of giant brass lions stood guard. For good luck, the boys rubbed the paws of the lions, which gleamed like gold from so many visitors doing the same. In later years, their parents sometimes rewarded them for good behavior with lunch on Nanjing Road. It could be a bowl of borscht at a white-tablecloth Russian restaurant or a hot dog and frosty bottle of Coca-Cola at an American café.

  The Lin family had joined three million people in Shanghai, the sixth-largest city in the world, behind London, New York, Tokyo, Berlin, and Chicago. Despite the city’s international profile, Shanghailanders, as foreigners were called, accounted for a mere seventy thousand residents. The Bund gave first-time visitors the impression that they had arrived at a cohesive, Western-style city. In fact, Shanghai was a patchwork of many disparate districts, with the fetid, black waters of Suzhou Creek serving as a key dividing line. Lin Pu-chi conducted services at St. Peter’s on the south side of the tributary but lived and worked on the north side.

  It was not easy to be a son of Lin Pu-chi. Martha, the eldest child and only daughter, had it better than her siblings. Her father didn’t dote on her, but from the perspective of the boys, he treated her more gently. She was quiet to begin with and preferred to stay indoors practicing the used piano her parents bought for the Wing On house. Studious and obedient, she caused her parents no worry. Of the sons, the youngest, Paul, was sickly and unable to keep up with Jim and Tim, who were only a year apart. The two elder sons spent their days racing scooters in the lane or chasing each other on wooden stilts. For Christmas one year, each received the same gift: one roller skate. Jim got the left one, Tim the right one. They were going to have to learn to share, their father told them.

  If Lin Pu-chi was stern at home, he gave his sons a double dose of discipline at school. The Public School for Chinese Boys was the largest of five secondary schools operated by the SMC for the benefit of local boys. With seven hundred students, it was far bigger than any of the schools L
in Pu-chi ran in Fuzhou or Kaifeng. Students studied Chinese classics as well as spoken English, with most heading to jobs in commerce at foreign banks or trading firms. Classes took field trips to the theater and had special assemblies, such as a film screening about the snow-capped American territory of Alaska, presented by the Eastman Kodak Company. Lin Pu-chi helped to start a student magazine and, ever the orator, coached students for the annual Speech Day competition at the end of the academic year. One year, the event drew six hundred VIP guests to the Ritz Theatre in Hongkou and ended with his wife’s handing out prizes onstage to the winners.

  At school, Lin Pu-chi shared a spacious office with his English counterpart, Mr. J. Moffat. At lunchtime, when most students went home to eat, the Lin boys had to dine with their father in his office. A school cook prepared them a light meal of soup, noodles, or dumplings. Afterward, everyone took a fifteen-minute nap. On a table next to his desk, Lin Pu-chi kept a stack of papers and tests from his classes. Once, Jim could not help himself and took a peek at his own exam for biology class, which his father taught. He had studied more for that test than any other and sailed through the questions. He was crestfallen to see in his father’s handwriting a disappointing “B.”