Shanghai Faithful

by Jennifer Lin

  “B?” Jim asked incredulously. “I got everything right. Why did I get a B?”

  “You’re my son,” Lin Pu-chi replied. “I couldn’t give you an A because everyone would think it was favoritism.”

  Lin Pu-chi set a high bar, expecting from his children what he demanded of himself. Martha and Paul consistently delivered. But for Jim and Tim, earning top grades did not come easily. One semester, Jim proudly presented his father with his report card that had a smattering of hard-earned As. His father reacted with a tepid, “Oh.” In one syllable, he conveyed his disappointment, a sting that never went away.

  Family provided pleasure. The children looked forward to seeing their uncles on their mother’s side; Watchman Nee and his younger brother George often came over for supper. Dinnertime came alive with conversation. Watchman Nee loved to drive and had access to a Fiat sedan. “Why don’t we call your uncles?” Ni Guizhen might tell her children on a sunny Saturday. When they arrived, the boys would squeal, “Take us for a ride!” Two people would sit up front with Watchman Nee, and everyone else would cram into the back. The boys hung out the windows as Watchman Nee motored up and down North Sichuan Road. As a treat for Martha, Watchman Nee once took her and her mother—minus the boys—on a special sightseeing trip to Hangzhou, the capital of neighboring Zhejiang Province, set on the idyllic West Lake.

  A quiet moment for Ni Guizhen at a park in Shanghai in the 1930s. Courtesy of Lin Family Collection.

  Despite the differences in their church lives, Lin Pu-chi enjoyed seeing his younger brother-in-law. Watchman Nee, almost six feet tall with an open face and toothy smile, had a magnetic personality—the opposite of the older, intimidating Lin Pu-chi. Over steaming plates of food, the men talked of everything but religion, at least in front of the children. But when Watchman Nee openly groused about the paternalistic way missionaries treated local Christians, he privately had the sympathetic ear of his brother-in-law. Missionaries, Watchman Nee once complained, treat Chinese Christians like they were “just a kind of little toy terrier to be taken up and set down without their opinion being consulted.” Lin Pu-chi did not take such an extreme view but understood full well the younger man’s impatience and frustration.

  Lin Pu-chi, who had spent two formative years in the United States, enjoyed listening to his brother-in-law talk about his world travels and adventures. In 1933, Watchman Nee had circled the globe, traveling to London by way of Singapore before sailing to New York and crossing Canada by rail to Vancouver. An evangelical Christian group known as the Plymouth Brethren had extended the invitation to him to visit them in various cities. They wanted to meet the man whose vast biblical knowledge and flair for speaking were generating attention and excitement in China.

  Watchman Nee once regaled the family with stories about a motor trek through the snowy mountains of southwestern China. Watchman Nee had a friend, a fellow Christian and wealthy businessman who went by the name Shepherd Ma, who owned a Ford. In the spring of 1934, the pair loaded the backseat of the car with cans of gasoline and boxes of gospel pamphlets. With Shepherd Ma doing most of the driving, they took off from a port city on the Yangtze River in Hunan and headed south to the capital of Changsha before crossing Guizhou Province and reaching elevations as high as six thousand feet in Yunnan. Whenever they stopped, Watchman Nee stood up in the car and spoke to crowds. They were twentieth-century versions of the early missionaries, motivated by an intense need to evangelize, but instead of being carried in sedan chairs by porters, they traversed rough roads from behind the wheel of a black sedan. (A few months later, Mao Zedong and thousands of Red Army troops embarked on their legendary Long March through the western and northern parts of China to evade Nationalist troops.)

  After he came back from that trip, Watchman Nee’s life took a major turn. He was going to marry his childhood friend, Charity Chang. The news thrilled Ni Guizhen. The women also had been friends in Fuzhou, but Charity moved to Shanghai when she was still young. She went on to study biology in Beijing at Yanjing University, an elite missionary school, and returned to Shanghai, where she taught at an SMC school. The marriage announcement was as much about love as the willpower of a headstrong mother, in this case Watchman Nee’s. Lin Heping was anxious to see her thirty-one-year-old son betrothed and, after some initial hesitation about the attractive and educated Charity, agreed to the match. Not everyone reacted well to the idea. Charity’s aunt thought the poor preacher beneath her accomplished niece and publicly said so. Some of Watchman Nee’s followers, conversely, thought Charity too worldly for such a pious man. Lin Pu-chi tried to mediate, assuring all sides that the young couple should have a chance at happiness. But his mother-in-law forced the issue. In October 1934, as Watchman Nee concluded a series of religious talks in Hangzhou, Lin Heping surprised him: he was getting married right then and there.

  On October 19, Watchman Nee and Charity exchanged vows before hundreds of guests, including a beaming Ni Guizhen. Her friend was now family.

  In 1934, the population of Shanghai was swelling, and the congregation of St. Peter’s grew with it. Members wanted to open a new branch on the western edge of the city and took advantage of an offer from a Chinese Christian headmistress to use her school’s assembly hall on weekends for free. Lin Pu-chi was asked to lead the worship while his wife, Ni Guizhen, was recruited to play the piano for services.

  Lin Heping surrounded by two of her daughters and two daughters-in-law. Ni Guizhen stands top left, and her childhood friend and the wife of Watchman Nee, Charity, stands next to her. Courtesy of Lin Family Collection.

  The family’s Sunday commute thus changed from a tolerable two-mile ride to St. Peter’s to a grueling hour-long journey to the far western suburbs of the International Settlement. It prompted Lin Pu-chi to act on an idea that had been brewing for some time. The atmosphere in Hongkou was becoming worse as tension between Japan and China intensified. All-out war seemed inevitable. Japan was making more demands for territory in the northeast, in effect hacking off one province after another. Lin Pu-chi felt it was time to move. He found a terraced house on a quiet lane off Jiaozhou Road that was closer to St. Peter’s as well as the western chapel. The building was erected before 1900 and was not as modern as the Wing On home, but its location was more convenient. And it was far from the Japanese garrison.

  In 1935, the family packed its belongings and headed across Suzhou Creek. Ni Guizhen was enthusiastic: she’d live across the street from her brother and his new wife, her friend Charity.

  Hardoon Road

  Watchman Nee and Charity had a soft spot for the youngest Lin son, who was cute and precocious, having skipped several grades in primary school. The couple had an open-door policy for their nephew, who was allowed to visit whenever he desired. Their house was down a lane on the other side of Jiaozhou Road. Young Paul enjoyed his uncle’s vast collection of books and American magazines. He would curl up in his uncle’s library, flipping through issues of Life and Reader’s Digest as well as the occasional rare find like a Ford Motor Company magazine with an article about his uncle’s car trip across southwestern China.

  The layout of Shanghai in 1937, including points of interest for the Lin family. Courtesy of Sterling Chen.

  Ni Guizhen saw Charity often, and it was only natural for her occasionally to accompany her sister-in-law and brother to religious gatherings at the Christian assembly they attended on Hardoon Road. Outsiders called their group the Little Flock, a moniker they detested. It came from the name of a hymnal Watchman Nee had published, Xiaoqun Shige, or Little Flock Hymns, which included a collection of songs he had written or translated from English. They disliked the Little Flock label because it made them sound like they were part of a denomination, similar to calling someone an Anglican or Methodist.

  That was the last thing they wanted. The popularity of Watchman Nee had as much to do with how he worshipped as what he taught fro
m the scriptures. The Shanghai Christian Assembly had no ties to missions, no affiliation with Protestant groups. They did not attend a church in the traditional sense but shared fellowship in a “local church.” Their meeting place had no pews, no stained-glass windows, no cross on the roof. There was no formal liturgy; the only customs they adopted were traditions directly from the Bible, such as baptism by immersion and the breaking of bread. Most significantly, they were not led by clerics. Members called each other “brother” and “sister” and rejected the stepladder hierarchy of deacons, priests, and bishops that characterized other churches. This, they felt, was a more pure form of worship, as close as modern Christians could come to the ways of the early followers of Christ, as exemplified by the original missionary, Saint Paul.

  Theirs was a truly homegrown movement, free of the history and foreign baggage of establishment missions. This appealed to many Chinese whose swelling sense of national pride and purpose fostered a desire to distance themselves from institutions with a foreign taint. They yearned for guidance and hope amid the chaos in China, marked by not only warfare between China and Japan but also civil war between the Nationalists and Communists and economic hardship from the Great Depression. Splendor and squalor lived side by side in Shanghai. Thousands existed hand to mouth in overcrowded shantytowns, unable to find work and too frightened to venture beyond the stability of Shanghai.

  Watchman Nee offered the assurance of salvation at a time when people needed an escape from the misery all around them. He made people think about how they related to God at the core of their being, their spirit—not just in their rational mind. He took this message beyond Shanghai to neighboring cities such as Hangzhou and Nanjing; north to Beijing and Shandong Province; south throughout Fujian; and west to the ports of Wuhan and Chong-qing. Worshippers wrote down his talks and sermons and gathered them into books that were not only distributed among Christians in China but also translated for believers around the world.

  The focal point of his activity was the assembly hall off Hardoon Road in the heart of the International Settlement. In 1927, Watchman Nee took over three adjacent houses and combined the ground-floor space to create one open room. The buildings were old frame structures with pillars inside and squeaky floors. On Sunday morning at 9:30 a.m., a crowd would gather in the main meeting room, sitting on little stools packed one next to the other. When space ran out, people stood at open double doors or windows or put their stools in the lane, listening to the service via a loudspeaker. In the main room, women sat on one side of the room, men on the other. They were a mixed crowd, doctors and teachers mingling with laborers and rickshaw drivers.

  What they heard was not bombast. Watchman Nee’s speaking style was gentle. There was no pulpit, and he made those around him feel that he was listening and not judging. Standing before a crowd, dressed in the dark blue cotton gown of a traditional Chinese man, he prayed slowly, letting the words out deliberately, and he distilled his thoughts in language that anyone could understand. Never referring to notes, he relied on stories or anecdotes to convey his message, prefacing his remarks with “I remember a true story” or “One day I was walking down the streets of Nanjing when . . .”

  Watchman Nee photographed in Shanghai with an unidentified foreigner in the 1930s. The photograph is part of a private collection of Angus Kinnear, the biographer of Watchman Nee. Courtesy of Angus Kinnear family collection.

  The Bible, he told them, was God’s way of directly communicating to them. He explained that it was sixty-six books, divided into the Old and New Testaments and written by no fewer than thirty people in a span of more than sixteen hundred years. The writers were lawyers and fishermen, princes and shepherds, men of different backgrounds, languages, nationalities, and periods. He preached that there was a time in history when simply holding the Bible could mean death. “Everyone who possessed it would be inhumanly persecuted and later killed or burned,” Watchman Nee said. The book, he assured the gathering, was simple and easy. “It tells the origin of the universe, the earth, the plants, human beings, how they established their kingdoms, and how they will eventually end.”

  “This,” he would say, holding up a Bible, “is all.”

  From her first visit to Hardoon Road with her sister-in-law, Ni Guizhen felt a strong connection. For years she had listened to her husband speaking from the pulpit and following word for word the Book of Common Prayer for private and public devotions. But in this simple hall, with its low ceiling and humble stools, people seemed more spontaneous, more engaged.

  She went back another Sunday instead of joining her husband and children at St. Peter’s. It wasn’t long afterward that one Sunday became two, then three, four, five . . . until she realized that she preferred the fellowship at Hardoon Road over the services at St. Peter’s. And so she told her husband.

  “What do you mean?” he exploded. “You can’t be serious!” He didn’t try to keep his voice down for the sake of the children.

  “It’s what I want,” she replied.

  “I’m a pastor at St. Peter’s. You are my wife. What will people think?”

  Ni Guizhen held her ground. Here was someone whose life dream as a young woman was thwarted by an imperious mother. She was not about to relent to an equally forceful husband who framed her choice as a matter of spousal obedience.

  “You have a duty,” Lin Pu-chi insisted.

  Her response cut him to the quick. “Your sermons have no life to them,” she said. “You have knowledge, but no passion, no spirit. I want to stay at Hardoon Road.”

  Lin Pu-chi moved out of their bedroom on the second floor and slept with Jim in his room on the third floor.

  More than his pride was wounded. He could not let the matter rest. He had his position with the church to consider. Not only was he an assistant pastor at a prominent parish in Shanghai, but the Anglican community also had made him editor of the Chinese Churchman, a vital Chinese-language magazine that circulated among clerics and church members throughout the country.

  If his wife stopped playing piano on Sundays, people would notice. If she disappeared entirely, their whispers would gather force.

  This was more than a family squabble. The popularity of independent preachers was a matter of concern for all Protestant churches. Watchman Nee? He was a “sheep stealer,” clergymen decried, who was poaching their flocks. And he was just one of many. Others, such as Wang Mingdao in Beijing and John Sung with his “preaching bands” in almost ninety cities, were gaining followers at the expense of establishment churches. The Anglican and Episcopal Churches in China—or known jointly as the Chung Hua Sheng Kung Hui—was so worried about the trend that when its general synod convened in Fuzhou in April 1937, members cited the trend as an obstacle to church unity. The Little Flock and Watchman Nee, the general synod later reported, “induce people to leave their own churches and be immersed by some of their people as a sure way of salvation. They preach against organized churches and an official ministry.”

  Lin Pu-chi felt conspicuous when the topic came up. They were talking about his relatives; they were talking about his wife. And she was now sometimes taking their daughter, Martha, with her to Hardoon Road, though the three boys dutifully followed their father to St. Peter’s.

  One Sunday, the eldest son, Jim, humored his mother by going with her to Hardoon Road. When he arrived, he was shocked. People were praying, but spontaneously. They were not reciting devotions from memory or reading from the Book of Common Prayer. His mother leaned toward him and whispered, “Let the Holy Spirit descend on you.”

  At the end of the meeting, some of the congregation began clapping with excitement, jumping, laughing, and then, to Jim’s astonishment, began spouting indecipherable words. Jim looked around and joined in, babbling gibberish. He wasn’t sure what was happening, so he made a game of it. He found the service more entertaining than inspiring.

  The following Sun
day, Jim returned to St. Peter’s, sitting in the last pew with Tim and Paul, listening to the familiar cadence of his father’s voice from the pulpit.

  Marco Polo Bridge

  In July 1937, Watchman Nee left for Manila at the invitation of an old school friend from Fuzhou who had moved there. His former classmate wanted him to address Little Flock members in the Philippines. With her husband traveling, Charity accepted an invitation from the Lin family to join them on a holiday to Yantai, a popular resort on the Bohai Sea, north of Qingdao in Shandong Province. They had made arrangements to rent rooms through a friend of Watchman Nee.

  Much of Shanghai cleared out in August, when temperatures climbed so high that St. Peter’s cut back hours and canceled choir practice. Missionary friends, as was their custom, took off for Lushan, a cool mountain retreat a day’s travel from Shanghai.

  The US Navy used the port of Yantai as a base of operation. Shortly before the family arrived, part of the US Asiatic Fleet—four American destroyers and a flagship—left for the Soviet naval base in Vladivostok. The two nations wanted to make a show of naval power to discourage Japan from further incursions in China. Tensions had recently escalated: on July 7, Japanese and Chinese forces exchanged gunfire at the Marco Polo Bridge on the outskirts of Beijing.

  The vacation house was a block from the beach. The Lin boys enjoyed swimming in the calm water and climbing atop a rock jetty to spy on American sailors splashing in a cove—sometimes without bathing suits and in the company of giggling women. Their mother, meanwhile, stayed indoors with Charity. Neither dared to put on a bathing suit. Women in the Little Flock dressed modestly in long, black skirts and would never wear anything remotely revealing. Instead, Ni Guizhen had a houseboy carry buckets of seawater into the bathtub in order to soak privately and gain what she thought were its therapeutic benefits.