by Jennifer Lin
All of the Ni brothers were part of CBC: Watchman Nee was chairman of the board; George was the chemist in chief; a third brother handled distribution with about a dozen salesmen; and a fourth oversaw purchasing. George was a constant presence at the factory, but Watchman Nee spent more time with customers, shuttling between Shanghai and Chongqing with his wife, Charity.
If it seemed odd for an Anglican priest to be working for a drug company, it was even more unlikely for Watchman Nee to be immersed in a life of commerce. He saw it as a means to an end: in addition to relatives, CBC employed many Christians from the Hardoon Road church, providing them with critical support during tough economic times. But the more the company took him away from his religious work, the more his close associates from the Little Flock disapproved of this unexpected detour into capitalism.
At the beginning in 1940, the CBC work was only part-time, taking up an hour or so a day and leaving Watchman Nee with time to continue his biblical teaching and expansion of the Little Flock. But the demands of the company soon consumed his attention and time. Some elders from the Hardoon Road assembly objected to the duality of his life, viewing his new role as a waste of time and effort. They couldn’t understand how he could spend his days hosting business lunches or negotiating deals when he could be doing religious work. In their eyes, his reputation was tarnished; ultimately, they told him to stop coming to Hardoon Road to preach. He had been ostracized from the very group he started. So severe was their reproach that gossip began: the church’s inner circle must have known something the rest of the worshippers did not. Rumors spread of everything from marital infidelity to the misuse of funds and collaborating with the Japanese.
Dejected, the forty-year-old preacher was nevertheless unwilling to walk away from the workers who depended on him. One day, sitting with the factory manager, a fellow Christian from Fuzhou, Watchman Nee commented, “I envy you. You are free to do what you like in the factory, and if then you go and say a few words at the meeting, they will acclaim you a very zealous brother. No one will question you. But me? Twenty-four hours a day, they need to know exactly how I spend my time. I am a marked man.”
Church activity at Hardoon Road stopped, partly in response to the confusion and controversy surrounding Watchman Nee and partly in reaction to pressure from the Japanese military police, which tried to regulate and control the activities of all churches, not just the Little Flock. Rather than comply, the Hardoon Road group fragmented, with members meeting on their own in small groups, usually in someone’s home. At the Lin house, Ni Guizhen often gathered with her sister-in-law Charity and three or four other women.
Recovery
After seven years of war came the reassuring sight high above Shanghai of a squadron of big, loud American B-29s en route to take out Japanese military targets. The high-altitude plane with its remote-control machine guns was the most advanced bomber of its time, dubbed the “Superfortress” by the US Army Air Corps. Air attacks of Japanese installations around Shanghai began in late 1944 and ended by August 1945 after two B-29s dropped atomic bombs on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki within three days of each other. In Nanjing on September 9, 1945, Japanese commanders surrendered to China.
Throngs of well-wishers on the Bund cheered the arrival of the US Seventh Fleet. More than two hundred vessels, including American cargo vessels with names like Liberty and Victory, anchored stern to bow for miles along the Huangpu River. The presiding bishop for the American Episcopal Church sent a congratulatory telegram to his Chinese counterparts: american church rejoices with you for victory day. grateful for your steadfastness during war.
But there would be no respite for China. The end of the Sino-Japanese War had exposed battle lines between the Nationalist and Communist forces. The People’s Liberation Army wasted no time filling the military vacuum of power left by retreating Japanese forces in northeastern China. No sooner had the war against Japan ended than civil war began.
Shanghai remained an island of stability under Nationalist control, allowing residents to carry on with their lives. Lin Pu-chi left the CBC factory and found work with a new national office for the Anglican and Episcopal Church in China, the Sheng Kung Hui. He became an assistant to his friend and mentor Y. Y. Tsu, now Bishop Tsu, who had been posted in Free China during the war, by the end even serving as a chaplain for the US military. The Chinese Churchman magazine resumed publication with Lin Pu-chi restored as editor. In one of his first articles, he told readers about the desperation of starving Chinese clerics in outlying areas. He reported receiving two letters, one from a priest and another from a village preacher. The priest barely earned enough to cover meals for his family, let alone keep socks and shoes on the feet of his children. “All my six children wear rags and look like beggars,” the man wrote.
He quoted the preacher, who said families in his impoverished village were ravaged by bubonic plague, cholera, and malaria. A drought in the autumn was followed by a typhoon, destroying crops. “The hard life is unimaginable,” the preacher despaired in his letter.
Lin Pu-chi spelled out what readers already painfully knew, that runaway inflation had made the Chinese currency meaningless. In the years since 1936, the cost of living for Shanghai workers had increased 5,200 times. “Suppose the pre-War salary of one church staffer was 100 yuan,” he wrote. “He should be paid 500,000 yuan now. . . . No wonder they are unable to get enough food and clothing and their children unable to go to school.”
The only remedy, he argued, would be more donations from those who could give as well as an inevitable plea for help from foreign missions. “Some people are against raising funds from Missions, thinking that would impede the independence of the Chinese Church. This is stupid.” Rather than watch colleagues starve to death and debating whether this would hurt the drive for self-sufficiency, he said the Chinese church needed to ask for help. Foreign missions, for their part, responded to the crisis, with British and Canadian Anglicans plus American Episcopalians transferring emergency funds to help the Sheng Kung Hui.
In 1946, the Lin family had much to celebrate. The eldest daughter, Martha, continued her father’s legacy by graduating from his alma mater, St. John’s University. But it was her mother’s dream that she fulfilled. When Ni Guizhen was a young woman, she had had to give up her studies in order to enter an arranged marriage, forever putting aside her desire to become a physician. Now her only daughter was Dr. Lin. The war years had been difficult for students of the medical school, which followed a British model of conferring a degree after five years of academic study and clinical training. The school had to relocate several times because of fighting and lost most of its foreign faculty to evacuation or internment. But it never ceased training students, who included Martha’s youngest brother, Paul. Martha went on to become a resident in obstetrics and gynecology, while Paul’s vaunted ambition was to go to the United States to study neurosurgery. He dreamed of returning to China as only the second brain surgeon in a country of 550 million (the first being a doctor at Peking Union Medical College Hospital). Paul even taught himself how to play the violin in order to improve his manual dexterity.
St. John’s medical school had a sterling reputation in both China and the United States, thanks to Dr. Josiah McCracken, a rawboned Kansan and a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania, who joined St. John’s in 1914. McCracken, a college football star who won a silver medal in the shot put and a bronze in the hammer throw at the 1900 Olympic Games in Paris, forged close ties financially and academically between St. John’s and the Christian Association of his alma mater. Most of the professors were Penn men, and the Shanghai medical school’s official title, which it bore on its crest, was changed to the Pennsylvania Medical School.
Both Paul and Martha attended the medical school of St. John’s University. Paul used to wear a school blazer with a gold-threaded crest that read, “Pennsylvania Medical School St. John’s University
,” which acknowledged the school’s relationship to the University of Pennsylvania. Courtesy of Lin Family Collection.
Lin Pu-chi had wanted Martha to continue her schooling in the United States as he had. Through connections at St. John’s, she could have taken her residency at the Cincinnati Children’s Hospital. But the thought of leaving China was too much for timid Martha, who chose a more predictable path. She decided to marry. Her betrothed, John Sun, was a gentle, quiet businessman. Even though John was a graduate of Shanghai University, he was not the scholar Lin Pu-chi would have preferred. Lin Pu-chi disregarded the Sun family’s substantial wealth, which included a newly purchased Spanish-style villa with a spacious yard and driveway big enough for two sedans, a Dodge as well as a Pontiac. It mattered more to him that John did not have initials after his name signifying at least a master’s degree. His future son-in-law managed his family’s sizable real estate holdings as well as an embroidery store on Nanjing Road. Lace-making was a skill imported to China by missionaries, and the Sun family’s shop, with its front window brimming with delicate silk slips and embroidered tablecloths, was one of the finest on Nanjing Road. American sailors on leave in Shanghai thought nothing of plopping down fifty dollars for an embroidered silk robe for a girlfriend back home.
The matchmaker in Martha’s case was her mother. Ni Guizhen knew the Sun family from the Hardoon Road assembly and made the introduction. Before moving to their new house in the western suburbs, the Sun family had lived next door to the church meeting place and became active members of the Little Flock. The patriarch of the Sun family also had another connection to Watchman Nee: he was a substantial investor in his CBC pharmaceutical business and a managing partner of the company.
On the second Saturday in July 1947, twenty-six-year-old Martha was married in the Anglican tradition at the Church of Our Savior by her father’s friend, Bishop Roberts. She wore a demure white gown and a veil that was longer than she was tall. Her wavy hair was loose but teased with a bouffant in front. Around her neck was a gold heart pendant and in her hands an overflowing bouquet of white lilies and feathery ferns. After the ceremony, guests celebrated the marriage over cake and tea in the church auditorium.
Prodigal Son
Once married, Martha became a more regular member of the Hardoon Road assembly. By 1947, the group had begun to recover from the disruptive years of war. Witness Lee, a longtime associate of Watchman Nee from Shandong Province, helped him to heal the rift with members of the Little Flock. A change meanwhile had come over Watchman Nee. In 1948, he detached himself from the day-to-day responsibility of running the pharmaceutical business and went so far as to dedicate his profits from the business to supporting a revival of his church work. He left Shanghai for Fuzhou with the idea of using his hometown as a new base. At first, he repaired and restored his family’s vacant home on Customs Lane to use as a training center but expanded from there, buying up cottages in the mountaintop getaway of Guling. His plan was to transform the former missionary hill station into a gathering place for both fellowship and religious retreats. A half century ago, missionaries had built sturdy stone houses in the mountains to escape Fuzhou’s brutal summer heat. But by 1948, they were happy to sell the houses to Watchman Nee, aware that the People’s Liberation Army was winning the civil war.
Witness Lee convinced Watchman Nee to return to Shanghai to face the members of the Hardoon Road assembly. He had been absent for six years. Before a room full of skeptics and critics as well as loyal followers, Watchman Nee acknowledged his failings. He compared his foray into business as being like a desperate widow who remarries in order to support many children—only to discover “unexpectedly all her children deserted her after her second marriage.” He broke down, and those in the meeting who had harbored doubts and questions accepted his contrition.
In the summer of 1948, Watchman held a training conference in Gu-ling, drawing about seventy followers. From June to the end of September, the Little Flock met in the lush, cool hill station for days of fellowship and learning. Ni Guizhen arrived with her husband in mid-July. Each morning began with Watchman Nee’s delivery of a biblical message, followed in the afternoon with testimonies from participants and evening hours dedicated to discussion about how to reach newcomers. Watchman Nee, relaxed and reconnected, would walk among the others, his hands clasped behind his back as he invited and answered questions.
The revival of the Little Flock in Shanghai was so robust that the group began to make plans to build a larger meeting place to replace the cramped Hardoon Road site. More than 1,500 people regularly tried to squeeze into a meeting place big enough for only a few hundred. People sat on stairways or stood in the lane, straining to listen to the service. Soon they identified a large property at 145 Nanyang Road with a big house and vast garden, and they purchased it for 210 gold bars, equal to $105,000 in US currency. For the first of three installments, church members raised half the funds, with Watchman Nee personally contributing thirty-seven gold bars. Construction began in the garden for a one-story brick and wood hall with 2,400 seats.
But as the Little Flock was shoring up its foundation in Shanghai, Watchman Nee was well aware of the inevitability of a Communist victory against the weaker, corrupt Nationalist government. In November 1948, he delivered an urgent message to church members: some of them must leave China for Taiwan or Hong Kong to carry on their work. Communist troops, already victorious in northern China, were advancing into the Yangtze Valley with Shanghai within their grasp. One of the people he urged to leave was Witness Lee, who questioned and challenged the decision. “Brother,” Watchman Nee explained, “you must realize that although in this desperate situation we trust in the Lord, it is possible that the enemy will one day wipe us out. If this happens, you will be out of China, and we will still have something left. So you must go.”
• 11 •
Bund to Boardwalk
Shanghai, 1949
The steady clicks of a typewriter broke the morning stillness in the Lin home. In his cramped office behind the kitchen, Lin Pu-chi dated a letter on official church stationery—May 14, 1949—and typed: To Whom It May Concern. He was taking no chances. He had spent months planning how he would get his sons out of China to jobs at hospitals in the United States. He put out unabashed pleas for help, accepted offers of money from friends and family, wrote to church colleagues in Hong Kong and the States, filled out paperwork for passports, and stood in line for a day and night for tickets on a coastal steamer that would leave from the Bund that afternoon. But just in case he forgot something or some link in the chain unexpectedly broke, he hoped this letter would serve as insurance for his sons. And so he wrote: Paul M. Lin and James M. Lin come from a very good Christian family. I can sincerely recommend them to friends and fellow Christians in the United States. Any courtesy and assistance to them will be greatly appreciated.
Lin Pu-chi folded the letter and placed it in an envelope along with a pocket-size booklet containing important names and addresses and a brief description of the family’s religious lineage, as well as this parting advice for his sons, written in Chinese: Go to church. Watch your health. Worship God. Help people. He signed the letter with his looping signature, adding the full breadth and weight of his station as assistant secretary and editor for the Chung Hua Sheng Kung Hui—the Anglican and Episcopal Church in China.
The assuring words and steady signature hid the anxiety that was building inside him. From the time his sons were young, Lin Pu-chi had planned for Jim and Paul to study in America. They didn’t talk about it much; it was understood. He had earned his graduate degrees in the United States, and so would they. But the war was rushing the timetable. Just a week earlier, Paul had finished his medical school classes at St. John’s a full month ahead of schedule. Administrators weren’t wasting any time. Beijing had fallen without a fight in January, with the Nationalist government retreating from the capital of Nanjing in April. With each pa
ssing day, the muffled sound of explosions edged closer to campus. Students of means were making arrangements to flee, while those with Communist allegiances were eager to step out of the shadows. That spring, they had the temerity to press faculty to teach in Chinese instead of English—an affront to St. John’s American roots but a foreshadowing of the inevitable.
Shanghai newspapers were filled with articles predicting how the Nationalist government would rebuff the advancing People’s Liberation Army, the PLA, and hold the city. But no one believed it. There was reason for pessimism. At St. John’s, the faculty families still on campus estimated that Communist troops were no more than eight miles away and advancing from all directions. Word had spread that an airfield near the Longhua Pagoda, which was lined with wing-to-wing planes ready to whisk Nationalist VIPs to safety, was under attack. Just outside the campus gate, the neighborhood of Caojiadu was on war footing. Under the eye of Nationalist soldiers, political prisoners, women as well as men, dug zigzag trenches by roadsides. Villagers, meanwhile, were hawking anything they could for food. They spread their blankets on the ground, displaying trinkets, leather shoes, pottery, towels, and pigskin dowry chests to barter for bags of rice or chickens. Even the boatmen who usually moored their flat-bottom houseboats on Suzhou Creek near campus seemed to sense that the final battle was about to begin. Days earlier, the waterway was so jammed you could get across by skipping from one deck to the next. But even the boatmen had fled. The muddy creek was empty.
To get his sons to the United States, Lin Pu-chi had to raise about $1,000 each, or the equivalent of a year’s salary. He cashed in a life insurance policy and retrieved gold bars, hidden behind a sliding wooden panel in the attic. He put aside his pride to accept $100 from his boss, Bishop Y. Y. Tsu, $100 from Bishop Roberts, and $500 from Watchman Nee.