Shanghai Faithful

by Jennifer Lin

  As they stepped outside for a morning walk, Paul seemed tired and subdued. He had stayed up late talking to Uncle George, the younger brother of their mother. Unlike Paul’s siblings, George had decided there was much that needed to be said about the past, and he didn’t hold back. Paul could not process everything he had just learned. His siblings could sense it but said nothing.

  The extended family strolled down a small street where sidewalk vendors were selling breakfast food. Paul perked up when he spied a man placing long strips of dough in a wok of hot oil. “Youtiao!” Paul enthused to his daughters. “I used to buy these on my way to school.” He bought a bundle of the greasy, Chinese-style crullers and passed them out. As the English-speaking foreigner in the sky-blue pants went from one vendor to the next, buying fried pancakes with green onions, hunks of rice cake, and bottles of cold soy milk, people stopped and stared, unaccustomed to Americans in their midst. Martha and Tim hung back a few steps, relieved to see their youngest sibling enjoying himself.

  After the walking breakfast, followed by another sit-down breakfast at the house, Paul had business to tend to. First things first: he needed to register at the local station of the Public Security Bureau. Though relations between the United States and China had improved, allowing for family reunions like theirs, the authorities still insisted on knowing the comings and goings of all foreigners.

  “What is the purpose of your visit?” an officer questioned Paul, inspecting his passport and looking for the visa.

  “To see my family,” Paul replied in rusty Chinese.

  “How long will you be here?”

  “Two weeks,” Paul informed them.

  “Where will you go?”

  “Nanjing, Suzhou, Hangzhou, and Beijing.”

  The first full day was jammed with sightseeing, starting with a stroll along the fabled Bund and then a visit to a Buddhist temple; the Children’s Palace for a puppet show; and a stop at the vast People’s Park, built on the grounds of the former Shanghai Racecourse. Topping off the day was a feast at the Xin Ya Restaurant on Nanjing Road. At a big round table, Uncle George sat next to Paul and toasted him with warm beer. Guests ate their way through a procession of dishes: cold meats, mushrooms, shrimp with peas, eggs, squab, squid, melon soup, chicken, fish, duck, noodles, another soup, and dessert of sticky rice filled with black-bean paste and floating in almond milk.

  Satiated, exhausted, and happy, everyone slept soundly that night.

  When Terri and Julia were young girls growing up in the 1950s, in the aftermath of the “Resist America, Aid Korea” conflict (known to Americans as the Korean War), they learned songs with lyrics such as “Defeat the vicious wolves of American imperialism.”

  For most of their lives, the United States was China’s enemy, so having American uncles was a problem for the family. After all, their grandfather, Lin Pu-chi, had been falsely accused of being part of a US spy ring. Everyone knew that his letters to and from his sons were monitored by authorities. Paul assumed as much, which was why he never told his father that in the wake of the Korean War, he had enlisted in the medical corps of the US Army. The American military needed to replenish its stateside ranks of doctors, and in 1955, Paul, who had become a US citizen, signed up for two years. His father and siblings would never know this. If public security officers in Shanghai had known that letters going to Paul Lin were actually forwarded to Captain Paul Lin at the Madigan Army Hospital in Tacoma, Washington, it could have made a difficult situation catastrophic.

  But since the death of Mao and rise of Deng Xiaoping, China had made a sharp pivot. Yesterday’s enemies were today’s new friends. At House 19 in Lane 170, the family wanted all their neighbors to see their Philadelphia relatives, these so-called American wolves. There had been times during the Cultural Revolution when some of these same people used the family’s American ties as a reason to condemn them. But now, having relatives from the United States was more a point of pride than a source of shame.

  From the time he walked into the house, Paul was the focus of attention. He seemed to be enjoying the reunion, but every now and then he became quiet, withdrawn, pulled by an undertow into dark thoughts about the past few years. Paul had been eager to visit Shanghai and step back into the past, to sleep in his old home, to spend time with his sister and brother, to meet their children and spouses, and to say hello to old friends. But the trip also gave him a chance to say good-bye to two people who were no longer there—his father and mother.

  A soot-belching steam engine pulled into the station in Suzhou, a smaller city west of Shanghai known for its elegant villas, walled gardens, canals, and beautiful women. Paul and his daughters, plus Martha and Tim, arrived in the late morning. The air was hot and dry, a break from steamy Shanghai. If foreigners were a rare sight in Shanghai, they were alien creatures in smaller Suzhou. China had been sealed off from Western travelers for so long that the only impression most people had of foreigners was what they saw on television. Even that exposure was limited since most families did not own TV sets. After a stop at the Suzhou Friendship Store, a foreigners-only souvenir and antiques shop, Paul and his daughters drew a crowd of gawkers that was so large it spilled from the sidewalk into the street, stopping traffic.

  The group wasted no time heading to its destination. Climbing into two big black taxicabs, they took a road out of town that cut through rice paddies and fields planted with rows of beans, tomatoes, and cabbages. The drivers stopped at a small bridge over a canal. They could go no farther. Everyone got out and crossed the bridge to a cluster of one-story brick houses that were part of the Huangshan production team. Martha and Tim led the way. Children peered from doorways, spied the foreigners, and darted back inside. A petite, gray-haired farmer with a wooden rake over her shoulder smiled when she saw the entourage of visitors but ran away screaming after one of Paul’s daughters snapped a photograph of her.

  “She thinks your camera will steal her soul,” explained Victor, who was traveling with the group and helping with translation.

  They followed a path up a hill overgrown with weeds. On either side were rows of gravestones, packed one next to another. As Paul climbed higher under low pines, he reached down to pick flowers among the weeds. His daughters followed his lead, snapping off stems to form sprays of tiny white flowers, purple clover, and small yellow blossoms.

  Turning off the trail, they stopped at a two-foot gray stone marker. All the weeds around it had been cleared, and the big chiseled characters on the tombstone were freshly painted in red and black. This was the grave of Ni Guizhen and Lin Pu-chi. On the right side were the dates of their birth and death; on the opposite side were the names of their children.

  Paul paused before the gravestone, his three daughters standing behind him. He knelt and put the bouquet of wildflowers on the rectangular cement base. He bowed his head, showing no emotion. Any bitterness or anguish he had felt about what Uncle George had told him only days earlier remained hidden.

  Then slowly, he began to recite a prayer in English, his daughters quickly joining him: “Our Father, who art in heaven . . .”

  Helpless to undo the past, he moved on.

  “May they rest in peace,” Paul murmured softly before turning and heading down the hillside.

  VI

  Revival

  • 21 •

  Faith

  Fuzhou, 2015

  I settled into my first-class window seat on a bullet train from Shanghai to Fuzhou, which, according to the timetable, would cover 346 miles in exactly 5 hours and 1 minute. The electronic scroll above the door to our compartment ticked off our accelerating speed in kilometers per hour.

  280 . . . 281 . . . 282 . . .

  I used the calculator on my cell phone to do the conversion; we were close to hitting our cruising speed of 185 miles per hour. The light was dimming in the hill country of northwestern Fujian, where groves of bamboo st
ood like giant feather dusters. The mountains were getting tighter, the tunnels more frequent. At one point, I counted five in quick succession, the sound in the car alternating from a vibrating hum to a loud whoosh as the train shot from one tunnel to the next.

  It was close to midnight when I checked into my hotel on the north shore of the Min River. I had come to Fuzhou to retrace the steps of my grandfather Lin Pu-chi and his brother-in-law Watchman Nee. Both men began their religious journeys in Fuzhou before moving to Shanghai, where their worlds intersected and sometimes collided. Lin Pu-chi worked within the denominational church, while Watchman Nee distanced himself from foreign missions and cultivated a popular independent religious movement. When they died in the early 1970s—Lin Pu-chi at home in Shanghai, Watchman Nee in a labor camp in Anhui—each had reason to despair. Religion of any sort had no place in this society, this new China. Protestant churches were shut down during the Cultural Revolution, while followers of Watchman Nee, branded a notorious counterrevolutionary, dared not utter his name.

  I remember when China announced in 1979 that it would reopen churches. We were visiting our relatives at the time and had just spent the day visiting a temple with a five-story gold Buddha sitting in lotus position. Victor, my cousin’s husband, who spoke fluent English, told us that he had heard the news on the radio. He predicted that it would have little effect on people. Maybe some old people would return to churches, Victor explained, but his generation had little interest in religion because of their indoctrination during the Cultural Revolution. In a journal entry for June 22, 1979, I wrote: “After what happened to my grandparents, it’s a wonder that anyone in the family has any religious beliefs left at all.”

  We were both monumentally wrong. Article 36 of the Chinese constitution, adopted in 1982, granted “freedom of religious belief,” and the reopening of churches sparked a revival with so much momentum that China could soon have the largest population of Christians in the world. Fenggang Yang, a sociologist at Purdue University who arrived at that estimate by extrapolating from current trends in China, thinks that could happen by 2025.

  Chairman Mao extolled the masses to “serve the people.” His successor, Deng Xiaoping, encouraged a generation to get rich, and they did it with gusto. But without Mao or Deng to glorify, many Chinese have felt a spiritual hollowness that they increasingly fill with religion of all kinds, not just Christianity.

  And how many Christians are there in China?

  It is a simple question that is impossible to answer. China’s churches are all over the place, literally and figuratively. The government requires churches, temples, and mosques to register with the State Administration for Religious Affairs, which oversees China’s five recognized religions: Protestantism, Catholicism, Buddhism, Daoism, and Islam. There are no denominational distinctions among Protestants, no Anglican versus Presbyterian churches; since the 1950s, everyone must be part of the Three-Self Patriotic Movement (TSPM) and its sister organization, the China Christian Council, which operates seminaries and prints Bibles.

  It would seem like a straightforward exercise to tally the population of Christians in China by adding up all the people belonging to churches under the auspices of the TSPM and its Catholic counterpart. But that’s where things get complicated. A majority of Christians choose to practice their religion outside the sphere of the government. They operate off the grid in “house churches.” These informal gatherings can take place in apartments, auditoriums, offices, or even outdoors and attract anywhere from a handful of people to thousands. Some of these groups worship in a way that would be similar to the Catholic Mass or a Protestant service. Others operate on the fringe and bear the imprimatur of charismatic individuals with idiosyncratic beliefs. What all share, however, is an aversion to government oversight.

  The official population of Protestants and Catholics in China is twenty-nine million, according to the “Blue Book of Religions” report published in 2010 by the state-supported Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. But the real number may be more than double that figure. The Pew Research Center in Washington, DC, estimates that China’s Christian population is closer to sixty-seven million, or 5 percent of the country’s population. Researchers examined public opinion surveys, church membership reports, and Chinese government statistics. In a 2011 report on global Christianity, Pew estimates that Chinese Catholics number about nine million and Protestants an additional fifty-eight million, of whom about thirty-five million are “independents” with unregistered churches.

  By comparison, eighty-eight million people belong to the Chinese Communist Party.

  When I arrived in Fuzhou in the summer of 2015, I had the city of Wenzhou on my mind, and this made me anxious. If you drew a straight line north from Fuzhou along the coast of the East China Sea, it would be 160 miles to Wenzhou. Both cities have vibrant Christian communities; the number of Protestants and Catholics in Wenzhou is so large that the city is called the “Jerusalem of the East.” But in 2014, tension increased between the provincial government of Zhejiang, where Wenzhou is located, and its churches, even ones registered with the government. Provincial authorities had launched a campaign to remove large crosses from churches. The official reason: they were “illegal structures” that violated zoning rules. The unofficial reason, according to religious and political observers of China, was unease among local Communist Party leaders with the strong public profile of churches in cities such as Wenzhou.

  The cross campaign made headlines around the world when the provincial government demolished the five-million-dollar Sanjiang Church in April 2014. The church loomed large by the side of a highway in a new economic zone. Members refused to remove their giant cross on a 180-foot spire. They signed petitions and protested. Authorities responded by razing the entire building, claiming it occupied five times more space than authorized.

  From then on, the news in Wenzhou only got worse. Five months later, viewers of CNN saw a late-night clash, captured by amateur video and security cameras, between riot police swinging truncheons at members of a different church, who had barricaded themselves in a failed attempt to stop the removal of the cross on their church. In an eighteen-month span, provincial authorities had demolished or removed crosses from more than a thousand churches in Zhejiang, of which many were officially registered congregations. Social media lit up with images of protests. Christians made crosses from wood and painted them red or wore T-shirts with crosses. Catholic priests, led by the bishop of the Wenzhou Diocese, openly criticized the cross removals as “an evil act.”

  The overriding question: Where was this coming from? Was it just the action of an overzealous provincial party boss who didn’t like seeing so many red crosses rising from rooftops in a new economic zone? Or was it coming from higher up? Earlier in the year, President Xi Jinping had urged religious groups of all stripes to pledge their loyalty to the state and had warned against foreign influence. If this was the start of a campaign to rein in churches, the people most at risk were Christians operating on the edge of the system. In Fuzhou, this group included many of the people I hoped to soon meet.

  Ancestors

  My daughter, Cory, joined me for the first leg of my trip to Fuzhou. She had not been back to China since we lived in Beijing from 1996 to 1999, when she was a little girl and I was covering Asia as a correspondent for the Philadelphia Inquirer and Knight-Ridder Newspapers. Now she was twenty-two, and we were seeing Fuzhou with an elderly cousin. His father was my grandfather’s younger brother, whose eagerness to marry forced Lin Pu-chi to cut short his studies in Philadelphia in 1920. In Chinese tradition, we started our tour with a pilgrimage to the gravesite of the patriarch, Dr. Lin Dao’an, my great-grandfather whom missionaries had trained as a doctor. The day was oppressively hot, alternating between showers and full-on sun. At Gao Gai Mountain on the edge of town, we followed a meandering stone path under pines. When we could climb no farther, we looked into the thicket of weeds for the
grave and carefully began sidestepping down a steep, muddy embankment.

  The stone sarcophagus of Dr. Lin stood amid knee-high wild grass. It was shaped like a cross and had pitched sides inscribed with red characters. The writing recorded when he was born and when he died and mentioned his three sons, including Lin Pu-chi, but none of his three daughters. Next to the sarcophagus was a small headstone with three names: these were Lin children who never made it to adulthood. We said a prayer and placed bouquets of burgundy, yellow, and white chrysanthemums at the base of Dr. Lin’s grave.

  I was apprehensive about our next stop, Christ Church Cathedral, where in 1927 the Anglican Church appointed a thirty-three-year-old Lin Pu-chi as the congregation’s first dean in charge. A year earlier, I had heard from contacts in Fuzhou that the city intended to tear down the old church to make way for development. We parked in the lot of the old YMCA on the waterfront, which had been converted into a nightlife complex with restaurants and bars. Cory and I followed our cousin down a lane, past shoddy brick homes and cinderblock apartments. I was relieved to spy the church’s distinctive twin towers above the rooftops. The cathedral had survived the wrecking ball, but I could hear the crunch of metal on brick and the beep of construction vehicles moving in reverse. As it happened, everything but the church was being demolished. The metal arm of a crane took big bites out of buildings, while front loaders removed bricks and concrete and leveled the ground.