by Scott Tong
“Battery’s dead.” So I pull out my low-end Android purchased just for this trip. It’s a lousy phone with a lousy camera, but that’s all I have at this point. My dad pops his head out of the car, and I motion for him to wait just a bit more. The girl runs back in five minutes, heaving victoriously, and shows me the snapshots: main entrance, signs, administration building, trees, garden. Perfect. “I ran out of time for the sports field,” she says. I thank her profusely. “Mei shi,” no worries, and she’s gone.
The pictures make clear the old Baldwin School has retained a rare, park-like feel in the middle of a Chinese city. Many of the green, open-space areas in Chinese cities are spots once controlled by foreigners in nineteenth-century neocolonial days. Here, there is still a pavilion with traditional characters—pre-Communist—and an arched stone bridge sloping over a lily pond. Surely this is where female students in Baldwin uniforms sat and studied and wondered what New China might bring. Just before ducking into the cab, I notice a sign on the outside wall of the school, with a quote attributed to Deng Xiaoping. It would have been relevant during my grandmother’s time there as well, perfectly capturing an ambitious China trying to find its place in the world: “Education must face modernity. Face the world. Face the future.”
A hundred years ago, in roughly that same spot, a different sign stood on the wall. In English, it was a Gospel passage from the book of John: “Ye shall know the truth. And the truth shall set you free.”
The woman who put up that verse: the towering school principal at Baldwin, Welthy Honsinger (later Welthy Honsinger Fisher). She would go on to become a lifelong mentor to Mildred Zhao. Their story is, to me, a fascinating collision of two separate stories—of women from opposite corners of the world, unsatisfied with the choices before them.
Honsinger’s life in America began predicable enough. Born in Rome, New York, alongside the Erie Canal, she attended Syracuse University and taught at a local high school. Then she shocked her family, announcing that she was going to teach in China. In 1906, Honsinger attended a missionary recruiting talk at Carnegie Hall and, as she put it, “heard the call.” She quit her job and left behind two things: a promising soprano opera singing career and an aggressive suitor named Tom.
Her family and friends expressed horror. “Why waste your abilities on the dirty heathen?” one coworker asked helpfully. Honsinger’s half sister tried to dissuade her by taking her to New York City’s Chinatown. “Look around,” the half sister gestured with her arm. “These are the people you’ll be living with next year.” But Honsinger sailed. Her timing could not have been worse, to be honest. Anti-Western sentiment had been brewing in China for decades, and in recent years came to a head. In a bloody uprising known as the Boxer Rebellion, rebels targeted foreigners and murdered countless missionaries. In Nanchang, her eventual destination, local children drowned rats they labeled “foreign devils.”
Honsinger arrived at the Baldwin School and proceeded to rankle the American teachers already there. She demanded to live in the same quarters as a Chinese colleague, upsetting the established protocol. But she got her way. In the early days, Honsinger complained about her American colleagues as expat snobs, deriding them as spoiled women living in “Grand Rapids homes” and eating cured meat from Montgomery Ward back home.
I’m sure the veteran teachers at Baldwin viewed Honsinger as idealistic and naive. Give her a little time and China will wear her down. This was exactly the sentiment I got myself upon moving to China. “You cannot be too nice to them,” one Chinese Malaysian expat who worked in the water business warned me during the first week. One father from our kids’ international school observed that I appeared a little new and a little too friendly. “Which is too bad,” he said, shaking his head, “because China turns you into an asshole.” He moved on to his next assignment shortly after.
At the Baldwin School, the locals didn’t take to Honsinger either. One domestic school worker described her feet “as big as boats.” Students complained that Honsinger stank of mutton (she later gave up meat). But over time, she learned a bit of Mandarin and mastered the ice-breaking activity of eating watermelon seeds and spitting out the shells. Honsinger remained determined. In a missionary journal article, she wrote: “Here, little waifs, plucked up from the gutters ere the dogs should devour them, have been sheltered. . . . Here broken-hearted women have found a sympathetic ear. . . . Hobbling cripple girls with tiny feet have come and gone away healthy girls.”
Honsinger may have had honorable intentions, but it must be said that the Chinese never welcomed the American Bible-toters with open arms. It’s impossible to separate the missionary era from the broader semicolonial backdrop that began with China’s defeat to Britain in the Opium War. The 1842 treaty that followed compelled China to open up key port cities that came to be known as “treaty ports.” In came a motley assortment of opportunists: British traders, German brewers, Japanese industrialists, General Motors, Standard Oil, and American soul savers. Ever since the US Civil War and settlement of California, missionary groups had looked further west to expand their influence. Protestants first penetrated mainland China in the 1800s (Catholics started earlier), but their numbers exploded after an 1860 “unequal treaty” that flung open the doors further. Women did most of this work; six out of ten American missionaries serving overseas were female.
In the end, did the foreign missionaries help China? This is a long debate. Two very different historical narratives collide on this point. In the traditional Chinese Communist Party telling of history, these were the years of humiliation at the hands of the foreign devils. A billion people held down. This remains the ideological grand narrative today, that the Chinese spent a century under the thumb of outsiders before standing up and liberating themselves. The Chinese people built today’s China. This underlies the hyper-nationalistic streak the world is seeing now, the new attitude of: we are now due.
An opposite view is that the foreigners delivered modernity. In the lingo, the Western “impact” brought a Chinese “response.” As the argument goes, the benevolent colonialists went over to build hospitals and universities, modern cities and industry. They transformed an agrarian people weighed down by tradition. One can debate this endlessly, but somewhere in the middle is an emerging view: that the key players here are the Chinese people who actually engaged with the foreign barbarians—the students, the reformers, the brokers and middlemen, the Mildred Zhaos. These young Chinese adopted the leading ideas of the time and adapted them to Chinese society.
At the Baldwin School my grandmother and her classmates learned American-style calisthenics. They sang “American the Beautiful,” “John Brown’s Body,” and Handel’s “Hallelujah Chorus,” and on stage they performed A Christmas Carol. English was the language of the classroom, and over time some students took on American names: Sally, Pearl, Grace. On the other hand, she always remained traditionally superstitious. Even though she was a Christian, Mildred Zhao also went to fortune tellers, my mother has told me, “paying people lots of money to write her fortune on a piece of paper.”
In 1919, China exploded in a rage of nationalism. This is the year Mildred would have been a high school sophomore. In faraway Versailles, the talks to conclude World War I set off a collective anger among Chinese worldwide. In their view, the treaty should have returned the German-controlled ports in Shandong province to China, thus rewarding Chinese contributions to the Allies. Instead, negotiators stiffed Beijing and ceded the area to Japan. Riots and protests broke out across key Chinese cities beginning on May 4.
In Nanchang, two hundred students turned out to encourage a boycott of Japanese goods. The events that later became known as the May Fourth Movement were part of a broader collective rant against everything that held China back: foreign villains, traditional Confucian culture, feudalism, the suppression of women. The word thrown around was “new”: New Culture Movement. New Life magazine. The intellectual journals of the day included New Youth, New Tide, New Educa
tion, New Voice of Society, and New Woman.
It must have been a confusing time for Mildred Zhao and her classmates. On one hand, the movement was an appeal to modernize; yet at the same time, foreigners were the enemy. It’s as if the desire was for foreign things but not foreign people. Whose side was she on? In the end, she chose to look outward.
***
In the earliest letter I have from my grandmother, she writes of the violence and death around her. It is 1920, a time when China is a Balkanized mess run by regional warlords. Mildred Zhao has taken a train trip with her teacher Anna Graves to northern China, getting off to visit her parents living in a place called Paotingfu in what is today Hebei province. Graves continues on to Beijing (or Peking) and then Tokyo, where news comes of a mutiny in Paotingfu. Mildred writes that everything is safe:
My dear Miss Graves.
When I got your first letter from Peking, I was very glad to hear that you got to Tientsin and Peking safely.
She switches gears to the mutiny, a rebellion of a few soldiers against the warlord Wu Peifu. No big deal, Mildred writes, “just a short mutiny about a day.” Her family inside the city wall is safe, though residents outside “were plundered by these soldiers. . . . The cholera has been very serious here this summer. Many people have died from it every day.”
The handwritten letter is written in the old-school cursive where your pen does not leave the paper. It is so neat and tidy that today only a software program could replicate Mildred’s practiced uniformity. It is that perfect. Then Mildred moves on to life at the school, mentioning names of her classmates and teachers.
Phoebe will teach kindergarten. Miss Hsia moved to Soochow. Miss Honsinger has returned to China. Miss Baker wants me to translate newspapers into English. I just wrote Audree in France, where my cousin will go to study.
Then she asks her teacher’s advice on studying overseas. Even at the age of seventeen, Mildred is thinking of going abroad.
What do you think about this? Do you agree with this or not?
My parents and cousins give their best regards to you.
Your loving pupil,
Mildred Chao
It was a thrilling time to engage outside ideas and visitors. The American feminist Margaret Sanger went to the mainland to espouse new contraception techniques. Bertrand Russell, the British philosopher, visited and spoke of his work on mathematics and logic. Albert Einstein even stopped by, after finishing his work on relativity theory. “We are very lucky of having heard the playing of the world famous violinist, Miss Parlow, an Englishwoman,” Mildred gushes in another letter. “It makes me crazy about good music.”
Around the same time, another imported idea showed up in Shanghai, one that would affect Mildred greatly. A small group of political radicals met on the top floor of a girls’ school in the city’s French Concession. They formed a new organization they called the Chinese Communist Party. It was 1921.
For Mildred, the wheels would fall off a year later. She enrolled in China’s first women’s college, Ginling Women’s College in Nanjing, a school started in 1915 by five American women educators supported by US mission groups. Today, it stands as one of several foreigner-founded universities still around today (though some exist under new names). Soon after beginning at Ginling, Mildred contracted malaria, forcing her to stop playing piano; then she caught influenza. Soon after, in 1923, she had what she called a mental health “brokedown,” writing that she lost her self-control. “My parents were bitterly distressed on my illness especially, and they spent a great sum of money in the cure of my illness.”
Ginling Women’s College forced her to recover at home, so Mildred moved in with her parents. By then they worked at a silk-spinning plant in Wuhan, near her ancestral village. “I don’t know how I can go on with my college education,” she writes. “Probably I shall never have this hope in my life again.” So Mildred sought help from her American teachers. She asked Anna Graves for career ideas—“do you like me to be a secretary?”—and for money to attend university abroad.
“I do hope that someday I can come to London to study in the School of Economics,” she wrote to Graves, then in England. “I liked England better than I liked America, because England is much older and probably higher in her civilization, although her people are not agreeable enough than the Americans. I really feel very embarrass [sic] to ask your help like this, but I cannot keep it in since I want to go on in my studying very much.”
***
“China Longevity Insurance Company reminds you, the next station is the Nanjing Massacre Memorial Hall,” booms the automated voice on the public bus. My father and I are visiting Nanjing in the summer of 2013, and we are on our way to Ginling Women’s College. My grandmother’s old school has since been absorbed into Nanjing Normal University. An elderly woman rises to exit, shoving my father quickly into her seat before anyone else can claim it. “Sit,” she instructs. “My stop is next.”
It is another leafy campus, in another scorching Chinese furnace city. Not knowing where to start looking, Dad asks a student walking by if she can steer us to the Ginling Women’s College part of the school.
“I am a Ginling student!” she exclaims, explaining that she’s in a graduate program studying English.
“Then we can speak English,” my dad says. “You can practice.”
She looks down, with the pained smile of someone who has just stubbed her toe. No, she is too shy to try out her English on us, so we keep speaking Mandarin. This student is a bit heavyset, with wire-rimmed glasses and hair pulled back in a simple ponytail. She wears jeans and a green long-sleeve T-shirt that reads “VANIIY FAIR.”
The original Ginling Women’s College campus is stunning. It’s a circular drive surrounding a main, classically styled Chinese building that looks straight out of the Ming dynasty. Here’s the odd part: I later look up this building and learn it was designed by an American named Henry Murphy. It is a fascinating tale of cultural mixing from the time.
Murphy, who also designed the Yale-in-China campus in Hunan and Fudan University in Shanghai, described the Ginling style as “adaptive Chinese renaissance.” The walls were built from the new technology known as reinforced concrete. There were modern lighting fixtures inside, as well as the latest indoor plumbing. But outside, it was entirely Chinese looking. Even this Chinese-looking building is a hybrid—a metaphorical Twinkie, as many would deride: Asian yellow on the outside, white on the inside.
***
Chinese cities again exploded with anti-foreigner rage in 1925. Mildred Zhao was teaching Chinese to students at a boarding school in Wuhan when she wrote Anna Graves. “I am afraid we are not allowed to write you about government affairs, otherwise I will tell you a little about China, for she is changing every day. Have you heard about the Shanghai incident of May Thirtieth?”
On May 30 in Shanghai, thousands of students and laborers demonstrated in front of the police station on Nanjing Road. They protested the arrest of six Chinese students venting against foreign imperialism. Some of the chanters screamed, “Kill the foreigners!” Just after ordering the crowd to scatter, a British law enforcement official ordered his Sikh and Chinese officers to shoot. They fired forty-four shots and killed eleven people. Protests erupted across China. Then in Canton (Guangzhou) a month later, British troops fired on demonstrating students, workers, military cadets, children, and Boy Scouts—killing fifty-two. A follow-up strike in Hong Kong lasted more than a year.
The politics that followed proved tragic to Mildred’s family. Two political parties capitalized on the nationalistic sentiment across China. Membership in the newly born Communist Party skyrocketed, and the Nationalist Party of the brief 1911 revolution, the Guomindang, was revitalized as well. The two parties formed a marriage of convenience to take out powerful regional warlords and reunify a strong, new China. In July 1926, the joint forces began what became known as the Northern Expedition. After taking the Hunan city of Changsha, they moved toward Wuhan.
Controlling Wuhan was the ruthless warlord Wu Peifu. He was known for taking commanders who’d lost key positions and publicly beheading them. But Wu’s armies had lost two of the three cities of Wuhan and held only the political capital, Wuchang. Inside the double walls of Wuchang was Mildred Zhao’s family.
The attackers laid siege, cutting off all supplies to force or starve the people out. Newspaper articles suggest Wuchang was entirely blocked off by the ninth day. In one newspaper account, a woman named Liu Tai Ching of Shanghai was visiting Wuchang when the attack began. “I myself saw a family of three killed” by a bomb, Liu said. “Together, blackened and horribly wounded.”
Families rationed their remaining food, watering down rice to make porridge. Three meals became two. One Episcopal church took in five hundred hungry people, and a Catholic hospital treated the malnourished. According to Liu, the price of scarce dry beans and turnips rose fivefold. Every dog was eaten.
Mildred Zhao’s father, my maternal great-grandfather, did not survive. “National troops under the leadership of Chiang Kai Shek came to Hupeh from Kwantung,” Mildred wrote to Anna Graves. “Wuchang was besieged. For forty days we were in a great horror inside the city wall. My father died on the thirty-second day.”
I don’t know exactly how he died, though many succumbed to starvation. One Irish missionary caught inside the walls of Wuchang, surnamed O’Donohugh, provided this description in William Barrett’s book The Red Lacquered Gate: “In this city many thousands have died of starvation. The sights witnessed daily are revolting and deplorable. The helpless and the hopeless, the women with faces wan and haggard, the younger people with hands pressed against their stomachs shouting with hunger, all like walking corpses, moving about, heedless of bombs or bullets. Within the city there is no burial ground and the supply of coffins has long been exhausted. Along the street, corpses lie around any old place.”