"I Would Not Exchange It ... for a Seat in the President's Cabinet."
Well, I see this is the fiftieth entry since I began this saga nine months ago. And despite my fear of running out of material, we’re still in the 1890s, with many episodes to come.
Last week I attempted to put an image in context, that of Jimmy Graham sallying forth on a trip into the countryside, riding atop a wheelbarrow pushed by a wheelbarrow man. Whatever your residual post-colonial doubts and troubled meditations, I should add that I am in the midst of using a wheelbarrow to haul loads of pea gravel—over a ton, all told—into our backyard. And I’ve been thinking about what a clever and energy saving invention the wheelbarrow is!
But onward. Today we follow Jimmy into a village, and spend a night in a village inn. This will be fun, I promise, and I’ll be going a bit longer than usual.
The villages Jimmy Graham visited were densely woven with family relationships, and these ties extended to neighboring villages. Sometimes that was represented in the village names. One might find multiple villages of Wang or Tong in close proximity to each other. Two Wang villages in close proximity might be named Larger Wang Village and Smaller Wang Village. Or a village might be named after a feature, such as a temple, or for an otherwise forgotten event (e.g., “Market Town of the Crows” or “Tiger Catching Village”).1 Over the centuries, cross-thatched layers of generations had shaped these communities, forging their bonds and bounds, their rivalries and reconciliations. The social horizon of the typical farmer or villager might be defined by a dozen or so closely related towns, and the market town that served as their center of commerce.2
Graham’s evangelistic task was to spread the gospel throughout his assigned region. And it was largely up to him to decide which direction and strategy to take as he traveled through the region. The aim was to establish chapels and then churches over a period of time. But reading the discussions of itinerating evangelists at the 1877 missionary conference in Shanghai, it is clear that most missionaries did not expect to enjoy short-term results. Hudson Taylor of the China Inland Mission viewed it as preparatory work, in which the missionary became known within an area, friendships were made, misunderstanding were overcome. Then, in five, ten, or even twenty years there would be an “ingathering.” For Taylor, wide itineration was not a waste of time.3
A number of the villages Jimmy would visit had walls of rammed earth and brick surrounding them as protection against raiders. None of these towns were laid out in grids. And a city’s walls did not necessarily run in straight or uniform lines, but might bulge and swerve according to the geomancer’s calculations of feng shui.4 Gates in the town walls would not be linked by straight roads, for that would allow evil spirits a straight run through town. The streets of a town or village were the threaded accretions of the centuries. In a network of streets, no two would necessarily be parallel. As Arthur Smith put it, “Sometimes in a village a quarter of a mile long, there may not be a single crossroad enabling a vehicle to get from the front street to the back one, simply because the town grew up in that way.”5
Nor were there maps to guide a stranger through this puzzling network of communities. One traveled from the Lower Wang Village to the Village of Benevolence and Virtue by knowing the terrain, the hamlets, the intersections, and the roadside shrines.6
Midday might find the missionary at a market town, with its walled precincts setting it off as a miniature empire. Within the town gates, the narrow roadway, often barely two or three yards wide, makes its way between tile-scalloped roofs, their broad eaves and deckled edges nearly meeting between one side of the street and the other.
It’s market day, and the vendors of food and household necessities are gathered in a central roadway or market square. Here are assembled farmers and merchants, some of whom started on their several-mile journey to market before the first cock crow. With goods or produce or poultry loaded on a wheelbarrow or suspended from a shoulder pole, they had made their way through the gathering dawn to the market town. A market vendor, representing an established “general store” in a nearby village, features a wide sampling of goods.
By late morning the market is wrapped in a din of haggling, cajoling, gossiping, and laughter, punctuated by clucking poultry, grunting pigs, barking dogs, and buzzing flies. In the heat of summer, with the sun glaring from its zenith, the pungent odor of over-ripe meat and discarded vegetable matter competes with the wafting aroma of garlic and peanut oil sizzling in a vendor’s wok.
This is a farmers market quite innocent of boutique soaps and hand-crafted ciders. Yet an abundance of useful items are for sale. Cooking utensils, wooden buckets, varieties of baskets, and other household goods are all displayed on rush mats. Root vegetables, greens, and seasonal fruits are laid out in neat and colorful order. A press of men and women go about their business, while others loiter and share local news and gossip. Children are gamboling at play or gathered in front of a portable puppet show. A scribe, at his small table, with brush and ink is writing a letter for a customer. There are baskets of grain, beans, and dried fish. A barber’s customer, with his long braided queue, is perched on a stool and having his head shaved to the Manchu requirement. Nearby a blade sharpener plies his whetstone, honing a customer’s scythe. A cobbler repairs shoes. A tinsmith fashions a pot. A broom maker is seated on the ground, practicing his craft beside his wares. Men, carrying loads balanced and suspended from shoulder poles, bob and weave their way through the crowd.
All this and more formed a scene that, to the unaccustomed eye, might teeter on the edge of chaos. But there was an underlying order. And over the years the scene became commonplace and sensible to Jimmy Graham. What’s more, viewed through the eyes of an itinerant evangelist, this village marketplace pulsed with potential connections. It was a perfect venue for making acquaintances, sharing the gospel, and distributing literature. The insatiably curious villagers, particularly children, would gather about to observe this foreign person.
In the early years, however, Jimmy would sometimes encounter violent opposition. (In a later post, we will explore the reasons, and the “conspiracy theories” that lay behind these hostilities.) When speaking to a group, or handing out literature, he made it a practice to stand against a wall, a prudent precaution against an attack or hurled rock coming from behind. This was not paranoia. He had been assaulted and beaten. And when he returned home after these encounters, Sophie would apply hot compresses to his welts and wounds. On at least one occasion a rock hurled at his head had knocked him unconscious.
Writing in 1916, after a warm Chinese welcome on the Graham’s return from furlough in the U.S., Jimmy reflects back on those early days:
I assure you that there was a different kind of welcome handed out to us in those days. There were not half-a-dozen Christians in the immense territory from a point a little above Chinkiang [Zhenjiang] on the Yangtse River away up into Shantung [Shandong], in a population of twenty or twenty-five million people, at low estimate. This was also the only Mission station in all that territory (about 425 x 300 miles), and we were simply holding on here by the skin of our teeth, and the unwilling sufferance of a very hostile people. One could not appear on the streets without being reviled and often stoned, could travel for weeks at a time without meeting a single Christian or a person who knew anything about Christianity; not a school or chapel or hospital in the whole territory. We were misunderstood, hated, reviled, threatened, and a good, sound beating was not an entirely unknown experience.
For the traveling evangelist, a noon meal could be had at a food stand or a small restaurant, where a bowl of savory noodles and tea could be had for a few copper coins. There were health hazards, to be sure. And extra precautions were taken, for the restaurateur’s bowl or cup was likely cleaned with a dash of water and a dirty rag.7 But for Graham this is no midday break of “personal time.” The tall white man, dressed in Chinese fashion, attracts attention. And as he leans his angular form over cup and bowl, the conversations continue.
Evenings are spent at a village inn. These were typically rough and ready affairs, more hostelry than hotel. I’ve imagined some of them to be like the mountain huts I stayed in over half a century ago in Japan. But in a Chinese style. A courtyard houses the travelers’ wheelbarrows, carts, and beasts of burden. Dogs, chickens, ducks, and a pig or two wander about at will. Flies abound.
Outside a north China inn.
The traveler’s room affords no comforts we would recognize, even on those rare occasions when he lands the best room, the one reserved for traveling magistrates. No bath, no amenities, no real privacy. Isabella Bird, the doughty travel writer who sojourned solo for hundreds of miles through China in the late nineteenth century, described one of these inns:
The floor was a damp and irregular one of mud, partly over a cesspool, and with a strong tendency to puddles. On the other side of the outer boarding was the pigsty, which was well-occupied, judging from the many voices, bass and treble. There were two rough bedsteads, on which were mats covered with old straw, on which coolies lay down wadded quilts, and sleep four or more on a bed. It is needless to say that these beds are literally swarming with vermin of the worst sorts.
The walls were black and slimy with the dirt and damp of many years; the paper with which the rafters had once been covered was hanging in tatters, and when the candle was lit, “slaters,” cockroaches, and other abominable things crawled on the walls and dropped from the rafters.8
This, as Bird describes it, was one of the best in her travel of four or five months to come. And the peeping eyes through cracks and freshly dug holes in the wattle walls were a regular nuisance. For a semblance of privacy, she carried curtains to tack up on the walls.
But for Graham’s purposes, the inn affords yet more opportunities for conversation.9 News that a white-skinned, large-nosed, blue-eyed foreigner is spending the night in the village inn promises an evening’s entertainment not to be missed. The word spreads: “He wears our clothes and speaks our language . . . after a fashion . . . Let’s go and see this strange sight.” So into the inn they file and crowd about this curious human specimen from over the horizon and—so it is rumored—beyond the sea.
It is now dinner time, and Jimmy sends his hired wheelbarrow man off to buy some fresh bread. An inn would often have a dining room where guests, seated at plank tables, would hunch over their bowls of noodles or rice served from an oversized pot.10 Tonight Jimmy is not partaking of the inn’s fare, so he unpacks his portable alcohol burner. Then he scrambles some eggs in a frying pan, and boils some water in a large cup for cocoa. Often one from the crowd, who has traveled about, acts as a ringside commentator on the foreigner’s activities, explaining what each item is. Most of these villagers have never ventured more than a day or two’s walking distance from home. And the interpreter offers colorful sidebars of misinformation. Jimmy is amused. But no matter.
Inevitably, a youngster tries nipping just a wee taste of cocoa from the cup. But Graham is watchful, and with a deft but gentle hand turns the dirty finger aside. Reprimands are voiced from the group. One item of curiosity is a can of condensed milk, something perhaps not seen in Jiangsu Province north of the Yangtze. They wish to know what the white stuff is. “It’s milk,” Graham replies. And a murmur ripples through the group. What an extraordinary thing! For they do not drink milk. Cow’s milk is for calves. It turns their stomachs to think a human would drink it. And then to put it in a metal container so it can be transported afar? This boggles the imagination. But while meditating on this curiosity, the crowd continues to watch in a respectful quiet, occasionally punctuated with comments. They do not mean to be impertinent, and Graham, wanting to hold their attention as long as he can, remarks on things as he proceeds. The itinerant evangelist never misses an opportunity to hold an interested gathering, to make new friends, and to extend his social network.
With dinner completed and pot, plate, and cup cleaned up, Graham continues the conversation with his new friends. Why, they are curious to know, is a person of such strange features and customs traveling through this countryside and spending the night in their village? What is his honorable business. What is he selling? What does he want? When the opportunity arises, Graham shifts the conversation toward the distinction between body and soul, animal and human, the human predicament, the need for salvation, the hope of heaven, and the fear of hell. They know of hell, that it is eighteen stories deep, and ever hotter downward as one proceeds. But how does one escape this end? How will they avoid it in the afterlife? And so the gospel unfolds. The missionary pulls out some tracts and Gospel portions that he offers at a modest price, or in some cases distributes freely.11
As darkness descends, the soft glow of lamplight cues an opening medley of snoring from various corners of the inn. Another day of gospel conversations has drawn to a close. And Graham, with his last visitors melting away and his bedding spread on a platform of boards or on his own cot, prepares for bed. Taking due precautions against the inn’s resident vermin, he contemplates the day’s events. Then, lying down and committing himself to the Heavenly Father, he prays for individuals he has met that day, and drifts off to sleep.
Meanwhile the rats, mice, bed bugs, and other emboldened citizens of wall and rafter celebrate their nightly High Carnival, parading and feasting on the scraps and crumbs of travelers’ tables, and patches of exposed human flesh. Joseph Stillwell preferred sleeping on his cot in the inn’s courtyard over sleeping on an inn’s kang.12 He found the company of the barnyard menagerie preferable to the resident bed bugs.13
The philosopher Bertrand Russell, on his extended trip to China in 1920, spoke of a night in a Chinese hotel that was “not altogether pleasant. Armies of bugs walked across the bed all through the night.”14 And Russell was not staying in a remote and humble village inn. He tells us that he had turned down the option of a China Inland Mission guest house, because they had—politely, I’m sure—stipulated that he and his younger female friend, Dora Black, sleep in separate rooms. (Well, a philosopher should know that ideas have consequences!)
The next morning Graham is awakened by crowing cocks, grunting pigs, and the bustle of early-rising travelers. Today he will not be staying on in this village. So he eats some breakfast, packs his things, and with wheelbarrow loaded, starts off. There are many more villages to visit, more conversations to be had along the way.
This was Jimmy’s primary work (though he did much else as well) for his first two or three decades in China. Looking back in 1920, he declares this work to be his “first love.” The mode of travel would change from time to time. Sometimes by boat, at times by donkey wagon, later by bicycle or motorcycle. In the 1920s and 1930s his son, who returned to China as a missionary, favored a Harley Davidson with sidecar.
But we catch the spirit of Jimmy Graham as he reflected on it in April 1921. In a two-page letter to churches back home, he concludes in his understated tone:
I have been writing this under some drawbacks; I am on an itinerant trip. All day we have been out on a large lake, twenty by forty miles, fighting against a heavy head wind. All this afternoon, the men have been rowing hard to make a harbor before dark. The boat is a little cockle shell of a thing and is being tossed about like a chip—a word in your ear—I shall be glad and feel much easier when we cast anchor inside the breakwater which I see a half mile off to our starboard. This itinerant work brings quite a few thrills along with it, but it all comes in a day’s work. I would not exchange it, after 30-odd years’ trial, for a seat in the President’s Cabinet.15
That “30-odd years’ trial” of itinerant work was an entirely different missionary life from those Western missionaries who lived and worked in the major treaty ports of China, whether in educational or medical or church work. The Grahams were in “up-country” work, and it put Jimmy and Sophie in close contact with a level of Chinese society that even many urban Chinese did not experience. For this broad and abundantly populated swath of China, viewed from the cosmopolitan heights of Shanghai or Beijing or Nanjing, was the province of China’s unwashed millions, the “old one-hundred names.” Here on the plains that stretched north and south, life was buffeted by hardship, flood, famine, banditry, and assorted and brutal twists of fate. For the urban Chinese—and Shanghai in particular—these people of northern Jiangsu Province were ignorant, poor, and dirty, a faceless but renewable resource of menial labor and food production.
Scott Tong, who searched and found his ancestral home in this very area that was traversed by Jimmy Graham, offers a view from the twenty-first century: “If this forlorn part of northern Jiangsu ever had a heyday, I don’t know when it was. Across China, people from the area known as Subei are looked down on, and have historically occupied low rungs of society.” Quoting a mainland-born friend of his, “No one has any reason to go there.”16
Just how expendable were these people of the Subei? In June of 1938 Chiang Kai-shek ordered the breaking of the dikes that held back the waters of the mighty Yellow River, which snaked across the region to the north. In one day, with one stroke, and no warning, he cut loose a force of nature—ancient and potent in its defense against invaders—to temporarily thwart the advancing Japanese forces. And as the waters of the Yellow River surged and roared across the agricultural plains, they ruined farmlands, engulfed villages, swept away the lives and livelihoods of as many as 800,000 Chinese, and reclaimed an old river course that emptied into the ocean some 300 miles away from its previous mouth. In his diary, Chiang Kai-shek records no remorse.17
Mostly illiterate, often cruelly taxed, many pressed into ineradicable debt, subject to disease and famine, preyed on by the powerful, and hobbled by superstition, the rural population took what fate and fortune delivered. Like a person seated by a flowing stream, their back to the upstream current, they snatched whatever good fortune happened to float past in the current of time. None but a rare few would ever feel empowered to face upstream, into that current, and shape a better future.18
Working with these people, bringing the gospel to these communities, is the labor Jimmy Graham would not have traded “for a seat in the President’s Cabinet.” But it was just his kind of experience of grassroots China that might have critically informed U.S. presidential cabinets and their policies toward China in the 1930s and 1940s.
See Arthur H. Smith, Village Life in China: A Study in Sociology (Oliphant, Anderson & Ferrier, n.d.), 30-34, for numerous examples.
Albert Feuerwerker, “Economic Trends, 1912-49,” The Cambridge History of China 12.1: 31.
J. Hudson Taylor, “Itineration Far and Near as an Evangelizing Agency” in Records of the General Conference of the Protestant Missionaries of China Held at Shanghai, May 10-24, 1877 (Shanghai: Presbyterian Mission Press, 1878), 101-107.
Smith, Village Life, 20-21.
Barbara W. Tuchman, Stillwell and the American Experience in China, 1911-45 (New York: Macmillan, 1985), 76. See Smith, Village Life, 21.
Smith, Village Life, 30-34
Joseph Stillwell humorously recounts a cook who “cleans by wiping with a dark object like a piece of garage waste” and “wipes a pair of chopsticks on his trousers.” “The foreigner prefers to clean his own bowl with boiling water.” Tuchman, Stillwell and the American Experience, 76.
Isabella Bird, The Yangtze Valley and Beyond (Hong Kong: Earnshaw Books, 2008 [1899]), 171.
Much of what follows regarding a typical night at an inn is based on an unfinished account Jimmy Graham wrote in his later years.
Tuchman, Stillwell and the American Experience, 75.
Whether or not to offer literature free of charge was a much discussed topic among missionaries. Some were convinced that what people paid for, they valued. And so payment, however modest, for Scripture portions or tracts was the best policy, though always allowing for exceptions.
A raised sleeping platform made of bricks or adobe, a kang was large enough to accommodate several people, or an entire family. Built into its base was a fire chamber with flues that allowed it to be warmed in the winter.
Tuchman, Stillwell and the American Experience, 76.
Bertrand Russell, The Autobiography of Bertrand Russell (Atlantic Press Monthly, 1967), 359.
This is one of my favorite passages from his letters.
Scott Tong, A Village with My Name (University of Chicago Press, 2017), 8; Emily Honig, Creating Chinese Ethnicity: Subei People in Shanghai, 1850-1980 (Yale University Press, 1992).
Jay Taylor, The Generalissimo: Chiang Kai-shek and the Struggle for Modern China (Belknap, 2011), 155.
The image of a man facing downstream, into the past, with the future upstream and behind, may be found in Graham Peck, Two Kinds of Time, with a new introduction by Robert A. Kapp (University of Washington Press, 2008 [1950]), 3.