STRANGE land! Strange people! Strange customs!
O UR FIRST FEW DAYS in China were spent in the home of a missionary. We soon, however, became located in a home of our own,
How happy we were when we had found it, even though it was located next to a Hindu temple, for European houses were at a premium in this land of the Orient.
Soon we had purchased our simple furnishings and hired a native cook at the wage of ten cents a day, having found that without a servant we would loose caste in the eyes of the Chinese and our ministry among them would thus be hampered.
Next we engaged a Chinese teacher, and both Robert and I studied hours daily, beginning in the tones and the smaller syllables. We were bewildered to discover that one must not only learn to speak but to sing the language in various keys. For instance, the word “sen” pronounced flat or with an upward intonation or in a lower tone would mean different articles entirely!
Imagine the horror of one of our missionaries who thought he had quite mastered the language, when he dismissed 2 meeting and thought he had said, “Let us all go home,” but found out later he had really said, “Let us all go to the devil!” The wrong tonal inflection had caused this horrible error.
Robert and I studied earnestly and diligently, though assured by older missionaries that it took some people as long
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as twenty years to get a good working knowledge of a dialect, and that some hundred different dialects were used throughout China, not one of which could be understood by those using another!
Mr, Semple did not waste an hour of precious time, at all times studying or preaching through an interpreter, distributing Chinese gospel literature or praying for this land which lay under the inky pall of superstition and heathenism.
“Just think,” he would say to me in the evenings, following a full day of service for Christ, “just think, every third baby born in the world is Chinese, One-third of the world’s population is Chinese; every third funeral is that of a Chinese! What a mighty task lies before Christianity and the church of Christ
Again there were times when he would say
“Do you know, darling, I do not believe that I am ever go ing back to America. I believe that when the Master comes, I will rise to meet Him from Chinese soil, my arms laden with yellow pearls won for Him here.”
After the dishes were put away, following the evening meal, Robert would kneel in the dusk of the dining room and pray for China. I, secking a breath of air after the stifling heat of the day, would sit out in the hammock on the piazza with m feet curled up under me for fear of rats that were bold by day and bolder by night! I was not afraid of mice as most women are, but I certainly was wary of those rats. They were almost as large as cats, and raced through the house without regard to property or personal rights!
Sitting there on the porch during the day, when I was not out assisting Robert in some task, I saw the world pass by in a very curious kaleidoscopic review
There were practically no horses in Hongkong. Therefore, human shoulders must bear the burdens. Coolies working for five and ten cents a day were harnessed like horses, They drew heavy loads, or bore across their shoulders great yokes from each end of which hung tremendous weights — bales of cloth, loads of bricks or stone. These coolies ran at a “dog trot” back and forth before our home in a day-long endless procession — they were the beasts of burden of China.
Hearing them groan as they jogged along, I could not help but wonder if they had ever heard the name of Jesus. If not, surely they had nothing to live for, I thought.
Occasionally the pad, pad of small feminine feet resounded on our street, and women as well as men would travel by, heavily laden under creaking yokes, sometimes carrying young babies strapped to their backs, How my heart ached for those unfortunate infants! Hour after hour, from early morn till late at night, they hung in their carryalls, their little heads snapping back and forth as the mother’s body would jog down the street, If they cried, the mothers could not stop to tend them. If they slept, their heads would fall back, leaving faces exposed to the merciless glare of the sun.
How could the Chinese toil like that? How could they endure? We were warned repeatedly that white people must never step out of doors without a cork helmet or umbrella or we would be victims of sun-stroke!
From my piazza, I watched venders of all sorts of foodstuffs go by—especially noticing those selling highly decorated roast pigs that had been offered to heathen idols. These pigs were scored in fanciful designs and beribboned in riotous colors from nose to tail. Looking upon them we understood for the first time what the Apostle Paul meant when he said, “Touch not the meat offered unto idols.”
Not all the people who passed our house were poor. Rickshaws, flower bedecked, constantly rolled by. Licentious soldiers; European soldiers with coyly painted Japanese gitls, disgusted me. How could one preach the gospel to these Chinese and tell them how to live and die, teach them of the Christ of our Christian country when here were soldiers from the Continent, liquor-sodden, flaunting boldly their un-Christian immorality?
‘On our way to the little Chinese mission, we would pass favorite haunts of these drunken defenders of civilized nations, The Chinese would point to them and say:
“Is that an example of your Christianity?”
One thing I had never reckoned on was the quickness in retaliation of the native. Sometimes we would ask one to give his heart to Jesus and he would say:
“You tell us to come to Jesus and give up our opium. Who forced it into this country? The honorable white men brought in Bibles and opium on the same boat. They started and encouraged the culture of the opium-bearing poppy.”
Sometimes a particularly bitter native would add:
“Do you know how the white man came into possession of Hongkong? You may have forgotten, but we have not, It was when we protested and refused to receive the ships full of opium. The white men came with their gunboats and started war, and, because we were unprepared to fight, we were obliged to capitulate and give them Hongkong as a peace offering.
The Chinese of China are not the abject, lowly, truck gardening laundrying yellow people we see in America. In their own country they seem to be quick-minded, serious students and keen of perception. They speak right up, and oftentimes, in no uncertain terms, deal sallies which can be answered only after much thought. They insist that their religion is much older than ours. We are a new nation, they say, and they count a thousand years as we count a hundred!
A story is told of a young Chinese Christian who was on his Way to the cemetery with rice and chicken to put on the grave of his grandfather, “Li Chee,” he was asked, “how long do you intend to continue putting offerings of food upon the grave of your ancestors? You know they cannot rise and eat it.”
"Most reverend, delightful, educated missionary lady,” he replied, respectfully, “we who are as humble as dust under your exalted wisdom feel that we should desist from placing delicious food upon the graves of our honorable ancestors when your people cease placing flowers upon the respected graves of your most glorious ancestors. Can they rise and smell the flowers?”
Funerals wound past our door in seemingly endless array, and I spent much of my time in watching them. First would come Chinese players with whining Oriental instruments; then, with silken banners floating above, would come litters of food to be offered at the graves. After the litters the paid mourners walked, crying as if their hearts would break. Next came the body of the deceased himself, accompanied by his widow beating upon her breast in anguish, and followed by his neighbors at the rear of the procession
Military funerals would pa:
officers borne in stately grandeur upon gun carriages, covered with the flag of their nation. Taps would sound, and, in Happy Valley cemetery just around the corner, a firing squad would sound the last salute.
One day I witnessed my first Mohammedan cortege.
All the color and ceremony of the other funerals were there — flowers, gifts, mourners, banners; but unlike the others the
_ deceased was borne openly upon a silk canopied, flower-strewn litter. "Perhaps he will be placed in a casket within the temple,” I thought.
In a moment there came from the dim recesses of that Mohammedan shrine the rhythmic insistent beat of the tom-tom, and through the side door I caught the flash of rising and falling bodies in the accustomed form of worship.
I turned away, and tried to drive that awful rhythm from my brain by concentrating on the letter I was writing to loved ones in America.
Suddenly, my nostrils were assailed by the pungent odor of greasy smoke. Rising quickly, I hurried to the kitchen, thinking Ah Chee, our cook, was either burning some more of his outlandish native dishes or had set the kitchen on fire! However, he was not in the kitchen, neither was there a fire in the blue burner oil stove.
Looking through the open kitchen window, I saw rolling billows of smoke—acrid, greasy, nauseating smoke — coming toward our house! The sight that greeted my eyes horrified me.
‘The small temple backyard, adjoining ours, was full of people, and there in a circle knelt the Hindu worshippers. A tomtom orchestra beat out its nerve-racking dirge, and white-robed figures went down and up with spellbinding regularity. This, however, was not what startled me so much as the fact that the greasy smoke was pouring from a stack of cordwood in the center of the circle, and top of the blazing, smoke fire was—a squirming Hindu!
Oh! They are burning a man to death, I thought to myself!
I did not know that this was the crude form of Hindu cremation, and that the writhing figure on the blazing pyre was the corpse I had seen carried into the temple a short time before.
For several moments longer I stood by the open window, transfixed, and then, slamming the window down with a sudden jerk, I stumbled gropingly to the front room and fell moaning across my bed.
A few minutes later Robert came in and, heating my moans, ran to me, swept back the mosquito net curtains and gathered me into his arms, For the first and only time in my life, I broke into real and uncontrollable hysteria. Scream after scream broke from my lips. By that time the Chinese cook arrived on the scene crying
‘Missee!
Missee! Waz amalee you?”
When I had quieted down, Ah Chee explained
“Hindu man him burnee dead man allee time. You no see urns in Hindu Happy Valley?
I remembered then that I had seen the little urns and had remarked upon the fact that the Hindu graves in the Happy Valley cemetery were marked by one stone, topped in each instance by an urn. * Although it was a cemetery, Happy Valley was oftentimes a breath of life to Robert and me. It was one of the most outstanding beauty spots of Hongkong. When the steaming hu midity of the day would be too much, we would trudge up there, sit on the grass and drink in each little breath of fresh air, and admire the surroundings. Such a wealth and profusion of flowers — lotus, water lilies, wax-like magnolias as large as dinner plates, and hundreds of the most gorgeous tropicalhued blossoms, At times I found it a lovely place to walk amid the quiet gree from the hard glare of daylight, a haven where angel statues spread their marble wings above me. Little did I think that the dear form which upheld me in its strong arms during most of my walks would rest one day in the near future amid this beauty!
Robert seemed to be drawn nearer and nearer to the Lord each day. He spent hours in prayer day and night. As we would walk together slowly through Happy Valley, he would read the inscriptions of missionaries who had laid down their lives for Jesus, and remark on the fact that they must have considered it a wonderful privilege and honor to be martyrs for Christ in this heathen land of China.
av. Surely the shadows of things to come were falling across our pathway and we knew it not. It is wonderful to realize that God, in His mercy and tenderness, does not give us to know what lies ahead — either good or evil — often if we were aware of the future we would not have the strength or fortitude to bear the knowledge to face the issues! “Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof,” and “My grace is sufficient for thee,” said the Lord!