On the Front Lines with the Inland Mission: A Review Essay Daniel W. Crofts

onventional wisdom suggests that Western The CIM’s outreach to the small-town and rural backwaters Cin China changed course by the 1920s and 1930s. Instead of China was largely invisible to outside observers. “Christians of itinerant preaching in pursuit of individual conversions— in America know nothing about our mission,” Todd tartly stock-in-trade for the hardy pioneers who reached China in the observed. Denominational missionaries who worked in “large latter decades of the nineteenth century and the first years of enough places to have hospitals and schools” left “most of the hard the twentieth century—the more culturally flexible team players places to reach untouched.” They worked among “up and outs,” of the post–World War I era jet- Todd wrote, “and we among tisoned and instead down and outs. We also can emphasized good works. They Missions to China’s Heartland: The generally get closer to the peo- organized medical dispensaries, Letters of Hazel Todd of the China ple just because we do live in hospitals, schools, and universi- Inland Mission, 1920–1941. closer touch with them.”5 ties, and they worked to establish Edited by Robert Gardella. Portland, Maine: In order to get close to the YMCA chapters and agricultural MerwinAsia, 2009. people, CIM missionaries need- 1 cooperatives. Pp. vii, 237. Paperback $45. ed to speak the language. The Hazel Todd (1893–1941) and first order of business for newly Arnolis Hayman (1890–1971) of A Foreign on the Long March: arrived CIM recruits was a crash the China Inland Mission (CIM), The Memoirs of Arnolis Hayman of the course in what would now be the principals in two recently China Inland Mission. dubbed Chinese immersion. The published books, offer striking women went to a special CIM exceptions to the conventional Edited by Anne-Marie Brady. Portland, Maine: school in ; the men to wisdom. For Todd and Hay- MerwinAsia, 2010. Pp. v, 160. Paperback $32. a comparable facility in Anqing. man, as for the organization After months of intensive study, that brought them to China, young apprentices were directed evangelistic outreach remained the sine qua non. Their lives in- to a locale where they could improve their language skills and volved abundant good works, but as the means toward an end. begin evangelistic work under the supervision of experienced Working among “the poorest of the poor” at a time of political older missionaries. Over time those greenhorns who had the breakdown, revolutionary upheaval, and desperate hardship, right mix of skills and tenacity learned to stand on their own feet. they were sustained by a deep and unquestioning faith.2 Their Hayman, who first reached China in 1913, learned both Chinese world was providentially guided. Even if God’s will was at times and the language of the Black Miao, aboriginal peoples who difficult to discern and even if advances came only in the tini- clustered in eastern Guizhou, where he headed several mission est increments, they knew that “God makes no mistakes.” They stations. Todd, who first arrived in 1920, found herself able to embraced Christ’s admonition to “teach all nations,” and they communicate effectively in Hunan by 1922. When relocated to were sustained by his promise, “Lo, I am with you alway, even Anhui in the late 1920s, she gained comparable facility with a unto the end of the world.”3 quite different dialect. Marauding Chinese soldiers during the troubled 1930s were startled—“that foreigner talks Chinese.”6 Hudson Taylor’s Mission Hazel Todd: CIM Veteran The China Inland Mission was the brainchild of British evangelist J. Hudson Taylor. It was a “faith mission”—meaning that it was Todd’s letters, expertly edited by Robert Gardella, were origi- entirely dependent on voluntary support. It abjured denomina- nally sent to her family in California. She remained single and tional backing or overt fund-raising. Its goal was to carry the self-reliant. The cause of evangelism gave her life a focus and Christian message to ordinary folk in China’s vast interior. Ini- direction that snuffed out any competing personal agenda. tially British, the CIM became genuinely international. A signifi- Much of her life was spent on the road, preaching at periodic cant number of its missionaries originated in the United States, markets and outstations. She routinely walked long distances continental Europe, and the Commonwealth (Canada, Austra- and stoically accepted spartan creature comforts. Her attachment lia, and New Zealand).4 Hazel Todd was born in Minnesota and to narrow CIM orthodoxies was absolute. Christian “Modern- lived in Los Angeles before heading to China; Arnolis Hayman, ists” who accepted the theory of evolution were attempting “to born to a missionary family then living in Ceylon, grew up in tear down faith in the Bible.”7 She regarded traditional Chinese New Zealand. religion and a belief in “idols” as superstitious nonsense—an obstacle to be exposed and overcome. An outburst of Chinese Daniel W. Crofts, Professor of History at the Col- nationalism among students in the 1920s was “anti-foreign and lege of New Jersey, Ewing, New Jersey, is the author anti-Christian.” She keenly resented unfairness and inequality— of Upstream Odyssey: An American in China, “so many people lack proper food and clothing while others have 1895–1944 (Norwalk, Conn.: EastBridge, 2008). such plenty”—without asking why an all-powerful God allowed such conditions to exist in the first place. She could recount how a mob destroyed the mission in Changde, even while serenely insisting that “the Lord has a purpose in all this.”8 Because the CIM emphasized “direct evangelism,” it gave

July 2011 171 lower priority to medicine. Fewer than 2 percent of its mis- Todd admired Chinese Christians. Her letters include sionaries in China were doctors.9 But early-twentieth-century frequent words of appreciation—for the young woman who advances in Western medical technology encouraged missionary resisted family pressures to accept an arranged marriage, for amateurs to learn by doing. Quinine could overcome malarial the pregnant woman with bound feet who walked nine miles attacks, injections of serum could provide some immunity against to take Communion, and for the three hundred believers who deadly typhoid and cholera, and santonine could kill intestinal flocked to attend a Christmas celebration at an unheated building roundworms, a nearly universal scourge in rural China. Todd in an outlying town. She bemoaned the loss of “one of the finest was appalled by the medical conditions she encountered—ghastly Chinese Christian workers with whom it has been my privilege infant mortality, a lack of sanitation, and virulent diseases that to work, who has walked many a mile with me preaching the had been controlled in prosperous industrial countries. “A greater gospel and shepherding the flock”—killed, alas, by Communists. knowledge of medicine and how to use it would be worth nearly Todd took a special interest in Paul Hsu, who started to prepare everything to me,” she exclaimed within months of first being for a career as an evangelist when she sponsored his enrollment dispatched upriver. Not until a furlough in the late 1920s did she at a Bible institute in .13 receive any formal medical training. Upon her return to China But Todd’s letters also reveal much about the disconnect she discovered that medical work could be “just as productive between missionaries and their intended beneficiaries. In all in spiritual results” as overt evangelization. She was told by her kinds of ways, some trivial and some consequential, the West- erners and the Chinese poorly understood each other. Todd noted that paring knives were unknown in China—therefore Todd was annoyed when Chinese cooks left “the peeling” on vegetables such as carrots and cucumbers. But cleavers were another story—“when chop- local women showed ping up anything they do it quicker and better than we do.” greater interest in seeing Todd was annoyed when local women showed greater interest in seeing the inside of the home where the mission women lived the inside of the home than in listening to the sermon. Subtle matters of language usage where the mission women deterred easy communication. “The Chinese after all are so dif- ferent from what we are, and it is easy to say the wrong thing or lived than in the sermon. say it in the wrong way,” Todd reported in 1925. Weeks before her untimely death in 1941, the same thought persisted—“many of the Chinese ways of thinking and talking remain strange to us.”14 patients that she could “beat” Chinese doctors—and that she Like any organization of its era, the CIM was led by men. should concentrate on medicine and leave to others the visiting But its ideology demanded that all Christians had a paramount of church members and “working to reach outsiders.” Candidly obligation to spread the Gospel. Christian women therefore reporting both her medical triumphs and her shortcomings, Todd had a responsibility to reach out to Chinese women. Over time, personified the CIM’s ambiguity regarding the proper balance CIM women came to outnumber men, a pattern apparent in between medicine and evangelistic outreach.10 other missionary organizations. And even if women were sup- Todd’s writing was direct and forceful, with pithy assess- posed to be subordinate to men, those with leadership potential ments of people and circumstances. A fellow missionary was “our increasingly found ways to exercise their talents. Hazel Todd was pocket edition of Scotland.” He had been “fearfully spoiled before a striking case in point. “Women need some way of expressing coming to China, and his hat still is not big enough for him.” An themselves,” she once wrote. “In the past having large families old woman had “a face long enough to eat butter out of a churn.” was enough,” but she sought “something more.” Her letters Todd knew that a pet might give her welcome companionship, reflect a growing confidencein her own capabilities. Ultimately but “in a land where many starve for lack of the plainest food, I she achieved greater seniority than any other CIM missionary begrudge the rice to feed even a cat.” Amid wartime destruction in Anhui. Defying gender-based constraints, she and her fellow and misery in 1939, she announced that “this paper would catch women ran a “prize station”—one of “the best in the mission.”15 fire and burn very quickly if an attempt was made to explain or give my opinion of the situation here.” Fascinated by the power Arnolis Hayman: With the Communists of words, she once announced that “books are always more interesting to me than people.”11 Arnolis Hayman’s book is a heretofore unpublished memoir of But even if Todd had a solitary side, that was not the whole the author’s harrowing fourteen months as a captive of the Com- story. When asked to take charge of several young apprentice munists between October 1934 and November 1935. Anne-Marie women in 1930, she summarily scuttled formal CIM nomencla- Brady, a New Zealand Sinologist, wanted to know more about ture conventions and started referring to her new companions the experience of a fellow New Zealander. She tracked down by their first names. In effect they became a family that worked Hayman’s sons in Australia and now has edited the document congenially together. They celebrated each other’s birthdays they shared with her. Composed soon after Hayman’s release, and exchanged small presents at Christmas. But the arrange- his memoir provides a rare window onto the Long March, one ment did not last. Ruth and Margaret Elliott were reassigned to of the legendary episodes of Chinese history.16 different stations. Most traumatically, Eva Knight died suddenly Brady sees Hayman as “a courageous and extremely mod- in 1936. “In all my life I have never had a more loyal friend,” est man, with a deep commitment to China and the Chinese Hazel Todd lamented. She reflected wistfully on how she had people.” He and a CIM companion, Alfred Bosshardt, had the become “lonesome.” For over a year the only missionary in a misfortune to fall into the hands of the Second and Sixth Red county of “half a million people,” she rarely encountered any Armies, headed respectively by He Long and Xiao Ke—just at the other foreign or American woman or anyone “with whom I can time when Chiang Kai-shek’s Guomindang forces were attack- speak English.”12 ing Communist enclaves in upland South China. Hayman’s and

172 Intern ation al Bulletin of Mission ary Resear ch, Vol. 35, No. 3 Bosshardt’s captivity, in a rugged region of northwestern Hunan, which they did not get, but also medicines, which they did. As occurred at a time when the main columns of the Long March Hayman’s and Bosshardt’s health deteriorated, sympathetic under Mao Zedong were careening west and north, ultimately guards brought in a Chinese doctor to treat them with a tradi- to find sanctuary in faraway Shaanxi.17 tional potion. “If bitterness was a standard of quality,” Hayman Hayman’s memoir recounts a harsh mix of banality and dryly observed, “we should certainly have been healed.” The terror. The forty-four-year-old Hayman and the thirty-eight- subsequent ministrations of an acupuncturist also failed to aid year-old Bosshardt were closely confined, especially after an the severely malnourished Hayman, but the experience did leave abortive escape attempt. For weeks they might remain impris- him with “more respect for the bravery of many patients who oned in a darkened room, doing their best to maintain each constantly submitted to such treatment!”22 other’s spirits. Then suddenly they would be roused to march, Compared to the two-plus decades of Todd’s letters, the as the Communists moved from hamlet to hamlet. The prison- Hayman memoir is less varied and more formulaic. Todd’s let- ers never had enough to eat. By the end of his captivity, Hay- ters extend from her apprenticeship as a young adult through man could no longer walk and weighed barely one hundred to her emergence as an accomplished CIM veteran. She calls pounds. His companion, Bosshardt, “had never seen a famine attention to the turmoil and tragedy of China during the 1920s patient look so thin as I appeared.” Food brought for them by and 1930s—as warlords, Communists, the Guomindang, and the intermediaries who were attempting to secure their release Japanese violently struggled for power, while the conditions of life was confiscated before it ever reached them. But kindly guards for ordinary people deteriorated from bad to worse. Hayman’s sometimes enabled them to purchase an occasional duck egg.18 memoir focuses on his harsh experiences during a single year, The grimmest aspect of Hayman’s memoir is his repeated when he feared for his life and could not pursue his calling. He mention of Communist captives being summarily executed. It was held in a few remote towns and often so secluded that he was a “common occurrence.” The victims included those whose could not observe what was going on around him. His writing is families could not meet ransom demands, Guomindang soldiers, more unadorned, though he dashed off a few bright sentences— especially officers, and infirm or elderly persons whose presence “Hygiene was often preached to us by the Communists but they would slow Communist movements. Farmers whose circum- gave us little opportunity for putting it into practice.”23 stances were better than the average were denounced as “local But the retrospective significanceof the Hayman memoir is tyrants” and especially endangered. Hayman was sickened by substantial. His captors ultimately became the rulers of China—or, the stench of beheaded corpses and anguished by the “heart- more accurately, part of the like-minded nucleus that elevated the rending screams” of prisoners, including women and girls, who ruler of post-1949 China. Only three foreigners participated in the were tortured to reveal where money might be hidden. His “true Long March. Otto Braun, agent for the Soviet Union’s Comintern, picture of Communism as we saw it” involved a night guard did not speak Chinese. That left the two missionaries. Bosshardt who would hold his “long knife-like sword in a threatening posture” and “try to provoke us.”19 Hayman, like Todd, gained support from the CIM’s char- Hayman, like Todd, gained acteristic Christian fatalism. Everything that happened was part of God’s plan—the path of history reflected providential support from the CIM’s design. Hayman’s role was to witness, as best he could, not to characteristic Christian complain. Yet he had never before encountered such a fiercely uncomprehending audience. His captors were entirely dismissive fatalism: everything that of Christian teaching. Instead, Communist ideology “became happened was part of God’s almost a religion to them,” and they earnestly tried to propagate their faith. In Communist eyes, Hayman and Bosshardt were plan. their deadly enemies—advance agents for the “imperialists” who wanted to “partition and enslave China.” They “colluded with despotic gentry and landlords” to “mislead and tame the published two accounts of his experiences as a captive, but Brady local people,” and they also “secretly conducted military scout- considers both flawed.The Restraining Hand, published soon after ing.” Hayman’s familiarity with “the backward culture of the Bosshardt’s release, and The Guiding Hand, published decades Miao” showed that he intended to weaken and divide the Chi- later, were both ghostwritten, Brady writes, and “heavily edited nese state.20 to suit the format of a missionary .” Brady also judges that Hayman and Bosshardt initially gained solace from their both of Bosshardt’s books were “extremely diplomatic” toward copies of the and a devotional textbook, Daily the Communists.24 Light on the Daily Path, which offered “precious” biblical “morsels” Brady’s strictures against Bosshardt may be exaggerated. She that often seemed strikingly apropos to the two captives. Brady, sees him as complicit in embellishing the mythology of the Long who edited Hayman’s memoir, discovered that his references March, in part because he and his one-time captor Xiao Ke— to passages in Daily Light enabled her to fix the dates of their each improbably having survived an additional half-century— movements. But after they attempted to escape, their reading exchanged pleasantries during the 1980s.25 But Bosshardt cer- materials were confiscated and “put to the basest use possible.”21 tainly was no Communist apologist. He was impressed by the Hayman, like Todd, had learned that medical outreach dedication of his captors, but he spurned their outlook. He complemented evangelism. Following the example of other deplored the outrageously casual violence on the Long March, missionaries, he opened a “dispensary” and found that “the even if he did not give it as much emphasis as Hayman. Bosshardt number of patients who came to me for care was always on the explained how Communists appealed to the rural poor—and increase.” The more informed of his Communist captors shared he bluntly warned fellow missionaries that they often failed “to his appreciation of Western medicine. Their ransom demands get low enough to appreciate the poverty and sufferings” of the included not just anti-aircraft guns and “wireless apparatus,” people whom they attempted to reach. Hayman likewise noted

July 2011 173 how successfully the Communists recruited “poor farm tenants” of his life, protracted for an excruciating fourteen months that who were mired in debt and often did not have enough to eat. He left him near death. Once liberated, he revived and resumed his also reported that Communists scrupulously paid for everything work for the CIM. But yet another ordeal awaited him. He and his they got from the poor. He and Bosshardt admired the speaking wife were interned by the Japanese from 1942 to 1945. Hayman power of one young Communist promoter, “the Lecturer”—they thereafter moved to Australia, became an Anglican minister, and “longed to see him born again and coveted his zealousness for the stayed active until 1971, when he died at the age of eighty-one.27 preaching of the Gospel.” On balance, Hayman’s and Bosshardt’s Todd and Hayman, seen together, offer many insights accounts of their shared captivity are largely complementary. about CIM evangelicalism. They labored almost a century ago But Brady correctly observes that Hayman’s narrative offers in the obscurity of “the traditional villages and market towns of more specific detail, that it is more introspective, and that it bet- China’s vast underdeveloped countryside.” Their counterparts ter captures “the boredom and monotony of a hostage’s life.”26 today, as Robert Gardella reminds us, work in places that the outside world neither knows nor cares about. On a recent visit Readers of Hazel Todd’s letters watch her grow over time, only to a remote outpost in South Sudan, New York Times columnist to see her life snuffed out. A typhoid-induced heart attack sud- Nicholas D. Kristof pronounced himself awed by the “selfless” denly felled her in November 1941. She was not yet fiftyyears commitment of Catholic priests and sisters, who give their lives old. Arnolis Hayman’s memoir recounts the dramatic high point to “serving the world’s neediest.”28

Notes 1. Lian Xi, The Conversion of Missionaries: Liberalism in American Protestant 9. Ibid., pp. 61–62. Missions in China, 1907–1932 (University Park: Pennsylvania State 10. Ibid., pp. xvi–xvii, 19, 21, 42, 44, 71, 75–80, 94–95, 98, 146, 200, 202–5, Univ. Press, 1997), pp. 95–128. See also Kathleen L. Lodwick, Educating 211. the Women of Hainan: The Career of Margaret Moninger in China, 11. Ibid., pp. 70, 79, 101, 147, 173. 1915–1942 (Lexington: Univ. Press of Kentucky, 1995); Lawrence 12. Ibid., pp. 84–86, 135–36, 138–45. D. Kessler, The Jiangyin Mission Station: An American Missionary 13. Ibid., pp. 118, 121, 126–27, 131, 133, 137, 138–40, 195, 200, 208, 214. Community in China, 1895–1951 (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina 14. Ibid., pp. 48, 108, 124, 191, 207. Press, 1996); Jun Xing, Baptized in the Fire of Revolution: The American 15. Ibid., pp. 133, 136, 181. See Jane Hunter, The Gospel of Gentility: American Social Gospel and the YMCA in China, 1919–1937 (Bethlehem, Pa.: Women Missionaries in Turn-of-the-Century China (New Haven: Yale Lehigh Univ. Press, 1996); John Hersey, The Call (New York: Knopf, Univ. Press, 1984). 1985); John Lang Rawlinson, The Recorder and China’s Revolution: A 16. Brady, Memoirs of Arnolis Hayman, pp. vii–ix. Topical Biography of Frank Joseph Rawlinson, 1871–1937, 2 vols. (Notre 17. Ibid., p. ix. Hayman was released in November 1935, just before Dame, Ind.: Cross Cultural Publications, 1990); John S. Service, ed., the Second and Sixth Red Armies headed west to join forces with Golden Inches: The China Memoir of Grace Service (Berkeley: Univ. of Mao in Shaanxi; Bosshardt remained in captivity until April 1936, California Press, 1989); , Beyond the Stone Arches: An by which time the trailing columns of the Long March had reached American Missionary Doctor in China, 1892–1932 (New York: John Yunnan, north of Kunming. Wiley & Sons, 2000); Charles W. Hayford, To the People: James Yen and 18. Ibid., pp. 61, 84–92, 119, 131, 141, 148. Village China (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1990). 19. Ibid., pp. xviii, xxvi–xxvii, 22, 37, 39–40, 43–46, 67, 69, 87, 89, 95, 96, 2. Anne-Marie Brady, ed., A Foreign Missionary on the Long March: The 100, 104, 105, 126. Memoirs of Arnolis Hayman of the China Inland Mission (Portland, Me.: 20. Ibid., pp. 24–25, 57, 59–65, 66–67, 128–29. MerwinAsia, 2010), p. xix; hereafter Memoirs of Arnolis Hayman. 21. Ibid., pp. 22–25, 27–28, 32–33, 35–36, 49–54, 66. 3. Robert Gardella, ed., Missions to China’s Heartland: The Letters of 22. Ibid., pp. 60, 74, 111, 131, 136–37, 138. Hazel Todd of the China Inland Mission, 1920–1941 (Portland, Me.: 23. Ibid., p. 128. MerwinAsia, 2009), pp. 47, 215; hereafter Letters of Hazel Todd. Brady, 24. Alfred Bosshardt, The Restraining Hand: Captivity for Christ in China Memoirs of Arnolis Hayman, pp. 57, 66 (Matt. 28:19–20). (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1936) and The Guiding Hand: Captivity 4. The CIM is the focus of three recent studies: Alvyn Austin, China’s and Answered Prayer in China (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1973); Millions: The China Inland Mission and Late Qing Society (Grand Brady, Memoirs of Arnolis Hayman, pp. xvii–xix. Rapids: Eerdmans, 2007); Linda Benson, Across China’s Gobi: The Lives 25. Harrison Salisbury, The Long March: The Untold Story (New York: of Evangeline French, , and (Norwalk, Harper & Row, 1985), p. 303; A. J. Broomhall, Hudson Taylor and China’s Conn.: EastBridge, 2008); and Daniel W. Crofts, Upstream Odyssey: Open Century, 7 vols. (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1981–89), 7:554; An American in China, 1895–1944 (Norwalk, Conn.: EastBridge, 2008). Crofts, Upstream Odyssey, p. 176. 5. Gardella, Letters of Hazel Todd, pp. 188, 216–17. 26. Brady, Memoirs of Arnolis Hayman, pp. xvii–xix, 80–81, 128–29; 6. Brady, Memoirs of Arnolis Hayman, pp. xvi, xviii–xix; Gardella, Letters Bosshardt, The Restraining Hand, 11–12, 23, 32, 64, 251–52, 272–73. of Hazel Todd, pp. xvi, 24–25, 94, 112, 116. 27. Brady, Memoirs of Arnolis Hayman, pp. xxxvi–xxxvii; Gardella, Letters 7. Gardella, Letters of Hazel Todd, pp. 16–17, 40, 116. of Hazel Todd, pp. 213–14. 8. Ibid., pp. 36–37, 42–43, 48–49, 51, 56, 65, 96, 119, 120, 127, 130, 139, 28. Gardella, Letters of Hazel Todd, p. 216; Nicholas D. Kristof, “Who Can 140, 147, 154, 184. Mock This Church?” New York Times, May 2, 2010.

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