God's Chinese Son (5 page)
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One June evening in 1835, at the entrance to a side street leading to the
more affluent Canton suburbs, a dead baby lies in a basket among the
rubbish, its body doubled up and its head, slightly swollen, dangling over
the basket's edge. So narrow is the way, at this spot, that a Westerner,
returning from a stroll in the countryside, has to step over the basket,
noticing the contents only when his foot is in midair. As he stares in shock
and bewilderment at the baby's face, a group of Chinese bystanders gaze,
in equal bewilderment, at him.
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The Reverend Edwin Stevens has been in Canton since
October 1832. His sights are set on higher things, for in Yale
College he was caught up in the great religious "awakening"
that swirled through New England, was ordained a minister
after study in the New Haven Theological Seminary, and accepted a posting to Canton as the chaplain of the American Seaman's Friend Society.
Living in the American hong, he has followed a rigorous schedule of
study, preaching, and tract distribution, commuting on Saturdays down
the Pearl River on whatever foreign longboat can offer him a ride to the
main anchorage for ocean vessels at Whampoa, and returning thence each
Monday. When Stevens cannot find a foreign boat, he must hire the local
Chinese boatmen to take him to his duties. It is four Spanish dollars for
the twelve-mile passage, and about three and a half hours rowing and
sailing time when against the tide, with mandatory checks at every customs station. Even this short trip has its dangers. Foreign officers and
sailors, traveling the same route, have been waylaid by Chinese ruffians,
and robbed or held to ransom. Stevens sometimes finds it hard to persuade
ship's captains to let him use their decks or cabins for his services, for
some find him "austere and unsocial," since he shuns everything "vain or
sportive," and devotes his energies to combating the evils of strong drink,
visiting the sick and dying, and giving the dead a Christian burial.'
The seamen to whom he preaches are often in desperate enough straits
after long months at sea packed ten or more in cabins twenty feet long
and half as wide, driven wild by the excitement of three days' shore leave
granted after their long voyage from Philadelphia or from Liverpool. The
Chinese compound the turmoil by selling to the thirsty sailors the local
brand of drink they call "firewater," a blend of raw alcohol, tobacco juice,
sugar, and arsenic, which causes, writes Stevens, "a degree of inebriety
more ferocious than that occasioned by any other spirit." Inside Hog Lane,
where the establishments that cater to the foreign seamen have their own
alluring signs spelled out in Roman letters, "Old Jemmy Apoo," "Old
Good Tom, old house," and "Young Tom, seller of wines of all kinds and
prices,"
2
this firewater can "destroy the reason and the senses" of its drinkers, oftentimes leading the sailors from their initial euphoria into "riotous
scenes of the greatest enormity." Despite the fact that the drunken sailors
are often robbed and even stripped by Chinese toughs, and that the government issues constant edicts against the sale of liquor to foreigners, the
sailors always return for more, preferring the risks of Hog Lane to the
more sheltered tea and coffee shop at number 19, New China Street,
which worried Christian philanthropists have set up for them.
3
Other temptations abound. Those Westerners who like to chart such
things believe there are eight thousand prostitutes or more in the Canton
area. Some are unreachable behind the city walls, but many others can be
found in the enclave of Honam Island that the sailors have affectionately
named Portsmouth Point, where the coolies employed by foreigners also
congregate. And every sailor or preacher rowing up the river has seen
other women preening themselves on the decks of their "flower boats,"
small feet or large, red jackets or green, butterfly shoes and silver anklets,
rising and falling at their pilings with the tides.
4
To add to the lures, small and nimble "wash boats," paddled by three
or four women, dressed in the dark and faded trousers and jacket of the
locals, but with brightly colored head scarves over their hair
—
a fashion
garnered from the Portuguese
—
will pull alongside the foreign vessels as
soon as they moor, offering a wealth of promise besides the laundry in
their cheerful greetings: "Ah, you missee chiefee matee, how you dooa?
I
saavez you long tim, when you catchee Whampoa last tim."
s
The banter
ought to lead no further, since nominally each foreign boat has two Chinese officials on board for the duration of its harbor stay, but such rules
are laxly followed. Nominally, too, no liquor that might loosen the rules
is ever brought on board, but sailors smuggle drink onto their ships in
every way, from waterproof containers tied to their waists to entire ballast
casks from their longboats filled with firewater.
6
No wonder the congregations are sometimes muted of a Sunday. "Preached this day in the
Splendid',"
Stevens notes in his journal, "to an audience of some 80 or 100
hearers, from the text, 'Fools make a mock at sin.'
I
enjoyed considerable
freedom and there was the best attention; but
I
saw no apparent conviction
of sin, or sorrow for it." A week later, preaching to the officers and crew
of the
Otters Pool,
with the Bible's soothing words "Come unto me all ye
that labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest," Stevens finds
that "no one seemed deeply affected."
But Stevens accepts such apparent setbacks as part of a wider plan, as
he tells his congregation in a Sunday sermon: "The word of the Lord has
been thoroughly tried in all ways.
It
has been tried by history, and not
found wanting. It has been tried by astronomy, by geology, by argument,
and by ridicule. It has been tried during thousands of years by every man
who pleased, in every way he chose; by all the learning which could
be brought against it,
by
the conceited and the ignorant; by friends and
foes, by him that believed and him that believed not. It has stood all
trials."
8
To deepen his understanding of Christian missionary work in China,
Stevens has talked at length with a Chinese Christian from Canton, Liang
Afa. Born in 1789 to a poor family, Liang received only four years of
schooling before he had to find work, first as a maker of writing brushes,
and then as a carver of the wooden blocks used in book printing. Liang
was plying this trade near Canton when in 1815 the Scottish Protestant
missionary William Milne hired him
—
even though Liang was at this time
a devout Buddhist—to work on the blocks of a series of religious tracts
and sections of the Bible that Milne and his Protestant co-missionaries
were currently translating. Among Liang's first tasks in this new employment were the printing of Chinese versions of Deuteronomy and Joshua,
by means of which he learned something of the Bible's content and structure.
9
This knowledge was soon deepened, for Milne was an exacting
master who insisted that all those in his employ attend his daily Christian
services, whether they believed in Christianity or not. Even though among
the Chinese listeners "some would be talking, some would be laughing at
the novelty of the doctrines preached, and some smoking their pipes,"
Milne was undismayed. Preaching in Chinese, he challenged his congregation to see the falsity of the Buddhist ways to salvation, and to choose the
harder yet truer roads of Jehovah and Jesus. After much internal struggle,
Liang was won over, and on a November Sunday in 1816 he received
baptism from Milne's hands.
10
Believing, Liang began to write. He called his first Chinese tract "An
Annotated Reader for Saving the World." In thirty-seven pages he told of
God's power as creator, and of His Ten Commandments, and used a
variety of Paul's epistles to describe God's anger and His mercy. Carving
the wooden blocks himself, Liang printed two hundred copies, and had
just begun distributing them in and around Canton during the spring of
1819 when he was arrested by the Chinese authorities, imprisoned, fined,
and savagely beaten. The officials also confiscated Liang's house and
burned all the wooden printing blocks that he had made. Undeterred,
over the ensuing months he converted his wife to Christianity and baptized her in person. Shortly thereafter, the couple prevailed on Robert
Morrison to baptize their son."
After Milne's death in 1822, Liang worked for the London Missionary
Society as an evangelist and Chinese-language teacher, and was himself
ordained as a preacher in 1827. During these years he struggled to compose a longer work in Chinese that would fully develop his ideas on Christianity and serve as an introduction to the full range of his newfound
faith, and in 1832 he was done. He titled his book
Quanshi liangyan—
"Good Words for Exhorting the Age"—and after asking the Chinese-
speaking Western missionaries to check it over for theological faults,
Liang printed the book in Canton the same year.
In the nine chapters of this book, Liang tried to encapsulate all he had
learned from his fifteen years with the Westerners. He quoted passages,
both long and short, from the Old and the New Testament, transcribing
the strange-sounding biblical names into Chinese characters by sound
rather than sense, just as his missionary teachers had. He told of the fruit
the serpent led Eve and Adam to eat and of their expulsion from the
garden of Eden. He told of Noah's Ark and the great flood that destroyed
almost everything on the earth. He told of the destruction of Sodom and
Gomorrah. He warned his people with the words of Isaiah and Jeremiah,
and encouraged them with chants of Psalms 19 and 33. He recorded all
of Jesus' Sermon on the Mount from Matthew's Gospel; and gave the last
chapter of the Revelation of John the Divine, which sealed the book for
all time with the terrible oath of the Lord. Liang commented on those
passages, sometimes briefly, other times at length, as he explored the mysteries of God's grace and the range of human failings; he offered his own
ruminations on fate and faith; and, in chapter 6, wrote out his own spiritual autobiography for all to see.