On a family vacation I read a book brought by one of Jeff’s uncles about my children’s great-great-great-grandfather. This started me reading a couple of other books of letters by people in the same family. I’ve read a fair bit of historical fiction, but I worry that my view of the past is overly flavored by current authors. Primary sources can be a good antidote, with the diary of Samuel Pepys being the most interesting I’ve read. So I was interested in these books as more accurate pictures of some 19th-century people living in unusual circumstances.
Mark Williams and Isabella Riggs Williams moved from the American midwest to China as missionaries in 1866, and continued to be based there until they died about 40 years later. (Foreign missionary work was a big thing in the 19th century.) Mark’s autobiography is dull reading, except for his account of fleeing across the Gobi Desert in 1900 when the Boxer Rebellion was killing missionaries. I found the book of Isabella’s letters, “By the Great Wall”, more interesting.
These books weren’t illuminating about the lives of the family’s Chinese neighbors. The missionaries don’t show much in the way of curiosity about the lives or values of the people they’re trying to convert.
Some of their experiences felt very familiar to me: the difficulties of travel, toothache, the best way to grind your oatmeal to make it more flavorful, trying to keep track of young children.
But the central purpose of their lives feels very foreign to me. These people were very consistent with their beliefs! They really believed they could help save people’s souls for eternity, and they made great personal sacrifices to do so. In some way, I really admire these people for dedicating themselves to what they believed was the highest service of others. Isabella wrote, “The whole of life is not simply to be thought well of by others, to make a comfortable living, to be surrounded by pleasures — it is to do God’s will, to do the work He gives us.”
160 years later, some parts of their work (nursing the sick, providing dowries for girls with unbound feet) still seem meaningful to me. But their core purpose was a religious one.
Choose your ending for this post:
- Something about crucial considerations; is the thing you’re working really hard at even the right thing to aim for?
- Something about the difficulty of aligning AI with “human values” when human values have differed so much across times and cultures (19th-century Christian beliefs; 19th-century Buddhist beliefs; 21st-century atheist beliefs).
Long post-script: Themes that I found the most interesting
Geographic distances
Isabella’s brother wrote that when she “went from us in 1866 to China, it was as if to another world, much as if in these days one were to venture on a voyage to Mars.” The voyage took three months by sailing ship from New York around the tip of South America. Later voyages were faster once there were ships from the US West Coast.
Isabella, on how the missionaries amused themselves one evening during the 3-month sail: “We jumped the rope. It was fun to see Mr. Doolittle’s ponderous body shake when his turn came.”
Marriage
After Mark applied and was accepted as a missionary, there was one problem: he needed a wife. As family records later summarized, “The mission board wanted men attached, to prevent unsuitable liaisons in the field.”
I get the impression that there was a small pool of missionary families who provided the likeliest matches, because a girl who knew the missionary life and was willing to continue it was a better choice than someone who had no experience of living outside her own culture. Mark chose to become a missionary, but Isabella was born to it; their daughter Mary married another missionary; Mary and Will’s daughter Winnie married an American aid worker she met in China while she was serving as his Chinese interpreter.
Mark is very pragmatic when describing marriage as a professional necessity: “I was appointed by the board to North China. However, I was not engaged to be married. Miss Peabody recommended Isabella Riggs, but she declined. So I had to stay.” He did itinerant preaching and some teaching for a year, then saw her again at the annual missionary meeting: “I purchased a good suit of clothes costing about sixty dollars, as prices were high after the [Civil] war. I soon found Isabella. . . . I doubtless looked better to her than I did in the rusty suit I had in the summer.” As they were sitting listening to someone’s speech about China, Isabella “used the words of Ruth, ‘Where thou goest, I will go also.’ It came over me like a flash that now I could go to China. My future was plain.”
Their son-in-law Will Hemingway was a medical doctor who wanted to be a missionary in China. Will initially considered Mark and Isabella’s daughter Emily for the necessary role of missionary wife, but she was already engaged. Family story is that Will’s mother told him “there is another one of those girls,” so he moved on to Emily’s younger sister Mary. They had never met, but he wrote her a letter suggesting they marry. Mary thought this was very forward and replied that they should get to know each other, and IF things seemed suitable they might take it further. They did marry and move to China together.
Will and Mary’s marriage sounds like an unusually egalitarian one for 1903. One of their daughters was later disappointed that her own husband didn’t treat her with the same kind of equality, after seeing her parents work as a team.
Division of labor
The men were the ones actually applying to work as missionaries, but for two generations, it seems the wives were better-suited to some aspects of it.
From later family records: Mark “had not been really happy, or effective, in Kalgan. His job had been to sit in a chapel by the road, attract people in, talk with them and convert them to Christianity, have them come to church. He was shy, didn’t like it, was only kept on because there was no one else to do it.” Isabella was doing outreach to women and children, as below.
When missionary families went back to the US on furlough, the trip was partly for fundraising. Will wasn’t well-suited to this part. Family records: “Though one-on-one Will was charming, persuasive, and fascinating, in writing or when speaking for a group he became stilted and put people to sleep. That was one of the reasons that during furloughs both Will and Mary did the church circuits to raise money for the mission work, and left the kids with relatives. Will would give a brief introduction and turn the podium over to Mary, who would tell stories of the Chinese and life in China. He would work the crowd one-on-one soliciting donations. In most other missionary families the husband would travel the circuit and the wife would stay put with the children.”
The women’s outreach
Isabella’s letters reflect turning many everyday interactions into a chance to win people over.
On traveling and trying to convert some of the crowd drawn by the sight of foreigners: “By and by the crowd scatters somewhat, and some pleasant-faced women come in. They are a little afraid, but soon they sit down on the edge of the brick bed and talk. They ask about our age, family and friends, and we answer, knowing that if anything will win them, it will be the answering all these questions kindly. Then one of us tells, as plainly and distinctly as possible, of God and His Son Jesus. They listen respectfully, and one woman says, ‘Jesus is your God. It would not do for us to worship Him. I am a Buddhist.’”
“Our geraniums and verbenas are doing their duty nobly. I have given away a good many rooted slips and some cuttings, and am rooting some verbenas for our landlady. Anything which will establish friendly relations between us and this people is not to be slighted, even down to the little cotton cloth doll we made one day for our carpenter’s little girl. He has a cordial smile for me ever since.”
“Went with the cook’s wife to see Er Ku Tzu’s mother, and had a good visit. I like her. Her little girl has never seen foreigners, and was frightened when I asked if she would not like to come to our Girls’ School. She cried so hard that I thought we should have to come away before we began talking about the Bible.”
Isabella on hosting her husband’s students in shifts: “This morning we had our second breakfast for the schoolboys. We invited eight boys this time. It is so much better to have only a few each time. I cannot control, or instruct, or amuse twenty-seven boys at once.”
Providing medical care
Some missionaries (including women) were medical doctors, but others without formal training seem to have functioned as prescribers and first aid providers free of cost. This was strategic as part of the missionary work. Isabella, about a fellow missionary: “It was in a great part due to Mrs. Gulick’s medical work that the hearts of the people were made friendly, and the way opened for the Gospel.”
Isabella might have been causing more harm than good with her treatments; she mentions calomel which was a mercury-based medicine used for fevers in both Chinese and Western medicine. She was weak for six months after getting typhus, and I’m guessing part of her illness was caused by her own medications.
Isabella’s first aid seems to be more successful, as in treating a man with an injured finger: “I wanted him to go to Peking, thinking amputation of the first joint was necessary. It was impossible for him to go, so he has been coming here to have it dressed, and I am proud to say that the finger is nearly well.”
Some of their work was opium detoxes. Isabella: “Dr. Murdock is having wonderful success with her opium patients. She gets them past the miserable stage very soon. It does not last more than two days or three at the most.”
A doctor friend writing: “It was she [Isabella] who took in the man with typhus fever, after his family, fearing the contagion of the disease, had cast him in his sick- ness upon the street. He crawled to the mission gate, and the doctor being far away in the country, she had a room prepared for him, and cared for him herself until the doctor’s return.”
Both societies had some mixture of treatments that worked, and others that were neutral or harmful. Etta on the psychological benefit of the kind of medicine her students want: “People outside the school had rash and were sick two or three days, but the two girls I had in my room at the schoolhouse where I slept and took care of them, were sick two weeks in a kind of delirium. . . .We were afraid of typhoid or typhus. I read all the books I could find, and tried all the remedies I dared. Mr. Sprague thought to save criticism we ought to call in a Chinese doctor. I examined the herbs he sent in to be steeped. Caraway was among them, and sliced pears, and turnips. I don’t think it hurt them and it made the Chinese feel safer.” Etta’s students recovered, but she caught the illness and died ten days later.
Life with young children
Isabella with one baby and two Chinese foster daughters: “After dinner the girls sew, the two students are at their books again, and I try to keep a half an eye on the baby, and the other half is usually devoted to medical reading.” [“Try to keep half an eye on the baby” is a tale as old as time.]
“Mr. Williams tells Etta Bible stories in Chinese these days, and she repeats them to me. Just now she is playing with one of her dolls, on the floor. Four of her five dolls have had their heads broken off, and the other has a dreadful hole in her cranium.”
Isabella with three children: “I don’t do much but live from day to day. I cannot visit, or give medicines as I have done, while my hands are full with my three children. Faces to wash, wet aprons to change, stockings to mend, heedless children to reprove . . . so go the days.”
Mark about losing track of one of their six children while on a ship voyage to the US: We “could not find Etta. The ship servants and passengers joined in the search, on deck and below. The suspense was crushing. Had she gone on deck and fallen over? But after some time, she was found in the room opposite her own, having gone there by mistake.”
Isabella, on the state of the living room with six children, 1882: “We are glad of this large room. It is our only one, and is none too large, being used for Chinese meetings and Sabbath services. It is likewise none too large for air, when we have twenty to forty Chinese women in visiting! Moreover our sitting-room is only grand when in order. It is far from fine when the chairs are prostrate, the blocks scattered around, and paper cuttings everywhere! My fight for neatness and order is truly perpetual.”
Language
Isabella’s father was a missionary turned linguist who wrote and English-Dakota dictionary. As a teenager, Isabella worked as a teacher in Minnesota, teaching Dakota children to read in their native language so they could read the New Testament her father had translated into Dakota.
Mark’s poem about learning Chinese:
We struggled hard with inward groans,
To speak correctly all the tones,
To get the northern Mandarin,
Clear cut, as spoken at Tientsin.
In broken Chinese was our talk.
Slow we progressed, with many a balk.
Isabella: “I am thinking of sending for an English-Russian phrase book, so I can talk to the Russian ladies who speak neither Chinese nor English. Of course what I say will be very poor Russian, but it will bridge the yawning gulf of silence by making them laugh, and feel a pitying kindness to my attempts. Isn’t it queer, the comfortable superiority we feel over another person who makes blunders in speaking our language?”
Isabella on difficult conversations in a foreign language: “I had to discharge the sewing woman for untidiness, and tell the teacher that I had been paying him too much salary and make it less. I can express common things in Chinese, so as to be understood, and I can explain parts of the Gospels, but as for putting unpleasant things in the least unpleasant way, I give up at that point.”
Preciousness of imported items
Isabella: “As I have been relieved of two pairs of scissors and my third, and last thimble, my labors will be lighter hereafter! One of the twins carried my steel thimble outdoors, and lost it, long ago. The ten-cent one went next, — was stolen, — and now the other twin has taken my silver one into the court, and probably one of the men, who were carrying coal in baskets on their backs, picked it up.”
Isabella: “Mrs. Gulick wants me to send for a lot of [sewing] machine needles, so that she can break as many as she pleases!”
Opium epidemic
Both Isabella and Mark repeatedly describe the ravages of opium addiction on the Chinese population. Both blame the English for continuing to bring opium to China, and Mark preached against the opium trade while visiting London. Isabella: “As we go along the streets, we see men slinking into the opium dens. Oh, to think how many there are of these hell-mouths! What a sad letter for you. Oh, that I might send it instead to the English people! I could go on my knees and with tears beg that Christian nations would have mercy upon poor heathen China.”
When a boy she’s been caring for starts to use opium: “I have come to face the dreadful possibility that my life should be a failure, con- sidered as a missionary life. There is nothing but prayer to meet such a fear. If, so far as I know, I do not save a single soul, and if I do not live in the spirit which may have power with God and men, why my life is a failure. If I see Lu Yuan’s precious soul caught in by the devil’s snare, if I see truth fading out of his face and falsehood coming in its place, if I know that according to human probabilities, every day makes his salvation less probable, there is nothing but agony of prayer to meet the case. For if I do not save him and his mother, whom shall I be used to save? Some one whom I know and love less well? Some one whom I neither know nor love at all “
Genuine belief in the afterlife
Especially when she departs from family members she never expects to see again in this life, Isabella often writes about her expectation that the family will be reunited after death.
After her sister lost a baby: “As for the darling whom I may not see now, we shall all meet her by and by. Dear sister, you are to be rejoiced with, you who are the mother of a Shining One. It may be that her special work is to lead all our minds the more to look upward, so that heaven may be really the place of all which we shall surely feel to be most like home. Oh, it is so different to me now from what it was once. Where our dear mother and father are, and where Jesus Christ is, cannot be a strange place at all to me.”
“My heart was set on your hearing the ‘Messiah,’ at this Christmas season. Never mind, you and I are going to hear far finer chorus singing and help in it as well. It may not be so very many years till then. The choruses will be all the sweeter to us because some from among the Indians and Chinese will be singing there, and we shall remember that we helped them to come.”
Events as proof of faith — or not
Isabella recounts the words of a Chinese woman whose husband converted to Christianity and destroys the family’s traditional religious items: “As soon as he had washed the dust from his face, he burnt up the gods. I wasn’t pleased, but said nothing. The next morning he left for Peking (to go to the Bible Training School), and I thought, ‘If the gods are angry, he will meet misfortunes on the way.’ But he reached Peking safely.” So the absence of punishments from discarded gods is evidence toward their not being real.
But years later Isabella writes that any misfortunes aren’t evidence of her god’s absence: “One Friend has been with me, nor will He leave me; should any untoward thing happen, it would not be that He had left me, but only that He saw best.”
Clothing
A lot of the women’s time was taken with sewing.
Isabella, 1883: “One of my Chinese friends came for me to-day to go with her to a mandarin’s house, to look at their newly- bought sewing-machine. But alas, the book of directions was in Russian, and I could do nothing with it !”
Isabella and Mark don’t seem to wear any Chinese clothes, but the children sometimes do: “Hsin Ching has made [baby Etta] a very pretty wadded garment, bright blue, with gray lining and black edge. Our teacher and all the rest of the Chinese shook their heads over her ‘foreign clothes’ and prophesied that unless I let her be dressed according to the fashion of the country, she would die. They were all so pleased when she had the new gown on, and predicted that when she is grown she will not wear ‘foreign clothes’ at all.”
As an adult, Etta does wear Chinese clothes at times, I expect because Chinese women’s clothing of the 1890s was more suited to wintertime journeys by horseback than Western dresses: “wadded purple trousers, blue skirt, dark blue silk wadded gown and long gown of squirrel fur. I felt so bulky I couldn’t get on my saddle without mounting the horse-block.”
Isabella on recycling every bit of old clothing: “Kai Tz (Mrs. Wang T’ang) is sewing for me, and Stephen’s baseball suit is fast turning into little Liya’s winter gown. Mrs. Sprague has given an old dress which makes a suit for Tsung Mei Tz, and some of your dress-pieces Jiave patched poor Lao Ku Er up, so that she feels very proud! I am not a bit satisfied to let these children be so ragged and dirty. It makes me miserable. Rags are used for patching, the next worse for shoe-soles; the felled seams of clothes which have lost usefulness are cut out and used for mops on the boats. The final refuse may be saved for the beggars (or picked up by them), to sell to the felt mattress man, who puts such between the thicknesses of felt.”
Etta, on repairing clothes for the boys who attend her father’s school: “‘Madam, I want to go home to my mother,’ said one lad. ‘My trousers are so ragged I can’t wear them any longer. The cotton wadding has all fallen down into my legs, and is very bunchy, — not comfortable at all.’ ‘Perhaps we can mend them here.’ So the lad went to bed, and sent his trousers in to me. There is always opportunity to learn something in China. I was learning about dirt. The garment, ragged and filthy to the extreme — how could I ask my woman to touch it! With sharp scissors I cut off the vilest rags, burning them, and basted large pieces over the holes; then my woman came in, and ’twas easy to enlist her kind heart on the boy’s behalf. The labor of love accomplished by those women was not small. Often have I said, ‘Remember them, O my God, for this.’”
(Four generations later, the family has enough ties to China that my kids have occasionally worn wadded Chinese clothing, which is stuffed with cloth to make it warm.)
Foot binding and unbinding
I assumed foot-binding was largely a practice that indicated wealth, but as the Williamses describe it, it was almost universal in Kalgan. In the 1890s, Etta became an advocate for natural feet.
Etta in 1894: “The school matron’s niece Hsi Hsi is to have her feet unbound. She doesn’t want to, and goes around with her eyes red with crying, but my stony heart is unmoved. You see, it isn’t that she is of so much importance but her aunt, as matron of the Girls’ School, must not have her influence against natural feet. . . . Hsi Hsi’s brother joined in, that the trouble was in having to go home to Yu Chou, where the people had never seen a large-footed woman.”
Plants
From the time she was a teenager, Isabella writes a lot about plants and flowers. She tries to get various plants to grow in China, with mixed success.
A month before her death: “I was much pleased with the flower seeds, and am going to plant sweet alyssum in a pot, now. Such lovely things as we shall have next year! My English violets are beautiful and fill our rooms with fragrance.”
Mark: “In the winter of 1896-1897 our stove was a poor one. Isabella slept in a bedroom that was like a cellar in order that the plants in the parlor might not freeze.” She died from pneumonia that winter.
Escape from the Boxer Rebellion, across Mongolia
Mark’s book is remarkably boring, except for the part about escaping the Boxers who are about to burn down all foreign buildings. He joins a group of Christian refugees. “The mandarin told us he could not protect us, and we must leave that night for Mongolia.” They’re escorted by soldiers through the Great Wall into Mongolia. They hang out with some Buddhist monks for a while, hoping they can return home. When it becomes clear this isn’t feasible, they join a caravan going across the Gobi Desert toward Russia.
“The nineteen people in our party fill the tent, and it is hard to get food cooked for so many. The little babies cry, and hte older ones run around endanger of being scalded, or stepped on. Often the babies are rolled up and laid on a bed, and run great danger of being sat upon.”
“Imagine the sight! We had five camel carts, twelve horses, and ten baggage camels. The baby carriage trailed after a cart. Mr. Larsen rode a bicycle, and Mr. Sprague and I drove two unruly sheep.” He doesn’t mention the fate of the bicycle and the baby carriage, but it’s hard to imagine they were feasible to use across the actual desert.
As the party expands, “I am supposed to be a sheep driver, fuel gatherer, and chaplain in turn. Mr. Larsen rides a bicycle, and attracts much attention. . . . We kill a sheep almost daily, for thirty people eat a good deal.” They travel along an established caravan route, which has telegraph poles by this point. They make it to a Russian consulate. “I have seen drunken men, a sight which we never see in China, which shows that we have come to Russian civilization!” They travel west by wagon, then by the Trans-Siberian railway, then by ship back to the US.
The worst parts
As in all old narratives, I was worried there would be a part where one of them beats someone. There sure is, from Isabella about her foster daughter: “I have had to whip Topsy very severely several times. We think we shall like both girls very much when they are tamed, however!”
She’s explicit that she’s only telling her family the cheerful parts, but she sometimes sounds much sadder: “Pray for us. We are lonely and weary sometimes. Living here in this heathen land is a kind of death, a long dying.”
Funny parts
Teenaged Isabella traveling: “As we had no tent, Anna and I fastened our mosquito bar [netting] up under the wagon at night. Somehow we fixed it so as to let in all the mosquitoes who chose to come in, and in consequence had a night of it! We were wonderfully glad when morning came.”
A heat wave causes the butchers’ shops to close, resulting in a displacement of cats:
“The Kalgan cats were well- nigh famished ! Several strange cats prowled through our house nightly, and they, with the three which the children own, lapped the milk pans clean ; tipped over the canned milk, and nibbled its edges; ate up and scattered dry bread ; devoured huge pieces from the fresh loaves; licked the butter at any chance opportunity; and worse than all, waked me, and kept me awake and up and down in chase of the disappointing cat tails! I was aging rapidly, and really becoming feeble, when the butcher shops opened again.”
Isabella telling her teenaged children to use enough postage from the US to China: “Such good letters came to-day! We like to pay ten cents extra on your letters, — we really do, — and it was well worth it. Still for economy’s sake (I’m getting to hate economy sometimes), if you would have your letters weighed every time you send them, it would be well. I dislike the present postal arrangement by which your five cent stamp goes for nothing if the letter is the least bit over weight, and a red ten cent ‘Postage Due’ is clapped on!”
Isabella and 84 exploding rotten eggs, 1882: “Dr. Murdock’s patients bring her eggs, sugar, vege- tables and fruit of all kinds as thank-offerings. I buy most of them of the dispensary at market prices. Once I got a lot of bad eggs, eighty-four! It was my first experience with eggs that pop like firecrackers, and it scared me. Pop, pop, and with every pop a scream, and then a laugh. Those eggs were worth all I should have paid for them, for the fun of the thing. I popped them by dozens, one morning, pop, scream, laugh. I did sometimes keep back the squeal, but there would come a loud report, and then a body could not help it!”