f ‘ i, tJ y fi / / ‘y Ly | ; 42 Ai2 ¢ / : é / GREENSBORO DAILY NEWS Cavaleade SUNDAY, MAY 28, 1972 BeOks eos a eS | Editorials. ......4-5 pe Pazae hus Boe 6 Arte Arey ya eat ‘ Tar Heels In China Stories By Susan Herring Jefferies Special To The Daily News North Carolina has probably sent more missionaries, statesmen, scholars and traders to China than any other southern state. From the first opening of the ports in 1843, contrary to Kipling’s old saw, East and this corner of the West met again and again. Sometimes with a bang. But the good earth survived. About seven of these impacts is a strong odor of tar. Wheth- er successful or not probably depends on point of view, which has - a way of changing over the decades from one hemisphere to the other. Stout Fighter For The Lord North Carolina’s picneer mis- sionaries, Matthew T. and Eliza Yates, arrived in Shanghai aboard the clipped ship Thom- as W. Sears in 1847, Beset by storms off the Cape of Good Hope and becalmed in the South. Pacific, the journey took four months, To build a Baptist outpost between the mosquito-infested moat of the native city and the foreign concession took Yates four years. What with slim pick- ings during the War Between the States, it took Southern Bap- tists four decades to hoist him to a saintly pedestal. Today there can be little doubt of his courage in facing Staggering odds, but what hap- pened was like having a rug pulled out from under him — but not by the Chinese, be it noted. And it was no beautiful Oriental prayer rug, either. One sultry night in September of 1853, Taiping rebels boiled up from the south where they had been making righteous noises. Under their leader who called himself ‘Taiping Wong,” or “Great Peace King,” they were undertaking to free the land from 200 years of Manchu op- pression. Not too well known was the fact that he had failed twice to paSs imperial exams for civil service, and bitterly resented China’s defeat by the British in two opium wars. / * * * HE HAD FOUND a kindred spirit in the Rev. Isacchar Jacox Roberts, a Baptist from Kentucky, and together they de- nounced the use of opium, de- stroyed idols and enforced the Ten Commandments by means of the sword when necessary. Yates thought the movement “far surpassed the Reformation of Luther,’”’ and hoped to ‘teach the: way of the Lord more per- fectly,” once the takeover was complete. All very pious and supposedly democratic but up- setting to the regime in Peking to which the West owed a toe hold a: the Middle Kingdom. Richard McKenna 3 A) ET nA REA rE Susan Herring Jefferies is the daughter of the Icte David’ Wells Herring, one of North Carolina's first foreign mis- sionaries. She was born in China, and came fo the United States at the age of 16 to attend college at Meredith. She lofer taught at Meredith and at Southern Seminary in Buena Vista, Va. Presently, she is a statistical analyst in genetics at N.C. State University in Raleigh and has maintained a keen interest in China all her life. She is the author of Papa Wore No Halo," published in 1963, the story of the life of her late father as a Southern Baptist missionary in China. She is cur- rently working on a novel called "Pagoda Passage,"" a story laid in the Yellow River area where she grew up and where, in 1937-38, Chiang Kai-shek was battling the Japanese. _ The accompanying article is the result of her research into the role North Carolinians have played in China and is told in episodes involving seven persons. SUT MLL) UL TO aH eee IAAT At the sudden appearance of the rebels, one official refused to turn over the seal of office, was slashed to bits and left at the gate of Yamen as a warning. Others escaped to the Foreign Concession. Yates went to investigate. Six-foot guns and naked swords .bristled in the darkness, but guards waved him past as a “hao pung-yeo,” or good friend because he could speak the lan- guage. He was promised that foreign life and property was to be respected, but to be on the safe side, sent his wife and daughter to the Foreign Conces- sion. * * * DETERMINED to hold fort against counterattack by the Im- _perialists, Yates barricaded him- ‘self with mattresses at doors and windows in ‘his grey, brick mansion. ‘‘Here I stay until the roof is shot from over my * head,’” he wrote home to Ameri- Ca. In the immediate area, at least, Christianity became the “in” thing. Sabbaths previously unheard of were rigorously en- » forced, and attendance doubled and redoubled. ‘‘Even the sound of the church bell seems to comfort the people,’’’ Yates re- ported. One Sunday, Wong Ah-sou, a nephew of this Chinese Crom- well, came to the chapel to apply for membership. Once, he said, he had bathed his heart region in the accepted ‘‘Taip- ing” manner but now he wished to go under the water and be a “true disciple.” Yates was elat- ed. The killing of the natives con- tinued, however, and both sides began to demand entry to the compound, situated as it was between the old and the new. Yates had one answer to both. “I am your friend. You say, your enemies are thieves. Do you think I would harbor hood- lums?” During one long day of firing, Yates heard a cannon ball hit the roof, roll along a rafter, and caught it as it dropped through the ceiling, having, as he put it, “wasted its energy.” Came finally the ‘‘Battle of Muddy Flat,” when a group of westerners decided to support the.rebels and routed the Em- peror’s forces decisively, * * * REJOICING IN THE victory, Yates moved his family back to the compound, but his joy was short-lived. Much besides the terrain remains muddy, Wheth- er, as one historian claimed, the French acted out of Catholic bias against the Protestant na- ture of the Taipings or out of dismay at the loss of trade, they joined with the British to back law and order, Manchvu-style. Yates was told by a new American consul to leave the mission compound to its fate and allow the city to be set afire, by the Emperor’s forces, if they. chose. Whereupon Ah-sou took the axe with which he had been hacking away at idols, and stormed into the British Consu- late. Yates and Roberts plead for and gained the boy’s release from being chained up as vio- lently insane, but the young man died soon after of causes unde- termined. Thus ended puritanism in Shanghai. Peking saved face by payment to the Baptists to re- build. What with funds from home non-existent, Yates invest- ed in real estate. Soon he was able to donate sizable profits to Wake Forest College and other worthwhile institutions at home. Perhaps he was too much of a Tar Heel to feel at home for long on any Cloud Nine. Only the Chinese came out losers. Dark-skinned Sikhs were imported from India to police the concessions, doubly effec- tive ‘because the Chinese were afraid of them. Although Japa- nese were allowed to come and go at will, Chinese and dogs were excluded. This in their own country, ; Under layers and layers of so-called inscrutability, their hatred of foreign devils smol- dered until the turn of the centu- ty when even the Imperialists turned against the white man. Eee Parker At Wedding Party In China About 1918 He Stands Below Grinning Dog, Next Te Woman On Right MR, AND MRS. HERRING in their Chengchow, China home in 1921. It was bombed to rubble by the Japanese. David Wells Herring: David Wells Herring cf Pender County sailed for China in 1885, Also aboard ship was the one- time stowaway, Charlie Soong, who had been sponsored by Gen- eral Julian S. Carr and numer- ous missionary societies across the state, and educated at Trini- ty College (now Duke Universi- ty). iS he to father the famed “Soong Dynasty’’—son, T.V, and the daughters who married Sun Yat-sen, Chiang Kai-shek, and H. H. Kung — the bright-faced lad was thought to be the best hope of Christianizing China. Herring thought otherwise. Dating a letter, ‘‘Dec. 23, 1885, latitude 32.16, longitude 167.11,” he wrote his opinion to a cousin. “That Chinaman is the most _ China: A Lesson And A Hope Richard McKenna reversed the usual order. After years of service with the United States Navy in the Orient, he became a Tar Heel. He came to Chapel Hill because he was told the University was the place for a man with a purpose. McKenna graduated Phi Beta Kappa in 1956. In 1963, he wrote the highly successful “‘Sand Peb- bles” which won the “‘Sir Walter Raleigh” award for the best fiction of the year published by a North Carolinian. The ‘Washington Post’’ quotes ‘McKenna as puzzled that he did not realize earlier how galling the “Unequal Treaties” had been to the Chinese. Set up to protect BY foreign interests, even 75 years © later, they allowed a meager 5 per cent tariff on imports, mostly channeled through for- eign bondholders - without so much as passing through Chinese hands, “We (sailors) know it was all right to curse and kick coolies in China, but you had better not do anything like that in Japan or the Philippines.’”’ About all the and his fellows realized was that whiskey was a lot, cheaper in China than in the land of the free and the home of.the brave. A quote from John © Ciardi seems in order, for he might have been speaking of Mc- Kenna, “The drunkard hopes to i lose himself in his bottle,” Chiardi wrote in the “Saturday Review,”’ ‘‘whereas the writer hopes to find himself on his ‘page . ... (but there is no mercy in it! ‘no page cares what it has cost the writer.’’) * * x AFTER THE STORY was pub- lished, McKenna revealed the disciplines he had put himself through — rigors that may in- deed have shortened “his life. Anyway, he was dead when the movie was made and the part played by the warlord of the twenties: carefully disguised in view of the current image. Even so, this was no gaudy western with good and bad guys roman- tically fashioned. Even the mis- sionaries came in for scrutiny, some right and some left of the cutting edge of reality. In a world of militant protest and confusion, it is comforting to think that McKenna’s com- passion may_have flowered in the sunshine of North Carolina. He wrete: Well, those were the good old days and they are gone forever and I am glad. I find moret discomfort than pleasure now in these memories. They make me wonder what I maay be taking casually for granted right this moment, which could seem equally incredible to me thirty years from now, if it is granted me to live that much longer. - Too Stubborn To Yield conceited thing I ever saw. He is going to bust something wide open. He and Bryan (another Tar Heel) had an argument to- day at dinner, Arminianism and Calvinism, Whew! All cther con- versations were hushed. I don’t think Bryan will suffer himself to take issue with that ‘smarty’ any more.” Herring had been groomed at Wake Forest to inherit the prophet’s mantle from the aging Yates. He found nothing like he had expected of a mission field. He made a long journey inland and was convinced that he want- ed nothing to do with ‘flowery beds of ease” or the exploitation in the ports. i Herring found that, long be- fore Galileo, the sons of Han -_ had conceived the earth as a sphere without upsetting any re- ligious applecart. He saw Chinese working together to build dikes along the Yellow River, already flowing with its load of silt some twenty feet above the plain. é a He saw children in schools, backing up to the teacher and shouting their lessons in chorus. At least they were facing in the sare direction, and Herring saw no need to change their ways. (Mrs. Jefferies has told Her- ring’s story more fully in the book, PAPA WORE NO HALO, published by Blair of Winston- Salem). * * * ON HIS FIRST furlough, Her- ring tried to convince the breth- ren to let him dress and live simply like the Chinese, propa- gating Christianity in the quiet nanner of its founder, The method may have smacked too much of Confucius. At any rate, long black queues and flowing (See David: E-7, Col. 1) Lee Parker Made Face With ‘Wives’ Lee Parker, at 80, still drives every day to his office in the Raleigh Insurance Building, He worked in China for the British and American Tobacco Compa- ny from 1916 to 1921. A bache- lor, young and eager to see the world, he traveled from the far reaches of Manchuria to the humid ports of the south, Fifty years later he and Mrs. Parker went to see the changes wrought in the middle half of the century in Asia. His view- point is thus ur que. Zhe entrance to the Parker home on Glenwood Avenue is guarded by ceramic elephants and opens on vistas of Chinese rugs, lamps, 24d tables of inlaid ivory. Lee’s\ wife, Janie, and the poodle seem to share his zest for people — especially those who have roots in the East. * * * PARKER SAYS that China, seen from a port, is no more Chinese than chop suey. ‘In China you mus: vield to kewi- chew (local mores) for it will never yield’ 1 yon. This I learned early.” I wanted an example. “Well, my interpreter coughs politely and tells me that even the poorest coolie boasts of at least one wife. Thereafter I claimed anywhere from four to eight. Here we call it status, but face is the better word.’ The round face flushed with laughter to the thinning harvest of white hair. ‘‘The missionaries tried to warn me against the evils in the ports, but me — I had to see for myself.” Janie, serving tea, urged me to ask what happened in Kobe, It proved an interesting story. One lady, the wife of a British army officer serving on the World War II western front, had _ undertaken to guide three young bachelors about the port. Two managed to get lost when the “motherly” madame — all of 30 years old — ‘directed the rick- shas to a leading geisha house, (See Parker: E-2, Col, 1) Lee Parker doer CF