Seeds of Chinese Nationalism : ...

When my mother, an unmarried woman of 22, arrived in Shanghai in 1904, the memory of the Boxer Rebellion and its martyrs was still green. During her first month of teaching at Miss Jewell’s School in the International Settlement, she was wakened one night to what she thought was the sound of gunfire, and running out into the hall of the dormitory was met by some other teachers, one of whom exclaimed, “The Boxers!” A few moments later a servant appeared to reassure them, saying that it was only firecrackers in a street procession. Nothing so dramatic as this ever happened to me during my boyhood, but those who had been under siege and had survived were still looked on with awe, and the (possibly inaccurate) number of martyrs--242--was easy to remember for its symmetry. Growing up in Chinese territory, I knew that many Chinese still sympathized with the Boxers in their effort to get rid of the foreigners and, being somewhat Chinese myself, I understood that feeling, though I had sense enough not to express it to my Presbyterian father.

In his foreword to this remarkably full record of one missionary family’s experience in China, Harrison Salisbury notes that approval of the Boxers still survives in China and aptly draws a parallel between the events of the rebellion and the essence of Greek tragedy. With the missionary’s concern for the saving of immortal souls set against pride of a totally different cultural inheritance, disaster was inevitable.

The Prices were not quite the typical mission family. They heard the call a little late in life, went to Oberlin College, as devout Congregationalists, to prepare themselves for carrying out their duty, and arrived finally in an inland station. Eva Jane Price wrote lively letters home; her husband, Charlie, rather dull, formal ones. With the birth of children they became, like most Protestant mission families, doubly vulnerable, torn between carrying out what they saw as their divinely appointed duty and their human feeling as loving parents. Some of the most moving passages of these letters--rescued by Eva’s grandnieces from a wicker basket that had been passed from generation to generation--are Eva’s assurances to her family and herself that she and Charlie are grateful to God for taking their two young sons to himself so early in their lives. Beneath these sincere assurances of faith, one feels the aching arms and heart of a loving mother, who now has special reasons to cherish their third child, a daughter, remaining with them to the end.

But not everything is tragic here. Indeed, through Eva’s eyes we get a vivid, often humorous, picture of what it was like to live in a remote mission station in China in those years, struggling to learn a tonal language without gender, number, or tense. Like most American families in China, the Prices maintained a non-Chinese household and style of living. “Home” remained across the ocean, and this record is broken by a furlough period in America. By this time, at least one reader had so closely identified with the Prices that he felt like crying out against their return, knowing how truly reluctant Eva was to go, though understanding her sense of duty, and knowing as well what lay ahead for them.

But return they must, and their final days make engrossing reading, involving all the suspense of a popular thriller, with a sympathetic Chinese official doing his best to protect them, their efforts to escape to the coast coming close to success, only to be. . . . But the record and letters themselves must be read to get a full sense of who Eva and Charlie Price were and what they believed in and what they meant to China and China to them. And with the book read, this reviewer found it sobering to consider that millions of the Earth’s inhabitants continue to believe in one or another revealed religion as truth apart from the culture that fostered it and, like the members of the mission movement, are willing to die for it.