What China Needed Was the YMCA : GOLDEN INCHES The China Memoir of Grace Service <i> edited by John S. Service (University of California Press: $19.95; 347 pp., illustrated and annotated) </i>

In 1930, in response to her husband’s urging, Grace Service began reading through stacks of her letters and diaries with the thought of recording the extraordinary experiences of her 32 years in China. “I promised him I would try,” she relates, “but told him that all I had in mind was a woman’s story, a tale of the never-ceasing procession of small events that make up life anywhere.” More than half a century later, “Golden Inches: The China Memoir of Grace Service” far exceeds that modest goal.

Richly annotated by her eldest son, John S. Service, the “China hand” who knew Mao Tse-tung and Chou En-lai in Yenan, her memoir provides intimate access to the lived details of China’s political and social disarray in the tumultuous years between 1905 and 1937. Across the pages of “Golden Inches” spills an astonishing procession of events.

We glimpse the perils of bandit-plagued houseboat journeys through the Yangtze River rapids from Shanghai to the remote interior, the surges of xenophobia during the emergence of China’s Republic, the revolutionary hostilities resulting in “heads hanging in all the trees along that road” as the Service family arrived in Nanking in 1911.

China was “on the threshold of vast changes,” Grace and Robert Service were told at their formal introduction to the YMCA’s international work program in 1905. The Y’s goal, embraced by the Services, was to promote education, public health, community spirit and Christian moral values.

Twenty-nine years later, the rising tide of nationalism, coupled with severe financial and bureaucratic difficulties within the YMCA, terminated what they had accepted as their lives’ work. Robert’s dismissal from his post was a blow from which he never recovered.

“Golden Inches” offers not only a vivid and valuable account of the Services’ personal effort to change China but also a journey back in time to a moment when intrepid American families trekked to Mt. Omei or to the Tibetan border on summer holiday by sedan-chair, crossing precarious hanging bridges and lodging in temples or primitive local inns, constantly subject to robbery and always accompanied by vast provisions, sometimes a cow to provide milk for the children, sometimes portable galvanized bathtubs carried and filled by coolies. But while the “small procession of events” that Grace narrates is always engrossing and often gripping in its intensity, it also presents disturbing juxtapositions.

Preoccupied with the provisioning and protection of her family, she necessarily distanced herself from the mud, the bloodshed and the extremes of want beyond her gates. It was just this disciplined detachment that enabled her to endure the tragic loss of an infant daughter on the first of many harrowing river journeys, and to cope with her husband’s near-fatal typhoid or the lingering effects of her own rheumatic fever. As we glimpse a population ravaged by poverty and famine, by exploitation and by the dislocations of civil strife, we understand the painful process of becoming numbed to human misery.

As mother, foreign hostess and dedicated YMCA wife, Service was a product of her era. She had to turn her husband’s collars since “there were no tailors in these early years who knew anything about ‘foreign-style’ sewing.” She had to arrange the menu of beans, fried chicken, ice cream and cake for the Fourth of July picnic in 1923. She assumed that her “boy” was there to serve the needs of this American family, that her servants would provide cupcakes, butter and bath water, and that ideas for home improvements amid such monumental deprivation could be drawn from the pages of The Ladies Home Journal.

It was precisely the conditions of inequality, scarcity and suffering that Robert Service worked tirelessly to mitigate through the agency of the YMCA, but as “Golden Inches” makes apparent, there was no easy remedy for China’s social and economic distress.

With her husband wedded also to the YMCA, which he selflessly and almost single-handedly founded in Chengdu, the burdens of daily life fell to Grace. At times, her loneliness becomes palpable. The letters and diaries on which her memoir is based clearly provided a refuge and an outlet for her talents and her creativity. While her days were largely consumed by duties to husband and home, her writing was a way of sustaining herself.

Jack Service pays tribute to his mother’s inner trials as well as to her courage, her independence, and her literary gifts in making accessible the unsung achievements of this remarkable woman. In editing her manuscript, he also provides rare insights into his own early life as he comes to terms, for example, with a father whom in important ways he never knew and whose life in many ways paralleled his own.

Like Robert Service, Jack devoted himself to a China mission that required intense personal commitment and ultimately self-sacrifice. Just as his father was finally dismissed from the YMCA that he had nobly served, so Jack, the most brilliant and insightful of the State Department’s political analysts, was dismissed from the Foreign Service at the height of the McCarthy persecutions for his heretical conviction that the future of China lay with the Communist Party, not with the corrupt and inept regime of Chiang Kai-shek.

Just as “Golden Inches” testifies to the strength and endurance of Grace Service, it also bears quiet witness to the intellectual and emotional resources of her eldest son. Since Jack Service has refused to write an autobiography, we must be doubly grateful for the “personal nature of the footnotes,” which contribute importantly to this fascinating portrait of an American family and the China they lived to serve.