Gladys didn’t know what to do. The engineer told her the city of Fufeng was three days’ journey from Sian, and as far as he knew, Fufeng was still accepting refugees. Gladys wept bitterly at the news, but deep inside she found the strength to go on.
The next three days on the train were a muddled blur for Gladys. Sometimes she thought she was back in England with her parents, sometimes she hid her head in her hands when she thought she heard Japanese planes, and sometimes she thought she was standing on the banks of a wide river she could never cross. By the time they got to Fufeng, Gladys couldn’t celebrate. She hardly knew where or who she was. In spite of her condition, she managed to find an orphanage that would take all the children. Within two days of delivering the children safely to the orphanage, Gladys fell into a coma. No one could wake her from it, and she was transferred to a hospital.
Chapter 16
Going Home
The voices sounded far away at first, drifting quietly through the fog in her mind. But slowly they grew louder. Gladys could begin to make out the words—English words. She opened her eyes. She was lying on a bed in a room with white walls. But where were the children? Why couldn’t she hear their voices? And where was she, anyway? The last she remembered she was riding on a pile of coal on a train.
Gladys could hear the voices in English again. They were coming from beyond the curtain that surrounded her bed. A man was talking. “It’s hard to believe she’s only thirty-eight. She seems much older. Her body appears to be completely worn out.”
Then Gladys heard a woman’s voice. “It’s incredible she’s alive at all. Fever, pneumonia, typhoid, malnutrition. Any one of those would kill a normal person, and she was carried in here two weeks ago with all four!”
Who was talking? Gladys wanted to know. She let out a moan, and the curtain was instantly pulled back. Gladys saw a European doctor and a nurse, who hurried to her side when they realized she was conscious again.
For the next two months, Gladys faded in and out of consciousness in the hospital run by Baptist missionaries. Sometimes she didn’t know who she was or what she was doing in the hospital, and she always asked the same question: “Are the children safe?” Miraculously, they were. Through the entire journey from Yangcheng, not one child had died or even become seriously ill.
Finally, Gladys was well enough for the doctor to suggest she stay with some missionary friends of his in the countryside. There she would be able to rest and recover even more.
Gladys lived in the country for several months before she felt strong enough to move out on her own again. All of the children were being taken care of in a refugee orphanage, but as soon as Gladys was able, she collected fourteen of them, including Ninepence, Francis, and Boa Boa. Together they made a new home in the back room of an empty factory. The older girls took in sewing projects, called piecework because they were paid a tiny amount for each piece they sewed. The older boys found odd jobs, such as carrying loads for people or gardening. When they pooled all their money, they had just enough to buy food each day.
Gradually, as Gladys became stronger and able to think more clearly, she went back to missionary work. Ninepence was old enough to take care of the family while Gladys was away.
On one of her mission trips, Gladys took a long trek into Tibet with a Chinese Christian doctor. While there, they were invited to spend a week in a lamasery. As she and the doctor climbed up the steep mountain to the lamasery, Gladys had the feeling the monks inside had been waiting for them. When they arrived, she found that indeed they had been. The head lama himself proudly showed her a gospel tract, which had been glued to the wall. It read, “For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son (John 3:16).” The head lama told Gladys how they had been waiting for three years for someone to come who could tell them more about this God. When they’d heard Gladys and her companion singing Christian hymns in the valley below, they knew they were the ones who could explain the verse to them.
Night after night, the five hundred Lamaist monks listened to Gladys and the doctor preach. Many monks asked Gladys to pray with them or asked questions about the Christian faith. Several years later, Gladys learned that the Communists had destroyed the lamasery, as they had destroyed many other churches and temples in an attempt to remove all outward signs of religion in China. But Gladys knew that among the monks there were those who had truly believed the gospel message and that the Communists could never destroy them.
Wherever Gladys went she shared the gospel message. She worked for a time in a leper colony, where she urged all the newly converted lepers to pray for the local prison. Gladys began preaching in the prison day after day until many of the prisoners became Christian converts. Everywhere she went, it seemed, Chinese people were searching for the true God to help and guide them.
Even though they had already been through so much war and hardship, many Chinese people sensed that the worst was still to come. And it was. Once the war with Japan was over, Gladys witnessed even more bloodshed and brutality. The cruelest thing of all was that this time it was not an outside country inflicting the damage. The Chinese themselves were destroying each other. The tremendous disruption the war with Japan had brought to China had created an opportunity for the Communist party to grab more political control. Now the Communists were in a bitter fight with Nationalist Chinese forces for control of the country. In the north, the Communists seemed to be winning the fight, but at a terrible cost to the Chinese people.
As the fighting raged on, Gladys was asked by the Methodist church to become an evangelist for them. Refugees were still flooding into the area from all over China, and the Methodist church, like all Christian churches in China, had too few trained workers to help. Most foreign missionaries either had been sent home or were still held in concentration camps. Gladys agreed to do it, but only on the condition that she could continue her other work as well. Once more, Gladys was working long hours with little sleep and little food, but she was doing what she loved. When she preached, hundreds of people listened to her, and many became Christian converts. They were from all walks of life. Some were poor refugees who owned nothing but the tattered clothes they wore. Others were people who still held high positions in Chinese society. A large number of students at the local university also became converts, and Gladys encouraged them in their new faith.
Within months, the Communist party took control of the university. It made each of its five hundred students fill out a long questionnaire. Some of the questions were very strange, some even funny, like How many children does your uncle have? How much money did your grandfather have when he died? But the last question had dangerous implications for Christians. What political party do you support? If you are for the government (Communists) put a circle. If you are against it put an “X.”
For each student, answering this question was a serious matter. To draw a circle was to say you were for the new government, which meant you and your family would be favored with good jobs and good money. To put an “X” meant that you were against the government and you would be marked for life and not be allowed good jobs or opportunities in your own country. Each student carefully considered his or her answer. When the circles and X’s were counted, the officials were furious. Two hundred questionnaires had X’s on them. The government had to find out what was happening. It was not difficult to discover. Student after student told about their conversion to Christianity through Gladys’s preaching and explained that they now supported Jesus Christ and no one else.
Of course, this made the leaders of the Communist party very angry. They needed every student’s loyalty, and so the three hundred students who had drawn circles on the questionnaire were called to a secret meeting. They were told to harass the Christian students any way they could until the Christian students agreed to support the Communists. A month later, the questionnaire was given again. This time when the papers were collected, there were even more X’s than before. Instead of the Communists changing the Christian students’ minds, it had worked the other way around!
Again, the circle drawers were called together. They were told by the Communists they must do more to stop the Christians. So prayer meetings were broken up, and Christian students were beaten in darkened alleys. But at the end of a month, not one of the Christian students was ready to support the Communists. In fact, they were more determined than ever not to support them. This angered the Communists very much. They assigned ten Communist supporters to each Christian student to break them down. The Christian students were not allowed to talk to each other, and they were constantly mocked by their companions. Every movement they made and every word they said was recorded. After three months of this, the Communist party called an open meeting in the town square. Gladys was there, praying for the students.
Over two hundred students were marched into the square, heavily guarded by Communist troops. A man clutching a sheath of papers climbed onto a box. He picked up the first sheet of paper and read a name loudly. A seventeen-year-old girl stepped forward from the group of prisoners. Gladys recognized her as a member of a family from Peking that before the war had been very wealthy. The girl was one of the newest converts. Gladys shivered as she thought about the pressure the girl had been living under for the previous three months.
The Communist official cleared his throat. He looked directly at the girl. “Who do you support now?” he asked.
The crowd was hushed. The girl spoke loudly and clearly. “Sir, three months ago, I thought Jesus Christ was real, and I thought the Bible was true. Now after three months of your hatred, I know Jesus Christ is real, and I know the Bible is true.”
The official, his face turned white with rage, yelled to one of the soldiers on his left. The teenage girl was pulled roughly into the center of the square and shoved to her knees. With one swift movement the Communist soldier drew his sword and sliced the girl’s head off. Gladys buried her own head in her hands. All she could do was pray the same prayer Mrs. Lawson had taught her, the one she had prayed after seeing her name on the wanted poster in Yangcheng. “If they must die, let them not be afraid of death, but let there be a meaning, O God, in their dying.”
As much as she wanted to flee from the terrible sight, Gladys stayed while each of the more than two hundred students was asked whether he or she would support the Communist government. Even though they knew for certain they were only moments from death, not one of them said they supported the Communists. Every one of them was beheaded.
As Gladys walked slowly home after the brutality in the town square, she wept bitterly for what China was becoming.
Gradually, over the next year, it became more difficult for Gladys to continue her missionary work. She was being watched most of the time, and while she didn’t fear death or imprisonment for herself, she was concerned that she was drawing attention to many other local Christians and putting their lives in danger.
After much prayer, Gladys decided to move to Shanghai, where she was introduced to a group of influential Chinese Christians who told her about a local society they had formed at the end of the war. The society had collected money from around the world and now used it to send German missionaries and orphaned missionary children back to Germany. German missionaries had been put in a difficult position during the Second World War, which had ended a year before. Their financial support from Germany had been cut off, and countries at war with Germany would not help them. Many German missionaries had died of starvation in China as a result, and those who had lived through the war were weak and in need of medical treatment.
