It sounded awful to Belle, but she mumbled some kind of thanks to Mr. Brownlee and fled to her room. Three words kept repeating themselves over and over in her head—proud, disobedient, troublemaker—along with the phrase “If you prove to us that you have conquered these traits…” Conquered them! Belle became indignant every time she thought of those words; they implied that the council believed the reference and that they really thought she had issues with such things as pride, disobedience, and troublemaking.
How Belle wished she knew who it was that had written such things about her to the council. She imagined what she would say to that person! In fact, Belle was so indignant that she wrote to a friend from Moody, explaining to him how unfairly she had been treated. His reply to her letter was a surprise. “Belle, you need to think of it differently. If someone had accused me of those traits, I would have answered, ‘Amen, brother! You haven’t told the half of it.’”
Belle thought long and hard about her friend’s letter and finally conceded that he was right. Perhaps other people saw things in her that she did not see in herself. What was she trying to hide? Eventually she would run into some difficulty on the mission field. Everyone did, and pride might well rear its head within her. Perhaps it was better to agree with the reference writer than to argue the matter. This new attitude liberated Belle from resentment, and she felt relaxed leaving the matter for God to sort out. In His time and His way, she told herself, she would make it to China to work among the Lisu people.
Back in Vancouver Belle tried to figure out what to do next. She did not want to return to teaching school, because she would have to sign a contract to do so, and who knew how long it would be before China opened up again. Instead, she took a job supervising the Vancouver Girls’ Corner Club, a Christian club designed to encourage young working women in their faith and give them the opportunity to invite their coworkers to evangelistic meetings.
Belle found the job invigorating but exhausting. She lived with her father and brother on the north side of Vancouver, which meant that she had to catch a ferry to and from downtown Vancouver, where the club offices were located. The ferry did not sail frequently in the evenings, and it was often midnight before Belle was able to catch one home.
As 1928 rolled around, a stream of mail flowed between Belle and John Kuhn. John told of the difficulties the uprising in China had caused and how he was glad that she was not living in China. For her part, Belle told John about the Girls’ Corner Club and her concerns for her father, who was still gambling with the family money on Wall Street.
Finally the letter that Belle had been waiting for arrived. Belle’s future depended on the content of the letter. John had finished his language studies and had been deemed among the most gifted linguists that China Inland Mission had ever trained. Now it was time for him to be assigned as a missionary to a province in China. The decision of where he went was partly his—he was able to say where he felt called to serve—and partly that of CIM, who got to say where he was needed the most. Would he be sent to the far northwest of China, where he had originally intended to go, or south to Yunnan Province, where the Lisu lived?
Belle could hardly contain her excitement when she read that John was on his way to serve as a missionary in Yunnan Province. Even more than that, in his letter John asked Belle to be his wife and partner in life and in the mission. “Cable the word ‘light’ if you accept the proposal and ‘dark’ if you refuse,” he ended his letter.
“Light!” was the one-word telegram that Belle delightedly sent to John in China. Now, if only China Inland Mission would reopen the borders, she could be on her way!
In October 1928—eighteen months after Belle had left candidate school in Toronto—a party of CIM missionary candidates was asked to sail for China. By this time all thought of Belle’s being unfit for missionary service was erased. In fact, Charles Thomson wrote Belle a letter explaining his opinion. It read, “I have never mentioned to you that little condition of the Toronto council. From the first, both Professor Ellis and I felt there was a mistake somewhere, and I want you to know that so thorough is our confidence in you that we do not find it necessary to call the Western Council together. I have called each of them, and they all agreed that you are a unanimous choice. You have our complete blessing.”
Belle wept as she read Charles’s letter. She recalled just how close she had come to “defending” herself, and now the matter had completely turned itself around without her help.
Belle eagerly began packing her trunk. Among the items she packed were a rug, curtains, and a large homemade quilt that a friend had given her as a going-away present. Belle planned to use these to help furnish the house that she and John would eventually share after they were married. Belle also packed her guitar to take along with her.
Finally Belle was done packing. On October 11, 1928, she would set sail for China, where her future husband and the Lisu people all awaited her.
Chapter 8
China at Last
Belle peered over the railing of the Empress of Russia. The sky was battleship grey and melted into the sea at the horizon. So far, eight days into the voyage from Vancouver to Shanghai, China, the sea had been rough and the temperature cool for fall, but Belle did not mind. She was ecstatic to finally be on her way, though it had been sad to say good-bye to her father and brother when the ship made a brief stop in Victoria.
On board the Empress of Russia with her were eleven other CIM missionaries—nine new recruits and two experienced missionaries returning to China from furlough. One of these returning missionaries was Ruth Paxson, who conducted an hour-long Bible study each morning. Belle eagerly attended the Bible study. She loved listening to Ruth’s stories about China and her advice on how to fit in as a missionary. But this particular morning Ruth said something that upset Belle. Ruth looked from the face of one eager young missionary to the next and pronounced, “When you get to China, all the scum of your nature will rise to the top.”
Belle was indignant. Was Ruth Paxson saying they all had scum in their nature? The other missionaries on the voyage seemed like kind, generous people, and Belle felt scum was too strong a word to describe their response to the challenges they would face on the mission field. Belle did not anticipate any major problems adjusting to missionary life; God had called her to the mission field, and that was all she needed to know.
Six weeks after setting sail from Vancouver, Belle stood at the rail of the Empress of Russia and watched as the coast of China came into view. The land was lush and green, and as the ship moved closer to land, Belle could see small villages dotted about the landscape. Eventually the ship passed through the mouth of the Yangtze River, whose water was a muddy brown color. Soon afterward, the ship turned south into the Hwang-poo River. After traveling fifteen miles up the Hwang-poo, it arrived at Shanghai. By now all of the missionaries aboard were lined up along the railing as the Empress of Russia inched her way closer to the dock.
Chicago had been a bustling city, and even Vancouver, but Belle had never before seen anything like Shanghai. The whole city seemed to be a seething mass of activity. The Hwang-poo River was clogged with vessels of all sizes. Ships were coming and going amid hundreds of junks and smaller sampans that zipped up and down and across the river.
Belle could see men everywhere on the dock. Some were waiting to tie up their ship and move the gangway into position, while others were moving freight from ships docked nearby. Men were carrying heavy loads slung from bamboo poles that rested on their shoulders, while others pushed along wheelbarrow-like contraptions piled high with goods. It all looked like total chaos to Belle, but she noted that the hundreds of men she saw seemed to know what they were doing and where they were going with their loads.
Soon after the Empress of Russia had docked, a representative from China Inland Mission came aboard to escort the new arrivals to the CIM guesthouse. As the group made its way through the streets of Shanghai, Belle was once again dumbfounded by all the activity. Western-style office buildings lined many of the streets. Street vendors were selling vegetables that Belle had never seen before, not to mention meat that she had no idea what animal it came from. Flies languished on the meat in the sun, and a stench unlike anything Belle had ever smelled before permeated the air. Amid all of this, children played in the street, men drank tea under the tattered awnings of street-side teahouses, and women haggled with street vendors over the price of goods.
Belle was glad when they finally made it to the CIM guesthouse, a small oasis amid the teeming bustle and activity that was Shanghai. She was also overjoyed to find James Fraser waiting for her at the guesthouse. “Welcome to China at last,” he said.
How wonderful it was for Belle to see a familiar face and someone who knew her parents. James looked a little gaunt, but his eyes were still ablaze with the same enthusiasm she remembered from The Firs and from his weeklong visit with her family in Victoria.
James explained to Belle how on his return to China from furlough he had not been sent back to work among the Lisu people. Instead, he had been appointed as a special assistant to D. E. Hoste, the general director of China Inland Mission. He was disappointed about this decision because his heart was with the Lisu people. Still, he could not escape the fact that he believed God had opened this new door of service for him, and so he had accepted it. Now that the antiforeigner uprising was over, James served as the superintendent of CIM’s work in all of Yunnan Province, which allowed him to be closer to the Lisu.
Two days after arriving in Shanghai, James led a small group of the new missionary recruits, including Belle, who were assigned to work in Yunnan Province to Kunming, the provincial capital. Kunming was located twelve hundred miles southwest of Shanghai, and to get there the group traveled by river and by train.
Exhausted but excited to be in Yunnan Province and closer to the Lisu people, Belle arrived at the CIM guesthouse in Kunming. Waiting there for her was John Kuhn. While the two of them had corresponded faithfully since John left Moody Bible Institute back in Chicago, for the first time since their engagement, Belle was looking into the eyes and listening to the voice of the man she would spend the rest of her life with. For some reason she felt strangely shy.
Belle’s shyness did not last for long. After all, the two of them had a lot to talk about. Mrs. Helms, who ran the CIM guesthouse, served them tea and scones while John told Belle all about his experiences during the antiforeigner uprising. John had fled to Shanghai for a time, but his journey there, while still hair-raising, had been a lot less life-threatening than James’s journey to safety. On the trip to Kunming, James Fraser had told Belle a little about his experience. He had been much farther inland when the call came for foreigners to evacuate to the coast. With so much antiforeigner feeling in the countryside, it was too dangerous for the fleeing missionaries to travel overland to the coast. Instead they took to the Yellow River in three makeshift rafts. It was a harrowing journey: robbers followed them along the riverbank, one of the rafts got caught in a whirlpool for several hours, and one of the missionaries died along the way. But eventually James had led the group to safety in Tientsin.
Sadly, John could not stay long with Belle in Kunming. He had to get back to his work in Chengchiang to the south, and it was time for Belle to begin her language classes. The two parted knowing the plan ahead: Belle would stay at the guesthouse for three months for language study and then transfer to an outlying mission station to work alongside a more experienced female missionary while continuing to learn the language. China Inland Mission had a strict policy mandating that engaged couples in the mission needed to live and work in China for two years before they could marry. That meant that John and Belle could not marry until November 1930, a date that seemed such a long way off. Still, they both had plenty of work to keep them busy until then, and they anticipated seeing each other only a few times before their wedding.
