When she managed to get any spare time, Lottie loved to swim in the ocean or practice riding a donkey. She soon found that Sallie had been right: It was much easier to balance on a donkey than in a sedan chair. Lottie wrote many letters back home to her family and friends. She also kept in regular contact with Henry Allen Tupper, the secretary of the Southern Baptist Foreign Mission Board. Henry Tupper had been instrumental in both Edmonia’s and Lottie’s being given permission to go as single women missionaries to China. Henry Tupper made it a point to discuss Lottie’s and Eddie’s progress at every meeting of the Foreign Mission Board. In time, many Baptist women became interested in the Moon sisters’ work. They were astonished that the two of them had given up a comfortable life in the South to serve in a strange and far-off country. Soon women’s missionary societies were being formed in every church district, and they began looking for a project of their own.
Henry Tupper had just the project for them. Lottie had written asking his opinion on trying to raise money back home so that the Moon sisters could have a house of their own in Tengchow. Living with the Crawfords had become a trial. Tarleton Crawford was old and obstinate, and he seemed to annoy Edmonia at every turn. Much to Lottie’s embarrassment, Eddie forgot all of her southern charm and responded with screaming and yelling. Lottie thought the work of the mission would go a lot more smoothly if the two were separated.
Several weeks later, an overjoyed Lottie received a letter from Henry Tupper telling her that instead of agreeing to the two thousand dollars she had suggested raising for a house, he had increased the amount to three thousand dollars. As soon as he had announced the goal of buying the Moon sisters a house, the women’s missionary societies had taken up the challenge.
By the time the Southern Baptist Missions Convention of 1874 rolled around, twenty-five hundred dollars had been given toward the total cost of the house. Lottie was grateful. She and Edmonia decided to donate a quarter of their missionary allowance to make up the other five hundred dollars. Soon the three thousand dollars was waiting in a bank account in the United States for them to use.
The money was not needed right away, however. The wife of James Hartwell, who led the North Street Baptist Church in Tengchow, became ill, and the doctor advised James to take her back to the United States. As a result, the Hartwell home lay empty, and Lottie and Edmonia moved in. Lottie soon found she was able to get a lot more mission work done now that she didn’t have to keep resolving arguments between Eddie and Tarleton Crawford.
By 1876 things were running as smoothly as could be expected. Lottie had taken over Edmonia’s work supervising the boys school, and the number of students attending had risen to fourteen. Eddie spent much of her time in bed or around the house. She was constantly sick with influenza or asthma. Still, Lottie was glad to have her around, and when she was able, Eddie took care of running the house.
The missionaries in Tengchow took turns taking a short vacation to rest from their busy schedules. When Tarleton and Martha Crawford went to Japan in August, Edmonia, Lottie, and Sallie were the only Baptist missionaries left in the city. With great efficiency they took care of the school and handled Martha’s duties as a nurse. Back in the United States, Henry Tupper was delighted to read how the three single women were coping so well without a man to “lean on.”
When the Crawfords returned from Japan, it was Edmonia’s turn to take a break. Everyone had advised her to spend the winter in Japan, as the climate there was milder and she was not coping well with the damp weather in Tengchow. Eddie met up with another woman missionary, Eliza Yates, in Shanghai, and together they journeyed to Nagasaki.
It was not a happy journey. Edmonia’s nerves were raw, and she complained about everything. Not only that, she seemed frightened and disoriented. Indeed, Eliza became so alarmed at Edmonia’s behavior that she sent for Lottie. At the same time, she wrote to the Foreign Mission Board asking them to bring Edmonia Moon home, as she was not a well woman.
Lottie was shocked when she received Eliza’s letter asking her to come to Japan. She had hoped that Eddie would feel better when she got to Japan, but apparently her health had gone downhill fast. Within hours of receiving the news, Sallie and Martha had worked out how to cover Lottie’s workload between them so that Lottie could go to the aid of her sister. Soon Lottie was on her way to Shanghai to catch a ship that would take her across the Yellow Sea to Japan.
As she traveled, Lottie began to face the fact of Edmonia’s physical and mental illness. In Tengchow, Lottie had sheltered her sister from people and carried most of Eddie’s workload. But now Edmonia had gone out on her own and had fallen apart. Something more would have to be done about her condition.
The trip to Japan was uneventful, and when Lottie finally met up with Eddie, she was dismayed at how sick her sister was. Eliza had been right to send for her. There was no option but to take Edmonia back home to Virginia.
As Lottie crossed the Pacific Ocean by ship on her way home, hoping that Edmonia would survive the journey, she had no way of knowing that another sister, Mollie, was also very ill. The joyous family reunion Lottie had anticipated on her arrival home was tinged with the sad news that Mollie had died six weeks before. Mollie had left behind a husband and a baby daughter, Mamie.
Thankfully, the rest of the family were well and happy, and they were able to spend Christmas 1876 together at Viewmont, where Orie and her family were now living. It was almost like old times, though the family was not nearly as wealthy as it had been before the Civil War, and Lottie’s mother was not there.
Orie took over care of Edmonia, prescribing for her bed rest along with large doses of whiskey and cod liver oil. That, along with the well-heated house, appeared to speed Edmonia’s recovery.
The family was glad that Lottie had brought her sister home. It was obvious to all that Eddie had suffered some kind of breakdown and would never be fit to go back to China. However, many Southern Baptists were not so forgiving of the Moon sisters or the three other missionaries who had returned home from China at about the same time. Many of these people could see no reason why Lottie, the other three people, or even Edmonia had to come home. After all, they had pledged to stay in China until death. Why had they given up so easily?
Easily? Lottie fumed! She was appalled by their attitude. These people had no idea how difficult or dangerous it was to live in China. As a result, she traveled whenever she could to speak to Baptist groups about the hard conditions in China. She quickly discovered, though, that it was often more effective to write letters to people and churches describing missionary life. She wrote about all the missionaries and their children who had died in China, about the dreadful diseases that were so easily contracted there, about the violence of local militias toward missionaries, and about the stress of living in a totally foreign environment. She encouraged the mission board to be a little more understanding of its missionaries. Indeed, Lottie felt as passionate about educating Baptists concerning the realities of missionary life as she did educating Chinese people about the Christian life. Everywhere she went she challenged American Christians to become more supportive of missionaries regardless of where they served. Otherwise the whole world would not get to hear the gospel.
Perhaps it was because of Lottie’s education and her experiences as a missionary, but people began to listen to what she had to say. Mission boards started to ask questions about whether missionaries ought to be able to come home every eight or ten years and whether more attention ought to be paid to providing better housing for them.
Lottie was very pleased that her visit had stirred up such questions, but what she wanted most was to get back “home” to China. Returning to the mission field was not easy, though, as the foreign missions budget had been slashed since she arrived back in the United States. However, Lottie still had access to the Moon housing fund, which had never been used. She asked the contributors to the fund if they would allow the money to be spent on her passage back to China. The donors immediately agreed. What use was a house if there was no missionary to live in it?
It was November 8, 1877, almost exactly a year since she had left China, that Lottie Moon climbed aboard the Tokio Maru in San Francisco. This time she was no longer the novice missionary among the other thirteen missionaries aboard on their way to serve in Japan and China.
After her arrival back in Shanghai, Lottie spent several days visiting with friends there. One person she visited was Anna Safford, her old teaching companion from the female academy in Danville, Kentucky, and the girls school in Cartersville, Georgia. Anna now lived and worked in Soochow, a village just outside Shanghai. The two women enjoyed a wonderful time together, reminiscing and sharing about each other’s missionary work. All too soon, though, it was time for Lottie to make her way back to Tengchow.
Chapter 9
Heavenly People
Welcome back, Miss Moon,” yelled several of the schoolboys who were waiting outside the Hartwells’ house for Lottie. Lottie had finally made it back to Tengchow, a year to the day since she had been reunited with her family at Viewmont. As she thought about it, Lottie realized that the Chinese Christians at Monument Street Church and the children in the school were also her family, and they were a family in need.
In the year Lottie had been away, famine had broken out in the region, and many peasants were starving to death. Lottie saw them everywhere—in the streets, begging at the market, and clamoring to get into the church to warm themselves. The famine presented a unique opportunity for the Christians in Tengchow, and Lottie was pleased to learn they had taken offerings for the poor and given away a lot of food to the hungry.
Other changes had taken place at Tengchow, too. Sallie Holmes had faced the heart-wrenching decision of whether to return to the United States with her son, Landrum, to help him settle into college or send him off alone and continue her missionary work. Eventually she chose to stay at her post in Tengchow, but the decision did not come without tears over being separated from her only child. And while Sallie had lost a son, Martha Crawford now had two children, ages fourteen and seven. The children’s parents had been missionaries in Japan but had both died, leaving the children orphaned. The Crawfords had adopted them.
On the voyage back to China, Lottie had decided it was time to pursue the dream of a school for girls. As soon as she arrived back, she set about making the dream a reality. Finding a building to house the school was not difficult; a row of rooms was attached to the Hartwells’ house that could be used for that purpose. However, finding students to attend classes proved nearly impossible. Girls in China had few choices that they could make about their lives, which proved to be the problem in getting them to school. Girls had no choice, for instance, about having their feet bound when they were four or five years old. Traditionally, in China, small feet were seen as a sign of beauty, and no man would marry a woman with unbound feet. But bound feet were quite a problem when it came to going to school. They had to be rebandaged often, and they easily became infected, which sometimes led to a girl’s death.
Another choice that girls lacked was whom to marry. Sometimes at birth Chinese girls were promised to future husbands. Of course, they didn’t get married right then, but they were expected to be ready to go whenever their future mother-in-law decided it was time for the wedding. If a girl was away at school, she wouldn’t be ready to go immediately to be with her husband and his family. And because most girls were promised to be somebody’s wife, no one could see any point in educating them. Why would a girl, or any woman for that matter, need to know how to read or write when her main duties would be to clean house, cook meals, and rear children under the watchful eye of her mother-in-law?
