For all of these reasons it was very difficult to get girls to attend school. Yet Lottie would not give up on the idea. “I have to start somewhere,” she told herself as she scoured the countryside looking for prospective students.
After two months of searching, Lottie returned to Tengchow in February 1878, having persuaded five girls to attend her school. The girls were not the daughters of high-class Chinese families she had hoped to attract. In fact, most of them were fleeing a life of prostitution or parents who spent all the family money on opium or gambling. Despite this, Lottie was sure she could teach them.
Before the year was over, school enrollment had swelled to thirteen girls. Since no one would pay for his daughter to attend school, Lottie was forced to assume responsibility for the girls’ housing, food, and medicine. However, she was glad to do it. She firmly believed that somewhere in the hearts of these often willful and unruly girls were the seeds of tomorrow’s Christian women.
Lottie combined American and Chinese ways of teaching the girls. As she had done for her American students, Lottie gave the girls singing lessons and read them Bible stories. But there was no changing the way they learned from books. The normal Chinese method was to be able to recite huge chunks of text by heart, and the girls soon set about learning the entire Gospel of Matthew. They would stand with their backs to Lottie, yelling out verse after verse until they could recite the whole twenty-eight chapters of the Gospel straight through.
While the girls school kept her busy, Lottie tried not to miss an opportunity to go with Sallie Holmes out into the countryside to share the gospel message. One winter day in 1878, a year after Lottie had returned from the United States, Sallie sent word by messenger that she was taking a trip into the countryside and wanted Lottie to join her.
Lottie stood peering past the messenger at the icy weather conditions. It didn’t seem to her like the best weather to be out in the countryside. “Tell Miss Holmes I think we should wait until the storm passes,” she told the messenger.
Half an hour later, Lottie received a knock at the door. It was the same messenger with a note for her. On the note was one word: “Go.” Lottie sighed. Traveling in the countryside was difficult enough when the weather was fine, but it was almost unbearable in winter when icy winds and rain blew in off the ocean. There was nothing appealing to Lottie about standing in freezing rain while being called a foreign devil or being refused entrance to an inn for the night. Still, if Sallie was willing to brave such weather, Lottie would accompany her.
Lottie padded herself with extra layers of flannel petticoats and wrapped some cold noodles and chicken to eat along the way. Soon the two women set out in sedan chairs, the wind whipping around their legs. They reached the first village and stood in the street waiting to attract attention. It came in the form of a young boy Lottie had given a Gospel of Mark to on a previous visit. The boy held the tract up and grinned at them.
Lottie smiled back and began asking the boy questions about what he had read. Soon another boy joined him, and then an older woman and two little girls. The woman stroked Lottie’s sleeve while the little girls giggled and tried to lift up her dress to see her petticoat.
As much as Lottie wanted to swat them away, she waited until they had satisfied their curiosity. Then the woman started in with the inevitable questions. “How old are you? Do you have children or are you barren? Why does your mother-in-law allow you to go out alone?”
Lottie tried to answer each question graciously, though it was still difficult for her to accept strangers touching her and asking her personal questions—questions no polite person in southern society would dream of asking.
Nightfall came early in the winter, and just as the two missionary women were deciding it was time to travel on, one of their chair bearers announced he had relatives in the village who were prepared to shelter them both for the night. A family willing to have foreign devils in their house? Lottie was delighted. She knew it was a brave step for an uneducated Chinese person to take. So many outrageous rumors were circulating about foreigners that most families would not be able to sleep if they knew a “devil” was in their house. Lottie had heard many of these rumors, which never ceased to amaze her. People had seen missionaries eating pickled onions and reported that they were eating the eyeballs of small children. They had seen children’s porcelain dolls and pronounced them to be embalmed babies, and men drinking red currant juice were said to be drinking the blood of murdered children.
When the women arrived at their host’s house, they found the entire neighborhood was waiting for them. Immediately the questions started up. Sallie took charge of the situation and invited the boys to join her in the yard while Lottie took charge of the girls and women in the house. Because of the way Chinese society worked, there was no way the men could be seen learning from a woman, but Lottie noticed a group of men forming at the gate. She knew the men would stand there and listen to Sallie talking to the young boys without officially joining in.
Lottie walked into the low-roofed house and looked around. The side room where she and Sallie were to stay was only about nine feet square, and most of that space was taken up by the k’ang, the knee-high platform that served as a bed. This k’ang, Lottie observed, was not made of bricks, like most, but was made of dried mud. A tiny worn mat covered the k’ang. It was all the bedding the women would be offered for the night. The floor of the room was packed dirt, and there was a paper-covered window in the far wall, but no door, just an opening to the rest of the house. Everything in the house was covered in a thick, grimy film created by the smoke of many generations of inhabitants.
“Do you have heavenly books?” asked one of the girls who had squeezed past Lottie to sit on the k’ang.
“Yes, let me read to you,” Lottie said, amazed that by now about fifteen people had squeezed themselves onto the k’ang waiting to hear what she had to say.
Time passed quickly, and the women asked Lottie question after question about Christianity until she was too hoarse to speak anymore. Only then did they let her alone. However, they all promised to be back first thing in the morning.
After the women left, Lottie, totally exhausted, unlaced her shoes and fell onto the mat on the k’ang fully clothed. She was asleep in no time. The noise of scratching chickens awoke her early the next morning. She peered out the open doorway into the family room. Fifteen sets of eyes peered back. Lottie tried to smile, but she was weary of being watched every moment. She dreaded the next volley of questions that was sure to be unleashed as soon as she left the bedroom.
Sure enough, as she walked into the family room, more people flooded in from outside. “Look how untidy her hair is,” said one girl. “Oh, and did you see the way she put the rope through the holes in her shoes?” asked another. There was a general rumbling of interest, and everyone looked down at Lottie’s shoes.
Soon Sallie, who had been sleeping on the k’ang beside Lottie, emerged from the bedroom. The two missionary women sat down and ate a breakfast of millet. Four small boys stood staring down at them while they ate. Lottie watched as people outside ripped the paper out of the window for a better view of the women eating.
“I’ve counted them,” Sallie said in English. “There are thirty people watching us!”
“Thirty!” Lottie echoed in Chinese.
Their hostess must have guessed what Sallie had said. “I am so sorry. I beg your humble pardon, but you must forgive all the viewers. You see, we have never seen any heavenly people before,” the woman apologized.
Lottie forced herself to smile again and nodded her head. “Let them look,” she said, “and when we have finished eating, we will tell them more about the heavenly book.”
The day was as busy as the one before had been. Hundreds of people reached out to touch Lottie’s skin or her clothes, and she was asked the same old questions time after time. As the day wore on, the words of their hostess kept playing over in Lottie’s mind: We have never seen any heavenly people before.
Lottie thought a lot about the opportunities she had to share the gospel message with people who had never heard it before. This was what she had come to China to do. At the same time, it had proved to be more difficult than she had imagined it would be, especially being endlessly watched and touched and asked questions. She liked her privacy and had been raised to believe there were certain questions you didn’t ask people. However, the Chinese valued none of this. Lottie decided as they headed back to Tengchow that it was time to overcome her discomfort at being observed so closely. She wanted to be more like Sallie, who took it all in stride and didn’t become frustrated at being watched all the time.
When Lottie arrived home she wrote in her diary, “I must conquer my unwillingness to talk and be fingered, and teach the children.”
A copy of the Baptist newspaper the Biblical Recorder was waiting for Lottie when she arrived home. Normally, Lottie loved to read it, but this particular issue made her angry. One of the front-page articles announced that “in this modern world we are at the end of the days of missionary hardship.”
Lottie wished the writer of the article could have been on her last trip. She was frustrated that Christians back home did not understand the hardships that not only she personally but also all missionaries had to endure. Sallie had sent her son home to college and now had the worry of not having heard of his whereabouts for over a year. And her own sister, Edmonia, had been unable to take the strain of life in China. Lottie felt something had to be said on behalf of all missionaries, and she was the person to say it.
The next day Lottie took out a pen and some paper and wrote a long letter to the editor of the Biblical Recorder complaining about the article. Afterward she wrote to her old friend Henry Tupper and told him: “I am always ashamed to dwell on physical hardships. But, this time I have departed from my usual reticence because I know that there are some who, in their pleasant homes in America without any real knowledge of the facts, declare that the days of missionary hardships are over. To speak in the open air in a foreign tongue from six to eleven times a day is no trifle. The fatigue of travel is something.… If anyone fancies sleeping on brick beds in rooms with dirt floors and walls blackened by the smoke of many generations, the yard also being the stable yard and the stable itself being within three feet of your door, I wish to declare most emphatically that as a matter of taste, I differ.… I find it most unpleasant. If anyone thinks that the constant risk of exposure to smallpox and other contagious disease, against which the Chinese take no precaution whatever, is just the most charming thing in life, I shall continue to differ. In a word, let him try it! A few days of roughing it as we ladies do habitually will convince the most skeptical.”
Lottie hoped these words would lay to rest any idea among Christians back in the United States that there were no longer any hardships to be endured by missionaries serving in foreign lands.
Chapter 10
Mission Stations
Is it any wonder that we feel like kings’ daughters tonight?” Lottie wrote in her journal. “There are beautiful spiderwebs on the rafters and clean matting on the k’ang.… With a heart full of joy, it is no effort to speak to the people.”
Lottie put down her pen and smiled. Finally she had come to terms with her surroundings. The joy of telling others about her faith had conquered her worries about hygiene, illness, and bugs. She now felt at home among some of the poorest people on earth.
Just as Lottie was finding her niche as a missionary, however, Tarleton Crawford was losing his grip on reality. His wife confided in Lottie that he was experiencing “brain trouble.” It was obvious to Lottie that he was suffering a nervous breakdown similar to the kind that Edmonia had suffered. Soon afterward, Tarleton Crawford packed a bag and left Tengchow in the middle of the night, alone and without any money. Martha Crawford was distraught and waited anxiously for some word of his whereabouts. Finally word came that he had made his way back to the United States.
