“Yes,” Lottie replied, eyeing the structure. “It certainly stands out.”
Soon her shentze was outside the walled mission compound. Rising above the wall Lottie could see the two-story tower that Tarleton was having built for her and Edmonia.
Martha spoke to the gatekeeper in Chinese, and the gates were quickly opened. Lottie’s wobbly legs hardly allowed her to stand straight as she stood in the courtyard of her new home. Edmonia appeared at the door. She looked much the same as always, perhaps a little thinner, and Lottie rushed across the courtyard to embrace her.
The two sisters had a lot to talk about. Eddie wanted to know all about her brother and sisters back in the United States, and Lottie wanted to hear all about Eddie’s experiences in Tengchow. As they drank tea and talked, Lottie noticed her sister coughed a lot. “Are you all right?” she finally asked.
Edmonia smiled weakly. “Well, it hasn’t been easy here, to say the least,” she replied. “Some things are a terrible strain.”
“What things?” Lottie asked.
Eddie looked around to make sure no one was listening and then lowered her voice and spoke. “Like the new tower Tarleton Crawford is building for us. It’s caused so much trouble.”
“Trouble?” repeated Lottie, feeling alarmed. “Why would it cause trouble?”
“It’s the whole idea of a tower,” confided her sister. “The Chinese all like to live in compounds or houses with walls around them. I suppose it’s the only way they can get any privacy with so many people around.”
“I’ve noticed that,” agreed Lottie. “So what’s the problem with the tower?”
“It’s privacy,” Eddie said. “Apparently the Chinese don’t build tall buildings because someone could look out of them and down on other people inside their courtyards. When Tarleton Crawford started to build this monstrosity, there was a riot. The local men thought he was going to spy on their wives, and they stormed the gate with sticks and stones.”
“What happened?” Lottie asked.
“Tarleton Crawford got out his gun and aimed it at a few of them. They fled, but I’m not sure it’s all over yet. They seemed very angry.”
Lottie sat in silence. She wondered how a missionary who had been in China for over twenty years could make a decision that would cause anger and suspicion among so many local people.
“And another thing,” Edmonia went on. “People in America might think it’s proper for single women like you and me to live with a married couple, but do you know how the Chinese view it?”
“No,” Lottie said slowly, dreading what Eddie would say next.
Eddie’s voice dropped even lower till it was just above a whisper. She looked into her older sister’s eyes. “They think I am Tarleton Crawford’s second wife, and I’m sure they will think you are his third.”
Lottie felt herself blushing. “That’s terrible,” she replied. “What can we do about it?”
“I’m not sure,” Edmonia replied. “But we will have to think of something if we expect the Chinese women to take us seriously.”
Lottie and Eddie talked on, though Lottie’s mind was racing with the new information she had been given. What should she do? Was Eddie right in suggesting that Tarleton Crawford was out of step with what Chinese people thought? And what about having to use the power of a gun to keep a mission house open. That didn’t seem right at all. She might be a novice missionary, but Lottie decided there and then that she would never raise a gun against a Chinese person. After all, she had come to bring them the hope of a new life in Christ, and she could not see how a gun helped in any way to further that end.
Chapter 7
A Picnic in the Countryside
The day after Lottie’s arrival in Tengchow, Martha Crawford took her and Edmonia to visit Sallie Holmes. Sallie was about five years older than Lottie, with an oval face and kind blue eyes. Lottie immediately liked her, and she admired her even more after hearing the story of why she lived in China.
Sallie had come to China with her husband in the mid-1850s before the treaty ports had been opened up to Westerners. The Holmeses were the first Western missionaries in Chefoo. Life there was not easy for them at first. They were often spat at and threatened, but they persevered and started a small church. Sallie gave birth to a baby girl, but the child died soon afterward. Sallie was expecting her second child when one night, about two years after moving into the area, her husband, James Landrum Holmes, was asked to ride out and talk with a band of robbers who were threatening the town. It was the last time Sallie saw her husband alive. James Holmes was brutally murdered by the band of robbers.
The murder left Sallie in a very difficult position; should she go back to the United States or stay at her mission post without a husband and with a baby on the way? She chose to stay, and since she had her own private source of income, the Foreign Mission Board was happy for her to do so. Three months after her husband’s murder, Sallie gave birth to a son, whom she named Landrum. In 1862 she moved from nearby Chefoo to Tengchow.
After telling Lottie her story, Sallie changed the direction of the conversation. “Your sister has done so well learning Mandarin. She was able to take over the boys grade school within a year. Have you visited it yet?”
“No, I haven’t,” Lottie replied. “I have so much to see and learn in Tengchow. Mrs. Crawford is busy with her medical clinic, and she thought that perhaps you would be the best person to acquaint me with ways to reach Chinese women with the gospel.”
Lottie watched Sallie’s eyes light up. “I would be delighted,” Sallie exclaimed. “I’ve been praying for a helper for so long.”
The women talked on for another half hour. By the end of the conversation, it had been decided that Eddie’s language teacher should be employed to help Lottie learn Mandarin, and then Lottie should help her sister with the boys school. And as soon as Lottie knew a little of the language, Sallie promised to take her out into the country on one of the fifty or so preaching trips she made each year.
Lottie spent the rest of the day checking out the boys school while Eddie spent her time planning lessons and testing the boys on their work. Lottie had been in many schools before, but watching Eddie at work in this school was very different. When the students recited their lessons for Eddie, they would turn away and face the wall. Eddie told Lottie that it was seen as disrespectful for a student to look at a teacher while he was talking to her.
The following day Lottie had her first appointment with her new Mandarin language teacher. Since she already spoke several languages fluently, Lottie did not anticipate much difficulty learning Mandarin. To her surprise, it turned out to be a lot more difficult than she had thought it would be. All of the other languages Lottie knew were based on Latin, whereas Mandarin was a tonal language. This meant that if the same sounds were made at a higher or lower pitch, they would mean two completely different things. To make matters worse, many different dialects were spoken within twenty miles of Tengchow, and if Lottie wanted to work among the women in the countryside, she would have to learn them all. This challenge gave her a new appreciation for what her sister had managed to accomplish in eleven short months.
On Sunday, Lottie was eager to go to church. She had read so many letters from Edmonia that she felt as if she already knew many of the Chinese Christians. The church itself was similar on the outside to many she had seen in the United States. It was made of gray stone blocks, and it had large double wooden front doors and a high spire. Inside, it was very different. The sanctuary was divided down the middle by a thin wooden wall. The men entered the building through the double doors at the front and sat on pews facing the pastor. The few women who attended services entered the church through a side door and sat on the other side of the wall from the men. They could not hear the sermon very clearly, and Martha Crawford spent most of her time during the service telling the women what her husband was preaching about.
When Lottie commented on the fact that there were about forty men on one side and only ten women on the other, Sallie whispered, “We have to be grateful there are any women at all in church. It’s not an easy thing for them to come.”
“Why not?” Lottie asked.
“Chinese women are very restricted,” Sallie went on. “No doubt you have noticed there are not many of them in the markets or even walking along the streets. That’s because women stay inside their compounds. It’s their tradition. Only a very poor woman would venture out to run her own errands.”
Lottie sat and thought about what she had been told. She had thought it was difficult being an independent woman in pre–Civil War Virginia, but the lot of women in China seemed much more restrictive. She looked down at the feet of the woman next to her and shuddered. The woman’s feet were no more than four inches long, wrapped in layers of white cotton fabric. The whole idea behind foot binding horrified Lottie. Every young girl’s toes were bent and tied under their feet until the bones in the foot broke and the toes turned back toward the ankles easily. The pain was so great that the girls could not walk for months at a time, and when they did manage to move around again, they hobbled slowly, never able to run or skip again. As she looked at the woman’s feet, Lottie hoped that one day she could find a way to help stop the horrible practice of foot binding.
Lottie had been in Tengchow for three weeks when Martha Crawford announced it was time for her to experience life outside the city walls. “Today is Saturday, and I’ve arranged a picnic for us,” she told the two sisters at breakfast. “Sallie Holmes is coming along, too. We will travel by sedan chair to several of the outer villages. Mr. Woo, a deacon from the church, will accompany us. Either he or I will do the preaching. We will take a picnic lunch with us and return before nightfall. It can get a little chilly, so bring a shawl.”
An hour later, Lottie looked out of her second-story window to see a procession of coolies (Chinese laborers) carrying sedan chairs and making their way along the street to the mission compound. “Come on, Eddie, it’s time to go,” she said, putting her language notebook into a bag and opening the door.
Edmonia followed her sister downstairs, and soon they were being helped into their sedan chairs.
“Good morning, Lottie,” came a voice.
Lottie turned to see Sallie Holmes sitting on a donkey.
“A lovely day for an outing, isn’t it?” Sallie said.
Lottie nodded, grabbing for the bamboo rods that supported the chair. “Do you prefer riding a donkey?” she asked.
“Most of the time,” the veteran missionary replied. “They’re bony creatures, but I can anticipate the jolts a little better than in a sedan chair.”
Lottie nodded, making a mental note that she should learn to ride a donkey herself.
Soon the procession of coolies, sedan chairs, and missionaries set off down the road toward the town gate. Sallie led the way on her donkey, followed by Eddie in her sedan chair, and then Martha Crawford, while Lottie brought up the rear. Each sedan chair was carried by four coolies. Mr. Woo walked alongside the women. On the way to the town gate they had to pass through the local marketplace, which meant some tight maneuvering for the coolies carrying the chairs as they made their way around huge baskets of fruit and avoided mules laden with baskets of rice and millet. From her perch on the sedan chair, Lottie watched all the commotion of the marketplace. The way people cajoled and bargained with each other until they agreed on a fair price was unlike anything she had seen back in the United States. In a strange way, the people seemed to enjoy the bargaining process more than actually getting the product they wanted.
Before long they had passed through the gate and were making their way along a flat dirt track with maize fields on either side. The fields stretched back from the edge of the Yellow Sea and went on for as far as Lottie could see. There were no houses, though, to break the horizon since, as Sallie explained, Chinese farmers lived in walled villages and walked out to their land and back each day. They did this because they did not want to spend the night outside the wall where they could fall prey to bands of robbers.
