God Is Red (2 page)

“Every inch of soil beneath my feet was red, shining under the frail winter sun, as if it had been soaked with blood.”

I
jotted down this observation in my journal in the winter of 2005 while trekking on a narrow mountain path in China's southwestern province of Yunnan.

I had arrived in Yunnan a year before, running away from public security agents who came to interrogate me for interviewing members of Falun Gong. Fear of arrest prompted me to jump from my second-floor apartment. I fled to the sun-drenched city of Dali, where I took temporary shelter at a friend's place. Like a rat sneaking out from a tight-lidded container, in this case, the Sichuan basin, I brushed off the dust, stretched my limbs on the beach of Erhai Lake, and resumed my life as a writer and musician—performing my Chinese flute on the street and in bars, and interviewing people and writing about them.

Broke and depressed in a new city, I cut myself off from my friends in Beijing and Chengdu. During the day, I roamed the streets, hanging out with beggars, street vendors, musicians, and prostitutes, listening to their life stories. In the evenings, I doused my loneliness with liquor, through which I even made an unexpected acquaintance with plainclothes police officers who had been sent to monitor my activities. Unlike those in Sichuan, policemen in Yunnan never refused a free drink and felt no qualms about being my drinking buddies. Even in their highly intoxicated state, they didn't forget to toe the Party line by saying how hard they tried to protect the Communist system, and that it was good for China. But drinking was not an effective escape and even worsened my sense of loneliness.

Then, at the end of 2004, l met a Christian, known among local villagers as Dr. Sun, a medical doctor. Following his conversion to Christianity, he quit his position as the dean of a large medical school near Shanghai and came to the rural areas of Yunnan, healing the sick and spreading the gospel. On that day, he was performing a cataract surgery inside my friend's shanty house in Lijiang. The patient was an old lady who was too poor to pay for the procedure at the government-run hospital.

The bespectacled Dr. Sun, in a casual green jacket and a white T-shirt, looked more like a schoolteacher than a surgeon. With thin hair on top, he reminded me of Xu Yonghai, a neurologist-turned-preacher whom I had met six years before in Beijing. Yonghai, an activist with the government-banned “house-church movement,” had been imprisoned a few months previously for preaching in the southeastern province of Zhejiang. On this particular day, Dr. Sun did not proselytize.

To my surprise, he said he had read my books—pirated versions that he had managed to purchase on the street. As he politely complimented me on my literary efforts, I was beginning to wonder what it was in Christianity that had driven these successful medical doctors to abandon their lucrative careers in the big cities to pursue a life filled with risks and hardships.When I asked Dr. Sun for permission to interview him, he initially declined. “I've led an ordinary life,” he said humbly. “If you are interested, come with me to the mountains. You will discover extraordinary stories in the villages there.”

Of course I was interested. I had spent the better half of my life capturing extraordinary stories from ordinary people.

One year later, in December 2005, Dr. Sun and I met in Kunming, the capital of Yunnan and set out on a monthlong journey that took us deep into the mountains, first by bus and then on a small tractor, along perilous mountain paths paved with small rocks, which the locals call “hard candies.” We passed Fumin and Luquan counties, both of which I had never heard of, and then Sayingpan Township, where the paved roads ended. Trudging along on winding red-mud trails, we reached a cluster of small villages hemmed in by tall mountains. According to Dr. Sun, there was a vibrant Christian community there.

The place reminded me of an old Chinese saying: “Heaven is high above and the emperor is far away,” which refers to regions that are so distant and isolated that they seem to fall beyond the reach of both divine and secular powers. I wondered how it was possible for Christianity, a foreign faith, to find its way and grow in such isolated locations, where the vast modernization that was sweeping other parts of China had not yet reached. Peasants still eked out a meager living by plowing tiny plots of terraced land with hoes and shovels. Television was still a luxury, and many had never heard of refrigerators, not to mention computers or the Internet. Medical care was almost nonexistent—for example, when one of the villagers fell sick, it took his relatives six hours to carry him to the nearest hospital. En route, on the bumpy road, he expired. The itinerant medical service of Dr. Sun was the only hope for the inhabitants of those remote villages.

In the subsequent days after I started talking with some of the villagers, my initial assumptions gradually changed. It was true that people in the cold, high plateau of Yunnan were cut off from the developed urban centers and were destitute. However, on a deeper level, the region was never immune from both the political and cultural influences of the outside world. In fact, this region was well within the grasp of both divine and secular powers.

In the village of Zehei, inhabited by China's ethnic Yi people, locals led me to the muddy hut of Zhang Yingrong, an eighty-six-year-old church elder whose peaceful and benevolent looks made me think of my late father. Zhang Yingrong talked fondly about the London-based China Inland Mission that had sent its first group of missionaries to Shanghai more than 150 years ago. At that time, several of these nineteenth-century missionaries set their sights on the Yi villages hidden up in the mountains. Because modern transportation was lacking, these foreigners, with “blond hair and big noses,” rode on donkeys, journeying for many days to reach the region, just in time to save the mountain people from a devastating bubonic epidemic, using Western medicine and their knowledge of modern hygienic practices. They also brought with them, in their inexact Mandarin translations, copies of the Shengjing—the Bible. The Word of God, Zhang Yingrong said, gradually penetrated the whole region by winning the hearts and minds of villagers who for generations had found solace in the chanting of local shamans and the worshipping of pagan gods. Zhang Yingrong's father was among the early followers and then brought his whole family along. The missionaries eventually established schools and hospitals. At an early age, Zhang Yingrong attended the Southwestern Theology Seminary, and before he reached twenty, he was ready to follow in the missionaries' footsteps.

Zhang Yingrong's captivating stories piqued my interest in Christianity about which I knew very little. I grew up in the era when Western missionaries were portrayed as “evil agents of the imperialists,” who enslaved the Chinese mind, killed Chinese babies, and ruined indigenous cultures. I decided to talk with some local Christians, and under Dr. Sun's guidance, I ventured deeper into the mountain valleys.

Another Christian leader, Reverend Wang Zisheng, an ethnic Miao, lived in a village across a river. He recounted a similar tale about the blue-eyed missionaries who saved lives and spread the words of the gospel. So did Reverend Zhang Mao-en in Salaowu. As the interviews progressed, I found a pattern—locals had inherited their Christian faith from their parents and grandparents who had benefited from the teachings of a certain foreign missionary. Was the missionary English, French, German, American, Australian, or New Zealander? They didn't know. To them, it was not important. Through the efforts of that foreign missionary, who had found a fertile ground in which to plant the seeds of faith, Christianity had taken root earlier than it had in other parts of China. Three or four generations later, Christianity was part of the heritage of each individual family and an integral part of local history.

It was a path filled with strife and blood.

“Sometimes, devils often follow the footsteps of God to undo his work,” a local Christian whispered to me, referring to the period in the 1940s when the Communists forced their way in there and Mao Zedong's atheist ideology clashed violently with the Christian faith. Zhang Yingrong, who was a preacher in training when the Communists initiated the land redistribution campaign in 1950, was labeled a “landlord” even though he had no properties in his name. The ruthless beatings, the forced kneeling on broken tiles in the pouring rain, and the near starvation reduced him to a state of near paralysis for a number of years.

Another preacher, Wang Zhiming, led the Christian movement after the Western missionaries had retreated from China. In the 1950s, local Communist officials closed the church and sent him to work in the field to be reeducated. He quietly accepted the reality of being under Communism and temporarily ceased his church activities. During the Cultural Revolution, when the Party infringed on his bottom line—that is, denied him the right to pray—he acted in defiance and was willing to give up his life. As expected, he was arrested while leading a prayer session inside a mountain cave and was brutally executed following a public condemnation meeting, with his tongue cut out of his mouth to prevent him from preaching.

In the Mao era, local Christians were not allowed to pray and attend church and were forced to accept the Communist ideology. They complied, but only a few openly denounced their faith. In order to protect their faith from being totally suppressed in that region, some brave Christians gathered for services inside mountain caves. As a result, Christianity survived, and a few years after Mao Zedong's death, it came back again with a vengeance. Village after village became Christian territory.

On that journey to the Yi people, I attended a Eucharist celebration, which locals celebrated like a holiday, slaughtering pigs and chickens for a sumptuous feast.

I grew up in the cities, where Christianity has also revived and flourished in the post-Mao era but with a distinctive foreign identity. Many new converts are highly educated and well-off professionals or retirees. They have embraced Christianity the way they do Coca-Cola or a Volkswagen—believing that a foreign faith, like foreign-made products, has better quality. Many younger urban Christians have been throwing themselves at the feet of Jesus because it is considered hip to wear a cross and sing a foreign-sounding hymn.

In the Yi and Miao villages, Christianity is now as indigenous as qiaoba, a special Yi buckwheat cake. A majority of the Christians I met were poor illiterate farmers who had nothing to share with a visitor, but a wealth of stories. Like qiaoba, Christianity is life-sustaining to the Yi. For Reverend Wang Zisheng and church elder Zhang Yingrong, faith enabled them to survive the brutal persecution during the dark years under Mao. For Zhang Meizhi, who lost her husband, brothers, and sons to Mao's political campaigns, a recent conversion to Christianity lifted her anger and finally gave her some peace. For a villager who had been ostracized after killing a snake, which the locals believed could cause leprosy, his newly acquired Christian faith put him in the midst of a large and welcoming community.

In the urban metropolises of China, will Christianity provide a spiritual haven that calms the restless populace caught up in the relentless pursuit of wealth and material comfort? It has certainly changed the lives of Dr. Xu Yonghai and Dr. Sun. Or will the Christian faith, like Buddhism and Taoism, make people more submissive to totalitarian power? There is an ongoing debate among Chinese scholars as to whether some Christians forgave the murderous government as a genuine display of God's benevolence—or as an excuse for cowardice. As the Party continues to persecute Christians, and keeps a wary eye on any spiritual movement that might challenge its authority, the willingness of Christians to forgive, however, is not universal. When I asked a centenarian nun if she was willing to pray and forgive the Communist government, which had destroyed her church, she jumped up from her seat and stamped her feet emphatically, “No, certainly not! They still occupy our church property! I refuse to die! I will wait until they return everything back to the church!”

After I came back from the trip with Dr. Sun, I became preoccupied with the topic. To continue my research of Christianity in Yunnan, I went back to Dali again in 2009 to trace the footsteps of early Christian missionaries, many of whom had settled there and used the city as a launching pad for their missions in places farther away. These trips have exhilarated me, lifting me out of my drunken depression. The stories of heroic Christians like Zhang Yingrong, Reverend Wang Zhiming, and Dr. Sun have inspired me, prompting me to write a book during a time when East and West are meeting and clashing on many fronts. In these remote corners, I have discovered a center point, where East met West, and although there has been a collision of cultures, there is now a new Christian identity that is distinctively Chinese.

The circuitous mountain path in Yunnan province is red because over many years it has been soaked with blood.

Liao Yiwu,
Chengdu, Sichuan province,
November 2010

Z
e Yu looked like one of those smiley, big-bellied Buddhist statues found in restaurants all over China—benevolent, round face, shaved head, rotund, and triple chinned. He's a monk and knows all the jokes. And when I suggested he could be the Maitreya, the Buddha yet to come, he responded with a good-humored laugh and said that we, that is, my mother and I, were just in time for lunch and led us into the old part of Dali City in the southwestern province of Yunnan. My watch showed just past noon. It was August 3, 2009, and we had traveled two days and a night from Chengdu in neighboring Sichuan province to stay at a courtyard house lent to us by my friend, the avant-garde poet Ye Fu, in a rural village at the foot of Cangshan Mountain.

We ate in a Muslim halal restaurant. A painting of pilgrims in Mecca hung in the main serving hall. We ordered beef and lamb while Monk Ze extolled its range of vegetarian dishes. As we chatted, we talked about “Charter 08,” the manifesto to promote political reforms and human rights in China, of which he is a signatory. I saluted his courage but wondered whether a monk shouldn't stay out of politics. His happy face became earnest: “Without democracy, Buddhism won't survive here.”

As we walked off lunch in the old city, Ze pointed out little details, missed by the average tourist, that brought to life Dali's thousand years of history. The old city was small by Chinese standards—only three or four kilometers from one end to the other, with a permanent population of thirty to forty thousand. But concentrated here were worshippers of many gods and deities. The indigenous Bai people venerated thousands of them in their temples, from the legendary Dragon King of the Eastern China Sea and the Queen Mother of Heaven to ancient emperors and warriors. He showed us Muslim mosques and Buddhist temples and Christian churches, both Catholic and Protestant. Less conspicuous, he said, were the practitioners of Bahá'í and Falun Gong, who used their homes, as did those Christians who refused to recognize government-sanctioned churches.

Since it was the Christians who had stirred my curiosity, Ze wanted to show me a well-known cemetery for Western missionaries who had journeyed into China more than a century before. He believed I might learn something. And so, a few days later, after much walking along mountain paths and several bus rides, Ze and I reached Wuliqiao Village. After more walking, mostly uphill, we stood under a blazing sun at the edge of a cemetery. “Here?” I asked, but Ze shook his head. This, he said, was for Muslims, primarily ethnic Hui. I knew about the Muslim rebellion against Chinese rule in the mid-nineteenth century and the violence that swept Dali. Many Han and Bai were slaughtered. The Qing emperor sent troops and brutally suppressed the Muslim uprising with thousands of casualties. The cemetery was bounded by a stone wall. “Only Muslim ghosts are allowed in here,” Ze said. With suppression of the Muslim rebellion came a period of calm, and it was during the lull that missionaries from, among others, the China Inland Mission, poured into the area.

“We are close,” Ze said and kept walking. After about three hundred more meters the road dead-ended in thick waist-deep cannabis plants and fragrant herbs. We found a side path that led to a tall ridge, and from that vantage point Ze swept his arm to take in five plots of corn in the middle of which stood an excavator, its metallic arm convulsing like the leg of a giant cockroach. “There,” he said, “is the missionary cemetery.”

We zigzagged our way down on a steep path, arms outstretched like birds to keep our balance, but I could yet see no sign of a cemetery. The excavator lifted its arm and struck the earth, lift and strike, lift, strike. “Are they renovating the cemetery?” I asked. Ze gave me a cynical laugh. “You may wish. They are extracting the headstones. High quality rock, much sought after by property developers.” As I looked down at the uneven ground beneath my feet, I could see broken and jagged pieces of stone and, as I focused on the pieces, groups of letters from the Roman alphabet and then whole words, in English, and crosses.

We found the foundations of the cemetery wall and managed to pace out two equal squares, each of about half an acre. Space enough for the bodies of many foreign or Chinese Christians, but no complete records have survived to say just how many.

My research told me this: British missionary George Clarke purchased the land and built the cemetery. Clarke's Chinese name was Hua Guoxiang, which means fragrance of blossom and fruits. An active member of the London-based China Inland Mission since 1865, Clarke left England in 1881 with his Swiss wife, Fanny, and reached the ancient city of Dali via Myanmar and Guizhou province.

George and Fanny Clarke were almost certainly the earliest missionaries in the region. Initially, they printed Christian pamphlets and gave them out at markets and along the roadside. They also distributed candies to children. But they soon realized that their pamphlets were largely useless because most Bai villagers were illiterate, and their own Mandarin Chinese was of little use in communicating with people who spoke only Bai. So they set about learning Bai while initiating literacy programs in the villages and teaching people to sing hymns in Chinese. They also learned how to imitate the Bai ancestor-worshipping dances and incorporated some of that culture into their Christian teachings. Soon, the Clarkes dressed up in Bai costumes and danced to the rhythms of gongs and drums on the street to attract people and spread the gospel. They wrote up hymns using a popular form of local ditty. I heard stories about how the Clarkes would visit the Bai villages to spend time with musicians and were seen dancing on moonlit nights near Erhai Lake.

The Clarkes lived in Dali for two years but had limited success. They set up a boarding school but attracted only three students. Fanny became pregnant and gave birth to a son. They named him Samuel Dali Clarke.

Two months after giving birth, Fanny became seriously ill. News of her illness spread quickly among her Chinese neighbors, who came to console her. They were deeply touched by her beautiful voice and by the optimism she showed during her illness. She had left instructions with her husband that she be buried in Dali so she could be part of Cangshan Mountain and Erhai Lake. Her devotion inspired people around her and after her death, many of their Chinese friends and neighbors flocked to the church and were baptized.

So began the Christian cemetery at the foot of Cangshan Mountain. On the walls that fenced the cemetery, craftsmen engraved crosses and biblical verses in both Chinese and English. George Clarke buried his wife on the morning of October 30, 1883. It was the first such funeral the indigenous people had ever seen—to them, sending off the dead involved incense burning, sutra chanting, and shaman dancing. They were now being asked to understand that Fanny's soul was ascending to heaven, where she would be with God.

In the ensuing years, at least fifty foreign Christians served the communities in Dali. According to
The History of Christianity in Dali,
written and self-published in 2005 by Wu Yongsheng, between 1881 and 1949 the city became an important Christian base in southwest China. In the beautiful land dotted with lakes and hemmed in by mountains, churches sprung up across the countryside, attracting more than a hundred thousand followers. Missionaries built hospitals, orphanages, and schools.

I was struck by the dedication of the missionaries. One such story relates to a Canadian missionary doctor, Jessie McDonald. She came to China in 1913 and worked at a hospital in China's central city of Kaifeng, Henan province. In 1940, when Kaifeng fell to Japanese forces, she moved the hospital southwest to Dali, where she established the Gospel Hospital. Her work came to an abrupt end on May 4, 1951, when Communist officials seized the hospital and its equipment and ordered McDonald out of China. A big Red Cross symbol on the front wall of the hospital was painted over with a slogan: “Kicking imperialists out of China.” Many Christian followers became scared; they either quit the church or publicly renounced their faith. McDonald is said to have been the last foreign missionary to leave China, and on her last day she ignored the threats of soldiers and went to pray at what is now the Old City Protestant Church, built by missionaries in 1905. She was alone in the church, surrounded by empty pews.

At the top of the church's dome was a clock weighing 150 kilograms and modeled on London's Big Ben. Its bell was commissioned by Richard Williams and William J. Embery, who personally delivered the bell via sea to Saigon, Vietnam, from where it was taken along the Mekong River to Yunnan and on to Dali. The entire journey took three months.

McDonald made for the bell and struck it for the last time. The sound rippled through the city. Three old men drinking tea in the old city remember it. “The chiming came in waves, resounding waves, one after another; people in Xiaguan could feel the vibration,” said one.

On the afternoon of January 28, 1998, a couple from France, descendants of George and Fanny Clarke, were met in Dali by Wu Yongsheng
.
The couple had been inspired after reading Alvyn Austin's history of the China Inland Mission,
China's Millions,
and wanted to visit where their great-grandparents were buried.

That story reminds me of lines from a poem by Paul Valery, “The Graveyard by the Sea”:

But in their heavy night, cumbered with marble,

Under the roots of trees a shadow people

Has slowly now come over to your side.

The poet returns in his imagination to the cemetery of Sète, his hometown on the Mediterranean. He is sitting on a tombstone at noon, staring out on a calm sea, contemplating life and death. But things are rarely as we imagine them to be, and though the French couple may have been expecting a slice of China's natural beauty, the scene they came across in 1998 was much the same as the one I encountered a decade later. No cemetery, no garden, just an empty, albeit rocky, field plowed for planting. Wu told me the villagers gathered around the French visitors and attempted to recount what had happened to the graves. One said that during the Cultural Revolution the Red Guards often used the cemetery as a target in their fight against foreign imperialists, waving red flags, shouting slogans, and singing revolutionary songs. They ransacked the cemetery, again and again, claiming that they would wipe out the ancestral graves of imperialists. Another villager recalled that the Red Guards had used explosives on the gravestones and blown them into pieces. Another said destruction of the cemetery started way back in the 1950s; with each political campaign, the cemetery became a target of hatred toward foreign imperialists. That didn't take into account local pillaging; headstones and markers were recycled as pigsties, courtyard walls, and the footings for numerous houses. Even before the Cultural Revolution started, half of the graves had been leveled. The missionaries' cemetery was one more desecration in the name of Communism that trashed China's treasure troves of history.

The French couple didn't find the grave of Fanny Clarke. But they had to have been heartened that she survived in the stories the local villagers told from one generation to the next. I'm moved to quote Paul Valery again:

The wind is rising! . . . We must try to live!

The huge air opens and shuts my book: the wave

Dares to explode out of the rocks in reeking

Spray. Fly away, my sun-bewildered pages!

Wu says the couple picked wildflowers and wove them into a wreath, which they placed in the middle of the cornfield. They had with them a small accordion, and the woman began to sing a song she said was Fanny Clarke's favorite. When Wu told me about the song, I recognized it right away. It was from an 1805 poem by Thomas Moore that has remained popular with singers and composers and even Hollywood:

'Tis the last rose of summer

Left blooming alone;

All her lovely companions

Are faded and gone;

No flower of her kindred,

No rosebud is nigh.

To reflect back her blushes,

To give sigh for sigh.

Here I was at the same place eleven years later. It was approaching dusk. The song was in my head, and I swayed to the rhythm of an unseen accordion. “It's time to go,” Ze said. We retraced our steps, back aboard buses, back through cannabis bushes, back to the highway. I could see the steeple of a church, and a new crescent moon had risen with the stars. I could hear hymn singing off in the distance.