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By Root 239 0

In the late 1930s, Han Suyin worked at the same hospital as Sister Mann. The two became good friends. Han practiced her writing on Sister Mann’s typewriter. After the Communist takeover in 1949, Han Suyin went to practice medicine in Southeast Asia, but Sister Mann stayed in Chengdu and continued running her workshop. She saw Chengdu as her permanent home. In the early 1950s, the government required all schools to hang portraits of Chairman Mao in classrooms. As a Christian, Sister Mann rejected the government demands. The local leaders came to talk with her, to persuade her to comply. She wouldn’t budge. One day, while Sister Mann was away, the leaders pasted a poster of Mao on the wall above the blackboard. When she came back, she noticed the poster and was outraged. She found a ladder, climbed up, and ripped the poster off. That greatly offended the authorities. Local leaders openly accused her of being an imperialist spy and kicked her out of the country.

Sister Mann returned to the United States, and Han Suyin went to visit her in the 1960s. Han found out that Sister Mann had no interest in politics. She never badmouthed the Communist Party. She didn’t rip down Mao’s poster for political reasons; she simply believed the secular government should not place its authority above that of God.

Liao: Was this attitude prevalent?

Liu: Sister Mann’s story is not unique. When the Communist government rose to power, they rewrote history and portrayed Western Christian missionaries as monsters and saboteurs. Many missionaries who had worked and lived in China for decades were forced out of the country. All their charity work was used as evidence against Western countries, which the government claimed attempted to colonize and enslave the Chinese people. Christianity is thriving again in China. It is the job of historians and writers to uncover the historical truth and explain it to the public.

Chapter 18

The New Convert

Shangshuyuan used to be home to a Catholic seminary, the Seminarium Annuntiationis, construction of which was begun by Bishop Marie-Hulien Dunand, a French missionary of the Chengdu diocese, in 1895. It took thirteen years to complete, a vast building in the gothic style covering eighteen thousand square meters that turned out a generation of priests to serve southwest China. A century later, it was a crumbling edifice. The excesses of the Cultural Revolution helped hasten what wind and rain were already doing. When I first visited in early 2000, it stood naked and lonely and skeletal.

In May 2008, as two newlyweds, the groom in a black suit and the bride in a Western-style white wedding gown, posed for portraits in front of the site, the earth began to shake and the remaining structures of the chapel collapsed around them. Within seconds, what had been left of the Seminarium Annuntiationis was gone. Pictures spread quickly on the Internet. The 2008 Sichuan earthquake claimed the lives of nearly seventy thousand people. It was a powerful quake, more powerful than even the Red Guard.

On the afternoon of January 13, 2010, while having tea with my sister in Bailu Township at Shangshuyuan, I overheard a group of fashionably dressed young men talking about the Sichuan earthquake and was drawn into their conversation. It emerged that one of their number, Ho Lu, who was twenty-four, had recently become a Christian, and when he admitted that the quake “still creeps me out” and suggested we change the subject, I asked if he would talk about what led him to Christianity.

Ho Lu: I started going to church with my mother when I was a child. Then, when I was in high school, I was quite a rebel. I hated everything my parents did to me, and I gave up on the church. But over the past two years, I think I have been getting more mature and decided to go back to church. I was baptized six months ago.

Liao Yiwu: So, you came full circle.

Ho: I guess. I figure we probably have to run many circles in life, but the more circles we run in, the more confused we become. Look at those old ladies in the park. Every morning