Fireproof Moth: A Missionary in Taiwan's White Terror Page 3

  When she and I learned that there was a missionary recruitment conference at Glen Lake, a Methodist camp in central Texas, we jumped at the chance to attend. Two of the most dynamic executives from the board of missions, Tracey Jones and Eugene Stockwell, were the main speakers. Their descriptions of the challenges, the hardships, the risks, and the rewards of being a missionary made what I was experiencing as a pastor in this country pale by comparison. They offered a perspective on missions completely new to me.

  In one of his sermons, Tracey Jones—a son of missionary to China during World War II and later the general secretary of the United Methodist General Board of Global Ministries—drew on the images of the “four horsemen”[5] to describe not the end of time but the realities of the current world. With stories from every continent, he talked about the scourges of war, famine, and death. He said words about “preaching the good news” and planting churches but spoke more about the role missionaries were taking in peacemaking, agricultural, and medical missions.

  Eugene Stockwell—born and raised in Buenos Aires, Argentina, where his father founded the Union Theological Seminary—said that missionaries were needed in other countries not so much as pastors but as teachers to help train native pastors in universities and seminaries.

  At the close of the conference, when we sang “For All the Saints”, I thought of Adoniram Judson and the call to me through his story. Unlike Judson, whose motivation was solely to win lost souls for Christ, Jones and Stockwell gave me a different view of the role of the missionary, one that made sense to me:

  And when the strife is fierce, the warfare long,

  steals on the ear the distant triumph song,

  and hearts are brave again, and arms are strong.

  Alleluia, Alleluia!

  As we sang the fifth verse of the hymn, absent was the image of winning lost souls for Christ. In its place, but scarcely less presumptuous, I saw myself in some foreign land engaged in hand-to-hand combat against injustice and ignorance. Judith and I left the conference ecstatic and reconfirmed in our determination to become missionaries. We just didn’t know where.

  Chapter Three

  Choices Exclude

  Oh, I kept the first for another day!

  Yet knowing how way leads on to way,

  I doubted if I should ever come back.

  — Robert Frost (1915)

  At Glen Lake I got the address of the Methodist Board of Missions in New York. I wrote immediately declaring that Judith and I intended to be missionaries. That we might not pass the rigorous screening process we heard about at the conference didn’t occur to me. I was called to be a missionary and was a Methodist.

  Since I wanted to teach church history or the Bible in college or seminary, I asked why I needed to go to a seminary. Why couldn’t I go directly from my bachelor’s degree in religion to work on my doctorate? Why did I need to add three years of seminary in the middle?

  “In the field of theology,” wrote back Paul Yount, a personnel secretary at the board, “you go to a seminary before going on to doctoral studies.”

  A few lines down in his response, Paul continued: “I’ve just returned from spending a couple of hours going through graduate school catalogues checking out what you want to do. I didn’t realize it, but you can go directly to doctoral studies without getting a B.D. [Bachelor of Divinity). I’m sorry; I didn’t know.”

  Paul was the authority in New York. I was a brash kid in Texas. How could I be right? He had my full attention.

  “You can do what you propose doing, and we won’t object. But if you say that you may also want to teach in seminary, I think it would serve you well to experience how pastors are trained.”

  I had to admit that made sense. Besides, five years before going overseas already seemed like an eternity; what was adding three more years?

  What I hadn’t realized in all the talk about doctoral study was that my grades in the first two years of college wouldn’t have commended me to any credible graduate program. In my last two years at TWC, inspired by my friends, my grades improved and I was experiencing the joy of learning apart from academic requirements.

  When my mother learned that I was thinking of attending the seminary at Perkins School of Theology at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, she was enraged. She wanted me to go to a conservative or fundamentalist school that she thought matched both of our theologies. My theology, if it can be said that I had one, was in flux when I graduated from TWC. The fundamentalism of my mother and her parents was losing its hold on me, and I didn’t know where the new river of learning was taking me. In the summer of 1959 I enrolled at Perkins because it was the Methodist seminary that most ministers in the Central Texas Conference attended. My reason was not an act of rebellion against the wishes of my mother; it was just easier to go there.

  I had some anxiety about going to this liberal graduate school and was determined to protect my faith. I was on guard against intellectual sophistication. What I was not prepared to encounter at this school—what my mother called a “den of Satan”—were professors of such deep faith. That first summer I was looking for horns and tails in the form of skepticism and cynicism, but what I found was honesty and commitment. With William J. Power in Old Testament, Joseph Allen in ethics, Albert Outler in church history and Wesley studies, Ritchey Hogg in missions and ecumenics, and my advisor, William Farmer, in Gospel studies, I soon discovered that those for whom the Christian faith was the object of study was also their life. I began to realize that genuine faith did not mean sacrificing intellectual integrity. I learned that the opposite of faith is not doubt, but perhaps certainty.

  Dr. Allen’s most important instructions to me were not in the classroom. In the fall of 1960, he challenged my class to get involved in the presidential campaign that pitted John F. Kennedy against Richard M. Nixon.

  “Decide which you think is the best choice for president and get involved in their campaign; give yourself good reasons for making the decision.”

  In the first election in which I would be old enough to vote, one of the key issues of the campaign was Kennedy’s religion. Several friends and I listened on to his radio address to the Greater Houston Ministerial Association in September, in which his Roman Catholic faith was the sole topic:

  If I should lose on the real issues, I shall return to my seat in the Senate, satisfied that I'd tried my best and was fairly judged.

  But if this election is decided on the basis that forty million Americans lost their chance of being president on the day they were baptized, then it is the whole nation that will be the loser, in the eyes of Catholics and non-Catholics around the world, in the eyes of history, and in the eyes of our own people. [6]

  By the end of his speech, I was a Kennedy supporter. My contribution, in addition to my vote, was to distribute signs and leaflets.

  Dr. Allen also introduced me to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Like many others, I learned about King soon after the beginning of the Montgomery Bus Boycott. That was in my first year at Texas Wesleyan College. When I became pastor of Annetta and Temple Hall in June of 1956, the boycott was big news. Many people in my churches, as well as throughout the rest of the South, said that King was a communist. I didn’t believe that, but I whispered to him, seven hundred miles away, “Dr. King, I believe in what you are trying to do, but you’re going too fast. Slow down. Give us whites a chance to get on board.”

  Dr. King came to speak at a voter registration rally in Dallas in 1960. Dr. Allen took three of us to hear him. I don’t know if we were the only ones he invited or if we were the only ones who accepted. When we arrived at the Dallas Memorial Auditorium, the first thing that struck me was that we were the only whites in an auditorium of two to three thousand people. King was supposed to speak at seven o’clock but didn’t begin until ten o’clock. Once he started, he had us all in the palm of his hand. And when he started his “Free at last, free at last…” signature closing line, there was such shouting, clapping, and
stamping of feet that the building shook. If that revelation I experienced Sunday night in Iowa Park was God’s “still small voice,” this was God speaking in thunder, lightning, and an earthquake combined. When it was over, the ethics professor said to me, “I’m glad we’re on the same side with King.” In the months ahead, King would have reason to doubt that white moderates were on the same side.

  As we drove back to the campus, the other two students and Dr. Allen chatted about the evening. I was lost in thought about my great-grandfather, Amos Lancaster Thornberry. My grandfather, father, and I shared his middle name. I was proud of it but had always been glad that the name Amos was not passed on to me.

  Amos grew up in a large family in Greenup, Kentucky. When the Civil War broke out, many families split over the war, especially in border states. Amos was the one member of his family that was in sympathy with the Union. He said he was opposed to slavery. In 1861, at the age of sixteen he enlisted in the Union Army, his brothers all joining the Confederate Army. He was wounded in the battle for Atlanta but stayed in the army until the end of the war. He went back to Greenup only long enough to marry his fiancé and then headed to Texas. He never contacted his family again.

  I had heard the story since I was a little boy, but on that night, when Dr. King spoke, it came alive with meaning. I realized my great-grandfather had been involved in this struggle!

  Marshall Smith was a black Baptist minister who commuted back and forth to his family and church in east Texas so that he could study at Perkins. He spent a couple of nights a week in the quarters where Judith and I were dorm supervisors. At six feet one inch, he wasn’t as tall as me, but with his stocky build, he weighed a good deal more. He was one of three African-American students in the seminary. Marshall was my first African-American friend, and I was his first white friend.

  “What do you say to Kuby’s for lunch?” I said to three of my classmates as we came out of Kirby Hall. A block off the SMU campus, the German deli was a favorite of students and faculty alike.

  “You guys go on,” Marshall said. “I don’t think Kuby’s will serve me.”

  “What do you mean?” another responded. “This is Kuby’s we’re talkin’ about. It’s almost a part of the university.”

  “Come on, Marshall!” I said, but I was embarrassed that I hadn’t thought about the possibility of his being refused.

  We entered the crowded deli and were immediately the center of attention. We got in line with our trays and moved to where orders were placed.

  “You can’t eat here,” Kuby said across the counter. “I’m German. We’re not prejudiced. But my customers…,” he said. He paused, and we looked around at angry stares. “You understand, don’t you?”

  “No, I don’t understand,” Marshall said.

  We left our trays with napkins and silverware on the tray slide and walked out angry and embarrassed. The sit-in movement that had begun in Greensboro, North Carolina, a year earlier had spread to Nashville and other southern cities. In January of 1961, the movement had reached Dallas. Leaders from the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) arrived to organize sit-ins at strategic locations around the city. Some students from the seminary joined with the Campus Young Democrats to focus on segregated eating establishments near the university. Every day demonstrators were arrested. Following the lead of Earl Allen, one of the other black students at Perkins who lived in our dorm, Judith and I participated in demonstrations at the University Drug Store and the Toddle House across the street from campus. We missed the day at the drug store when the owner closed the doors and set off DDT bombs on the demonstrators. Students got sick. One of our friends told us that when he couldn’t breathe and ran out, the owner, Mr. Bright, shouted after him, “Can’t take it, huh?”

  As the four of us walked back to the campus, we decided we would organize our own sit-in at Kuby’s.

  The next day we went back, took up two tables, and sat. The usual chatter in the room faded into silence. The usually smiling Kuby grimaced as he stood by the cash register apparently not able to decide whether or not to call the police. After an hour or so of sitting and receiving hostile stares and words from other customers, Kuby came over to our table.

  “Go on through the line,” he said.

  We ordered sausages and hot potato salad with the deli’s signature apple strudel. We got our food and ate. Some of the customers waiting in line left.

  Back at the table, Marshall said, “This is good potato salad.”

  Although this was our one sit-in together, we learned that within a month Dallas joined twenty-five other cities across the South in desegregating restaurants and lunch counters. This was three years before the Civil Rights Act of 1964 made such segregation unlawful.[7]

  More important to me than the small victory at Kuby’s was the deepening bond between Marshall and me. We talked about what we might do together in the future. He knew I planned to be a missionary and never said a negative word about it. But since I wanted to teach in college, he suggested that I consider his alma mater, a small black college that didn’t have enough funds to adequately pay its professors. The prospect excited me, but I was still committed to going overseas. Besides, Leo Hsu had convinced me of where I wanted that to be.

  Leo was a Crusade Scholar at Perkins from Hong Kong. The Methodist Board of Missions had a fund to bring promising Christian students from the mission field to study in the United States. He was the only Chinese student in the seminary. Living in the single men’s dorm, Leo started a personalized laundry service to supplement his income. Before long he was well-known among both the seminary students and the SMU undergraduates. Leo was more interested in relationships than academics. He exerted only enough effort to make passing grades. It wasn’t a matter of intelligence but of different priorities.

  Leo taught me how to play bridge. He had master points and was an expert. I, on the other hand, never gave bridge the attention he thought it deserved, and it showed in my game. He also came to cook Chinese food for Judith and me in our apartment and brought with him the only other two Chinese students in the undergraduate school. He insisted that we all eat with chopsticks and showed no mercy. Leo was short and as wide as he was tall, and he ate fast. When he cooked, we soon realized we had to be fast with our chopsticks or he would eat up the food.

  Sometimes good friends are quite unalike, and that was the case with Leo and me. Leo knew I felt called to be a missionary, and he made it his personal mission to recruit me for work with Chinese-speaking people. Leo was nothing if not persistent. Finally, Judith and I said yes and I wrote another letter to Paul Yount at the board.

  Yount’s supervisor, Mel Williams, responded to my letter. He wrote because his missionary experience had been in China. Mel, as he asked us to call him, was already an institution at the board. He knew every one of the board’s six hundred Methodist missionaries and the names of most of their children. He wrote that the only Chinese-speaking areas open to missionaries were in Hong Kong, the Philippines, Malaysia, Singapore, and Taiwan. There was no question in Leo’s mind about where we should go, and Hong Kong went to the top of our list. Since we were still at least three years from going, Mel advised us it was too early to try to decide which of the four places it would be.

  In my third year at Perkins, Dr. Farmer asked me to stay for an additional year and teach first-year Greek. Because I felt the invitation to teach was such an honor, I delayed doctoral work at Boston University. That additional year confirmed my desire to be a teacher.

  Boston University had a cooperative program with Harvard and Andover Newton called Missions, Ecumenics, and World Religions, which allowed me to focus most of my study on Christianity in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries outside Europe and the U.S.

  Since I had to pass qualifying exams in French and Greek, I needed a tutor. My advisor, Per Hassing, recommended an old man in Back Bay.

  “He knows how to get students ready for the exams, and you will enjoy getting to kn
ow him,” Dr. Hassing said in a heavy Norwegian brogue that not even thirty-five years as a missionary in Southern Rhodesia could erase.

  The tutor was in his late seventies. One day, when the heat from the radiator of his small apartment was cooking us, he rolled up his sleeves and I saw a blurred serial number tattooed on his left forearm. When I asked about it, he acknowledged that he had been at Auschwitz and was grateful for his liberation by Soviet forces. Although a talkative man, he didn’t speak again of Auschwitz.

  “Did you tutor Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.?” I asked one day after hearing it from Dr. Hassing.

  “Ah yes,” he said as his face brightened with obvious delight. “He was a good student, that Martin.”

  “I’ve heard from Dr. DeWolf, his adviser, that Dr. King wasn’t a social activist while he was here in school. Is that true?” This wasn’t as much a question about Dr. King as it was about me. Newspapers were filled with stories about Dr. King’s campaign in Birmingham. As the situation there intensified, King appealed for more marchers to come and fill the ranks vacated of the thousands being arrested. Student organizers in Boston were going to charter a bus to take volunteers. With my field exams coming later in the spring, I declined.

  “Ah, Harold is right and would know better than anyone else; Martin avoided those organizations. He was here to study, and that’s what he did. Oh, he and Coretta went to an occasional concert, but he didn’t let anything distract him from what he was here for, including preparing for his German exam,” he chuckled.

  “When he was here as a student,” he continued, “I knew I would be reading about him, but just not so soon. Within six months of receiving his doctorate, he was leading the Montgomery Bus Boycott.

  “You see, these students running around advocating for this and that,” he said, waving his arms. “They are good causes, most of them, but they are jeopardizing the good they might be able to do later because they’re not paying enough attention to their studies now.”