LETTERS FROM YANGCHOW – A Missionary’s Perspective of War and Peace - JOAN FOO MAHONY in Kuala Lumpur. Dedicated to the late STEPHEN H. GREEN – Yangchow and Tokyo

Smitten By Faith Issue Number October 8th 2022

In 1974, at the age of 25, I moved to Tokyo where I was to spend 10 of the most meaningful years of my life and my legal career. During my time in Tokyo at the then law firm of Anderson Mori & Rabinowitz, one of the most enduring friendships I made was with a gentleman called STEPHEN H GREEN ( ‘Stephen’) who was already in his sixties when I met him.  Stephen was an American who was absolutely fluent in what was then the 3 most important languages required for working in Japan : his native English, Chinese and Japanese.

Stephen was born in China where he grew up and had his entire education in Yangchow, China until the Second World War in 1939 when, while his missionary father, STEPHEN W GREEN ( ‘W’ for short ) remained in China, the 18 year old Stephen together with his mother Ellen and 16 year old brother Benny were evacuated to return to the safety of the USA. Emotionally, the USA was a reverse culture shock for this white family who felt totally Chinese and had nothing in common with their fellow Americans. Once ‘home’, both W and Stephen quickly enlisted to fight the Japanese as you will read below. But when the war was over in 1945, China was still in turmoil with fighting between the Nationalists and the Communists. An imminent return to China for the Green family was not feasible.

Nonetheless, Stephen was determined to return to Asia. So he made his way back east – not to China - but as close as he could get and this was to US occupied Japan. With his knowledge of oriental languages, Stephen had no problem finding work in Japan, but he never stopped dreaming of one day returning to China.  However, the years rolled away; he fell in love with a Japanese girl and they married. Japan was now to be his ultimate destiny because soon his wife became very ill and Stephen devoted his life to caring for her. And, so Stephen never left Japan; he never returned to the China of his dreams; keeping in his heart a deep nostalgia for the country of his childhood and youth.

Above : These pictures above show Tokyo after the Second World War - the city that welcomed Stephen when he moved there.

Stephen’s amazing knowledge of Japan and the Japanese, China and the Chinese was most unusual and rare indeed. Surely, invaluable for a major American law firm like the one we worked for. My boss Richard Rabinowitz certainly recognised this and he hired Stephen to work for him as his general factotum and as his eyes and ears. Sadly, Stephen had no professional qualification and so, we the young lawyers out-ranked him even though he ( so humble and unassuming ) was wiser than any of us. At that time, I had no idea of Stephen’s unusual family background in missionary work in China. But I could see he was different from the other Americans. He never laughed out loud and he always looked a little sad. Yet, Stephen’s kindness, humanity and compassion was enough to light up a room.  Stephen did his work quietly and kept to himself. But, whenever I had the opportunity, I loved sneaking to Stephen’s room to chat with him about his family and his life in China. I was fascinated by what Stephen told me about his father, an Episcopal missionary educator, an amazing evangelist and human being who, like his father before him spent his entire life in the outer reaches of China educating Chinese students in the service of God.

Left : An office outing of the law firm of Anderson Mori & Rabinowitz; picture taken sometime in the seventies. I am circled in pink. Stephen is not in the picture because he never went out on any social outings. Sadly, those were the days before mobile phones so I do not have a single picture of my friend Stephen H. Green.

Right : The only picture I have of Stephen is the one in his father’s papers - ‘Letters From Yangchow’ which show a 12 year old young boy’s military pass in Yangchow. I am hoping that perhaps one of friends in the law firm can find a good picture of Stephen, the man.

In 1984, just before I left Japan for good to move to Hong Kong, Stephen came to see me with a precious pile of papers wrapped in a beautiful ‘furoshiki’ ( Japanese fabric used to wrap gifts). When he gave this bundle to me as a parting gift, he said they were his father, W’s ‘Letters From Yangchow’ – actually just 3 letters - written in 1937 during the Second Sino-Japanese War. These precious missives were  all typed up by his father W in the days of the old clunky type writer. In those days, all copies were original carbon copy paper copies. There were no copying machines; no lap tops. So, I knew these pages I held in my hand ( albeit copies ) were very rare indeed. Stephen said they were for me to keep, read and do whatever I wished with them.  My eyes filled with tears. This wonderful man, so ‘old’ beyond his just 60 years, so private and humble, was entrusting me with his family letters.

Somehow, I have managed to hold on to the ‘Letters From Yangchow’ all these many years since 1984. They have ‘travelled’  with me with every house move I made to various cities - Hong Kong, New York, Boston, London and Kuala Lumpur. Miraculously – somehow – all the pages of ‘Letters From Yangchow’, now yellow with age, the typed words so small you need a magnifying glass to read - were never lost !

Left : The beautiful historic Grand Canal which ran through the then bucolic sleepy town of 1930 Yangchow

Middle : Map of China showing location of Yangchow ( or Yangzhou as it is spelled today)

Right : Detailed map of Jiangsu District showing Yangzhou between Nanjing and Shanghai.

You will note the spelling of the city of ‘Yangchow’. That was the spelling when W wrote it in 1937. Today, the modern universal Romanized spelling is ‘Yangzhou’. But, I will keep to W’s original spelling. The name Yangchow means ‘Rising Prefecture’ as it was once an ancient capital of Imperial China. Today, you can see only poor remnants of the walled city ramparts of historic Yangchow which is located between the cities of Nanjing ( Nanking before ) and Shanghai, on a plain north of the Yangtze River in Central Jiangsu Province in East China. The magnificent Grand Canal crosses the prefecture from north to south running through the city centre. At the time the Green family lived in Yangchow, it was a small town of only 200,000 people and Stephen recalls parapets and moats - peaceful, quiet, bucolic. A lovely little town.

When he gave me the ‘Letters From Yangchow’, Stephen also wrote a beautiful inscriptive note in English and Chinese on the front page which I will treasure always.

“ Joan,

Nostalgia and melancholy can be close cousins and your bright cheer has oft dispelled fits of those feelings for me. Nonetheless, I’d like to inscribe here two lines from Li Po which I have always liked ( characteristically ?) :

‘Chopping the water with a knife does not stop it from running. Similarly, drinking to stop the sadness does not diminish but increases it.’

Stephen, February 1984 “

Left : The front page of the original Letters From Yangchow

Right : Stephen’s lovely inscription to me in the facing page of his father’s Letters.

Li Po (李白) is also Romanized as Li Bai, a Chinese poet of the Tang Dynasty born around 701. After growing up in Szechuan province, Li Po left home to sail the mighty Yangtze River, thus beginning the many journeys documented in the more than 1,000 poems he was inspired to write. He is considered one of the most important poets of the Tang Dynasty. Undoubtedly, as Stephen wrote in his inscription to me, Li Po's melancholic poems ( characteristically ? ) appealed very much to him. I was happy to read in Stephen’s inscription that I cheered him up.

And now, 85 years since W’s letters were written, I know that the time has finally come for me to share W’s ‘Letters from Yangchow’ with you. W’s and Stephen’s memories are too precious not to share with others. Not to whet the appetites of the curious and the mindless but to enrich the lives of those sensitive souls among us who can benefit from them. Just as in the case of the readers of ‘Smitten By Faith’, W and his entire family were smitten by the power of their faith and the vast mysteries of China. They had love, compassion and most of all a sense of duty. China and the Chinese benefited.  So, today I would like to dedicate this article to my friend Stephen H. Green and thank him for enriching my life with his father W’s very personal  ‘Letters From Yangchow’.

The Letters were actually a bunch of 3 letters written by W in 1937 during the military conflict and full scale resistance of the Chinese to Japanese expansion plans in China, known as the ‘Second Sino-Japanese War’ from 1937-1945 to distinguish this from the ‘First Sino-Japanese War’ which had already began in 1894 -1895. The Letters were sent by W to a close family friend, called ‘Patricia’ in the USA. He signed off his letters as ‘Uncle Steve’. After the death of W, Patricia sent the letters in 1972 to Stephen in Tokyo.

W passed away in 1971. At the Eulogy given by the Rev Edward P Allen at the funeral of Stephen W Green on Sept 24th 1971 in Monrovia, California, he said :

“ … Stephen W. Green was probably one of the most completely disorganised men I have ever known, and yet at the same time, a man of very deep love and patience  for the little people of the world : a man who had a ministry that many people have never noticed because it was always performed in corners of the world where no one was watching and where many people were lonely.”

W was the son of an American Episcopal missionary and in 1910 he too decided that, like his father before him, he wanted to be a missionary in China, Japan, the Philippines or even India. His applications were turned down by all those places. The church did not want him. So he got on an English freighter which happened to be sailing to China, working his way on board. When he finally reached the port of Shanghai, this young enthusiastic evangelist who wanted only to serve God as a teacher, presented himself at the Shanghai Mission Office of the Episcopalian Church and said,  “ Here I am; use me.”

Such courage. Such audacity. Of course, they accepted him and for the next 35 years put him out to work as a missionary all over China and then finally at Yangchow. In China, W met and married another American, Ellen a nurse, and they had 3 sons together, the eldest of whom was Stephen H Green whom I had the good fortune to know in Tokyo.

Left : The Mahan school ground in the 1930s

Middle : W with his wife Ellen in the centre

Right : School photo. You can see W seated among the teachers and pupils. W is circled in green.

The young Green family lived and worked in Yangchow where W taught at The Mahan School, a private school founded in Yangchow by the Episcopal Church in the late 19th century, taking its name from a combination of the name of the famous American Admiral Mahan and the Chinese word ‘Mei’ and ‘Han’ which spoken together mean ‘America and China’ . W taught at The Mahan School for 3 decades, the last one was when he became the headmaster there in the early 30’s. The Mahan School, like St. John’s University in Shanghai was for over 60 years a proudly independent educational institution with some distinguished and accomplished alumni in governmental and business careers all over China. Stephen writes, “I hope that my father realized that generations of students remember his intellectual curiosity, his affection for garrulous dialogue, and his intellectual honesty, as I do”.

At the Mahan School in Yangchow, Stephen says that the family lived a quiet uneventful life and his younger brother and he ( the third brother died ) were home-schooled by a White Russian governess in the mornings and a classical Chinese scholar in the afternoons. When I knew Stephen in Tokyo, he not only spoke  Chinese like a native, he wrote Chinese and his handwriting reflected quite a beautiful calligraphic style. Stephen told me, “ I was fortunate to have lived the childhood that I did with my father in that grand old city which figured for over nine centuries of Chinese commerce, literature and art.”

In 1937, when the family were on vacation, they were caught up in Tsingtao ( or ‘Qingdao’ today ) during the military escalation of the ongoing hostilities known as the ‘ Second Sino-Japanese War’. What was then a sort-of ‘phony’ war in China became dead serious when not long after that, came the Second World War in Europe in 1939 and the Japanese military took the opportunity of the global war to escalate their operations in China and strike elsewhere in South East Asia. W made the decision to send his family home to the USA while he remained in China and continued his work at the Mahan School, close to the people he had loved and served all his life. Yangchow was quickly occupied by the Japanese but during the initial Japanese occupation, since the USA was not yet in the war, the Japanese Military Police unit garrisoning Yangchow allowed W to continue teaching at Mahan until his repatriation on the exchange ship, the ‘Grisholm’ in 1939.

After Pearl Harbour in 1941, with the Pacific war in earnest, both W and Stephen enlisted. W was recruited by the US Marines as a military intelligence officer with the rank of ‘major’ and sent to China. The young Stephen ( just 18 years old ) joined the army and was sent to India and then to the interior of his beloved China with the US Army. Both father and son survived the war unharmed and returned to America.  With his reunited family, W then continued his missionary work, this time among America’s poor, homeless and misfits in Episcopal missions in California, Kansas, South Caroline, Sierra Madre and other places. W made them into a community that loved and supported each other. There were also family tragedies, the most difficult of all was the tragic accident which killed Ellen. It must not have been an easy time for Stephen who quickly headed back to his beloved Far East.

These 3 ‘Letters From Yangchow’ by W were written in the short period of one year – in 1937 and gives us a peephole on what war and peace must have been like for brave missionaries like W in China. As Stephen said : “ The letters seemed worth sharing with friends because they are evocative of their time and place and because they are authentic genre to the point of tedium, and of course, because he was my father”.

I have decided to reproduce in the forthcoming 3 weeks, the edited versions of the 3 letters in 3 instalments . So for this week, here is LETTER I. I will follow in the next forthcoming weeks with Letter II and the final Letter III. For paid subscribers, there will be a bitly link for them to retrieve the complete letters in their entirety once they are all published in Smitten By Faith .

So, sit back and enjoy the tales of ‘ Letters From Yangchow’ – revealed publicly for the first time since it was written in 1937.

LETTERS FROM YANGCHOW by STEPHEN W GREEN

Written in Tsingtao and Shanghai, 1937

LETTER  I ( written in Tsingtao )

Left : Overlooking the Yellow Sea in north China, the quiet harbour of Tsingtao ( or Qingdao as it is spelled today )

Right : You can see where Qingdao is on the big map

Tsingtao ( Begun at 10:55 pm, September 28, 1937 and continued on various dates to time of mailing, probably when USS Chaumont sails from Tsingtao about the middle of October 1937 )

[ Editor’s note : 1937 was the beginning of the Second Sino-Japanese ‘war’ and intensive hostilities had already begun in Shanghai and elsewhere in China. The Green family were actually on summer vacation in the north near Tsingtao when these began so they could not easily travel to return to their home in Yangchow. While they were in Tsingtao, W wrote this letter to Patricia in the USA. Obviously, Patricia would then apprise the rest of their relatives with the news.]

Dear Patricia and all :

We have been in no actual danger as yet, though  of course, we may get in at any minute, and there have been times when we thought trouble was coming near, both in time and place. After leaving Yangchow, we came here to Tsingtao …a beautiful city … an ideal summer resort.

…..On a hillside overlooking the outer bay are many cottages built of stone and stucco with red tile roofs. Sanded roads run down to a beautiful sanded beach. Our house is at the foot of the hill… We put our suits on at home and skip down to the beach – there is even time for quite a swim after the children come home at noon from school before we eat lunch. From our veranda we see the moonlit waters, and when a typhoon blows up our way we lie in bed and hear the waves booming on the rocks, or we take the children down to be dashed by the waves.

…When we first arrived this time in Tsingtao, we stayed with some Russian friends who told us many tales of their last days in Russia and of their escapes across the border…

… Hankow, 400 miles up the Yangtse has had at least one bad raid when hundreds of civilians were killed, not to speak of the many wounded. And, to crown it all, Canton and the Hankow-Canton Railway near Canton have been badly bombed and are still in such danger from more raids…

…..We had one incident in Tsingtao when some Japanese were shot one day while Stephen and I were in town.

…We don't go for walks to the country or the mountains anymore; mails are very irregular; beginning yesterday the printers of our little local newspaper have gone on strike ostensibly because the editor put in the paper a pro-Japanese article but probably for other reasons; but aside from these small matters and from a great amount of letter writing, one might think that we were simply extending our vacation for a few weeks during this pleasant September weather.

…The governor of this province, General Han Foh-Chu, is reported to be trying to straddle a fence. They say that he was soccer-friendly with the Japanese and a recent Reuter report told of a visit to him by Doihara, the so-called ‘Lawrence of Manchuria’ at which visit a proposition is said to have been made that he turn over the province without fighting. He would have much difficulty in doing that as many Central Government troops and officers are up here, but there is the possibility that he will not give too vigorous orders to his own 30,000 provincial troops to stand against the Japanese if they should attempt to come down from the north along routes occupied by his men. Then too, there is always the possibility that no matter how loyal troops may be they will be overcome by the Japanese who have far superior equipment in artillery, tanks, planes and so forth.

…If there is fighting near here, we do not believe that we shall be any very great danger. If the Japanese come by land down the railway, there will be plenty of time for us to get out. If they should take it into their heads to attack by water, they will almost surely try to land about ten miles from here rather than risk having all their property in Tsingtao itself spoiled by their own fire if they tried to land there, and the further risk of being bottled up in a narrow peninsula. If they land at ShaDzeKou, ten miles away, they would encircle Tsingtao and we could then get out by water. There are several US gunboats standing by in the harbour and plans have been made to take us all out in case of an emergency.

…Trenches and dug-outs are now being dug not far from our house in Tsingtao. Most of us still think there won’t be much trouble here, but it may be that we are getting out just in time. Ellen and I  have now, October 19th practically decided that she and the children will go to America, probably Pasadena, as soon as convenient after we reach Shanghai. I hope to join her in January or February of next year.

Love to all, Uncle Steve.”

[ EDITOR’S NOTE : To explain what the Sino-Japanese War was for his relatives in America, W then includes a letter written by his son Steven for a school project when he was just 12 years old. It is most interesting to see how this little boy was able to view the sporadic Sino Japanese undeclared ‘war’ with such maturity. This is what young Stephen wrote about what he called “ the Sino-Japanese Undeclared War” and which W included in his Letter I : ]

“ The people in America seem to think that we are right in the midst of all this fighting, but you’d really not know, if you were here where we are, if you did not hear people talking about it….

…Nearly always the Japanese and Chinese governments have greatly disliked each other. In 1932 Japan and China had a fight. I don't think it was big enough to be called a war and there has been much propaganda issued by both governments against each other which has made many of them hate each other very much.”

[ LETTER II WILL BE PUBLISHED IN NEXT WEEK’S ( October 15th ) SMITTEN BY FAITH. STAY TUNED . ]

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