Ch 8-1: Sending Off for Furlough
Over time, rituals built up around the departure for furlough and the return to Chengtu. Every month, the West China Missionary News carried notices not only of who was going on furlough and who was returning, but of the teas, dinners, parties and other festivities that their fellow missionaries were holding to mark the departure and the return. In June 1925, the anonymous reporter from Chongqing noted that:
Mr. and Mrs. F.M. Davis, Mr. E. N. Meuser and family and Mrs. Speers, and Dr. Peterson all from Chengtu have recently passed through Chungking going on furlough or downriver. A large party consisting of the Stewarts, Wilfords, Walkers, Dr. R. G. Kilborn and Miss Wilson is expected from Chengtu daily— also going on furlough. (West China Missionary News, June 1925).
Those who were leaving on furlough were feted by those who remained behind. David Crockett Graham (Autobiography n/d, 55) described with fond recollection how he and his family were honored as they departed for furlough in 1918:
In addition to the farewell reception by the church, there was a big reception given by the Suifu people in our church. In their speeches many nice things were said, and we were given many silk banners, on which were very complimentary sentences. ‘A good soldier of Christ.’ ‘As high as the mountains and as long as the waters.’ ‘He is studious and loves people.’ The church gave a big banner which I still have, and a fine silk banner presented by the Chamber of Commerce, the Educational Association, The Board of Aldermen, and the Farmer’s Association… When we started on our journey from Suifu, many friends and church members escorted us a long way out of the city. Among them was the member of the upper house of parliament, who held my hand affectionately and continued to say, “I can’t bear to see you go.” I finally requested him to return to Suifu.
Profuse strings of firecrackers attached to long poles were a customary part of departure festivities. In January 1924,
To the tune of a fusilade [sic] of firecrackers, Mr. and Mrs. Lee Lovegren boarded a raft on the evening of May 5 and sailed at daylight the next morning down river on their way to America for furlough. The previous Sunday Mr. Lovegren gave a farewell message to the Chinese Church and Mrs. Lovegren sang a sweet solo. (West China Missionary News, June 1925).
New missionary Margaret Simkin (1978, 17) observed the firecracker ritual as the Sawdons, a senior missionary couple, set out for furlough in 1923:
The Sawdons got away last Tuesday morning at 6:30 with the usual din of many firecrackers. In China whether you are welcoming an important guest or saying goodbye, celebrating a birthday anniversary or having a wedding or funeral, there must be plenty of noise. … Can you imagine a family as they set off? – several sedan chairs, then carriers by pairs bearing loads slung between bamboo poles, and all this amid the smoke and din of firecrackers!
In 1938, as Max and Emily Gentry were getting ready for their second furlough, Emily recorded the rituals and preparations that attended their departure. The Gentrys distributed their old linens and clothes to Chinese employees and servants, presumably because the Gentrys would obtain new goods in North America. Emily attended a ladies’ lunch in her honour, while Max was feted by a tea for a hundred people put on by the Board of Directors of the hospital where he worked. Both Gentry’s made the rounds of their friends.
Of all the valedictory rituals, Emily (1988, 139) wrote, "the event which I especially enjoyed was given by the thirty students who had attended my English class for three years. They had decorated the Chapel nicely, served tea, then had a program and speeches, followed by supper."
The Gentrys never returned to China from their second furlough. Max Gentry went to Edinburgh and London for specialized medical training, but by the time the furlough was done, he and Emily decided that it would be safer to stay in the United States with their three sons. Max joined his brother in medical practice in Omaha. In years of intense insecurity in West China, such as 1911 or 1927, furlough became a permanent exit for some like the Gentrys.
Earl Willmott sent an exuberant letter to friends and family after he and Mary Katharine Willmott returned from their furlough on December 14, 1937, expressing his excitement about everything from their spectacular send off to their triumphant return:
What years of life packed into these twenty months away from Chengtu! What happy times with friends old and new! How extraordinarily everything worked out as we had hoped and planned it! … Getting away from Chengtu in March 1936: the packing of innumerable trunks, boxes, bags, being entertained to teas, dinners, parties, finally off in the trunk all packed in with quilts and hot water bottles and a tarpaulin, the two-day run in the rain over the newly completed road to Chungking; waiting for the river to rise so the little steamer could run, finally through the gorges of the Yangtze – bound for the outside world once more! I remember when we passed the Bridgmans on an upbound ship and feeling so sorry for them – their furlough over! (Now I know how glad they were getting home) (emphasis added).
These departure festivities were major features in the landscape of missionary social life, interspersed with tennis and amateur theatricals. People were always coming and going to and from Canada, the United States or other places, so that friendships, even those which were marked by deep personal affinities, were punctuated by transience. Martin Johns, who was born in 1912 in Chengdu to one of the early missionary couples, recalled that farewell parties were major events: The departure of a group of missionaries was always a big event in the life of the mission and there was a great round of farewell parties for those leaving.
It mattered little to the Chinese whether the missionaries were going for furlough or forever. The send off always involved copious rounds of firecrackers. Martin Johns (1988, 116) remembers their final send off in 1925:
When the great day arrived many friends gathered at the dock in Chengtu from which our flotilla was to depart… As the ships started to move out into the current those on shore let off great strings of firecrackers. Their noise was the last link to our friends as we drifted down-river on the first stage of our long journey to Ontario. The excitement covered the sadness that we all felt as we left our Chinese "homeland" behind.
When Mary Lamb, working as an evangelist for the Women’s Missionary Society in Fuling, departed for the last time in 1940, returning to Canada to take care of a niece whose mother had just passed away, the procession of well-wishers on her last day began in the morning and continued until midnight. Lamb (quoted in Shulman 2008, 254) recorded in her diary that it was not until one-thirty in the morning that she was able to make her way to the riverside, to get the boat that would take her on the first leg of the journey back to Canada.
For clergy in particular, farewell formalities could be drawn out over weeks or even months, encompassing special church services as well as dinners and teas. Bidding farewell provided an occasion for disparate strands of the mission community to pull together. When Thomas Torrance, the Scottish-born representative of the American Bible Society, based in Chengdu, prepared to depart at the end of 1934, the ceremonies included the presentation of silk scrolls and banners, the passing of a resolution by the West China Union University General Faculty congratulating him on his three decades of work, and of course a writeup in the West China Missionary News.
The WCMN article noted the presence of many Chinese Christians in the gatherings, including people who had come from the Qiang people from the eastern edge of the Tibetan plateau, whose language Torrance had learned and whose artifacts he had collected for the WCUU Archaeological Museum (Anon. 1934b, 24).