Books: Childhood in China

MINOR HERESIES — John J. Espey —Knopf ($2).

Before the Japs came, life at the American Presbyterian Mission in Shanghai was tolerably peaceful. From across the fence drifted a medley of sounds: the shrill screams of a little Chinese girl whose feet were being bound for the first time; the cries in the Roman Catholic insane asylum ; the chatter of Seventh-Day Baptists; the heavy snores of the local opium addict.

When darkness fell, the click of locks and latches betrayed the arrival of the gentle nightly burglar; and often there was a series of high shrieks as the cook (who suffered from “an unfortunate hereditary malady”) chased his sister around the Women’s Bible School with a knife. “Being a good law-abiding Christian,” said the cook, “certainly does break down a man’s patience in the end.” But the Presbyterian Espeys remained patient to the end. To son-&-heir John J. Espey, these scenes of Shanghai childhood seemed nothing out-of-the-way — until his parents brought him home to the U.S. in 1930 (he now teaches English at Los Angeles Occidental College). Minor Heresies is a gay and graceful account of his exotic boyhood.

“Evoe! Evoe! Dionysus!” Inhabitants of the haughty International Settlement regarded the Mission area at South Gate as a cross between the frontier and a zoo. The so-called “honey-boats” drifted slowly down the neighboring canal, carrying Shanghai’s human excrement to the truck farms. The dusty road was always filled with grunting pigs on their way to slaughter. Under the willow trees old Chinese lay dozing, waiting for their daily lunch of sparrows to get stuck on the bird-limed twigs.

There were the usual Occidental eccentrics — British Miss Roder, who spent most of her time washing off Chinese contamination in boracic acid; American Mrs. Sedley, who believed she was “the nymph of the spring” and danced around a water hole in nightgown and flowers, crying: “Evoe! Evoe! Dionysus, Dionysus!”

Mei li jen loo mung. American visitors to the Espey home usually called spindly-legged little John Espey “Toothpicks” or “Droopy Drawers.” But to the Chinese servants he was “the only son of an only son, first cousin to the President of the U.S. … a nephew of the King of England, and [owner of] the tongue of a five-clawed dragon.” Twenty American gunboats lay on the Whangpoo, simply waiting for him to whistle them up to shell his enemies to bits. He was familiar with the tomb of General Grant, and hailed from Pittsburgh — a spot that in piety ranked second only to 156 Fifth Avenue (Presbyterian Headquarters).

Master John and his sister also carried on the Lord’s work where their elders had failed. Sometimes they sang to the heathen what they believed to be an old Mandarin Christmas carol, beginning: “Gau lei tzu mei li jen loo mung” — until they discovered it was simply a pious Chinese schoolteacher’s version of “God Rest Ye, Merry Gentlemen.” But their greatest good work was when they got one of their cooks to the point of promising to become a Presbyterian if Miss Espey could lick him in a Lord’s Prayer race in Chinese. Time & again the cook was on the brink of conversion—only to pull abreast at “our daily bread,” and spurt victoriously into Amen while Miss Espey was still screeching for ever and ever. Later, the Espeys found that the conscienceless cook had won by skipping the power and the glory. But, as he blandly reminded them, “Confucius said ‘Nought done in a hurry is thorough, and an eye for petty gain means big things undone.’ “