The Story of Mary Liu

By Edward Hunter

"The Story of Mary Liu" by Edward Hunter is a poignant and powerful narrative that delves into the life of Mary Liu, a courageous woman who endured and resisted the harsh realities of communist China. Through her personal story, Hunter paints a vivid picture of the cultural and political turmoil that defined mid-20th century China.

Mary Liu's journey is one of resilience and determination. Born into a world of political upheaval, she navigates the oppressive environment of Maoist China, where fear and suspicion permeate daily life. The book captures her struggles against the repressive regime, her fight for personal and religious freedom, and her ultimate quest for a life of dignity and truth.

Hunter's meticulous research and compelling storytelling bring Mary Liu's experiences to life, offering readers an intimate look at the human side of history. Her story is a testament to the strength of the human spirit in the face of tyranny and the enduring hope for a better future.

"The Story of Mary Liu" is more than a biography; it is a lens through which readers can understand the broader socio-political landscape of communist China. It highlights the profound impact of political ideologies on individual lives and underscores the universal desire for freedom and justice.

This book is a must-read for those interested in Chinese history, human rights, and the inspiring stories of individuals who stand against oppression. Edward Hunter's "The Story of Mary Liu" is a moving tribute to one woman's bravery and an enlightening exploration of a tumultuous period in world history.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Porirua Publishing
• Release date: May 30, 2024
• ISBN: 9781991305329

Edward Hunter

Born in New York, Edward Hunter spent a great amount of years living in Asia. It was in beautiful Thailand that he first began to put his love for Asian art into writing. He had a weekly column in the Bangkok Post entitled, “Antique Hunter,” as well as columns in Living Magazine, and was used as an authority by various media from around the world. When he returned to the United States in the mid 1980’s, he decided to switch careers and entered the intriguing world of high end retail. He worked for Sulka, Loro Piana and now works in Tailored Clothing at the Bergdorf Goodman Men’s store, located on Fifth Avenue in New York City. He is proud to be a founding member of BG 100, an organization created by Bergdorf Goodman to acknowledge the achievements of the top 100 selling associates. He will quickly tell you that it is service to the client that makes a salesperson’s reputation. Yet, by creating his card words, he has altered the value of his business card so far that, after the very first sale, a client almost always remembers to ask for “the poet”, “the philosopher”, “the salesperson who writes on the back of his cards”, or just “Hunter”. Four ways to selling success instead of the traditional one. Or as one of his many clients once said “it’s like receiving an American Fortune Card, not unlike eating at a Chinese restaurant and receiving a Chinese Fortune Cookie!”

Book preview

CHAPTER ONE — MARY AS A CHILD

Let me not injure the felicity of others if I say I am as happy as any.

Thomas Browne: Religio Medici

I

EVERYTHING was white, Mary told me. The ceiling was white, and the walls were white. The strangers who came into the room and touched me were dressed in white. Even I was all white. I was wound round and round with it. It was only later I knew this white was white bandages.

There were bandages round her body, her limbs, even her face. Everything in the world was white, Mary said again. Only her eyes could look out and take it all in, and her busy little mind wondered what had happened to the world to turn it suddenly white.

This is her first vivid memory. This impression had wiped out almost everything she remembered before it; she was all alone with this whiteness.

A white figure came into the room and brought her something to eat. The child ate what was put or poured into her mouth. But she wasn’t hungry. The white figure stood by her side and fed her. Her mouth, like her eyes, was free of the bandages which covered the rest of her. What had happened? She had no recollection at all. Where was she? She had no idea.

She was only five years old by Chinese reckoning, which credits the infant with a year at birth, a subtle concession to conception. By more practical Western reckoning, she was four—much too young to understand her totally strange surroundings. Life existed, and that was all that could be said for it then. She does not remember how long she lay like this; she remembers only additional details. She would have liked to take her arms out of all these folds of bandage and free her legs from their casts, but she wasn’t particularly anxious about it. She was more tired than anything else. My arms and feet hurt, too, she told me. "I was glad to be able to rest them. They stung. So did my ears and cheek. Why couldn’t I get up? I was completely bewildered. Only, luckily, I was far too tired to think much about it then. That came later.

I don’t know when it was, but it must have been some days after my operations, that I noticed somebody else living in the room with me, occupying the other bed. I was puzzled to find there was another child there. I had never seen her before. To this day I am not sure whether it was a he or a she.

Mary was too tightly bandaged to move a muscle, but she could stare and she could listen. She began to notice a difference between herself and this other child. It was a much more important difference than whether it was a boy or a girl. This difference was the second lasting impression which came to her under her strange new circumstances, and the difference between herself and her little neighbour was just as extraordinary and inexplicable as the whiteness.

The difference was in the people who came to the bedside of this other child, Mary explained. They were not all wrapped in white. They wore ordinary clothes. All of a sudden a great longing came over me. I wanted my mother. Why wasn’t she here with me? ‘Where is my mother?’ I asked again and again.

Her few memories of this period in the Methodist-run hospital in Nanking, which must have lasted some weeks, can be quickly told. Much of her time was passed in sleep or in a state of artificially induced semi-coma. The doctors must have kept the child drugged to drown the terrible pain that stabbed at her from all directions. Otherwise she could never have survived it. The small recollections she has stand out unforgettably.

The other child had visitors; Mary so wanted to have visitors, too. Not just doctors, or nurses, or missionary ladies, but mother, her mother. Why didn’t she come?

Maybe her mother did visit her once, or maybe more than once. But, if so, these must have been quick, stolen visits. The child had a fleeting recollection that her mother did come and look down at her, and then quickly went away again. For years afterwards, all through her childhood, Mary wasn’t sure. She couldn’t be positive her mother had ever really come at all. She was only sure of missing her mother, and she was very, very sure of this.

A third distinct impression settled within her. It was the feeling that these callers who came to see the other child were talking about me, she said. I felt them looking towards me and discussing me.

This made her restless and unhappy. Children may not understand what is being said about them, but they can sense a tone and an opinion. The child wrapped in white was conscious these people were talking about her, not to her, and this added to her hurts.

I did not miss my father, she went on. I couldn’t even remember what he looked like. I had never seen much of him, and here in hospital I thought only of my mother. I could not remember what she looked like, but I remembered her, oh so vividly.

She vaguely felt she had been lost, for she could not get over the lost feeling she had. Here I was, she said, in a fancier bed than I could ever have had before, with white-gowned, curious people with strange blue eyes and peculiar yellow hair coming constantly to tend my wants. The only hair I had ever seen before was black, and I had never seen blue eyes. Probably the hair wasn’t actually yellow, but we Chinese whose hair is always black talk of yellow rather than blond hair. We are inclined to consider the hair of white people as either dark or light—black or yellow—without noticing the finer distinctions.

"My new, gnawing desire to go home was increased by the questions everyone began to ask me. ‘What is your name, little girl?’ they all said. They repeated this again and again as though they doubted what I told them. But I did know my name. Curious that I should remember all this so vividly, and remember, too, my annoyance that they didn’t seem to believe me. I suppose I had forgotten so much that I clung all the more to what I did remember.

"‘My name is Liu Yung-yung,’ I always said firmly. This was my real name, the name I was given at birth. The name Mary came later. After they had asked me the same question over and over again, they began to follow it up with another. ‘And where do you live?’ they would ask.

This was a different matter again. I had always been at home until, well, until whatever had happened to me happened. I couldn’t understand it at all. I vaguely remembered going out with my father, and then I found myself in a strange house. What this had to do with my father I couldn’t imagine. I had the feeling that really it hadn’t anything at all. I had had a birthday. Had this happened on my birthday? I wasn’t sure. I wasn’t even very sure what a birthday meant, except that somehow it was something very special.

Her father took her out, and that was the last thing she actually remembered. She had no idea at all what had followed. The world had changed from then on.

Mary knew well enough where she had lived. But she had always stayed at home, and so there was no need to use any name for it. The street was a nice street; she had liked it. Wasn’t that enough? She couldn’t imagine why a familiar street should need a name, and she couldn’t remember one at all, however hard she tried. She did, after persistent questioning, come to remember what part of the city she had lived in. She had heard this name frequently used: Wan-fusiang. This was a teeming district inside the big imperial city, where almost every house was the same to all outward appearance. The search for the home of one missing girl would have been more difficult than hunting for a needle in a haystack; it would have been more like looking for one particular wisp of hay in the whole pile. That anybody made the attempt is unlikely. Girls were not considered important enough to go to all that trouble about, anyway. For a boy, maybe, if he came from a high Manchu or Mandarin family, but certainly not for a slip of a little girl, especially a very, very sick little girl who was quite likely to die and leave only the expense of burial behind her.

This was still the period when families disposed of girl babies over city walls. Indeed, the first circumstantial report I heard was that this had been Mary Liu’s fate. The story, as rumour had it, was that a missionary lady was passing through the city gate when she heard a faint wail. She investigated and found outside the wall, on the frozen earth, this little girl, and that, after bringing her to the hospital, she had adopted her. It was a beautiful story that explained everything neatly; too neatly to be true, however.

There are countless Lius in China. Liu is one of the comparatively few basic names, like Smith or Jones in English. The search for this particular Liu was hopeless; where would one begin? There were no city records to go by. Theoretically, China had a census, and the magistrate was responsible for it; each household was supposed to have reported its members. But a census was inextricably related in the public mind with taxation, and each official merely made a rough guess at the number of people living under his jurisdiction. Lists were supposed to be kept by the tax collectors, for their incomes depended on this, but only the heads of families were enumerated. Families were listed, not individual members of families. The Boy Emperor himself had no means of knowing how many people he ruled over, at least not to within fifty or a hundred million more or less. Fifty million more or less was perfectly satisfactory when the empire had several hundreds of millions of people in it. The same is true even today, and explains why suicidal wave attacks—wave after wave of Chinese troops hurled at an enemy position until it is drowned in a sea of bodies—are the basis of Communist Chinese strategy in warfare.

All that anyone knew about Yung-yung was her name, and that she had been sent to the hospital by the proud old family of Lord Li Hung-chang, the tall, moustachioed statesman who in his time had inspired a lowly Chinese cook in San Francisco to greet him with a new dish of mixed vegetables. In it were bits of shredded meat and rice which the cook appropriately called odds and ends for the mouth, or, in his native Cantonese dialect, chop suey. If the name of this Chinese cook had ever become known, his fame would probably outlast that of the noble lord for whom he had devised the dish.

The time came when the bandages began to be slowly removed, first from Mary’s face, then, fold by fold, from her legs and arms. This was when she discovered what they had done to her. But how it had come about, and why, she still could not fathom, any more than any little Chinese girl of those days could understand why, at a certain age, the toes of her tiny feet had to be broken and bound tightly back, so that her feet would never grow any more, and for the rest of her life she would have to walk in a peculiar unnatural hobble.

Mary no longer had any hands or feet. She no longer had her left hand at all, just the arm down to the elbow, and all that remained of her right hand was the palm and the stub of her thumb. Her legs only extended to just below her knees.

II

The case seemed hopeless, utterly hopeless, like so many others that came into Ginling Hospital day after day after day. They expected miracles of Dr. Beebe’s staff. They brought him their dying sick and their terribly injured when the native doctors gave them up. Sometimes the patient was dead on arrival. Foundlings were left daily at all such institutions as his, and often they were dying, or already dead, when they were abandoned on the doorstep or in the entrance hall. These people expected miracles to rise like genii from the necks of his medicine bottles, or at the touch of his fingers.

Sometimes he and his staff felt that they really did perform miracles. The odds were so heavily loaded against them that without such divine aid, the doctor could not imagine how so much could be accomplished by simple people like himself and his helpers. The miracle lay not so much in individual cases, but in the way in which the hospital met each and every day’s seemingly impossible tasks.

Like the task of restoring life to this dreadfully discoloured, gangrenous new patient, the baby girl brought to the hospital this very day. A case of severe frostbite. Mid-February is freezing in Nanking; the damp cold sinks deeply into the flesh, far more so than at the even lower temperature in the dry north. A traveller going north towards the Yellow River and Peking feels warmer, though the thermometer may tell a different story.

The child had been sent by the household of the old Viceroy, Li Hung-chang, a powerful household, for though the Viceroy had been dead for a decade, he had been a grand old statesman in his time. He had earned the reputation of a Chinese Bismarck, labouring hard and skilfully to cement the cracks in the Empress Dowager’s Dragon Empire. Li Hung-chang had helped to save that Empire when the Taiping Rebellion nearly put it on the scrapheap. Would his long lifetime of effort in the service of the Manchus be enough to hold it together now? Dr. Robert Beebe, the medical missionary who was superintendent of the Ginling Hospital, must have wondered about this then, when he heard the name of the family who had sent him this little patient. Only a short time before, a comic-opera, free-for-all struggle had started a few hundred miles farther up the Yangtse River, at Hankow. A railway had been entirely completed, even to the printing of the tickets and the erection of an impressive monument in celebration—except that the contractors had neglected to lay the lines along the track! They had pocketed the money instead. What a to-do had followed! There were risings all over the land now.

Was this ridiculous affair going to be enough to shake the ancient imperial edifice into ruins? It seemed hardly credible. Yet the indignation had exploded into revolution, and uprisings were reported even from deep inside Manchuria, in the vast north-east, and throughout the hot-headed south, not sparing Dr. Beebe’s own mission area round Nanking. There was fighting here too on the outskirts. Rumour had it that Dr. Sun Yat-sen, who was in faraway Denver when these disorders broke out, was rushing back to China to be elected President, and that the country would be declared a Republic on his arrival. But the powerful General Yuan Shih-kai had been commissioned to crush the revolt at all costs and was now marching south from Peking, with the help of Japanese artillery experts. The imperial Japanese had once given Dr. Sun refuge and were known to have greatly encouraged the Chinese republican revolutionaries who had probably now bitten off more than they could chew. Yet China was so backward and so much of the country was in revolt. Dr. Beebe could not foresee the outcome; he could, however, do something for this little girl.

Apparently she had been indentured into the famous diplomat’s family as a slave. He didn’t know the details. He had been called to the bedside as soon as his doctors had seen her. Her tiny limbs were already charred by the intense cold, one cheek and ear were frozen. He would have to stifle his anger at her condition and operate at once if he were to save her life. The side of her face would heal all right—probably a light scar would be left on her cheek—but there was no hope for those limbs. They would have to come off. Even so, it would be a miracle if this small body could withstand such punishment. And it would be an even greater miracle if that body could withstand the punishment which life would deal it later. As a surgeon, such matters were not supposed to be his business, but he was also a missionary—this made them his concern.

He would have to deal with first things first. The amputations. Surgically, this was not a difficult task; the bones of a four-year-old are quite soft. The shock to the little system was what he had to worry about most. If only he could perform this operation in a way that would preserve her Chance for a useful life. He kept thinking of her future, for he was this kind of man.

Such tragedies were not unknown. China was full of twisted and dismembered and blinded bodies. They passed down the roads and narrow streets all the time, single or in file, the halt leading the blind, begging. Cases like these were a constant and profitable source of income to the beggar guilds. These halt and maim were the exception, for such misfortunes usually meant death. Only when tough human resistance overcame the blows a man-made destiny dealt out to it were there these survivals; the great exceptions, almost invariably short-lived. Life was so plentiful, so teeming, that efforts to save a life, particularly that of a girl, would seem not worth the candle. A new life could always be conceived. What possible use could this child be, to itself, or anyone else, or to society? If it were able to survive, let it live, but surely make no special effort. This was all that Buddhism required.

But this was not the philosophy of Dr. Beebe, the thin, earnest man working at a pitch which wore him down. Before the operation he consulted Rose, his wife, who was living in the hospital with him. She had come to China as a Presbyterian missionary years before, and had fallen in love with this dedicated Methodist surgeon. At his urging she gave up her career for marriage, or rather, she changed the direction of her work, for she was always intensely interested in her husband’s activities. She helped him to meet the heart-rending problems that confronted him each day, accumulating as time went on and people came to know the kindness of his heart that went with the magic in his hands.

Dr. Beebe carefully kept both Mary’s legs the same length and managed to retain a tiny bit of thumb of the right hand. A tiny bit, but it could make all the difference in the world. The future would tell.

His wife came to look at the child again after the operation, to make sure everything possible had been done to lighten her sufferings. Dr. Beebe’s heart had at once gone out to this little girl with the big, trusting eyes, who looked him straight in the face as if to say that she had the stuff in her to meet life fearlessly and without complaint, and expected the same high standards of others. Mrs. Beebe’s heart melted too under this enquiring yet confident look. In those eyes she read the inherited philosophy of a race which had learned that no road was ever the last, that there was always a new beginning and a new opportunity. The wordless attachment formed at that moment between the woman and the child was never broken. Mrs. Beebe is still alive as this book is being written, and in spite of her nearly ninety years, is just as close to Mary as she felt that first day.

III

Dr. Beebe tried to find out the child’s parentage and who was responsible for her. Here he came up against a blank wall. The little girl remembered her pretty-sounding name, Liu Yung-yung, but not her address or anything else specific about her past. This was natural enough; she was only a tot. She had been sent to the hospital by the wealthy Li Hung-chang family, but efforts to establish anyone’s individual responsibility in a case like this were doomed to failure. Everyone knew that the less was disclosed the better, for responsibility was something to be dodged at all costs. Responsibility could be lifelong and prove very expensive. The only possible course was to deny anything, everything. Under these circumstances, Dr. Beebe had to be content with sifting rumours for morsels of unconfirmable fact.

He heard that Yung-yung had been left out all night in the courtyard of the Li house. That seemed likely from her condition. She was no blood kin of the household, but she was a member of it; she must therefore have been bought for service. The entourage of a lordly family is always enormous; the servants are bought when they are children and brought up, so that when they are older, they will know their jobs intimately and be well acquainted with the likes and dislikes of their masters. This habit was an economical one, too.

Perhaps the child had tried to run away home and been promptly forgotten. Perhaps she had been reprimanded or slapped by someone, a door had slammed behind her and she could not get back in. Or perhaps the old lady of the house was smoking opium and, carried away by the poppy fumes, had fallen asleep. That was a common reason for such blunders. All kinds of rumours like these came to Dr. Beebe as being the facts of the case, related by the Chinese attached to the Mission. Who and what was he to believe?

Anyway, she had been found outside in the morning, taken into the house and put on a couch in the servants’ quarters. If only they had called a doctor at once, sent her to hospital then! But no, they thought she would thaw out, that she would be all right in a few days, or else die, and destiny should decide. She was left neglected, maybe because the servant who had forgotten to look for her that night was now afraid to alarm others about the little girl’s condition. So she lay in bed several days before one of the family’s relatives, on a visit to the house, happened to hear about her. Her tiny limbs were already darkened. He refused to let destiny decide; he was modern and insisted she should have proper attention at the foreign hospital. That was how she came to the Methodists.

Dr. Beebe made an appointment to see the Marquis Li Ching-mei, son of the old Viceroy and now head of the great family. They took tea pleasantly together, in the Chinese manner, and then Dr. Beebe brought up the case of the little Liu girl. Lord Li—by courtesy he was usually referred to by his father’s title—showed polite interest, expressed his deepest sympathy. Of course he knew nothing about the case, nothing at all. A most unfortunate case. He felt that the Ginling Hospital deserved the greatest appreciation from the Chinese people for the generous and unselfish help it gave unsparingly in all such instances of misfortune.

Yes, little Yung-yung had been sent to the hospital from his house, but that was all he knew about her, he said. He had no idea how she had got into his home in the first place. Dr. Beebe remarked that he had heard she had only just been bought, to be brought up as a servant in the usual way. But Lord la said he knew nothing whatever about this. There was simply no pinning him down, and there seemed to be nothing Dr. Beebe could do about it. What was to become of little limbless Yung-yung?

He really had no responsibility for her at all, Lord Li insisted. If only he had known how seriously she had been frostbitten, if only someone had told him early enough, he would have called in the foreign doctors at once, and by now all would have been well with her. But he had not known; no-one had told him. He was shocked to learn she had been left without treatment in his home, shocked that the consequences were so terrible, but surely the wise Dr. Beebe understood his position in the matter. There was nothing he could do about it now. Absolutely nothing.

Who was to support her? Dr. Beebe asked. She was in the foreign hospital now, observed Lord Li, under the care of the most generous foreign missionaries. They had saved her out of the goodness of their hearts, as their religion required. The inference of all this was not lost on Dr. Beebe, who knew his China. Responsibility was traditionally attached to any rescue effort. A man who saved a life was responsible for that life, for that person’s future employment and livelihood. Since the Christian mission had taken in Yung-yung in her hour of need, and had rescued her from the release of death, the responsibility for Yung-yung was now the Mission’s. Dr. Beebe knew the only hope for the little girl was in the Mission taking care of her. His problem was how to make this possible.

No doubt Lord Li was right, he said. The hospital was willing and even happy to accept its responsibility. Lord Li expressed his delight. Dr. Beebe said he would arrange the details himself. He would initiate a public subscription on the child’s behalf. The Chinese were a generous people.

Lord Li creased his brow a little. Why was this public subscription needed? To support Yung-yung, of course; and Dr. Beebe went on to explain that he had been unable to find out what family she came from, and that even if he did, they would certainly be unable to support a little cripple. She could not be put out on the streets as soon as her wounds healed. Lord Li had explained that she was not his responsibility. For a long, long time, Dr. Beebe patiently went on, she would have to be under skilled and tender care. Infection could easily destroy the good work that had been accomplished in keeping her alive. Surely the good lord would not wish her to be sold to a beggar’s guild, so that for a short while she could wring a few coppers from the passers-by by her cries of anguish, and then perish. Little Yung-yung must have continued medical treatment, personal care, schooling, clothes, food. All this would cost money.