China stood on the cusp of a critical juncture of history when I visited there with Mennonite teachers in April 1989. As a China Education Exchange delegation wrapped up its work, reviewing negotiations with university officials and looking ahead to future possibilities, news of massive student protests was breaking.
Just weeks later, the eyes of the world were riveted on Beijing and the Tiananmen Square uprising, sometimes called the ’89 Democracy Movement.
In the decades since, the ever mysterious, endlessly fascinating country of China continues to occupy a large space in both national news and world affairs. Two new books offer timely perspectives from the more than 100 years of Mennonite engagement in China.
From early missionaries to teachers of English, from the creation of the China Educational Exchange to Mennonite Partners in China, Mennonites represent a tiny but important part of an evolving story.
Myrrl Byler’s research into early missionary involvements, up through the more recent transition to Mennonite education and cultural exchanges, is important both to the church and to scholars by honoring the faith commitments of generations who served in China as well as providing insight into this still inscrutable nation.
Byler’s Crossing the River by Feeling for the Stones: Mennonite Engagement in China, 1901-2020 (Masthof Press) offers a fascinating narrative supplemented by exhaustive lists of personnel, organizations and educational institutions. It also includes a listing of Chinese exchange scholars studying in our colleges and seminaries.
More important, Byler’s work provides a valuable record of Mennonite vision, commitment and sacrifice over more than 100 years. A generous selection of photos going back to the era of missions adds substance to facts and figures, as does Byler’s inclusion of personal observations and reflections from the teachers who taught English and from the church and college officials who visited periodically.
Byler’s 30-year experience teaching and then serving as director of the China Education Exchange/Mennonite Partners in China adds depth and perspective to Crossing the River.
Byler’s story is complemented by a second book, Doors Cracked Open: Teaching in a Chinese Closed City (Wipf and Stock Publishers) by Fran Martens Friesen and Mary Ann Zehr. This is an engaging memoir set in the 1980s, the post-Mao period following the Cultural Revolution when China was just opening up. Assigned to teach English at a medical college in Luzhou, still a “closed city” in Sichuan Province, these young women found themselves in a world they could scarcely have imagined.
Being the only foreigners in the city, with their comings and goings closely monitored, Martens Friesen and Zehr describe daily adjustments in their isolation, disarmingly honest about the stress as housemates of accommodating differences in personality and style.
They acknowledge the toll of extreme loneliness. They describe with good humor ways they sought to cope with rigid constraints. Creative and courageous, they reveal a tenacity and understanding of what an individual requires to remain healthy and sane in monotony and isolation. This is an account, in many ways, of survival.
But it is much more. Through relationships with their students and colleagues, Martens Friesen and Zehr found purpose and even joy in their work, fostering connections across cultures that continue into the present. These young women demonstrated a spirit of love, generosity and service that has been a hallmark of Mennonite contributions in China.
Readers of both books are left to ponder: “What next for Mennonites in China?” “What next?” is a question that preoccupies North Americans as well. A 2020 worldwide pandemic and China again closing its doors presented a new reality. That reality, as Byler notes — with no teachers in China and no visiting scholars in North America — led to the closure of Mennonite Partners in China.
Byler’s concluding chapters, “The Church in the World” and “The Strength and Fragility of Exchange,” acknowledge the uncertainty: “The end of 40 years of active exchange raised questions about the future of relationships that had been established with individuals, institutions, communities and churches. The importance of the exchange to its participants and the impact it had on their lives are hard to measure.”
Fittingly, Byler concludes his history with the personal voices of those who served. In these reflections, the reader will gain a sense that this story — a story that arches over generations — is not over. We await the next chapter.
Lee Snyder of Harrisonburg, Va., is a former president of Bluffton University and former academic dean of Eastern Mennonite University.
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