This is a collection of letters from Hazel Todd of the China Inland Mission (CIM) to her family back in southern California, between 1920 and 1940, when she died in central China of an apparent heart attack (the “Introduction” and the “Epilogue” have differing accounts of her death). The letters were first assembled and privately published for family members by Hazel's younger sister in 1977. When Robert Gardella, professor of history (now emeritus) at the United States Merchant Marine Academy, came across the manuscript several years later, he was intrigued by it. With the family's approval he edited the manuscript further, did some more archival research, especially in the CIM materials at the Billy Graham Center archives in Wheaton, IL, and added several dozen explanatory footnotes. The result is this volume, which joins a flurry of fairly recent books featuring letters and journals of China missionaries. These include, among several, Eva Jane Price, China Journal 1889-1900: an American Missionary Family during the Boxer Rebellion (Macmillan, 1989); Motoko Huthwaite, ed., From China with Love: the Personal Letters of Bishop and Mrs. Logan Roots (EastBridge, 2010); and Donald MacInnis, China Chronicles from a Lost Time: The Min River Journals (EastBridge, 2009).
This volume of Hazel Todd's letters offers us more descriptions and narratives of the lives of ordinary rural Christians in these years than new insights into the missionary community. This is not to say that Hazel is not the centrepiece; she is, and she has many interesting features. She is extremely hard-working and conscientious, resourceful, even creative in adapting herself and the mission to local circumstances. It is readily apparent that she needed to be physically durable; she thought nothing of walking thirty miles in a day, and in a letter discussing the health of her mission colleagues she said of one of the newly arrived recruits that she looked like someone “who will wear well.”(p.84). At the time of her death in late 1941, Hazel was the most senior CIM missionary in the province of Anhui, in years of service. She spent a total of more than three of the 21 years back in the US. From late 1926 until early 1929, due to the turmoil of the Nationalist revolution, she was away from her station, which had been a small city in Hunan. After her return to China, because Hunan was deemed too dangerous, she was reassigned to a post in Anhui, the small city of Shucheng; she was based there from 1930 until her death. In 1937–38, she was in the US on furlough again, leaving just a few weeks before the outbreak of war with Japan. On her return, she got as far as Shanghai in November 1938, but it took several months to get all the way to her home in Shucheng.
Hazel's life and service in China were not unusual. Raised in North Dakota, she was a sturdy woman of simple evangelical faith, with almost no higher education; in fact she had only three years of high school. On the mission field in central China she learned the rudiments of medicine, and on one of her furloughs she took a practical medical course, but she was by no means a nurse. She was not an intellectual, but loved reading the newspapers from Shanghai and received several magazines, including The Atlantic. One summer she enjoyed reading T.E. Lawrence's The Arab Revolt. The varying pace of quotidian life, which depended partly on the agricultural season and partly on how many missionaries were at the station to share the work, especially that of visiting the outstations, which were generally eight to ten miles away. The tempo of rural missionary life is evident in these letters. Some entire years seem almost boring. In the mid-1930s she mentioned that for the previous year she had never been more than nine or ten miles from Shucheng. Some years, especially after the Japanese invasion and occupation, were chaotic and anything but boring. Part of the rhythm of life was spending two or three months in the summer at one of the mountain communities which provided relief for the foreigners from the heat. In her later years, busy with mission work, Hazel often skipped this respite.
Hazel in her letters also inadvertently gives us a profile of the rural Christian communities which grew around the foreign missionaries and the mission station. Relations between missionary and pastors and elders within the church reveal unexpected complexities. And she refers more than once to a Christian competitor, the entirely Chinese-run True Jesus Church, which trumpeted its independence from foreigners and apparently successfully lured away several of the CIM converts. The relationships between the Christian and non-Christian communities are also revealed in some detail when Hazel took time in a letter, as she often did, to describe closely the individual lives that she encountered daily.
Gardella has done a very competent job of editing and annotating this volume. This area of scholarship is not his main one, which is economic history. He has not imposed a theoretical structure upon Hazel Todd and her letters; he lets her speak for herself. Historians of modern China will for the most part not find this work extremely valuable, although historians of Christian mission probably will.
