Awakening a Sleeping Giant the Call

By R.Z. Sheppard

John Hersey, 70, is back home on Martha's Vineyard after wintering in Key West. But his attention is already turning westward, across Vineyard Sound and Buzzards Bay, over the American landmass, toward the Pacific and beyond. The New Yorker once again has asked him to visit and write about Hiroshima, 40 years after the city was destroyed by a single bomb and 39 years after Hersey marked the first anniversary of atomic warfare with the most celebrated piece of journalism to come out of World War II. Hiroshima filled the magazine's entire August 31, 1946, issue. Published in hardcover soon after, the terse account of unnatural disaster established its author as a major expositor of big themes and public enlightenments.

When he turned to fiction, Hersey practiced what he called the novel of contemporary history. "The important 'flashes' and 'bulletins' are already forgotten by the time yesterday morning's paper is used to line the trash can," he wrote. "The things we remember for longer periods are emotions and impressions and illusions and images and characters: the elements of fiction."

Like Sinclair Lewis, who employed the author as a secretary and driver during the summer of '37, Hersey had points to score. The Wall (1950) dramatized the life and death of the Warsaw ghetto. The War Lover (1959) examined the roots of violence through a self-hating American bomber pilot. The Child Buyer (1960) criticized trends in education, and The White Lotus (1965) took on racism in an allegory that made Caucasians the objects of discrimination.

The origins of Hersey's instructional impulses can be found in The Call, a novel cast as the biography of an American missionary in China. It is a subject that is close to home. Hersey was born in Tianjin, the son of Roscoe and Grace Baird Hersey, missionaries serving with the Young Men's Christian Association. Before returning to the U.S. in 1925, when John was eleven, the couple preached a social gospel that emphasized literacy and reform. It was a monumental labor complicated by floods, famines and warlords. Hersey provides the necessary historical overviews, but it is the abundance of detail that reawakens the sorrows of Old China. A short list of levies: "pig-rearing tax, firecracker tax, opium-smoking lamp tax, marrying off one's daughter tax, narcissus bulb tax, superstition tax, lower-class prostitute singing tax, and, terrible thought, night-soil tax, so that one couldn't even defecate without paying."

This is the world that awaits David Treadup in 1905 when his ship docks at Shanghai. He is a big man, good with his hands, though a little slow with his schoolbooks. One of Treadup's best assets is the ability to immerse himself in % drudgery, a fate he prepared for as a farm boy in upstate New York and an oarsman for Syracuse, where he heard the call to Jesus. Superficially, Treadup is a model of muscular Christianity. But he is also built to carry a good deal of symbolic weight. "What is moving in his story," writes Hersey, "what may in the end be thought to redeem the obvious failure of his mission in China, is his lifelong struggle to subdue the greater but sicker saint in himself and give himself to a more modest state of being: one of balance, sanity, serenity and realized human love in the face of a shifting and violent and mostly hateful world."

There are more inviting ways to introduce a 700-page novel, especially one that relies on the gradual accumulation of incident rather than the easy gimmicks of popular fiction. But there are no acceptable shortcuts in Treadup's journey of selfdiscovery or Hersey's exploration of the missionary character. Among his primary sources are the letters of his mother and father, although Treadup is not Roscoe Hersey, as the book's appended notes make clear, but a composite of at least half a dozen Protestant evangelists. As such, he can be a charismatic teacher who scoots around northern China on a motorcycle with a magic show of scientific experiments, a dogged organizer and tireless fund raiser, a man of radiant energy and corrosive doubts. This is the sort of character who might be considered larger than life, if his life had not been lived on a stage that dwarfed his best efforts and noblest beliefs. China, as Hersey portrays it, is the sleeping giant about to awake, and it is ravenous for a dignity that cannot be satisfied by outsiders with their wholehearted urgency. Still, this is the quality that Hersey rightly celebrates. "I have been wrestling with the desperate realization that there are some 300 million illiterates in China," says Treadup. "We must hurry!"

Treadup's Christian faith suffers in China, but only in the sense that he comes to reject his mission as simply signing up souls for Christ. When he arrives as a young man the motto is "Evangelize the world in this generation." After 40 years of rebellions, war, Japanese internment and Communist revolution, his ambition has shrunk to feeding the few people left in his village.

Hersey does not drum up any pious conclusions about the saintliness of humble work. There are some obvious parallels between American evangelism and the politics of Manifest Destiny. With some skillful prodding, the documents and , memories he has rescued from obscurity speak for themselves. Treadup's disillusionment achieves a rare authenticity because it is earned on every page. And that makes Hersey's slow book to China worth every word.