My Chinese family has deep roots at Ginling College, dating almost since its inception. First as students and then as faculty, women on both sides of my family – my grandfather’s side – the Shih family 石 from Hubei province and my grandmother’s side the Qian family 錢 from Sichuan province – have been influenced by this remarkable women’s college.
My Grandfather’s Shih family 石 from Hubei
1916 – 1920 My Grandfather’s Aunt Phoebe Hoh aka Hao Yu-ching 郝映青 joined the second freshman class at Ginling College and graduated in 1920. Phoebe and her sister Hao Baozhen 及郝寶真 (my grandfather’s mother) were born in Songpu, Macheng, Hubei China. The Mission Covenant Church of Sweden (MCCS) sent two missionaries – Anders Johansson and Otto Wikholm – to Songbu 宋埠 outside Macheng to what was then the village Haojiapu 郝家铺 where the missionaries rented property from the Hao family. In 1893, when Phoebe was 8 years old, an anti-Christian, anti-Western movements led to the missionaries being brutally beaten to death. Despite the local violence against MCCS, its mission came to influence Phoebe and gave her a path forward to pursue a lifelong career in education.
According to a letter posted online at Yale Archives dated Jan 27, 1935 from the Narola Rivenburg at Baptist Institute to Mrs. T.D. Macmillan, Ginling Board of Founders she writes, “Phoebe was born into a Confucian family in a small village where the family was one of the leading families. The Swedish missionaries came there and established schools which Phoebe attended, and as fast as she finished one set of grades, she was used as a teacher until higher grades were introduced, until she reached college proficiency. Her feet had been bound but when she entered the Swedish school she tried to unbind them. She has told me that the unbinding was far more painful than the binding.”
Phoebe was then sponsored by a Swedish missionary to attend St. Hilda’s School in Wuchang for junior high school. Meanwhile, her sister, Hao Baozhen 及郝寶真 married my grandfather’s father Shih Tsi-kai 石紫階 who was the first Chinese pastor for MCCS and devoted his life to the church and raised their children at the Swedish Mission in Huangzhou, 湖北 Hubei.
1923 – Aunt Phoebe Hoh aka Hao Yu-ching 郝映青 joined Ginling College as a teacher.
Phoebe was the very first Ginling alumna to return to school to teach literature in the Chinese department. After graduating in Ginling’s second class with a degree in sociology, Hoh continued her education at Peking University from 1920-1921. From 1921-1923, she served as a teacher and vice principal of the Shanghai YWCA Physical Education Normal School and participated in the National Congress of Christianity held in Shanghai. In January 1927, the Ginling College Executive Committee appointed Phoebe to vice president, which would have made her the first Chinese woman to be named to a leadership position. However, she never took the position because the Nanjing Incident changed the course of her career.
1927 – Nanjing Incident 1927. Phoebe protects Ginling western faculty.
The Nanjing Incident took place in March, 1927 when Nationalist troops entered Nanjing as part of their Northern Expedition military campaign. Troops, who the Nationalists later said were communists, began an anti-foreign campaign targeting the city’s foreign residents; several were killed or injured and their property looted.
According to According to a letter posted online at Yale Archives dated Jan 27, 1935 from the Narola Rivenburg at Baptist Institute to Mrs. T.D. Macmillan, Ginling Board of Founders she writes, “Phoebe more than any one else was responsible for the saving of the college from the communists who tried to kill the foreign teachers in 1927…Phoebe met the soldiers as they started to come into campus. She had prepared a gracious speech to welcome in the new government, for no one then dreamed that there was the strong anti-foreign feeling that was later manifested in the death of Dr. Williams. But instead of the polite reply that Phoebe expected, the soldier leered at her and pointed his gun saying, ‘We have come to kill the foreigners, where are they?’ Phoebe pretended not to understand….however, as the soldier reiterated his demands, ‘Show us your foreigners,’ Phoebe drew herself up and said, ‘I thought you had come to bring in a better government, all I have, I owe to my foreign teachers, can I give them up to be killed?’ The soldier replied by putting his gun to her breast…She drew up her head and said, ‘Well, shoot then, but my foreign teachers I will never give up.’ Foreign faculty hid in one of the buildings, and the soldiers were led in various directions, anywhere except where the foreign faculty were hid[den]. Phoebe did not [take] her clothes off for two weeks while she stood guard over the school which she so much loved. As a result of the devotion and bravery of these Ginling College faculty and students, the college escaped the looting which occurred in all of the other mission buildings in Nanking. Some of the buildings were burned, all were badly injured except Ginling…Phoebe was pretty badly shaken by these terrific experiences and so they decided to help her come to America to fulfill the long dream she had had of getting her doctor’s degree in Columbia University.”
Ginling sent Phoebe to Columbia University but she never completed her studies there. Her traumatic experiences and stress overwhelmed her and she left Columbia after completing all of her requirements for the degree up until her dissertation. She recovered from her “abused nerves” and returned to China. Her studies at Columbia centered around building a curriculum for rural schools in China to modernize the education system for girls. When she returned, she pursued her ambitions of rural education.
1929 – My Grandfather’s sister Shih Gan-lin 石甘霖 enrolls in Ginling class of 1933.
While her brother (my grandfather Shih Tao-tsi 石道濟) was studying at the adjacent University of Nanjing, Gan-lin enrolled in Ginling with financial support from a Swedish family friend Ellen Hedmark who she knew from the MCCS community where Gan-lin was raised. She studied education, was helped along the way by her Aunt Phoebe Hoh and eventually hired after graduation as a faculty member.
1933 – Shih Gan-lin 石甘霖 joins Ginling Faculty
Gan-lin was a faculty member for one year and later joined Iona Girls’ School located in Yichang on the Church of Scotland’s Ladies Mission campus as a teacher. There, she taught my grandmother Isobel (the future wife of her brother Tao-tsi).
My Grandmother’s Qian family 錢 from Sichuan, raised in Yichang
1936 – My grandmother Isobel Qian aka Qian Shu-yu 錢淑玉 enrolls as a freshman. My grandfather’s youngest sister Chuan-mei 石全美 enrolls in the same freshman class.
My grandmother Isobel graduated from Iona Girls’ School founded by Mary Emelia Moore (where Shih Gan-lin worked as a teacher) and started Ginling in the fall of 1936. Within a year of Isobel’s enrollment, the Japanese invaded Nanjing during the summer of 1937 when school was closed. Those who were charged with safeguarding the school were viciously attacked for sheltering local women on campus. Isobel did not re-enroll after her first year. She and Chuan-mei informally continued their studies in Yichang with Mary Emelia Moore, Isobel’s adoptive mother and former head of Church of Scotland Ladies Mission in Yichang.
In January 28, 1938, Moore dispatched a letter home to New Zealand for publication in the Evening Star. She writes, ” I was sitting with Isobel and [Chuan-mei] and we were reading (in preparation for college English) “Ivanhoe,” when suddenly there were loud detonations, and the house shook as if there were an earthquake. We went downstairs, and soon saw clouds of black smoke rising from the aviation field. We knew it was no earthquake, but the Japs…Overhead to the left of us, were two planes going at no fast rate, and on their turning towards us the police shouted to us to get under cover, which we did…In our compound all was well….but at the aviation ground and its environs…six planes were burnt up, 60 or more men were killed, and about 100 were severely wounded and carried to the hospitals.”
Later that summer of 1938, she wrote, “We had a letter from Nanking telling us how the Japs tried to get into the girls’ college, where there were 10,000 refugees, but were refused by Miss Vautrin and Dr. Bayley, American ladies. The former was beaten in the face by the ‘peace-loving’ Japs, so that her face is permanently (as I understand) swollen. They were going to carry off Dr. Bayley, but recognized that she is American. They did not get into the college. Miss Vautrin gave me some gladioli bulbs which I hope will be flowering when you read this letter. Every time I pass them I think with admiration of her courage and bravery, and feel glad that I may call her a friend.”
War Years and Beyond
1938 – 1939 – Chuan-mei continues her studies in Chengdu, graduating in 1939 with a degree in pre-med.
Ginling migrated to West China in the summer of 1938. In August, a group of faculty traveling via the Yangtze River reached Yichang and took rickshaws to Iona School and were shown to Mary Emelia Moore’s study. Moore told the group she estimated two million refugees has passed through Yichang on their way west. She said she is looking for great things from Sichuan, and added “the cream of the intellectual and spiritual power of China” has gone through Yichang. While at the Church of Scotland Mission, the group caught up with two former students who work there, Shih Gan-lin and Liu Die-djen. They noted the former students looked too thin. Chuan-mei and Isobel followed the group to Chengdu, and Chuan-mei resumed her studies at the make shift campus at the West China Union Theological College.
1938 – 1945 – Phoebe returns to Ginling’s relocated campus in Chengdu
After returning to China in 1931, Phoebe dedicated herself to establishing services in rural communities in Jiangxi and was appointed principal superintendent for the region for Women and Children. In 1937, the Chinese Ministry of Education ordered colleges to establish more social education projects in rural communities. Ginling hired Phoebe to continued her work. She was tasked with running a Ginling program for students to carry out social education programs where Ginling brought literacy training to women and children, provided affordable books to villages, developed training institutes for local women leaders so they could earn money from the production of handicrafts, provided war time resistance education, promoted better public health, nutrition and hygiene and helped women become more skilled home makers for their families – where children helped with chores and had access to play grounds.
Gan-lin passed away from tuberculosis in 1945 in Sichuan.
1946 -1949 – Phoebe returns to the Ginling campus in Nanjing to continue her rural service work
After the war, Phoebe returned to Nanjing and resumed her work in rural communities to continue her efforts of lifting women and children up through literacy, health and economic opportunity.
1950 – 1951 – Phoebe worked part-time at Ginling’s library
1952 – Ginling closed as a Christian women’s college.