Awaken
Memoirs of a Chinese Historian
by
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Every year before summer vacation, the school required all of its students to work for no pay picking strawberries on its farm. When we would reach the farm, we would discover large snakes there eating most of the largest strawberries. We would chase them away and then begin picking the strawberries under the burning sun. The American and Chinese teachers would stand at the corners of the field watching us to be sure that we would not eat any of the strawberries. But the fruit was so attractive that we couldn’t help eating some of the real big ones.
My contributions to the Adventist mission school were worth much more than the education I received from it. I studied and worked there for three and one-half years. I did not earn my junior high diploma because I had to miss all of the minor courses in order to work to pay for school. In the autumn term of 1938, I began to cough terribly. I wrote to my father in Shanghai that the school doctor diagnosed me as having pulmonary tuberculosis. My father, no longer illiterate, wrote me back and told me to quit school and return to Shanghai as soon as possible.
Before leaving the mission school in December, I attended the “Prayer Week”. Pastor Rebok, the principal, gave sermons on “Criticizing the Theory of Evolution” for the whole week. One day, he demanded that each one of us stand up to confess our “sins”. I did not feel that I had any sins to confess, so I just stuck to my seat.
Pastor Lindt, on the platform, noticed that I had no intention to “confess,” so he spoke up loudly, “Gu Chang-sheng must have something to say.”
At that point, I had to stand up and make my “confession”. I said, “I have committed sins in the classroom. I was always questioning the story of the Bible. Pastor Lindt tried to help me to surrender unconditionally to every word of the Bible, but I failed to do that. I ask Pastor Lindt to forgive me. Amen.”
Pastor Rebok said to to audience, “Gu Chang-sheng is not a true Christian. He disturbed our classrooms and troubled the beliefs of our students. Let us all pray for him and help him.”
On the last day of the “Prayer Week,” Pastor Rebok called all the students to gather in a circle on the front playground. Two Chinese teachers came from the direction of our boys’ dormitory carrying a large canvas bag. After they laid down the bag, Pastor Rebok asked us, “Do you know what is in this big bag?”
No one responded. The pastor then opened the bag and poured out all of its contents. Oh, God! It was full of books and magazines that were found in our dormitory. Pastor Rebok admonished us loudly, “You students are supposed to receive a pure Christian education and study hard in our school, but you spend a lot of time reading all of this junk. I summon all of you boys who read these bad books and magazines to confess your sins today. You must promise that, from now one, you shall never read these kinds of materials. It wastes your time and poisons your minds.”
Pastor Rebok took a match from his pocket and set the books on fire. We students all were shocked. We had thought that the books and magazines we read were good. We had passed them around among ourselves and enjoyed the information and knowledge we acquired from the books, most of which were classical Chinese novels and stories or current news about China and the rest of the world. None of us had ever thought that reading books was a sin. When we studied Chinese history in 11th grade, we learned that the first emperor of China, Shi Huang Di, (221 -207 B.C.) had burned books and buried more than 400 Chinese scholars alive during his reign. But witnessing the burning of good Chinese books and magazines in front of Chinese students by an American missionary teacher was an unimaginable incident in the 20th century A.D.!
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About the Book
Awaken: the Memoirs of a Chinese Historian transports readers into the turmoil and transformation of China in the 20th century through the eyes of a rare survivor, the Chinese Christian and scholar, Gu Chang-sheng. His memoir is the riveting and inspirational journey of a man who retained his independent spirit against crushing odds.
Missionaries rescued the Gu family from poverty and starvation and Chang-sheng grew up as a member of the Seventh Day Adventist Church. At the mission school, Chang-sheng endured hunger, back-breaking work, and humiliation in order to get the precious education he needed for medical school. The Communist Revolution dashed his dreams. The government of the People’s Republic dictated that Chang-sheng’s new career would be that of historian of Christianity in China. Under Mao Ze-dong, Chang-sheng survived beatings, “re-education” sessions, imprisonment and hard labor. After the Tiananmen Square Massacre of 1989, he chose freedom in the United States in order to speak out for human rights.
Many books have been written about life in China under Communism. Awaken: the Memoirs of a Chinese Historian spans almost the entire 20th century, giving Western audiences a unique perspective on eight decades of religious and secular life in China before the birth of the People's Republic as well as during the Communist regime. Gu Chang-sheng’s memoir parallels his youth under the authoritarianism of Christian missionaries with adulthood under the Chinese Communists. He renounced the dogma of the Seventh Day Adventist Church but never joined the Communist Party. His independence meant imprisonment and forced labor at worst; it was a balancing act at best. No matter what his circumstances, Gu Chang-sheng lived true to his motto, “Seek truth from facts” and continues to do so today.
About the Author
Gu Chang-Sheng is The People Republic of China’s pre-eminent historian of Christianity in China, respected both in the East and the West for his objectivity and intellectual rigor. He researched the history of Christianity in China for the Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences. During the Cultural Revolution, he spent three years in an isolation camp and seven years as a forced laborer in a factory. From 1976 to 1989, he taught history at Shanghai East China Normal University. Professor Gu was a Visiting Scholar at Yale University’s History Department in 1985 and at Yale Divinity School in 1986. In 1989, the U.S. Congress invited him to attend the Presidential Prayer Breakfast in Washington, D.C. Professor Gu remained in the U.S. after the 1989 Tiananmen Square Massacre so that he could speak out for intellectual freedom and human rights. He has published more than 100 newspaper and magazine articles in the U.S., Canada, China, Hong Kong and Taiwan. Gu Chang-sheng is the author of nine books in Chinese, including Missionaries and Modern China. His most recent article, On Being a Historian for 50 Years, was published in China in July 2007; it was immediately banned and recalled by the Beijing government in August 2007.