FRASER and his colleagues were facing a new situation. Spring had come and with it the stirring tidings from beyond the Salween, and now, early in May, permission from Shanghai had reached them to move out and make their home center in that southeastern district. Funds were in hand to build a simple bungalow, sufficient for their needs, and plans they had long been making could now be put into execution. To his Prayer Circle Fraser turned instinctively as he thought of all the help and guidance that would be needed.
It seems increasingly clear [he wrote] that God is pointing us down to this new field, rather than to the older districts of which you have particulars already. The number of converts in this Eastern district is still increasing. A hundred and fifty families have already turned to God this year, which, added to the two hundred and fifty of last year, makes a total of about four hundred households gathered in during the past sixteen months. Our western, southern and northern districts combined have barely half this number, nor are the converts as promising. So we feel distinctly led to place our home center among the Eastern Lisu... and shall have to work the other districts chiefly through native evangelists.... After all these years of what I feel to have been guerilla warfare, we are to have a permanent mission station right among the people. For this we have long been praying, and at last the way seems open.... You will join us, will you not, in praying over all phases of this new development.
There were seven voluntary Lisu preachers in the new district by this time, and Fraser was anxious to give them much-needed teaching. For this purpose he arranged with the Head of the High School to lengthen his summer vacation to include the whole month of August. Ba Thaw was still with him for translation work, so they went together and conducted a regular Bible School at Sinchaiho―the first of the great gatherings for which that locality (Muchengpo) was to become famous.
And what an enthusiastic, happy crowd it was, in the bamboo chapel on the mountain slope, high above the river! For two full weeks the meetings continued, morning and night. Such fellowship had never been known in Lisu land before. If at times the unaccustomed students showed signs of weariness, a hymn or chorus quickly restored interest, and singing seemed to fill all intervals.
Coming and going, the home of Moh Ting-chang at Hsiangta was open to the traveler and on the return journey Fraser was specially thankful for it. He had not been well for some weeks, but put it down to the damp heat of the season. Was this also what caused his uncertainty about a detour he wished to make on his way back to Tengyueh? Moh and Ba Thaw were hoping to accompany him to the town of Mangshih, down on the great Shan plain, where the copy of Mark’s Gospel had been picked up which led to Moh’s conversion. But the more Fraser planned for the journey, the more he felt uncertain about it. Difficulties of all sorts cropped up, and at last he felt sure that he was being guided to return home at once. A week later, in Tengyueh, he knew the reason. He had resumed his classes at the High School and, though far from well, was teaching as usual when he suddenly collapsed with what proved to be a serious attack of typhoid fever. For weeks his life hung in the balance, for malarial complications caused repeated relapses, but by the middle of October he was able to write to his mother:
I have any amount of things to be thankful for (‘Count your blessings!’) and the first is that I just got back to Tengyueh in time. I calculate, now, that if I had gone down to Mangshih, the fever would have caught me two days’ journey away from here, with no place to stay at, no one to look after me, no proper food or facilities for nursing in such serious illness. As you know, I have scores of times put to the test the simple plan of waiting upon God for guidance in perplexity, and have never yet been disappointed. Decisions so made have invariably proved to be wisest and best.
The kindness and care of his colleagues had been beyond telling.
Flagg came down from Paoshan specially to look after me and has been nursing me ever since. Mrs. Flagg moved out of their own room (the best in the house) to put me in it. They have given me the use of anything and everything they have.... I am wearing Flagg’s dressing gown as I write this. Naturally I feel very grateful to them, and I am sure you will too.
This almost fatal illness, and the fact that he could now leave his work in competent hands, decided Fraser to apply at last for furlough, long overdue. His English teaching was not resumed, but the translation of St. John’s Gospel was completed with slowly returning strength. Then came the move to the Cold Country, and the Lisu home Flagg had prepared with willing help from the local Christians. Bright autumn days were before them, and Fraser was eager to be back in his itinerant work again. Hundreds of converts were looking forward to the Christmas festival which would have to be celebrated in the new center as well as at Turtle Village.
But again the unexpected happened. The grassy uplands of the Cold Country proved too exposed for the convalescent. The unseasoned boards of the mission bungalow let in the wind almost as freely as the bamboo walls of the chapel, and after the second Sunday (when Moh Ting-chang came over for the services) Fraser went down with a sharp attack of pleurisy. Recovery was slow, retarded by painful swelling of the lower limbs, which made walking out of the question. Christmas Day was spent in bed instead of among his Lisu children, who felt for the first time the shadow of coming separation.
Fraser was now in his fourteenth year in China. The rugged strength and endurance he had brought to his task were perceptibly failing, but not so the brave spirit. His heart went out not only to the hundreds of converts round the new home and across the Salween River, bat to the Lisu of all the regions to the north, and other unevangelized tribespeople right out to the Tibetan border. This ensured a response to the request of a pioneer missionary on the Upper Mekong (twin river to the Salween) for a couple of Christian Lisu to come to his help. Mr. Lewers was alone up there, three weeks’ journey to the north of Fraser’s field. He had as yet little knowledge of the language, and there were tens of thousands of Lisu to be reached.
Spare two of these evangelists, at such a time, to go so far away? A smaller soul could not have faced it; but Fraser had grown with his work, grown into a leader of wide vision and great though humble faith. ‘Look not every man on his own things, but every man also on the things of others,’ applied surely to this situation. Two of his best voluntary helpers were found willing to go without payment of any kind, leaving their farms and families for an indefinite period, to face hardship and danger for love of Christ and in obedience to His command. And Fraser let them go, and gathered strength through waiting upon God to go on in the work without them.
And now began another long itineration before he could leave for furlough. Flagg had gone up to the Mekong to escort the Lisu evangelists, and Mrs. Flagg with little Ruth―not yet a year old, but a fast friend of Fraser―would have to be alone for six weeks at least, several days’ journey from the nearest Europeans. Bravely she faced it, that first woman missionary to the Lisu, and the converts rallied round her, including Paul, his family and neighbours, in the spirit Fraser recalled when he said some years later:
The Christians of three out of four of these Cold Country villages have been among the most satisfactory we ever had―so loyal, so hearty, active and intelligent.
God will reward them [he wrote at the time].... I think of one or two men, leaders in nearby villages, who have done almost everything they could possibly do for us, refusing any payment, and who say:
‘Teachers, we ought by right not only to do what we have done, but to support you in food and clothing as well.’
So Mrs. Flagg was well surrounded in her husband’s absence, and would not hear of Fraser’s journey being delayed. Two objects were before him now. In the first place there were many cases of real or supposed persecution to look into, in the villages throughout this eastern district, and troubles to settle among the Christians themselves; and then beyond, across the Salween, were hundreds of new converts waiting his coming, who had never yet seen a missionary. It was the middle of February when he left the Cold Country for Mangshih and the great plain stretching southward, and summer was well advanced before he came back, having had little if any news of his colleagues or of the outside world for three and a half months. ‘I never made a more needed journey,’ he wrote on his return, though the cost to himself had been great.
It was a new experience, on this itineration, to find himself a travelling magistrate as well as missionary; but there seemed no escaping the double role.
I do not relish these affairs [he wrote to his Prayer Circle]. Too often a wrong spirit is manifested by the converts themselves, when trouble of any kind arises; and quite frequently the right is not all on one side. There are, of course, some cases of pure persecution, where the converts suffer undoubted injustice. In two of the cases I have had to attend to, the sufferers told me that, in their opinion, the best way to settle the matter would be to get their swords, go in a body, and kill their persecutors! It is not easy to teach them to love their enemies.
Yet these same young converts were so loving and hospitable to their missionary, with all his Christian ethics, that Fraser found it hard to pass on and leave them. A Chinese shopkeeper in the market town of Chefang undertook to post a letter, sometime, somewhere, for the passing traveler; so standing at his counter Fraser wrote in pencil to his mother, giving some details:
The people I have been staying with at Palien the last few days are so very kind and hearty (Lisu converts, I mean) that it is a pleasure to be in their home. You love them and hate to leave them...
One of the cases we have investigated was that of the kidnapping of a Christian girl by a heathen Lisu. We went to ‘rescue’ her (I and my Lisu) over across the Salween but it turned out a kind of fiasco, for when we found her she did not want to be rescued after all! So we had to leave her―and this after walking I do not know how many hours by night with a lantern, to surprise them before they could run off with her again. We must have walked thirty miles each way. The matter was settled by the payment of a fine.
But as a rule, young women who had been abducted were only too glad to be set free again.
A case has just come up [Fraser was writing a little later] which I am having to settle. A Christian girl was run off with by some heathen of the same locality. They tried to get her to recant and consent to be the wife of a heathen man, but she stuck to her guns bravely―and being afraid of getting into serious trouble with us, they let her go again. But, returned or not returned, we cannot let our girls be abducted with impunity and are taking the matter up. The Christians are very indignant about it.
Many of the ‘cases’ to be settled were across the river among the most recent converts, and there also Fraser found the same warmth of heart and welcome. The custom of handshaking had come even to these villages, and men, women and children would flock out at his approach, line up on both sides of the pathway and greet him with singing―each one in turn gripping his hand in both their own, often with eyes shut and teeth clenched in their earnestness. They were so glad to see him and to have someone, at last, to teach them more about how to be saved from the power of demons and the fear of death.
But over here, across the Salween, Fraser found himself faced by conditions more trying than any he had previously met.
The country is poor and barren [he wrote]. The mountains are high and rocky, and the poverty of the people terrible. Many, if not most of them, are in rags and tatters, and the dirt of the hovels in which they live makes it a trial to the flesh to be amongst them.
Yet these were the homes he shared, day and night, for the next two months. The frequent rains of the wet season made it difficult to be much out of doors, but with all their poverty the people had already built eight little chapels which were put to good use. Two hundred and more families in forty villages―how was Fraser to help them all? To make the most of his time in the district, he arranged to hold a Bible School in a central place, and invited all who could to come together for half a month of teaching. This was a new thing indeed, with all the thrill of a festival for these backward people, and willingly they gathered about him, making their own arrangements for food and shelter.
Of course, it was all primitive in the extreme. The bamboo chapel might be full for a meeting, inquiries yelled from outside would be answered in the same strident tones by those within, and if a herd of cattle were driven by, the whole audience would stampede to the door and out on the hillside to take stock of them, leaving the teacher, meanwhile, waiting with what patience he could muster. But it was a beginning in placing these new believers on the rock of revealed truth. It made them feel that they were people of the Book―and many of the younger folk became eager to learn to read and write.
Fraser, too, was learning. He had been inclined to be impatient, at first, with the extreme ignorance and backwardness of the people. They were so taken up with externals, rules and regulations as to how to be a Christian―whether, though not growing opium himself, one might work for a heathen on the latter’s opium fields; whether pickled beans might be eaten (they are pickled in liquor); what to do when your son is engaged to a girl in a heathen family who insist on liquor being given at the wedding; whether you may wash clothes or hunt game on Sunday, etc. etc.
And their slowness in learning to think for themselves! Question and answer might proceed a little way―for example:
‘Who were the sons of Adam and Eve?’
‘Cain, Abel and Seth,’ for the lesson had been carefully taught.
‘Good! Now who were the parents of Cain, Abel and Seth?’
‘Don’t know. It isn’t in the Catechism.’
Impatient with them? [Fraser wrote]. Well, now, let me whisper to you―yes, I am afraid I do get a little impatient, sometimes. But then, remembering the dense ignorance these people have been brought up in, the absolute lack of Christian nurture or advantages of any kind, one feels sorry to have ever been impatient with them. And they mean so well, too! You see them sitting there―men, women, boys and girls—in all their dirt, poverty and ignorance; you remember One Who was never impatient, never harsh, even with sinners and outcasts, and your heart melts to them again. You have a new understanding of what it means, ‘He had compassion on the multitudes, for they were as sheep having no shepherd.’
Yes, Fraser was learning. The food that was all his mountain hosts could give him, at this time, was so poor that there were days when he simply could not eat it. It would not go down anymore. Then he had to fall back on his old plan of starvation―going without food altogether, until hunger compelled him to eat just what they ate. And yet, comparing the conditions of comfort and civilization down on the plains―in the Chinese cities with their culture, where Christ was not wanted nor His truth received―he could rejoice in ‘coming right away up to these mountains, amid the rocks, mists and forests, to find ourselves in little Lisu chapels of bamboo and thatch, put up by simple Christian folk for the worship of God.’
The people are perhaps shivering through their rags [he continued later]. They are poor, dirty, ignorant and superstitious, but they are God’s gift to us. You ask God for spiritual children, and He chooses them out for you. You shake hands with the brothers and sisters and mothers He has found for you, and sit down with them, the boys and girls all around you if possible. For I would far rather teach Lisu children to sing ‘Jesus loves me, this I know’, than teach the integral calculus to the most intelligent who have no interest in China.
In this spirit Fraser came very near to these new believers. Going with them, after the Bible School was over, to many of their villages, he wrote:
I have never, I think, travelled with people whose company on the road I have enjoyed more than these Lisu converts. They are so obliging, so good-humored, so simpleminded and so easily pleased. They simply never grumble at hardships. They will perhaps get drenched in a heavy downpour of rain, get little but dry rice to eat at the end of a long day’s journey, but still seem as happy as ever, to judge by the peals of laughter you hear from their smoky camp fires at night...
When you have been with them so many days―chatting, walking, eating, living and sleeping with them, you feel when you come to shake hands and say goodbye that you know them better and have helped them, imparting to them something of yourself.
Fraser was much impressed, at this time, by the thought that ‘not many wise men after the flesh, not many mighty, not many noble are called’ to follow Christ.
For if two things stand out clearly in my mind [he wrote after this journey] they are firstly how ‘foolish’ and ‘weak’ our new converts are, and secondly that God has really chosen them. 1 Cor. 1:27, 2827But God hath chosen the foolish things of the world to confound the wise; and God hath chosen the weak things of the world to confound the things which are mighty; 28And base things of the world, and things which are despised, hath God chosen, yea, and things which are not, to bring to nought things that are: (1 Corinthians 1:27‑28) is fulfilled before my very eyes! If you could come out here and see how useless mere preaching and persuasion is among these people, you would understand this better. One feels so helpless in face of their ignorance and need! But the Lisu work in our present district, with over two hundred families on either side of the Salween River (i.e. four hundred and more families in all) has been spontaneous from the beginning.
They will take you to a village you have never set foot in or even heard of before, and you will find several families of converts there, some of whom can read and write after a fashion, and a chapel already put up! They just teach one another―inviting converts over from neighboring villages for the purpose. They just want to be Christians, when they hear all about it, and just turn Christian, missionary or no missionary. Who put that ‘want-to’ into their hearts? If they are not God’s chosen, God’s elect, what are they?