God’s Little Daughters: Catholic Women in Nineteenth-Century Manchuria

231 Pages·2015·1.467 MB·English

by  Ji Li

God’s Little Daughters

God’s Little Daughters
catholic women in
nineteenth-century manchuria
Ji Li
university of washington press Seattle and London
this book is made possible by a collaborative grant
from the andrew w. mellon foundation.
© 2015 by the University of Washington Press
19 18 17 16 15 5 4 3 2 1
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University of Washington Press
www.washington.edu/uwpress
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Li, Ji, 1976– (Historian)
God’s little daughters : Catholic women in
nineteenth-century Manchuria / Ji Li.
pages cm. — (Modern language initiative books)
Outgrowth of the author’s thesis (Ph. D.—University
of Michigan, 2009) under title: Becoming faithful:
Christianity, literacy, and female consciousness in
Northeast China, 1830–1930.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-295-99472-7 (hardcover : alk. paper)
1. Missions—China—Manchuria—History.
2. Catholic Church—Missions—China—
Manchuria—History. 3. Manchuria (China)—
Church history. 4. Catholic Church—China—
Manchuria. 5. Missions étrangères de Paris. I. Title.
BV3420.M2L5 2015
282’.518082—dc23 2015002181
The paper used in this publication is acid-free and
meets the minimum requirements of American
National Standard for Information Sciences—
Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials,
ANSI Z39.48–1984. ∞
contents
Preface: Discovering the Du Letters vii
Acknowledgments ix
1. Christianity, Gender, and Literacy in Northeast China 3
2. Religion, Women, and Writing in Rural China 20
3. Religious Knowledge and Behavior 45
4. Establishing Faith in Local Society 74
5. Institutionalization and Indigenization 99
6. Faith, Gender, and a New Female Literacy in
Modern China 127
Epilogue: Meeting the Du Descendants 143
Appendix: MEP Missionaries and Indigenous Priests 145
Glossary 153
Notes 157
Bibliography 179
Index 209

preface: discovering
the du letters
On a hot summer afternoon in 2004, I sat in a small reading room
on the rue du Bac in Paris. After hours of reading the church records
in the archives of the Société des Missions Étrangères de Paris (MEP),
I happened to notice three packs of yellowed rice-paper documents
among the French-language manuscripts. Unfolding the papers with
their Chinese characters in dark ink, I unexpectedly entered another
world and time—an intimate milieu of nineteenth-century Chinese
Catholic women in Santaizi, a small village in northeast China.
Addressed to Father Lin, or Dominique Maurice Pourquié (1812–
1871), an MEP missionary who had worked in the MEP’s Manchuria
Mission from 1847 to 1870, the letters came from three of his Chi-
nese Catholic converts. According to the MEP catalogue, the letters
reached the MEP on November 14, 1871. “Merciful father, if you are
recovered, God’s little daughter begs you to come back!” wrote one
of the women; “God’s little daughter misses you and cries, like a lost
sheep without a shepherd.”1 Another concluded her letter sadly, “If I
were not female, I would come to stay in front of you.”2
I soon discovered that the letters contain a fascinating sentimental
mixture of strong personal emotions, explicit religious terminology and
metaphors, and a clear awareness of their authors’ gender. The letters
were dated 1871. Although the late nineteenth century had witnessed
the rapid growth of literacy in Europe, the level of literacy in China,
especially among women, remained significantly low.3 The ability to
write was particularly unusual for women in rural China. Writing to a
foreign missionary provided these letter writers with a legitimate space
in which to practice their literacy, articulate their faith and identity in
writing, and safely express personal feelings. Religious language plays
an important role both in the women’s sometimes clumsy writing and
in their awkward personal expressions of emotion.
viii Preface
I noticed that the letter writers remained somewhat mysterious
even though in the letters they called themselves “God’s little daugh-
ters” (xiao shennü) and signed their letters “the second daughter of
the Du family” (Du Xiao’erniu), “the eleventh of the Du family” (Du
Xiaoshiyi), and “the eldest of the Du family” (Du Xiaodazi), respec-
tively. Who were they? Why did they write the letters? Where did they
learn to write? What is signified by the term “God’s little daughters,”
which is seldom used by Chinese Christian women in other places? And
what was the relationship between these Chinese Catholic women and
their French priest? Questions such as these soon filled up a historian’s
mind. Motivated both by my joy at the discovery of precious historical
documents and by my curiosity about gender, religion, and identity, I
began the long intellectual journey that finally resulted in this book.
Sources
This book starts with an analysis of the Du letters and goes on to exam-
ine where and how these ordinary rural Chinese women gained their
literacy. Besides the Chinese texts, the primary sources central to this
book are French-language documents, mainly church records, housed
in the Archives of the Société des Missions Étrangères de Paris (AMEP).
In the course of three research trips to the archives, lasting two months
in 2004, six months in 2005–6, and nine months in 2007–8, I exam-
ined all eight volumes of the manuscripts, containing several thousand
individual items that pertain to the Mission de Mandchourie. Long
neglected by scholars, many of these materials remained untouched
and were classified only roughly according to time period. In a sense
this very neglect was a blessing, enabling me to discover the Du letters
and other precious documents among the manuscripts. These church
records contain rich religious, ethnographic, and demographic infor-
mation that cannot be found in Chinese materials.4
While French-language church records are at the heart of the book,
I have also made use of Chinese-language documents, including impe-
rial edicts, local gazettes, legal documents, Chinese converts’ journals,
and other writings. However, because of the destructive movements
against Christianity in China in the past century, in particular the
Boxer Rebellion in 1900 and the Cultural Revolution in 1966–1976,
that destroyed most if not all local churches and church records, using
Western-language records is a necessity to be able to reconstruct the
Chinese Catholic community in the nineteenth century.
acknowledgments
It has been ten years since that hot summer afternoon when I found
the Du letters. That was my first trip to France to explore archival
documents, which was encouraged by my Michigan advisor, James
Lee. Jean Hébrard, my French mentor, welcomed me at Charles de
Gaulle airport and introduced me to the Archives of the Missions
Étrangères de Paris (AMEP). At that time, little did I realize that I
would spend half of the following four years working in Paris, espe-
cially in AMEP’s small reading room within the beautiful courtyard
of a seventeenth-century seminary. In the ten years of research, writ-
ing, and rewriting that went into this book, I have traveled around
the world, from Ann Arbor to Paris to Beijing to Shenyang and finally
to Hong Kong. My intellectual journey has encompassed three coun-
tries and four wonderful universities. It is my pleasure and privilege
at long last to acknowledge these institutions, scholars, and friends.
I owe my deepest gratitude to my advisor, James Lee, a great mentor
and even better friend. He has supported my intellectual growth with
enormous trust and warmth. He taught me how to become a realistic
scholar with passion and commitment, pushed me along the path of
excellence, and witnessed my every achievement. I thank James for
his instruction and friendship: this book would not have been pos-
sible without his generous input, thoughtful training, and unfailing
encouragement over the past ten years.
In Ann Arbor, where this book was first hatched as a dissertation sub-
mitted to the University of Michigan, my first thanks go to Jean Hébrard,
whose unconditional faith in me meant a lot to me in a most difficult
time. In the final stage of my dissertation revision, Jean read my entire
draft and helped me refine my French translations word by word. I am
also indebted to Brian Porter-Szücs, whose knowledge of Catholicism
inspired my analysis of my own subject; to Ernest P. Young, Yiching Wu,