Yesterday I received a book from China. It was 崔书田 Cui Shutien's Chinese language translation of Chinese Escapade, a book originally written in English by Laurance Tipton. Laurance Tipton is a character in Our Lady of Kaifeng: Courtyard of the Happy Way. But he was also a real person, who lived through those difficult times, escaped from the camp, and joined the Nationalist resistance.
《中国逃亡记》 is a handsomely typeset book with an elegant, understated cover design. Published for the 70th anniversary of the liberation of the camp near Weihsien, it seems to have the local government's seal of approval.
an illustration appearing on the cover of 《中国逃亡记》
The illustration on the cover of the internees standing in line with buckets in their hands is very detailed, but in miniature, as if to emphasize the importance of words and to minimize the impact of images. I am enchanted by this style of cover.
The author/translator even autographed this copy for me. I am very touched and will treasure this book. I have also sent Cui Shutian autographed copies of both volumes of Our Lady of Kaifeng.
Eric Liddell is famous as the Olympic gold medalist who refused to run on the Sabbath, due to his Christian convictions. He is heroic in the sense that he stood up for his beliefs, when there was a great deal of pressure on him to do otherwise. That kind of stubbornness is always to be applauded.
But did you know that later on, he acted in a different way? Twenty years after winning the Olympic Gold Medal, Liddell found himself in an internment camp for enemy aliens in China.
And when Liddell had the choice of holding running meets for the children under his charge in that camp on a Sunday or not at all, he chose to award prizes for running on a Sunday.
What brought about that change? And what exactly is the Biblical basis for prohibiting running on a Sunday?
Old Testament Provisions Concerning the Sabbath
Here below is the text from the ten commandments, concerning the Sabbath:.
Remember the Day Off to keep it holy. Six days shall you work and do all your tasks. And on the seventh day, it is a Day Off to Jehovah your god. Do not do any work, you, and your son and your daughter, your slave and slave girl, and your animal and your alien resident who lives in your city gate. Because six days Jehovah made the sky and the earth and the sea and all that is in them and he rested on the seventh day. That's why he made the Day Off and blessed it.
The translation above is my own. I translated the word "Sabbath" as "Day Off", because that is essentially what it is, and once we take the veneer of sophistication that comes with the borrowing from Hebrew into English, then we can see exactly what is really going on here. This is a provision for a weekend, back in ancient times. It is there to make sure that people who are forced to work for other people have a day off.
The Sabbath is not for the benefit of the free man (or woman) who is commanded to keep it. It is for the son and daughter, who have to obey their parents and do everything they say. It is for the slave man and the slave woman, who otherwise might not have any time off at all. It is for the guest workers who live in the city, but get no vote, because they are aliens. It is for all the working animals, the beasts of burden, the oxen who have to help plow the field, to make sure that they, too, get a day off. The one commanded to keep the Sabbath is the owner and employer of all those who are to be let off work. They are not commanded to keep the Sabbath. He is!
Yes, this is couched in religious terms, but there is a very simple reason for the Sabbath. It's to give people -- even animals -- who have no control over their own time a break from working for somebody else. It is to make sure that forced labor does not go on forever without a day of rest. This does not mean that those granted the day of rest have to sit perfectly still while on that break. For some, it would be torture to do so.
When is the Sabbath?
Under the Hebrew calendar, the Sabbath is the seventh day, and the first day of the week is Sunday. So the Sabbath is Saturday, and that's what Saturday is called in Hebrew -- שבת. Seventh Day Adventists follow the Hebrew calendar, and they have Saturday as their Sabbath, too. But most Christians celebrate Sunday as the Sabbath, because they start counting the days of the week on Monday.
For all intents and purposes, it does not matter which day you use, as long as one in seven is your Day Off.
What is Work?
The Sabbath is a time to cease from work. But what exactly is work? Is breathing work? Is walking work? Is changing a baby's diaper work? Is preparing a meal for you and your family to eat work?
We all think we know what work is. It's a very simple concept, after all. But the definition of work changes depending on whether we are talking in terms of physics, employment law, taxation regulations or some other specialized field. Is anything we do when we are not at rest work? Or does it have to be paid for by others? What if you are a landlord? If your income is not considered "earned income" as defined by the tax code, does that mean you are not working to earn it? Or what if you are an amateur runner in the Olympics and have no professional standing? If you don't get paid, is that not work? Does it have to be something you dislike in order to be real work? If you are doing it just for fun, is it not work then? What if instead of being paid to do it, you have to pay somebody else for the privilege? When people take a music lesson, is that work? If they practice the piano, is it work? If they sing in the Church choir, is it work? What if you are the pastor and get paid to preach on Sunday? Is that work?
The bottom line is that for purposes of working on the Sabbath, "work" means being employed by somebody else with strict orders about what you must do and when you must do it.
Whom Does This Commandment Protect?
A mother's work is never done. No matter how religiously observant, no mother has ever said: "I won't feed my baby today, because it's my Day Off." No owner of a small farm ever said: "I won't milk the cow or feed the animals. because it's my Day Off." No one who is in business for himself has ever said: "I won't deal with this urgent order, because it is my Day Off." It would be as self-destructive as deciding not to breathe because it's the Sabbath.
The prohibition is only against the employer, owner, or master forcing a dependent to work non-stop, seven days a week. The reason behind the Sabbath prohibition was to spare the forced worker. It was not to keep the self-employed person from feeding himself or the joyous amateur from being happy on his day off.
But over time, tradition obscures the reasons for almost every religious or government-decreed commandment. So by the time they were in the diaspora, many observant Jews interpreted the Sabbath prohibition to be something that applied to them, but not to foreigners. They felt they could not prepare a meal for themselves on the Sabbath, but they could employ a "Shabbes goy" (a gentile of the Sabbath) to do work for them, on the holy Day Off. This went exactly contrary to the words of the commandment about the alien in your gate. Except that by now, they were the aliens in somebody else's gate. But these people were still the employer and the outsider was still their employee.
The United States government has also issued many rules to keep people from working every day of the week. These rules are supposed to spare helpless, dependent servants and employees from being exploited seven days a week, but do not apply to owners of businesses. If you have ever owned a business, you know that like a mother's work, it's never done. You work every day, all day long, till the task is accomplished. Yet when employers petition for an employer identification number, so they can withhold wages and give them to the IRS, the government's website keeps them from filing an application after work hours. This is not to spare the would-be employer, of course. It's to keep the clerks who work nine-to-five hours at the employer's expense from having too much work to do after the long weekend.
http://www.mygovcost.org/2016/03/31/how-bureaucrats-think/ What Does the New Testament Say About the Sabbath?
The original prohibition against working on the Sabbath was written at a time when every task in any household was performed by a person or an animal, not a machine. Your drawer-of-water was a person, not an electric pump. Your tiller, operated by a man, was powered by an ox or a horse. Boiling water meant cutting wood and starting a fire. You could not just turn a switch. Driving a car - or chariot -- involved using horses, not just horsepower.
But when those tasks became automated, and therefore did not involve anybody sentient working at all, the ritualized observers of the letter but not the spirit of the law continued to believe that driving a car is work, and that's why religious zealots in Jerusalem today will stone you for driving a car on Saturday. Apparently throwing stones on Saturday is not considered work.
Even by the time of Jesus of Nazareth, there were a lot of people who had turned the law into a ritual that went contrary to the original meaning. What did Jesus have to say about this?
"The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath."
So is it okay that Eric Liddell changed his mind about running on the Sabbath when he was interned at Weihsien? I think it's more than okay. It's a step in the right direction.
When there is a war, everybody -- on either side -- will tell you that they are fighting for freedom. In a way, that is true by definition. Each side is fighting for freedom from the other side. That is traditionally what war is all about -- who gets to rule whom.
But there are also internal wars that are less about freedom from invaders as freedom from tyranny. Those are the wars that are not about national freedom, but rather personal freedom. People rarely address this distinction clearly, so it is refreshing to find any writer who can conceptualize and articulate the difference. One such writer was Lord Byron, in his poem "The Isles of Greece", a serious lyrical piece within the larger satirical work Don Juan.
Fill high the bowl with Samian wine!
We will not think of themes like these!
It made Anacreon’s song divine:
He served—but served Polycrates—
A tyrant; but our masters then
65
Were still, at least, our countrymen.
Inspired by this during the heyday of my Blake's Seven fandom, I wrote the following filk:
Star One is found in The Blake Bunch, a filkbook by Aya Katz based on Blake's Seven
Whenever we go to war with a foreign country, one argument that is made fairly explicitly is this: "The bondage that we like the best, may yet be be ours. It could be less!" People fight to keep foreign powers from ruling them. They will support tyrants on their own side, rather than falling to the enemy.
During World War II, socialism was a very popular philosophy, and people on different sides of the war all had one form or another of it in force under the authority that ruled their country. The Soviets had communism, which is a kind of socialism. The Germans had national socialism. The Italians had fascism, which is also a kind of altruistic philosophy in which people sacrifice all for the homeland. The Japanese have always been very communitarian. The British had their own empire where people were expected to serve the interests of others overseas, for the good of the many. And the Americans had socialism under FDR, which included many programs under the New Deal, as well as price fixing and rationing of staple foods during the war.
When the leaders of these countries told their citizens they were fighting for freedom, they meant freedom from being conquered by the other side -- not personal freedom. Not freedom of contract. Not economic freedom. And not the freedom to express an opinion that was not supportive of the war effort.
After the war, Britain's Empire collapsed under the extreme effort of paying for the fighting, even though the British were ostensibly on the winning side. The United States was in better shape, but things never really went back to the freedoms that were taken for granted before the two world wars.
Self-determination is something that many of the old colonies gained, not by outfighting the British, but simply because the British no longer could afford to keep them. It was the same kind of "you are free to go" freedom that slaves of bankrupt masters sometimes win.
In the Weihsien Internment camp in China, self-determination was always allowed to the internees. They governed themselves under the Japanese rule. Their day to day life was a hell of their own making, because they voted on practically everything.
You don't automatically get personal freedom by being self-governing and self-determined. When your neighbor gets to vote on what you have, that is the least free form of government that there is. But the internees did not seem to realize this, because everybody in those days believed in absolute democracy. They were all socialist, each in his own way.
When things get really bad, some people worry about an imminent collapse of civilization. Other people become hopeful that the collapse will be upon them soon, freeing them from their captivity and servitude. When I was a teenager in the SF community, I ran into some of these people, who called themselves Survivalists. Today, the same sorts of people are called "Preppers", I am not sure why the name of a thing has to change every few decades, although I suspect that the idea falls into disrepute, and then it is revived under a new word that does not bear the stigma.
I have a lot of sympathy for the motives of the Survivalists and the Preppers, and the Shruggers, in that all of them are hoping to get the yoke of the Federal government off their backs and to rebuild anew under circumstances that are at once more difficult, but at the same time offer much more hope for the future. If only we could get out from under the current mess, scrap the present non-functional system, and start from scratch! Unfortunately, I don't think that's going to happen. Things don't tend to collapse. No matter how bad it gets, it could always be worse.
Here is a blog post by Sarah A. Hoyt that explains the widespread historical evidence that civilization does not tend to collapse, even under extreme pressure:
In Our Lady of Kaifeng: Courtyard of the Happy Way, we see an example of how collapse does not happen in a small, microcosmic illustration. You would think, for instance, that when the Japanese lost World War II, their internment camps in China would just fall apart and the inmates would wander away into freedom. This would seem to be a very reasonable model of collapse.
However, that's not what happened. What happened was this: the American government sent seven men in parachutes to take over the camp. The Japanese Commandant surrendered to the head of this party, and then the Japanese continued to run the internment camp on behalf of the American government, until an Army unit could take over. And the Army unit set up an entire indoctrination program to help the internees reenter American or Allied society, before eventually shipping them home. Meanwhile, the Communists were shelling outside the camp, because as far as they were concerned, the war was not over. It would not be over till they won complete control over China.
At no time did the internment camp just collapse. At no point did anarchy reign at the Courtyard of the Happy Way. At no point were the bad policies of either the government of Japan or the government of the United States the cause of a loss of order in the world of the internees. There was always somebody in charge! The prisoners took orders till the very end. We can argue about which jailer was more humane, but at no point was there freedom in that camp.
I don't write science fiction to illustrate these points. Why should I, when actual historical facts bear me out? Is there anything stranger than the truth?
I recently finished writing Our Lady of Kaifeng: Courtyard of the Happy Way. It is now undergoing the usual editing process, and it will not be available for sale until next year.
The issues in this novel are intertwined between personal and global concerns. But one question that we try to resolve is: what makes someplace a concentration camp? Is it it just that you're not allowed to leave? What other characteristics do concentration camps tend to have?
When I moved into my first apartment in Taiwan, a local friend gave me as a housewarming gift a framed picture of an angry god. "It will bring you luck. This god will watch over you in your new life."
"He looks angry," I said.
"I chose this god for you, because of all the gods, you remind me the most of him. So I think this is the right god for you," she replied.
With logic such as this, I was afraid to ask her what she really thought of me. I certainly hoped that I did not look like the angry god in the picture. He had a red face and bulging eyes, and he looked about ready to burst from apoplexy.
But I kept the picture and its frame, and I still keep it on the mantel for luck in my current home in the Ozarks. I like to think of this as my personal war god, who will help me keep up the good fight, while everybody around me is giving in and searching only for inner peace, and to hell with what happens to everybody else.
In my current work in progress there is a character called Sergeant Bu-Shing-de, loosely based on a real Japanese enlisted man whom almost everybody in the camp hated and despised and feared, because he was a real bully whose favorite phrase (in Chinese) was "It's not allowed." Sergeant Bu-Shing-de appears in almost every account of camp life that I have ever read for the internment camp in Weihsien. In most descriptions he does not come off in a very favorable light.
But there is one account that also shows him in a different, contrasting light, and that is to be found in Langdon Gilkey's Shantong Compound.
Much to his surprise, Lawrence was invited to have tea one day in Bo-shing-de's quarters, a large bedroom in one of the walled-off sections of the compound. When he entered this drill-sergeant's room, Lawrence could hardly believe his eyes.
Decorated by the Sergeant himself, it was furnished in the most artistic Japanese taste, illustrating utter simplicity, a remarkable sense of harmonious use of space, and a painstaking attention to detail. At the focal point of the room, complemented by a pair of classical flower arrangements, was an exquisite shrine to the sergeant's samurai war god. It was true, Lawrence remarked later, that this deity with his grimacing face and bow-legged stance, was hardly a thing of beauty. Yet the harmonious and artistic effect was in such striking contrast to the American soldier's gallery of mother, assorted pin-ups and model airplanes, that the sight of it made Lawrence gasp.
The horrible war god, expressing all the barbarity and cruelty of one side of the Japanese culture, and yet honored in the delicate, sensitive taste of this cruel soldier, seemed a perfect symbol for the mystery of the Japanese character as I knew it during the war. (Gilkey 1966.47)
Today, when so often we are surrounded by Christians who act like Buddhists and Buddhists who sound like Christians, and people lecture other people about how if they are religious, as they claim to be, they should not be war-like, intolerant and vindictive, it is important to remember that there is more than one kind of religion in the world. Not everybody is using religion to calm their anxiety and to find ways to endure impossible suffering in silence, while not raising a hand against their oppressors. Not every religion tells us to turn the other cheek, and not everyone believes that forgiveness is something that you give away for free to a wrongdoer so that you don't have to be angry, anymore. Some people still believe in vanquishing and then pardoning their foe -- in that order.
References
Gilkey, Langdon. 1966. Shantung Compound Harper: San Francisco.
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