Kiangsu

But what touched her was the serenity, even gaiety of his old age—“Being always perfectly happy, he had a charm about him”—and his fondness for disconcertingly simpleminded jokes, something he had always shared more readily with colleagues than he could with his own family “Kill Sydenstricker!” went a favorite one-liner passed round the missionaries of North Kiangsu.

PEARL BUCK IN CHINA Hilary Spurling 2010

Born in Kiangsu province and sent to school at Wuhu in Anhui, Shao had grown up on the same great northern plain as Nanxuzhou.

PEARL BUCK IN CHINA Hilary Spurling 2010

The exodus started in Anhui and North Kiangsu, provinces already scoured and picked clean when icy winds from the Gobi Desert drove the inhabitants south.

PEARL BUCK IN CHINA Hilary Spurling 2010

That same autumn Absalom left for the annual general meeting of the North Kiangsu Mission in Hsuchowfu, accompanied by their next-door neighbor, an energetic younger man named James Bear, father of the red-headed boy who played with Pearl under the veranda.

PEARL BUCK IN CHINA Hilary Spurling 2010

For the retirement rule, see Minutes of the Annual Meeting of the North Kiangsu Mission, Shanghai, 1922, 13, PHS.

PEARL BUCK IN CHINA Hilary Spurling 2010

Simple mathematics starkly outlined the scale of the difficulty for the handful of Southern Presbyterian missionaries who had elected to hold themselves responsible for saving the souls of ten million people in North Kiangsu.

PEARL BUCK IN CHINA Hilary Spurling 2010

In October Absalom convened the annual meeting of the newly formed North Kiangsu Presbyterian Mission, which assembled in Shanghai, and tabled a formal resolution urging him to go home at once on furlough to the United States.

PEARL BUCK IN CHINA Hilary Spurling 2010

A new rule requiring compulsory retirement at the age of seventy—specifically aimed at Sydenstricker, who was the only missionary in North Kiangsu anywhere near this age limit— became official policy at the annual meeting in Kuling in August 1922.

PEARL BUCK IN CHINA Hilary Spurling 2010

Minutes of the North Kiangsu Mission, 1903; OLW, 39.

PEARL BUCK IN CHINA Hilary Spurling 2010

“The North Kiangsu Mission has no place for free lancers or free lance work,” declared an official report containing, as far back as 1915, an unmistakable warning to Sydenstricker that routine defiance of mission policy would not be tolerated forever.

PEARL BUCK IN CHINA Hilary Spurling 2010