Book Review

ADVANCE GUARD FOR THE Y.M.C.A

Diego., TRACY B. STRONG, Tracy B. Strong, the son of China missionaries and the co-author of ''Right in Her Soul: The Life of Anna Louise Strong,'' teaches political theory at the University of California, San

1989

Overview

The foreign Christian presence in China in the first 40 years of this century increasingly appears to have been an important contributing factor in the slow development of the Chinese revolution between 1911 and 1949. Some sense of this can be gathered from John Hersey's fine novel ''The Call.'' Yet that book and most others on the subject remain focused on the men who lived for their ''call.'' Grace Service's memoir, ''Golden Inches,'' helps us understand that often behind those men, making their work possible, were equally extraordinary women. What support it was - a kind of marriage that seems to have all but disappeared in our time. ''I thought I had given you certainty when I brought you to China,'' Service remarked apologetically to his wife in 1934, after being ''demobilized'' by the Y.M.C.A. in response to economic pressures. Such a vision of ''certainty'' could only be that which a shared sense of vocation can bring. By the time the Services had reached Chengdu (by boat, up the Yangtze) in 1905, their first-born, an infant daughter, had died of dysentery and Bob had contracted a severe case of malaria; within a year, Grace had at least one miscarriage. They still knew no Chinese.

• Publisher: New York Times Company
• Subject: Hersey, John (1914-1993) / SERVICE, GRACE / SERVICE, JOHN S / STRONG, TRACY B