"Gospel Valley" - An Extended Review

Fuyin Gu [Gospel Valley] by Lin Ci
Hebei Educational Press, 2003. 188 pages. Illustrated.
ISBN 7-5434-4809-2

"Gospel Valley" vividly evokes the life and faith of the Lisu people living in the mountainous gorges of the Salween River. Here J.O. Fraser and, later, Allyn and Leila Cooke and Isobel and John Kuhn first planted the gospel amongst the Lisu people more than 70 years ago. Now Mr. Lin Ci, a young Han Chinese, has written a beautiful book about his experiences among the Lisu in the last few years of the 20th century. The result is one of the most beautiful books about the minorities and the Christian faith to have been published in China for many years.

Mr. Lin has obviously fallen in love with the Lisu and been deeply touched by their simplicity and their deep faith. He marvels as hundreds gather—young and old, men and women—to sing hymns in perfect harmony. He shares their daily life; most live in grinding poverty, scratching a living from the thin mountain soil.

The book is lavishly illustrated with both black-and-white and color photographs. We see the daily life of the Lisu—the women selling eggs and chickens, carrying everything in woven baskets. There are some beautiful photos of their mountainside churches as well as photos of them at prayer. There is even a rare photo of Allyn Cooke and his wife Leila (the first American missionaries in the area) preaching in the 1930s.

It is a great shame that this book is not available in English. However, I have translated a few extracts dealing with the gospel among the Lisu to give a flavor!

It was already dark. The photographic team were resting in a wooden house in Liwudi village. Somebody mentioned the name “Azida.” I saw it was an old lady in a black dress. Her name was Huannisi and she was 83 years old.

“When I was 17 I had a baby. Azida was the midwife—she got a strip of sky-blue cloth from her house and wrapped the child up in it.”

The old lady was still beautiful and her voice pleasing to listen to. In a remote mountain village when a baby was born more than 60 years ago, the fact that it was in the hands of a trained nurse and had been wrapped in a special, soft cloth, had made a lifelong impression on its mother.

“One day in 1944 I got up early and went out to work in the fields. That was a very particular day—the whole day I never met anyone else. In the evening when I returned to the village I found all the houses empty. Nobody was at home. I became more and more scared, running from house to house and from one side of the village to the other. Finally I bumped into a brother. He was crying and said: ‘Azida is dead!’ I ran like fury to the top of the hill (Azida’s house and the church were both at the top). Then I saw the entire village were there. I had come too late. Azida had died. The people of Liwudi were crying and praying. I then took part and realized I shouldn’t have been working.”

In this village when they say: “We are Christians”, it’s as natural as saying: “We are Lisu”. It seems it has been so from time immemorial. But in reality the ancient Lisu along with many other southwestern tribes were all primitive polytheists. The Lisu have only been Christians and used a written script for no more than a century. The change came in the early part of the 20th century when missionaries began operating in the area. Several decades later, Christianity had effectively replaced their original religion. It became the national religion for the Lisu in the Fugong region. The exploits of the early missionaries, buried in the dust of history, are still often referred to. Huannisi still remembers Azida, an American woman. She is still a saint in the hearts of the people of Liwudi. “Azida” is the name given by the Lisu to Mrs. Cooke. Nobody now can say what her English name was.

In the first year of the Republic (1911) there were some serious incidents at Liwudi when the government sent troops to “pacify” the area. But a stranger, bare-handed, interposed himself between the warring sides and defused a tragedy about to happen. The villagers of Liwudi respected him. They knew his name was Afujia and that he was of the Naxi tribe. Carrying an old wooden box on his back, this man went to all the Lisu and Nu villages along the river. The box contained many handdrawn color pictures. Everywhere he stopped he would find an empty patch of land and hang up his pictures. They all told a story: beginning with Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, to Jesus who died on the cross to save sinners…

The Lisu had never seen such beautiful pictures or heard such striking stories. They crowded round the stranger who preached to them from the Bible. Since he had stopped the killing, they treated him like one of the prophets in his stories. From respect, they came to trust him and eventually asked him how they could become Christians. Afujia was an itinerant evangelist, and while he was evangelizing the area he adopted an orphan called Wangli. After a year he had to return to Lijiang and Zhongdian to evangelize. So he said to Wangli: “You are an obedient child and a clever one, too. I can no longer teach you. I am illiterate, but you should learn to read.” So while passing through Baoshan or Dali, he took Wangli to a church school. There he met an American couple, Allyn B. Cooke and his wife Leila. Cooke was a professional missionary and his wife was a teacher at the church school. They were both very happy to see their Naxi disciple and the Lisu young man. From then on Wangli lived at their home and was educated in Chinese, mathematics, religion and English.

Allyn Cooke was born in 1896 in San Francisco and graduated from Los Angeles Bible College. In 1918 he joined the China Inland Mission and became a missionary. After arriving in China he determined to preach to the tribal people in the mountains of southwest China. In 1920 he was ordained as a pastor at Dali. He was introduced by the British missionary J.O. Fraser to work among the Lisu people in 1922. He seems to have visited all the Lisu areas. From 1918 when he first arrived in China till 1947 when he left Liwudi, apart from some short furloughs, he spent nearly 30 years in Yunnan.

Cooke was both a professional missionary and a scholar. Apart from preaching and visiting the Christians, he spent much time in his study. But his wife Leila was more outgoing, loving to mix with the poor, especially women and children. While preaching in Han areas they had learned Chinese customs, including the self-help and self-reliance philosophy of the peasants which they gladly adopted. Afujia’s descriptions of the tribes living along the banks of the Salween, and Liwu’s memories of his home aroused their deep interest in the gorges. Leola often asked Liwang to describe the life and customs of the Salween Lisu and she learned Lisu from him.

The British missionary J.O. Fraser is said to be the first missionary to reach the Lisu. He came to western Yunnan to the areas inhabited by the Lisu around the time of the 1911 revolution, and died there in 1938. When he began to preach the Lisu still had no written language, and the most effective form of evangelism was to use pictures, like Afujia. So Fraser had the idea to create a simple Lisu script so they could directly read the Bible. Another pastor, a Burmese called “Badong,” also participated in the first drafts of the Lisu script. [MY NOTE: this appears to be the Karen evangelist Saw Ba-thaw who is mentioned in Leila Cooke’s book Fish Four and the Lisu New Testament (CIM, 1947-48) as having aided Fraser]. But it was Mr. and Mrs. Cooke who used the new Lisu script to place the entire New Testament and a collection of hymns into the hands of the Lisu believers.

Even before meeting up with the Lisu of the Salween gorges, Allyn Cooke had started to translate the Bible into Lisu. Afujia’s experiences in the gorges had profoundly moved the Cookes, and had been the motivation behind them leaving an area relatively easy to evangelism to move to the backward, even barbarous, Salween valley. In her diary Leila wrote: “There are two reasons why we left Gospel Mountain in the south and moved north to the Salween gorges: Firstly, the number of converts among the northern Lisu is growing every year, and they have asked us to teach them the Bible. But there are also many unbelievers who need evangelizing. Then, secondly, by moving to the northern Lisu we can learn true Lisu, as this is an area where the most Lisu are congregated. There are no Han Chinese, so the Lisu they speak has no Chinese loan-words. This is very important for our work of Bible translation.”

In the 1920s and 30s the entire Salween valley was covered with primeval forest. In 1933 the Cookes, with their helper, Wang Li and his wife, arrived in Liwudi village in the present Fugong County in Nujiang Prefecture.

[TO BE CONTINUED]

Copyright 2005 by OMF International