Page 15 - PC Issue 14 Summer 2020

presbyterian.ca
SUMMER 2020
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INTERNATIONAL
PRESBYTERIAN
15
The Last Kindness of a Child
By Mark Dodge, PhD, Buffalo Public Schools, and Aletheia University, Tamsui campus, Taiwan.
In November 1878, the former Pres- byterian Record magazine published a letter from the Rev. K. F. Junor, de- scribing his family’s arrival in Tam- sui, Taiwan, to assist the famous Rev. George Leslie Mackay. The let- ter, written on July 6, boasted the “simply marvelous” success of the Canada Presbyterian Mission in Tai- wan, and described with wonder the size and beauty of Northern Taiwan, especially its principal city Bang-kah, the city that is Taipei today.1 The Can- ada Presbyterian Mission had already built 14 mission posts in and around the city. “Her [the Church’s] first mis- sionary went through untold labour, anxiety, and suffering, to give it to the Church in its present state. The Lord has preserved his life through it all, and on every hand are signs of great hope and promise for the future.”
But the hope and promise of Ju- nor’s first letter had already vanished by the time it was printed. Shortly after Junor’s arrival, Northern Tai- wan was devastated by a wave of malaria unlike anything they had ex- perienced before. So many people were sick for so long, that although Junor and Mackay both wrote regular reports to the Foreign Mission Com- mittee, it was October before these letters were mailed out. They were published in the Record together in December, in an extended article that allowed the missionaries’ supporters to relive the tragedy much as they themselves had experienced it.
On September 2, Junor wrote, “Since I wrote, and even a few days before, we have had a grievous term with sickness. No one here has seen such a time among the foreigners.”2 Mackay, who had been travelling around the countryside with several of his students, tending to the grow- ing number of Taiwanese who were falling ill during Taiwan’s hottest summer on record, was the first and hardest hit at the mission. Malarial fever sent Mackay to bed for several weeks, and when he began to recov- er it was followed by a bout of boils. Malaria was common in Taiwan, but it was stronger than usual in 1878. “Neither Mr. Mackay nor Dr. Ringer have seen such a summer as this before,” Junor wrote on September 11. “Nearly all the foreigners have been down with fever, and as for the Chinese, they have been dying by
scores. Hardly a day passes that we do not hear the music of a funeral, some days two or three times in our own neighborhood.”3 Junor’s home was on a hill overlooking the harbour, just a few hundred yards from the British Consulate and within earshot of one of Tamsui’s three large tem- ples, so it is not surprising that he should hear funeral music from his home. But even a large village of four or five thousand, such as Tamsui was in 1878, should not have to host two or three funeral processions in a single day.
On September 8, Mackay and his wife moved into the Junors’ home, a recently completed manse that was much larger and higher above ground than most local accommodations. In 1878, the best educated people be- lieved that disease was caused pri- marily by miasma—bad air—that rose from the ground and infected all around it. The idea that disease was contagious and should be quaran- tined stretches back into the middle ages, but most people thought that disease was in a place, carried by the air, not by people. The idea of “Germ Theory” had been proposed several times but most people rejected it. In 1878, the idea of inoculation was 80 years old, but no one was quite sure how it worked. Sir Patrick Manson, a British physician who spent six years in Southern Taiwan, had even suggested that malaria was spread by mosquitoes, but Mackay and Ju- nor were not familiar with “Mosquito Manson’s” widely rejected theories.4
The prevailing wisdom, when it came to preventing disease, was to stay surrounded by clean, fresh- smelling air, as high above the ground (from whence the bad mi- asma came) as possible. The Ju- nors’ new house has been specifi- cally constructed with this theory in mind—built on high ground with a well-ventilated crawl space beneath, and high second-story bedrooms with large windows to maximize fresh air. When Mackay fell ill, the best course of treatment known to the missionaries was to move him into one of these high, clean rooms as far from the disease-producing miasma as possible.
It was in one of these “healthier” upstairs bedrooms that four-year-old Frank Junor spent part of his last night bringing supper to the convalescing Mackay. On Aug. 31, Mackay had written of how suppor tive the Junors had been during his affliction, and that,
“they are getting along famously here. May God bless them abundantly in all of their labours.” Two weeks later he repor ted, “Frank, just the evening be- fore he died, carried a plate with food into my room, got up on the bed and sat beside me. He spoke to me of God, Jesus, and of heaven in such a way that although my own poor head was throbbing with pain, I listened with in- tense interest...When going out of the room he turned around several times and said, ‘Do call me if you want any- thing, I’ll come at once.’”5 Despite the long talk of heaven beyond, Mackay did not even realize Frank was sick until the next day, when he was gone.
Twenty-four years later, when Mac- kay died from throat cancer in 1901, Junor wrote a letter to the Dominion Presbyterian, correcting several parts of their obituary. “You say McKay was buried in the grave yard purchased by himself. This is a mistake. I purchased the grave yard, fenced it & laid it out. My own boy was the first buried in it & in it I buried Mrs. Fraser. Dr. M. would have nothing to do with it.”6 Junor’s words, underlined in his own hand for emphasis, connote a sense of resent- ment toward the colleague that he once took in “like a brother.” In 1901, after having spent years in medical school following the death of his son, Junor surely had a more developed understanding of contagious disease than he did in 1878. He never overtly alleged that Mackay brought into his house the illness that took Frank’s life, but it is clear that he felt Mackay had not been adequately suppor tive while he was grieving for his child.
But Junor was the one who was mistaken. He had purchased land and built the foreigners’ graveyard himself, but Mackay had been buried outside of its walls, in a plot he had reserved for himself and his Taiwanese wife and children, who were not allowed to be buried in the cemetery Junor
had built. In Junor’s grief he had built a wall to separate the foreigners from the Taiwanese. His cemetery was not just a place of Christian burial, it drew an explicit division between “Western” Christians and Taiwanese ones—a distinction which Mackay refused to suppor t, even in his death.
Over the last few weeks, I have heard lots of Junor-like resentments, and seen lots of walls going up. I have heard Chinese blame Americans, and Americans blame Chinese, and many, many wild claims that the recent out- break of the novel coronavirus is the result of some nation’s nefarious plot. I have seen scared leaders close their borders, shutting their people in with the virus, building walls they think will protect them from the accusa- tion of not having cared enough, even though everyone knows it is too late to stop the disease from coming in. At best we, and the rest of the world that already has it, are selfishly proclaim- ing that we are going to take care of ourselves and only ourselves, from now on. In America, where I am from, we won’t take care of everyone, be- cause so many are still without health insurance.
Mackay did not bring malaria into Junor’s house, mosquitos did. In the hot summer of 1878, even the high healthy bedroom that Mackay occu- pied was unlikely to deter them from taking Frank Junor back to God. Blam- ing Mackay or the Taiwanese cer tainly didn’t help. Locking me or anyone else out of America today will not stop COVID-19 from running its course. The only thing that can slow it down is if we all work together to reduce its oppor tunities to spread, and pointing fingers just doesn’t look like working together.
Ironically, in a recently released package of emergency measures, the rules that govern the licensing of new medications by the Food and
Drug Administration in America were greatly relaxed in hopes of speed- ing up the quest to find a vaccine for COVID-19. Perhaps these measures will also help to speed up the process of bringing a malaria vaccine to mar- ket. Malaria kills nearly half a million people (mostly children in poor de- veloping nations) each year. Despite the fact that a malaria vaccine has been one of the Gates Foundation’s top priorities for more than a dozen years, there is still no effective vac- cine against it.
Hopefully the vaccine for COV- ID-19, which has already killed sev- eral thousand people, will not take so long to produce. If we work together, instead of levying blame, if we err on the side of caution and if we remem- ber to be thankful rather than resent- ful, I am sure that we will emerge from this trial stronger and wiser than we were before.
I pray you all are safe and well, and that everyone remembers Frank Ju- nor, the four-year-old whose selfless last words were, “Do call me if you want anything, I’ll come at once.”
1 K. F. Junor, “Formosa: Letter from K. F. Junor,” The Presbyterian Re- cord, November 1878, 300.
2 K. F. Junor, “Formosa,” The Presby- terian Record, December 1878, 322. 3 Ibid. 323.
4 Katz Paul R. “Germs of Disaster: the impact of epidemies on Japanese mïlitary campaigns in Taiwan, 1874 and 1895.” In: Annales de démog- raphie historique, 1996. Morbidité, mortalité, santé. 207.
5 Mackay “Letters from Reverend G. L. Mackay,” The Presbyterian Re- cord, December 1878, 323-5.
6 Junor, “Letter of Aug. 10, 1901” in North Formosa Mission Reports ed. Louise Gamble and Chen Kuan-chou. Series 1 Vol V. Toronto: The Presby- terian Church in Canada, 2012. 232.