of them, but practically most of them had mosquito nets that was to keep out the mosquitoes so that you wouldn’t be bit by mosquitoes.
In all my time. over there I never had malaria except towards the end. Towards the end of my over there was when we were in the mountains getting away from the Japs. We didn’t have mosquito nets with us all the time. During that time I got malaria. Of course I attribute to the fact that it was from the mosquitoes during that time that we were gone. But, the Chinese have it and so that’s one of the big medicines that we used over there to give people who had malaria. To give them quinine.
I never had much faith in these Chinese doctors. Maybe they helped sometimes but I don’t think they too often they did. Maybe sometimes, but it wasn’t too evident.
One thing though that was a cause of wonder to me in Hokow where I had the dispensary, I used to go down and hour or so a day and would give people aspirin or quinine or something like that was a young kid. I guess he was about ten or twelve years old. He was around there. He wasn’t a Christian, but I think he was around the neighborhood and I used to see him playing around with the kids in the yard. One day he fell and broke his arm. Well, as soon as he did that he came to see me. Well, I could see the arm was fractured it wasn’t broken in the sense that the bones protruded or anything. But, I could feel that there was a fracture there, but what could I do. I told him to put the arm in a sling, you know, and I painted the outside with iodine and gave him some aspirin to try to control his fever. Well, a day or two he came back and said he still has fever so I gave him some more aspirin and I said, “Well you’ll just have to wait. It’s not gonna heal right away. You have to bear it for awhile.”
Well after a couple of days I didn’t see him anymore. And, maybe a week or so later I saw him around and he was walking around without his arm in a sling. I called him over and said, “What’s the matter with your arm, how’s your arm?” “Oh, he said it’s fine.” “ Well, I said it doesn’t hurt anymore?” No, he moved it around, swinging it around and everything. I felt of it and it felt like it was better. I said, “What happened, how did you cure it?” “Well, he said I went to a Chinese doctor and he gave me some medicine and I cured it. Well, in all the times that I was over there that was one of the few times I think that he might had some help to it, but he really cured that broken arm in maybe 15 or 20 days.
We were blessed over there that we never got sick. We got sick with a few minor. . .I got malaria one time and some of the others got malaria and once upon a time when we were out in the mountains hiding from the Japs we got
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dysentery. But no more of the serious illnesses we never had. We were blessed by that. 
It was true that Bishop Sheehan died right after I went over there. He got pneumonia and died and Bishop Misner died, too, but his was a heart attack. But, most of us was blessed with pretty good health. And, we really got through with our lives anyway. So we were blessed in spite of all the contagion and what not around there that we were exposed to. We never got sick and we never died.
Another thing that you notice about the Chinese is their poverty. Well, since they are poor, not only in their way of living, and so fourth, but in regards to money. They didn’t have much money and because they didn’t have much money they had to hold on to it. They spent it very carefully and they watched over it because it was so precious to them and they needed so much of
it. So, money, we always thought the lack of things in China, was the poverty and that was caused by money.
Because so many people were unemployed they didn’t have a very meaningful occupation. They didn’t pay so much. They were always available, people for whatever you wanted. You could always hire somebody and if you wanted to pay just a little bit more than the accepted wage well, you would be swarmed over with them.
So, because of the poverty they were willing to work. You could always hire people to work for you. Because of the fact that they had very little money they took care of it and they spent it very frugally.
Towards the end of our stay in China inflation was terrible. That was shortly before the fall of the Kuo Mang Tong and the Japanese taking over. Inflation was so prevalent. It got so. bad there in the end the government was not getting any taxes. Some of the taxes were collected but before it ever got to the government, to the heads, I’m sure it was taken by somebody else.
Because they had no money they just ran their printing presses all the faster.. . running printing presses 24 hours a day. Of course that was nothing but paper. Everybody knew that it was nothing but paper. So everything was prices increasing day by day. It got so bad there towards the end that the people had no confidence in the money cause they knew that it was only paper.
So they did like very realistically they sort of used rice as their standard. Instead of having a gold standard they had rice as their standard. That worked a lot better. For example, towards the end there when things were increasing in price every day and they used rice as a standard for the money.
If you hired somebody it would be something similar to this. For a month I want three bushels of rice, two pounds of oil, cooking oil, and a pound’
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of salt. That was your standard. At the end of the month when it came time to pay them you didn’t pay them the rice, the oil, and the salt, but you gave them the equivalent of those things at that time because at this time they probably were ten times as high as they were in the beginning. So, you paid them this way and rice was the standard and it worked well. But, at least, it was more sensible than trying to use that paper money, which was only paper.
At one time they were using just this paper, and I know they just put it on paper, and for example they just dropped a zero off the amount. A hundred bill they just dropped one, a hundred dollar bill was just ten. A ten dollar bill was a one. So they just dropped a zero off of it. So anything that would get them a one hundred dollars it was just ten dollars. When we have inflation like that it’s terrible. It caused a suffering for everybody. And, I wouldn’t want to go through it again. I’m sure the Chinese wouldn’t either.
Another thing about China was the difficulty in travelling. The didn’t have all the roads that we have here. It was very hard.., in the countryside in China they just had the roads, paths, you might say. There were roads, you might say, that would be 8 or 10 feet wide. But they were just made for walking and really pushing wheelbarrows on them.
A lot of them were just paved with a big stone to make a wheelbarrow travel rather comfortably over them. When the road was wet it made a solid footing for them. So a lot of the roads were just paths, you might say. A road, what they called a horse road, was really a double road. Cars could run over
it.
When we went over there, and at that time it was 1932, in the country they didn’t have any cars. That came later. If you wanted to travel you had to travel the way the Chinese did. The main way the Chinese traveled was walking. They walked from one place to another. Well that was all right for the men but the women, most of them didn’t have bound feet but some of the older ones still did and it was harder for them to travel. So most of the travelling that was done at that time was done by walking.
Or if you happened to have a road, there seemed to be a lot of rivers around there and they always had boats on them, particularly if you were going down the stream you might get a ride down, and it went pretty good. Because you went with the flow of the stream. But, if you were coming back you had to depend on wind to blow you back and it might take you ten days to make a trip of ten miles or something like that.
But the main way to travel in China was walking. In our time we were able to have a horse. Horses over there were used for riding not for work
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or anything else. If we had a horse when we went out to the country we could ride a horse. These small roads a horse could travel them all right. If you had a bicycle that was all right too. But, these roads were not so very comfortable or practice for bicycles because when you were riding along there were places that were pretty hard to pass over with a bicycle. You had to be a pretty good bicycle rider to travel a lot of these roads. So, walking was one and riding a boat downstream or something like that. That way it was very hard to transport articles from one place to another. They didn’t have no decent roads. They didn’t have carts or something like that. They had to carry it. The Chinese got to be very good at carrying things because that was the only way that they had.
They had a thing over there that they called a “beindong”, it was a stick of wood that the Chinese used. They placed it over their shoulder and they had produce of some kind at either end.. .kind of balanced on it.. .and they could carry it over their shoulder. That was a popular means of transporting things.. .or around the house or from one town to another you carried it with this beindong. Well a beindong was all right that was fine for transporting things but you have to know how to use it.
As I said it was a piece of wood that you carried over your shoulder but it had a little flexibility about it. It wasn’t just a stiff piece of wood. It was like a rod or something like that. It had a sway to it, a spring to it.
The Chinese knew how to use it. They could put their weight on it, lift it and swing it, and the things that they had balanced on their beindong on both sides of it it gave a little bit and it had a swing to it. By accommodating you step to the sway of this produce you had on your beindong it made a lot easier because you swung with the weight of the article. I tried it a time, but I couldn’t accommodate my steps to the swing of the thing I was trying to carry.
You might say it takes you twice as hard. When your shoulder was going up the weight was going down, when your shoulder was going down the weight was going up So if you accommodate your step to it it makes it a lot easier. It’s something like when people carrying articles on a beindong it’s not exactly a walk, or it wasn’t a trot it was something in between. . .a little pace..
little bit more than a walk but not quite as much as a trot. And, in this way they were able to carry things around.
Another way of transporting things was by way of wheelbarrow. The wheelbarrow was the same idea of things ad ours but it was made differently. The wheel on the wheelbarrow was much higher than ours. I imagine the
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wheelbarrow was between almost two and a half feet wide, it’s a high wheel, and on each side they had a little frame built around each side and there was a platform on two sides of the wheelbarrow of the wheels of the wheelbarrow and they could put articles on there and push them with a wheelbarrow. Push them, they could push more than they could carry because it’s much more popular. sometimes they used wheelbarrows to push things around from one place to another. Upon carrying things from one place to another they were very strong particularly those who knew how to use these beindongs or how to push a wheelbarrow.
They could push these things and transport articles from one town to another. It’s slow according to our standards, of course, but they could travel up to maybe 15 to 20 miles a day carrying a beindong. If a guy was strong they could have 50 to 75 pounds on there they could carry for one day, or a
wheelbarrow could carry much more. They could have 200 pounds on there, maybe, and they could push it along at say, 10-20 miles a day. That’s the only way you could transport things.
Later on in our stay there they started building auto roads. I
guess that must have been about in the ‘40’s where they built auto roads and they got buses. The only use they got of these they called, horse roads, for buses and they graveled them. They didn’t have them paved. they graveled them, From one town to another they had buses running between these towns. Never introduced
to just individual roads but just public roads and the buses would run from town to town.
You could buy a ticket on one of these buses and travel from one to another. Of course that was very convenient and very fast but it wasn’t
too long after they were built that the Chinese war and Japanese war began heating up and so they were afraid that the Japanese were going to invade China.
so, they dug up these roads. So, there was only one or two years that I was ab1e to use buses because after that the roads were torn up and there were no buses you could run.
So the only way you could get around was if you had a horse, you cou1d ride the horse, or you could ride a bicycle. But, none of them was too
convenient. a little bit faster. but a little more aggravating. To ride a horse, well, the horse wasn’t too big.they were smaller horses. They were bigger than a pony but they weren’t as big as American horses. They were where in between. And, a horse, maybe you could go 20 miles a day if you were going somewhere or a bicycle the same thing but that’s about the limit of it so to get around it was always difficult.
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I think that I was blessed in China that I didn’t suffer from homesickness too much. In the beginning and after going over and you naturally might be subject to homesickness. It was a strange country, strange customs, strange things people, and so fourth, there were so many things going on that you didn’t have time to think about that.
So, by the time that I might have gotten around to where I might have been worrying about it, the homesickness, I was interested in China and it never bothered me too much. But, I say, that’s personally. Others might have been differently. But, I think most of us were able to stand up pretty well.
The only place and time in China when I really noticed was maybe times like Christmas now, China is a pagan country and not many Christians there. In fact the pagans know enough to forget all about all, Christianity, Catholics protestants or not. The don’t know anything at all about Christmas.
In all the time about Christmas you get to thinking about all the times and good things that were at home Christmas. To see them not even knowing about it, it made you rather blue and so fourth. Of course the Christians knew this but the number of Christians compared to the pagans was so few that it was hardly noticeable. I remember the first year that we were over there at Poyang and Poya was right on the banks of the Poyang. It was an immense lake and on Christmas clay you would see these stores open, the people going around their businesses, and the women were going down to the Lake Poyang to wash their clothes and absolutely no thinking about. Christmas at all. That’s a little hard to take. Of course you would be a little homesick a little bit.
Of course the Christians knew about Christmas and so fourth. But in compare to the pagans there was a very small number. That was one of the few times in China that I felt rather depressed or rather homesick.
In Kiangsi, the province that we were in, that would be a little farther South in the latitude and longitude than Perryville is. The winters were not quite as strong as they were here, as they would be here in Missouri. In the Wintertime while it got cold it was not as severe as here. Very rarely did the lake freeze over or a pond freeze over. Maybe in a cold spell at night it might be the ice on the water in the morning but after the sun came up it melted. It was Very rare that it got so cold that the water froze.
However, our first year, the very first year we were in China it did. We Were right on Lake Poyang, we had a spell there I don’t remember how long it Was, it was several days I know that even the water on the lake froze. And, We could have skated if we’d had some skates but we didn’t have any skates. But, that was the only time that it got that cold.
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Sometimes it would feel like it but it wasn’t that cold. Many times in the winter it would be cloudy and we wouldn’t see the sun and we’d feel, cold but it wasn’t as cold as it felt.
This first year in Poyang, we didn’t have skates so we couldn’t skate, but we did one day. Father Smith and I made some ice cream and we enjoyed it and we gave some to the Chinese but they didn’t like it. They don’t like cold things. They don’t like cold things. Even the ice cream they didn’t enjoy because they don’t like cold things. They all want hot. In a way that’s certainly a blessing.
I don’t think that they realize it but they only want tea. They don’t drink cold water even in the summertime. Oh, they might drink water from a cistern or something like that but ordinarily they want warm tea. Even in the summer when they are drinking they drink tea. And, that’s a blessing because by boiling the water, well, it kills the germs and certainly China might have been wiped out if they hadn’t had that custom and they had drank that unadulterated water because most of it probably has dysentery in it, what not into it.
(side 3)
So the fact that they drank tea, that probably saved more lives than anything else even in the summertime.
As I was saying that a bicycle was as much bother as using. Oh, sometimes I would take my bicycle, but more often, but I had a horse, too, well that’s all I needed. After you’d get to the mission you’d have to take care of it and more again it’s in your way. So most of the time we walked. The carrier would carry your things where that you needed for the mission and your boy, that private servant that you had, went along with you to take care of you.
So, when we got to the mission, if they had a place, if they owned some property there, if the church owned what they called a mission chapel... well, it might be a room or some empty house, but most of the time that wasn’t the case.
You went out to the Christians and that village that they would empty out a room for you and while you were there you’d live in that room. It would be one of the rooms for one of the Christians and they would go someplace else to sleep while you were there. They gave up their room for you.
Now, one or two places we had while we were there we called a chapel and at one time we had a school there. . .religious school. . .where we taught religion. If there was a chapel there, there was usually a place for the priest
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to sleep, a place for the priest to say Mass. But if they didn’t you used one of these rooms that belonged to the Christians and you lived in there.
While you were there on the mission you lived in this room and you said mass in what you called the “common” room. Not all, but most of the Chinese houses were made so that there were a number of families living under one house. They’d have a father, his mother and Sons and daughters, and so fourth, and so fourth being in different rooms in his house and sometimes there’d be several families living in his house.
The way that most of these houses were made was in the center probably was a common room,. That’s where the women, most of the time, maybe they were sewing or mending their clothes or making shoes that ‘s where they would sit. Not only the women but the people living in this house that was their common place to sit.
So, usually we would use the room they gave us for the priest bed room and we set up things out in that common room for a chapel. We said mass there in this chapel.
Now making a mission was rather simple. You said Mass in the morning and all the people that were there would try to attend. You gave a sermon, instruction, you had communion, and so fourth One of the missions if in the beginning maybe they didn’t go to communion then you’d set up a day for a time for hearing confessions. Maybe the second day or the third day or how long you needed it.
You’d have day for confessions and people would come for confessions. During mass you’d not only have instructions but you’d have communion and so fourth. While you were making missions you checked up that and everybody in the village, who they were and so fourth.
Maybe some of them had some children. Maybe you’d have baptisms for the kids that had never been baptized since you were there the last time. Maybe some of the older persons would be sick and anointed them. You brought communion to the sick and so fourth. And, you checked up all this time while you were checking up on the mission.
You had a list of everybody there and you checked them off to see who was here and who wasn’t here. Somebody didn’t show up you would try to find out why and, so on and so fourth.
You had Mass in the morning with an instruction and in the afternoon well, there wasn’t anything so people could go about their own business in the afternoon and you were left on your own and you could do what you wanted to. But, in the evening, usually after supper, they’d congregate again and a lot of,
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times you gave instructions then and we talked over, and the happenings of the religion in the families and so fourth. They’d get everything straightened up and lined out.
The time that you stayed at a mission depended mostly on the number of Catholics and Christians there. If they had only a dozen or so it wouldn’t be very long and you could take care of everything else. Maybe you only stayed at that mission only two or three days.
And, then if you went to another place where if it was a bigger place, well where maybe they had a hundred Catholics or so fourth well, it took a lot more time to hear confessions and get everything straightened out. Yu might stay there four or five days. Get everything done in the same process, you know, mass in the morning, instructions, confessions, communion, anointing the sick and baptisms. And occasionally, not very often, but occasionally marrying a couple. This was the first opportunity that you had to marry them. You’d marry the couple and so fourth.
So, after 4 or 5 days, depending on the size of the mission, you’d go on to the next mission if they were in that neighborhood. Sometimes they were separated and you’d only made a couple of missions and then come back home because there’s nobody in the area. A lot of times in that area there’d be someplace else and you would go to the next town. It might be five miles away or something. You’d go to that place and make a mission and while you were making the mission you were living in their house, in their homes and they fed you. Well, that was all right. I boasted that Chinese are not too bad cooks. Sometimes they are not as good as they could be but they fed you and they tried to give you a little better meal than they have.
As I talked once before they don’t have meat too often, but if you were making a mission they’d try to get some meat. You’d have some meat during the time that you were there.
Since their food is rice, you know, three times a day, well, I didn’t mind that because I got to like rice pretty well. I didn’t too much in the beginning but afterwards you learned to like it. It’s pretty good, it’s not bad at all.
But, the monotony of the thing, they’d bring you breakfast, you’d have rice, vegetables, and maybe a little meat. Noon you’d have rice, vegetables, and maybe a little meat. Supper you’d have rice, vegetables, and maybe a little meat. And, if you didn’t eat it all maybe you’d get it back the next day.
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Meat, fish, and so fourth are too scarce and too precious to be thrown away. So you kept on eating until you got done with them.
Occasionally, not too often, but occasionally you’d be getting this diet and it would be rather monotonous and you’d wish you’d be rid of it or something. But, since you are there and their food they were feeding you, well, you’d have to be polite and eat what they gave you.
One of the big deals about being polite they’d try to be with ypu all the time and so many of the times when you were eating out at the missions they would want to come around and stand around and watch you. They didn’t want to leave you alone. That was sort of an embarrassment, at least it was a disrespect, they weren’t giving you the proper respect so they would stay around.
I know one place there where they weren’t too good a cooks and the people would stay around there and after about the third or fourth day that fish that they had gotten you had passed up about two days in a row it still came out. If there wasn’t anybody around I’d dump it out and let the dogs eat it. And, then when they came back to get the dishes they’d say, “Oh, you’ve finished it.” and I’d say. “Oh, yeah, yeah.”, and they’d say. “How did it taste?” And, of course you were polite and say, “fine, fine!” And, actually you were tired of it and you gave it to the dogs.
Most of the time I’d say they, they did the best they could and so we made the best of it. So, as I said when we were out in their area they gave up their bedroom for you to sleep in, well, then you should be thankful for it. We were, but the only thing is, while they gave you their bed to sleep in and they took their covers, their linens off of their bed.
You took your own, you brought your own with you. Usually the bed wasn’t too bad, sometimes it was clean but sometimes at night the old bed bugs came out and started biting on you. And, once or twice they’d have rats around the house, once or twice during the night the rats ran over you. Well, as I say that’s the exception, that’s not very often. I saw it but it’s not the general rule.
So, the food wasn’t too bad cause they gave you the best they had and we made the best of it.
Another thing I say, they’re poor, the only kind of meat that you have is pork. Sometimes, they’d kill a chicken. Well, that chicken is always good and that would made the food a lot more palatable. The fact that you had chicken to eat with your food.
So, making these missions, most of the time was not too hard. In fact it was a little enjoyable. A lot of people out there you hadn’t seen for
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