December 1999

Dear Friends,

This is our first newsletter as mission specialists serving through Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) in China. It has been a long road of preparation to get here, but we have finally settled into our placement. There's so much to tell that we're writing the letter in two parts. This one is from John.

Upon arrival in the country, the Amity Foundation provided an orientation conference for all the newly arriving volunteers. Kim is a veteran China volunteer, having taught English in various locales in the country already. I'm the newcomer and very much needed the benefits of Amity's orientation, which took place on the campus of the Nantong Teachers College. Nantong is a small city just north of Shanghai. We had three weeks of informative seminars about Amity, daily lessons in Mandarin Chinese, personal language tutors, seminar-style presentations on how to teach English as a foreign language, and opportunities for practice-teaching.

Besides all the activities in classrooms and conference rooms, it was a slow immersion into the culture and living-conditions. Although the guest-house on the college campus had nice accommodations, we were still removed from many amenities that we had been accustomed to back home. Water had to be boiled before use; some of us had hot water in the bathroom and some of us didn't; mosquitoes were more of a nuisance than we had been used to. The weather the first week was wonderful, but then the reality of what summer is normally like set in—haze, heat, and humidity. We had washing machines at our disposal there, but no dryers. We all had clothes lines on little
balconies outside our rooms.

The prime initial duty for me here is learning the language (Mandarin, a.k.a. Beijing dialect, a.k.a. putonghua, a.k.a. Standard Chinese). My favorite part of the orientation was personal language tutoring. I was paired-up with a young man named Wang Bin, a charismatic and friendly fellow with a very positive attitude and wonderful sense of humor. We became fast friends, and I was honored to receive from him a Chinese name: Wang Jun (pronounced "jwen"). Wang is the family name; Bin and Jun are given names. So now we're brothers! Chinese typically address each other using their family names, so I became accustomed to being called Strong, and I opted for calling my tutor Xiao Wang (Little Wang), as is common among friends.

One day, returning from town on our way back to school, we were approached by a woman on the street who asked Wang Bin about me. Was I from America? Was I Christian? Would I like to sit and talk for a little while about the Bible? She spoke of the Gospel of Matthew, and of the Good News, of the "light that has come from God," and of her desire to arrange a meeting between the foreign Christians and her Christian friends. After our talk with the woman, Wang Bin asked me about the book of Matthew. I made an attempt to explain what the New Testament means to Christians and what the Gospels are, but even after what I thought was a simple outline, Wang Bin confessed that he could not understand most of the words I was using. This was obviously more than just a language barrier—multiple cultural barriers contributed to that scenario. In order to communicate with each other on a deeper level than just everyday "survival language," we have to know more than just each other's words. We know nothing of each other's experience of life, family, love, values, morality, etc. How hard is it, even in our own "home town," to really know the people around us, and to be known by others? Pray that in the midst of my language-learning God might grant me the gift of discovering true fellowship and brotherhood with those lives I cross paths with: Western colleagues, Chinese Christians, neighbors and acquaintances.

After our encounter with the Christian lady on the street that day, there were other encounters the following Sunday at the church between a couple of Chinese women and Don Snow, our orientation leader. He told us that these women were probably part of an emerging sect called "Eastern Lightning," which promotes some pretty off-the-wall notions, primarily that the second coming of Christ has already happened and God has taken bodily form again as a woman somewhere in northern China. In future updates, we will outline
more of what we've learned about Christianity and "Christianesque deviations" in the country.

Blessing on you,

John and Kim Strong