Stephen Fortosis and Mary Graham Reid. Boxers to Bandits. Charlotte NC: Billy Graham Evangelistic Assoc., 2006. Print.
Boxers to Bandits tells the story of an American missionary couple who served in China from 1889 to 1940, Jimmy and Sophie Graham. Billy Graham’s ministry published this book, but the China Grahams are not related to the evangelist.
Like many missionary stories, there are many hardships as the Grahams persevered for many years. I picked up this book because I noticed that they served in the same general area of China where I taught English for a little while. What struck me was how most of their years in China, half a century, were characterized by anarchy and war. While this was in no sense a political book, reading this book makes it easier to understand how a “great simplifier” came to rule. Mussolini made the trains run on time? Well, Mao brought order to those he did not expel or kill.
From about 1900 on as the Qing Dynasty weakened, the Boxer movement first brought anarchy to the land. The Boxers may have been xenophobes, but there was little order to their actions. By the time the Boxer movement dissolved along with the last emperor, there was genuine anarchy. Sun Yat-Sen brought a few years of order, but after his death, the civil disorder came back.
For the Grahams, most of the civil disorder was characterized by bandits—organized criminals who were more or less free to operate except for the few times when some warring army passed through. From about 1925 until 1937 there was genuine civil war, then the Japanese invaded. Sophie had died in 1937. Jimmy left China for good in 1940. By then were there not only millions of Christians in China, but the Grahams had helped to bring modern medicine to the region of Jiangsu Province where they were.
The doctor who helped establish the hospital that the Grahams often worked out of was the father of Ruth Graham, Billy’s wife. So there is a connection with Billy Graham, just not one of ancestry. One of the other missionaries in the area where they worked was the father of Pearl Buck. The last chapter of Boxers to Bandits outlines the work done by Jimmy Graham III, Jimmy and Sophie’s son who lived and worked in China his entire life until he had to leave in 1950.
If you pick up this book and are not inclined to read the whole thing, read chapter two. Chapter two is a story that can stand by itself. It is a very moving account of survival during the Boxer Rebellion. Many Chinese Christians and foreign missionary families were killed, but their lives were not in vain.
The last 65 pages or so are different. This appendix is a reprint of a book published in 1941 called The Incense Bearers of Han. The book is a collection of testimonies about how different Chinese people became Christians. The stories are told by Jimmy Graham III, though he was not always the person involved in their conversions.
This collection of stories when added to the story of the Grahams debunks the myth of “rice Christians”—that people are attracted to Christianity because they are poor and get bribes or handouts from the missionaries. Indeed, during the Great Depression of the 1930s, the Grahams got very little support from American churches because the churches themselves were having financial difficulties. The churches they worked with in China were largely self-supporting from the beginning.
Both Jimmy’s and Sophie’s families were FFVs—first families of Virginia. Both had ancestors who were early settlers, civic and government leaders, and generally held in high esteem as only aristocratic Southerners could. Sophie’s family cemetery plot featured an obelisk which said, “The best blood in Virginia.” The joke about them was “that they left one place where people worshipped their ancestors only to sail to another.” (11)