The Sevilles in China, 1899-1919

Jessie Maude Merritt was born into a Baptist household in Newburgh, New York in 1874. The Merritt family owned a farm near that downstate city and that is where she grew up. Her hair was a light auburn which looked over blue eyes. One of the subjects in which she excelled at high school was mathematics. This may have had something to do with her getting the job she took after graduating. At the Sweet Orr Overall Company she was employed to perform clerical and accounts work. Just a few years into this job, in 1894, aged twenty, she married Walter Greene. The couple resolved before or shortly after the wedding to do missionary work together. But first they had to save up money to fund this activity. So, Jessie continued her job at Sweet Orr in hopes of accumulating enough money to enter Toronto Bible College. That was the institution that could prepare them for mission work in China. Jessie and Walter had read of Hudson Taylor’s interdenominational Christian project, the China Inland Mission (CIM). Both felt led to join up. But before they went anywhere, Jessie became pregnant and expected their first child at the end of 1894. Although the boy had developed perfectly in the womb, and no defect whatever could be found in his body, the umbilical cord strangled him during delivery. Just a few weeks later, as Jessie was still recovering, yet another loss fell down upon her. Walter Greene died of tuberculosis. In her twenty-first year she was a widow of a husband and bereft of a child.
Robbed of her partner, she clung to her plan to go to China. The next year, in 1895, she went north to attend Toronto Bible College. Four years later, in 1899, she sailed from Vancouver to Shanghai. This turned out to be the eve of China’s Boxer Rebellion, an anti-foreigner and anti-Christian outbreak of violence in 1900 which left 58 CIM missionaries dead as well as 21 of their children. At first Jessie, either in Shanghai or Wenzhou (southern Zhejiang province), covered herself in a blanket and hid underneath a window. Just outside the house, some were slain in the open. The violence had not passed, so in the middle of the night Jessie fled with other possible prey. They were disguised and tucked into a vehicle that brought them to a port where they embarked for Japan. Jessie stayed there for some months, waiting for the rebellion to end. On returning she resumed her language study. She had to learn both Mandarin and the Chinese dialect of Wenzhou, for she was to teach at a girls school in that city where she would have to use the latter.
At that school in Wenzhou George Hugh Seville turned up one day. Seville was born in 1876 and grew up a Presbyterian. He attended Shadyside Academy in Pennsylvania before going to Westminster College in New Wilmington in the same state. He matriculated at Westminster in 1895, the same year in which Jessie had gone up to Toronto Bible College. Seville’s major was Latin and Greek. Upon graduating from Westminster in 1898, he immediately applied that major in teaching those languages at a boys prep school. But soon he too heard a calling to join the Chinese missionary project organized by Hudson Taylor. As Jessie had to attend Toronto Bible College first, so Seville had first to receive some training. This requirement led him to Allegheny Theological Seminary, run by the United Presbyterian Church in Pittsburgh. So, in the year of the Boxer Rebellion and Jessie’s flight to Japan, in 1900, Seville began his theological study. In 1902 he completed his education at the seminary, and in early November of that year he boarded the Japanese steamship Maru at Vancouver. Seville got off the boat in Japan and stayed a week before traveling further south, arriving in Shanghai 2 December 1902. But Seville was assigned to Wenzhou, so from Shanghai he took a boat which stopped at Ningpo before floating down the coast and then up the Wenzhou River. Soon Seville was perfecting a pigtail because Hudson Taylor had made wearing one a requirement of all the men working in the CIM.
The mission compound is probably where Jessie and George met. That compound contained the main mission house, a two-story house with verandah, a garden of grass and bamboo trees, as well as separate girls and boys schools. When Seville arrived in late 1902 or early 1903 Jessie was already teaching at the girls school. The compound was large enough not only to accommodate those two schools but also dormitories attached to them. There was a Chinese church within the compound, which offered services for people both inside and outside. People from all parts of Wenzhou attended. On the compound there was a Chinese pastor who had his own house, and there were small dwellings for Chinese employees such as teachers, the cook, Wong, and the gatekeeper, Adjipah. A gatekeeper was needed because there was a high wall around the compound.
If not immediately, soon Seville was attracted to Jessie, the young widow and bright teacher. She may also have been a stern one: Jessie firmly rejected his wooing at first. Perhaps her memory of Walter Greene was still strong enough for her to feel disloyalty. Or maybe Seville didn’t seem mature enough: he was two years younger than she was. In any case, it took a few years for Jessie to agree to marry Seville. In the diary he kept during these years, Seville beseeched God to instruct him in the way that would win Jessie. He also noted his intention to write his brother Dade, a physician in Pittsburgh, to commission him to procure a diamond ring, just in case he would have to reply to a yes from Jessie. The yes did come after some more pursuit. Dressed in Chinese robes, Jessie (31) and Seville (29) wed at the Mission Headquarters of CIM in Shanghai on 29 March 1905. Shortly afterwards Jessie conceived, and their first child, Janet Elizabeth, was born 13 January 1906. Seville later recalled: “The other missionary couples of Wenzhou had no children, and the local Chinese church people were a bit curious about Westerners because of that. When Jessie and I had a child we realized our ‘stock had gone up’; we were considered to be really normal human beings.”
About two years later, another child was born to Jessie and George. Jessie was thirty-three and George was twenty-nine when John Eldridge was born, 7 November 1907. But before he had lived a year, on 25 July 1908, he died of gastroenteritis and diarrhea. The experience of his death may well have reminded Jessie of her first loss of an infant, in 1894—as well as the loss of her first husband which had swiftly followed that one. But her second husband, George Hugh Seville, was in excellent shape and was to remain fit all of his many years. Two years after the ill-fated John Eldrige was born, Janet Elizabeth, now three-years-old, was joined by a little sister. Elsa Ruth was born 24 October 1909 in Wenzhou. Jessie was now thirty-five and George thirty-three. The couple and their two daughters lived in the large house in the mission compound. There were two stairways on opposite sides of it. One led to the bedrooms of the Sevilles, the other led to the bedrooms of the female teachers at the school.Janet and Elsa got another sister in 1914. Edith Rachel Merritt was born 3 November, at Flower Garden Lane, Wenzhou, delivered by Dr. E.T.A. Stedeford, of the United Method Mission in Wenzhou. Janet was now eight and Elsa five years old. Jessie was forty and George thirty-eight. Since both Jessie and George continued to teach, their girls were cared for by a Chinese amah. The amah spent much time with them and taught them some Chinese. Each of Seville girls got Chinese names: Janet was Mei Oe, Elsa was Mei Yong, and Edith was Mei Fuh. When the girls were of age, they were sent to a boarding school up north.
On the coast of Shandong province’s northeast peninsula, in Yantai, CIM had established a school mainly for children of its missionaries. In 1894 there were over 200 students of missionaries at Chefoo School. But this school wasn’t an elementary school. In 1895 CIM opened a school for children aged 5-10. It was built at Tong-Hsin, three miles away from the first Chefoo building. Janet and Elsa were sent to this primary school of Chefoo. Janet probably went there in 1912. Elsa began attending when she was six, in 1916. Janet and Elsa usually returned to Wenzhou during breaks: they would take a coastal steamer to Shanghai and then a smaller boat to Wenzhou. Both Janet and Elsa were voracious readers, so their little sister Edith often found them engrossed in books. However, Elsa liked to read to her baby sister.Janet and Elsa wrote home every week. Elsa often asked after “little Edith” in her letters. Most of Elsa’s weekly letters were addressed to her mother. She sometimes signed them “Sunbeam” or “Sunbeam Elsa”. In a letter dated Chefoo, 12 Sept. 1917 (a little over a month before her eighth birthday) she reports that a teacher measured her as four feet one-and-a-half inches tall. The letters show that Elsa followed the events of World War I. She asks about her cousins fighting in it. In a letter from Chefoo, dated Nov. 6, 1918, she asks her father: “It is very good news, is it not, that Turkey has surrendered?” Evidently one of Elsa’s favorite adjectives was “ripping” to describe something excellent or first-rate. So in one letter she reports to her mother: “The tea was ripping.” Just a few lines later in this letter of June 18, 1919 she writes about a concert: “First, Miss Jeffrey played an absolutely ripping [double underline of those two words] pianoforte solo, then Miss Copp sang and lots of other ripping things were done.”While her sisters were away at Chefoo Edith was the center of attention at the compound in Wenzhou. She often walked around with the amah and flew kites with a girl named Bang Tsau. On other occasions she was taken in a rickshaw across the city to another compound, where she played with Nina, whose mother was Chinese but whose father was an official in the French consulate. When Elsa was home, the amah would lead her and Edith around, sometimes atop the Wenzhou city wall. Those promenades along the top of the wall were very entertaining for the two Seville girls. There were little dwellings, tiny shops, and even smaller enterprises scattered around it. As for the scene within the city, we can form some impression of what they experienced from a reminiscence, “Early Morning in a Chinese City”, penned by Elsa just several years after returning to America:

"Imagine the sounds of a slaughter-house, the confused babble of the subway rush hour, the varied odors of a garbage-collecting truck, and the appetizing aroma of a hot-dog stand combined, and you have an idea of the atmosphere of early morning in Wenchow.The air is hazy with smoke, sifting through the tiled roofs, of grass, straw, and twigs which are burning to cook the family breakfasts. The women, with their hair uncombed, in untidy contrast to the smooth, polished-ebony appearance it will present later in the day, are sweeping the dust and dirt out of the front rooms into the street. The pigs, kept in lieu of garbage cans, are let out for the day. The chickens, each marked with a splotch of bright-colored dye to distinguish it from members of the neighbors’ flocks, are shooed out to add their chicks and squawks to the grunts and squeals of the pigs, and the growls of the fierce-looking yellow dogs who are lying out in the middle of the street awaiting some passerby on whom to exercise their bark. On a few doorsteps there are children eating their morning rice, they are already handling the chopsticks expertly, although Americans at their age are clumsy and inefficient in managing the civilized spoon and fork.Two men trot by with a pig slung by its four feet to a pole over their shoulders, on the way to market: the protestations of the unlucky animal can be heard long after it is out of sight. Shopkeepers are taking down the wooden fronts of their shops: beggars are starting on their rounds to collect their daily portions of rice or cash from what we might call the “subscribers” on their routes. The sun climbs higher, and the comparative silence of early morning merges into the tumult of a Chinese city at business."

The Sevilles did not live in China uninterruptedly from 1905 to 1919. During those years they took furloughs which brought them back to America for short periods. One of these furloughs was scheduled for the fall of 1919. Having completed another year at Chefoo, Janet and Elsa took a boat south to rendezvous with their parents and Edith. The family then embarked at Shanghai, boarding The China in September. Elsa kept a little journal of the voyage, “Shanghai to San Francisco”:

“Sept. 14th [1919]. We left Shanghai on a launch. It was very late, and the launch, though supposed to leave at 4 P.M. never left till 6 P.M. There was a family on the launch, no, two families, who are missionaries on furlough.
Sept. 17th. We are in Nagasaki now. We arrived yesterday. Just now we are coaling.
Sept. 20th. Arrived in Yokohama.
Sept. 21st. Left Yokohama. It seems kind of countrified, compared with what I thought it would be. Everybody here rides bicycles it seems to me. We got out and saw the shops. We bought some sweets there, also two Damascene brooches, one apiece for Janet and me.
Sept. 25th. Guess what happened today?!! Mother’s cabin is on the corner of the deck. And Mr. Anderson, a judge, was just coming around the corner, when the boat tipped way way over, and he fell over, plumb into Mother’s lap! We laughed and so did everyone. But he was so confused! He should have laughed it off but he stammered and blushed so, that I felt sorry for him.
Sept. 26. We are on our way to Honolulu.
Sept. 27. We have two (2) Saturdays this week, because we are crossing the 180th degree of longitude.
Oct. 1. Today arrived at Honolulu! We got out and took an auto. We traveled all around. We went up onto the [Paly?]: a big high cliff, with rocks towering about it, flat on the top. This was where a battle was fought. The enemy tried to clamber up the side. When you look down you can see all over the plain. There is a magnificent view there. It is always windy there, and going across to the side, we all had to link arms going across to the edge to keep from falling over. On the way back we saw the place where the Queen lived. We dismissed the auto and got out. We went down to Waikiki Beach and saw the Aquarium. It was wonderful. There were beautiful fish there. I never have seen nor hope to see, any more beautiful fish.”

When the Sevilles left China, Elsa was almost ten years old. Janet was thirteen and Edith was only five. Edith could not have kept any journal, but years later she still vividly remembered their passage across the Pacific: “Each of us had a deck chair with their name on it, and they each had brought a steamer rug to keep them warm on deck. Every morning after breakfast I sat in my deck chair, and someone tucked me in. Everyone else sat in their chairs, too. Then a waiter in a white jacket brought each passenger beef tea in a white china cup. Then another waiter brought salted crackers. In the afternoon, at four o’clock, everyone got back on their deck chairs and the waiters brought tea and cookies.”
About a month after leaving Shanghai they landed in San Francisco Harbor. When George, Jessie, Janet, Elsa, and Edith had departed China in September 1919, they all expected to return after a short period. Not long after their arrival in San Francisco, Jessie was informed that she could not be granted the medical approval she needed to go back to Wenzhou. Thus, the Sevilles spent the next two years on the west coast before moving to the other side of the United States, where a grandchild of Elsa would one day take it into his head to become a missionary of English. Now returned, whether just on furlough or not, his curiosity was sufficiently piqued to research the events this narrative has described—and his curiosity sufficiently frustrated to regret his youthful indifference to the story of his grandmother’s life.