STRANGERS IN A STRANGE LAND -- From West Texas to Central China, new book on Maudie and Wilson Fielder

A Miles, Texas Sweetheart and a Comanche County Cowboy

The first time I stopped in Miles there was an excellent homemade pie store in what was once a gasoline filling station. For those new to West Texas, Miles, Texas, is a pleasant little town halfway between Ballinger and San Angelo on Hwy 67.

My purpose this visit was not for pie. I wanted to search out some local history. I wanted to see the area of town where Maudie Ethel Albritton lived.

The historical marker in front of the First United Methodist Church on Fourth and Broadway had just the facts I needed. The original 1901 wood frame Methodist Church was where Maudie attended Sunday school and church as a teenager.

Maudie was born in Navarro County in East Texas. Due to her mother’s poor health the family doctor recommended they move to a drier climate. They moved to Miles. Why Miles? The historical marker helped here too. The founder of the Miles Methodist Church was a Methodist circuit rider from Navarro County. It is quite possible that Maudie’s parents Tennessee and William Albritton knew him before he came west. Miles had a dry climate and good preaching.

Miles was home to Maudie until her 22nd birthday. The love of her life, Wilson Fielder, a cowboy from Comanche County, Texas, left the Concho River for China’s Yellow River. The fledging Republic of China was just emerging from the ruins of the Qing Dynasty.

The mail service from Central China to West Texas and back was slower than the Pony Express. With the patience of Job, Maudie accepted Wilson’s “far flung” proposal. So, in the summer of 1914, Maudie waved goodbye to friends and family at the Miles Santa Fe Railroad Depot and began the journey of her life.

A few months later Maudie married her teenage sweetheart, Wilson Fielder, in Shanghai, China. A honeymoon on the Yangzi River was but a beginning. Maudie and Wilson spent the next forty years sharing their faith in Central China, the birthplace of the Chinese people. They lived through some of the most hectic, action-packed years of China’s modern history.

The story of Maudie and Wilson Fielder has been in the works for twenty years. This columnist knew them well. The two youngest children of Maudie and Wilson made the book possible: Florence Ann McKinney and he late L. Gerald Fielder.

The title of the new publication of The Tao Foundation is “Strangers in a Strange Land.” Available in bookstores from October 10 –- Double Ten –- which is the one hundred year anniversary of the revolution that brirthed the Republic of China. (Based on the island of Taiwan since 1948.)

When Maudie’s train left Miles the town had a population of 1,500 and was served by two railroads. There were five churches, a beautiful brick school, two lumber yards and one of the strongest banks in Texas. (According to the Miles Messenger and Enterprize newspaper account.)

The Star Barber Shop advertised sharp razors, clean towels, hot and cold baths for a reasonable price. Tennis shoes (white) were selling for seventy-five cents a pair. The Central Hotel and Café offered a Sunday Chicken Dinner for thirty-five cents.

Maudie became a Baptist before going to join her Comanche County cowboy Baptist missionary Wilson Fielder. She was baptized in our very own Concho River the Summer of 1914 by Pastor Isaac Newton. The book is filled with such nuggets and items of inspiration; dozens of photos; a China map; an update on China Christianity after the Fielder’s retirement in 1950.

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MORE INFORMATION ON PUBLICATION DATE AND PRICE OF THE BOOK COMING SOON - - - - - -

SMU's Kaifeng China Torah

The Jews in China

In the 1950s, on a train from Taipei, Taiwan, to Kaohsiung, SBC missionary Pearl Johnson of South Carolina, told me about the Jewish congregations in Kaifeng, China. In the 1930s, when she was a missionary in Shandong and Guangdong provinces, she said there were about seven or eight Jewish families still in the city of Kaifeng. That started me wanting to know more about the Jews in China.

In the early1980s I was able to go to Mainland China. I flew into the city of Zhengzhou and took a bus fifty miles to Kaifeng. After visiting with an old pastor who was ill, I walked the Jiao Jing Alley in Kaifeng, the center of Jewish activity, but saw no evidence of the ancient Israelites. Their stone monuments and Torahs had long ago been purchased or stolen mostly by Europeans.

(A Kaifeng Torah is in the Bridwell Library, Perkins School of Theology, Southern Methodist University, Dallas. Texas. It was a special treat to see it once. It is Scroll 12 and includes Genesis. The history of how it came to be in Texas is as interesting a tale as the story of Jews thriving in China.)

In Beijing I met Zhao Shaowei, wife of Wu Jian, a former manager of the Jinling Hotel of Nanjing, China. Ms. Zhao was tall for a Chinese and had distinctly western features. She knew she was a descendant of the ancient colony of Jews in the city of Kaifeng. Both her mother and grandmother told her about the Passover meal and of eating, at times, baked bread without salt.

The West learned of the Israelite’s existence in China in the early 17th century. Pioneer Catholic missionary, Mateo Ricci, while visiting with a Kaifeng Jew who had a Chinese name, learned of their presence. The Jew styled himself an Israelite. The term “Jew” meant nothing to him. He told Ricci of their Hebrew Torahs and what he could remember of their history, which turned out to be little more than stone-carved monuments dated 1489 and 1663. Later investigations revealed the largest synagogue ever built to have been in Kaifeng.

The synagogue was established in the year 1163. The structure was destroyed several times, but always rebuilt. A 1489 inscription says the Jews arrived in Kaifeng during the Song dynasty (960 to 1126 AD). There were two stone monuments erected in the synagogue courtyard in 1663. On the stele they recounted the decades it took to rebuild the synagogue and rewrite the scrolls. By the 1850s the Kaifeng Jews referred to themselves as “the eight clans” with Zhao Shaowei’s surname being among them.

Consider the possibility of “The Lost Tribe of Israel” ending up in China. Descendents of the vanquished Northern Kingdom of Israel by the Assyrians in 724 BC could have migrated farther east and ended up in a cosmopolitan China. Maybe they were not lost, but living in settlements in Persia, Afghanistan, India and China.

Later migrations could have begun with the destruction of Solomon’s Temple and Judean exile in Babylon. Another good time for leaving home was in 70 AD as the Romans destroyed the second Temple.

Then again, It is more than probable that during the years of the Crusades, when Muslims and European Crusaders were fighting over who should “protect the holy places” of the Holy Land, Jews left in droves. Generation after generation they kept moving.

By the time of Jesuit Father Ricci, the Jewish congregation was on the brink of extinction, partly from the lack of rabbis who could read the Hebrew Torah and lead the services. Centuries of intermarriage with the Chinese had a part in melding the two cultures.

In China, the Hebrew people found the only place on earth where they were accepted and not persecuted. Their search, and ours, for peace and a normal life continues, as does my love of history.

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