This blog will be going on hiatus for about two weeks. I will indulge in a brief personal history to explain why.
From 1968 through 1970 I served with the Foreign Mission Board of the Southern Baptist Convention in Hong Kong as a missionary teacher. My primary assignment was teaching English and Bible at Pui Ching Middle School, a school which had been founded by Baptists in Canton, but was relocated to Hong Kong when the communists overran China. Incidentally "Middle school" in the Chinese system refers primarily to high school ("Little school" is elementary and "Big school" is university). However, Pui Ching was a K-12 school with about 5000 students at the time.
By the time I taught there, Pui Ching had established itself as the most academically superior school in Hong Kong among those teaching primarily in the Chinese language. At that time, because Hong Kong was still a British colony, most schools wishing to seem prestigious taught primarily in English. Of the two hundred seniors I taught each year, nearly eighty per cent continued their education in U.S. colleges and universities. It was significant that for many of them, I was the first American they ever knew; yet most of them were only one year away from freshman year in the U.S., and their English was not very good.
Although Pui Ching students attended weekly chapels and mandatory Bible class, less than ten per cent were Christians. But the seeds did not fall on hard soil in all cases, and I am happy to report that perhaps as many as twenty-five per cent or more of those students are now believers. And at least one is now a pastor of a Chinese church in New Zealand.
I happen to know this because, through the wonders of the internet, I have reconnected with many of those former students. In fact, I read e mails almost daily from many of them through a common listserve which they use. In the early years of my return from Hong Kong, I saw quite a few of them while they were in college, and in recent years have attended several of their reunions in Los Angeles and San Francisco. Two have visited me here in Tucson within the past five years, and one actually lives here, a pharmacy professor at U of A.
Even so, I was not prepared for the wonderful surprise I received last spring when one of them wrote to me saying that the Class of 1969 has invited Linda and me, at their expense, to attend their fortieth reunion in Hong Kong next week. It is timed to coincide with the schools's celebration of its 120th anniversary. It's hard to believe that I was actually teaching there during the 80th anniversary!
Chinese students are, by nature, very respectful to their teachers, but the bonds in this school are remarkably tight. Their worldwide alumni assocation numbers in the tens of thousands. Most have been quite successful as entrepreneurs, college professors, doctors, programmers, scientists, and so on. There is even a Nobel Prize physicist among the alumni of this school (although he graduated several years before I was there).
I should mention that Linda was serving in the same mission program during the same two years in Peru, teaching missionary children for several different families. I often say we were never on the same continent long enough to get married during our first seven years out of college!
At any rate, preparations for the trip, the trip itself, and recovery from the trip, along with the fact that this is my busy tax credit season, will keep me from posting for probably about two weeks. Please pray for our journey (we don't travel much nowadays) and for the wonderful contacts we will make during this time.
We'll miss you Thomas
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