Compound Walls: Eva Jane Price's Letters from a Chinese Mission, 1890-1900

Abstract

Each town along the road running out of Fen Cho fu, China, paid to avoid having foreigners murdered within its boundaries.' No one wanted the difficulties likely to arise from having a group of foreign missionaries beheaded in his or her village. Therefore the party of eight missionaries, including Eva Jane Price, the missionaries' children, a few Chinese Christians, and the government soldiers sent along to protect them managed to get through quite a number of villages before the inevitable happened. The government soldiers, who were actually under the orders of the society of Boxers, were unable to squeeze money from a village. Thirteen men, women, and children were murdered, and their bodies were left along the roadside. One of their Chinese Christian servants escaped, and his is the only voice to tell of what finally happened to Eva Jane Price and her party. China Journal 1889-1~oo: An American Missionary Family During the Boxer Rebellion is a volume of letters from Eva Price to her family and friends in the United States with occasional notes written by her husband and children, and an appendix containing an account of the Prices written by Fei Ch'i-hao (Fei Qi Hao), their Chinese servant.2 This collection of letters chronicles the experience of the Prices from their voyage out of Iowa to their final destination in Shansi (Shanxi), a central province of China where they performed mission work. In this paper I examine these letters for insights into the construction of a complex compound: Price's understanding of her own role as a woman and as a missionary in China. Her representations of these roles are predicated upon compound walls both ideological and actual. In representing her experiences in China as essentially within or beyond the walls of her home and her imagination, Price provides metaphoric imagery that is rich with potential to deconstruct what