The Lady Named Thunder: A Biography of Dr. Ethel Margaret Phillips (1876-1951), and: China Diary: The Life of Mary Austin Endicott (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Lady Named Thunder: A Biography of Dr. Ethel Margaret Phillips (1876-1951), and: China Diary: The Life of Mary Austin Endicott Carol C. Chin (bio) Clifford H. Phillips. The Lady Named Thunder: A Biography of Dr. Ethel Margaret Phillips (1876-1951) University of Alberta Press. xvi, 409. $34.95 Shirley Jane Endicott. China Diary: The Life of Mary Austin Endicott Wilfrid Laurier University Press. xv, 252. $24.95 There ought to be a word in the literary taxonomy for biographies written by the children or grandchildren of their subjects. They are certainly not first-person memoirs, although they often draw heavily upon the subject's own oral and written recollections, nor do they have quite the same flavour as scholarly or journalistic accounts written by non-family members. A [End Page 551] subcategory of this genre might be the life stories of missionaries, usually women, who spent their lives and raised their families in China in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Some of these provide a detailed and insightful glimpse of a particular slice of Chinese history, written by authors who spent their formative years in China. (Many eminent Sinologists were themselves the children of missionaries.) Others are more personal accounts, focusing on the struggle to create a normal family life under extraordinary circumstances, but with little to say about the epochal changes that produced those circumstances. Rarely does an author succeed in combining both the historical and the personal. The two books under review plainly illustrate both the charms and the difficulties of this type of biography. The life of Ethel Margaret Phillips, or Margaret, as she became known, was one of both hardships and triumphs. Her early life reads like a Victorian novel: abandoned by her mother, raised by grudging relatives, and sent to boarding school to train as a governess. In 1898, however, Margaret became one of the first women to enrol in medical school at the University of Manchester, and in 1905 she sailed to China as a medical missionary. After a brief stint in Beijing, Margaret settled in Pingyin, a smallish city in Shandong province with a well-established missionary presence and a fairly rudimentary medical dispensary. She was the sole foreign doctor in the area, and much of her effort went into overcoming the local population's distrust of foreign medicine and unwillingness to adhere strictly to prescribed treatment. Within a few years she convinced the mission to raise funds to build a properly equipped women's hospital, supervising the design and construction herself. By this time she had become a respected figure among the Chinese, receiving the Chinese surname of Lei, or 'thunder.' The author provides lively vignettes of many of Margaret's cases and her dealings with both the local population and the mission community, as well as her own bouts of serious illness. Later Margaret practised medicine in Beijing; it was during this time that she adopted a baby (the author) from the United States. She survived the Second World War in a Japanese internment camp but died a few years later in England. Margaret Phillips's life spanned a time of considerable political and social upheaval in China, and her daily involvement with patients provides a valuable window onto the lives of poor and ordinary Chinese during these changes. A slight drawback of the book, however, is the author's attempt to give the flavour of Margaret's experiences by relying heavily on indirect quotes from her diaries and letters with little attempt to distinguish the significant details from the trivial. Reading these sometimes banal observations in the third-person voice of the narrator can produce a rather odd effect. For instance, from the childhood chapters: 'One day Ethel insisted on being allowed to cook the Sunday dinner while everyone else went to church, just to show that she still could. Happily both the roast and [End Page 552] the pudding were a success.' Similarly, a telling account of the death of a Chinese convert whose family opposed his Christianity is introduced by the irrelevant detail that Margaret had overslept that morning. Such infelicities of style are an occasional distraction from an otherwise absorbing narrative...