Missionary’s story ‘too big’ for scrapbook

Adams uses great-aunt’s writings to help tell story of early 20th-century China

By KAY CAMPBELL
Times Faith & Values Editor, kay.campbell@htimes.com

On the morning that fighter planes were raining fire on Pearl Harbor, Attie Bostick answered the door of her house in China to find Japanese soldiers outside.

They had come to remove her, along with all other non-Chinese in the country, to internment camps.

Bostick’s journal resumes a couple days later in the internment camp where she would be held for two years. The entry is typical of her stolid, cheerful adjustment to whatever condition she found herself in.
“Settling down,” she wrote. “This is a very nice compound. All with some work to do, and happy to do it.”

When Becky Adams of Huntsville came across those words as she looked through her great-aunt’s papers a few years ago, she knew there was much more to the story. Adams had read Langdon Gilkey’s landmark 1966 memoir of the same internment compound where Bostick was taken, “Shantung Compound.” The place was no resort.

“I realized I would have to go beyond the letters to get information,” Adams said. “And I realized this story was far too big to stay in the family scrapbook.”

Adams included an excerpt of Bostick’s prison letters and journal in her just-published book, “Called to China: Attie Bostick’s Life and Missionary Letters from China: 1900-1943.”

Adams, a retired probation officer who now does background security checks, spent an intense two years, with some help, transcribing her aunt’s diaries and letters. She uses excerpts of those in the book. And, as the voluminous footnotes - nicely included at page bottom - attest, she also interweaves her aunt’s story with the history of China through which Bostick lived and worked.

Photos tell the story

A contemporary of legendary missionary Lottie Moon, for whom the Southern Baptist’s traditional December missionary offering is named, Bostick worked in several areas of central and northern China. A single woman in China’s then gender-segregated society, Bostick was able to organize Bible studies for the women while male missionaries worked with Chinese men.

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