Among the former China missionaries whose recollections are being compiled by the United Methodist China Oral History Project is the late Grace M. Brandauer. She and her husband, Fred, first went to China in 1935 and left there for the last time in 1950. They served in rural Yuangling, part of Hunan Province, with the Evangelical Church, which later became part of what is now The United Methodist Church.

During World War II, the Brandauers spent four years in the Los Baños prison camp in the Philippines as prisoners of the Japanese. Grace Brandauer later wrote a brief account of their imprisonment, Philippine Detour: A Missionary Adventure, published by the Missionary Society and the Woman's Missionary Society of the Evangelical Church.

The Brandauers' earlier years in China were not without perils of their own, including looting and extortion by bandit armies tied to powerful local warlords, as well as the wholesale killing that sometimes ensued when government troops closed in on the bandits. Almost invariably, it was the ordinary Chinese who were caught in the middle.

Just such a disaster fell upon the people of rural Yuangling, and Grace Brandauer told of it in her interview for the United Methodist China Oral History Project. The following excerpt is copyrighted by the General Board of Global Ministries and may not be reproduced without written permission from the copyright holder.

"We knew they were coming. . . . Those who couldn't flee had taken whatever money they had or valuables that they had and buried things. I can still see old Mother Di going around with a stick burying coins and silver dollars underneath bushes where she would find them again afterwards. Other people put some of their gold or valuables in pots of oil and stuck them up in the attic somewhere. Others dropped them into wells, just hoping that they would be able to salvage them when the robbers had gone.

"And then, everybody was quiet. . . . We knew that the robbers were coming and we were just waiting. On this warm, sunny, bright afternoon, with a blue sky and clouds and the fragrance of gwei-hua and the perfect quiet, doors were closed and people were just simply waiting.

"Then suddenly we heard the shots behind the cemetery behind our house. . . . And then we heard the tramping of feet—very faint and far off at first, but gradually it got nearer and nearer. . . . And all the bandits, thousands of them—there were ten thousand of them who took over the city—they all came, and they all were running, and they all entered right past our house, because we were at the end of the city. . . .

"Well, they all went into the city. . . and then we heard all the crashing of doors. They smashed in all the doors that were closed. And we heard people screaming and we heard all these hoarse voices yelling. Then they compelled all the women of the town, the ones in those houses, to carry for them, because in that part of China, the women do the hard work. . . . Then after they had looted, they set fire to the places they had looted. So we had lots of experience of fire. This went on for days. It took a long time for them to do all of this. . . .

"We didn't dare to get out of our house. . . . Pastor Liu and Fred, who were in the house with us, just sat there and we prayed. We prayed that God would protect us. And then I remember, after a day or two of this—they hadn't come to our compound yet—we heard them. We'd seen them all around the town going into all the places. We could hear the screaming and the pounding and the crashing of doors. Then we heard them pounding on our gate. . . . They pounded and pounded on the great, big, heavy iron gates below. I guess they thought it was too much trouble, that they'd go to some other place. So, we just rested and thanked the Lord. And then they came around again and kept on. Finally they did come in, in the afternoon. We were in the kitchen looking out of the back of our house and suddenly we saw them jump over the wall. . . . And this man took a big bar out of our upper gate, pulled that bar, threw it away, flung it open, and there were all the other robbers on the outside coming in . . . . So Fred went out. Right behind him went our two dogs. We had one dog which was a great big dog, Mac. And one small dog. (Sighs) Among those robbers who came up was one who had been in [Fred's] Bible class. . . .

"He recognized Fred and Fred recognized him, and then the robber asked Fred if we had radios and other things. And Fred said, 'No, we have nothing to give away.' And then Fred said, 'You know we're just here as ministers and missionaries.' And the man said he knew it. And while he talked, suddenly our big dog rushed up and nearly bit the man, he was so mad at the man. So the men got frightened, and the young man said, 'Oh, we'd better leave them alone. Let's go.' So they left. . . .

"Later, Fred went to the chief of the robbers and got a statement—a written statement—saying that nobody should molest us. Nobody came to us anymore. And then the government troops came, and they were stationed across the river.

"The troops began shelling the city, and the citizenry feared that once the troops entered the city, they'd slaughter innocent citizens along with whatever bandits they could find. To avert such slaughter, the citizens sought out the bandit chief and kowtowed before him—kneeling while at the same time touching their foreheads to the ground.

"The people were kowtowing before the robber chief and saying, 'Please get out of the city! Please get out!' because they didn't want to be killed by these government troops. So afterward the robbers finally said, 'You'll give us more thousands of silver dollars, then we'll go.' So the people had to take out their money from where they'd hidden it to give it to the robbers, and the robbers then left. And the government troops came in. . . . Chiang Kai-shek's troops. They had come up from Changsha."

Fred Brandauer died in February 1986. Grace Brandauer died in April 1997.

Grace Brandauer was interviewed in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, in June 1986, when she was in her 70s, by Ruth B. Phillips, then of the World Division of the United Methodist General Board of Global Ministries.

March 15, 1999