Excerpts/quotes from Langdon Gilkey's Shantung Compound.
The moment freedom came:
The day, August 16 1945, was clear blue and warm, as such a day should have been. We all began our chores of cooking, stoking and cleaning up slops as usual. About the middle of the morning, however, word flashed around camp that an Allied plane had been sighted...
... the boy who spread the word... ran through the kitchen yard screaming in an almost insane excitement, "An American plane, and headed straight for us!"
We all flung our stirring paddles down beside the cauldrons, left the carrots unchopped on the tables, and tore after the boy to the ballfield. This miracle was true: there it was, now as big as a gull and heading for us from the western mountains.
As it came steadily nearer, the elation of the assembled camp- 1500 strong - mounted. This meant that the Allies were probing into our area, not a slow thousand miles away! And people began to shout to themselves, to everyone around them, to the heavens above, their exhiliration:
"Why it's a big plane with four engines! It's coming straight for the camp - and look how low it is! Look, there's the American flag painted on the side! Why, it's almost touching the trees!... It's turning around again... It's coming back over the camp! ...Look, look, they're waving at us! They know who we are. They have come to get us!"
At this point the excitement was too great for any of us to contain. It surged up within us, a flood of joyful feeling, sweeping aside all our restraints and making us its captives. Suddenly I realised that for some seconds I had been running around in circles, waving my hands in the air and shouting at the top of my lungs. On becoming aware of these antics, I looked around briefly to see how others were behaving.
It was pandemonium, the more so because everyone like myself was looking up and shouting at the plane, and was unconscious of what he or anyone else was doing. Staid folk were embracing others to whom they had barely spoken for two years; proper middle-aged Englishmen and women were cheering or swearing. Others were laughing hysterically, or crying like babies. All were moved to an ecstasy of feeling that carried them quite out of their normal selves as the great plane banked over and circled the camp three times.
This plane was our plane. It was sent here for us, to tell us the war was over. It was the personal touch, the assurance that we were again included in the wider world of men-that our personal histories would resume - which gave those moments their supreme meaning and their violent emotion.
Then suddenly, all this sound stopped dead. A sharp gasp went up as fifteen hundred people stared in stark wonder. I could feel the drop of my own jaw. After flying very low back and forth about a mile from the camp, the plane's underside suddenly opened. Out of it, wonder of wonders, floated seven men in parachutes! This was the height of the incredible! Not only were they coming here some day, they were her today, in our midst! Rescue was here!
Fate:
Fate it thus the mask God's judgment in history wears to those who do not know him.
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The fate that overtook the white residents of China was neither arbitrary nor blind. Rather, it represented the slow but certain unraveling of the consequences of the greed and intolerance which accompanied the imperialism of their forerunners.
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On meaning and fate for the unbeliever and believer:
For the man who knew nothing of divine Providence, coming to camp was an arbitrary fate that separated him from every familiar meaning by which he had lived his life. To those - and there were many - who found this new situation to be a strange work of Providence, however incomprehensible these purposes were, there could be no such loss of significance in the new and unexpected situation.
--
Our particular jobs of salesman, professor, or senator may prove useless in a camp or even in the next historical moment. But our neighbour is always with us, in the city, in the country, or in the camp. If the meaning of life on its deepest level is the service of God - which in turn means the service of the neighbour's needs and fellowship with him - then this is a task that carries over into any new situation.
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On these two bases, therefore - the universal lordship of God and the universal presence of the neighbour with whom we can establish community - a significant vocation or task with religious roots cannot be removed by the ups and downs of historical fortune
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One of the strangest lessons that our unstable life-passage teaches us is that the unwanted is often creative rather then destructive.
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Only in God is there ultimate loyalty that does not breed injustice and cruelty, and a meaning from which nothing in heaven or on earth can separate us.
