This morning, I was leafing through a 1925 issue of the Southern Christian Advocate, the Methodist newspaper for South Carolina, in search of an answer to a patron's query when I found a special issue on women's foreign and home missionary work. I noticed the picture of Mary Winn, who was a South Carolina Methodist missionary in China for a number of years from the early 1920s to the late 1940s. Her name and picture jumped out at me because some years ago, we received a batch of letters she wrote to her family in the College Place neighborhood of Columbia. Her letters have been processed and are available here in the library. Here's the link to the collection. One of the benefits of working in these records over a number of years is that you see so many connections between different parts of the collection. I noticed in her letter that she talked about learning Chinese and teaching English in a missionary school for girls in Soochow, China, and she commented on how difficult it was for her to learn the Chinese characters. I am sure many of our students at Wofford today who are studying Chinese would agree with her.
I thought I might share an excerpt from her letter back to Methodists in South Carolina as it was published in the June 4, 1925 issue of the Advocate.
Sometimes in writing to our friends back home we wonder what they are most interested in, but I believe they like, most of all, to hear about the work that our schools are doing every day and about the girls in our schools. That, at least, is what I am most interested in. Every day there is a new charm and a new attractiveness to the girls in my classes. Their eyes are so bright and they seem to be just bubbling over with life. While I am writing this there is a group of girls out in the yard playing volley ball and they are entering into this game with all the zest and pep of teen age girls the world over.
This has not been an easy year for us. Just as we were ready to open school last September the fighting began in this province and it was the first of November before our girls could get here and classes could begin. Then everything ran smoothly until the last of January when the war rumors bcame more serious. The fact that the country was at war was very audible to us early one morning when we heard the boom of guns outside the city wall. There was one night that the Chinese teachers felt that it would be best to have the girls stay together rather than scattered around in their bedrooms so they all brought their mattresses down to the dining room and slept on the floor. During all this time we tried to be cheerful and happy and to keep up with our regular schedule but of course we didn't know what was going to happen next.
This year, my time is divided between language study and teaching. I study Chinese from nine to twelve and teach from one to four. Just now I am trying to review my examination on Chinese characters. The second year course requires us to write five hundred characters from memory. These characters are certainly fascinating and interesting but they have a wicked way of deserting one's brain just at the moment when one needs most to write them, so the mastery of these evasive creatures is a long and tedious process.
Reading letter such as this one or the dozens of letters in her papers brings us closer to her time and place. I am sure we could all hear these schoolgirls outside playing volleyball and sense the fear that Mary and her fellow teachers felt when they heard the sounds of war so close. Archives are about connecting us to our past and keeping alive the actions of people who came before us. I try to remember that every time I read something from an old newspaper or letter.
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