How Shen-fu Ye Shiduo, Passionist Father Jeremiah McNamara,
saved the life of my
father Tan Changming in 1937.
by Dr. Dali Tan, Ph.D.
Father Jeremiah McNamara, C.P.
My first thanks go to the Schinnerer family for this great opportunity. I would like to especially thank Damon Bradley and other Schinnerer grant committee members for their endorsement of this project. I would also like to give special thanks to Ellie Johnson for encouraging me to apply for a Schinnerer grant to trace the tie and to Robert Mooney for helping me find information on the internet. I am very grateful to Mr. Bao Dingguo from Fenghuang, Hunan Province for providing vital information and guiding us in our long finding journey in Fenghuang. For guiding us through the Western part of the Hunan during our entire trip and providing all the necessary logistics, I would especially thank Mr. Liu Zhigan.
I also would like to express my deep appreciation to Father Gao Fuyou, Paul Fan, Father Robert Carbonneau and the Passionist Historical Archives in New Jersey for providing me crucial information for this project. For their unfailing technical support throughout the entire process of putting this report together, I would like to thank Marlene Sclar, Jean Jeffress and Liz Blasco. Last, but certainly not the least, I want to thank my parents, Changming Tan and Yong Fu, my Uncle Yingke Tan and Toni and Joseph Stapanek for all their help on this finding journey. Without their enthusiastic encouragement and support, the successful completion of this project would have been unthinkable.
When my father was eight years old, my grandfather Tan Jutao was the magistrate for the County of Fenghuang, Hunan for a year (1937-1938). During that year, he worked diligently with his predecessor to prevent the bandit gang breaking into the town of Fenghuang and successfully made the bandit gang abandon their siege. Not very long after that, my grandfather was transferred to Xupu, and then Anxiang, another troublesome place. Before the family left the town, my father got very sick from malignant dysentery in 1937. It was during the time of the Anti-Japanese War which had begun that same year. It did not take long before there was a dire shortage of medical supplies and services throughout China. This shortage even reached into interior Hunan Province. At loss as to what to do, my grandfather dropped into the Catholic Church in despair. An American priest asked him "What is the matter? Your face is covered with gloomy cloud?" When he heard the situation, the priest said to my grandfather "Hurry up and take the boy here. I am a doctor." That was how my father's life was saved. All my father had were the two sources: the incomplete name—the Chinese title for the American priest (Ye Shiduo) and the incomplete place name—the Catholic church in the town named Fenghuang in the western part of Hunan Province.
With the help of the Schinnerer grant, I went back to China and accompanied my father in our journey to trace Ye Shiduo's whereabouts. Our first stop was Zhijiang, Hunan because we heard that it has a Catholic church with an active congregation. We met a Chinese priest, Father Gao Fuyou, and related to him the purpose of our journey. Father Gao told us that he himself had gone to Fenghuang to look for the old church but without any success. Needless to say, both my father and I were very much disappointed at the news. The good news was that Father Gao possessed a copy of the Chinese translation of a missionary memoir Havoc in Hunan: The Sisters of Charity in Western Hunan, 1924-1951 (Morristown, N.J.: College of St. Elizabeth Press, 1991) by Sister Mary Carita Pendergast, a Sister of Charity who was a missionary in the Yuanling Diocese from 1934 through 1954. In this book, we found Ye Shiduo's name in English-Father Jeremiah McNamara. We also learned that he was a Catholic priest in the Passionist religious order. Even though Father McNamara's church was located within Yuanling Diocese, almost nothing was told about him in this book. Against all odds, we decided to go to Fenghuang ourselves and thought that our journey would not be in vain even if we could find the ruins or relics of that church.
In the ancient town of Fenghuang, we were lucky enough to be introduced to Mr. Bao Dingguo who lived in the vicinity of the church when he was a young boy. He used to play inside the church which he remembered as having a very tall ceiling and colorful windows. He took us there and we found the entire foundation of the church and some buildings that used to belong to the church. We went into the dilapidated building and my father thought that it was the church hospital where he was hospitalized for more than two weeks. Besides remembering Ye Shiduo and the sisters who nursed him back to health, my father also recalled that the cream of potato soup was very delicious. The potato and tomato were all planted by the church personnel.
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