Surrounded by Conflict

Due to its location and ownership of an airport, Kienow was a prime target of Japanese air raids. The Kienow mission was only half a mile away from the air field, so the Sisters frequently heard and saw bombs dropped nearby--as Sr. Virginia told Mother Stephanie in a 1938 letter, she and the others heard bells announcing the arrival of planes "about every five or six days." Most of the bombs focused on the airfield, but some struck and damaged other places--including the Women's Compound here on August 15, 1942.

Japanese planes constantly flew over China during the Second Sino-Japanese War (1937-1945). One of these planes dropped this flyer as it flew over an orphanage in Fuzhou, the capital city of the Fujian province. Based on the images and translations of the text, it is most likely pro-Japanese propaganda.

By 1949, the over two-decade old conflict between China's communists and nationalists was finally coming to a close. An inevitable communist victory and takeover of the land, including the town of Kienow, led to the evacuation of many Christians and (especially) foreigners. Sisters and some of the native people from the Kienow mission came back to Ohio in multiple groups.

The Sisters and girls pictured in this news article traveled by plane, truck (which took them twenty hours over rough mountain roads!), train, and boat to come to the U.S. They left Kienow just before the Red Army arrived to take control of the city.

The Dominican Sisters established their mission during a perilous time and place in China. In a 1936 letter from Sr. M. Virginia, she says that while the Sisters were spending a week in Shanghai, they would tell the people they met of final destination to Kienow. She wrote that these people "said to us in astonishment, 'You are not going to the province of Fukien, the section of China which is suffering and has bled so from the persecution of the Communists?'"

The civil war between the Chinese nationalists and communists had been happening since the 1920s. This violence strongly affected China's Christians, as the communists would destroy their churches, kidnap their priests, and even kill them. Sr. Hildegarde noted to her congregation back in the U.S. that their Dominican brothers, who had been working in China for years at that point, had learned to "keep only the barest necessities in the field, as they never know just when they will have to flee" from communists. 

Some Chinese Christians came to the mission due to being driven from their homes by communists, who "always" attacked Christians because they believed them to have money. Two young sisters from Huan, Mary and Rose, recounted this kind of escape to Sr. Leocadia when she and the Sisters stayed with the Dominican Brothers in Fuzhou during 1935. The girls told her how they had to crawl through the streets at night so that the Reds' machine gun bullets wouldn't hit them. They described how one of their brothers, along with many other Christians, was captured and then brutally exectuted in front of them by the communists when he refused to give up his possessions.

The Communists weren't the only source of danger. According to a letter by Sr. Rosamond in the Sisters' Alumnae Journal: "For the past three years a scourge far greater than the communists, bandits, or famine has broken the lives and blasted the hopes of the poor benighted people of China. I mean the Japanese war on China with the frequent air-raids, the crash of bombs, the terrorizing sirens followed by a mad rush for safety, and the return to ruined homes and wrecked institutions."