We met on the high (50,000 feet or so) road to China, two of nine on a flight out to teach English as a Second Language to older high school students in Xinjiang Province, in the far northwest part of that ancient country. It was not a place many Americans were traveling to, that summer of 1986, and our group caused some commotions, strolling the wide streets and crowding the small seats of the local buses.
They plied us with blazing hot tea and room temperature orange soda, the better to dodge whatever inhospitables might be thriving in the local water supply. We ate a lot of rice, dared each other to sample the glassy, green-yolked “hundred-year-old” eggs, learned to swallow fermented horse milk at the Uighur ceremonies.
We taught English classes every morning at a state agricultural college, to reluctant students whose previous lingual immersion was in useful phrases like, “Please have the valet iron my socks.” We endeavored to communicate more practical messages … draw them into shy, stumbling conversations … make sense of some grammar and syntax and colloquialisms.
Afternoons, we showed American movies and tried in vain to explain them – The Natural, for instance, which proved once and for all that the sport of baseball makes almost no sense if you’ve grown up in any country outside the U.S.
Evenings, we stood on a stage and fielded questions from the locals about any and every aspect of American life: “What is your favorite type of fertilizer?” (It was an agricultural area.) “Describe your house.” (Harder than it sounds.) “Explain the importance of chaps in your country’s politics.” (They’d seen pictures of President Reagan on his ranch.)
In between that came wild adventure: horseback riding with the Kazakhs, folk dancing with the Communists, breaking into locked bathrooms, exploring ancient ruins, and mingling with a warm, timid people overflowing with questions they were not free to make public … many of them involving God and the Bible.
And in between all of that, I came to know Leslie.
Our students, who enjoyed coming up with Chinese names for us, poetic and heavy with symbolism, called her “Moonflower” – “beauty that blossoms in darkness.” I liked to call her that, too. My students called me “Pey Bing,” which had something to do with “a green tree that shimmers in the morning sunlight reflected on the rising breeze.” So Leslie just called me Chris.
Our interactions were fairly pro forma until the night we both managed to get locked out of the agricultural college dormitory. We sat out on the front stoop, waiting for someone to notice we were missing, looked at the stars and marveled at all the culture clash we’d been absorbing.
An hour became two, and we talked of our families, our faith, our plans … where we’d come from and where we hoped we were going. There was nothing romantic in the conversation. Just two travelers, far from home – kindred spirits, discovering their kinship.
We had wandered into a wide, new, unexplored corner of a world that was turning out to be so much bigger than we had imagined. And a deep reassurance came with realizing someone else, on the same moonlit stoop, looked at that world in so much the same way.
We found, too, that in just a few crowded, complicated days, something in this new land had changed us, diverting our lives and future in new directions. Not the same directions, it would turn out, but ones that would always be within hollering distance of each other.
A friendship was born that night, and a lifelong affection for each other’s soul and dreams.
A few weeks later, on our last night in Hong Kong before heading back home, she passed me a Bible verse – something, she said, she wanted me to remember. Ephesians 2:10: “For we are His workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand that we should walk in them.”
“He already knows what He has for you,” she said. And, of course, what He had for her, too.
In the years that followed, we managed to converge from our far-apart locales now and then to explore her beloved San Diego, and hike the hills of Tucson. Her letters told of adventures across Asia, ministering God’s love to strangers in remote and desolate places, teeming cities and dangerous milieus.
She learned how to be lonely. Discovered the depths of her own determination. Found joy enough in odd moments and corners to know she could go and thrive wherever her Lord chose to take her. And she found someone who could share all of that.
My wife and I were on hand for her grand wedding at the Hotel Del, and prayed from afar as she and her husband returned to Xinjiang to start a business among the people she’d met there so long before. The years flew by, and the decades. She sent photos of the growing children, emails filled with stories of hurting people and small miracles of grace, of burgeoning friendships and ominous changes in the attitudes of the governing authorities.
And then suddenly, so many things seemed to go wrong – setbacks for the business, crackdowns by officials, pressure to leave the region and the work and relationships of so many years. She returned here for what should have been a brief homecoming two Christmases ago, but the door to the Orient was immediately slammed and locked behind her.
She watched – furious, frustrated, helpless to do anything but pray – as people she and her family had given their lives to were crowded into brutal concentration camps, while so many in her own homeland chose to shrug and look the other way.
And suddenly, last spring, amid all of that: cancer.
Slid into the shadows of her hospital room, a month ago, and gazed on the familiar face. Her husband’s eyes were still bright with hope; hers were shaded, quiet. A little dazed, too, with the pain and the medicine, and the dawning realization that – like that – her time of transition had come.
We looked at each other across 35 years.
He had known what He had in store for her, out on the moonlit steps that night. And He led her, hand in hand, down the far, winding trail. Her students of that long ago summer would be no more surprised than her friends to find that her beautiful soul did, indeed, bloom in darkness.
And blooms now, even brighter, in a land that is fairer than day.
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