Beyond East and West by John C. H. Wu (review)

Over the recent decades, while there has been a growing interest in the history of Chinese Catholicism, particularly in Late Ming and Early Qing, not enough scholarly attention in the English-speaking world has been given to Chinese Catholic elites in the twentieth century. Limited treatments include an edited book by Ruth Hayhoe and Lu Yongling on Ma Xiangbo (1840–1939), who founded the Jesuit Aurora University in Shanghai in 1903, and Ernest Brandewie contributed to a monograph in 2007 on Bishop Thomas Tian Gengxi (Tien Keng-hsin), S.V.D. (1890–1967), and Paul P. Mariani in 2011 on Bishop Ignatius Gong Pinmei (Kung Pinmei) (1901–2000). Given the scarcity of the academic outputs in the field, Chinese Catholic elites’ autobiographies, such as John C. H. Wu’s (Wu Jingxiong, 1899–1986) Beyond East and West, would be indispensable for us to hear Chinese Catholics’ authentic voices in a turbulent century.

Originally published by Sheed and Ward—a Catholic publishing house—back in 1951 and republished by University of Notre Dame Press in 2018, Beyond East and West may be considered the only one of its kind in terms of not only the original language—English—this Chinese Catholic author used for writing but also the multiple identities he owned: Protestant-turned Catholic, professor of law, judge, lawyer, scholar (of jurisprudence, Chinese philosophy, literature, and religious studies), official of the Nationalist central government in the Republic of China, Minister Plenipotentiary of the Republic of China to the Vatican (1947–49), friend of Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. (Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States), Oriental philosophical mentor to—and correspondence partner of— Thomas Merton (one of the most well-known Catholic writers of the twentieth century), and a father of thirteen children. Wu was also known as the “Chinese [G. K.] Chesterton,” and this spiritual autobiography can be well named, this reviewer claims, as the Chinese Augustinian Confessions.

While it consists of, as in the original edition, “A Note of Introduction” by the Catholic writer Francis Joseph Sheed (Sheed and Ward was named after him and his wife Maisie Ward), two main parts with twenty-one chapters plus a Prologue and an Epilogue, and Wu’s Explanations and Acknowledgments, this new edition also includes both a long, helpful Foreword by John Wu, Jr. (one of Wu’s sons), and an additional chapter, “European Reminiscences,” that was left out in the original edition for reasons of space.

The book is arranged chronologically. It starts from the stories of Wu’s birth, childhood, earlier formative education, and marriage in Ningbo city around the turn of the twentieth century through the early Republican period (Chapters 1–6), before turning to his conversion to Methodism in 1917 during his studying at the Comparative Law School (at Shanghai) of the Methodist Soochow University (Chapter 7). As the narrative progresses, the reader will then follow him to the Michigan Law School at Ann Arbor and later to the University of Paris in the early 1920s (Chapters 8–9). Upon his return to China in the mid-1920s, Wu became a law professor in his Alma Mater, before being appointed a judge in the newly born “Shanghai Provisional Court” and then becoming a lawyer in the 1930s (Chapters 10–11). Wu’s almost two decades of drifting away from the Christian faith since his American period ended up converting to Catholicism in the winter of 1937 immediately following the outbreak of the Sino-Japanese War (Chapters 12–15). The rest of the book then recounts his wartime and postwar experiences, religious and secular, in Hong Kong, Guilin, Chongqing, Shanghai, the Vatican City, and other more cities across Europe, up until the year 1949 when the Communist took over China (Chapters 16–21).

Wu’s life was entangled between the East and the West, Chinese religions and Western Protestantism/Catholicism, the secular and the religious, the material and the spiritual...