Interview with Carl B. Huber

14 November 1995

Carl B. Huber - CBH
Eric Hillemann - EH

Carl Huber talks about being chosen as a Carleton-in-China representative and the trip to China.

CBH:...As time went along, there was an opportunity to get this Carleton-in-China appointment; there were twenty-five, I didn’t think I’d have any chance to get that at all. But surprisingly, a lot of people had better grades, but I was on the basketball team, tennis, squash, handball, I did everything but get good grades down there, but they were passable. So when I got that appointment, I was in shock. I didn’t know anything about it; I hadn’t gone any further than 500 miles. So my aunt, Mrs. Riegel, packed about five of in a touring car and we headed for the West Coast. About partway out in the Bighorns, where you have to back up to pass other cars, Mrs. Riegel said, “You take over.” I hadn’t done a lot of driving; I drove the rest of the way to the coast. We got on the President Lincoln; at that time, remember, there were no aircraft. You didn’t fly. Got on the President Lincoln, and it was two weeks by way of Hawaii to Japan. Spent a month in Japan, went across the China Sea, came in at Tientsin, and then got into Peking. From Peking, we have a 27-tunnel, narrow-gauge Belgian railway into Fenchow-fu in Shansi Province. On the way, I was having trouble with my papers, and in the middle of it, and I couldn’t speak any Chinese, a Chinese student helped me out with that. That’s the first I began to learn about what fine people they were, and how helpful they were. So when we got in there, I had a little house on the edge of the Mission Board compound right next to the middle school. And the first thing I did was to hire a housekeeper. And I had many applications for that, and I took half a dozen and interviewed them. The first one who came in was a woman who, I thought she looked like she could be a good domestic. But I asked her why she wasn’t home taking care of her kids. She said she had fourteen children but none were alive. That’s when I began to realize why life expectancy at that time was 27 years of age. They actually didn’t count the youngsters until they were one year old. Many of them, because they lost them right at birth. So I hired Hen Fu, and for four dollars a month, he took care of my housekeeping, my cooking; he bought my groceries, but after a little while, I began to realize that about fifteen to twenty percent of that stuff wasn’t coming to the house. So I asked Hen Fu about that one day, and he said, “This is part of our culture. When I work for you, if I don’t take more than twenty percent, that’s not stealing. So I can do that.” [Both laugh] And then of course I got into the programs in the school, teaching English, typing, anything, but I got more interested in setting up athletic programs, coaching. I had a basketball team, and I had a six-footer as a center, and you didn’t have many six-footers, so we won our share of games, and got the girls going on volleyball. And all this played in the long dress and everything; we had no athletic equipment. I would buy the (something), bring it in, and we would travel by bike or bus or any way we could get around.

EH:Let me back you up a little bit... What kind of preparation did the college provide? Any kind of orientation for you or preparation for what you were going to face?

CBH:Yes, we had people who [had been] there before, my predecessors, who set us up. They had a lot of information available as to what was going to be ahead; in fact, I had diagrams of where I would live and what happened in the school and all that. No preparation as far as the language. I picked up a little of that on the way over, on the ship. But it was all set up. As I recall, I think I had $500 as my expenses for the whole time I was over there, and had money to come back through Europe.

EH:So that was enough?

CBH:Yeah. It was plenty, at the time. You see, when I’m paying a houseboy four dollars a month, and he’s doing all those things. My groceries and everything. The exchange rate at that time, Eric, was about three and a third to one, in our favor. So we could do a lot with that.

EH:Is there any particular advice that you remember getting from the previous representatives?

CBH:Yes. There were a lot of things that I got over there, such as what kind of dress I would have, how to treat the people, an endless amount of information, and it helped. However, when I got there, things were not quite the way I thought they were going to be; then I began to lean on Walter Judd. We had the Mission Board compound there. The Matthews’ were there at the time, and interestingly enough, a little sidebar here, three years ago we got a call from Tucson, and she said, “I’m Charlotte Matthews. My name is Keating now. Do you remember when you taught me to play tennis when I was age seven? And may we come up and visit you?” They came up and visited. And all of those people out there were very helpful. Especially Mrs. Judd. She was excellent. So [I had] good preparation; I pretty much knew what I was getting into, but there was always something new everyday out there.

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EH:Well, tell me something about your adjustments when you arrived in Fenchow and your first days and weeks there, how you settled in.

CBH:I can’t remember any real problems; as I say, I had the Missionary compound, with these people helping me, and there was one individual by the name of Zhou Eng Hua [spelling uncertain]. To this day, I don’t know what his association was with Carleton-in-China, there wasn’t anything formal. I don’t think he worked with the school, but he kind of came and took me under his wing. And his wife would feed us; he started to teach me the language, Zhou Eng Hua was his name. He went with me on the hunting trips, before I had the language, and would introduce me to people, and he made it very easy. Also the Judds invited us over to meals, and Walter was working on me, so that I would understand what he was going through. He was trying to teach Chinese doctors, one day they move their families into the hospital. He said, “You can’t do that.” They walked out. He lost thirty or forty doctors. Part of their culture is that if you have anything and you have a job, you move right in with it. And he had to really retrench a lot on this. He was teaching me these things so that it would be a little easier with me when I got outside and I was outside of the wall city. You know about the walls? They were about 50, 60 feet high. Maybe 20, 30 feet wide. I used to hike around them; it was nine miles around them. And four gates, 100,000 people inside that. But I had no trouble with adjustment there at all; everything went just fine. But this Zhou Eng Hua, I think that he probably helped me as much as anybody else. Everybody was nice and helping. I just didn’t have any culture shock or anything like that. I liked these people, right from the get-go.

EH:Had the school already started when you arrived?

CBH:Oh yes. You bet. And we had our opening, raising the flag, and everybody came to attention, it was quite military. And the students had uniforms, as you know. I just can’t remember anything that was—

EH:So you were thrown into the teaching immediately?

CBH:Yeah. Right. There wasn’t much time then. However, during the winter, and the winters didn’t get cold, I remember 13 [degrees] above, they closed the school for six weeks to two months, to save heat. And you’re familiar with Oberlin College and that program.

EH:Yes.

CBH:And there was a Jo Hamilton--there was also a Josephine Hamilton--and there was a Fran Cade. Have you heard these names?

EH:Yes, I have.

CBH:Okay. So Jo Hamilton and I took off with about fifty bucks apiece, and I don’t think you could get a better tour of China. We did rickshaw, bus, coastal steamer down to Funchow, riverboat— where we got stopped by Chinese with guns, to take tolls on the river— wound up in Hong Kong, living with a British magistrate who wore the white wig, spent a week to ten days there, and came up through the center of China on the new Canton-Hanchow railway. They didn’t have enough locomotives, so we have an incline, and during the night I heard this thing slipping, and we slid back several miles and they had to put another locomotive on this. And we lived with the people, slept on the ground many times. We had two ukuleles, and the Chinese love music. We played our way all through this; I don’t think you could ever get a tour any finer than that in China. We lived with the people, also picked up pinworms. [Both laugh] We were treated after that, anyway.

EH:Yeah. I have an account that you wrote of that trip, with me, in fact.

CBH:Is that right? [Laughs]

EH:Yeah. Let me show it to you to see if you remember writing this. [Carl is still laughing]

CBH:Oh, I don’t. I don’t. That’s very interesting.

EH:I have to show it to you later.

CBH:I didn’t know there was any record of that.

EH:This is actually an extra copy. If you want to keep it, hang on to it.

CBH:Oh, sure. I would. I had forgotten about that.

EH:I gave it a read last night while I was preparing for this, and it just sounded like a fascinating trip.

CBH:It was. I just wanted to bring that out because it was one of those things that’s . . . Another thing, before I get away from it, which I might not come back to, on my weekends, I would strap a shotgun and a rifle on the bicycle, and I would go back in the hills, as far as I could ride, park the bike, and walk in, and I didn’t know any of the areas that I went into. I was told if I went over this ridge, you’d get down in a valley and there would be people living down there. The troglodytes, they built their homes into the hills. So the first time I did this, the sun was setting and I went down in this valley with two guns, shells, not much else, clothes on my back, and people came out toward me as I was getting down in the valley, 15, 20, as I recall. And they started to talk and I didn’t know the language well; I picked up a little bit, and the children came up and started to pick at my skin a little bit, and I didn’t know whether I was going to be that evening’s barbecue or what I was going to be. I was really concerned about it. All they were doing was arguing about who was going to put me up for the night.

EH:Well.

CBH:And I went into a home and they gave me about half of it. And when I left, after they helped me find game and everything, I could not give any money to the parents. I had to give it through the children. When I was in there, and I think I stayed two nights that first time, a woman came out of the kitchen; she had a young girl in one hand and a butcher knife in the other hand. You don’t have a recording of this, do you?

EH:I don’t think so.

CBH:Did you ever hear about this?

EH:I don’t think so.

CBH:Well, this was interesting. She had a young girl in one hand and a butcher knife in the other hand. And it took an indeterminate amount of time before I could understand that she wanted me to operate on the girl’s eye. She had some eye trouble, and she had heard about the medical missionaries, and she thought that anybody who was a Chinese or an American would be a doctor. And I had a difficult time explaining to her that I could not do the job. That I wasn’t equipped for it. However, I did mention Dr. Judd, [Carl translates the name into Chinese], back in Shansi, in Fenchow-fu, and eventually, we got the girl in there, and the operation was completed, and everytime I went back to hunt in that area after that, I could name my situation and image. I just learned to care so much for those people after a while; Eric, you would do the same thing. The reason I haven’t gone back, and I haven’t gone back at all, I don’t want to be on a leash, and you still have to be on a leash over there. No matter what anybody says, you can’t roam free like I did then, and I like to.

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