A Father who knows best
By Rebecca Price Janney, Special to The Layman, September 18, 2003
At 29, Ting Ting Yan won China’s equivalent of an Academy Award and throughout the 1980s enjoyed celebrity as one of her nation’s top novelists and screenwriters. Innocent stories in which people expressed love and kindness, learning how to live purer lives in a corrupt society were her hallmark. She wrote as well to find a better life for herself, one that came only after she fled to America following the Tiananmen Square uprising. In America, she would not only come to Christ, but she would also find happiness as the wife of a Presbyterian pastor.
Warner Davis, Meggie and Ting Ting YanAlthough the Communist government rewarded her with a good salary, apartment, and domestic help, the party demanded total allegiance. “I grew up during Chairman Mao’s reign,” she says, “and was taught that he was our great father who knew what was best for the Chinese people. There was no freedom.” It had been that way her entire life.
“One bitter day when I was 14,” she recalls, “our school had an assembly. Chairman Mao’s minions had roamed the country to weed out all the bad ‘seeds’ that had taken root.” A party official pushed her father, a teacher, into a painful crouch. Then he circled Mr. Yan screeching repeatedly, “You are an enemy of the state!”
“My father is a good man,” Ting Ting thought rebelliously. She didn’t find out until years later what terrible thing he had done. In 1949, her grandfather had been a prominent general and had opposed Chairman Mao. He was executed. That night Ting Ting’s father removed her grandfather’s body from the public square and buried it. That act dogged her family for decades.
Three years later, the party sent Ting Ting to a remote farm near Burma for two years to teach Maoism to the peasants. When she finally returned home, she gained admission into the Army’s elite dance corps, where she excelled as a performer and worked hard to prove her devotion to Chairman Mao. In spite of her best efforts, however, Ting Ting never got a lead in a production, had to do more menial labor than the other dancers, and was forced to sit with new recruits during political classes. The party leader told her, “Work harder,” but no matter what she did, Ting Ting could not remove her family’s political stain. She was to find her niche elsewhere.
One day, a younger official asked if she could write a song for a new production, and he ended up using it for one of the dance routines. That prompted Ting Ting to write a short story, which the Army magazine published. “I grew to love writing,” she says. “It gave me some confidence when my self-esteem had plummeted.” It was also something that gave her hope after an official kicked her out of the Army, explaining that, due to her family’s political background, she could never be trusted. Ting Ting could not bring herself to tell her parents the truth, so she said she left the Army because of ill health.
“Afterwards, I escaped through writing into a more pleasant world,” she recalls. She did movie reviews for newspapers and magazines, then secured a position with her city’s movie studio, producing uplifting documentaries. When the universities reopened in 1978, Ting Ting entered the prestigious Beijing Film Academy. There had been no new movies in China for 10 years, and the government was eager to produce films. The following year, Ting Ting’s happiness multiplied when she married a fellow writer. “When I held my dark-eyed daughter Meggie for the first time two years later, I thought my life would continue happily-ever-after,” she says. The government, however, had something to say about that. It ordered Ting Ting and her husband to live in separate cities to keep them available for work. They were allowed one 30-day visit per year. The marriage did not survive. In addition, the government required her daughter to reside with Ting Ting’s parents so that she could go wherever she was needed.
She knew instinctively that life was not supposed to be that way and began a spiritual search that took her initially to the mountains to meet a prominent Buddhist monk. At one point she asked him, “Do you still plant your own vegetables?” Historically, monks always had done so, believing that all else was corrupt. His face suddenly hardened and his chest puffed out. “I am a level-18 government official,” he scolded. Next she went to an ornate Christian church in Beijing, which proved just as disillusioning. “Love your neighbor,” the minister proclaimed. “That is what Chairman Mao taught us.”
“The party controls everything,” Ting Ting concluded, “even religion.” No matter what she did or where she looked, she couldn’t make her life like one of her happy stories. Despite the high acclaim her writing had won, she felt hollow.
About Ting Ting’s profilerAfter Rebecca Price Janney contacted The Layman, asking if she could submit an article about Ting Ting Yan, the editors did a routine search. Among the discoveries:
- One of her early journalistic assignments (which she boldly asked for) was a four-year stint as a sports reporter, covering the Philadelphia Phillies for a weekly newspaper. She was 15 years old when she started that job.
- She has written 15 books, including Great Letters in American History: Words from the Pens of Americans – Great and Small and a biography of Harriet Tubman.
- A member of a PCUSA congregation in Philadelphia, she is a graduate of Lafayette College and Princeton Theological Seminary with a doctor of ministry degree from Biblical Theological Seminary in Philadelphia. Her husband, Scott, is a fundraiser for Temple University.
- Her doctor of ministry dissertation is titled “A Study of How the Role of Women in the American Protestant Church and Society through the Centuries Bears upon the Faithfulness of Contemporary Evangelical Women.”
- She has a compelling commitment to bring the witness of Christian women into the forefront of today’s church.
In March 1989, Beijing University students staged a campuswide demonstration against government corruption and for democracy. Ting Ting says, “They, like so many of us, were tired of being cogs in the Communist Party’s machine.” That May, the Tiananmen Square uprising broke out while she was working on a new film. Ting Ting cast her lot with the brave students, remembering all that the government had put her and her family through over the years. “When I marched with the students several miles to the premier’s office one hot afternoon,” she recalls, “people lined both sides of the street handing us ice cream and drinks. The love and good will I had written about and yearned for manifested itself all around me.”
Ting Ting longed to do more. One day, she went to the apartment of a celebrated social scientist, Yan Jia-Qi, to see if he might have some ideas. He went over to his desk and pulled a petition from a drawer. As Ting Ting skimmed the contents of what came to be known as “The 16th of May Announcement,” he explained its purpose. It asked the government to recognize the legality of the demonstration and not to use violence against the students. It also made a case for promoting democracy and human rights. “It would help our cause if you signed this,” he said quietly. “Think it through, though, since doing so could endanger you.” She picked up a pen and signed the document. “For the first time in my life I had no concern about what the party would think of me,” she says.
The petition ran in every important Chinese newspaper, but the government’s response was not what its signers desired. Officials ordered tanks to the perimeter of Tiananmen Square, and when the students refused to disperse, the Army slaughtered thousands. The government also began searching for intellectuals who had supported the students, including those who had signed Jia-Qi’s petition. When the announcement had run in the newspapers, many of the names had been accidentally eliminated, and the government started tracking down the missing signers. Ting Ting worried that someone might turn her in. She needed to leave the country, but how? Columbia University accepted her into an English program, and she was able to get away safely.
Ting Ting faced many challenges in the United States, like not being able to send for her daughter, Meggie, until she could make enough money to support her. Nor could she write for a living because she didn’t know English well enough. Later, however, she realized that God was writing his own story about her.
Ting Ting won a grant to study Chinese missions at Princeton Theological Seminary, but she could not begin until the following fall. In the meantime, she took a temporary position as writer-in-residence at the Presbyterian Conference Center at Stony Point, New York. “Many kind people at the conference center drew me closer to God through their efforts to bring Meggie to me,” she recalls. “In spite of my earlier disappointments with religion, I never had given up on knowing God.”
On Father’s Day, 1992 Ting Ting attended Stony Point Presbyterian Church. When the pastor, Warner Davis, began his message, Ting Ting half expected a sermon about the virtues of the American system. Instead, he spoke sincerely about the importance of fathers. “I dabbed at my tears,” she says, “missing my own dad more than ever. I thought of his tortured life and how Father Mao never had accepted me, although I had spent a lifetime trying to please him. As I pondered these things, Pastor Davis referred to God as a Heavenly Father. He said that our earthy fathers often fail us, but God will never leave us or forsake us. He loves us unconditionally.”
Tears streamed down Ting Ting’s face as the message struck a chord. Wanting to know more about God, she took church membership classes. By Christmas, she had given her life to Christ and was baptized. “Once upon a time, I lived in a world polluted by a man who, though presenting himself as a benevolent father, cared only for himself and his system,” she says. “Only in my stories did I experience goodness and mercy. Then I met God, the heavenly Father, who alone had the power to give me a pure life. In his kingdom, I have found acceptance by One who forgives generously and loves me lavishly. I call that a real story-book ending!”
God wrote another surprise into Ting Ting’s story. During the holidays, Pastor Davis invited her to see the Christmas tree Stony Point had sent to Rockefeller Center. She eagerly waited for him to pull up in his white Chevy with other church members. Instead, he arrived solo. They began spending time together, though cautiously at first. Ting Ting wanted to know how her parents and daughter felt about him, and Warner had a long-standing policy of not dating church members.
On a frigid February afternoon in 1993, Ting Ting’s parents arrived at JFK airport with Meggie. During the following year, when she and her daughter lived in Princeton, Warner often visited them. They were married on June 25, 1994 at the Stony Point Presbyterian Church and now reside in Collierville, Tenn., where Warner is a pastor. Ting Ting teaches Chinese and is a riveting speaker at conferences where she speaks of her experiences in terms of freedom and faith. Meggie, an aspiring photographer, graduated in June from Swarthmore College.