PARLORMAID IN ENGLAND TO MISSIONARY IN CHINAWispy Gladys Aylward was not even five feet tall. She toiled as a parlormaid. But she wanted to serve Christ and she was willing. To go to China as a missionary was her dream. Suddenly she made a mad dash in a train across Siberia to Manchuria. By 1931 at 29 she made her way to Yangcheng deep in China and began to serve Christ at what came to be called the ‘Inn of the Sixth Happiness’.The next years became legend. The ‘Small Woman’ captured the hearts of the Chinese. She became a citizen of China. For years the Chinese fought Japanese invaders. Gladys helped refugees and orphans. In 1938 she led 100 orphans across mountains to safety. She barely survived, enduring typhus, pneumonia and malnutrition.She was expelled from China by the Communists. By the late 1950s she was an icon, the subject of books and a movie starring Ingrid Bergman. Embarrassed by fame she went back to Free China (now Taiwan) to run an orphanage and died there at 68 in 1970. Decades after she could defend herself, secular press in the 21st century depict Gladys Aylward as a reckless spy for China during World War II. If alive she would invoke her beloved Nehemiah: “Hear, O our God; for we are despised: and turn their reproach upon their own head...”
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