He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Developing Mission: Photography, Filmmaking, and American Missionaries in Modern China, and reported the following:
Page 99 of Developing Mission describes how visual presentations – lantern slides and movies (the latter the primary subject of the chapter in which the page is found) – motivated future American missionaries and Chinese intellectuals to pursue higher callings. In some cases, images of violence shocked viewers into life-changing responses. As this page relates, Lu Xun, one of China’s most famous political writers, “gave up a potential medical career after witnessing a graphic anti-Chinese lantern slide presentation while a student in Japan during the Russo-Japanese War.” Similarly (in visual engagement but not ideological outcome), a Catholic schoolboy in Iowa, Joseph Henkels, realized his vocation to the priesthood and missions (later spending over twenty years in China) after seeing a lantern slide – its impact heightened by red color tinting – showing the blood-soaked garments of missionary “martyrs” slain in events that prefigured the Boxer Uprising of 1900. Such experiences highlight how films' and lantern slides’ spectacle-based visual qualities spurred personal conversions to larger causes: revolutionary, religious, or a mix of the two.Visit Joseph W. Ho's website.
As a test, page 99 reveals important themes and characters at the heart of the book. Visual technologies and encounters with modern images and worldviews intersected with evolving Christian missions across twentieth-century China and parallel developments in Chinese nation-building. Some individuals referenced on the page have colorful experiences (photographic or not) with repercussions discussed at greater length in other parts of the book. Henkels, for example, will weather the Japanese invasion and occupation of China, jump-start the religious life of a future archbishop of Taipei, and inadvertently cross paths with a certain John Birch in death and photography (I won’t tell you how – it’s in chapter four!)
The page also points to broader questions raised and answered throughout the volume. How did missionaries create experimental films in and beyond China, building on earlier experiences with still photography and transnational identities? What happened when missionary filmmakers turned their lenses on military atrocities and regime change, with results that subsequently escaped the mission enterprise entirely? What did such image-making experiences say about modern China and embedded missionary presence in peace and war? Readers of Developing Mission who arrive at page 99 – and pass it – will see for themselves.
--Marshal Zeringue
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