China Diary: The Life of Mary Austin Endicott

Larissa Liepins is a Toronto-based freelance journalist.

While China Diary is about the life of a missionary wife in China, one
doesn’t need an interest in Chinese history or in the experiences of
Canadian missionaries to thoroughly enjoy this biography of Mary Austin
Endicott. During her life, Endicott was overshadowed by her husband,
James (Jim) Endicott—a household name in 1950s Canada, when he was
accused of treason for his anti-war, pro-Communist sympathies. This book
pays homage to a woman who was an intellectual force in her own right.

Endicott did not actually keep a diary. Rather, she wrote more than
5000 letters to friends and family during her 16 years as a missionary,
and—fortunately for us—they survive in the National Archives of
Canada. Shirley Jane Endicott, her daughter and biographer, writes in
the book’s introduction: “These letters contain her fears and
triumphs—surviving perilous trips through the Yangtze Gorges,
overcoming her terror of speaking in public, glimpses of a marriage
between two forceful personalities and the importance of spirituality in
her life.” Endicott herself was an accomplished storyteller, but her
daughter has done a wonderful job of weaving her mother’s letters with
her unfinished memoir to create a well-organized and very readable book.

Endicott grew up in privilege in Chatham, Ontario, where her family was
the first in town to own a car and her father was elected mayor when she
was 13. Yet she followed her missionary husband to warlord-run China in
1926, overcoming loneliness and despair to raise four children (she
became a foster mother to four Chinese boys) and running a one-room
school.

The final chapters cover Endicott’s left-wing political activism upon
her return to Canada, her fight for teachers’ rights as a school
trustee, and an intense correspondence with an inmate at the Kingston
Penitentiary. But the intimate and thoughtful letters she wrote to her
husband while the two were separated for years at a time form the
emotional core of the book. That her biography is also a fascinating
window on the turbulence of early 20th-century China is icing on the
cake.