Eric's Beijing Diary

This is the true story of a doctor who came to China in the early twenties, and worked in Changhsa (Hunan Province) for almost thirty years during the first part of the 20th century. It is a story fraught with mystery and many unanswered questions.

When I write an account like this I strongly prefer to wait until I have all the facts before I start, and to keep conjecture to a minimum. But as I said, there are many as yet unanswered questions: Did he actually murder her, or did she try to make it look that way? His case was helped by the fact that she was the one who brought the knife to the encounter. Was he actually Jewish, and why did he suddenly decide to make that known? His mother was an illegitimate child, so it’s hard to prove anything. Maybe that’s a story she told him to deflect from her own uncertain past. But who knows? Maybe it was true. But if so, then why did he return from Palestine? Why didn’t he stay there?

Anyway, although questions remain, it is time for this story to be told.

His name was Karl Fink. Or at least it started out that way. He was to assume a couple other identities before he came to China. His medical practice began the city of Hamburg, after a brief stint as a military doctor in World War I (I think), but most of his medical career was spent in China, and much of it, I believe, was affiliated with an orphanage in Changsha.

He had been married very briefly after World War I, but divorced a year or two later. He did have a son from that marriage, but I don’t know what became of him. Later he had some sort of relationship with a patient that led to the drama that overshadowed so much of his life. She was trying to blackmail him, I guess, and came to his place with a dagger. There was a scuffle of some kind, and she ended up dead. Did she attack him? Did he grab the knife and stab her? Or did she try to manipulate him by threatening suicide? The most likely is that she attacked him and ended up getting the wrong end of the knife herself. We will probably never know just what happened, but she was dead and the doctor fled.

He ran. Changed his name and ran. He was eventually arrested and jailed, but he escaped. I don’t know how. He fled to Czechoslovakia, but eventually came back and presented himself to a charity organization saying that he wanted to go to China as a doctor. How well did they vet him? Did they ask any questions? They no doubt did, but apparently not the right ones. Like “why would such a promising young physician want to go to China?

He was sent to Hunan province. He first worked in a hospital in the city of Hongjiang, where he met and married one of the single woman missionaries.

I don’t know all the details, but there was a terrible fire in the town and his hospital was destroyed. The hospital was rebuilt, but he was eventually assigned to open a new hospital in Changsha, the capital city of Hunan. He actually lived in the house where Hudson Taylor had died, which building was eventually used as part of a new hospital.

The Sino-Japanese War began in 1937. The Chinese had a practice of burning the area they thought the Japanese were going to invade so there would be nothing left for them when they came. There was a false rumor that the Japanese were coming, so the Chinese started burning the area, but they did it in secret, so the local population was not warned and many people died. Lots of wooden houses—maybe 30 or 40 thousand people died. It is also reported that many local people who sought to put out the fires were shot by Chinese soldiers who wanted to “burn the ground” in front of the Japanese.

Chiang Kai-shek came to Changsha and held a court martial. The officers responsible were executed. As it turned out, the Japanese never came, so the whole burning campaign had been unnecessary.

In 1939 he returned to Germany for a furlough. He was arrested and imprisoned in Hamburg. Did he turn himself in? I don’t think so, because he and his wife had gone to Germany for a furlough back in 1934. They had been in Germany for about a year that time, and nothing had happened. Whatever the case, this time he was apprehended and brought to trial.

From the police report:

Dr. Fink is about 1.75 to 1.78 m tall, slender, close-cropped, dark hair, slightly thinned at the front of the forehead, elongated narrow face with sunken cheeks of yellowish brown color, dark eyes, piercing gaze, clean-shaven, early hint of dark blond moustache, somewhat curved nose (hooked nose).

In 1939, He was given a two year sentence for manslaughter.

Here’s where I have a question: Why manslaughter? I’m not a lawyer, but I do have a reasonable familiarity with the three basic categories. Manslaughter is when you did not intend to kill someone—weren’t even angry with them, but you do something unlawful that results in somebody dying.

Second degree murder is when you did not originally intend to kill someone, but you kill them in the heat of the moment.

First degree murder is intentional homicide.

It seems to me that if she killed herself in front of him to try to frame him, he was innocent, because he didn’t kill her. But if he grabbed the knife from her and then killed her, that would be second degree murder.

I do have sympathy for someone confronted with a crazed person and having to deal with this person alone. Many years ago I worked at Oregon State Hospital. Every once in awhile, one of the patients would flip out and become really crazy. The staff would then call every ward to see if there was an extra man on duty who could come and help. We would all take our glasses off and then come at this person calmly with seven or eight guys, lead them to an isolation room, and restrain them on a bed with belts. I can’t imagine what it would be like to confront someone like that alone, especially someone who had a knife and was threatening me with it. Still, I don’t see why he would have to stab her. Was he angry with her for trying to blackmail him? If so, that’s not manslaughter.

I don’t know. Reportedly, the court was influenced by many reports from China about his humanitarian work there. I don’t doubt that, because the doctor and his missionary wife were very well liked here in China—no question about that. But I still think that from a legal standpoint, the key factor was that she brought the knife, not him.

Whatever the case may be, he was given a suspended sentence and allowed to return to China in 1940.

World War II pretty much disabled the relationship between China and Germany and the Germans in Changsha were expelled from China. The doctor and his wife got around this by going to the city of Qingdao, which was in that part of China occupied by the Japanese. So they actually lived out World War II in China (1942-1947). This is the irony of war. While the whole world was falling apart, the doctor and his wife were living a life of peace, hanging out with other foreigners in Qingdao by the sea. If you’ve never been to Qingdao, it’s a really nice place, situated right on the coast, with a moderate climate. The doctor was quite a musician, I guess, so they would get together and have concerts and stuff, relatively untouched by the chaos everywhere else. Sorta like me hanging out in a COVID-free zone in the mountains of western China for the three years of COVID, while people were getting sick and dying in places to which foreigners who had been in China fled for “safety.” They should have stayed here.

The doctor and his wife returned to Changsha in 1947, but as you may know, if you’ve read your history, in 1949 the Communists took over, and the missionaries were kicked out of China. This was viewed as a disaster by mission organizations, but it was a blessing in disguise, because the “caretaker” missionaries were gone, so leadership had to emerge from within the Chinese church, and the result was exponential growth of Christianity.

They went to Germany from where the doctor, who had announced that he was actually a Jew, went to Palestine where he worked in Arab refugee camps. What’s up with that? Was this just some new identity that he pasted on himself? That was my first reaction, but upon reflection, I think he was probably just looking for something to do. He did not stay long. Having lived in China for 20 years, now, I can imagine that going from China to Palestine would have been quite an adjustment. After a year or so, he returned to Germany.

When the missionaries were kicked out of China, many of those who were nearing retirement just decided to remain in their home countries. But the younger ones weren’t ready to relinquish the calling they had given their lives to. The doctor was sixty years old by now, so I guess he could have retired, but he was not ready to quit yet. He seemed to be living as if he had one more life to save. So he presented himself to his old mission board and asked to be placed. One could bemoan the fact that he could not return to China, I guess, but in fact, China was a pretty chaotic place at this point in time, so for the doctor, his new assignment at the International Catholic Hospital in Shinjuku (the Manhattan of Tokyo) was really made to order, and it was to this hospital that a young missionary brought his wife in the spring of 1954.

She had hepatitis. As soon as he saw her, he told her she needed to go right to bed. His reaction was very different from that of the countryside doctor she had gone to up on the field, who thought her yellow skin looked perfectly normal.

The doctor told them to wait right there, and he went to arrange a bed for her. As soon as he left the room, the woman turned to her husband and said, “Let’s get out of here.” She wanted to go home.

Her husband said, “Nothing doing.”

They had their daughter with them, I guess, so the husband returned to the field with the little girl, leaving his wife in the care of the doctor. It wasn’t that night, but maybe the next night that the unthinkable happened: She went into labor. That wasn’t supposed to happen. She wasn’t due for another two months. But then things went from bad to worse. She started hemorrhaging, and they could not stop the bleeding. Nothing seemed to work.

As she lay dying in her hospital bed in Shinjuku, her one consuming thought was that she did not want to die alone. She was a nurse. She had seen it. They drag the dying person on a gurney down to the end of a darkened hallway with the other hopeless cases. Then they check the bodies once in a while to see which ones are already dead and ready to be sent to the morgue. That was before hospice.

Such were the thoughts that plagued her soul as the life was ebbing out of her body. Did she share her fears with the doctor? I am inclined to think so, because the doctor left to call her husband. I wasn’t privy to his conversation with the staff, but it was something on the order of, “Keep her comfortable; I need to get her husband on the phone. She’s not going to make it.”

He called her husband and told him that he had better get down there right away. That call was a “hail Mary” if there ever was one. Thre was no way he could get right down there. He had his daughter with him—not sure where the other child was—and he was several hundred miles away. It was completely unrealistic. I think the doctor just did it because she had wanted to have her husband with her when she died. Anyway, the doctor and her husband talked and decided to wait until the morning and reconnect. The husband went to bed, waiting to see what the morning would bring. The doctor went to work. He was not one to give up when there was a life to save.

I don't know what he did, but somehow he was able to get the bleeding stopped. Or maybe it stopped by itself. I don’t know. Nosebleeds stop by themselves, so maybe that’s what happened. Anyway, I don’t know what he did, but it finally worked. The baby was born at 4:30 in the morning, and at 5:30, her husband got a call, “You have a new baby boy, and the mother and baby are doing fine.”

Doing fine?? That was a stretch. She was still very sick. In her case, “doing fine” meant that she was going to live. As for the baby, he was very weak and heavily jaundiced, but alive. I guess “doing fine” meant that the doctor was betting that he would eventually pull through, and I am here alive to tell you, seventy years later, that he did.

Mom said, “You were so weak you couldn’t even cry. You just squeaked.”

Dad said, “You looked like a little Indian.”

In today’s woke America, some people might call that a racist statement. But Dad was a farm kid from North Dakota. He was just making an observation. A heavily jaundiced Norwegian-American baby would look like a little Indian, right? You gotta believe me, you guys—I really wasn’t trying to look like a little Indian. It was the furthest thing from my mind. Fortunately, there were no woke morons yelling, “CULTURAL APPROPRIATION!!” So I was allowed to heal in peace.

I never told my mother the doctor’s story. I wonder if she would have seen him differently. But differently from what? In all my conversations with my mother about my childbirth, she never said a word about her impressions of the doctor. Nothing good, nothing bad. I have no idea what she thought of him. Did she know his story? Perhaps. But I don’t know how she could have known. If she did, she never let on.

What kind of person was he, really? Well, you have to give him credit for persistence. Twice his hospital was destroyed by fire, but he kept going. On his seventy-fifth birthday, he was awarded Federal Cross of Merit by the German government. And of course he was well recommended by everyone who knew him. I met one of those people years ago. In 2006, on a visit to Tokyo, I went back to the hospital where I was born and met a nurse who had worked with him. From everything we can tell, he was well liked and respected wherever he worked. And yet something very terrible took place that he was somehow involved in.

So what do we conclude from this? Did he get away with murder? Or was he confronted with a situation that was too much for hm to handle? Maybe both. These are questions that must be asked, because this wasn’t just a “he said, she said.” This was not a made up crime. There was a dead body. This calls for accountability. But how do do that? It’s not easy.

The court decided that he was in some way responsible for her death. But again, she brought the knife. So I just don’t know. So many questions remain unanswered. But one thing I do know: He saved my life, and he saved my mother’s life, and the rest, as they say, is history.

Labels: Japan