Becky Cerling Powers is the author of the new book Forbidden Orphanage Outside the Forbidden City. It focuses on the life of her late cousin, Laura Richards, who worked with orphaned children in China in the 1930s and '40s. Powers' other books include Sticky Fingers, Sticky Minds.
Q: What inspired you to write Forbidden Orphanage Outside the Forbidden City?
A: My Aunt Jean inspired me to write it.
Growing up, I was always curious about Laura’s story. My mother was a story collector, like me. She liked hearing people’s stories in general, and Laura’s stories in particular. She really wanted to know about Laura’s life in China, and if she learned anything new from Laura when Laura visited, Mom passed on the tidbits to me and her sister-in-law Jean.
It was Mom’s storytelling about Laura that caused my Aunt Jean to start thinking about finding out the story and writing a book. Jean lived in the Los Angeles area and visited Laura in her assisted living center. When I learned that Jean and Laura had started to collaborate, I was delighted. This was a story I wanted to know.
But then Laura decided that publishing a book could still be dangerous to her beloved orphans and former volunteers. The book project halted. I was disappointed.
But it was a busy season for me as a mom with three young children and a husband who had to travel a lot with his work. My focus was on my family and friends.
Then Jean unexpectedly died of cancer, and her daughter sent Jean’s collection of Laura Book interviews, photographs and other materials to my mom, who passed them on to me. I began reading through Jean’s Laura Book Collection, and that was when I decided I wanted to pick up the project and write a book–even if I only did it for my own kids.
Q: How did you research the book, and what did you learn that especially surprised you?
A: The short story of how I researched the book is that Laura had a close friend, Fern, who helped Laura with her correspondence. Fern sent Laura’s death notice to everyone on Laura’s Christmas letter list. Mom wrote Fern to ask if she knew about any old letters from China that Laura had, and Fern sent her a couple of them.
I wrote Fern, said I wanted to pick up the book project, and asked if she could help me locate any of Laura’s friends and colleagues from China for my questions. These folks became a rich source of firsthand material. They answered my questions by phone, by mail, and in person because I made trips to California and visited several of them who lived there.
Fern also lent me her copy of James Leynse’s memoir Beauty for Ashes, which gave me wonderful descriptive details of the world of 1930s and 1940s Beijing that Laura inhabited with the children.
The long story about how I researched the book is actually on my website (www.beckypowers.com) in the form of EndNotes on a PDF that people can access on the Forbidden Orphanage book’s landing page https://www.catalystpress.org/all-content/forbidden-orphanage-outside-the-forbidden-city.
I have a story about those EndNotes. When I first started writing the book, I thought I was writing a documentary, so I made footnotes. Then I realized I was going to have to use novel-writing techniques to keep the average reader’s interest, so I embarked on a journey of learning to write a novel.
By the time the manuscript was ready for an editor, I had developed a close friendship with a local publisher who offered to read it. She gave copies to beta readers, people who were willing to read an unpublished manuscript and give feedback.
From the comments, I realized that one of the beta readers thought the story was mostly fiction and that I’d made up all those stories about answers to prayer. That’s when I went back over all my manuscripts and made meticulous EndNotes.
I was particularly happy about those EndNotes years later when a Ph.D. candidate from Columbia University read Laura’s Children, my first self-published version of Forbidden Orphanage.
He contacted me for his research, used the EndNotes, and discovered important material in the primary documents for his doctoral thesis. (He has published his work, by the way, in a book: The Adoption Plan: China and the Remaking of Global Humanitarianism by Jack Neubauer.)
The first big surprise was what an adventurous life my nondescript, super quiet elderly cousin had lived…Standing up to bandits! Escaping concentration camp in a war! Surviving with children in the middle of a battlefield under machine gun fire and mortar attack!
I had had absolutely no idea of the physical dangers she had endured. I did know that she’d experienced famine, but famine was just a word to me. I didn’t picture the horror of seeing the bony bodies of people who had died of starvation lying in the family’s neighborhood ditches and fields. My imagination wasn’t educated enough when I started the project.
My second big surprise was Mr. Nieh. My mother had always assumed a very romantic story about Mr. Nieh and Laura. We had no idea how much younger he was than her, and we certainly had no idea that after he helped her so much and convinced her to marry him, he became a thief and a rapist! Or that she had no recourse, no legal right to divorce.
We knew her story was tragic. Today I realize that his story was tragic, too. He must have started out with good intentions – probably seeing himself as the rescuing hero. But in the crisis, he caved.
Mr. Nieh gave me plenty to ponder…about not losing faith because of people who look like good apples but have a rotten spot that spreads. Not to be surprised by…let’s call it what it is: evil and the complex nature of people like Mr. Nieh…doing so much good and so much harm; the problem of mixed allegiances like Mr. Nieh with his clan; the reality that the Good is so tangled up with the Bad that throwing away the Bad can throw out the Good along with it.
Q: What do you see as Laura Richards’s legacy today?
A: I gave the Chinese translation of the self-published book some years ago to a young Chinese Bible translator. I didn’t know that he had been struggling with a desire to translate the Bible into his wife’s unwritten tribal language, but that he’d given it up as impossible. Where would he get the funding to invent an alphabet and pay mother tongue translators for the project?
Reading Laura’s story made him rethink what was possible, and as a result, today that alphabet has been invented, and the entire New Testament has been translated along with a few Old Testament books.
Now his wife’s people are receiving MP3 recordings of the Bible in their language. Now they can become literate in their own language instead of having to rely on learning to read in some other language. This means their language is more likely to be preserved instead of dying out. For me, all the work I did to write this book is worth it, just for that.
Q: What do you hope readers take away from the book?
A: First, I’d like readers to take away what I’ve taken away myself. Laura Richards challenged my view of reality. She challenged my assumptions about the best way to live. She pushed me into exploring another way of thinking and living.
I hope readers will take up the challenge to notice what they are depending on for their security. And to look deeper into the mystery of what really constitutes The Good Life. Because there really is true goodness in the world. It’s up to us to decide first, whether to seek it (instead of living our lives focused on Me & Mine First) and then, if we find it, whether to ally ourselves with it.
Second, I’d like readers to think about their relationship to the literature of the Bible. What I mean is this: you cannot not understand Laura’s story about losing her children without background information about the culture of China and its recent history. (All that research I poured into the book.)
My newlywed husband had none of that background–just an ordinary graduate degree in geology. When I first told him that I had a relative who started an orphanage in China but had to come back to the United States after the Revolution, Dennis said, “Well, she wouldn’t have left the children if they’d been her own biological children.”
Like we all do, he was making assumptions based on his own experience–his own culture and his own time in history, which included little or no news from China.
People do the same with the Bible. They make assumptions based on their own experience, their own culture, their own historical time bubble. But in order to gain the insight the Bible offers, you need to recognize that this is ancient literature from a culture that’s not like yours.
To benefit from its life changing content, you need to suspend judgment and be curious. Be willing to explore a different world. Be a thoughtful, open-minded tourist. (A helpful tourist guide for you could be the videos, guides, articles and podcasts at www.bibleproject.com)
Third, I’d like readers to remember that it was Laura’s life intention to represent the God she served. When you look at her life, what do you see? Mercy. Sacrificial love. Gracious generosity. A woman who saved lives and empowered society’s weakest to live productive lives.
Whatever it is people believe about Jesus, they need to measure their perception with Laura’s life, because she radically followed the teachings of Jesus.
Q: What are you working on now?
A: I’m redesigning my website. When that’s done, I want to get back to a historical novel I have half written that is set in the Borderland of El Paso, Texas and Juarez, Mexico.
And one of these days I hope to write a children’s book about Laura and the children surviving the Japanese occupation using the motto Laura taught the children: “The older help the younger, and the stronger help the weaker.”
Q: Anything else we should know?
A: I have a second book coming out this year in a completely different genre. It’s a children’s picture book called Wherever I Go, a rhyming paraphrase of King David’s Psalm 139. It is scheduled for release in the summer of 2026. And it’s a project that’s been in the making even longer than Forbidden Orphanage!
I first wrote the poem for our kids in 1976 and illustrated it with their photographs. Now it is being illustrated by Karen Vermeulen’s luminous, quirky graphic art. You can check it out on my website or on the publisher’s website at Flare Books, an imprint of Catalyst Press https://www.catalystpress.org/all-content/wherever-i-go.
--Interview with Deborah Kalb
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