Shantung Compound
By Langdon Gilkey
Foreword by Os Guinness
(1997)
This modern classic offers a live laboratory experiment exploring the tensions of life.
When the props of society are removed, how do people survive—and act? How do crises sort out the leaders from the led? How do they crystallize character from convention? Virtue from hypocrisy? What is the role and relevance of faith?
Gilkey draws from the journals of his time in a Japanese internment camp in China during World War II to tell the story of how prisoners from many nationalities were forced to create a miniature society—and face the moral and political quandaries intensified by camp life. Sometimes disturbing, sometimes surprising, sometimes humorous, Shantung Compound highlights the dilemmas of the modern condition of humanity and the responsibility and ingenuity required to tackle our problems today.
Selections from this memoir are introduced by Os Guinness. An Englishman, he was born in China and, with the other foreigners, was forced to leave after the Chinese revolution. Several of his friends, in fact, were in the camp with Gilkey.
Strangely enough, I still kept expecting the opposite. For one of the peculiar conceits of modern optimism, a conceit which I had fully shared, is the belief that in time of crisis the goodness of men comes forward. For some reason we think that when there is little food or space among a community of people, they will be more, rather than less, apt to share with one another than in the ordinary well-fed existence. Nothing indicates so clearly the fixed belief in the innate goodness of humans as does this confidence that when the chips are down, and we are revealed for what we “really are,” we will all be good to each other. Nothing could be so totally in error.
Shantung Compound
Category: Readings (No. 16)
