A remarkable testament of the power of faith in the face of challenge.面對苦難，他的一生見證了信仰的力量。
Bravery embodied in a country boy from rural China.一個來自中國鄉間的少年，活出了勇氣。
A brilliant and passionate orator and author of dozens of books.才思敏捷、熱誠洋溢的講道者，寫下數十部著作。
A self-taught composer of hymns.無師自通的聖詩作曲者。
A devoted student and teacher.一生潛心求學，也傾心教導。
A loving and deeply affectionate husband, father, and grandfather.滿懷深情的丈夫、父親與祖父。
A man of God fulfilling his promises.一位用一生踐行承諾的神的僕人。
The Life of 1943Rev. Dr. David2026 Kawai Tsang
曾大衛 1943博士牧師2026 的一生
Scroll to begin向下捲動
Hong Kong · 1967 An artist’s interpretation香港 · 一九六七年 藝術演繹
DAVID TSANGA life of faith. A journey across the water.信仰的一生，從越過那片海說起。Preparing the story故事即將展開
1943. China at war.一九四三年。戰火中的中國。Age 00歲
Scroll to begin向下捲動
China at war, 1943戰火中的中國，一九四三年
By January 1943, Japan’s invasion had torn through China for more than five years. Into a country at war, into a family already living in flight, a seventh son was born.一九四三年一月，日軍侵華已延續五年多。在一個戰火未息的國家，在一個早已流離逃難的家庭裏，第七個兒子出生了。
The occupation of Manchuria in 1931 had widened into full-scale war in 1937. China kept resisting, even as occupied ports and severed supply routes deepened its isolation.
The year after he was born, a new Japanese offensive, Operation Ichi-Go, swept through central and southern China, targeting railways and Allied airfields. Beyond the military maps were families trying to reach safety, carrying whatever they could. By then the seventh son was a year old, and had to be carried too.
Background: Shanghai, 6 October 1937. Japanese naval infantry in the ruins near Sanyili, Zhabei. Photograph by Yoshio Kawamura.背景：上海，一九三七年十月六日。閘北三義里附近廢墟中的日本海軍陸戰隊。河村好雄攝。
The historical record · photographs & sources歷史檔案 · 照片與資料來源
Shanghai, 6 October 1937. Japanese naval infantry near Sanyili, Zhabei. Yoshio Kawamura, The Manshu nichi-nichi shimbun. Full composition shown here; the background above is cropped and darkened.上海，一九三七年十月六日。閘北三義里附近的日本海軍陸戰隊。河村好雄攝，《滿洲日日新聞》。此處保留完整構圖；上方背景經裁切及調暗。Source and public-domain record來源與公有領域記錄A later U.S. Army historical map of the April 1944 Ichi-Go plan. Arrows mark planned military advances, not David’s family’s route.美國陸軍後來編製的歷史地圖，呈現一九四四年四月的一號作戰計劃。箭頭標示軍事進攻計劃，並非大衛一家的逃難路線。圖中英文地名包括桂林、柳州、廣州及香港。U.S. Army Center of Military History · Public domain美國陸軍軍事歷史中心 · 公有領域View image ↗放大查看 ↗Southwest China, 1944. Chinese workers reopening the Burma Road, photographed by the U.S. Army Signal Corps.中國西南，1944年。中國工人修復滇緬公路，美國陸軍通訊兵攝。
Ages are counted from David’s birthday, 8 January 1943. His American papers record 3 December 1944; the family gives the January 1943 date as the true one.歲數按大衛的生日一九四三年一月八日計算。他在美國證件上的出生日期為一九四四年十二月三日；家人以一九四三年一月的日期為真實出生日期。
8 January 1943 · Born into a family of ten brothers一九四三年一月八日 · 十兄弟之家
The seventh son.第七個兒子。
David was born on 8 January 1943 in Shaoguan, in the north of Guangdong, into a family already living in flight from Japanese soldiers. Their ancestral home lay far to the east, in Jieyang; his father, Shau Man Tsang, was in Shaoguan at all only because the war had sent him there as an army doctor. His mother was Choy Chuen Chan. He was the seventh of ten brothers.
In the family’s account, a servant carried David and his brother Gabriel in two bamboo baskets slung from a shoulder pole. Running downhill, he dropped them. The baskets rolled into the valley and vanished in the dark. Both boys were found unharmed. David later saw God’s care in their survival.
據家人傳下來的故事，一名家僕把大衛與哥哥 Gabriel 分放在兩個竹籮裏，用扁擔挑著走。跑下山坡時，他失手掉下竹籮。籮子滾進山谷，消失在黑暗中。後來，兩兄弟都被找到，安然無恙。大衛日後把這次生還，看作神的眷顧。
Much later, reading his own life for the pattern he was sure ran through it, he noticed that the character 韶 in Shaoguan holds inside it 召 — to be summoned, to be called out. He never believed he had been born there by accident.
His American papers give a different date: 3 December 1944. That is what the documents say. It is not the day he was born. As with a good deal else in this life, the record and the man did not quite line up.
Horses were the animal he loved. He painted one in ink on his own paper — a mare with her foal — and a galloping horse closes this page. He was also born into a horse year. Because 8 January 1943 falls before that year’s Chinese New Year, the old calendar still counts it as 壬午: the year of the Water Horse. A horse of water, for a boy who would one day put everything he owned on his head and swim.
David大衛View full photograph ↗查看完整照片 ↗David with his family, seated at the viewer’s right in the bottom row. Identified by Angell. Photograph date unknown.大衛與家人合照。他坐在最前排右側（以觀看者方向為準），由 Angell 確認。拍攝日期未詳。
A generation earlier · Jieyang, Guangdong上一代 · 廣東揭陽
The seven daughters七個女兒
The Tsangs were Hakka — a name that means guest families: people who had moved, settled, and moved again. David would describe his own household in exactly those terms, as sojourners, and it stayed his way of understanding himself for the rest of his life. But the faith he was born into had not been in that house for long. It had arrived twice in a single generation, and neither time had it simply been given.
His grandfather, 曾慶餘, was a frugal farmer who rose before light to gather animal dung along the village roads for fertilizer. He and his wife had seven daughters and no son. In that time and place, daughters could not carry a family name forward, and every dowry to come would press harder on a poor man. One day he met an English missionary. Hearing what troubled him, the missionary asked whether he might pray for him, and prayed. The next year David’s father was born; two more sons followed. His grandfather became a believer in earnest and, in time, an elder of the village church — as David’s mother’s father also was.
Then David’s mother bore ten sons. He was the seventh. She stopped, the family remembered, only after she told God that this was enough.
到了大衛的母親，一連生下十個兒子；他排行第七。家裏傳說，直到她向神說了一聲「夠了」，才停下來。
Faith, David wrote, cannot be inherited: God has children, but no grandchildren. His own father proved it. When the third boy in the house burned with fever, the doctor of the family could do nothing for his own son, and his wife told him plainly that this was what came of refusing to believe. He answered like a man laying a wager: if your God is real and heals my son, I will believe in your God. An elder of the church was sent for and laid his hand on the child. As the elder’s foot crossed the threshold on his way out, the fever broke. His father kept the bargain; years later, safe in Hong Kong, he was serving as an elder himself.
This was the house David was born into: a faith that had come to it twice and had never once been handed down. It would have to come to him as well. It did — when he was ten, and in the same form. A bargain.
1949 onward · From age 6 · Land reform and its aftermath一九四九年起 · 6歲起 · 土改及其後
A family under persecution.一家人， 承受迫害。
After the founding of the People’s Republic in 1949, land reform made landowning families targets of political campaigns. David’s family was classified as “landlords” because they had owned property. They endured severe persecution. In his memoir, David records that the village militia captain persecuted them repeatedly.一九四九年中華人民共和國成立後，土地改革使有田產的家庭成為政治運動的打擊對象。大衛一家因曾有產業，被劃為「地主」，遭受嚴重迫害。他在回憶錄中記下，村裏的民兵隊長曾多次逼害他們一家。
He was a child, with no say in the family history held against him. The danger came from within his own village, reaching the people he depended on. His childhood would be shaped by the struggle to live under that pressure.他還是個孩子，卻已要承受自己無從選擇的家世。危險就在村裏，落在他所依靠的家人身上。他的童年，是在這份重壓下艱難度過的。
Enlarge the original page ↗放大原書頁 ↗The Land Reform Law of the People’s Republic of China · Promulgated June 30, 1950. Page 43 of the government’s official legal compilation.《中華人民共和國土地改革法》· 一九五〇年六月三十日公布施行。政府編印《中央人民政府法令彙編》原書第四十三頁。
Article 1 presents reform as ending “feudal exploitation” and giving land to peasants. Article 2 orders the confiscation of landlords’ land, farm animals, tools, surplus grain and surplus rural housing.第一條把土改定為廢除「封建剝削」、實行農民土地所有制。第二條則規定沒收地主的土地、耕畜、農具、多餘糧食及多餘的農村房屋。
After the war his father went back to the ancestral district and became director of the local hospital. Beside it lay a small lake and a river, and stone steps where people went down to fetch water. On a hot summer day, in the year he was about to start school, David was splashing at those steps with the other children. He could not swim.
The mud went out from under his feet. He was thrashing in the water when something pushed him, hard, toward the steps; the ground came back beneath him and he climbed out. Only then did he see his father on the far bank, ordering him home. He picked up his clothes and fled.
He believed for the rest of his life that the hand had been God’s, and unseen. Twice now, before he was old enough to ask anyone for help, he had come out of danger unhurt: once from a valley in the dark, once from the water.
At ten, David lay on his bed and would not eat. His mother had been taken to a public denunciation rally, where people were accused and humiliated for supposed political offenses; the landlord label had made her a target, and the charge was careless speech. There was nobody a boy could go to. So he wept, and made a bargain with a God he had heard about all his life and did not yet know.
“God, if You exist, please bring my mother home. If You are willing to help me, then from now on I will believe in You.”
「上帝啊,如果您存在的話,就請把我媽放回家.如果您肯幫我的話,以後我必相信您.」
His childhood prayer, recalled in Him, You and Me. English translation.童年禱告，見《衪你我》〈因我神的手幫助我〉。
She came home that night. Only later, from someone who had been in the hall, did he learn how. Four people were to be dealt with. The crowd worked through the first three. As they turned to his mother, an old man broke out of the crowd shouting — the father of a killed revolutionary, and so a man the cadres dared not offend — demanding to know why his son’s killer had still not been caught, and refusing to be satisfied. It took them a great deal of trouble to talk him home, and by the time they had, there was nothing left in them. Nobody had the appetite to struggle against his mother. She was let go.
He had said that if God helped him he would believe. He kept his word. He was a man who kept his word, he wrote — and this was the first of many times that a promise, once made, decided what he did next.
Afterwards his faith took a form his brothers found strange. He got up early to tend the breakfast fire while his mother went out to the fields for vegetables; he swept the house; he carried the washing down to the river. At the water’s edge he was the only man among the women, and they stared. He did not mind. Helping his mother, he wrote, left nothing on his conscience. He thought later that this was where he was first trained not to be governed by what other people thought of him.
He was the youngest pupil in every class and near the top of it; for a time he sat in the same year as a brother three years older and a cousin five years older. By his first year of junior middle school he had read his way through the great Chinese novels — Three Kingdoms, Water Margin, Journey to the West, Dream of the Red Chamber. A teacher told him afterwards that he had been the only pupil in the whole school with a perfect mark in the examination mathematics. He had every reason to believe that study would open a future.
It did not. In the Anti-Rightist years his eldest brother was labelled a rightist, and the property his grandfather’s generation had gained had already fixed a landlord label on the family. Against those two words a perfect mark counted for nothing, and the local high school would not admit him. At fifteen, the world struck him as grossly unfair.
So he left. The only school that would take him was an overseas-Chinese school in Xiamen, hundreds of miles away in Fujian — and its standard, it turned out, was higher than his village school’s. He was fifteen and had to manage everything alone; he became, in his own phrase, an old man in a child’s body. He also learned there what it was to be alone with God. And his classmates, more than fifty of them, knowing exactly what his family background was, elected him their deputy class monitor anyway.
Long afterwards he was grateful for the door that had shut. Had he not failed, he wrote, he would never have gone to Fujian at all.
多年以後，他反而為那扇關上的門感恩。他寫道：當年若不是名落孫山，他根本不可能到遙遠的福建去升學。
“When I was young I often felt like a blade of grass growing in a crack in the rock, needing many turns before it could see the open sky.”
「我年輕時常覺得自己好像是一棵生長在在石縫中的小草,須經幾番曲折才得見廣闊的天空.」
Him, You and Me · “God acts for those who wait on Him.” English translation.《衪你我》〈神為等候衪者行事〉。
1959–1961 · Ages 16–18 · The Great Chinese Famine一九五九至六一年 · 16–18歲 · 中國大饑荒
An egg, only on his birthday生日才有的一顆蛋
David’s teenage years unfolded amid catastrophic hunger. Mao’s Great Leap Forward had intensified collectivization, bringing farming and food distribution under collective control. As harvests fell, rigid state grain demands left many rural communities without enough to eat. Millions died in the famine.
When David spoke to Angell about those years, hunger had very particular names: tree bark, insect larvae, an egg he could eat only on his birthday. He returned to these memories often. The boy trying to earn a place in medical school was also trying to find enough to eat.
Family recollections shared by Angell.家人憶述，由 Angell 提供。
View image ↗放大查看 ↗A later report on these years. USDA analysts described the agricultural collapse after 1958 and the food crisis that followed. March 1964, p. 28.回看這幾年的一份報告。美國農業部分析人員記述1958年後的農業衰退及糧食危機。1964年3月，第28頁。
Medicine offered David a way to follow his father and put his quick mind to use. In his final school year, he represented a school of more than a thousand pupils in a city essay competition. But ability could not erase his political background. At night, after the dormitory lights went out, he drew the covers over himself and read his Bible by flashlight.
He meant to sit for the Shanghai First Medical College. The school’s security chief was a man from his own home district, treated him as one of his own, and told him he wanted to cultivate him. The method was less clean than the word. He wanted a fellow student’s family letter stolen; he suspected the boy of spying. Here at last was a way to move the one obstacle his marks could not. David agreed without stopping to think, took the letter, and handed it over.
The letter was delivered; the bargain should have been complete. His conscience would not let it rest. Night after night he could not sleep. To get his peace back he went to the student, confessed, and asked to be forgiven — and was cursed roundly for it. That was the first price. The second came from the official who had promised to make him, and who now treated him as a traitor and, when the chance came, had him struggled against. The medical-school dream, in David’s own words, went with the wind.
He was a doctor’s son in a family that counted dozens of doctors on both sides, and at seventeen or eighteen he had traded his place among them for a clear conscience. Decades later he wrote that God’s road had turned out to be higher than his own. He had wanted to heal bodies. What he was given instead, by his own count, was several thousand people brought to faith — among them people who found healing, or children, or a way back from the edge.
A light beneath the covers · symbolic illustration被窩裏的一點光 · 寓意畫作
After graduation · Guangzhou畢業後 · 廣州
A teacher, then a craftsman從教師到木匠
Teaching in Guangzhou gave him work when medicine was no longer possible; his overseas-Chinese background made the post easy to find. His father and older brothers were in Hong Kong, and he applied again and again for permission to visit them. Every application failed. He went on praying about it for five years.
He had no relatives in the city and lived on other people’s ground, and for a while that drove him nearer to God than he had ever been: he would walk out alone into the empty fields to pray and weep. He also spent three months reading the Bible from beginning to end for the first time. What he read unsettled him — teaching evolution in his classroom now conflicted with what he understood Scripture to say. Once again, keeping his livelihood meant living with a troubled conscience. A doctor’s certificate for his sleeplessness let him resign without disgrace, and he resigned.
Then a thought arrived: the Lord Jesus had been a carpenter; why should he not be one too? A friend taught him the trade. The work was exacting — wooden patterns from which machine parts would be cast, where a fraction of an inch wrong in the pattern turned the finished part into scrap. With practice he could tell at a glance whether an angle was truly ninety degrees, whether a line was truly straight. Years later he traced his insistence on precision in matters of faith, and his eye for the difference between a real believer and a nominal one, back to that bench.
Then the Cultural Revolution reached into his working day. He was ordered to join songs before a portrait of the leader each morning. To David, this violated his faith; he left the carpentry job. Cycling past his church, he saw Red Guards inside and slogans across its walls. His work was gone, his church occupied, and applications to visit his father and brothers in Hong Kong kept being refused. Beside that church, he gave the life he could not yet see a purpose.
He said it out loud, beside a ruined church, with nothing at all in his hands. Five years of praying had opened no door. One was about to open.
他站在殘破的教堂旁，兩手空空，把這句話說了出來。五年的禱告，一直沒有開門。門，就快要開了。
“Lord, if You open the way for me to go to Hong Kong, I am willing to devote my life to helping You rebuild the church.”
「主啊,如果您開路使我能去香港,我願意奉獻一生,幫您重修教會.」
Him, You and Me · “God acts for those who wait on Him.” English translation.《衪你我》〈神為等候衪者行事〉。Story & historical sources故事與歷史資料
David’s memoir, Him, You and Me, “Be merciful, as your Father is merciful,” explicitly recalls repeated persecution of his family by the village militia captain because of their landlord classification. Angell also describes the persecution as severe. The memoir does not date these incidents or specify their methods; this passage does not assign them to 1949 itself.
The law is a primary record of the Chinese government’s policy. The full original pages 43–44 are reproduced from its official legal compilation, without cropping or added lettering. The law’s stated aims and confiscation provisions are distinguished from David’s own account of persecution; it is not a record of actions against the Tsang household.
Him, You and Me: childhood, education, hidden Bible and the 1966 vow; his English “My Testimony.” The school incident and subsequent work follow his memoir’s sequence; their exact years are unrecorded. The hunger memories—tree bark, insect larvae and an egg only on his birthday—come from Angell’s recollection of his father’s spoken stories, not the reviewed memoir. The twelve books awaiting scans may add detail. Angell also confirmed that David was the seventh of ten brothers. His parents’ names follow Esther’s handwritten note, shared by Angell on 9 September 2026: his father, 曾壽民 (Shau Man Tsang), and his mother, 陳賽珍 (Choy Chuen Chan). The English edition keeps the family’s spellings; the Chinese edition uses the characters in her note. His mother’s detention and his brother’s designation are not assigned to a particular campaign date. Historical background is supported below.
Birth date corrected by the family in September 2026: David was born on 8 January 1943. His American documents record 3 December 1944, and this site previously followed that date throughout; every age and the Chapter 1 range have been recalculated from January 1943. Ages the memoir gives in his own words are unchanged — he says he was ten at his mother’s denunciation rally and fifteen when he left for Xiamen — so those events now fall a year earlier than the page previously placed them, and their years are marked approximate. Documented years are unchanged, so the ages beside them each move up by one. The 1944 Ichi-Go offensive is now told as what came the year after his birth rather than as the circumstance of it; the archival photographs keep their own 1944 dates. The date on his American papers is read as 3 December 1944 in United States month/day order.
父母姓名據 Esther 的手寫註記，由 Angell 於二〇二六年九月九日提供：父親曾壽民（Shau Man Tsang），母親陳賽珍（Choy Chuen Chan）。英文版保留家人的英文拼寫，中文版採用註記中的漢字。
Angell supplied the corrected birth date, that horses were David’s favourite animal, and the family’s reading of the two horse years. The zodiac years are calculable: 8 January 1943 falls before the Chinese New Year of 5 February 1943, so it belongs to 壬午, the Water Horse year; 2026 is 丙午, the Fire Horse year, which began on 17 February 2026. The Elijah image is 2 Kings 2:11 and is offered as the family’s reflection, not as a claim about how he died. His date of death is not recorded on this site: the Fire Horse passage and the age of eighty-three both assume he died on or after 17 February 2026, and should be confirmed before publication.
Further passages of Him, You and Me now carried in this chapter: his birth in Shaoguan and the family’s Jieyang origin; his own reading of the character 韶; the Hakka household described as sojourners; his grandfather, his seven daughters, the English missionary’s prayer and his eldership; his mother’s ten sons; his father’s wager and the fever that broke as the elder left the house; the near-drowning at the stone steps; the full wording of his childhood bargain and the old man who interrupted the rally; his washing clothes at the river and what he thought it trained in him; his classmates’ election of him as deputy class monitor in Xiamen; the intended application to Shanghai First Medical College and the security chief who was a fellow townsman; the rebuke he received when he confessed; the five years of prayer for a permit to Hong Kong; and the carpenter’s eye for a true angle. His grandfather’s name appears in the memoir’s characters, 曾慶餘; the family has not supplied a romanization. Ages for the near-drowning and the stolen letter follow the memoir’s own sequence and are given as approximate; the memoir assigns them no year. The figure of several thousand people brought to faith is David’s own count, in his memoir and his résumé.
Angell’s further family account, shared in September 2026, supplies the birth during flight from Japanese soldiers, Gabriel’s name, the household servant, the shoulder pole and the downhill fall. The memoir also records the nighttime basket accident and both brothers being found unharmed; no precise age or date is assigned to that accident.
Angell 於二〇二六年九月補充的家人口述，提供了逃避日軍途中出生、哥哥 Gabriel 的名字、家僕、扁擔與下坡時失手掉下竹籮等細節。回憶錄亦記下夜間竹籮墜落及兩兄弟被尋回、安然無恙的經過；不為這次意外配定確切年齡或日期。
In the 1960s, young people looked across the water toward Hong Kong and imagined a life they could choose. Behind them were political persecution, families condemned for their background, and futures narrowed by the Cultural Revolution. Ahead lay a border they could not freely cross.
British Hong Kong offered the possibility of beginning again. For those with relatives there, it could also offer a first home. But land routes were guarded and boats difficult to obtain. Some turned to the sea. They became known as the Freedom Swimmers.
For hours, the body had to keep going. Cold, cramps and exhaustion could be fatal. Discovery could mean capture and imprisonment. Some survivors trained and tried again; surviving one attempt did not make the next safe.
Hong Kong, May 21, 1967. Police and spectators during the unrest. David reached this city in the same year; he is not shown here.香港，1967年5月21日。動亂中的警察與圍觀市民。大衛在同一年抵港；照片中並沒有他。
Demonstrators are outside the frame. Full composition; converted to WebP.示威者在畫面以外。保留完整構圖，轉為 WebP 格式。
FREEDOM · 自由自由 · FREEDOM
To reach the far shore, they first had to risk never reaching it at all.
為了抵達彼岸，他們得先冒著再也無法上岸的危險。
Historical sources & image notes歷史資料與圖像說明
The historical accounts describe other swimmers. David’s own route and time in the water remain unrecorded; his three-day account covers the whole journey over land and water.
歷史記述所述為其他泅水者。大衛的具體路線與泅水時數尚無記錄；他所說的三天，指整段水陸行程。
The background is an artistic interpretation of David’s crossing. The photograph documents unrest in Hong Kong in 1967; it does not show swimmers or establish the date he arrived.
Christmas 1966 · Age 23 · The first attempt一九六六年聖誕 · 23歲 · 第一次嘗試
A promise, then a prison許願之後，卻是牢獄
For David, Hong Kong held his father and brothers, and the chance to live the faith he could no longer practise freely. His church was occupied, his work had come into conflict with his conscience, and permission to visit his family had been refused. He had promised God a life of service if a way opened. With the official route closed, he tried to find his own.
David set out from Canton (Guangzhou) alone, hoping to reach Hong Kong. At Christmas in 1966, he was caught and jailed. The year in which he had made his promise ended in prison. He would remain there for a month.
January 1967 · Age 24 · Released一九六七年一月 · 24歲 · 獲釋
Sent back to the village被遣回家鄉
David tried to make himself seem like a simple country fellow, pretending not to understand the Cantonese dialect spoken to him. In January 1967, after a month in prison, he was released and sent back to his home village. The prison doors had opened, but he was restricted to the village. The life he had known in Canton was beyond his reach.
1967 · Age 24 · Preparing to try again一九六七年 · 24歲 · 預備再試一次
An artist draws a way back畫出一條歸路
He did not want to risk capture again. Being allowed to live in Canton had been a precious privilege, and the failed attempt had cost him that freedom. Yet an artist friend kept urging him to try once more. David later wrote that he agreed out of loyalty to his fellow townsman. The friend then drew false train tickets that enabled the two men to return to Canton.
For five years he had asked God to open a way. He came to believe that the friend who would not stop asking was the way: the messenger, as he put it, whom God had sent to take him to Hong Kong.
This time, David prepared for the water. He knew that cold had killed other swimmers, so he practised in cold river water. He also learned to recognize Orion’s Belt: three stars in a row that could help him find his direction at night. The journey would demand endurance, but it would also draw on his careful preparation and what he had learned.
1967 · Age 24 · The way to the shore一九六七年 · 24歲 · 走向海岸
By night, he moved. By day, he hid.夜裏趕路，白天藏身。
Before he could enter the sea, he had to reach it unseen. In the account he gave Angell, he travelled at night. Daylight meant hiding in bushes while Communist guards passed close by. Sometimes he hid in ponds and rivers, drawing breath through reeds. Progress depended as much on keeping still as on moving forward.
The last stretch of land was thick with thorns. Scrub grew dense along the mainland shore. To reach the water, they pushed through it. He was escaping with a friend; the two took turns going first, pushing the branches apart a little at a time, slowly and without noise. The thorns tore at them as they went, and he reached the water already cut.
Night travel and hiding are recalled by Angell; the thorn scrub and the companion come from Esther’s recounting.夜行與藏身，據 Angell 的記憶；帶刺的灌木與同行的朋友，據 Esther 的憶述。
Beneath the stars · an artistic interpretation guided by Esther’s correction and Angell’s account.星空下的泅渡 · 依 Esther 的更正與 Angell 的憶述而作的藝術想像。
1967 · Age 24 · The crossing · Family recollections一九六七年 · 24歲 · 泅水渡海 · 家人的憶述
Upright in the water. Quietly toward freedom.直身在水中， 靜靜游向自由。
David held himself upright in the water, his belongings on his head to keep them dry. He paddled below the surface without splashing. Each movement had to carry him forward without giving him away.
Esther recalls the danger plainly: guards could shoot if they spotted someone escaping.
Esther 記得，那份危險很直接：一旦發現有人逃走，守衞可能開槍。
Across the water lay rural Hong Kong—farmland, with few lights. David used the stars to keep his direction. Capture had stopped him once. This time, he kept going.
Swimming posture, belongings and the rural shore follow Esther’s correction; navigation by stars follows Angell’s recollection of David’s account.泅水姿勢、隨身物品與鄉郊海岸，據 Esther 的更正；藉星辰辨方向，據 Angell 記憶中大衛的口述。
1967 · Age 24 · Landfall一九六七年 · 24歲 · 上岸
A sign in English一塊英文招牌
Barbed wire ran along the shore where he came in, fencing off the waterline. He found a hole in it and went through. Even standing on land, he did not know where he was. Then he saw a sign written in English, and knew that he had reached Hong Kong.
He knocked on a door and asked to use the telephone. The man who answered wanted to know who he was and where he had come from; he was not about to let a stranger in off the street. David asked whether he knew a Dr. David Jung. The man did — the two of them had grown up in the same hometown. The door opened.
他敲開一戶人家的門，想借用電話。開門的人問他是誰、從哪裏來——他不會隨便讓一個陌生人進屋。大衛問對方，認不認識一位 Dr. David Jung。對方認識——原來兩人是同鄉。門，就這樣開了。
1967 · Age 24 · To his father一九六七年 · 24歲 · 去見父親
Dressed to look like he belonged穿得像個香港人
The call went through, and it reached his father. A taxi was arranged. But so many people were crossing from China that police were still working the area, checking who was who; if they found him, he would be sent straight back. So the household dressed him as a Hong Kong man — good clothes, nothing about him left to notice — and a relative’s mother rode in the taxi at his side.
Looking like someone who belonged there, with an older woman of the family beside him, he crossed Hong Kong by taxi to meet his father.
他看上去像個本地人，身旁坐著家族中的長輩，就這樣坐車穿過香港，去見他的父親。
The landing, the door and the taxi come from Esther’s recounting, recorded with the family in September 2026.上岸、敲門與那程計程車，據 Esther 的憶述，二〇二六年九月與家人一同錄下。
Of all of this, his memoir records only that he and his companion arrived safely after three days of travel over land and water. The crossing was over. Keeping the promise he had made beside his occupied church would take the rest of his life.
“A year later, the Lord enabled me to swim to Hong Kong.”
「一年後，主使我能泅水到香港。」
David’s own English, “My Testimony,” describing 1967, the year after his vow.英文〈My Testimony〉原句的中譯，所述為許願翌年：一九六七年。
From his own papers他的文稿
He wrote it down.他把見證， 寫了下來。
His later testimony carries the journey in his own words: the closed church, his promise, the swim, and the life of service that followed.在後來寫成的見證中，他親自記下了被佔的教堂、向神的許願、泅水抵港，以及此後獻身服事的道路。
A faithful rendering of “My Testimony” from David’s original Word document. Writing date unknown.〈My Testimony〉由大衛原始 Word 文件忠實呈現，寫作日期未詳。英文原件記述：文革時，他許願若能到香港，願意終身事奉；翌年泅水抵港，後在播道神學院求學，並於1971年赴美深造。
1967–1971 · Ages 24–28 · A new beginning一九六七至七一年 · 24–28歲 · 重新開始
The promise becomes a life以一生履行承諾
For a month after his arrival, David was ill with fever. He remembered it lifting on the day he went to enroll at seminary. To him, this was an answer to the prayer he had carried for five years, and confirmation that he should give his life to ministry.
Hong Kong was itself living through riots and curfews. Within that unsettled city, he began four years at Evangel Theological College. Reaching safety had given him the chance to study; his promise gave him a reason to use it.
Open the original scan ↗放大原件影像 ↗Age 24 · Hong Kong seminary. The family’s filename supplies the age and setting; no date is printed on the photographs.二十四歲 · 香港神學院。年齡與地點據家人原檔名；照片本身未印日期。
One of his first lessons came from a child who disrupted Sunday school. David went to visit him at home to understand why. He found a boy left hungry while his mother was out at work. David bought him breakfast, then left money for the next morning’s meal. The child’s behaviour changed; later, he even came looking for David at the seminary. The promise to rebuild a church was finding its way into the care of one person.
That same day, back at his father’s shop, a relative unexpectedly handed him an offering envelope. The sum inside was exactly one hundred times what he had left for the boy’s breakfast. He recorded the arithmetic, and the thought that followed it: had he known, he should have left more.
He wanted more training so that he could do the work better, and he asked God for it directly: open the way to America, move a seminary there to accept me, provide the money, and let me pass the examination. In China he had been permitted to study only Russian, so at seminary he made up two English courses from the beginning, sitting beside classmates schooled in Hong Kong. One of them could not understand how the newcomer had come top of the English examination. He went on to take Greek in English, and he passed the TOEFL. He carried a dictionary everywhere and went to the English service after his Sunday duties were done.
By 1971 he had his Bachelor of Theology from Evangel and a letter of admission from Trinity in America. What he did not have was the fare. At a seminary chapel he heard a line from the book of Ruth — that the man would not rest until he had settled the matter that day — and stopped worrying about it. Not long after, an elderly woman of his Hong Kong church, no relation to him and barely an acquaintance, offered to pay for his studies in America; another member wrote his financial guarantee; and the church’s woman evangelist, uneasy about sending someone who had never travelled, arranged for family friends to meet him at Los Angeles and put him on his connecting flight.
America gave him a classroom, and work to do after class. At Trinity he studied by day and cleaned offices at night, still sending money to his mother and brothers in China. His own education could move forward without letting go of his responsibilities at home. Prayer, preparation and long hours belonged to the same calling.
Every other Chinese student at the seminary received money from home each month, or from a mission society. He was the one sending it — to his mother and brothers in the village, and now and then to a student back in Hong Kong.
“I believed that in the Lord I could overcome every difficulty.”
「我相信靠主可以勝過一切的困難.」
Him, You and Me · “In the Lord I can do all things.” English translation.《衪你我》〈靠著主凡事都能作〉。
His first years at Trinity · Chicago三一神學院的頭幾年 · 芝加哥
A stranger in the pulpit無名小卒站上講台
In his first year he took a course in personal evangelism, which meant walking onto the campus of Northwestern University with four American classmates and talking to students about faith. He had led many people to faith in Hong Kong, but never in English, and never across that much distance of culture — rather like a Chinese physician, he thought, presented with a Western patient. That afternoon he led one non-Chinese student to faith. When the class reported back the next day, no other student had brought anyone. He drew his own conclusion from it: in this work the Spirit’s presence counts for more than fluency or a clean accent.
Word of what God had done in China through him had reached the school — his testimony had by then been written into an American Sunday-school curriculum — and the seminary invited him to bring the message at its chapel. It astonished him. Chapel speakers were the pastors of large churches and famous scholars; he was, in his own phrase, a nobody. He accepted, and then removed the one obstacle he could control. He wrote the sermon out, asked a bilingual friend to put it into English, and learned the English by heart.
It landed. A classmate came up afterwards and said: David, whatever you ever need, I will do it for you. David took him at his word on the spot — he needed someone to drive that evening to Moody Bible Institute to collect a young woman. The man drove him there, more than two hours, and drove her back to her school hours later. Not many years after he had come ashore with cuts on his arms and nothing to his name, an American seminary was asking him to preach to it.
In 1974, Billy Graham convened a world congress on evangelization in Switzerland, and delegates came from every part of the world. David went as the sole representative of the church in China. He was precise about how that had happened: the church in China had not elected him — it was in no position to elect anyone — and the congress organizers had appointed him.
Eight years earlier he had walked away from a carpenter’s bench rather than sing to a portrait, and had spent that Christmas in a cell. Now he was meeting Christian leaders from around the world and the heads of the great seminaries. The congress adopted a declaration on living simply. Because his Chinese handwriting was good enough, the head of the translation team asked him to make the Chinese fair copy, and he took the job.
The Chinese delegates met on their own to discuss how to carry gospel work forward among Chinese people everywhere, and chose seven senior and widely respected men for a committee. Two delegates, one from Taiwan and one from Singapore, objected that the men chosen were old. The argument would not settle. David — thirty years old, present by appointment rather than by any constituency — stood up and said that for the sake of the gospel, whoever was best suited to do the work should do it. The younger men had no answer to that, and let it go. The committee formed that day grew, he wrote, into the worldwide association for Chinese evangelism that exists today.
He was thirty. He had crossed a border in the dark with everything he owned balanced on his head; he had been held for a month in a cell; a high school in his own county had refused him a place. Nobody in that hall had voted for him. He spoke anyway.
Further passages of Him, You and Me now carried in this chapter: his own reading of the fellow townsman as the messenger God sent; the offering envelope that came to exactly one hundred times the boy’s breakfast money; the prayer he made about America; the two remedial English courses, the top mark, Greek taken in English and the TOEFL; the line from Ruth heard at chapel; the elderly church member who was no relation and paid for his American studies, the guarantor and the arrangements at Los Angeles; sending money home while other Chinese students received it; the Northwestern campus visit and its result; the invitation to preach at the seminary chapel, the written and memorized English sermon, and the classmate who drove him to Moody and back; and his account of the 1974 congress in Switzerland — his appointment as the sole representative of the church in China, the declaration on simple living, the Chinese fair copy, the dispute among the Chinese delegates and what he said, and the committee that followed. The congress is identified as David describes it; the Chinese text keeps his own naming of the association that grew out of that committee. He does not record the congress dates, the campus student’s name, or the chapel date; none is assigned here.
Angell’s further family account, shared in September 2026, dates David’s first capture to Christmas 1966 and his release, after one month in prison, to January 1967. It supplies his pretended inability to understand Cantonese, return to his home village and restrictions there, the value he placed on living in Canton, his artist friend’s persuasion and drawn false train tickets, cold-river practice and learning Orion’s Belt. These details come from his father’s stories as Angell recalls them, not from a prison record or the reviewed memoir. The prison’s location, exact release day, practice river and successful crossing’s date remain unspecified.
Esther’s recounting of the escape and arrival, updated with the family on 9 September 2026, supplies the thorny scrub along the mainland shore and the friend escaping with him; upright swimming with his belongings on his head, quiet paddling beneath the surface, and a sparsely lit rural shore; the barbed wire at the waterline and the hole he found in it; the English sign that told him he had reached Hong Kong; the knock at a stranger’s door and the shared hometown with a Dr. David Jung; and the Hong Kong clothes and the relative’s mother who rode with him in the taxi to his father. That name is spelled as heard in the family recording and is not otherwise confirmed; his relationship to David is not recorded. The thorny plant was not identified. The landing place, the household, the taxi’s destination and the date of the crossing remain unrecorded.
Esther 對逃亡與抵港的憶述，於二〇二六年九月九日由家人補充更正，補上了以下細節：大陸岸邊帶刺的灌木與同行的朋友；身體直立、頭上放著隨身物品，在水面下靜靜划動，以及燈火稀疏的鄉郊海岸；水邊的鐵絲網與他找到的缺口；使他確認身在香港的英文招牌；敲開陌生人的門，以及與 Dr. David Jung 同鄉的巧合；還有那身香港衣服，與陪他坐計程車去見父親的、一位親戚的母親。該姓名依家人錄音所聞拼寫，未經其他查證，他與大衛的關係亦無記載。帶刺的植物未能辨明。上岸地點、那戶人家、計程車的目的地與渡海的確實日期，同樣沒有記錄。
Esther’s correction of 9 September 2026 supersedes the earlier backstroke and chest-bundle description. The danger of gunfire is her recollection, not a claim that shots were fired at David. She also describes bodies drifting downriver into Hong Kong during the Cultural Revolution; she does not say David encountered them on his crossing.
The seminary photograph scan is family archive DT-0636. Its original filename identifies David at age 24 in Hong Kong seminary; the age and setting are family-supplied, and the scan has no printed date.
David’s memoir, Him, You and Me, “God acts for those who wait on Him,” records five years of waiting, the fellow townsman’s appeal and David’s agreement out of loyalty, the three-day whole journey, fever and seminary enrollment. His own English “My Testimony” explicitly records the swim; Angell also confirmed 1967. Religious meaning and the account of recovery follow David’s testimony. The night travel, daytime hiding, guards passing, concealment in ponds and rivers, breathing through reeds and navigation by stars come from Angell’s recollections of his father’s spoken stories. These details are not quoted from the memoir, whose afterword says he omitted much of the journey. The three days cover the whole journey; David’s exact route, distance, swimming duration and weather remain unrecorded.
The historical opening draws on archival scholarship about the wider era and another swimmer’s first-person account; these do not establish conditions on David’s particular crossing. Hong Kong study, the hungry child and American study follow the memoir and résumé.
Before Esther there had been someone else. They had begun writing while he was still in Hong Kong, and by the time he reached America they were, as he put it, special friends. She was studying in Texas and invited him to a student retreat there. He had no spare money, so he asked God for the fare. A week later a hundred-dollar check arrived from Hong Kong — which happened to be the exact cost of a return ticket between Chicago and Dallas.
The days there did not go well. Their backgrounds, and their ideas of what a life was for, did not meet. She asked him whether he could give up studying for the ministry. He answered that if he were never going to die he could skip seminary — but since he knew that everyone dies, he would not be changing the road he was on.
At the airport he said: thank you for these few days; let us say goodbye here; I do not think we shall meet again. They never did. He was in his late twenties, he had chosen the calling over the person standing in front of him, and he wrote that he never once regretted it — because in this world, he said, he was a Hakka, a guest. It left him alone. After a few such turns he stopped trying to arrange his own life, and began to wait.
Before he finished at Trinity · A prayer about marriage三一神學院畢業之前 · 為婚姻的禱告
He asked for a nurse他求的，是一位護士
So he took the matter to somebody else. Before he finished at Trinity he went to Mrs. Walker — his “prayer mother,” as he called her — and asked her to pray that God would give him a wife who would walk the road of service with him.
She asked what kind of partner he wanted. A Chinese sister who loved the Lord, he said, and if possible a nurse. Why a nurse? His answer was practical: the work ahead would keep them moving, and a nurse could find work wherever they landed.
Mrs. Walker began to pray. She had never heard of a pastor in Canada named Lee. At about that same time, Pastor Lee — Esther’s own pastor — was sitting in Esther’s house telling her about an old friend of his, and asking whether she would like to meet him. She said she would think about it. “You don’t have to think,” he told her. “I’m going to write to my friend David, and he will write to you.”
窩科太太開始禱告。她並不認識加拿大那位 Lee 牧師。差不多同一時候，Lee 牧師——正是 Esther 自己的牧師——坐在 Esther 家中，說起自己一位老朋友，問她願不願意認識。她說讓她想一想。「不用想，」他說，「我寫信給我的朋友大衛，他會寫信給你。」
c. 1974 · Calgary and Chicago約一九七四年 · 卡城與芝加哥
A year of letters寫了一年的信
She was in Calgary and he was in Chicago, and for the better part of a year they knew each other only on paper. A phone call between them cost nine dollars in 1974 — not a thing two people did lightly. So they wrote.
He wrote about his daily life, his studies, his jobs, his struggles. He drew in the letters too — scenery, small pictures set into the page; she thought him a creative man. The second letter carried a photograph of himself and asked for one of hers, and she sent a print so small he could not make anything out of it.
She kept the whole stack of his letters for years. They were let go when the family moved away from New York and everything had to fit into one car.
那一疊信，她保存了許多年。後來一家人離開紐約，所有東西只能裝進一輛車，那些信便沒有留下。
Esther’s own account, recorded by Angell.Esther 的憶述，由 Angell 記錄。
The visit · An aunt in Chicago那次探訪 · 芝加哥的姨母
She was the one who travelled動身的是她
She had invited him to Calgary, and he could not go; between studying and working he had neither the time nor the money. He prayed about it instead. If this was the woman God had chosen for him, let her come to him — and if she did not come, he would know she was not the one.
Her own reasoning was plainer. Money was not a problem for her and it was for him — he was working his way through school — so if anyone was going to make the trip, it would be her. She had an aunt in Chicago. She said she was going to visit her aunt, and went.
Her aunt did not know the real reason she was coming. What Esther did not know, until she arrived, was that her aunt already knew David: student though he was, he preached at her church now and then. Asked his name, her aunt said, oh, I know him. Without that aunt, Esther says, the two of them would never have come together.
Esther’s own account, recorded by Angell.Esther 的憶述，由 Angell 記錄。
Their first meeting · Eight inches of snow初次見面 · 八寸大雪
He had promised to visit her他答應了去見她
She telephoned from Chicago and asked to meet. It was exam week, so he arranged to come once his papers were done. On the day he was to drive, the radio forecast eight inches of snow, and friends told him not to take the risk.
He went anyway, and the reasons he gave were his own: she had come a long way, and not going would be heartless; he had given his word, and breaking it would be unjust. For feeling and for duty, he wrote, he had to go.
The drive from school into Chicago normally took an hour. That day it took more than eight, and near the end the car broke down. He walked the last stretch through the snow for over an hour. Stepping through the door of her aunt’s house — an ice pop, he wrote, and a snowman — he gave her a fright. What stayed with him was her face: anxious, close to tears. He suspected the storm had also made her look at him differently.
Him, You and Me · his own account of the visit. English translation.《衪你我》記述這次探訪。
One week in Chicago芝加哥的一個星期
Seven days七天
She had been warned about him. Her pastor said David was a very quiet man — that she should be prepared, that he hardly said anything unless he was sure, that he was careful. His younger brothers said the same: in a house of ten boys he was the one who stayed out of the fighting, who stayed behind.
He talked. She stayed with her aunt and he came to collect her, and on one of those days they drove the five hours to St. Louis. By the second day he had told her about his whole life and what he hoped to become, and about the appetite for adventure he carried. She mostly listened. Meeting him, she said, was like finding an old friend — they were comfortable with each other from the start.
On the seventh day he asked her to marry him. She was a little surprised and not really surprised: she felt she had known him a long time. They were both around thirty-one, she points out — not twenty-year-olds; they had seen a good deal of life by then.
Before anything else, he said, he would ask her father — a man he had never met. He telephoned him from Chicago, with her aunt there, and asked for her hand. Her father wanted to speak to his cousin first; the aunt vouched for him as a decent and trustworthy man. They were engaged that same week. Esther stayed about ten days in all.
In four years at Trinity he had never once been late with his fees. He was late that term. He had spent the tuition money on the ring, and paid the school back by instalments.
They married on August 16, 1975, in a Chinese church in Canada — the other end of the red carpet, as he put it.
一九七五年八月十六日，兩人在加拿大的一間華人教堂裏結婚——用他的話說，走到了紅地毯的另一端。
Esther’s own account, recorded by Angell.Esther 的憶述，由 Angell 記錄。
1975 · Age 32一九七五年 · 32歲
The graduate走到畢業這一天
In 1975, after four years at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, David received his Master of Divinity. He had chosen Fuller for further study because his calling was mission, despite a fully funded offer from Princeton. Fuller waived his tuition on one condition: he had to bring $3,000 for room and board. It was a large sum then, he noted — gasoline cost thirty cents a gallon. His home church in Hong Kong offered to lend it if he would return and work off the debt. He declined, with questions of his own: whose money is a church’s money, and should a servant choosing his field listen to God or to a creditor? He wrote to his fiancée that if God wanted him to do this degree, God was not so poor as to need him to borrow. She wrote back that she had exactly three thousand dollars in the bank, and sent the check.
David at Trinity. The original photograph from the upper right of page 16B, The Evangelical Beacon, August 5, 1975.大衛在三一神學院。原照裁自一九七五年八月五日《The Evangelical Beacon》第16B頁右上方。
Enlarge certificate ↗放大證書 ↗Master of Divinity · Trinity道學碩士 · 三一神學院 June 13, 1975 · Age 31. His original certificate, preserved by the family.一九七五年六月十三日 · 31歲。家人保存的學位證書原件影像。
1976 · Age 33一九七六年 · 33歲
Learning, with Esther beside him求學路上，有她同行
At Fuller’s School of World Mission, David earned his Master of Theology in 1976 and prepared for the doctoral entrance examination. Prayer went alongside wide reading: he wanted to be ready for whatever the examiners might ask. That summer, he and Esther travelled through the United States and Canada, gathering dissertation material in university libraries and the Library of Congress. The research became a journey they made together.
Enlarge certificate ↗放大證書 ↗Master of Theology · Fuller神學碩士 · 富勒神學院 June 7, 1976 · Age 32. School of World Mission.一九七六年六月七日 · 32歲。世界宣教學院。
1977 · Age 34一九七七年 · 34歲
Doctor of Missiology宣教學博士
Fuller awarded David his Doctor of Missiology on June 6, 1977. In his research, Chinese thought met the Christian faith he had carried through persecution—two lasting concerns brought together in preparation for ministry.
Enlarge certificate ↗放大證書 ↗Doctor of Missiology · Fuller宣教學博士 · 富勒神學院 June 6, 1977 · Age 33. School of World Mission.一九七七年六月六日 · 33歲。世界宣教學院。
1977 · Age 34 · A scholar’s distinction一九七七年 · 34歲 · 治學的肯定
The Dean’s Annual Award院長年度獎
His dissertation, A New Missiological Approach to the Chinese Ju-Chia, brought Chinese Confucian thought into conversation with missiology. Fuller recognized it with the 1976–77 Dean’s Annual Award for the best dissertation produced in a language other than English.
Enlarge award ↗放大獎牌 ↗The original award plaque, marked 1976–77 and signed by Dean Arthur F. Glasser.原獎牌註明一九七六至七七年度，由院長 Arthur F. Glasser 簽署。
1977 · Age 34 · The record of his studies一九七七年 · 34歲 · 求學的記錄
The work behind the degrees學位背後的努力
The report card records the work behind the degrees: theology, anthropology, church growth, research and his dissertation, studied at Fuller between 1975 and 1977. Its final cumulative GPA is 3.79—a record of the preparation he carried into ministry.
Before he graduated, a great-grandson of Hudson Taylor came to the school to invite him to teach at a seminary in Taiwan. David turned it down. He had never built a church, and he was not willing to stand in a classroom teaching church growth out of other people’s books. He wanted to try it himself. So when a pastor came down from Vancouver and offered him a newly started preaching station in a city full of Chinese families, he took it for his Macedonian call.
In Vancouver he found out what he had walked into. The preaching station had belonged to another denomination; the pastor who invited him had changed denominations and brought the work across with him. David would not take a side in it. He stepped away and set out to start a congregation in another district where Chinese families lived — and the first pastor, afraid for his own work, opposed him hard. A Western Baptist church offered him a room. He posted letters inviting the Chinese families nearby, and because he had not yet been ordained he could not sign himself Pastor, so he signed himself Doctor. The telephone calls started at once: he was arrogant; he was proud. Religious people in the city went to the Baptist superintendent and told him the district had no need of gospel work. The superintendent withdrew the room.
He was thirty-three, newly married, newly a doctor of missiology, and had come a long way to be told he was not wanted. He wrote instead. The Blazing Torch, one of the books that stands in his library today, was finished in those difficult months. Rather more than a year later, the way opened back to California.
A Western church in Pomona, California, had a burden for the Chinese families living around it, and asked him to come down from Canada and start Chinese work. He came. In 1978 he was ordained there, and eleven years of study — Hong Kong, Chicago, Pasadena — turned into a week’s work: visiting, preaching, funerals, people at the door.
With Esther beside him, the promise he had made beside an occupied church in Guangzhou was becoming a household.
Esther 與他同行；當年在被佔教堂旁許下的承諾，如今成了一個家共同承擔的生活。
1979 · Age 36 · Pomona Valley, California一九七九年 · 36歲 · 加州葡園
A hundred people in six months半年，一百人
The work moved quickly. Inside six months the Sunday gathering had passed a hundred people. But most of them did not want to be the Chinese department of somebody else’s church — inside the Western congregation, Chinese members were treated as second-class — and they wanted a church of their own. David agreed with them. It was what the people wanted, and he believed that in Scripture such a thing must be willing. The Pomona Valley Chinese Christian Church came into being, with him as its founder.
The Western church’s leader turned on him. He called David an enemy, threatened to throw the books out of his office into the street, and complained about him to Dr. Arthur Glasser at Fuller — David’s own dean and teacher. Called in to answer for himself, David did not argue the case. He said, gently, that his conscience did not trouble him, and that he thought this matter had better wait until they stood before the judgment seat of Christ. He wanted neither to damage the friendship nor to give up the principle. Some time afterwards Glasser met him again and apologized to him deeply.
It was the first church he founded. It would not be the last.
這是他親手建立的第一間教會。此後還有。
1979 · Age 36 · Waiting for a first child一九七九年 · 36歲 · 等候頭一個孩子
He told them it would be a boy他說，會是個兒子
In the church’s second year Esther was expecting, and David caught himself wondering which it would be. That morning’s reading handed him a line from Isaiah: for unto us a child is born, unto us a son is given. He was not sure that counted as an answer. Then at the prayer meeting that evening he heard Sister Irene Lee praying in Cantonese for Mrs. Tsang’s 細滿子 — her little boy — to grow well and be safely born. After that he believed it, and began telling people.
One of the people he told was an elderly Western woman evangelist, who informed him with some authority that she predicted a girl, and that her predictions had never yet been wrong. He told her that this time she would be wrong, and that she was welcome to wait and see. Their son was born that December.
He was glad, he wrote, not because a son was better than a daughter, but because God had kept faith with him — and, he admitted in the same breath, because now he would not have to worry about which the next one would be. He was, after all, a man shaped by Chinese custom.
Baby Sunny with her older brother, Angell.嬰兒時期的 Sunny 與哥哥 Angell。
Story & historical sources故事與歷史資料
Further passages of Him, You and Me now carried in this chapter: the earlier friendship in Texas, the hundred-dollar check that matched the Chicago–Dallas fare, what she asked him and what he answered, and their parting at the airport; the tuition spent on an engagement ring and repaid by instalments; the declined invitation to teach at a seminary in Taiwan and his reason for declining; the Vancouver preaching station and the denominational dispute he withdrew from, the letters signed “Doctor” because he was not yet ordained, the telephone attacks, the Baptist superintendent’s withdrawal of the room, and The Blazing Torch written in that period; the Pomona invitation from a Western church, growth past a hundred in six months, the founding of the Pomona Valley Chinese Christian Church, the conflict that followed, his answer about the judgment seat, and Dr. Glasser’s later apology; and the Isaiah reading, Sister Irene Lee’s prayer, the disagreement with a visiting evangelist, and his own comment on why he was glad. The résumé independently records him as founder of the Pomona Valley Chinese Christian Church, 1979–1985; the memoir does not date the founding, and no month is assigned here. The Vancouver year, the composition date of The Blazing Torch, and the name of the Texas friend are unrecorded. The named great-grandson of Hudson Taylor and the Taiwan seminary follow the memoir’s own naming.
Courtship, summer 1975 marriage and 1976 research trip: Him, You and Me, which supplies the prayer to Mrs. Walker, the request for a nurse and his reason for it, the prayer that she should come to him, the eight-inch forecast, the eight-hour drive, the breakdown and walk, the “ice pop and snowman” arrival, and the declined church loan and his fiancée’s check. Esther’s own account of the same months was recorded by Angell on 8 September 2026 and supplies: Pastor Lee’s visit to her house; the year of letters between Calgary and Chicago and the nine-dollar phone call of 1974; what David wrote about; his drawings; the exchanged photographs and the stack lost in a move; her reason for making the journey herself; her aunt in Chicago, who already knew David because he preached at her church; the warning that he was a very quiet man; the drive to St. Louis; the proposal on the seventh day; his call to her father; the engagement that week; and the wedding date of August 16, 1975. Mrs. Walker and Pastor Lee did not know each other, and Pastor Lee is named only as Esther remembers him. Where the two accounts meet they agree: he prayed that she would come to him, and she came — for reasons of her own. Degrees: the original Trinity and Fuller certificates, dated June 13, 1975 (Master of Divinity), June 7, 1976 (Master of Theology), and June 6, 1977 (Doctor of Missiology). The graduation photograph is the upper-right picture on printed page 16B (PDF page 2) of The Evangelical Beacon, August 5, 1975; the printed caption and Angell identify David. It is cropped directly from the scan, without reconstruction. The newsletter also lists his 1971 Th.B. from Evangel Theological College. The Dean’s Annual Award plaque specifies the best dissertation produced in a language other than English, 1976–77. His Fuller student record covers 1975–77 and gives a final cumulative GPA of 3.79; student identifiers are covered in the displayed copy. Ordination: résumé and certificate. Angell supplied both birth dates, his mother’s name Esther and her maiden name Fung. He identified the infant photograph as baby Sunny with her older brother Angell; its exact date is unrecorded. The family portrait has its own April 1981 handwritten caption. The wedding photograph is illustrative; its date is unrecorded. The children’s Chinese names follow Dad’s note, “Sunny’s Chinese name.”
A move threatened to end the Chinese congregation at Cornerstone United Methodist Church in Orange, California. David insisted it should continue. After preaching in English on Sunday mornings, he began again in Chinese each afternoon. He offered his living room and made a pulpit himself. The carpenter’s skills were building a church; the afternoon he might have spent resting became another part of his calling.
The reason he gave was plain: the church had already taken three years of denominational support for Chinese work. How was it going to explain closing it — to the conference, or to God? So he began again from nothing, because every one of the old Chinese members had gone.
It cost him more than his Sunday afternoons. Religious people said the English-language church must be going badly for him and that he was opening Chinese work as a line of retreat; the district superintendent complained that starting a new field was not a pastor’s business but a bishop’s. He wrote that working in this world was hard, and then went on working, because it was God he was answerable to. By the time he handed the Chinese congregation on to another pastor, more than fifty people were coming.
His own records name a second church founded in southern California in these years: the Chinese Methodist Blessed Church. The English naming varies between his papers, and the memoir does not say which gathering became which congregation.
“My wife is about to go on the night shift; I need to go home to look after the children.”
「師母快要去上夜班的時候了,我須回去照顧孩子。」
Him, You and Me · an undated recollection of balancing pastoral work and fatherhood. English translation.《衪你我》記述牧養與父職的日常；這段回憶未註日期。
In those years · California那些年 · 加州
Two things he would not do他不肯做的兩件事
The Pomona work had been started from nothing, and at first the church could pay its pastor only a travel allowance of four hundred dollars a month. Esther took a clinic job that paid badly but left her weekends free for the church. In that situation, a man who attended the services offered him a way to make money. He had obtained permanent residence himself through a sham marriage, and proposed that David simply pass him the names of people who wanted to immigrate: fifteen hundred dollars for David on every successful case. Everyone would win, he said — and the new immigrants would help the church grow.
David told him it was deceiving both God and the government. The man said many Korean pastors were doing it. David said he made his decisions by looking at Scripture, not at other people. The man left the church. A gentleman may want money, David wrote, but he must come by it in the right way; he was not going to offend God in order to own a church full of people who had come for something else.
Some years later a member who had moved east telephoned him in January. Her husband earned twelve times what David did. Doing her taxes, she had realized that a large donation to the church in the previous year would reduce what she owed; could the church accept a check dated to last year? He told her it went against Scripture. She said the sum was very large. He told her that no sum was large enough to get him past his own conscience, and hoped he had not offended her. There was no way, he wrote, to please everyone and God at once.
1985 · Age 42 · A handwritten hymn一九八五年 · 42歲 · 一首手寫詩歌
A song for parents把親恩寫進歌裏
That care for family also found its way onto a score dated 1985. David wrote both words and music about parental love. The third verse turns gratitude into something children can do: ask after their parents’ comfort and serve them morning and evening.
The man who had persecuted them came to tea逼害過他們的人，來喝茶
The first time he went back to the village, half the neighbourhood came to look at the rare visitor from America who had left as a boy and returned grey. Among them was old Mr. Pang, who had been the captain of the village militia — the man who, in the years when the family carried the landlord label, had persecuted them again and again.
One relative in the room, who had probably suffered more than the rest, moved to put the old man out of the house. David stopped him at once and asked him to let the past go. He had already let it go himself. The strong pressing the weak, and charges found for whoever was to be accused — he thought that pattern old enough in his country not to be a surprise, and he did not want to carry it in himself. They drank tea together and talked, and the afternoon stayed peaceful.
Later he led the aggrieved relative to faith in Christ.
後來，他帶了那位心懷不平的親戚接受了主。
1987 · Age 44 · Easter一九八七年 · 44歲 · 復活節
A son returns遊子歸鄉
After thirty-six hours of travel from California, David reached his home village for his mother’s funeral. As he stepped into the hall where she lay, the mourning party of relatives and friends began at once to wail aloud. He stood in front of his mother’s body and did not cry, and knew how that looked. He had two reasons. She had believed, and she had passed seventy. And she had been bedridden for years in pain; released from it, what was there to grieve? He noticed, in the quiet afterwards, that the wailing could be switched on and off: with no outsiders in the room the mourners rested and chatted, and the moment someone arrived to pay respects they could weep on command. He admired the control, and declined to imitate it.
More than a thousand people came, among them cadres from the county, the district and the village. The day happened to be Easter. So the boy who had once wept on his bed and bargained with God for this woman’s life stood up at her funeral, in front of his own flesh and blood and the officials of three levels of government, and preached the resurrection and eternal life in Jesus Christ. He thanked God, afterwards, for the courage.
There was one more reunion at that funeral. Years before, when David was small, an aunt used to give him pocket money, and he hid it in a milk tin above the door lintel; it vanished on the day his second brother left for Hong Kong without saying goodbye. That brother went on to Taiwan and never wrote, until a letter arrived asking for ten thousand American dollars to open a barbershop. Esther had just sold her house in Canada; with her agreement, David sent five thousand — a large sum then — hoping his brother would feel something of God’s love in it. The shop never opened and the money was never seen again. Their father was not pleased. But at the funeral David saw the brother he had not seen for thirty-five years, and prayed with him to receive the Lord.
He went back to the village most years while his mother was alive. On one of those visits he found the local church in a bad state: the district government had been using the building as a canteen for years and wanted money for a new one before it would move out, and the pastor had not been paid his stipend in a long time. David asked what the man’s monthly wage was, handed him a year of it in banknotes, and told him to take it as God’s wages, since the money was God’s anyway. Back in America he raised the rest from friends and sent it, and the church got its meeting place back.
Early 1990s · His forties · Farewell九〇年代初 · 四十多歲 · 道別
The people behind the ministry牧養，留在人心裏
As the family prepared to move east, people at Cornerstone wrote down what David and Esther had meant to them. Between the photographs were memories of a baptism, Wednesday prayer meetings, nursery care and friendship. Their ministry had entered people’s daily lives; these were the voices saying goodbye.
Open the original scan ↗放大原件影像 ↗“Thank you for leading me to Christ and baptizing me.” — Carrie, page 18.「謝謝您帶領我認識基督，並為我施洗。」——Carrie，第18頁；中文為翻譯。Open the original scan ↗放大原件影像 ↗“You are the quiet strength and support of Rev. Tsang’s ministry.” — a message to Esther, page 19.「您是曾牧師事工背後安靜的力量與支持。」——致 Esther 的留言，第19頁；中文為翻譯。
Family archive · PDF pages 18–19. The original filename says 1991; the album itself is undated. Full scanned pages are preserved, including their mixed photograph orientations.家族檔案 · PDF第18至19頁。原檔名註一九九一年，相冊內未見日期。保留完整掃描頁及照片原有的不同方向。
The 1990s → early 2000s · His late forties and fifties九〇年代至二〇〇〇年代初 · 四十多至五十多歲
Across Chinese communities走進華人群體
A call east回應東岸的呼聲
A Chinese church had spent years looking for a pastor. After ten months of prayer and a visit from its leaders, David agreed to leave California for the Chinese Christian Church of Washington, D.C., in Silver Spring, Maryland. Friends questioned the move, but he had given his word. He would keep it, taking the family across the country.
One friend asked why he was going against the traffic — everyone on the east coast was trying to move west. Another, a pastor, gave him a farewell dinner and then told him the truth: he had preached at that church; it had driven out faithful servants of God more than once; he would be wise not to go. David answered that it was too late — he had already said yes, and he was not going to take it back. He put himself in God’s hands and went.
The warning was accurate. He suffered a great deal there for the gospel, and after four years God led him away. He wrote about it with unusual bluntness. Washington, he said, broke his own myth about himself. He had thought that a man with a doctorate in missiology, who had brought thousands of people to faith, who acted on conscience and had planted growing churches, could not possibly be disliked. People had wept when he left Pomona and Cornerstone. He had been, he decided, too naive. The Lord Jesus was a better man than he was and was rejected all the same. Who was he? After that he understood his own suffering differently: he was walking where his Master had walked.
A local newspaper offered another place to teach. As chair of the Washington area’s Chinese ministers’ association, David gathered believers from different churches to publish Christian articles and announcements on a shared page. Their work grew into the Agape Evangelistic Association. He later served Columbia Chinese Baptist Church in Ellicott City, continuing his ministry among Maryland’s Chinese community.
David had agreed to buy a home when a church in New York invited him to serve. Walking its crowded Chinese streets, he saw a need for the gospel and wanted to go. But the elderly couple selling him their house had made plans around his promise. He chose to keep the agreement, accepting the cost of selling again. In Flushing, he became senior pastor of Boon Church of OCM, preaching in Mandarin, Cantonese, Swatowese, Hakka and English.
Esther did the arithmetic for him: cancelling the purchase would save about twenty thousand dollars in taxes and fees on a house they were about to sell again. Keeping it would cost that money, and would let an elderly couple move into their retirement home on the day they had planned. He weighed the two and paid the twenty thousand dollars, which he described as the price of his word and of a pastor’s good name.
He approached leadership as work to share: pray first, make the goal clear, then invite people to serve through their own gifts. Equipping coworkers meant helping them see why their part mattered spiritually. As he wrote: “Team work is the way to get the job done.”
Wherever he went, people put him in charge of things. In China, with a bad family background, his classmates made him deputy monitor. In Hong Kong, a junior student, he was elected head of the student association. In California he was chosen vice-chair of a valley-wide Chinese association by people outside his own church, and head of the Chinese Methodist caucus although he had not come up through that denomination. In New York, newly arrived, he was made vice-chair of one association of churches and chairman of another for the whole metropolitan area. He put it down to being willing to commit himself, and went on committing himself.
The count he kept was of a different kind. Over those decades, he wrote, God gave him the chance to bring several thousand souls to faith. His own résumé says the same thing in one line, without a number attached to his name: God has used him in the past to bring thousands to Christ.
His guiding principle, Him, You and Me. English translation.他在《衪你我》中寫下的做人宗旨。
Story & historical sources故事與歷史資料
The handwritten hymn Parents’ Kindness Is as Deep as the Sea (DT-0627) credits David with words and music and bears the handwritten year 1985. It is not identified as a song written specifically for his children. The Cornerstone farewell album (DT-0615), pages 18–19, supplies the fellowship memories and quotations. English excerpts preserve the handwriting; Chinese is translated. The filename supplies 1991, while the album pages mention the coming Washington, D.C. ministry without an internal date. It therefore illustrates the transition east without resolving the different appointment dates in his records. No unnamed person in an album photograph is identified.
Further passages of Him, You and Me now carried in this chapter: his reason for refusing to close the Chinese work and the fifty-odd who were attending when he handed it on; the criticism that he was opening Chinese work as a line of retreat and the district superintendent’s objection; the four-hundred-dollar monthly allowance at Pomona and Esther’s clinic work; the immigration scheme he refused and what he said to the man; the backdated donation check he refused; at his mother’s funeral, the mourning party, his own dry eyes and his two reasons, the thousand mourners and cadres of three levels, the Easter sermon, the second brother, the stolen childhood savings, the five thousand dollars sent to Taiwan and the prayer they made together after thirty-five years; the yearly visits home, the village pastor’s unpaid stipend, the year of wages given to him and the money later raised in America to recover the church building; the militia captain who had persecuted the family, the relative who tried to put him out and the tea they drank instead; the friend who asked why he was going “against the traffic” and the pastor who warned him at his farewell dinner; the four years in Washington and his account of the myth it broke; Esther’s twenty-thousand-dollar calculation on the house; the offices he was elected to in four places; and his own record of several thousand people brought to faith, which his résumé states independently without a number. The memoir assigns no years to the immigration scheme, the backdated check, the village-church gift, or the offices; they are placed here in the order he tells them, within the periods his professional records support.
Him, You and Me: Cornerstone’s English and Chinese gatherings, the living-room congregation and pulpit, childcare, his mother’s Easter 1987 funeral, ten months of prayer before moving east, newspaper ministry, the call to New York and his guiding principle. Church names, locations, roles and preaching languages: résumé, personal testimony and Record of serving. The teamwork quotation and leadership approach come from “My leadership style” in Record of serving; the English quotation is verbatim and the Chinese is a translation. These are historical appointments; some dates differ across his records, so their sequence is retained without assigning exact tenures. The childcare episode and lectern photograph are undated. Historical context below.
《衪你我》記述房角石教會的中英文聚會、客廳聚會與手製講台、照顧孩子、一九八七年復活節母親喪禮、赴東岸前十個月的禱告、報紙事工、到紐約服事的心願，以及做人宗旨。教會名稱、地點、職務與講道語言，據履歷、個人見證及英文〈Record of serving〉（服事記錄）。同工合作的引文與帶領理念，出自該記錄的「我的領導方式」；英文照錄，中文為翻譯。以上均為歷年的服事經歷；個別任期在記錄中不一，故保留先後次序，不另配定確切年份。照顧孩子的那次經歷與講台照片，日期均未詳。時代背景參考下列資料。
More than thirty years earlier · Vancouver三十多年前 · 溫哥華
A book she had already named一本早已取好名字的書
In the years they were living in Vancouver, Esther woke in the middle of the night and woke him with a single sentence. “Honey,” she said, “have you finished that book of yours, I, You, He?” David had no idea what she meant. What book, he asked. It turned out to have been a scene inside the dream she had just come out of. He never asked her what the rest of the dream was, and she never told him. He kept the question.
He kept it for more than thirty years. Late in life he asked God whether this was now the time to finish the book called I, You, He, and took the answer to be yes. Then he made one change to the title his wife had brought back out of her sleep. The book opened with his grandfather’s conversion and was, from the first page, an account of what God had done; all thirty of its subjects were built on God’s own words; and he had asked God about every illustration before he let it in. So He went first. Him, You and Me.
“You,” he wrote, is everyone who has anything to do with me: believers and unbelievers, the good and the not so good, the spiritual and the unspiritual, the ancients and those not yet ancient. “I” is the author.
David had spent years pursuing the education once denied him. In The Secret of True Doctrine, dated 2004 in his family’s catalogue, he asked how believers could gain spiritual depth without attending seminary. He wrote for the individual reader as well as the study group and Sunday class, carrying the work of teaching beyond his own voice.
2008 · Age 65 · Words of thanks二〇〇八年 · 65歲 · 一封感謝信
What his teaching left behind他的教導，留在人心裏
A handwritten letter shows what his teaching meant to two of his listeners. As David prepared for retirement, Jerry and Amy thanked him for two years of pastoral care: he made faith easier to understand and reminded them how to live it. They joked that his vivid storytelling deserved an Oscar. Their gratitude embraced Esther too—her laughter, warmth and quiet strength were part of what they would miss.
“We love your teaching because you make it so easy for us to understand.”
「我們喜愛您的教導，因為您講得淺白易懂。」
Jerry and Amy · their handwritten letter to David and Esther.Jerry 與 Amy 致大衛及 Esther 的手寫信；中文為翻譯。
Enlarge letter ↗放大信件 ↗Date as written: 11/1/2008. Signed “Jerry and Amy @ MCCC.” Family-preserved original.原信日期：11/1/2008。署名「Jerry and Amy @ MCCC」。家人保存的原件影像。Read the letter閱讀信件中文全文
Transcribed from the handwriting, with original wording retained.
11/1/2008
Dear Pastor Tsang,
Jerry and I are very grateful to have you as our Pastor for the past two years. You are a truly honest and obedient servant of God. You are also humorous, wise and practical. We love your teaching because you make it so easy for us to understand. The stories and analogies you tell are so vividly delivered that you could have won an Oscar for your delivery. We are so glad you are here to remind us how to be good Christians and to serve our Lord wholeheartedly. Your strength and perseverance in following Christ has been very fruitful. May God continue to bless you, your family, and your well-deserved retirement in Canada!
Dear Mrs. Tsang,
We've come to love your smile and your happiness you convey with each laugh! You are so meticulously organized and we are amazed with how you packed everything together. Your love for God and your husband sets such a good example and your quiet strength displays both warm and gentleness. You'll be missed! May God continue to bless your health and family!
Love,
Jerry and Amy @ MCCC.
以下為原信的中文翻譯。
11/1/2008
親愛的曾牧師：
Jerry 和我非常感恩，過去兩年有您作我們的牧師。您是神真誠、順服的僕人，也幽默、睿智、務實。我們喜愛您的教導，因為您講得淺白易懂。您把故事與比喻講得如此生動，簡直值得獲頒一座奧斯卡獎。我們很欣慰，有您在這裏提醒我們怎樣作好基督徒，全心服事主。您跟隨基督的堅定與恆毅，已結出豐盛的果子。願神繼續賜福給您、您的家人，也祝福您在加拿大享受辛勞之後的退休生活！
Undated · in his later years of ministry未註年份 · 晚年的事奉
He had left his position. He had not retired.職退，卻未曾休。
A pastor in China had invited him many times to come and preach, and for a long time he did not respond: he was busy every day evangelizing where he was, and he did not think that bringing people to Christ was a matter of region or race. Then his deacons agreed to it and a woman in the church paid his fare, and he read that as the answer. He went for three weeks.
On one Sunday he preached to a congregation of more than a thousand. Before the service the pastor apologized to him: to stay within state policy, the printed order of service could call him only Doctor, not Pastor. David said he did not mind in the slightest, and privately enjoyed the joke God appeared to be making. In Vancouver he had been torn to pieces for signing himself Doctor. In America he had kept the title off the church bulletin so that religious people would not make trouble. In China he was not permitted to be anything else. He preached Jesus without hedging; more than twenty people stood to profess faith; the church asked for another service, and he preached four times that day.
He noticed the organist particularly. She played for the Lord in all weathers; she was blind; and she had the whole hymnbook by heart.
他特別敬佩那位司琴的老姊妹：她風雨無阻地為主司琴，眼睛看不見，卻能熟背整本琴譜。
On another Sunday, in a church of eight hundred packed beyond its walls, about three quarters of the congregation stood when he gave the invitation. Afraid they had misunderstood him, he said again that he was asking only those deciding that day. More than six hundred stayed on their feet. Some days later he preached the same sermon in Taipei with his voice in ruins — the last hall in China had had bad sound and no microphone, so he had shouted for hours — and eight people responded. He drew his own conclusion about money and the kingdom of God, and quoted his Master on how hard it is.
In Toronto, at a Chinese church of more than three thousand, he preached a missions convention. On the last day he gave four messages one after another, and stood at the door shaking hands after each. Getting into the car afterwards, his legs cramped, and he understood that a man past seventy no longer has the body he used to have. Then a member asked whether he would come and speak to his mother-in-law, whom he had been bringing to church for ten years without result. The schedule was full and Esther had just arrived in the city; he went anyway. He asked after the old woman’s health, prayed for her, explained the gospel briefly, and inside half an hour she prayed to receive the Lord. Driving him back, her son-in-law wanted to know how ten years had come to nothing and half an hour had been enough.
The family catalogue records Discard the False, Keep the True and What Pilgrims Must Know in 2014. Across devotionals, pastoral handbooks and memoir, his question persisted: how should belief change the way a person lives?
In Spiritual Spring and Autumn, his Chinese learning and Christian faith meet. He invoked Confucius’s Annals as a model of moral discernment, then explained his purpose: clear understanding of Scripture. He hoped the readings would nourish believers, support Bible-study groups and give pastors insight for sermons.
Esther helped proofread his memoir. David cut away unnecessary words and kept each chapter short, choosing carefully what a reader needed from the long life behind the writing.
Plum and pine · an artistic response to his own words.松柏與寒梅 · 依他的文字寄意。
“I am not a peony, but a plum blossom.”
「我不是牡丹而是梅花。」
His own image of endurance, Him, You and Me. English translation.《衪你我》後語：他以寒梅寫自己。
The peony, he explained, covets wealth; the plum blossom goes through the cold. One keeps company with flowers added to brocade. The other keeps company with the hardy trees of winter.
His memoir closes with a ring-shaped poem. In Chinese, part of each line’s final character becomes the next line’s first. His own English rendering is preserved below.
回憶錄以一首迴型詩作結：由中心起讀，每句末字的一部分，成為下句的首字。以下保留他的原文。
心 無 偽 主 勞
片 卻 不 休 碌
一 退 雖 楓 甘
紅 職 是 之 作
秋 深 鎖 林 牛
Even though I have left my position, and yet I am not retired. My life is like the forest of maple trees locked into the autumn. Glowing with an autumn tint, my heart remains truly to God. I am willing to labour for the Lord like a cow.
His own English renderings, preserved in the manuscript.Story & historical sources故事與歷史資料
Further passages of Him, You and Me now carried in this chapter: the preface, which records Esther waking him in Vancouver to ask about a book called I, You, He, his not knowing what she meant, and his keeping the question for years; the afterword, which records his asking God whether it was time, his reason for putting He first, his definitions of “You” and “I”, and his explanation of the peony and the plum blossom. The three-week preaching visit to China and the Toronto missions convention come from the memoir and are undated there; the memoir was completed around 2014 and describes both as recent, which is why they appear in this chapter without a year. The Chinese pastor who invited him is named in the memoir; the churches, cities and the organist are not otherwise identified, and no church is named here. The numbers of people who stood are David’s own record.
The introduction to The Secret of True Doctrine supplies its question about spiritual depth without seminary and its intended uses for personal study, groups and Sunday teaching.
The horse-and-foal painting is DT-0616, labeled as David’s original painting by the family and signed 曾牧; its caption is Psalm 103:13. The calligraphy is DT-0620, signed by David and bearing four English renderings on the original. Both works are undated and are presented as related artwork, not as events or publications dated to this chapter. Their full-page scans retain their original composition.
Dates come from the preserved book catalogue. The original thank-you letter is signed Jerry and Amy @ MCCC and dated 11/1/2008; it thanks David for two years of pastoral care and wishes him retirement in Canada. Its date is retained as written, and MCCC is not expanded. The English reading text is transcribed from the handwriting; Chinese is a translation. The letter does not establish that all his ministry ended in 2008. Spiritual Spring and Autumn: author introduction and preface. Him, You and Me: afterword, his wife’s proofreading, plum-blossom image and closing poem. Undated works are presented as related readings, not newly assigned publication years.
年份據家人保存的書目。感謝信原件署名Jerry and Amy @ MCCC，日期寫作11/1/2008；信中感謝大衛兩年的牧養，並祝福他在加拿大的退休生活。日期照原件保留，MCCC不另加推定全名。英文閱讀版按手寫原文謄錄，中文為翻譯；這封信並不表示他所有的服事都在二〇〇八年結束。《屬靈春秋》參考作者簡介與序言；《衪你我》參考後語、師母校對、寒梅自喻與迴型詩。未註日期的作品作延伸閱讀，不另行配定出版年份。
Chapter 06第 06 章2015 — 2026 · Ages 72–83 · 72–83歲
20152026
His words.Remain.生命有盡，愛與文字長存。
After years of ministry across cities and congregations, David and Esther made their retirement home in Vancouver. His memoir’s closing poem expresses his resolve: leaving a position need not mean ceasing to serve.
He addressed that poem to his fellow soldiers on the field of what he called an age-long war, and signed off from his readers as a man stepping into the years of the old horse in the stable, whose ambition still runs a thousand miles.
Words had been the instrument of his whole working life. He preached in Mandarin, Cantonese, Swatowese, Hakka and English. He wrote and published in Chinese, and kept writing after he stopped holding a pulpit. He had once memorized an English sermon line by line rather than let a language stand between him and the people in front of him.
In 2020, David was formally diagnosed with dementia — an illness of memory and language.
二〇二〇年，大衛正式確診失智症——一種影響記憶與語言的病。
2022 · Age 79 · Austin, Texas二〇二二年 · 79歲 · 德州奧斯汀
Closer to family搬到家人身邊
In 2022, David and Esther moved to Austin, Texas, to be closer to Angell and his family. After so many moves made for ministry, this one was made for family.
David was also diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease in 2022. Looking back on their years together, Esther recalls signs she now associates with Parkinson’s as early as his forties—her retrospective recollection, long before the formal diagnosis.
David’s life drew to a close in 2026. We meet him again in Jerry and Amy’s letter, the short chapters of his memoir, and photographs with the people beside him: a husband, father and pastor who sought to live his faith.
二〇二六年，大衛的一生在此落幕。我們仍能從 Jerry 與 Amy 的信、回憶錄的短章，以及他與身旁的人合影的照片裏，再與他相遇：一位努力活出信仰的丈夫、父親與牧者。
He was eighty-three. He had been born in a year of the Water Horse, and he died in a year of the Fire Horse — 丙午, which began on 17 February 2026. His family, reading the two ends of his life together, thought of the prophet Elijah, who was taken up in a whirlwind with a chariot of fire and horses of fire. The man who had crossed dark water under Orion’s Belt went out in the year of the horse of fire.
His family is gathering these photographs and writings so others can hear his voice for themselves. Twelve physical books—about 1,500 pages—are still awaiting scans. As they arrive, they will join his library: pages to return to, a conversation family and friends can continue.
In 1966 a carpenter with no work, no church and no permit stood beside a building covered in slogans and told God that if a way were ever opened, he would spend his life rebuilding the church. He was given sixty more years. He used them: two churches founded from nothing, congregations pastored on both American coasts, a shelf of books, and, by his own count, several thousand people brought to faith. He kept his word.
The dedication of his closing poem and his phrase about the old horse in the stable come from the afterword of Him, You and Me. The five preaching languages come from his résumé; the memorized English sermon is recorded in the memoir. Dementia is described here only as an illness of memory and language; no claim is made about what he experienced, retained or lost, and the family has supplied no such account. The count of two churches founded, coasts served and several thousand people brought to faith follows his résumé and his own memoir; his résumé names him founder of the Pomona Valley Chinese Christian Church and of the Chinese Methodist Blessed Church in southern California.
Angell supplied the retirement in Vancouver, the formal dementia diagnosis in 2020, the Parkinson’s disease diagnosis in 2022, the purpose of moving to Austin, and the later assessment of likely Parkinson’s disease dementia (PDD). Esther’s recollection of possible signs in his forties is reported through Angell; it is not dated as a diagnosis or established disease onset. A family message dated July 21, 2022 says they had recently moved to Texas, supporting the move’s year. The exact retirement year and date of the later PDD assessment are not supplied. The final year, 2026, and the pending scan count also come from the family. The later portraits are undated and are not used to infer health details or events. The scans have not yet arrived.
View image ↗放大查看 ↗
