“One of our schools is a boarding school for Chinese girls and women. We call it the ‘Asylum.’ As to churches, our plan is a little different from yours. We have classes at different places, but all are members of the one church at San Francisco.”
At Los Angeles, from a Chinese Mission School, which was sustained for many years by the California Chinese Mission, twenty in all have united with the Presbyterian church in that city.
The United Presbyterian Church.—This church, also, sustains a mission school in Oakland, which has an average attendance of about forty pupils.
The Woman’s Union Mission to Chinese Women and Children has been in operation nearly nine years. As its name indicates, it is a union work, and is sustained for the most part by ladies in the different churches of San Francisco and Oakland. The Society has been aided materially this last year by the Chinese themselves, having received a gift in money from the “Six Companies,” and also from the Chinese merchants.
The special work of this Mission is among Chinese children, and for them a day school is sustained in the second story of the old “Globe Hotel,” at the corner of Dupont and Jackson streets. With this special work is also combined visitation among Chinese families. The number of scholars on the roll the past year is fifty-two. Thirty-two of these are boys and twenty girls. There are two teachers employed, an English teacher and a teacher of Chinese. The running expenses of this Society are about eighty-five dollars a month.
If, now, I add to this statement the following statistics touching our own Congregational Mission, the exhibit of missionary work among the Chinese in California will be complete.
We maintain 11 schools: at Oakland, Petaluma, Sacramento; in San Francisco, the Central, Barnes and Bethany; San Leandro, Santa Barbara, Stockton, Visalia and Woodland; in which 16 teachers are employed. 1,492 pupils have been enrolled during the year. The average attendance for the 12 months’ has been 244–647 being the largest number reported in any single month. 93 profess to have ceased from idol worship, and 75 give evidence of conversion.
There is, outside these organized missions, considerable work done by the churches in Chinese Sunday-schools, no complete or reliable statistics of which could be easily obtained. At those sustained by Congregational churches the total average attendance is, of pupils about 250, and of teachers about 100.
There is furthermore, we may trust, in Christian households scattered throughout the State, a work done for Chinese employed in them, which cannot be reported here, but whose record is on high. There, too, its fruit will appear, gathered into everlasting life.