A child of missionary parents, John Hersey spent the first ten years of his life in Tientsin, China. During this time he acquired a knowledge of conversational Mandarin that he never lost. He had spoken the language before he learned English. He also never lost his love and admiration of the Chinese people. At the age of seventyone, he wrote The Call, a novel whose hero is a young missionary stationed in China in the early through mid-1900s.

David Treadup genuinely wants to help the Chinese people. At the offset he differs little from the evangelical fundamentalists by whom he was trained. However, he soon becomes aware that American-style evangelism is not making that much of an impact and decides that education might succeed where Bible pounding so often fails. He begins giving science lectures to young upper-class Chinese because he feels that if they...