Lillian Dickson of Taiwan

Christian Herald Magazine, May 1962
By Clarence W. Hall

When one day a few years ago the foreign-missions board of the Presbyterian Church in Canada learned that the wife of one of its ablest leaders on Formosa was engaging in conduct unbecoming a missionary spouse, it promptly took investigative action.

The lady’s name was Lillian Dickson, wife of James Dickson, principal of the Taiwan Theological College.  The board’s rules were plain: a missionary wife held no commission of her own.  Her function was a prim and proper one, limited to practice of the gentile arts of housewifery-period.

Yet here,  according to reports, was a wife who’d been going about Formosa consulting officials, snatching young boys from prison and young girls from parents who were selling their daughters into prostitution; traipsing off into the island's primitive regions to consort with aborigines only a short step removed from head-hunting; moving in to rehabilitate the leprous; establishing orphanages and churches all over the island, and generally stirring up more ruckus-and improvement-in the embattled island than anyone had ever attempted before.

It was not that the board disapproved of such a flagrant spate of good works.  It was only that they were being performed by a missionary’s wife- and without benefit of the board’s approval, guidance, or support.

Confronted by a committee sent out to investigate, Lil Dickson pleaded guilty to wanton compassion. “But what would you do,” she demanded, her blue eyes flashing, “if God pushed yu like He’s pushing me?”

Back in Toronto, the board went into executive session with one topic on its agenda: “What to do about Lillian Dickson.”  The session ended with the board members closing the fractured rule book , and sighing in concert, “What a woman!”

Today, thanks to Lil Dickson’s indomitable spirit, Formosa is dotted with an incredible variety of orphanages and churches, hospitals and clinics, homes for handicapped children, schools and kindergartens, services for the blind and leprous, emergency relief operations galore.  Islanders call her “the littlest lady with the biggest heart.”

Says Hollington K. Tong, former Nationalist Chinese ambassador to the United States: “Christianity’s leaping growth in Taiwan, tenfold since 1945, is largely due to this tireless woman who can’t say no to human need.”

She hadn’t wanted to be a missionary in the first place.  Daughter of a flour-and-feed mill operator in Prior Lake, Minn., Lil Dickson yearned to put her exuberant vitality into a newspaper career.  This yen met its undoing when she went to Minnesota’s Macalester College and fell in love with a classmate, an ex-cowboy from South Dakota named Jim Dickson.

Jim too had hankerings far removed from mission fields until he came under the magnetic influence of Macalester’s beloved president emeritus, Dr. James Wallace. Possessed of a genius for inspiring young men toward the Christian ministry, Wallace told the tiny co-ed and the rangy ex-cowhand as they stood before him one day, “If you want to make your lives together really count, go to the mission field.”

By 1927, following Jim’s graduation from Princeton Theological Seminary and ordination, the Dicksons were on their way to Formosa. Save for brief furloughs and the war years, they have been there ever since.

For 19 years Lillian Dickson managed to play the role of “proper” missionary wife according to her church’s rules: tending her home, raising her two children, keeping Jim reasonably content amid the chafings of official resistance to Christian missions.  It wasn’t easy.  While the Japanese, who had held the island since 1895, permitted missionaries to conduct schools and hospitals, they frowned on attempts to make Christians.  Completely closed to missionaries were Formosa’s mysterious mountains- ranging up to 14,000 feet-where dwelt some 150,000 fiercely independent aborigines of obscure origin.

For hundreds of years these primitive tribes, with a long history of head-hunting, had courageously resisted all of Formosa’s successive occupying powers.  Especially defiant was the heavily tattooed Tyal tribe, 35,000 strong, who occupied the high peaks and deep gorges of north central Formosa. Even the efficient Japanese police could not curb their murderous customs, resorted instead to ringing the mountain bases with electrified barbed wire.  Even so, some Tyals slipped through; a few came into contact with Christian missions and were converted.

One such convert was a 58 year old Tyal woman named Chi-oang, her withered face heavily tattooed with tribal markings, whom Jim Dickson met one day on a tour of coastal mission stations and persuaded to take a two-year Bible course at a school he’d set up in Tumasi.  Chi-oang then disappeared into the mountain fastnesses.

It was not until after World War II, when the Dicksons hastened back to Formosa, that they discovered how well Chi-oang had used her new-found faith.  It was an astounding story.  Led by the frail old Tyal woman, an underground Christian movement had swept  through the mountains, resulting in more than 4,000 converts.

The Japanese police, alarmed at Chi-oang’s activity, had put a price on her head.  Yet sick and feeble, the dauntless old woman had flitted like a wraith out of their hands.  When her pursuers got too near, strong young tribesmen carried her on their backs for miles to places of safety.
The Japanese dispatched special forces into the hills to stamp out the Christian sparks Chi-oang ignited.  They made bonfires of Bibles and hymnbooks spirited in from the coast, beat and threatened the admittedly Christian. But they found Chi-oang’s converts faithful even in the face of death.

Now , with the war over, Formosan pastors told the Dicksons, hundreds of aborigines were coming down from the hills, knocking at the doors of their churches, asking for Bibles and baptism.

When Jim Dickson announced that he must go and see for himself what had happened, Lil begged to go along.

Together they penetrated the formerly forbidden territory, found Chi-oang’s trail everywhere in whole villages turned Christian, little bamboo churches being erected, the people eagerly seeking further instruction.

Back in Taipei, Jim Dickson moaned, “Here we have one of the most amazing movements of modern missionary history, and, what with teaching and oversight of churches, I have no time and no one I can trust to make a real survey of needs-and no funds to meet them if I did find out,”  At which Lil said quietly, “You’ve got me, Jim.  Let me try – please.”

Thus began the first of Lillian Dickson’s many treks into the Formosan mountains, the start of Christian endeavor that, now engaged in by many groups, is rapidly transforming the lives of the mountain people.  Today, more than 63,000 have become Christians, worshipping in some 400 self-supporting Protestant churches, an almost equal number of Roman Catholic churches.

However, when Lil Dickson first ventured into these mountains there was almost nothing and no one save the aborigines.  Often alone, sometimes with a Formosan pastor and some native Christian woman for companion, she set out upon these jaunts with a perky insouciance that belied her deep-down fears.  To her husband she confided, “I could never, never do it if it weren’t for Christ’s sake.  Somehow one can do anything for Him.”

To contact the widely scattered groups of Christian aborigines required trips of several days, even weeks, at a time.  She took with her only a small bag containing a change of clothing and some medicines.  Later, learning that the mountain people loved music and singing, she learned to play the accordion.  Thereafter, wherever she went the accordion went with her, carried on the back of some native bearer.  Word of her coming preceded her  by mountain grapevine, and great crowds of tribes people came out to meet her.

Not all tribal leaders were friendly. At one village, conferring with local Christians until past midnight, she was told that in a neighboring community the chief, a huge hulk of a man, had been beating and threatening death to any who became Christian.   Outraged, Lil tramped the five miles through the darkness, found the chief’s hut, shook him awake, “You’ve been persecuting Christians,” she shouted like an avenging angel delivering doom. “If I hear of any more of it, I’ll make big trouble for you!”

The big chief, who could have felled her with one stroke, meekly promised never to molest Christians again.  And he didn’t.  When I asked Lil Dickson what kind of “big trouble” she had in mind, she laughed.  “I don’t know.  I hadn’t figured that far.”

She grew accustomed to wading streams waist deep, to being carried on the shoulders of mountain men when water was over her head; and she learned how to creep across dangling bridges spanning raging torrents.

On one such crossing, noting a band of aborigines curiously watching from the opposite shore, she said to a companion, “They’re either praying for us or laying bets on whether we’ll make it!” 

Not that she always came through unscathed.  She was often down with dysentery from eating native food, often arrived home with skin pocked with infections from nights spent in native huts.  But such ailments she took in stride, called them mere “occupational hazards.”

Lil Dickson brought back to Taipei more than bruises and exhaustion.  She brought back a thorough survey of the mountain people’s direst needs and an unshakeable determination to meet them.  Their spiritual needs were dire enough.  Even more immediate were their physical needs.  Because of primitive living conditions, poor sanitation and no knowledge of hygiene, inadequate diet and lack of medicines, few lived to attain middle age.  Infant mortality was unbelievably high; mothers who bore a dozen children were lucky if more than one survived.  TB was especially virulent; incidence among the tribes ran a low of 50 per cent among the Bununs to as high as 80 per cent among the Paiwans.

Jim Dickson listened wearily to Lil’s list of needs and plans to meet them.  “But where are we to get the money?” he asked. “Let’s make a start ,” she said, “God won’t let us down.”

When she told the American aid officials how TB was rampaging through the mountains, hoping to snare some funds for a few mountain clinics, she was informed, “The problem is like the sea.  Anything you or we could do would be only dipping at it with a bucket.”   Hotly Lil replied, “Nevertheless, I’m going to take out my bucketful!”

To Jim she said, “I think I’ll write a few letters to friends at home.”

In letters to the States she described her mountain people, their staunch Christianity, their needs and her hopes, graphically pictured the “wonderful people dying before their time, the little lives that flicker out so easily in the mountains.”  ‘She told of the constant threat from across the Straits:  “ The Chinese Reds boast that they will enter Formosa through the aborigines, but if we can win the hearts of these people with love and kindness…”

She asked for no money, simply wrote, “Though we have no funds, we’re going ahead with plans anyway. Pray for us.”

Without a dime to pay for them, she placed orders for materials and drugs, selected a site for her first mountain clinic, began rounding up volunteer helpers, doctors and nurses.  Jim talked another mission into inaugurating a mobile medical clinic as a stop-gap.  Before any bill came due, gifts of money and clothing began coming from the States.  Lil wrote more letters, and as more money came in she launched more projects.

Today, Lil Dickson’s “mountain work,” among all the seven main tribes, includes: over 100 new churches built; 100 church kindergartens caring for more than 5,000 youngsters of working mothers; a school at Hwalien for 60 aboriginal boys of high- school age; where farming, animal husbandry and trades are taught; a similar school for girls, where some 90 at a time are instructed in housekeeping, child care, hygiene, cooking and sewing, with courses leading to nurse’s aid or kindergarten teacher training; a teacher’s training school at Koan-san which has already graduated more than 200; 10 large clinics serving 28,000 patients a month, many with in-patient facilities, a separate TB sanatorium, and four maternity wards.  In areas where her clinics operate, both TB incidence and infant mortality have dropped markedly.

Lillian Dickson’s work among Formosa’s aborigines was by no means her sole field of endeavor.  Once she’d tuned her heart to the human cry for help, she heard that cry coming from everywhere.  A jingle she likes to quote is; “You never know where God will lead until you go to meet a need.”

One caring “leading” was toward the big government leprosarium near Taipei.   In 1947, visiting it for the first time, she was appalled at the extent of human misery and hopelessness she found, promptly felt the urge to do something about it.

Jammed together in vermin-ridden shacks with not so much as a chair to sit on, some 1,000 ragged inmates were provided with only one bowl of rice a day, had to do their own cooking over open fires that often burned hands their disease made insensitive, ate from battered tin cans, slept on rat-gnawed filthy pads on the bare ground.  Many were blind; most were crippled; few got more than casual medical treatment.  Suicides among the inmates averaged three a week.

In charge of the leprosarium was a corrupt superintendent who sold most of the food and drugs supplied, made it plain that he resented her “interference.” Indignantly she stormed, “I’ve only begun to interfere!”

To set things right at the leprosarium, Lil Dickson knew she needed money, big money.  Finding it impossible to get help from the refugee Nationalist government, struggling to settle itself on an island daily threatened with invasion from the Communist mainland, she appealed to the official in charge of American aid distribution, coaxed him into coming out to see for himself. “God sent a rainstorm that kept him there an hour, long enough for me to tell him everything.”  The conference resulted in an aid grant of $300,000, “enough to build eight beautiful new dormitories.”

Meanwhile Lil Dickson urged the chastened superintendent to provide a place for a clinic, recruited a doctor to visit the leprosarium every day, talked a German mission into providing a full-time nurse.  For weeks she used her own money to buy medicines to ease the sufferings of the dying, wrote her friends in the States for help in getting drugs for the others.

With the money that came in, she set up a proper kitchen, hired cooks to prepare cooked meals for all, brought dishes to replace the tin cans, new beds and a chair for each patient.

Improvising a suitable room for a library, she stocked it with magazines and books, opened a school with a Christian volunteer teacher, established a Bible- study course, obtained a kiln and started a brickyard where the able-bodied could earn a little money.  For the less able, she provided seeds and flower settings.  Today the formerly bleak and dusty compound features many garden plots perennially a-bloom with roses, peonies, chrysanthemums, poinsettias.  The leprosarium is now called Lok-Seng –I (meaning Happy Life)-a name chosen by the patients themselves.

It is not surprising that today almost half of the leprosarium’s 1,000 patients are baptized Christians.  For them Lil Dickson built, several years ago, a lovely chapel.  With no money to start with, she began building anyway, adding brick by brick as money came in.  From all over the compound she laid cement walks leading to this “Church of the Lepers,” provided basket-like carts to wheel the legless to services, had music and messages piped to the bedsides of those too ill to attend.

When she discovered that patients ready for release from the leprosarium found re-entry into normal society difficult, she begged money to build two “half-way houses,” one for men and one for women, where they could spend a period of preparation for making a new life.  When she found among the leprous artistic talents that, despite crippled hands, could be used to absorb idle hours and even make new careers for themselves, she helped patients erect an occupational –therapy building where the handicapped turn out quantities of intricate embroidery and needlework, wood-carvings, sculpture and painting.

A third division of Lil Dickson’s incredibly varied labors is among orphans.  Today under her direct care and support are some 500, in 12 different orphanages and homes.  She says, ”I’m like the old woman who lived in a shoe- only I’ve got more shoes.”

She got into her orphanage operation when, visiting a temporary prison one day, she discovered to her horror that young boys, some no more than 9 years of age, were being put into prison along with hardened adult criminals, imbeciles, perverts and vagrants.

Pathetic leftovers from the mainlanders’ headlong flight to the island, hordes of homeless and orphaned children roved the streets, lived by their wits, were picked up in droves for petty thievery or merely because they had no “residential certificate.”

In one prison Mrs. Dickson found 140 such boys - dirty, half sick, undernourished, frightened.  Piteously, she said, “They seem so small to have such big troubles!”

A magistrate told her, “I’ll gladly turn some of these kids over to you, Mrs. Dickson- if you’ll take them.”  She replied, impulsively, “Of course I’ll take them!”

Without a cent to start on, she bargained for land and money, persuaded volunteers to help, and began taking out prison boys a few at a time. “I just mothered them,” she explains, “and they responded, even the toughest of them.”  Eventually she acquired a group of buildings, established a school and chapel, brought in teachers to train in trades and crafts.  Later she set up a Boys Home Annex and two “second mile” houses in town where older boys could live while pursuing their studies or working in Taipei.

From these homes, which have housed hundreds since their inception, more than 30 boys to date have been graduated; all are now making good on their own.

Indignation as well as compassion has led Lil Dickson into similar projects for girls.  When she learned that girls in a government school for the blind desperately needed a separate dormitory, she acquired a two- story house opposite the school, worked day and night to paint and furnish it, and moved in 30 girls.

Shortly after setting up her work for prison boys, Lillian Dickson established similar houses of refuge for little girls taken from prison or turned over to her by impoverished parents tempted to sell them.  Such sales usually led to lives of prostitution.

Among other homes for children set up by Lil Dickson and supported by her contributors in the states are: one for handicapped children deserted by their parents because of their crippled and “useless “ condition; one for the mentally retarded, similarly outcast.

Struck by the pitiful sight of 300 children trying to learn at a government school for the deaf and dumb, she found she could buy inexpensive hearing aids in Japan for $10, relayed word to her correspondents.  Without waiting for the money to come in, she ordered 65 of the instruments on credit, then reported: “As they heard sound for the first time, and expression of utter bewilderment and astonishment would come upon their faces.  That expression would change to one of such transcendent delight that you felt ashamed to see it- as if you’d stumbled onto a scene so sacred that you could not look.”

Despite all who would try to slow her down, Lillian Dickson goes on throwing bridges over chasms of crisis as they arise.  Her policy is, “Where there’s a need, answer it. You can have a conference later-on how it was done!”

Such emergency work of course must be fitted in between the astounding array of more than 50 permanent projects- for orphans, aborigines, the leprous, blind and handicapped-which she founded and still maintains.

The question naturally arises: how does one little five- foot- minus woman, however energetic, manage to supervise so many varied operations for human succor?  The answer lies in her faculty for facing the formidable with an indomitable faith, plus a capacity for infecting others with her own limitless compassion.

When one day, drenched with demands from every side, she broke into tears, saying to herself.  “I just can’t meet all these demands!”  a Voice seemed to say. Who can’t?”  Lil Dickson says, “I was stunned by sudden self-realization.  Did I presume to think it was I who had this burden?  Would I dare to say the Lord can’t do it?”

Besides a staff of fifteen young Formosans, the only paid workers at the big block-long three story warehouse that is her headquarters and supply station in Taipei, she has the aid of hundreds of part-time volunteers.  Among these are many wives of U.S. officers, enlisted men and other members of the American colony on Formosa.  Carried along on the tide of her own enthusiasm- always at full flood- her volunteers give themselves unreservedly in response to one of her favorite dictums, “The deed you do is the prayer you pray.”  Since she takes not a cent of salary for herself, and most aides are volunteers, she operates on less than two per cent overhead.

Her faith is simple and direct.  In starting a new project for which there are no funds, she tells her workers, “Let’s start it anyway.  If God wants it done, He’ll provide for it somehow.”  Miracles don’t surprise her.  “I live in the midst of them every day,” she says.  Her conviction is, “Get set for a miracle, and it usually comes.”

An example she cites of what happens when one “Gets set for a miracle” was the unexpected quarter help came from when, a few years ago, she conceived the occupational- therapy building for the leprosarium.   Without any money, she begged the land space, drew up the plans.  Then, while on a visit to the States, she took the project to Dr. Daniel A. Poling of Christian Herald which operates its own string of charities.  “I wish I could help you,” said Dr. Poling, “but our contributors earmark their gifts for only our rather specialized projects.”

The next day Poling got word from a lawyer that a deceased client had left Christian Herald charities a $16,000 legacy, for “Leprosy work.”  Dr. Poling summoned Mrs. Dickson to say, “We have no leprosy work, so we can’t fulfill the testor’s wishes unless you help us.  God must have been listening to our conversation yesterday,” he added. “Of course,” replied Lil.  The bequest provided not only for the therapy building but for two of the homes for cured patients as well.

Where possible, Mrs. Dickson interests other agencies and missions in taking over full or partial support of projects she starts.  World Vision Inc., for example, now provides operating funds for the Pu-li Christian Clinic for Aborigines, and for three of the boy’s homes.  Christian Children’s Fund gives support to certain orphanages she helped to start.  Church World Service and mission societies of various denominations provide supplies and medical services.

However, her work’s main support must come from individuals and local church groups in the States who hear about her and write to inquire if they might help.  With these correspondents- some 20,000 of them at present- she shares her experiences and hopes in a chatty monthly letter.
Those who respond are told exactly what their gifts will buy.  Contributors receive pictures of the children they “adopt” patients they sponsor, churches or equipment they buy-installed and in use.

Meticulous record is kept of every dime or dollar that comes in.  A ledger labeled “In Account with God” is kept for her by a former Taipei banker, now a graduate of her husband’s seminary.

To enable her supporters to get tax credit for their gifts, Lillian Dickson years ago incorporated her work as The Mustard Seed Inc.  Her choice of name refers to Matthew 17:20- “If ye have faith as a grain of mustard seed, …nothing shall be impossible unto you.”  The name seems singularly apt.