Anne Bliss Mascolino, granddaughter of a medical missionary working in China for 40 years, paid a recent visit to China.
Anne and her husband Thomas Anthony Mascolino attended the "Coming Home: Renewing the Kuliang Friendship" cultural exchange event, which kicked off in Fuzhou, Fujian Province, on March 16, according to Fuzhou News.
The couple visited the Kuliang Families Story Museum, where the story of her grandfather Edward Lydston Bliss, an American missionary doctor who practiced medicine for 40 years in Shaowu, a remote mountainous area in Fujian Province, is included.
Kuliang was once a popular summer retreat for foreign missionaries, businessmen, and diplomats in the 19th century when Fuzhou was opened as one of China's earliest trading ports.
Born into a religious family in 1865 in Massachusetts, Edward Lydston Bliss received his bachelor's degree in Latin and Greek from Yale University. After giving up his first aspiration as a teacher, he applied as a medical missionary to the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions in 1891. Two years later, he arrived in Shaowu, where he was commissioned as a physician.
At first, he was not well received by the locals, as Western medicine was strange and new. However, he started with delivering babies for women who encountered obstructed labor. Apart from delivery, he treated malaria, rash, and cataracts, and even took teeth for the locals, which won the favor of the locals. He also set up clinics and hospitals and trained many Chinese doctors.
Studying the native dialect under a local teacher, Bliss gave himself a Chinese name, "Fu Yihua," which means "blessings" and "beneficial to China."
His son, Edward Lydston Bliss, Jr., was born in Kuliang in 1912 and lived in China for nine years. The later journalist wrote a book, Beyond the Stone Arches: An American Missionary Doctor in China, 1892–1932, to remember his father's four decades in Fujian Province.
The son considered Shaowu as his hometown, said Anne Bliss Mascolino, who retraced her family's footsteps in Shaowu lately, along with Friends of Kuliang member Elyn Maclnnis, according to Hola Fujian.
Edward Bliss Jr. who worked at CBS News for 25 years, "picked the map of China and put Shaowu on the map" early on his television program, which was seen by millions of Americans.
