teacher missionary Shirley Eckart a beautiful human being

I do not know if I'm being naive or sentimental, but Candice Bergen's character of China teacher, the young, Miss Shirley Eckart from Vermont, impressed me deeply as an innocent, kind-hearted, warm, and compassionate person so much so you wonder if such people actually exist in this world. And it wasn't because Candice Bergen was so beautiful in this movie. Her beauty inside was far greater than her physical beauty, which was incredible.

Shirley Eckart comes from Vermont, but from what social class we're never told. Being of that time period, the late 20s, we can only assume Miss Eckart's Vermont background was at least solid, middle-middle-class at very least, and more likely, middle-class, but less chance of upper middle class. Still, Miss Eckart showed a true Christian heart. Against the social norms of the time, she introduces herself (not through a proper chaperone...scandalous!) face to face with U.S. Navy Chief Petty Officer 1st Class Jake Holman. In other words, Miss Eckart didn't treat Jake Holman like white trash, which would have been more typical of the greater social class consciousness of the time. She evinced genuine curiosity and pleasant, non-condescending conversation with Jake Holman, who we know is an utterly confident man in his technical skills, but still somewhat shy, especially as Jake knows in the 1920s, proper young, educated white women do not consort with an ordinary American sailor.

Miss Eckart does not condescend nor look down on the Chinese people, accurately portrayed in late 1920s China as living mostly in over-populated, wretched urban poverty. (The ancient Chinese of the golden early years of the Song Dynasty would be shocked, and humiliated, to see how low Chinese civilization had fallen in the early 20th century). The fate of overpopulated, underfed, impoverished, politically fragmented and chaotic, corrupt late 1920s China is a fate we Americans should do everything possible to avoid following. Miss Eckart sees all this and sees no cause to push it in the faces of the Chinese people she intends to help educate. There were genuine, sincere Protestant missionaries in China at this time who really did want to bring Christianity and education to the Chinese without subjugating them nor trying to make a profit out of it, like some of their counterparts in the Hawaiian Islands of the 19th century who made great fortunes while trying to Christianize the Hawaiian natives. Nor were these China missionaries interested in turning the Chinese into Asian counterparts of white people. It wasn't easy trying to Christianize the Chinese. The Chinese themselves originated from a great ancient civilization. The Chinese were too saavy, too sophisticated, and too rational to comprehend the apparent contradiction of the Christian Holy Trinity that espouses only One God of three, equal, divine beings. Of all the Roman Catholic and Protestant Christian missionaries in the history of China, perhaps it was the American (and some British, I think) Methodists who were the most successful.