Leaving the Witness

The elders asked me to meet them at the Starbucks on Nanjing Road in central Shanghai. The sun was bright that day; the usual haze had lifted for a change. When I arrived, I was greeted by Brother Steven and Brother Richard. They’d already bought me an iced coffee. The ice on top had melted. I stirred the drink with the straw.

Brother Steven started.

“Amber, we wanted to meet with you today because we heard about some things that were said.” He cleared his throat. Brother Richard’s eyes stared just past me. “We wanted to meet with you to encourage you, and give you the help you need. Please don’t feel nervous.”

The sun was bright in my face, sort of like an interrogation lamp.

“Do you know the conversations we are referring to?”

He was referring to conversations I’d had with my former Bible student, a young Chinese teacher named Jean. I’ve never been able to lie very well. I told them the truth. That yes, Jean was confused. But that I’d felt it was the right thing to do, to explain certain things to her.

“Yes, of course,” said Brother Steven. “Now please tell us exactly what was said.”

Sipping our coffee drinks, we looked like the other expats one sees around Shanghai. But we weren’t. We were Jehovah’s Witnesses. We had, each of us, arrived with bags full of Watchtower publications wrapped in gift paper or hidden inside socks, to be used for converting Chinese people to our faith. We knew lots of stories of Witnesses who had been followed, watched, bugged, deported by Chinese officials. All three of us were criminals in the eyes of the Chinese government. But only one of us was a criminal in the eyes of the church elders, and this meeting in the Starbucks would result in a different kind of deportation. It would result in the swift kick out of the life I had lived for thirty years, and into an intimidating, complicated world I had known only from the periphery.

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I began learning Mandarin Chinese in 2003 through a night class offered at my congregation in Vancouver. I had been a devout Jehovah’s Witness from the time I was a child, and I became a full-time missionary the day I graduated from high school. It was a pretty typical path for a young Witness. Pursuing any kind of career was frowned upon as materialistic and a distraction from what really mattered: preaching.

Four days a week, I would put on my modest skirt and practical shoes, fill my briefcase with magazines and other Watchtower publications, and walk to the Kingdom Hall near my home in Kitsilano. I’d meet...