Free A Mighty Purpose by Adam Fifield Page A

the benefits of life and health and education were organized disproportionately for the few, and not the many. The visual imprint of these lifeless souls, and the morally vexing questions that came with them, would flicker in Grant’s mind, on a continual loop, for the rest of his life.
    But Peking was also a wondrous place for a young boy, a great domain to explore, which is something his parents apparently liberally allowed. “It was a boyhood of freedom,” he would say years later. He bicycled everywhere, weaving between the rickshaws and street merchants. With his friends, he built tree houses and clambered aboard rooftops. Many of the roofs were connected, and the boys could roam above the city, from block to block, for up to half a mile, as occupants cursed them from below. Grant knew that, as a foreigner, he was not subject to the same laws as the Chinese, “so there was the additional element of freedom.”
    Curious and adventurous, he played tennis and basketball, collected stamps, and joined the local Boy Scout troop. He got into skirmishes. During one fight, a boy grabbed his arm and hoisted it roughly behind his back, until his elbow snapped. It was the third time he had broken it in the same place; the first was after rolling down a hill. He fell a lot, and, by his own estimation, his forehead was stitched up twenty times.
    By far his favorite activity was reading. He read the entire
World Book Encyclopedia
, from A to Z. He claimed to have checked out
War and Peace
from the school library and to haveread it in a few days. He liked
The Hardy Boys
series and
The Swiss Family Robinson
. The book that seems to have made the biggest impression on him as a young reader was
The Forty Days of Musa Dagh
, Franz Werfel’s 1933 novel about the 1915 Armenian genocide. Based on real events, the book “powerfully affected” Grant.
    He lived with his parents and sister, Betty, who was two years older, in a large, enclosed compound in the middle of the city that included the hospital and medical college where his father worked. His mother, Charlotte Hill Grant, was a “true homemaker” who looked after Jim and Betty attentively, with the help of a Chinese nanny. Her hobby was buying and collecting broad robes and pieces of art from the imperial court, which was selling off the items, and the Grant household became filled with elegant artifacts from ancient China. A perfectionist who “loved beautiful things,” she also liked to sew and was often heard humming. Grant remembered “a light and happy atmosphere” permeating the home, seemingly due to his mother’s warmth and positive aura; he credited her with largely forming his own upbeat and optimistic outlook. The family took weekend excursions together, venturing into the countryside to visit temples; over the summer, they sometimes spent several months at a resort. In one photo taken when he was six, he and his sister are standing with their nanny, who is holding their hands. They are both wearing shorts and long boots and are standing rigidly straight. Jim is staring into the camera, his eyes wide, looking surprised or perhaps bewildered. His ears protrude underneath neatly combed hair.
    Like his son many years later, Grant’s father worked long hours, traveled frequently, and “was gone half the time.” When Grant was eleven, his parents divorced, and he and his sister lived with his mother.
    He went to a school in the medical college compound, where he estimated that about half of the two hundred students were Chinese, a quarter were American, and a quarter were European and Japanese. Several of his closest friends were Chinese, and his first girlfriend was Scottish-Chinese. “I always grew up feeling that China was one of the greatest civilizations in the world,” he recalled, “and that the disorder they were in was a temporary phenomena …, that the Chinese would regain their status as one of the world’s leading civilizations during this