China (Location Key)

Only two fictions mention China, and both treat it (to quote The Town) essentially as "some far place" (194). In The Sound and the Fury Jason Compson's self-deceived musings on the value of money include the example of the rich man in Jefferson who sponsored a "Chinese missionary" - by which he means an American who travels to China as a missionary (194); before the Communist revolution in 1949, there were hundreds of Protestant missionaries in China at any given moment. At the beginning of The Town Charles Mallison explains that his cousin Gowan Stevens stayed with family in Jefferson for several years because his father was sent by the State Department "to China or India or some far place" (3).