The Parlor Maid Who Crossed a Continent

In 1930, the China Inland Mission told Gladys Aylward she wasn't qualified. Too old at twenty-eight. Too uneducated. Too ordinary. She was a parlor maid from Edmonton, north London — small in stature, slight in frame, with nothing on her resume that impressed a missions board. But Gladys knew something the board didn't. She knew whose child she was. She saved her wages penny by penny and bought a one-way ticket on the Trans-Siberian Railway.…