Alex Moffett was born in 1905 in Suzhou, China, to missionary parents. He lived in China until 1923 when he attended Washington & Lee in Virginia for college and then went on to Vanderbilt for medical school. He and his wife, Virginia, returned to China in 1935 where they did medical missionary work until 1940, including during the Sino-Japanese war. After returning to the U.S., he had a private practice in Taylorsville, North Carolina, for twenty-nine years. Interview conducted as part of American Beliefs and Cultural Values, an American Studies class taught by Hanna Griff at Grinnell College in 1993.
While I was in college, there was the first of the communist uprisings in China and that killed a few Americans. And so my family and a lot of missionaries then went to Shanghai rather than be anywhere in the world.