The wife of Hü Yong Mi was brought up in a home of wealth and rank in Foochow. Her aristocratic birth was manifested by the size of her tiny embroidered shoe, which measured exactly three inches. When Hü Yong Mi was asked by the missionaries to become a minister, he was somewhat dismayed to learn that in the Methodist Church the minister's family must frequently move from place to place. In his own words, "The Chinese greatly esteem the place of their birth; if a man goes abroad it is considered a matter of affliction; for a family to move is an almost unheard of calamity." He replied, however, that although he had not known of the existence of the custom, he was entirely willing, for Christ's sake, to undertake the work of a minister in spite of it. The missionaries then asked if his wife would be willing to go with him. He answered that he could not tell until he went home and asked her. But when he had talked the matter over with her, this dainty, high-class lady replied, "It matters not to what place; if you are willing to go, I will go with you." Within a few weeks they left Foochow to work among their first parishioners, a people who might well have caused the hearts of the young pastor and his wife to fail, for Hü Yong Mi says of them: "In front of their houses I saw piles of refuse, and filthy ditches. Within, all was very dirty--pigs, cattle, fowls, sheep, all together in the one house. Not a chair was there to sit on. All went out to work in the fields. They had no leisure to comb hair or wash faces.... None knew how to read the Chinese characters. Some held their books upside down; some mistook a whole column for one character." Mrs. Hü and the children were very ill with malarial fever while in this place, but in spite of all their hardships, a good work was done. Mrs. Hü was as earnest a worker among the women as was her husband among the men, telling the good news to those who had never heard it, and strengthening her fellow-Christians. Many a programme of the Foochow Women's Conference bears the name of Mrs. Hü Yong Mi, for she could give addresses and read papers which were an inspiration to missionaries and Chinese alike. Her friend, Mrs. Sites, has written especially of her influence on the women whose lives she touched: "In the stations where the Methodist itinerancy sent Rev. Hü Yong Mi, this Christian household was something of a curiosity. The neighbouring women often called 'to see' in companies of three to twenty or more, and Mr. Hü expected his wife and children to preach the gospel to them just as faithfully as he did from the pulpit. There are many hundreds of Chinese women to whom this lovely Christian mother and little daughters gave the first knowledge of Christ and heaven." The same friend says of this wife and mother, "In privations oft, and in persecutions beyond the power of pen to narrate, she has become a model woman among her people."