As a young man, I often wondered what it was like for young women to serve Mormon missions. …actually, I didn’t. For a variety of reasons, I was pretty clueless. Even after serving my own two-year mission, I displayed a chronic lack of understanding about the experiences of women in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
What I could have benefited from was a candid mission memoir like recently published The Legend of Hermana Plunge. Written by Angela Liscom Clayton, the book captures the volcanic ups and downs of serving a mission in the Canary Islands in 1989-90. The terrain and culture were exotic and the experiences of young missionaries proved to be as well. After reading the book, I scored the opportunity to interview the author. Our Q&A session provides just a sampling of what Angela’s excellent memoir offers readers.
INTERVIEW – PART ONE
Take us to a moment in your memoir that serves as a good teaser for prospective readers. What happens, and why is it significant?
Angela: There’s a passage in the first part of the book that explains where I came up with the tongue-in-cheek name Hermana Plunge that I used throughout my mission. I was pretty critical of the pep rally style meetings up to that point:
“After a few weeks in the zone, I decided in one meeting that I was going to top whatever energy Elder Fletcher threw out there, escalating the meeting to a fever pitch. I matched every challenge he gave us and increased it. I finally declared myself Hermana Plunge and walked out of the meeting to a nearby shop and had a new chapa (name badge) made that said “Hermana Plunge” which I wore off and on to demonstrate my fealty to mission culture. I began to sign my letters to President using this new alias as a way to demonstrate my enthusiasm and commitment. I still felt the same way about the goal setting, that it was all a performance, but it was still fun to join in. As with improvisation in theater, if you say yes to everything thrown at you, you can end up in a different place than you expected.”
Describe your mission in a nutshell:
Angela: I served in the Spain Las Palmas mission from spring of 1989 to summer of 1990. The mission included the Spanish-speaking Canary Islands, in the Atlantic Ocean, just west of Morocco, and the Portuguese-speaking Azores and Madeira further northwest in the Atlantic Ocean, and the Portuguese-speaking island nation of Cabo Verde, further south on the coast of Africa. Our mission was entirely made up of islands, so every transfer involved an inter-island flight or ferry. Some missionaries were trained in Spanish and some in Portuguese. Our president had served a Portuguese language mission, and his Spanish was a little rough as a result.
The weather was sunny and warm year-round in the Canary Islands, and there were a lot of tourists. The Canaries are like the Hawaii of Europe, and like Hawaii, the islands are volcanic with a dryer side on the south and a greener side on the north. On the most populous islands, there were branches in all the major cities. Less populous islands might only have one branch for the whole island.
What sparked your desire to write a memoir? And what motivated you to see it through to publication?
Angela: We used to joke as missionaries that we should write a tell-all memoir because our mission had a lot of unique aspects to it, certainly when we talked to others who served elsewhere. But I really didn’t seriously consider it until I read Craig Harline’s memoir Way Below the Angels. The thought that kept coming to me was how male-centric these stories are, and for the elders, the experience really was very male-dominated at the time.
It took me a little time to get motivated to crack open my three-decades dusty mission box because a mission is hard and full of angst, and I had really mixed feelings about immersing myself in it again and bringing back all those contradictory emotions. But once I started to read through it all, it was very easy to write. It only took me a few months, and it came together very naturally once I decided how I wanted to tell the story.
Among the many passages which struck me, at one point you listed about 10 techniques you used to find people to teach. Almost all the methods used were sales tactics (albeit for religious ends). Couched deep in the list you say, “We fasted and prayed.” Tell us about the tension you experienced between physical and spiritual aspects of missionary work.
Angela: Yes, I think that you must be referring to the La Palma section. Man, that was a tough area! We were racking our brains every day trying to come up with a plan and dealing with our own and the elders’ discouragement. I never fasted more in my life than I did in that area. I was never really a big faster, and I’m still not. Because of our mission’s “Challenging and Testifying” approach, the focus was really more on the physical—just showing up—which sounds easy, but it really isn’t easy every day. The physical act of going out in the morning, knocking doors, talking to people on the street, these were the go-to strategies for me.
We added spiritual methods like fasting and praying when we were really feeling down in the dumps or specifically worried about someone we were teaching or a fellow missionary. The spiritual also came into play when we were teaching, but in general, we felt that if we just went out and talked to people, someone would talk to us. There were only a few times when I felt a strong impression to change where we were going, either for safety or for success.
Let’s change gears and talk worldly. The Legend of Hermana Plunge includes a fantastic bra story. Without repeating it, let’s say what starts as a discrete discussion between two sisters about bra size, soon escalates to include Elders, and later a female investigator. The passage is just one of many which reads funny and endearing, showing people being delightfully genuine. How suited were you for the unexpected ways mission life rips a person out of her comfort zone?
Angela: I was unprepared for the hyper-controlled atmosphere in the MTC, and leaving there was a huge relief. I had times when I was greatly stressed out due to additional responsibilities. Mostly if I made friends with my companion, I felt like I could deal with just about anything that happened. I was very lucky in that regard. I would certainly credit my mission more than anything else with helping me to be comfortable in my own skin. I really learned to laugh at myself and to make friends with a wide variety of people that I would otherwise not have befriended.
END OF INTERVIEW – PART ONE
Keep your eyes peeled for Part Two of my interview with Angela Liscom Clayton, author of the new mission memoir The Legend of Hermana Plunge. We’ll talk candidly about the dynamics between elders and sisters and discuss how the mission changed her. You can read an excerpt of the memoir at Amazon. The book is available in both paperback and Kindle editions from BCC Press.
Questions for Discussion:
Have you read The Legend of Hermana Plunge yet? If so, what was your reaction?
Are you familiar with the “Challenging and Testifying Missionary” approach? What do you think of it?
Wheat & Tares 
Very interesting, both Jake and Angela. I look forward to reading the book.
I think most missionaries have, as Angela noted, “mixed feelings” about the whole thing. I read Craig Harline’s memoir of his mission. experience, and I think it’s the case that no one can really understand or properly evaluate their experience as a missionary until 20 or 30 years have passed. Newly returned missionaries are, I think, incapable of objective reflection on it for several years.
I look forward to the book. Love the anecdote about having that rebellious resistance to goal setting but then going all in. I remember SYL (speak your language) in the MTC. We would set goals, give ourselves daily grades and then have district metrics and reporting on that. We were learning Korean and had been there two weeks. All we could say is “let’s go” or “let’s eat”. “Elder, shall we pray? Yes, let’s pray”. Everyone set their goal at 5 (the max on the scale), it came to me, and I set my goal at 3.5. Everyone in the room looked at me like they wanted to kill me.
I have ordered the book and really look forward to reading it!
I think this book will be an eye-opening experience to read..
Very few Sisters from America served in Japan when I was there in the 1970’s. At age 21 most girls who served missions back then had sort of given up on ever getting married. I think the leaders of the church still remembered the vicious WWII Japanese soldiers and thought it was too dangerous for sisters there. (False). The only two American sisters in our mission were both over 6 ft tall and over 250 pounds. It was joked that they were sent there to protect the Elders. A combination of their body build, garments and the hot wet climate guaranteed they got a perpetual horrible case of the “the crud” or fungal infections in unmentionable places. They were like freaks to the Japanese people. It had to be miserable.
We had perhaps upwards of a dozen native Japanese sisters in our mission who averaged about 60-62 inches tall and 90-100 pounds. They were very devout and worked like machines. We had little to do with them. Marriage options for Mormon female converts in Japan were next to zero,. The branches had at least a 10 to 1 ratio female to male or worse. Typically a Japanese girl would take the religion of her husband .So the few Mormon Japanese guys could marry any girl outside of the church and expect to convert her. I don’t know if going on a mission helped or hurt a Japanese Mormon girl’s meager potential to marry within the church.
I would think many of their experiences might be similar to those of Hermana Plunge but also different in fundamental ways. Most were destined to go inactive. Long-term retention was under 5% .
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PS>Were there any mission legends about outrageous P-day trips? Like, they would have to be pretty good in an isolated place like the Canary islands.
Example:
My first companion was a bit unconventional.(This was in the 1970’s during the Cold war). He did not follow rules. He sought out investigators among unusual people like the fishermen in Japan and was not afraid of going out on the ocean with them. We were not monitored daily like today and could disappear for a couple of days unnoticed. We left on P-day on a small fishing boat For a 3 day cruise and had engine failure during a bad storm and were fortunately rescued by Russian fishermen.. My companion had such an outgoing personality that he quickly won the Russians over. They offered to take us to Vladivostok where they were based and introduce us to some nice Caucasian girls since we hadn’t seen any for months. We had a jolly time and then were ferried back to an isolated beach in Northern Japan to make our way back to our apartment. We were gone about a week and told the ZL’s our phone was broken when they wondered why we didn’t answer their weekly call. That was truly a story and I told it often back in the day.
Mike: There were some “antics” among the missionaries on p-days and even on regular days, a few I mention in the book, and the APs were notoriously bad about taking the mission car to the beach for the day. I’m not aware of any trips to other countries. There are also some stories that didn’t make it into the book because they weren’t my own stories. One story that didn’t make it is one I only heard last year! There was a companionship visiting the apartment of some other elders, and peeking out from under the bed was a box full of panties and bras. The elder who saw this was pretty shocked: “What on earth is that??” I mean, it looked like something a serial killer would have! The elder whose box it was explained, “Dude! Dude! No, it’s like this really cool thing I do. If I see a bra or panties on a clothesline, and I think they look cool, I take them, but I leave a crisp $1 American bill in their place.” I mean, I guess whatever, but a fancy bra or panties (even in 1989) probably cost more than $1!
There were also some elders who said some really unfiltered things to us as sisters from time to time, although my husband points out that just some elders held their tongues more than others. Some didn’t and blurted out things like “I’ve always wanted to do it with a black girl.”
Generally speaking, I think most converts DO go inactive. Hopefully their experience helped them in some way at the time. I don’t think lifelong church membership can be the only measure of success because if it is, well, then missionary work isn’t on the whole very worthwhile. Even my top families eventually fell away (after decades) in many cases, one that may have been related to the November 2015 policy (although two of their sons are still active). You just never know what will happen with people. You love them and their conversion isn’t the only reason you love them, just as it is as a parent. You love and support and respect them, and no matter what you are there for them.