My Several Worlds

II

Canton, Ohio,

August, 1953

TODAY WE HAVE BEEN travelling over Pennsylvania mountain country and then as afternoon came on, our direction being westward, we reached Ohio and by nightfall came to this quiet small city, which was the home of William McKinley. The American President and his wife lie in an enormous tomb in a park. A long flight of steps leads to the tomb and at the head of the steps there is a statue of the dead statesman.

By a curious coincidence McKinley had something to do with my life in that second world which followed after the troubled Boxer years in China. My father was not killed, nor were any of the white men in our province of Kiangsu killed, and that this could be was the result of the wisdom and courage of one man, our Viceroy, who when he received the edict of the Empress Dowager, refused to obey it. It was more than mercy, it was also foresight, for our Viceroy understood what our old Empress did not or could not, and it was that no one, not even she, could stay the progress of time. The Viceroy knew that it was not white men alone who had bred revolution in China. Their presence and deeds, more evil than good, had only hastened the awakening of the Chinese people. Why, the people asked themselves, had they no weapons to resist the arrogance and robbery of the invaders from the West, who were different from any others of the past? The white men had seized lands and rivers instead of the throne, and they had built railroads to the coast so that they could carry away their loot in ships. Nor did they yield as the others had to the superior civilization of China. On the contrary, the westerners considered their own civilizations superior and they tried to prove them so by guns and cannon. Such weapons were as terrifying to the unarmed Chinese people as a hydrogen bomb might be to an undefended city here in Ohio, to this very city in which we sleep tonight.

Even this city has its direct relation to those years of early revolution in China, since a reason for this journey of ours is something more than pleasure alone. Our family has three sons, the elder two nearing draft age and the third one not far behind. The hideous possibility has become a reality. I who have been reared in one world, a Christian one, and taught that love and brotherhood must be the law of life, and reared too, in another world yet kindlier, with the Chinese belief that life is sacred and that it is evil to kill even a beast, and how much more a human being, I now face the tragic probability that my sons must deny both Christian and Asian teaching. They must join our armed forces and fight perhaps an Asian people, a people whom I love and admire and to whom I am deeply indebted. To prevent this I am helpless, although it could have been prevented long ago in Asia, and prevented many times since, but now perhaps it is too late, since it is not we who have won in Asia, although we might have done so easily had we but understood the nature of the peoples there.

And McKinley, whose bronze statue towers over this small Ohio city? What has he to do with the child I once was? Little enough and yet very much. For when the strange year of 1900 was over, the year in which I saw in my American mother’s eyes the fear of a Chinese, so that from that day on I too had that fear, all mingled with love and friendship at it was, we came to the United States, my own country. My first shock here was the assassination of President McKinley. I scarcely knew the difference then between Emperor and President. In China our young Emperor had died suddenly, murdered, it was rumored, by the command of the Empress Dowager, who was by then herself within hours of her own death from old age and illness. But she would not, could not die until the dangerous heir was first gone. And now suddenly here in my own country the President was murdered, too!

I cannot remember everything, for much had happened and worlds were tumbling about me. But I do remember that I was in my grandfather’s house in West Virginia, where I had been born, a place of peace and beauty, and there on a particular day I was gathering white and purple grapes with my cousins. It was September, hot, still and fragrant, and I was happy and quiet, enjoying to the full my country, my own, where there was no war any more, no hatred, no revolution. Then someone called to us to come quickly and we ran into the house. We went to the parlor, uncles, aunts, my parents, my brother, my cousins and I. There my grandfather stood very straight in his black suit, his stiff white wing collar, his black tie, his snowy hair brushed up from his forehead. His dark eyes were somber and his face was grave, and when we were all assembled he said in a solemn voice:

“Children, the President of the United States has been assassinated. Our President is dead.”

Of all of them only I broke into loud weeping, to their astonishment and dismay, and my mother put her arm about my shoulder.

“Oh,” I cried, “must we have the revolution here, too?”

“What is the child talking about?” my grandfather demanded.

Nobody answered for nobody knew except my mother, and she understood so well that she said nothing at all while she let me sob. And what I was afraid of I did not know until years later.

Indiana

Indiana, I read in books, is of all our states the most valid sample of our whole country. Agriculture and industry, fourth generation immigrants and first generation, plains and hills, rivers and lakes, Indiana has them all. There is even a picturesque corner where rounded tumbling hills have attracted the most American of our artists, and surely some of the best American writers have come from this state, that is, the ones least affected and to a degree the least experimental. I smile at the word experimental! Nothing is new, and everything has been done before. I read this week a reviewer’s comment on a book, a criticism that the author had not used “the modern technique of cutback.” New? Five hundred years ago Chinese novelists were using the cutback with consummate skill, and in Europe, whose history is comparatively recent, French writers were using the cutback when America was new. Joseph Conrad was a master of the cutback, and when I have used it, it has not occurred to me that I was doing anything modern, for I was not. The cutback is an admirable technique for portraiture, but not for edifice.

I feel Indiana is plain American. Sometime or other it went a little mad and people built a few astonishing huge and turreted houses. One such I saw today, painted snow-white and looking like an enormous iced cake. Somebody evidently was proud of it as an antique and quite rightly so, for it was imposing and bizarre.

But the houses of our country are a revelation of our variety. No man knows what an American will construct when he is able to afford his own house. He pays no heed to history or landscape. On the contrary, he behaves as though he were Adam in some Eden of his own. I confess I do not know what to make of our newest building developments, accompaniments of industry, but I assume that they are merely merchandise and that no one will live in them beyond a temporary necessity.

The houses here in Indiana are decently ugly except for the notable few, and they are as various as are the houses in other states. How long did it take, I wonder, for the Chinese people to become so unified, so molded by history and geography combined through centuries, that their architecture became stylized, a distillation of centuries of family living? It was nothing in my Chinese world to find a family that had lived a thousand years in the same place. Homes grew slowly from the landscape. The wide plains of the North created wide gently sloping roofs, and the abrupt upward lines of volcanic southern mountains tilted the roofs sharply. Under the roofs, north and south, however, the rooms were arranged in the same patterned order with the same tolerant allowance for independence and privacy in the midst of a complete family life. Each generation lived separately in one-story rooms, but were united by courtyards to the other generations. Thus the Chinese realized the need of the human individual to be alone and yet close to others, especially of his own kind. Thus children grew in free security, surrounded by loving adults of various generations, and thus adults shared the burdens of family responsibility. There was no terror of losing one’s job, for in such a circumstance one simply lived on with the family and without reproach, until a new job was found. There was no need for orphanages for there were no orphans, since the family kept its own. And the old were loved and revered and never put away into institutions as sometimes they are put away here, and must be put away, I am told, because of small flimsy houses where there is only room for two people and their two children.

I am glad I once had the grateful joy of living, even for that year of McKinley’s assassination, with my grandfather and my uncles and aunts and cousins in a big porticoed house. I did not know my own good fortune, for then I took it for granted that everywhere in my country everybody so lived. I was only nine, and I may be forgiven for my ignorance, and yet I still believe that the generations need each other and should live together.

Yung, my Chinese friend, spent last month at our farm and out of long quiet talk I remember two scenes she put before me. The first one had nothing to do with families but with fish. She began in her usual gentle fashion, and very seriously.

“I have something to say to you.”

“What is it?” I asked.

She had spoken in English and now she changed to Chinese, the mid-Chinese Mandarin that was our childhood language. She said:

“Dear Elder Sister, I went to the Museum of Natural History in New York that I might learn something useful and scientific.”

“And did you learn something useful and scientific?” I inquired.

She looked sad. “Scientific, perhaps, but not useful — only troublesome.”

“Tell me,” I suggested.

She hesitated and then went on. “A man there told me such a strange thing. He said that we human beings are come from fish. Must I believe this? It makes me so sad. Only a fish!”

She shook her head and sighed. “So disappointing, isn’t it? A fish! Elder Sister, is it necessary to believe this?”

“No,” I said. “Don’t believe it. The man was guessing. There are many stories of our beginning. Believe what is nearest to your heart as well as your mind.”

She brightened. “You really think so?”

“I do,” I said firmly.

It was also Yung who put into clear and pitiful words the picture of an old lady, an American old lady, or old man for that matter. She said, in the way she has, seeming sudden, but not sudden because she has been thinking long before she speaks, and this time she spoke in English, “I feel sorry for American old lady and old man.”

“Why?” I asked.

For answer she gave me an example out of her life in the New York apartment house in which she lives with her excellent husband. She said, in her ever-gentle voice, still in English, “In our apartment house lives a nice old lady alone. We did not know her. But our neighbor came in one day so happy saying, ‘Do come downstairs with me to see my friend’s granddaughter. My friend is very joyful. Why? Because today for the first time the little girl, five years old, is allowed to come to visit grandmother and to spend the night.’

“I cannot believe such a thing — five years old and never spending the night with grandmother! We went downstairs and it was true. There were the little girl and the grandmother, both happy, and the grandmother told me the story. She said such a long time she had hoped the child could come to visit her but she dared not to ask it. But on this day happily the child herself suggested it, when the old lady went to visit her son’s family. ‘Grandmother,’ the child asked, ‘may I spend the night in your house?’ The old lady dared not to cry out, ‘Oh, come!’ Instead, very quiet, she said, ‘Whatever your mother wishes, my dear.’ So the child asked the mother, who said, ‘Wait until your father comes home.’ So the old lady waited long until her son came home and again she waited for the child to ask, not daring to seem eager for fear it would not be allowed, and she was so happy when the father, her own son, said, ‘Why not?’ And then the child’s mother said, ‘Just this once.’ All this the old lady told and I really did weep, because in China the grandmother could not be so afraid of the younger ones. It is not right.”

I agreed with my Chinese friend and then remembered, contrariwise, what a young American man had said to me only a few weeks before. He said, “I wish my mother would stay with us always the way you say Chinese grandparents do, but she doesn’t want to be bothered by young children, even her grandchildren. She wants to travel, to hear music, to go abroad, to live her own life, as she calls it, and so my children have no opportunity to know their own grandmother.”

Two sides of the same story, and the only sense I can make out of it is that our American pattern is to be patternless, unless individualism is the pattern.

In my own case, my grandfather was remote but comforting. He had his place in the house where I was born, an upright, somewhat rigid figure, but always kind, and though the few months of that year in which McKinley was killed passed quickly and I stayed with my grandfather no more, yet I had seen him, I had lived in the house with him, I had felt him the source of my being, because he was my mother’s father, and his other children were my uncles and aunts and their children were my cousins, and so I was one of a clan and not solitary. When my parents took me back to China with them, I went back knowing where they had come from, and so where I had come from, and we were not a solitary little group lost in a vast and alien China, alien now because the Chinese did not love white people and had killed many of our kind. No, we were Americans, and I had a country of my own, and a big white house where my kinfolk lived, and there were generations of us there, all belonging together. So a child ought to feel, and if he so feels, he can wander to and fro upon the earth and never walk alone.

Sioux Falls, South Dakota

We have been driving over the beautiful uplands of Illinois and Iowa, and cutting deeply into Minnesota. We arrived here in Sioux Falls to spend our first night in South Dakota.

I wonder what dream or experience, or both, led to the naming of American towns and villages? We passed in Iowa a little hamlet named Polo, in honor of Marco Polo. But why Marco Polo in Iowa, U.S.A.? His is a familiar name to me, for Yangchow is across the river from Chinkiang, my Chinese home town, and in Yangchow Marco Polo was governor for some years. It is a city famous for beautiful women, one of whom was my Chinese nurse, although I remember her old and missing some teeth, but still beautiful. What American in Iowa, then, dreaming of those travels on the other side of the world, called his town Polo?

And we passed a town called Woosung, but why Woosung in the heart of Iowa? What musing, wandering mind, compelled to stay at home, named his inland town for that port on the flats of the Yangtse Delta, that gateway to Shanghai and so to China? And while I was pondering on this, our car passed into Minnesota and there was Ceylon on a signpost but the only Ceylon I know is the jewelled island that clings to India’s foot.

Earlier in the journey we passed, too, through a bare little town in Illinois, all open to the sun. It was Galena, ancestor or relative, I suppose, to our little New Galena in Pennsylvania. Galena, Illinois, is the town where Ulysses S. Grant, not yet President, went with his family before the Civil War, to set up his tanning trade. He built a solid square red brick house, graceless, comfortable and commonplace, and from there he was called to lead the Union Army. He took with him some of his cronies to support him, a number unsurpassed before or since, I am told, by any administrator, but I confess I see no wrong in choosing friends for one’s supporters.

What interests me is that Ulysses S. Grant could have reached so high a position. Perhaps the chief weakness of a democracy is that seldom can a truly great person rise high, for people elect those whom they can understand and therefore admire, and these are usually men like themselves. And even as I write these cynical words the noble ghost of Abraham Lincoln stands before me. He, too, was a man of Illinois, the middle country, and I first heard of him from Mr. Kung, who revered him because he had freed the colored slaves. When I asked my parents, however, they were Southern enough to say proudly that the slaves were being freed anyway, and not by Abraham Lincoln.

Be this as it may, I see myself, a child of ten, returned again to China with my parents. It is the year 1902 and I am in the small old dining room in the mission bungalow on the hills above the Yangtse River, and I am listening to the grave voice of the old Chinese gentleman who is my Chinese tutor. He is a Confucian, which seems not to have troubled at all my Christian parents, although he instilled into me Confucian ethics while he taught me Chinese reading and writing, and I listened and learned and called him Teacher Kung. He prided himself on the surname Kung, which was also the surname of Confucius, this name again being a corruption of the Chinese Kung-futse or Father Kung. But I, as a Christian child, supposed that Confucius was the same as Our Father in Heaven, that is, God the Father, and I accepted all gods, having been accustomed to seeing temples full of many gods. Among them was my special goddess, she of mercy, the Kwanyin, always so beautiful and graceful, such a lady in her looks as well as in her kindness, and tenderhearted toward all female creatures. To be sure, there was her younger sister, The Virgin Mary, but a vague cloud I did not then understand surrounded The Virgin, an immaculate cloud, but producing also The Son. And the patient Joseph, standing always to one side in the Sunday-school pictures, how I pitied him, for somehow it seemed as though he had been cheated. I heard talk of this among the Chinese Christians who had no enthusiasm for Mary and felt sorry for Joseph. And this talk must have reached my own American Christian father, for he ceased trying to explain how Jesus was born of The Virgin. It was one of the mysteries and the less said about it the better. But the Goddess of Mercy was really immaculate and there was never any talk there about a god-father or a god-son. She was pure goodness. Besides, Chinese history or mythology, and often they merge, is rich in stories of beautiful virgins impregnated by gods to conceive divine sons, and this Mr. Kung taught me, too.

But the important lesson which he taught me was that if one would be happy he must not raise his head above his neighbor’s.

“He who raises his head above the heads of others,” Mr. Kung said, “will sooner or later be decapitated.”

It was true in China as in other democratic nations that when a man became too famous, too successful, too powerful, mysterious forces went to work and the earth began to crumble under his pinnacle. The Chinese are a proud and envious people, as a nation and as individuals, and they do not love their superiors and never did, and the truth is they have never believed that their superiors could exist. This fact partly explains the present anti-Americanism, this and the attitudes of missionaries and traders and diplomats, all white men indeed, who considered themselves whether consciously or unconsciously superior to the Chinese, so that a smouldering fury has lived on in Chinese hearts for more than a century and this fury, which white men could not or would not recognize, is the chief reason why Chiang Kai-shek lost his country and why the Communists won it. Had he been wise enough he would have expressed boldly his own anti-Western feelings and had he done so he might have held the leadership. But he thought he could win by American force and this his people could not forgive him, and, sadly for us, Mao Tse-tung seized the opportunity that Chiang threw away, and the power of history today is turned against us. It is hard for Americans to believe that American charm, so warmly expressed in the ready smile and the outstretched hand, does not win the Chinese. What then can the American do? He must read history afresh. He must prove to the Asian that he is not to be confused with the past, of which he is relatively innocent, and therefore he must not be compelled to bear its burdens. American boys must not die because England once ruled India and in China won the Three Opium Wars and fastened a ruinous tax upon the people, or because an Englishman allowed Japan to stay in Manchuria, and so established a foothold for an imperial war. Nor should American people be asked to share the intolerable and ancient burdens of France in Indo-China. We shall have enough to do to prove to Asia that we are not as other white men have been.

Yet we are only relatively innocent, for in those days after 1900 when white armies punished the Old Empress so bitterly, when her palaces were looted and incalculable treasures stolen from Peking by soldiers and officers with equal greed, Americans were among the white men. And we did not heed the history being made, and so we could not understand and do not yet understand its dreadful fruit. After the storm was over — so strangely called in Western history The Boxer Rebellion, but rebellion against what ruler except the white man? — after the storm and after the defeat, the white men went back again to China without a lesson learned. They went back in complacency, thinking that by force they had taught the Chinese a lesson, so that never again would they rebel against the white man’s rule. We were to be allowed to come and go as we liked over the Chinese earth, our ships of merchandise and our men of war were to be permitted to sail the waters and dock at any port. Our missionaries were given the freedom to live where they wished, to open schools foreign in all they taught, to establish hospitals which practiced foreign medicine and surgery, and strangest of all, these missionaries were free to preach a religion entirely alien to the Chinese, nay, to insist upon this religion as the only true one and to declare that those who refused to believe would and must descend into hell. The affrontery of all this still makes my soul shrink.

It made me unhappy enough even in the days when Mr. Kung was my teacher. He explained it to me gently and being an intuitive and feeling child I remember one afternoon that I wept. We had only just come back from America and the year in my kindly grandfather’s house, and I wept because I knew that if Mr. Kung and my grandfather could meet and talk things over they would understand each other and agree together. But how could they meet when one lived in China and the other in America, and even if they could have met, what common language could they have spoken? And yet I knew and know to this day that could such men as they have met and could they have found a common language, and it did not matter whether this was English or Chinese, all that has happened need not have happened. Pearl Harbor would never have been, and the atomic bomb would not have fallen and American prisoners of war would not have come back wounded and dying from a Communist China, for Chinese would not have yielded to Communism had they known there was hope in the white men of the West. It was when the last hope died that the Chinese turned away from us in final despair. And we cut the last golden cord ourselves, in innocent ignorance, if ignorance can be innocent any more in this day and age.

All this in some dim foreseeing way I think I vaguely understood that day when I leaned-my forehead down upon the oval dining table in the mission house and sobbed because of what Mr. Kung had just told me. For what he said in his beautiful polished Peking Mandarin was something like this:

“It will be peaceful for you here again, Little Sister, but not for long. The storm is still rising and when it breaks, you must be far away from here. You must go to America and stay there and not come back, lest next time you be killed with all your kind.”

“There must be a next time?” I asked, terrified.

“Until justice is done,” he said gravely and with infinite pity.

And I could say nothing, for I knew that his ancestral home in Peking had been destroyed by German soldiers, men to whom the German Kaiser had given the imperial command in some such words as these: “Germans, so behave that forever when a Chinese hears the name of Germany he will quake with fear and run to save himself.” And the Germans had obeyed their Kaiser.

Yet as the days passed, I forgot my fears as a child forgets, and I still took comfort because we were Americans. Surely, I argued, my Chinese friends would see how different we were from other white people. For a long time it seemed they did perceive our difference. I can see now, looking back, how changed I myself was after the Boxer defeat. My worlds no longer interwove. They were sharply clear, one from the other. I was American, not Chinese, and although China was as dear to me as my native land, I knew it was not my land. Mine was the country across the sea, the land of my forefathers, alien to China and indifferent to the Chinese people.

I used often to ponder that indifference, child that I was, and I was not deceived in the eleven years I was to live between the outburst of the Boxer leaders and the one led by Sun Yat-sen, a young fiery Chinese who grew up in a southern village. Could it be indifference when clearly my parents had made real sacrifice in leaving their comfortable American homes and all the delights of a clean and fruitful countryside to live here and preach and teach their religion? They were deeply devoted to the Chinese we knew and indeed to all Chinese, and in greater or lesser degree so were all the missionaries. Few of them were selfish or lazy, and most of them in those days came from homes well above the average. And yet I knew intuitively that they were not in China primarily because they loved the people, even though during years they did learn to love a people naturally lovable. No, they were there, these missionaries, to fulfill some spiritual need of their own. It was a noble need, its purposes unselfish, partaking doubtless of that divine need through which God so loved the world that He sent His only begotten Son for its salvation. But somewhere I had learned from Thoreau, who doubtless learned it from Confucius, that if a man comes to do his own good for you, then must you flee that man and save yourself. And I was troubled when my father preached his doctrines and I wished he would be silent, content only to live what he preached, and so, lifted up, to draw men to him without words. And this I wished, knowing that my father would never have preached had he not felt it his duty, for he was the gentlest preacher any heathen could ever hear, avoiding all mention of hell fire and dwelling only upon the wonderful love of God, surpassing the love of man. But I could not bear preaching from any white man, knowing what white men had done in Asia, even as today in my own country I cannot go into a church and hear a white man preach when I know that were a black man to enter that church it is likely that no place could be found for him to sit and listen to the story of God’s love for all mankind, and so there is no seat for me, either, in such churches. And this is because I grew up in China, in one world and not of it, and belonging to another world and yet not of it.

Notwithstanding, they were good years in many ways for a child, and it was not every day that I pondered upon such large grave matters. And of course there was much that I did not know. I knew that the Old Empress was dead and so was the Young Emperor, but she had, before she died, once again declared a little child her successor, the small Pu Yi. We saw pictures of him sometimes in the papers, a plump baby with an astonished wooden little face above his stiff satin robe and sleeveless jacket. There was a Regent, but nobody seemed to care and life went on as usual apparently, and had it not been for the inescapable past, I might have been the same child. But I was not. For one thing, I was old enough now to read history for myself and I perceived that Chinese historians and English ones gave entirely different versions not only of the same events but of each other, and that each despised the other as a lesser breed, although neither knew what the other was.

Those were strange conflicting days when in the morning I sat over American schoolbooks and learned the lessons assigned to me by my mother, who faithfully followed the Calvert system in my education, while in the afternoon I studied under the wholly different tutelage of Mr. Kung. I became mentally bifocal, and so I learned early to understand that there is no such condition in human affairs as absolute truth. There is only truth as people see it, and truth, even in fact, may be kaleidoscopic in its variety. The damage such perception did to me I have felt ever since, although damage may be too dark a word, for it merely meant that I could never belong entirely to one side of any question. To be a Communist would be absurd to me, as absurd as to be entirely anything and equally impossible. I straddled the globe too young.

All this learning went on quite pleasantly and painlessly and I was aware of no particular insecurity and certainly of no frustrations and boredoms. Indeed I had a happy life, though my days would perhaps have seemed intolerably slow and boring to my children now, who do not love books as I have ever done, perhaps because their imaginations were not caught young, as mine was, by the visions of minds between covers. Perhaps Mr. Kung had something to do with that. I see him still as he arrived upon all fine afternoons, except on Sundays, and he could not come upon rainy days because his mother forbade it, lest he wet his feet and fall ill, and being a filial son he did not wish to cause her anxiety, and there was nothing strange to me in that, although Mr. Kung was nearly fifty and his mother seventy-two. She was his mother, was she not, and would be until she died, and the web that held the Chinese together as a people, solid and eternal, was the love and respect between the generations. “Honor thy father and thy mother that thy days may be long upon the land” is an Asian precept as well as a commandment.

And so Mr. Kung arrived punctually on fine afternoons at two o’clock, carrying his treasure of books wrapped in a soft old piece of black silk. This he unfolded but only when he had given greeting to me and received from me a suitable bow and salutation, after which I, too, could seat myself. Then only, I say, did he open the silk with tender care and bring forth the book which we might then be studying. For two hours we read and he expounded, not alone the past contained within the book, but also the relation of that past, however dim and distant, to the present and even to the future yet to come.

Thus it was from him in those days of my early youth that I learned the first axiom of human life, and it is that every event has had its cause, and nothing, not the least wind that blows, is accident or causeless. To understand what happens now one must find the cause, which may be very long ago in its beginning, but is surely there, and therefore a knowledge of history as detailed as possible is essential if we are to comprehend the present and be prepared for the future. Fate, Mr. Kung taught me, is not the blind superstition or helplessness that waits stupidly for what may happen. Fate is unalterable only in the sense that given a cause, a certain result must follow, but no cause is inevitable in itself, and man can shape his world if he does not resign himself to ignorance. Mr. Kung liked to quote also from the Christian Bible, partly, I imagine, to prove to me his liberal Confucian mind, and his favorite text was the one about reaping the whirlwind if one sowed the wind, and he reminded me often, in his gently lofty manner, that one could not expect figs from thistles.

When four o’clock came the lesson was over. He covered his tea bowl and wrapped the book again in the square of soft black silk and we rose and I bowed and he inclined his head, reminding me of tomorrow’s preparation and of a few mistakes I might have made. So we parted, I following him to the gate as a pupil should follow a teacher, and there standing until his swaying robes and black silk queue had disappeared.

It would still be years before the demands of revolution, smouldering under the surface of our everyday life, would cut the queue away as the last sign of servitude to the dying Manchu Empire. But Mr. Kung was dead by then, taking his queue with him to the grave, and what I made of those later days I had to make without him.

Meanwhile our life went on in strange and silent peace. I was too old by now to play in the pampas grass outside the gate, and my free time in the afternoons after Mr. Kung was gone was divided between our home and my friends in the small white community or among the Chinese we knew. I did not run down the hill any more to visit the women and girls in the valley farms. I was getting to be what was called “a big girl” and if my mother was not with me then my Chinese nurse accompanied me when I went outside the gate. She was far more strict than any mother and she pursed her wrinkled lips if I stopped to buy a sweet from a vendor or some bit of jewelry that took my fancy at a silversmith’s. The Chinese silver was beautiful, soft and pure, and the smiths carved it in delicate patterns in a bracelet or a heavy chain, or they twisted hair-fine wires into exquisite filigree as delicate as cobweb, and studded it with plum blossoms and butterflies inlaid with blue kingfisher’s feathers.

For the first time, during these post-Boxer years, I tried to find a few friends among people of my own race. I remember a sweet-faced, brown-eyed English girl whose father worked for the English Bible Society, a gentle creature with whom I could find no profound companionship, for she had lived the secluded, almost empty life of most white families, entirely unaware of the rich culture of the Chinese people. Her home was built upon a high and narrow hill which had once been an island in the restless Yangtse until the river receded from the city to gnaw away the opposite bank. I remember less of this English Agnes than I do of her English home and the entirely English garden which surrounded it. That bit of England created above the turmoil of a particularly poor and crowded Chinese slum taught me love for England, nevertheless. The father, dark-eyed and brown-bearded, always in rough tweeds, was as English as if he had never left his native land, and the mother, an impetuous Scotch woman, was untouched by any idea that she was surrounded by other human beings who were Chinese. In spite of my knowing that this was entirely wrong of them, I enjoyed the family, the two older sons, home only for the holidays from the English school in Chefoo, and the two girls, my friends, and a Wee Willie, as they called him, who died somewhere in those years and who always, in his fragile gentleness, reminded me of Tiny Tim and then, very late, a loud and robust English baby, a postscript of a child embarrassing the whole family by his birth. Each of them enchanted me in his own way and nothing was more delightful than to sit down at tea with them and to enjoy real English cheer on a chill winter’s afternoon, when the houses of my Chinese friends were damp and cold. For however reprehensible they were, I loved my English friends and never more than when we gathered in a little dining room stuffed with ugly English furniture, secondhand from Shanghai shops, and had an English tea. There was no dainty nonsense about that meal. It might have taken place in any honest middle-class family in London or in Glasgow. There were no silly sandwiches, no hint of lettuce or olives. The big rectangular table was covered with a solid white linen cloth, and upon this were set the silver-covered plates of hot scones and dishes of Australian butter and Crosse and Blackwell English strawberry jam. There was no puttering with pale Chinese tea. We had strong black Indian tea, stout Empire stuff, enriched with white sugar and proper English condensed milk. And when we had helped ourselves to scones, the plate was set on the hearth beside the black polished grate, wherein coals burned cheerfully, beneath a mantelpiece and an overmantel, a hideous structure of carved shelves reaching to the ceiling, whereon every shelf was crowded with bits of porcelain or painted glassware, not from China, but from various spots within the blessed British Isles—“Greetings from Brighton” (in gold upon pink), or “Hearty Good Wishes from Dundee.” Never mind, it was hideous but it was warm and cozy and friendly and in its hideous funny way I loved it. And after the scones, but not until the last bit of scone and jam was eaten, and one did not take butter and jam for the same scone, we had fresh poundcake or English raisincake and more and more cups of tea, poured for us by the comfortable Scotch mother who sat at the foot of the table and talked unendingly while she poured, cheerful chatter as guiltless of wit and wisdom as any charwoman’s, but amusing and kind, for all of that. And this good English tea was prepared in a dark little English kitchen by a thin Chinese man of years, who survived the harrying scolding of his foreign mistress and consoled himself by cheating her richly when he shopped, and learning meanwhile to cook so well that when the white folk departed, forever so far as he was concerned, he found a job as head cook for a famous war lord who had a fancy for foreign food. And we were served at table by a table boy who afterwards burned down the house in which we sat. But how were we to know such effects, when we did not know the causes that we made?

Rapid City, South Dakota

If this state were anywhere else in the world, it would be such a wonder that people would be streaming here to see it by land and air and sea. As it is only where it is, today when we drove through it slowly — trying to assimilate its miracles — we saw few cars and those all American. It was a fearfully hot day, so hot that the air conditioning in our car promptly broke down in the devilish way that machinery does when it is most needed. This peculiarity is nothing new to me. We had no machinery in our Chinese bungalow, only the reliability of human hands and feet. Therefore the oil lamps always shone every night and no thunderstorm or even typhoon could put us into darkness, as any slight storm can do with electricity in our Pennsylvania house.

I had an exaggerated idea of machinery before I knew anything about it, and finding reliable human hands and feet very rare, after I left China, and frighteningly expensive when and if found, impulsively I set up a way of life upon our American farm entirely entrusted to electricity and machines. The years have taught me that nothing is less reliable than these can be at times, singly or in combination. Electric current can stop and render useless an otherwise perfect machine. Or the electric current may flow full and free and be repulsed by the indifference of a machine made idle by some cog or contact which will not work. Such accidents, if they are accidents, almost invariably take place on weekends when we have guests or when the entire family is home for holidays and a large turkey is roasting in the electric oven. I have never known the electric dishwasher to stop except when it was full of silver, china and glass, and another lot waiting, necessitating the removal of everything and washing and drying all by hand. This, too, happens only on Sundays or important holidays when essential experts cannot be found, because they have prudently learned to spend their own holidays far from home. The machine must therefore stand idle, perhaps for days, a hideous monument to its own power and the helplessness of men.

For the first few years I was innocent enough to think this perfect timing was pure accident, but I know better now. It is some devilish coincidence of which no scientist has dared to tell us. If, as one reads, the human being is merely a handful of minerals and a gallon or two of water, the only magic in us to make us think and dream must be the combination of these simple elements. And I read, moreover, that the secret of the atomic bomb itself is not in its materials, which are fairly common knowledge, but in the combination of those materials. It is the formula, so to speak, which compels being. This being so, it is not difficult to wonder whether that combination of elements which produces a machine for labor does not create also a soul of sorts, a dull resentful metallic will, which can rebel at times.

It must be so, it may be so, for why should our otherwise obedient car decide to cease its cooling upon a summer afternoon in South Dakota, when the temperature under nonexistent shade was said to be ninety-eight degrees and in the Badlands, so burning and so beautiful, was at least ten degrees more hot? We had rolled along all morning in a landscape as fabulous as the moon, shining silver under the wicked sun, and yet we had been as cool as a November day behind our closed windows. Suddenly, because we wanted to move slowly through the ancient wind-carved hills, our car made up its dim mind to rebel. The air conditioning stopped. We put down the windows, gasping, and were struck by such a blast of dried heat that we were parched and scorched, although we did not yield. We would travel on, we decided. At this the car stopped entirely, and we were towed shamefully to a garage, a big, new, handsome hulk, while merrily there passed us a hundred small decrepit cars fit for nothing but the junk pile. I cannot believe that the expensive and complex machine did not enjoy our confusion, meanwhile caring nothing for its own disgrace.

I confess that sometimes I find myself nostalgic for a house where the servants are humans and not machines, the while I know and hate the poverty that makes human labor cheap. And yet the servants in our Chinese home enjoyed their life, and they respected themselves and their work and us. They would not work for masters they did not like, and they expected and received respect from us. The relationship was irreproachable, and a decent servant would give up his livelihood immediately if he felt a lack of due regard from the master and his family. If he did stay on, he took some secret reward which compensated him for what he suffered.

Thus I knew a certain missionary, an American of a lesser breed, who being unaccustomed to the role of master, was arrogant and often bad-tempered, so that he could keep no servants in his house. One old woman remained with the family for years, however, and in apparent peace of mind. The Chinese never marvelled, although the white folk did, and only because I belonged as much to the one as to the other did I learn the secret, and it was told me by the old woman herself, a gay old soul with a devilish sense of humor. I did not ask, but this is what I heard. Her room was in the attic of the white man’s house, and her little window opened upon the tin roof. The wells in that region of North China are shallow and their waters bitter, and the white folk were accustomed to have cisterns dug to catch the rain water from their roofs. So it was with this house, too. The rain water ran down the roof into tin gutters and through tin pipes into the cistern. And what sweet revenge did this old woman find for the white man’s tempers? Each morning when she rose she emptied out upon the roof the contents of her chamberpot, and then went blithely about her day, while she with all the other servants drank the clean and bitter waters of the well.

But such old women are rare, doubtless. In our house our parents taught us to be as mannerly to the servants as we were to guests and elders, and each side maintained its pride. We kept our servants for years and belonged to them and they to us, and how many happy childhood hours I spent with them and how lonely might I have been at evening when the gates were locked for the night had I not been free to sit in the servants’ court, to play with their babies and listen to the music of a country flute or a two-stringed violin! Sometimes our cook, a small thin artist of a man who looked, by the way, like Fred Astaire, except that his skin was yellow and his eyes and hair were black, sometimes, I say, he would tell us a story from the past, because he could read. And he read The Three Kingdoms, All Men Are Brothers, Dream of the Red Chamber, and other books he kept in his room.

Certainly machines are not so companionable. At home in Pennsylvania I went not long ago to call upon a neighbor, a young farmer’s wife. It was the early afternoon, and I had perhaps half an hour to spare. I entered at the kitchen door, for she would have been astonished otherwise, and encircling her big kitchen I saw monumental machines, washing machine, drier, mangle, two freezers, refrigerator, electric stove, sink. With such help her daily work was soon done, and we went into the neat living room where there was no book, but where a television was carrying on. She paid no heed to it, and inviting me to sit down, she took her fat baby on her knee, immaculate and well fed, and we talked small stuff while minutes passed, and then I had to leave. Said she, real disappointment in her voice and look, “Oh, can’t you stay? I thought you’d spend the afternoon. I get so bored after dinner — I haven’t a thing to do.”

I thought of Chinese farm wives who take their laundry to the pond and chatter and laugh together while they beat their garments with a wooden paddle upon a flat rock, a long tedious process, it might be said, except what would they have done of an afternoon without it? And by their talk and merriment they were more amused, I do believe, than was that young neighbor of mine by the television rattling all day long, with its unknown voices and its pictured faces.

Two worlds, two worlds, and one cannot be the other, and each has its ways and blessings, I suppose.

At any rate, here in South Dakota the night has fallen, and I prepare for sleep in a comfortable roadside motel. The South Dakota sky is brilliant with bright stars, the wilful car has been hauled into a garage and tomorrow will have its inner organs cleansed and healed, we hope, and so its soul restored. And I am glad enough to turn the chromium faucet in the porcelain bathroom and fill the tub with water, hot and comforting, although without a human hand to bring it to me.

Dayton, Wyoming

A pretty sight passes the window at this moment near high noon on a summer’s day. I hear the clatter of hoofs, and looking out I see a string of horses cantering up the dusty road from the canyon. These are the riders who set out this morning after breakfast, with a wrangler in command, to spend the morning in the Big Horn Mountains. The horses are eager to get home and the riders sit them well. The riders are young, boys and girls still in their early teens, but late enough so that some are beginning to be sober folk, thoughtful because the armed services lie just ahead. The girls, I think, have it harder than the boys for they will stay at home, most of them. I notice that in spite of enticing posters, seducing propaganda and noble appeals, most women stay at home. There is something in their natures that cannot accept the necessity of warfare, even after centuries.

The horses pass and the dust settles again, the riders dismount and go their way. The scene is mountains, rock and sage and pine, and sands golden under the hot Wyoming sun, and I sit here writing in my book.

I have, as I well know, been avoiding those years between 1901 and 1911 after the Boxer Rebellion when I was growing up in China. As I look back upon them they seem now to be strangely hesitant years, their transience concealed beneath a sort of everyday happiness so brittle that I think we all felt that it could at any moment be shattered. Peace covered China like a sheet of thin ice beneath which a river boiled. Outwardly our life was better than ever. My mother dug up the buried family silver, our faithful servants gathered around us again, and my father came and went in such freedom, with so little cursing on the streets against foreigners, that I think even he was troubled, knowing what a price had been paid for such peace.

For after the Boxers had been dispelled and disgraced, after it was plain to the simplest villager that his country had been defeated, the new treaties guaranteed the safety of the white man wherever he might choose to travel, to live, to preach, to trade. In addition, China was compelled to pay vast indemnities for the desperate folly of the old dead Empress, and though my own country later chose to spend its share in scholarships for young Chinese in American universities, that time was not yet.

The Chinese are a practical people and very wise. They knew their own defeat and could not then risk another. The time for the next struggle lay far ahead. For ten years at least they must recuperate, reflect and plan. In those ten years I passed from childhood into adolescence. I am grateful for one aspect of that decade — the years contained a freedom which perhaps no white child had ever known in China and certainly could not know after the revolution broke again in 1911. Had it not been for that freedom, that perfect safety, insured by treaties, indemnities and punishments with which I had nothing to do and yet in whose benefits I unwittingly shared because I was a white man’s daughter, I could not have come and gone so easily upon the city streets and country roads. Only the dogs dared bark at me, for those savage, starving village dogs alone still dared to show the hatred they had been taught to feel against the foreigners. No, there were the children. Sometimes a child having heard his family talk at night behind closed doors, would still shout “Yang kwei-tse”—foreign devil! — as I passed, but if did his mother clapped her hand across his mouth, frightened because she had heard how cruel was the revenge that white folk took.

This fear always broke my heart, I think, and wherever I found it, I stopped and spoke gently to the mothers and asked them not to be afraid, and if I could I lingered long enough to talk and play with the child and I left only when I saw fear gone and friendly looks taking its place. This gave me comfort and it pleased me when they wondered that I spoke their language so easily, for then I had the chance to tell them about my country and how my people were not hateful and did not hate them and how much I wished that we could be friends, because indeed our hearts were all the same.

Here I must confess a secret, for which I hope my dear parents in their graves will forgive me, for I never let them know. Often I would have liked to have invited these friends I made to come to our house and visit us and see how harmless our family was, how kindly were my parents, how tenderhearted my little sister, but I could not invite them because I did not want them preached at. I understood the deep burden of my father’s soul, the duty that he felt to preach the love of God and his own yearning to save, as he said, their precious souls. I did not blame him, but I could not cast my friends into that white fire of his own spirit. And would they not distrust me if I put them in his power? They were naturally courteous, they would not have refused to hear him, but would they not say that I had used friendship to win them to a foreign god? I could not risk it, and so for years I had many Chinese friends whom I took care to keep away from my good parents, and this not only because I thought it right, but also because, quite selfishly, I could not risk their doubt.

I was richly repaid for their trust, for to this day I value what they shared with me, their homes, their work, their laughter and good talk. Once the trust was established, we talked, questioning each other in close human ways. There was plenty of time in those years. We still lived in the country, and my mother taught me in the mornings but there were the long lonely afternoons and I had few companions of my own race. It was natural therefore that my paths led me to the red gate between the stone lions of the Lu family a half mile or so away and that I spent hours in the courtyards there, playing with the babies, listening to the young wives gossip, and sharing the thoughts of a schoolmate, a pretty girl of my own age. And how she happened to be a schoolmate was that Mr. Kung died in 1905, and since I was so tall my parents felt I had better not be taught by a strange man but go instead two or three times a week to a mission school for girls. But I never again learned as much as I had learned from Mr. Kung. I wept at his funeral and wore a white band of mourning on my sleeve and I bowed before his coffin with the lesser members of his family. He died of cholera, in September. He rose as usual in the morning but he was dead by night and my mother did not want me to go to his funeral because of the danger of contagion and when I insisted she let me go with my father only on the promise that we would not touch our lips even to so much as a bowl of tea and certainly not to any funeral meats. She had good reason to demand such promises for she had nearly died of cholera once, before I was born, and had on the same day lost my sister whom I never saw, a child of four. And my father, having found a doctor, for that dreadful day took place in Shanghai where there were white doctors, was forced to decide which life was to be saved, his daughter’s or his wife’s.

“I cannot save them both,” the doctor had said.

He chose his wife, but sometimes I wonder if my mother forgave him for it. It would have been like her to have insisted on saving both and somehow getting it done, but she was unconscious and had no say. She always felt, I think, that my father accepted too easily the will of God.

Well, there were six or seven families not too far away where I was welcome and where I learned the other side of the victory the white men had won and I knew then what my life has taught me since, that in any war a victory means another war, and yet another, until some day inevitably the tides turn, and the victor is the vanquished, and the circle reverses itself, but remains nevertheless a circle.

From those long and happy hours of visiting I came home more torn in heart than any child should be, for I saw that each side was right as well as wrong, and I yearned over both in a helpless fashion, unable to see how, history being what it was, anything now could be done. I used to look at my parents, wondering how to tell them what I felt and feared, not wanting to betray my Chinese friends, either, for who knew what use my parents might make of what I told, reporting it in duty to the Consul, perhaps, or forbidding me to go again to my friends’ courtyards.

And yet I knew my parents were so wholly good, so utterly innocent, that surely I ought to tell them that Mr. Lu said there were wars ahead and more wars.

I never told them, and I comforted myself that if I had they would have said merely that what would be was in the hands of God. This I did not wholly believe, knowing very well that much can be done by men’s hands if they have the wit and will.

Looking back, I see my life in parts, each part fitting into the age in which I lived. If my childhood was different from that of other children of my time, and it was very different, then the deepest difference was that I always knew that I was a mere leaf in the gathering storm to come. Yet day by day I had plenty of love and kindness and I knew no personal unhappiness. There were no pressures on me, I had hours for myself and blessed freedom, for my parents were lenient and undemanding. And I had the fortune to be born with a nature easily diverted and amused, with a gift, if I had any gift, for enjoying what was around me, both landscape and people. I was healthy and full of good spirits and never idle or bored, a curious child plaguing everyone with questions sometimes too intimate and personal, and yet I will forgive myself to this extent: I had no interest in gossip, but only in story. I was entangled in every human story going on about me, and could and did spend hours listening to anyone who would talk to me, and there were always those ready or needing to talk. Of course I absorbed much useless information, and yet I wonder if any of it was really useless. I took deep interest, for example, in the farming problems of our neighbors, the difficulties of raising crops on five acres or so of land, and yet learned the miracle of how it was done, by hand actually, so that every rice plant was thrust into the paddy field by hand, and not by hired hand at that, but by farmers and their wives and daughters and sons and sons’ wives and their children. I watched the turn of seasons and was anxious with the farmers when there was no rain and yearned with them in their prayer processions and was grateful when sometimes the rain did fall. All knowledge was useful to me later when I began to write.

My own growth, perhaps, was from outside in, or to put it otherwise, I lived outside myself and lived richly. There was another life, however, and it was still imagined and dreamed much more than real. I never quite forgot the months I had spent in America, though my memories dimmed as time went on. I remembered certain hours, such and such an event, rather than consecutive time, and in an effort to hold what I had, I read incessantly. I had always read but now I read to search for and find my own world, the Western world, to which some day I would return, and must return, when the gates of Asia closed against me and my kind.

And yet I found few American books. Literature, it seemed, was English rather than American. Mark Twain my mother considered slightly coarse and though we had Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn, and I read them, they were unreal to me. I had not seen such persons for myself. Now, decades later, I can see well enough that Mark Twain caught something American and true that none other has, or so I think. Indeed, I have a son whose ways are so foreign to my ways that I would never have known what to make of him, I think, did I not have Mark Twain on my shelves. I read Tom Sawyer once a year or so, to help me understand this American boy who is my own.

The truth is that very few American books reached our part of the world in my youthful days, but Kelly and Walsh, the excellent English bookshop in Shanghai, carried a good stock of the new English novels and secondhand editions of the old ones and their lists reached us upcountry and I spent every penny given me, or earned, on books. My parents had already as part of the furnishing of our home the sets of Dickens and Thackeray and George Eliot and Walter Scott and their company, and we had the English poets and a fine edition of Shakespeare, and all these were a solid part of my childhood. My mother took The Delineator as her choice in American magazines and my father took The Century magazine and we had St. Nicholas and The Youth’s Companion to keep us in touch with the young of our own country. I doubt the validity of the touch, however, for I somehow got the notion of incredible perfection in America, and I grew up misinformed and ripe for some disillusionment later, though not severe, at that, for common sense came to the rescue.

One interlude broke those tranquil years before I was sent “home,” as we were always taught to call our country, for college. There was always something tragic, though I did not know it then, in the word “home,” used by white men far from home. Wherever these lived, in whatever country of Asia, with or without their wives and children, they spoke of their native lands as “home.” In India one would meet Englishmen who at eighteen had been sent there by their parents to seek a fortune, and had never once gone back, and though they were grey-headed and surely had established homes of some sort for themselves, yet they spoke of England as “home.” And saddest of all, if they had Indian wives or merely lived with Indian women, was to hear the little half-Indian children call England “home,” although they could never be at home there, or in India, either. There were such children in Chinkiang, too, and while my mother insisted that we never speak of them as anything but English or American, as their fathers were, yet I knew they knew that for them “home” was nowhere. I felt this plight so heartily sorrowful that I almost thought it wicked for me to be so lucky as to be wholly an American, my parents insuring all my blood.

So before I went “home” to college there was the interlude. The circumstances were that I was really too young for college, a natural result of being taught only by my mother in Western subjects. The year must be spent somehow, for my father’s furlough was not until 1910 and it was still only 1909.

I think, too, my mother felt that I was not ready to be left alone at college, even in my own country, composed as I was of innocence and an Asian sophistication, a combination resulting from daily living with a people as naturalistic as the Chinese were. I had had little chance to mingle with my own kind. Two months each summer, it is true, we went up into the high Lu mountains to escape the heat of the river levels and there I met the sons and daughters of missionaries and of businessmen. But I was so charmed by the landscape of those mountains that I spent more time in walking and climbing than I did in parties and playing tennis. Besides these yearly holidays, I had met only one American family who had girls of my own age. For a few months or perhaps for a year or two, I cannot remember, for huge events that have since befallen continue to destroy my sense of time, I made friends with the three daughters of a missionary family, healthy, gay and newly come from America. They did not stay long because the malarial climate of our river province made the mother ill. Yet I had a glimpse, at least, of American girls and their delightful ways. I was quiet, not so much from shyness as from the need to discover them entire. I watched them not as individuals but as the whole of America must be, full of such girls, laughing, noisy, wilful, teasing. They went away again and suddenly I was alone as I had never been before.

That was when my mother, always sensitive and observant, decided that I must spend a year away in a boarding school. I had one other such experience, when for a few months I had stayed on at a small new American boarding school in Ruling. It made no impression on me, apparently, certainly I learned nothing, for after three months I was not sent back, and the lessons with my mother were resumed. This time, however, I was to go to Shanghai, to Miss Jewell’s School, the most fashionable and indeed the only good school, supposedly, in our part of the China coast for Western boys and girls. A year or two later the American School was started and to it went the generations of white children after me, mainly American, and they were prepared for American life quite differently and certainly far more adequately than Miss Jewell’s School could do, at least in its latter days when I was there.

When I look back on the months spent in that strange place, the memory is unreal, fantastic, separate from any other part of the times in which I have lived. There was, in the first place, Shanghai, a city altogether unlike any Chinese city. It was a city created by foreigners and for foreigners. Decades earlier Manchu emperors had assigned a living space to the intruding westerners, and in contempt had allowed them nothing better than mud flats on the Whangpoo River, where the Yangtse flows into the sea. Out of this malarial waste the foreigners had made a city. Great buildings lifted their bulk along the handsome Bund. Parks were opened, the famous parks which later provided a slogan for the simmering revolution, “No Chinese, No Dogs.” Fine English department stores did a thriving business, extending themselves from the modern cities of India and from Singapore and Hong Kong, and specialty stores for the arts, for books and for music, completed a metropolis. There were excellent hotels for tourists and local businessmen as well as apartment houses, and expensive clubs for sports and amusements as well as great private homes belonging to the wealthy of all nationalities.

My own knowledge at that time of a city already fabulous around the world was meager enough. Shanghai had been for me merely the gateway to the Pacific Ocean, through which we had to come and go when we left China. No, there was the memory, too, of the few months we had spent there as refugees from the Boxers. Now as an oversensitive and too observant young girl I was to see Shanghai from the windows of a gloomy boarding school, and it was quite a different city. I learned then that, like most great cities, Shanghai was many cities wrapped in one and my knowledge of it depended entirely upon my experiences in it.

Miss Jewell’s School was established in buildings of somber and indestructible grey brick. Never have I seen, except in London, such buildings, shaped, it seemed, for eternal life. Upon the ground floor by the front door was the parlor and there on the day upon which I was to be received my mother and I sat waiting for Miss Jewell. Shades of Nicholas Nickleby enveloped me as I looked around that dreary parlor. The windows were partly sunken beneath the pavement of the street outside and they were heavily barred against thieves, a reasonable condition but one which added something dreadful to my impression of the room. Texts from the Bible, framed in dark oak, hung upon the pallid walls, and the furniture was nondescript and mixed. In a small English grate beneath a black wooden mantel an economical fire smoked up the chimney, a handful of coals carefully arranged to smoulder and not to burn.

There we sat, not knowing what to think, and I felt my own misgivings growing deeper as I saw my mother’s usually cheerful face gradually losing its cheer. She was not one to give up easily, however, and so we waited and presently into the room came a short, heavy-set, white-haired, black-eyed woman. It was Miss Jewell herself. She wore a dark full dress whose skirt came to the floor, and she entered silently because, as I was to discover, she always wore soft-soled shoes, partly so that no one might know when she was coming and partly because she suffered grievously from corns. I looked at this handsome sad-faced woman and did not know what she was. I felt most persons immediately, but this was someone new. She greeted us in a low voice and I noticed that although her hands were beautiful they were cold and she had a limp handshake. No warmth came from her. In fairness I must admit that she was already an aging woman and one always tired. She had been the headmistress of her own school for many years and dependent solely upon herself, and in spite of her seeming coldness, she did many good works. During the months I was to stay under her care not a few strange lost women came to her for shelter and somehow she always gave it and arranged work for them or a passage home. It took time for me to discover the hidden goodness, however, and on that first day I felt only a sort of fright.

Perhaps I never understood Miss Jewell fully, nor some of the women she gathered about her, until years later when in a New York theater I saw Eugene O’Neill’s plays about people dying of dry rot. Out of a proud but desiccated New England background Miss Jewell had brought to China a severe goodness, a passionate resignation, a will of steel. She was not like anyone I had ever seen, neither my cheerful parents nor my warmhearted Chinese friends. I kissed my mother goodbye and reminded her in a whisper that she had promised that I need not stay if I did not like it, and then when she had gone I followed Miss Jewell up a wide dark stair behind a Chinese houseboy who carried my bags.

The effect upon me of this school is not important except as it opened to me a strange subterranean world of mixed humanity. I had an attic room which I shared with two other girls, both daughters of missionaries whom I had not known before. Their lives had been wholly different from mine, and although we were soon acquainted, we remained strangers. This was because my parents were so unorthodox as to believe that the Chinese were our equals in every way, and that the Chinese civilization, including its philosophy and religions, was worthy of study and respect. My roommates came of orthodox folk, they had spent their lives in mission compounds, and as a consequence spoke only “servant” Chinese and had no Chinese friends, at least in my sense of the word. They despised me somewhat, I think, because I had been taught by Mr. Kung, and wrote letters regularly to dear Chinese friends. The nearest that we ever came to quarreling, however, was on the subject of Buddhism about which they knew nothing. I, on the other hand, knew a good deal about it in spite of my youth, because my father, always a scholar, had studied Buddhism for many years, among other religions of Asia, and he had written an interesting monograph on the similarities between Christianity and Buddhism. My parents never talked down to their children. On the contrary, they conversed upon matters of their own interest, and we listened, perforce, and joined in as we were able. Thus I knew rather clearly the general ideas my father had about Buddhism, one of these being that the likeness between that religion and Christianity was not accidental but historical since it is quite possible that Jesus may have visited the Himalayan Kingdom of Nepal when he was a young man, and during the twelve unrecorded years of his life. Such tradition is widespread in northern India and is even mentioned in Vishnu Purana, the ancient Hindu Scripture. Two thousand years ago all religions were a brotherhood and religious leaders and disciples communicated. My father believed that Jesus knew the teachings of Confucius as well as of Buddhism, for the almost identical expression by Confucius and by Jesus of the Golden Rule, for one example among many, could scarcely be accidental similarity of thought. In short, although my father was a conservative Christian, he had come to the conclusion that in Asia, where human civilization had long ago reached an unparalleled height of philosophical thought and religious doctrine, all religions had contributed their share to the profound and steady movement of mankind toward God.

These were shocking ideas to my two roommates, and though I presented them in innocence and in the course of bedtime talk, they reported me to Miss Jewell as being a heretic. I, on the other hand, was shocked that they could call the Chinese people heathen, a term my parents never allowed to be spoken in our house, so that even certain hymns were forbidden to us because they contained this ugly word. Miss Jewell, informed of my monstrous views, removed me from the attic room lest I contaminate the others, and put me in a little room alone. This pleased me for I could read after lights went out elsewhere, and from the veranda outside my room I could look across the street and observe a large and friendly Portuguese family. I never knew their surname, for I never met them, but I knew all their personal names, since they had loud lively voices and they called to one another from floor to floor and lived on their upstairs veranda with careless intimacy. Mama and Papa, Rosa, Marie and Sophie and little Dee-Dee were the ones still at home. On Sundays after Mass a married son and daughter and their children came home to spend the day, and on that day I too had leisure after compulsory church, and so I could watch them and share in their merry life. I grew fond of them in my way, for perhaps it is my weakness to be fond of people easily, although intimacy is difficult for me, and they gave cheer to what might otherwise have been a shadowed existence in those great dark buildings.

For once in my life I took no interest in my lesson books. I did not, I found, enjoy studying in classes, for I was accustomed to my mother’s quick mind and imaginative teaching and other teachers bored me, with the exception of my English teacher, a frail blue-eyed little woman whose oversenstitive spirit I discerned and dreaded somewhat, I think, because I felt in it depths for which I was not ready.

We had good teachers, Miss Jewell saw to that, but I was a restless pupil, informed in some subjects far beyond my age, thanks to my parents, but impatient when confronted with the more technical aspects of Latin grammar and mathematics. What I really learned had nothing to do with formal subjects. Miss Jewell, feeling that I needed a stricter Christian theology, endeavored to instill it in me by taking me to prayer meetings and then to places of good works. Both terrified me. The prayer meetings were unlike any I had ever seen. I do not know to what sect Miss Jewell belonged, but for her prayers she went to one private house or another where her fellow Christians met to pray. She was a busy woman and we usually arrived late, after the meeting had begun. We entered a dark hall, admitted by the usual blasé Chinese houseboy who led us to the room of prayer. It was always dark and we stumbled over legs and reclining figures until we found a space wherein to kneel. There we stayed as long as Miss Jewell could spare the time, and stiff with repulsion, I listened to voices in the darkness pleading for the presence of the Holy Spirit, or fervent beseeching for forgiveness of unmentioned sins, accompanied by moans and groans and sighs. The experience became so frightening, so intolerable to me, that I asked my mother to let me come home. Religion I was used to, but not this dark form of it, this grovelling emotion, the physical confusion, a loathsome self-indulgence of some sort that I could not understand but at which my healthy instincts revolted. In my father’s house religion was a normal exercise, a combination of creed and practice, accompanied by music. My mother had a fine strong clear soprano voice, well trained, and at any hour of the day she sang, not only the better hymns but solos from great oratorios and noble church music. My father’s sermons, inclined, it is true, to scholarly dryness, did not, however, contain any talk of hell. Infant damnation, a horrid idea from which I am happy to say all Christians have now recovered, was nevertheless in those days still part of the normal creed, but my father, heretic that he was, would have none of it, and my mother, having lost four beautiful little children, was raised to fury at the very mention of any child descending into hell. I had heard her comfort more than one young missionary mother beside the body of a dead child. “Your baby is in heaven,” she declared. “There are no babies in hell — no, not one. They are all gathered round the Throne of God the Father, and Jesus takes them in his bosom when they first come in, when they still feel strange to heaven.” Upon the common tombstone of three of her children, who died before I was born, she had their names inscribed and then the text, “He gathered them like lambs in His bosom.” And as long as she lived there hung on the wall of her bedroom opposite her bed, where she could see it night and morning, the picture of a shepherd with his sheep, and in his arms were baby lambs.

My parents were alarmed, then, when I told them of the dark rooms and the strange prayers, and they wrote my headmistress and requested that I be taken to no church services except on Sunday mornings in the Community Church, where Mr. Darwent, a short stout little Englishman with a bald rolling head and no neck, could be trusted to preach harmless sermons, sincere and brief. Thus one burden was removed from me.

Miss Jewell, however, did not give me up. She felt that I was old enough to have some share in her good works, and so I took her turn, when she was busy, at the Door of Hope, a rescue home for Chinese slave girls who had cruel mistresses. It was really an excellent work, and the municipal authorities gave it every support, even to the extent of legal help in freeing slaves from their owners. I was supposed to teach the girls to sew and knit and embroider, all of which tasks I disliked, but which my own beautifully educated mother had taught me to do well. She believed that it was still part of a woman’s education to know the household arts. “Even if you always have servants,” she was fond of telling me, “you ought to know how to teach them to do their work properly. And home is the place to learn home-making.”

She was right in this as in so much else, and I have never regretted knowing all she taught me, even though I complained enough then when I had to learn fine crocheting and lacework as well as cooking meals and baking delicate hot breads and cakes. I have not been able to impart these feminine arts to my own daughters. My mother had one advantage over me — we had to make American foods if we wanted to eat them. Nowadays, here in the United States, young women can buy such miracles of ready frozen stuff, wanting only to be thrust in an oven to be finished, that it is hard to make them believe that they have lost an art. And this ignorance extends even to the daughters of farmers. I had once a little Pennsylvania maid who could not cook or sew, and did not feel her ignorance unfitted her in the slightest to be a wife and mother. She would buy both food and clothes ready-made, she said, and laughed when I said I felt sorry for her because she had missed so much.

The Chinese slave girls at the Door of Hope, however, were eager to learn. They were wretched children, bought young in some time of famine and reared to serve in a rich household. We had only the ones from evil households, of course, for a bondmaid in a kindly family received good treatment as someone less than a daughter but more than a hired servant, and at the age of eighteen she was freed and given in marriage to some lowly good man. But these who ran away were the ones beaten with whips and burned by cruel and bad-tempered mistresses with live coals from pipes and cigarettes and ravished by growing adolescent sons in the family or by lecherous masters and their menservants. Such slavery was an old system and perhaps no one was entirely to blame for it. In famine times the desperate starving families sold their daughters not only to buy a little food for themselves but often, too, to save the daughter’s life. It seemed better to allow the child to go into a rich and hopefully friendly family rather than certainly to die of starvation. The girl was sold instead of the boy because the family still hoped to survive somehow and the son must be kept, if possible, to carry on the family name. Sooner or later, it was reasoned, the girl would have to leave the family, anyway, when she married. There are many romantic and beautiful love stories in Chinese literature centering about the lovely bondmaid who is the savior and the darling of the family, and these perhaps added to the hopefulness of the starving family when they sold their girl child. Nor was it always a girl who was sold. Sometimes if there were no girls, or if all the girls had been sold and there was more than one boy, a younger boy would be sold to a rich family, also. But a girl was more salable. A boy was less useful as a servant.

It was an old system, I say, and like all systems in human life, everything depended upon the good or evil of the persons concerned. The best government in the world, the best religion, the best traditions of any people, depend upon the good or evil of the men and women who administer them.

At the Door of Hope I saw the dreadful fruit of evil and still another aspect of human and certainly Asian life. Since I spoke Chinese as if it were my native tongue, the slave girls, unless they knew only Shanghai dialect, could talk to me freely and they did. Most of them could speak Mandarin for they had come from northern families who had travelled southward as refugees, although in famine times there were also men or women who deliberately went northward to hunt for children to sell again at profit in the large cities.

Many a night I woke up in my little room at Miss Jewell’s School to ponder over the stories these young girls told me and I wept to think there could be such evil in the world. This grieving either makes a heart grow more hard, in self-protection, or it makes a too tender heart. In my own case, perhaps there was something of both. I had early to accept the fact that there are persons, both men and women, who are incurably and wilfully cruel and wicked. But forced to this recognition, I retaliated spiritually by making the fierce resolution that wherever I saw evil and cruelty at work I would devote all I had to delivering its victims. This resolution has stayed with me throughout my life and has provided a conscience for conduct. It has not always been easy to follow, for I am not an aggressive person by nature. Once in India I was travelling by train from Calcutta to Bombay. In the compartment next to me was an English captain who disliked the Indians, it seemed, with an unusual virulence. When the train stopped, crying beggars and shouting vendors crowded as usual around the windows, and while it was not pleasant to be thus surrounded on a hot day, nevertheless these people were trying to earn a few anna to buy food. The Captain, however, did not use his reason. He carried a rawhide whip and he ran out upon the platform and beat off the half-naked Indians with vicious blows.

It was a horrid sight, yet if I had not made my resolution years before at the Door of Hope, I doubt I would have had the courage to speak to him. Much as I hated it, I did speak.

“How can you be so cruel?” I demanded. “They have not hurt you, and they are only trying to get a little money. There is no law against that.”

He was astonished for a moment, then he shrugged his shoulders. “Filthy beasts!”

Anger came to my aid. “Someday,” I said, “other white men and women and children, quite innocent, will suffer for what you are doing now.”

He shrugged again and walked away. I am not so foolish as to think he changed, for people seldom change once the mold is set, and he was past his youth. But I have never forgotten the dark Indian faces wearing the grave and bitter look I used to see on Chinese faces, too, when some white man was unjust. And the tragedy is that we are now reaping that very fruit. I read this morning in the newspaper of the cruel treatment given to the American prisoners of war in Asian camps. Part of it, I suppose, is not conscious cruelty but merely the difference in standards of living. The average Chinese workingman’s daily fare would seem near starvation to a hearty American boy, used to the best, and walking endless miles over hard roads under a heavy burden is only what many an Asian does every day for his living. If he is ill, it does not occur to him to go to a doctor or a hospital because a thousand chances to one there are none. Part of the cruelty, therefore, is the inevitable difference between poverty and riches. But the worst of it is undoubtedly really cruelty, instinctive and conscious at the same time, and the Asian is punishing the American because he is a white man now in his power and white men have been very cruel to the Asians in the past. The few good deeds done by a handful of missionaries do not change the history of centuries gone — not enough. The nightmare of my life has always been, since I understood anything at all, that someday a son of mine would have to stand in hand-to-hand battle with a Chinese, and that the Chinese, who knew his people’s history, would take revenge upon the innocent American. It has already happened to the sons of other Americans and may yet happen to my own.

Billings, Montana

This up-to-date Western town is built along the railroad, as so many Western towns are, like beads on a string, and I have just been wakened from a sound sleep in a very comfortable roadside inn by the noise of an engine and a few cars racketing past not fifty feet from the head of my bed. When the bed stopped shaking and the dust had settled, I fell to thinking of the difference between night noises here and the ones to which I was accustomed in that other world of mine. At home on our farm in Pennsylvania there are the house noises, the crack of old beams on a cold night, or the first peepers of spring and then the summer croaking of the bullfrogs in the pool, and later the autumn crickets. The dogs bark on a moonlight night and across the road sometimes a cow bawls in heat and must wait until dawn for the farmer to come and lead her to the bull. Or in the deep silence, and this sound I dislike for it always makes me afraid, a plane rushes through the night, too low, it seems to me, always too low, and I fall to wondering what the pilot’s mission is and why it must be done by night and what it is like to be speeding through the black sky, borne upon the beams of his own lights, with nothing between heaven and earth except himself, and what awful loneliness that must be.

Here in the West the train rushes past, making its mournful cry, and I do not know why these western trains have such a sad long echoing whistle as they fly past, a cry nearly human, so wild, so lost. It makes me think of human voices I have heard in the night elsewhere, the mournful monotony of voices singing in an Indian village, and I do not know what that song is, either, or why it is sung so often in the night, a few notes repeated over and over, thin and high until at last one’s very heart is caught and twisted into it. But the voice I remember most clearly is the cry of a Chinese woman, a mother, any mother whose child was dying, his soul wandering away from home, she thought, and so she seized the child’s little coat and lit a lantern and ran out into the street, calling the wailing pitiful cry, “Sha-lai, sha-lai!” and this meant, “Child, come back, come back!” How often have I heard that cry, and always with a pang of the heart! Lying in my comfortable bed and safe under our own roof, I could see too vividly the stricken family and the little child lying dead or dying and all the calling in the world could never bring his soul home again.

The Shanghai streets had their own noises, and often wakeful at Miss Jewell’s School, I heard the creak of a late riksha rolling along and the swift patter of people’s feet, and I heard the call of voices, girls’ laughter sometimes, or a hearty English voice, a man saying good-bye to someone. And deep in the night I woke to hear the endless slip-slip of Chinese feet in their cloth shoes, walking along the pavements, and I wondered where they went and why they never seemed to go home but always on and on.

In the spring of that strange year I spent at Miss Jewell’s School, she took me with her to still another of her good works. At a house whose name I cannot remember and where it was I have forgotten, too, there was a shelter for destitute white women, many of them prostitutes too old or ill to work any more, but some of them still young and even with babies. This place struck me with a profound horror, and actual terror. Here, for the first time in my life, I saw people of my own race, and women at that, so low in poverty and disease and loneliness that they were worse off than the Chinese slave girls at the Door of Hope. I could pity the slave girls because they had not chosen to be slaves, but I could not comprehend these white women of every Western nation. “French, English, German, Belgian, American — how had they let themselves come to such a pass and where had the first step been taken and how could they be made innocent again? I suppose my horror must have been plain, for the women fell silent when I came near, and though I did my best, playing games and reading aloud and teaching them to sew, there was never any communion between us. It was impossible, I had no background for it, nor did they understand me.

When I went home for the spring holidays my mother said I was too pale and thin and when I told her of Miss Jewell’s good works and my part in them, she pressed her lips together and her dark eyes sparkled with anger and I knew that I would not be sent to boarding school again. I had learned enough. Into the short year I had crowded human knowledge not only of a Shanghai underworld but of New England women, my headmistress and the teachers, the little Scotch music mistress who was engaged that year to a good young man and whose innocent romance was comforting, the dark and passionate woman who taught us geometry and whom I never understood until years after she was dead, and the other teacher, and I forget even what she taught me but I think it was Latin, who later married and became the mother of a delightful American writer, John Espey. And among those I remember there was also our matron, a tall elderly English woman, whose false teeth slipped back and forth whenever she spoke, but whom we all loved because she had no judgment, and left in charge she could be as silly as any schoolgirl with us, and she was always to be counted on for extra bread and butter at teatime.

Of my schoolmates I remember even less, and those I do remember are for no reasons except foolish ones, such as the missionary boy who would eat the eyes of the baked carp we always had at Friday luncheons. I was and am convinced that he hated fisheyes as much as any of us, but he could not forego the pleasure of seeing us all shudder and hearing us cry out and so he ate them. Yet he grew up into a very good American man, an artist, I believe, who has done well enough at commercial art in his own country.

Perhaps the one I remember best was the half-Chinese daughter of a distinguished American who, when his English love refused him for another man, devoted himself to the education of young Chinese men in a great university, and to help him in his work, he married a Chinese lady, plain-faced but of noble character. Of their children all were boys except one and the boys were handsome like their father but the girl was plain like her Chinese mother and she used to talk to me about herself, and wonder what would become of her because she was plain and because she was afraid no white man would marry her and she did not want to marry a Chinese. I think she never married, but I do not know whether she lived or died.

I was glad to be home, although it was lonely for a while, but not too lonely, for when summer came my parents were to take me to America to college. Would I come back again or not? I did not know, and the few months passed in a sort of sweet melancholy while I wondered if each day were a sort of last farewell to China.

And I have not mentioned the sound I liked best there at night but perhaps the memory belongs here. It is the voice of the great bronze bell that stood on a pedestal in the Buddhist temple halfway down our hill. As long as I could remember I had heard it sound in the night, not often, but at certain hours the round rich note of music reverberated through the darkness. When I was small I used to be afraid, the sound was melancholy and made me feel alone. But in the years of my childhood when I had been so free, more free than any white child before or since, I had often visited the temple in the daytime and had seen for myself how the bell was struck by a small kind old priest who grasped with both hands a piece of wood, the end of which was wrapped into a club with cloth. He swung out his arms and let this club fall against the bell hanging within its frame, and out rolled the great pure sound.

I remember the last night at home and all the bags packed and ready to close. I was sleepless and when I heard the bell strike its last note at dawn as we left the house, I had a strange premonition that I would never hear it again, and I never did.

Sauk Centre, Minnesota

This town was once the home of Sinclair Lewis and it is because of him that we have turned aside from the straight road home. I saw him only once, and it was at a dinner given in New York by the P.E.N. Club upon the occasion of the award of the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1938. I went as the guest of honor, but never was there a guest so faint of heart, and even dispirited, as I was that night. This mood went back to my childhood and perhaps partly to good Mr. Kung, who could not possibly know that even then I had intended to be a teller of tales, a writer of novels, though how that end was to be achieved I did not know. One longs to make what one loves, and above all I loved to hear stories about people. I was a nuisance of a child, I fear, always curious to know about people and why they were as I found them. Moreover, I began to read Charles Dickens at the age of seven and he had his usual influence, and this is always to stir alive the young imagination and create wonder about human beings. My first Dickens book was Oliver Twist, which I read twice through without delay. After that I read any of the dark blue clothbound set that filled a shelf in our parlor. My mother became alarmed at my absorption, especially as she herself resisted an instinctive love of Dickens — resisted, because in her young days he was considered coarse and a novelist of “the lower classes.” No such instincts troubled me. I spent my afternoons reading one volume after another, in summertime in the crook of the huge elm, and in winter sitting in the sunny corner of our back veranda. For ten years, I daresay, I read Dickens complete each year from cover to cover, laughing aloud, though alone, over Pickwick Papers and weeping quietly over the death of Little Nell and the cruelty of Hard Times. Sissy Jukes has remained with me always as a part of myself because she replied sensibly, though faltering with shyness when Thomas Gradgrind asked her if a mortality of seven to a thousand people was high, that it was high because it was just as hard on the seven who died as it would have been if more had died. Thomas Gradgrind shouted that she was a fool, but I have always known that she was right, and the more I see of life and humanity the more sure I am that she was eternally right and that it is the Thomas Gradgrinds of this world who are the fools and not the Sissy Jukeses.

The result of having few childish books and therefore of being compelled at an early age to read adult novels was that I decided well before I was ten to be a novelist, and only Mr. Kung confused my mind. He, as a Confucian scholar, had been trained in the early Chinese classical tradition that no reputable writer condescends to produce novels. Novels, he taught me, cannot be considered literature. They are designed to amuse the idle and the illiterate, that is, those persons who cannot appreciate a true literary style and moral and philosophical content. This discouragement was maintained during my most formative years, and was even increased by the religious feelings of my parents who considered novel-reading a mere pastime. Indeed, my mother and I played a sort of hide-and-seek all through my childhood, although neither of us ever referred to it. She hid the novels I read and I hunted for them until I found them. I cannot remember that I bore her any ill will for this. She was far too lovable and good, nor did she, apparently, feel any anger toward me for almost invariably finding her hiding places. The whole performance was carried on in silence by both of us. When I grew up I forgot about it and have since wished that I had remembered to ask her why she hid the books in such easy places. But she died too young. There were many questions I meant to ask her and did not until it was too late and she was forever gone.

The result of all this was that somehow I grew up feeling that the writing of novels was a lesser work than it is. Certainly I never felt that novels were literature and I was secretly ashamed of my continued interest in reading them. When The Good Earth took on a life of its own, no one was more astonished than I, and I was even apologetic that my first appearance, so to speak, in the world of literature, should be with a novel. I remember when the publisher of that book gave me a very handsome dinner in New York, at which various notables were present whose names I had only heard from afar, and I was required to make some sort of speech, I could only do so in the words of the ancient Chinese novelist, Shih Nai-an, whose masterpiece of compilation and original writing I had just finished translating under the title of All Men Are Brothers. This Chinese novelist, too, felt humble before his fellow scholars, for his vast work was still only a sort of collective novel, and sharing his feelings, I gave as my own speech the preface to his book, which illustrates the attitude of the Chinese scholars toward novels and the writing of novels. It closes with these sentences: “How can I know what those who come after me and read my book will think of it? I cannot even know what I, myself, born into another incarnation, will think of it. I do not know if I, myself, afterwards can even read this book. Why therefore should I care?”

All this may explain my own small estimate of my powers, so that one day in the autumn of the year 1938, when I heard that I had just been awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature for that year, I did not believe it, nor could I believe it until a telephone call to Stockholm confirmed it. My feelings then were still very confused. I could not understand why it should be given to me and I remember that I exclaimed, “Oh, I wish that it could have been given to Theodore Dreiser instead!”

I did indeed so wish, for I admired Dreiser greatly as a writer. He was, to my mind, far more than a mere novelist. He had in his deep, ponderous, gigantic fashion got hold of something profoundly American, and if before twenty I read Charles Dickens, after twenty I read Dreiser and after Dreiser, Sinclair Lewis, and of the two of them I felt Lewis the more brilliant but I knew Dreiser would be the more nearly permanent. And he was getting old, whereas I was still young, young enough to wait for future rewards.

If I had doubts about myself, they were doubled and tripled by my fellow writers who were men. The gist of such criticisms, and there were more than a few, was that no woman, except possibly the veteran writer, Willa Cather, deserved the Nobel Prize, and that of all women I deserved it the least because I was too young, had written too few books of note, and was scarcely even to be considered an American, since I wrote about the Chinese and had lived only in their remote and outlandish part of the world. With my background and literary education, I was only too ready to agree with all this, and yet I did not know how to refuse the award without seeming even more presumptuous. In real distress, for it made me very unhappy to feel that my fellow writers were against the choice, I could only continue making melancholy preparations to go to Stockholm and accept the award which had been given me so unexpectedly and without any knowledge on my part that I was even considered a candidate.

It is only honest to say that I am sure the blast from my fellow writers fell upon me with a severity they had scarcely intended. I had for years worked so entirely alone in my writing, in such remote places in Asia, among people who could not understand my yearning to associate with others, especially Americans, who were writers and with whom I could communicate as kindred minds, that I was oversensitive to this American criticism which did indeed fall upon me too soon. And it must be confessed that I have never quite recovered, though years have passed, so that I have been too diffident, ever since, to mingle much with American writers or, perhaps, to undertake my proper responsibilities with them. To go among them even now revives painful memories of that autumn in 1938, when I was still new in my own country, still eager and hopeful and, as I can see now, absurdly worshipful toward my elders in the golden field of American letters.

And all this leads me to the kindly memory of Sinclair Lewis, himself a winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature. As I said, I met him at a P.E.N. dinner, the only one, I think, which I have ever attended, and he sat next to me. I said very little because I felt reticent before so great a writer, and I listened with appreciation to what he said. He was already sad and disillusioned, and I felt a sort of reckless honesty in his words, his fine homely face turned away from me most of the time so that I had to listen carefully while he talked quickly on. Suddenly my turn came to make a little speech, and I got up, intensely mindful of the criticism from some of the very persons who sat that night before me, and looking back to what I had been taught in my Chinese childhood, I told them somehow, and I cannot remember exactly the words and I did not think them important enough to write down, that I had long ago learned that a mere teller of tales is not to be considered a literary figure, and that my novels were only stories to amuse people and make a heavy hour pass a little more easily, and a few more sentences of the sort. Mr. Kung would have approved all I said.

Sinclair Lewis, however, did not approve. When I sat down again, he turned to me with an animation sparkling with anger.

“You must not minimize yourself,” he declared, and I remember every word because they fell like balm upon my wounded spirit. “Neither must you minimize your profession,” he went on. “A novelist has a noble function.” And then, as though he understood all I had been feeling, he went on to speak of that function, and how a writer must not heed what others say. I would weary, he said, of the very name of The Good Earth, for people would act as though it were the only book I had ever written, but never mind people, he said, never mind! He had often wished, he said, that he had never written Main Street, so sick did he get of hearing people speak of it as “your book.”

“You must write many novels,” he cried with an energy intense and inspiring. “And let people say their little say! They have nothing else to say, damn them!”

What comfort that was from him, and how warmly I felt toward him ever after! Years later, when I heard that he had died in Italy so alone that he was reduced to playing his beloved chess games with his maidservant — though he said sadly she was so stupid that she could never remember how the knight moves — I wished that I could have known of his loneliness and could have made some return for his kindness to me. But I had supposed that a man so famous and so successful would have been surrounded by old and faithful friends, and I cannot understand how it was that he was not. I had heard of his faults and difficulties, but his genius was a burden heavy enough for him to bear, and because of it all his sins should have been forgiven, certainly by his friends.

I made this pilgrimage, therefore, to Sauk Centre and today I went about the town, trying to see it as perhaps it had seemed to him. I went into a little grocery store and asked the proprietor, a youngish man, if he knew of Sinclair Lewis. Oh, yes, he said, everybody knew about him here. They hadn’t liked him much after his Main Street, but people got over that and nobody cared now.

“Is there a monument to him anywhere?” I asked.

“Oh, no,” the man said cheerfully, weighing hamburger meat for a young woman with a fat baby, “there wouldn’t likely be any monument put up to him — not here.”

“Can you tell me which was his house?” I asked. He told me in an offhand way while he wrapped the meat and the young woman stared at me.

“It’s not open to the public,” he warned me. “It belongs to other people now.”

I thanked him and went away and found the house, a sober, comfortable middle-class house with gables and a porch and a neat lawn. And why, I wondered, should that fiery, honest, impatient spirit have come out of such a house? What accidental combination of elements produced him? I could only see him bursting out of those walls, and out of the town and what it stood for, loving it so much that he hated it for not being all he wanted it to be and knew it could be.

That was the way he loved his whole country, and that, too, I can understand.

Forest Haunt, Vermont

Our journey ends here in the Green Mountains of Vermont and across my memory stretch the broad reaches of our country. I am heartened, as always, by its size and its variety. There are many alarming possibilities in the fluid trends of our culture, and when I am oppressed by one shadow or another, as at times every thinking creature must be oppressed in the light of human history, I take to the car and, with as many of the family as possible, make a cross-country tour, sweeping widely and yet slowly enough to talk with people as I find them. Without fail I come home with confidence revived. The mere size of our land is an obstacle to any man who might imagine himself a Hitler or a Stalin. Yet size alone would not be a safeguard without the variety of our people, the many minds, each thinking with extraordinary vitality and independence within his individual limits. This variety is due, I suppose, to the variety of our ancestors and the customs they brought with them when they came here as immigrants to make a new country for themselves. We have not lived long enough together to become unified as the Chinese are, their racial differences all intermingled and melted into a common color, and their habits smoothed into uniformity by centuries of living together.

The Germans were well educated, far better than we are on the average, nevertheless they succumbed to Hitler, mainly perhaps because Germany is so small as to be physically manageable by one man and his adherents. And yet Russia succumbed to what is now called Communism, although she is so vast. But her people were ignorant and miserable and her intellectuals were persecuted and imprisoned, and when peasants and intellectuals revolt together, revolution is inevitable, although out of revolution invariably there comes chaos or dictatorship, and history is the proof.

And well I remember that old Russia, although I was very young when I crossed her wilderness of land. We left our home on the Chinese hill, after the night when I heard the temple bell strike for the last time, and we set out for America. Ordinarily, or had we been an ordinary family, we would have gone to Shanghai and taken a ship across the Pacific Ocean. But my mother suffered from a peculiarly virulent and incurable form of seasickness, and since she had during the years developed a tendency to a heart weakness, the doctor decided that she could not face the month of constant sickness which such a journey involved. Moreover, she wanted me to see Europe. She loved Switzerland and France and Italy and England, and she wanted to visit Holland again, whence her own ancestors had come. I think that she had some idea, too, of inducting me into my country for the four years of college by taking me first through the continent of Europe which had produced the new nation. At any rate, she bought a trunkful of books on Europe and we began reading them together the very day we left our Chinese home and settled ourselves in our tiny cabins on a Jardine-Matheson steamer going up the Yangtse River to Hankow, where we would then take the train for Peking, and Harbin in Manchuria. With European art and music we were already fairly familiar, for from the time we were young children our mother had supplied us with reproductions of famous paintings, and with biographies, suited to our ages, of great artists and composers. We had learned to play Bach and Mendelssohn, Handel and Beethoven on our little English-made Moutrie piano, sent from Shanghai, and upon which we practiced faithfully, if not always willingly, under her supervision.

Our preparation now for Europe was far more serious. My mother was an inspired if uneven teacher. She illuminated by her own enthusiasm any subject in which she was interested, and if she were not interested, she skipped shamelessly and openly. For Europe we could scarcely have had a better teacher. Her own appreciation, not only of art and music but also of history, communicated itself to me, and long before we reached Europe I had quite clearly in mind the differences among the peoples, their characteristics and their achievements. In addition, my mother described to me many of the beautiful places she remembered from her former visits, and I could scarcely wait to see them with my own eyes. Germany she scorned for some reason unknown to me, but my father supplied something for this lack, since he spoke German perfectly, among his other languages, and his religious studies had given him a perspective quite different from my mother’s. Then, too, his own ancestral origins were in southern Germany. In the year 1760, three brothers, his ancestors, the sons of a well-known German scholar, decided to leave their home and the company of men like themselves in order that they could have religious and academic freedom in America. Their father was willing, but required each of them first to have a trade, wisely declaring that a university education would be worth nothing to them in a wilderness. Within a few years after their arrival in the new country the War of Independence began and at least one of them achieved some fame as an aide to George Washington, although he was taken prisoner at Fort Washington, in Pennsylvania. The family traditions were strong in their later home in Virginia, and when my father was growing up there, German was still spoken as a second language in the family.

Looking back, I find that my memories of China grow suddenly dim on that day when we left our compound on the hill and this must have been because my mind was already turned toward Europe and my own country. At any rate, I remember amazingly little of the long train journey northward, and even of our stay in Peking, a city I learned later to know well and to love very much. I did find a deep interest in The Forbidden City, for my impressions of the Old Empress, that dominating figure of my childhood, had remained vivid. The Imperial Family, now weak and inconsequential, were still in residence, and of the famous Summer Palace we could see only the outside, the pagoda beautifully set against the hills. But it is all vague, very vague, and my true memories of Peking came decades later, in another world, and then The Forbidden City was open to any tourist, the doors swinging and the beautiful rooms empty, and the Summer Palace was a picnic place for pleasure seekers.

Harbin, our first stop in Manchuria after we left Peking, was not interesting, being but the familiar medley of a crossroads town, a mixture of peoples and buildings, and I remember only odd and outlandish bits, such as a Mongol camel driver walking briskly at the head of his caravan of dingy camels, and he was remarkable to me because as he walked he was knitting with two long bamboo needles, and his yarn was strands of raw wool which he pulled out from the loose mat of the grey and hairy coat which the camel behind him was shedding. The garment looked like a long wide scarf, although how it could be worn I do not know, except by a man who slept and ate with his camels, for the reek of the camel is eternal, and not to be removed by the best of washings. In the First World War a group of patriotic American ladies in Kuling knitted vests for soldiers in Europe and the only plentiful and cheap wool was that spun from camel hair, and although it was carded and spun and done up nicely in skeins, the smell of camel was still in it and so strong that my mother held her nose and dropped all the yarn into a pail of strong carbolic solution to soak for a day or two. When it was taken out and dried, the camel reek was still there, triumphant over the carbolic, and I remembered it from the knitting Mongol.

Once in Russia itself, my memories grow suddenly strong and clear. The background is vast, endless days of train travel across a flat wooded country, the trees of birch and pine, a weary dreary monotone, with very little change except the intervals, once or twice a day, when we stopped at a station for food and water. Then descending from the train I stared at the strange, wild-looking people, as different from the Chinese as they were from the Europeans I was to meet later. I had seen poverty in China and starvation in famine times and I was later to see poverty in my own country in city slums and in southern towns but never had I, nor have I since, seen poverty to equal that of pre-revolutionary Russia. I saw the poverty, although I was also to see the vast wealth of the nobles and the priests, but at first I thought all Russians were like the savage hungry people in the country, peasants and villagers clad in skins with the fur turned inside and filthy with crusts of aged dirt. Besotted ignorance was on the faces of these poor people, and a terrible despair, as though it was beyond their memory or their imagination that anyone had ever cared for them or ever could care for them, so that all they could think of was a little coarse food to stuff into their empty mouths. Yet they had their feelings, these wretched ones. They embraced one another, a man seizing his friend warmly in his arms and smacking kisses on his cheeks, and they talked with rough voices and laughed loudly in a childlike eager fashion.

I remember my father looking very sober indeed and saying to my mother, “Carie, this can’t last. There’ll be a revolution here within the next ten years — mark my words! People can’t live like this and look like this without an explosion ahead.”

When we reached Moscow we saw a different Russia. Here were plenty of poor people, too, but there were also rich and well-fed ones, wearing handsome furs and satins and English woolens. They rode in carriages or hired droshkies and they talked in French as easily as in Russian, and many of them lived in France or Italy, but especially in France, for most of every year. Moscow was a handsome city, far more interesting to me than Saint Petersburg, but what impressed me, and perhaps depressed me, were the vast cathedrals, those palaces wherein the priests were the ruling princes. The lights, the gold and the silver, the immense and cavernous groined ceilings and in the naves the gilded images and jewelled icons, the smouldering incense and the thousands of candles, were in terrifying contrast to the ceaseless stream of poor people who came in to pray, their sad faces brooding and yearning. And what really broke the heart was the worship of the relics, the bits of dead saints, the fingerbone, the wisp of hair, the fragment of dried skin, which the ignorant pressed to their lips. It made me weep because it was so hopeless, the prayers lost and all the suffering still there. No wonder that a day was to come when the people turned in frightful anger even against the priests. “The hungry sheep look up and are not fed.”

And I wandered with my parents and a guide through the dark small rooms of the ancient parts of the Kremlin and I can still feel upon me the speechless weight of human history as the guide described the tortures of prisoners and the tribunal chambers under the Czars who had been despots, although the present family, he told us, was far more gentle than most of the Imperial Families had been, both the Czar and Czarina much absorbed with their children and especially with their son, the Crown Prince, who suffered from haemophilia. Yet it was this gentle family who a decade or so later was murdered by the angry people, who forgot their gentleness and remembered only that their rulers had done too little to make the lives of the people more bearable.

Even then, young as I was, I felt a fearful premonition of a world to come, when many innocent would suffer because of the anger of an outraged people. I remember hoping again and as usual, with a sort of awful fear, that my own would escape the punishment we did not deserve and that when the peoples of Asia rose up against the white men who had ruled them, Americans could be recognized as different. It was possible that the day would come, and now it has come, and, alas, even American boys lie dead in the earth of Korea.

Years later, after the revolution had broken in Russia and Communism had taken it over, I was curious to know how the people fared. Time was then in the middle of the Second World War and Russia was a friend and an ally and not yet a potential enemy to the United States, and we still had the will to understand each other. I did not want to go to Russia again, however. I cannot speak the language, and unless I can speak the language of a country I find myself constricted and consequently impatient. Moreover, I had already a deep distrust and fear of Communism, for by then I had seen its effects in China. Yet I knew that the average people of any country judge their government by what it does for them and not by its theory, and remembering the misery I had seen in Russia thirty years before, it seemed to me at that time quite possible that the new Russian government might have improved the lot of the common man. At least it could not be worsened. I sought and found, therefore, a Russian woman in New York, one young enough to have grown up under the new regime and yet old enough to have been born under the old, and we became friends. Our long discussions were so interesting to me that I put them verbatim, though arranged and edited, into a short book, entitled Talk About Russia. There Masha, the daughter of Russian peasants, told me the story of her life as a child and a young girl in a new Russia entirely strange to me. I could never have endured its restrictions, and yet I could see, nevertheless, that Masha had lived a better — that is, an easier — life than had her parents, and if I felt that the tyrannies of the new regime were intolerable, I had to agree that at least there were compensations in food and opportunities for education. Thus Masha’s parents were illiterate but she and her brothers and sisters all went to college at the expense of the State. It was easy to understand her enthusiasm for her own country as we wrote our book together.

Even so, we differed often. For example, when we came to the matter of the right of free speech, so dear to an American, Masha could not understand why I felt it was an essential for happiness as well as for democracy.

“You Americans are always wanting so much to talk!” she exclaimed. “Why do you need always to talk?”

And we differed, too, on the absolutes of right and wrong as well as on the right to one’s own beliefs. For example, two books on Russia had just been that year published, both by American writers. One was favorable, the other unfavorable to the Soviet system. This Masha could not understand.

“One of the two is right and therefore the other is wrong,” she declared with indignation. “The one that is right should be kept, the other should be abolished.”

“But Masha,” I reasoned, “every American has the right to decide for himself which book is true.”

“And if some decide one is true and some decide the other is true?” she inquired.

“They have the right to differ,” I said.

“You call it the right, I call it the confusion,” she retorted.

To such discussion there can be no end. We were in this way as far apart as our two countries, and yet we became dear friends, and have so remained, accepting our difference.

Not long ago, however, I asked Masha how she felt now about Russia. She has lived a long time in the United States as a citizen and the wife of a well-known American, and years have passed since our book was published. And she is very changed, in many ways, from the girl who had come, so young and so Russian, to live in New York. She had longed for her own country and had been homesick until her husband let her go to visit her Russian family, “not knowing,” he told me, “when I put her on the train, whether I would ever see her again.”

And on the train, Masha told me, she was set back, and not to say shocked, because some Russian officers who were her compartment mates treated her as an American instead of a fellow countrywoman.

“Did you visit your parents, Masha?” I asked.

Her mother and father had been central figures in our book together. They had reminded me of other peasant couples I had known in China, and though I had never seen them, I had grown fond of them. Mother had been the typical humble Russian peasant wife until the revolution came and then she had caught at the one straw which she could use, which was that women and men were to be equal. The next time Father raised his hand to emphasize a command by a blow she had stood her ground. “I have the same equality you have and I am not afraid,” she had told Father. “Father was better to Mother after the revolution,” Masha had said, “so he stopped beating her. When he was mad he still threatened her, but he was afraid to touch her.”

“I did visit my parents,” Masha now replied. “And they were well and happy and glad to see me. They are old and retired but they live comfortably.”

She laughed, her grey eyes crinkling. “Do you know what Father said to me the first thing? He had seen our book. Someone had read it aloud to him, and so he said, reproachfully, ‘Masha, your book was so nice, but only one thing was not nice. Why did you tell all those Americans how I beat Mother? I didn’t beat her so very hard!’”

We both laughed and then Masha was serious. “As for other things, I found them not altogether the same. Someone’s husband, whom I knew, someone near to me, was sent away to Siberia for making criticism of the government. Nine years he must stay and still he did not come back when the years were over. So my friend went to look for her husband in Siberia and she found him in the labor camp, very thin and sick, and still working, and when she complained, the commissar laughed and said, ‘Oh, yes, it is time for him to go home — I forgot it—’ and they let him go and she thought they could now go home where the children waited. But when they reached the border they were stopped and told that never could they leave Siberia. This happens now and I could not believe it would have happened before when I was in Russia. And I know another friend who hides because he too had said something about Stalin and it was known.”

She sighed. “Perhaps revolutions are only good at first — I don’t know. But now I just live here quietly in America, not thinking at all about politics or such things, but only to be a good wife to John and a good mother to the children and to make the garden and so on. I have some roses, too, in my small greenhouse John made for me. Certainly my life is good now.”

And so Masha, too, could not tell me about Russia today. I have only the memory of that old country as I saw it decades ago, and all that happens has been and is the fulfillment of the inevitable, the premonition that lay so darkly upon me even when I was only a young girl.

And then we were in Poland, in the great beautiful city of Warsaw, where so much history and destruction have since taken place, and then in Berlin, and I could feel no quivering of its foundations. Yet only a few years later it became the storm center for the First World War. Paris lay dreaming in beauty that summer and if any Frenchman guessed what lay ahead in fewer years than could be counted upon the fingers of one hand he did not show it. I felt no more premonitions after we had left the dark Russian land. Europe was only a pleasure ground, and England when we went there was a bulwark. Uneasy though I had often been through my childhood when I watched the doings of individual Englishmen in Asia, I felt nothing in London and in the little English towns and villages except a life as solid as the globe itself. I used to watch, as a very small child, the bearers from the wharfs of river steamers on the Yangtse as they carried bags of sugar from the English ships that had come in from Java and bales of cotton from India and boxes of tinned butter from Australia. Those were heavy loads and the thin wiry figures of the Chinese men, naked to the waists, trembled under their weight. Every man had a tally stick when he left the hulk to which the ship was tied, and this tally stick had to be checked by an Englishman, sitting in a comfortable chair at a table under an umbrella on the street that ran along the Bund of the British Concession. Too thoughtful a child I doubtless was, for I was troubled by the sad humility of the brown men and the cold impartial calm of the white man. I was troubled because the load was too heavy and the white man did not care that it was, and because I knew each bearer was poor and I could imagine his family, working and perhaps living on one of the little river sampans, and I knew where the white man lived. He lived, he and his wife and his son, Tony, in a fine brick house plastered white, and surrounded with cool verandas and standing in a compound full of flowers and shade trees. The contrast was very troubling indeed, and that trouble has followed me all the days of my life. I thought of it in England, so compact and so beautiful and safe as it was, and I wondered if the English people knew, and of course they did not know or dream that the very safety of the loveliest country in the world depended upon the feelings between that brown burden bearer far away and that white man who checked his tally stick. And this trouble I carried with me to my own country, not full-blown but folded like a tight bud in the core of my heart.

Before we left Europe, however, we went to Switzerland, a country for which my mother had a great love, partly because of its natural beauty but most of all, I think, because there three different peoples had agreed to live together in peace with themselves and the world. There, too, she had found comfort in earlier years after the loss of her two daughters and her son, all so small, who had not survived swift and deadly tropical diseases, one after the other dying so quickly that she had not been able to recover. Now we spent months in a pleasant little pension near Neuchatel, and my mother sent me to a French school to improve my French accent.

I do not remember such things, I fear, as school. What I see is the pension family of decayed gentility, Madame La Rue, a thin little widow in perpetual black, seated at the head of her scanty table and with much dignity serving the watery soup as though it were vichyssoise, while Monsieur, her eldest son, sat at her right hand to measure each ladleful with his sharp dark eyes. I came to grief with them both in the garden one day when I picked a blackberry and ate it. Monsieur saw me through the parlor window and reported the crime to Madame his mother, and she came out and with the utmost courtesy informed me that the guests were not supposed to pick the fruits. I apologized, burning red, for I had not meant to rob anyone, but only to give myself the joy of eating a berry fresh from the vine.

And I remember that a Russian countess and her two daughters had rooms at the pension also, and that they complained bitterly of the meager menu, and that neither Madame nor Monsieur paid the slightest attention to them, Madame, indeed, turning her fine worn profile away and conversing with her son on the right as though Russians did not exist. I had then long thick blond hair, and one day my mother sent me to the hairdresser with the Russian lady, who wished also to have “the hairs of my daughters washed,” as she put it. At the hairdresser’s she sat waiting and watching and talking without stay, while her daughters were tended, and when my hair was loosed from its braids and brushed and combed with a fine toothcomb, as the “hairs” of her daughters had been, she exclaimed because my hair was “clean,” as she put it.

“Never,” she said in her fervent fashion, “have I seen the hair long and thick, so, but without the insects!”

She beamed admiration and incredulity, and I was too shy to declare that we never had insects, lest her feelings be hurt. Looking back upon her robust and cheerful personality, I doubt she could have been hurt by anything.

And I remember, still instead of improvement in my French, that there were huge black cherries for sale in the countryside about Neuchatel and one day we bought a bagful, my little sister and I, and we ate the half of them before we discovered minute white worms in them. We could not refrain from examining each of the remaining cherries and we found worms in every one, and so we had to believe the worst, gloomy as it was.

Such small scenes took place against an immense background of scenery, the blue lake at Geneva, the waters of Lucerne, and above all the high white Alps.

On the ship crossing to America I spent more thoughtful hours, perhaps, than I had ever before. My mind was full of all I had seen in Russia and Europe and of the talk that I had with many people wherever I went. I was a shy young girl, not used to young people of my own age and race, but I was drawn easily into human lives partly by my own curiosity but more, I think, by imagination which led me to understand feelings and thoughts and compelled me to conversation. I learned early that people are always ready to tell their opinions and troubles and problems and these drew my deepest and unfailing interest, wherever I was. I left the continent of Europe with a fairly clear idea of the peoples there, and especially, perhaps, of England and the English people, whom I could not keep from loving, now that I knew them, although when I saw them in China I had always taken sides against them with the Chinese.

What I realized was that these pleasant peoples, and especially the wonderful English, had no knowledge and therefore no conception of what their representatives in Asia were doing to destroy them. These peoples were living, each in their own beautiful country, entrenched each in their own civilization, without the slightest foreboding of what I knew then was inevitable, the uprising of Asia against them. When I talked with my father about this one evening while we were still on the ship, he said something which I never forgot. “The uprising,” he said, “will begin in Russia, for there the people are oppressed not by foreigners but by their own rulers. The Russians are the most miserable and wretched people on earth today, and there the world upheaval will first show itself. It is clearly foretold in the Scriptures and it will come to pass. When it breaks in Russia it will spread to other countries of Asia, and because men of the white race have been the oppressors, all the white race must suffer.”

I remember the fear that fell upon me and then the passionate pity for those pleasant and endearing people in England and Europe, and I said to my father,

“Can’t we tell them? Can’t we warn them?”

He shook his head. “They have their prophets,” he said.

I knew he was thinking of the Biblical story, a sort of parable, of the man who, in hell for his sins, wanted to send a warning to those he loved, who were still upon the earth, that they might escape his fate, and God’s stern reply was that they had their prophets and would not heed them.

My father and I did not often talk together. He was in some ways an unbending man. One had to enter his world of intellect and religion, for he never left it. But that evening we understood each other. And then because I was on my way to my own country, so unknown and yet so eagerly longed for, now that I knew the old days in China were gone forever, I could not keep from asking him the old question I dreaded to hear him answer.

“But Americans won’t have to suffer, will they? We have no colonies — no real ones, like India — and we have no concessions in China, and we are using the indemnity money from the Boxer Rebellion for Chinese students in American colleges, and we have done so much good for the Chinese people — hospitals, schools, food in famines—”

He listened to this with a quiet patience and then he said, “We must never forget that missionaries went to China without invitation and solely from our own sense of duty. The Chinese therefore owe us nothing. We have done the best we could, but that, too, was our duty and so they still owe us nothing. And if our country has taken no concessions, we have kept silent when others did, and we too have profited from the unequal treaties. I don’t think we shall escape when the day of reckoning comes.”

A chill came over me when he said this and I feared that he was right. Today, worlds later, though we are innocent, we Americans, of the guilt of the weight of history of the white man in Asia, we are not innocent of the guilt of silence. The burden of Asia has fallen upon us, and for what other white men have done, we too must suffer.

Green Hills Farm,

Pennsylvania

I entered America in September, 1910, with a sober heart and a mind too old for my years. We had used up all our days in England and there was none to spare and so we travelled directly to the town where my college was. I had originally hoped to go to Wellesley and had taken the examinations for entrance there, but my Southern relatives, still haunted by the War between the States, had objected sufficiently by letter to my parents so that a compromise had to be made between a Yankee college and the Southern finishing schools against which I rebelled. A Southern college for women, Randolph-Macon, was chosen for me. My mother approved it because the education there was planned to be exactly what a man would get. After being married to my father for thirty years she had developed into an ardent feminist, and I must say with cause. My father, who based all his acts upon Biblical precedent, followed strictly some careless remarks made centuries before by Saint Paul, in which that saint stated flatly that as Christ was head of the Church, so man was head of the woman. My mother had an intrepid and passionate nature, but my father was a monument of calm, and as usual the monument won. In our home my father was the head, and although my mother battered at him, he held his position. To her eloquent and sometimes angry assaults on the subject of being a woman, as for example when she felt that the family bank account, always slim, should be a joint account so that she could draw checks as well as he, he never answered anything more violent than a quiet protest, “Oh, now, Carie, don’t talk that way!”

The result of years of defeat, although she never acknowledged subjection, was that my mother determined to give her daughters every possible advantage over their future husbands, and so she was charmed by the idea of educating me exactly as though I were a boy.

Arrived at Lynchburg, Virginia, I found my college to be a collection of red brick buildings, still new enough to look raw, at least to my eyes accustomed to years of the finest and most cultivated scenery in the world, which certainly the best Chinese landscapes are. Within those buildings there was no beauty to be found, and the minimum even of comfort. I can measure how long ago that was when I return now occasionally to visit my college and find it mellowed with beauty everywhere and a place already enriched by tradition. In my day, however, it was stark, and it was hard to have no beauty to look at as I came and went along the wide halls down which the only carpeting vas a strip of dull brown linoleum, thick as leather. But other promises were fulfilled. We were soundly taught and the curriculum carried no hint that we were young women and not young men. We were not corrupted by home economics or dressmaking or cookery or any such oft substitute for hard thinking. We were compelled to take sciences whether we liked them or not, and mathematics and Latin were emphasized and excellently administered. Each year the student body petitioned for a course in home economics, for in that day no girl thought it possible that she might not marry, and each year the faculty sternly refused to yield to the request. The theory was, and I think it entirely correct, that any educated woman can read a cookbook or follow a dress pattern. It is the brain that needs education and it can teach the hands. I was proud of my college when I discovered recently that while the students still petition each year for a course in home economics, the faculty still refuses to yield.

Of my college days I remember shamefully little and this is no one’s fault except my own, for my life was limited by my personal situation. My parents returned to China immediately after depositing me and I had no home for the next four years. My life was confined, therefore, to the college buildings. True, my elder brother was married and was living in the same town, but unhappily there was a shadow over his house, and I did not enter it willingly. The greatest sacrifice of my college life was in my senior year, when he wished to take a new job in a distant city, and not wishing to leave his children he asked me to live in his house instead of in the college buildings. I loved him and we were understanding friends, and I loved his two attractive children, and I did what he asked, but it was a hard year, and for me tragic, because it was my first insight into the danger which besets any marriage when the man and woman are too unlike in their background of birth and education. Yet I did not learn enough to save myself, some years later, from the same mistake.

But it is too soon to speak here of marriage. When I look back from this distance upon those four college years, I see them as an experience, divided again by my different worlds. I had grown up in Asia, a region of the globe in which my college mates had not the slightest interest and certainly of which they had no knowledge and this fact lent me an aura of strangeness, more unkindly called queerness, which after a short time I perceived well enough in their attitude toward me. With some fortitude I saw that unless I did something about it, I would spend four lonely and unhappy years, for no one is more cruel than the young American female unless it be the young American male, and that it was carelessness rather than conscious cruelty only made the cruelty seem the more severe, especially as I had been reared in a culture where human relationships were the first concern. It took some weeks of thinking to orient myself in this new culture of complete individualism. Meanwhile I could not complain of lack of notice — rather, the opposite, for I had too much attention. Girls came in groups to stare at me, and I soon began to understand the detachment of the only Chinese girl in the student body, a senior, who came and went with friendly indifference to her fellow students. In their way they were even fond of her, but while she accepted their good intentions she never yielded herself. I was not satisfied with her position. I wanted to belong to my own kind and to belong, as I soon saw, meant that I must separate my two worlds again. I must learn to talk about the things that American girls talked about, boys and dances and sororities and so on, and I must look like them, and above all I must conceal the fact that inside me was a difference that I could not escape, even if I would.

After reflection I decided to live as fully as possible in my college world, to achieve as far as I could its modest awards, and above all to enjoy everything. The first necessity was to buy myself some American-made clothes, and so I put away the fine Chinese linen and silk dresses with which my mother had outfitted me. They had been made with affectionate care by our Chinese tailor and he thought he had copied them faithfully from models my mother showed him in The Delineator. But I soon saw that there was an infinite difference between his dresses and those my college mates wore, and not the quality of the linen and the silk nor the exquisite perfection of his embroidery and drawn work could compensate for the questionable fit of his sleeves and the wrong length of the skirts. I bought a few American dresses and I put up my hair, which I still wore in a thick braid doubled up and tied with a ribbon, and instead of the handmade leather shoes made by our Chinese cobbler I bought American ones. Externally I became an American. I learned the proper slang and exclamations, and by the end of my freshman year, I was indistinguishable from any other girl of my age and class. And so I joined my world.

I was happy enough at college, although often I was desperately lonely without my family and my home. Vacations were a misery, for I felt obligated to go to my brother’s house, and there was the inescapable shadow, mitigated only by the sweetness of the little children. The long summer vacation was a blank to be filled somehow, and I filled it the first year by going to see my uncles and aunts and cousins. They were kind, but remote indeed from any life I had ever known, and while I loved the countryside and the magnificent Allegheny Mountains rising behind my grandfather’s house like a stage backdrop, yet I did not know how to communicate with my American family. They were immersed in their own life, very naturally, and while I tried to share it, yet it was strange to me, and many of the things we had to do, the visiting, the afternoon calls, the small daily household tasks, seemed trivial and uninteresting, and the talk, lively as it was, incurably local. I had been accustomed to world thinking and world living and it was hard to center in the little town. Yet I learned to enjoy it, as I might enjoy for the moment the reading of a closely knit family novel or watching a play, and I began to see the drama of personalities in close range. My grandfather, so completely the head of the family, was dead by then, and his place was taken by my elder uncle, a gentle and kindly man, black-haired and black-eyed as my mother’s people were. There was a haunting physical resemblance to my mother in all my aunts and uncles proper, and this drew me to them. Yet they were all different from my mother, and sometimes I fancied in them an unexpressed disapproval of her because she had left the family and gone so far away — and to be a missionary! We were not missionary folk by ancestry, and perhaps they did not quite forgive my mother for being different from the rest of them, and I do not know why she was. She was talented enough to have been anything she chose, but some emotional discontent must have made her impetuously willing at a certain moment in her life to give up her pleasantly comfortable home and follow my father across the world, for her soul’s sake, whatever else the reason. With the family I went on Sundays to the white-spired Presbyterian church where my father’s eldest brother was the minister and I did all that I could to seem like everyone else, while I knew I never could be, however I tried. Meanwhile I lost my heart to my country itself. The cleanliness which made it safe to drink water unboiled, the freedom from the possibility of dysentery and cholera which made it pleasant to pluck an apple from a tree and eat it skin and all, the abundance of water to bathe in, the spaces wherein no one lived, the miles of fields and lawns and countryside, the coloring of autumn forests, all these won my heart.

One thing I could not understand and do not yet and this was the apparent lack of interest or curiosity in Americans about other countries and peoples. I remember my wonder that my college mates never asked me about China, or what the people there ate and how they lived and whether China was like our country. So far as I can remember, no one ever asked me a question about the vast humanity on the other side of the globe. Certainly no member of my family asked me anything, and years later I remember my father, too, returning after half a century in China for a last visit to his family, coming back again sorely hurt because none of his family had asked him any questions about the people to whom he had given his life. More decades later when I came to America to live, I found the same incuriosity or disinterest, and today after I have made my home for twenty years here in as pleasant a community as can be found anywhere, I have to report that still I have never found an everyday American in the least interested in any of the ways of life of Asia. No farmer has ever asked me about the Chinese farming, or the crops that are harvested there, no doctor has ever inquired of the interesting and indeed invaluable medical knowledge of Chinese physicians, no housewife has ever asked me how Chinese women do their work, and no American boy or girl has ever asked me how the Chinese young people live. True, sometimes when I am asked to talk to school children, their teachers prompt them and they ask proper little questions and forget what I answer. Once in New York, in a lecture in the Town Hall series at eleven o’clock in the morning, an hour when ladies of leisure and cultivation attend, I gave what I hoped was a penetrating analysis of Chinese thought upon modern problems, and at the end of the time allotted me I waited for questions. There was one question. It came from a portly old lady in the front row. She wanted to know whether the chop suey she ate in Chinese restaurants in New York was really a Chinese dish. I told her it was not. I must admit that questions do follow a lecture, but they are more likely to be political than human.

This lack of interest in other peoples would be of no importance, perhaps, except that it limits the field of mental enjoyment, were it not for the fact that the United States is at a crucial point in her history. It has already been disastrous that we have not known and therefore have not understood other peoples, and especially the peoples of Asia, so that again and again we have lost opportunities for influence. It is almost too late, I fear, to expect other opportunities, but I hope that it is not quite too late. Yet I doubt that the habitual indifference of our people can be changed in a decade or even in a generation. People do not change easily anywhere.

Long ago when I was in college I pondered upon this aspect of my college mates and it was reflected even in their parents when I went home with them occasionally for visits. But I was young and I shut out of my mind the danger and the possible results, and I went on to enjoy myself as an American girl. By my sophomore year I had my techniques established and was able to feel a genuine interest in the activities of the group, except that I could never be deeply concerned over sports. The competitive instinct was either not born in me or my childhood in China had not developed it. Thus it did not seem to me of the slightest importance who won a game, and in sports therefore I did not shine. I was inclined, too, to waste little time on studies I did not enjoy, such as Latin, mathematics and physics, and stole hours from them to spend in the library reading books I had always wanted to read and had not found before at my hand. I read prodigiously, extravagantly and greedily, in season and out, and certainly lowered my general level of grades thereby. But here, too, my noncompetitive nature prevented me from trying to get higher grades than others. When I did so, it was accidental. Years later I went back to visit my college, and I found a legend among the freshmen that I had once failed an English course. It was not true, but when I observed what a comfort it was to them to believe it, I had not the heart to spoil it. What did it matter whether I had failed it or not?

By my junior year I was sufficiently American to be elected president of my class, and then I had really to identify myself with my college mates in fairness to them. That was the best year of my college life and I enjoyed it. Other honors came my way, I do not remember them all now, but they had their part in my happiness and I was too innocent or young or unconcerned to realize that many honors do not make one better loved. Such revelation and premonition of the future came in my senior year, when, needing some extra money, I competed for prizes for the best short story and the best poem of the year and won them both. I was glad for the cash and not, I think, unduly impressed by the honor, since I had written stories and poems equally badly, I am sure, as long as I could remember. But what astonished and wounded me was that in the congratulations of my fellows I discerned a slight hostility, a hint of complaint that one person had been given the two best prizes. Upon reflection, I felt the justice of this, and yet what could I say?

Of my senior year I can remember very little that is pleasant or that added to my growth. I lived off campus at my brother’s house and I was burdened with a secret my brother now shared with me, that he had decided upon a divorce. He asked me to write to my parents and I did so, and they wrote back in such horror and shock that he postponed the whole matter for several more years. Our families on both sides were extremely conservative in every way, and there had never been a divorce in our history. To my parents it seemed unthinkable that their son, particularly, should commit such a sin. My mother wrote to me, weeping, as I could see from the tear splotches on the paper, and blaming herself that she had sent my brother to America at fifteen.

We met in secret, my brother and I, and talked long hours, and after much thought the decision for postponement was made, for the sake of our parents. True to his decision, he did not seek divorce until after their death, years later, although he lived separately and alone in the intervening years, except for visits from his growing children. This crisis of personal life so near me was an isolating experience, for it meant that the normal life I might have had in my brother’s home during the years I was in America was denied, although I gained in the knowledge of human nature and the difficult and delicate relationships of marriage.

So I came to the end of college and took my place in the long procession of graduates. I received my diploma, lonely to know that my parents were not in the chapel crowded with other parents, although by then I was used to loneliness of that sort, at least. Summing it up, I am amazed at how little I learned in college. No one except myself was to blame for this, I am sure. College was an incident in my life and out of its main stream, an experience which remains incidental. My attempt, successful enough in its own way, to be like other American girls, was not permanent, I fear, and after my graduation I was faced with my two worlds again. Which should I choose? Should I stay to become permanently American or should I go home again to China?

All during the days of packing and farewells, I pondered this choice. I wanted to stay, that I knew. Between the two countries my heart chose my own, for I was beginning now to understand that beyond the college walls was a whole country I still did not know, although it was mine and I was born to it. I had my living to earn but that was no problem and I felt secure enough in myself. I could choose among several teaching jobs, including one to remain on in the college as an assistant in psychology with the professor under whom I had majored. Already during my senior year I had been a minor assistant to the extent of helping him correct freshman papers and examinations. Yet my conscience moved me to return to my parents. I did not want to be a missionary, for I knew I could never preach or persuade people to change their religion. I had seen enough of that dangerous business in years gone by. Moreover, I had not the spiritual attitudes which could make it possible for me to proclaim my religion superior to all others. I had seen too many good people who were not Christian, and, as my father used to remark, it took the arrogance out of anybody to have to acknowledge that the best Christian converts were always good people anyway, the best Buddhists or Mohammedans or Taoists or what not, even before their conversion to Christianity.

One day a letter came from my father that my dearly loved mother had been taken with sprue, a tropical disease which at that time no physician knew how to cure and scarcely to treat. Yet it was a slowly fatal disease, robbing the blood of its red corpuscles until in the end the victim died of a deadly anemia. My mind was made up on the instant. I wrote to the Presbyterian Board of Foreign Missions under whom my parents worked and asked to be sent to China as a teacher, and I packed my bags and prepared to sail as soon as I could get passage. I did not think of my return as permanent, but only until my mother was well again, or if she did not get well, then until — but that end I could not face.

No sooner was my passage assured than there came a letter from the Board saying that war threatened in Europe and all passages abroad would be postponed until it was clear to what extent our country would be involved. It is an example of the remoteness of our college life that this news came to us all like a thrust of lightning. We had been studying European history, and yet our study had not prepared us for the uprising of the Germanic peoples in an effort to control the European continent. Our history professor had, it is true, spoken of such a possibility, years hence, but none of us thought of it as part of our lifetime. To me it came with special foreboding, for I saw it as the beginning of the inevitable struggle between East and West, the inflaming incident for a long period of war. Yet I persuaded myself, or tried to, that the murder of an uninteresting archduke in a little European town could not ignite the world. But I did not understand how charged and supercharged were the feelings beneath that small incident, meaningless in itself. It was the touching off of the tinder of human hostilities and fire lit fire around the globe.

Meanwhile I could only cable my parents, unpack my bags and settle down. I accepted the assistantship at college as the easiest job, making it clear that I could only take it with the understanding that at any moment I must be allowed to resign and go home to my sick mother. Thus I began the task of teaching freshman psychology to the incoming class of girls from all over the country. There was no necessity now to be one of them. I was their teacher, and being so young it was all the better if I carried my head high and kept my distance.

In November my mother was worse, and by dint of anxiety and pressure, although the war loomed darker than ever, I persuaded the Presbyterian Board to let me go home anyway. A classmate and close friend generously came to take over my job, and I set forth alone across the wide spaces of land and ocean to return to the country I had known better than any other, and yet which had changed very much in the four years that I had been away. I began again to think in Chinese. During the four years I had not spoken a single word of Chinese, for our one Chinese student came from Shanghai and did not speak Mandarin, and I did not know her dialect. Chinese was my first language, but for the college years I had spoken only my second language, English, and I had unconsciously absorbed the soft drawl of Virginia speech. I remember that a young American on the ship corrected my pronunciation even of the word China, which he insisted I called “Chahna.”

He was a meticulous young man, on his way to the Philippines to work for the Standard Oil Company, and during the idle weeks on the ship, he was part of my American education. I had known a few American men merely as casual companions, but he was another sort. Somewhere along the way we decided firmly, at first individually and then together, that while we would be friends on the ship we would not continue our friendship after parting at Shanghai, and we did not. I do not remember why we came to this stern decision, for nothing was serious between us, but I imagine that it had to do with his contract and certainly with my own determination not to get myself involved with anybody until the question of my mother’s life was settled. But ship friendships are brittle stuff, and certainly the magic of the wide Pacific ended abruptly when the yellow waters of the Yangtse rushed out to muddy the blue.

At any rate, reality began for me when the tall thin figure of my father and the little figure of my younger sister appeared upon the pier to meet me. The very fact of my mother’s absence struck me to the heart. Neither of them had the slightest ability to tell less than the truth. She had not been well enough to come to Shanghai, but she hoped to meet me at the train in Chinkiang.

I read many warnings nowadays against too deep an attachment between parents and children, and I am sure that such dangers are overrated. There should be a deep attachment, heart should be tied to heart between parent and child, for unless the child learns how to love a parent profoundly, I believe that he will never learn how to love anyone else profoundly, and not knowing how to love means the loss of the meaning of life and its fulfillment. I loved both my parents but at different times and in different ways. During my childhood all my love went to my mother, and I felt very little for my father, even going to the extent of remarking one day at the age of eleven that I hated him. My mother rebuked me but there was no other fuss made about it and my father, although he had overheard me, said nothing. I was not made to feel wicked or ungrateful and so I continued to hate my father mildly until I was old enough to appreciate him, which was not until I was grown. During the years when he was seventy to eighty years old, I adored him and found him delightful and charming, affectionate and amusing, and he knew it and expanded in the friendly atmosphere between us. Yet it was not my fault nor his that we had both to wait until such an age for mutual understanding, He did not know earlier how to accept my world and I did not know how to enter his. We had to grow together in time and maturity, and I am glad he lived long enough for that.

My love for my mother was a thing apart. It was rooted in my blood and my bones. I felt her every pain, I knew when she was wounded, and she was wounded always too easily, so that toward the end of her life she suspected people unfairly of wanting to hurt her, and while I knew this was wrong and I argued against her judgments, yet I could not forgive the ones who wounded her even when they did not know what they did. I wanted her to have the happiest life possible for a human being, and this desire was perhaps made the more passionate because I discerned, although she never acknowledged it, that as she grew older she was desperately homesick for the land she had left too young. It was impossible for her to return, she could not leave my father, and she could not cross the ocean again with her weak heart and enfeebled frame.

How weakened she was I had not been able to imagine until I saw her at the railway station in Chinkiang. There she stood, and instead of the strong upright figure I had remembered, wearing her thick white hair like a crown, her dark eyes bright, her lips firm, I saw a small little lady, very dainty in dress as always she was, but shrunken and tiny, so tiny that I lifted her up in my arms when I ran to her.

“Mother, how little you are!” I cried.

“Daughter, how big you are!” she retorted, laughing.

My heart trembled at her fragility and I tried not to weep and she saw it and made me turn to greet the crowd who had come to welcome me, my old Chinese friends, my English Agnes and her family, a few American missionaries, our servants and neighbors. What a heartwarming home-coming it was, with all of them trying to hug me at once and clinging to my hands and making speeches and giving me flowers and little gifts and packages of Chinese spongecakes and sesame cookies! It was a mild and glorious afternoon although the season was late November and we lingered so that I could speak to everyone and the station gang gathered around to stare and remark upon our goings on. I was home again, even though during the years I had been away the compound in which I had grown up had been given over to a boys’ school and the old bungalow torn down to make place for a new two-story modern dormitory. My parents had moved to another hill and another modest mission house had been built for them. But the hills and the valleys were the same, and as we walked along the familiar roads of beaten earth, the farmers looked up from the fields and saw me and put down their hoes and came to speak to me and their wives and children ran out of the earthen houses to call to me. “And have you come back?” they shouted. “It is good — it is good.” And when we came to the new house, unfamiliar though it was to me, I found that my mother had set aside for me the pleasantest upstairs room, facing the distant river and overlooking the green valley. It was a bare room, I suppose, with the minimum of plain furniture and there were no rugs on the floor, but bowls of late roses stood on the desk and the dressing table, and my mother had made white curtains for the windows and my old bed was there and my childhood books were in a little bookcase built in the wall, and it was home again.

That night my mother and I sat long in talk and I made her tell me about herself and how it was that sprue had begun and then fastened itself on her, and unwillingly she showed me her poor mouth, sore and red, and told me that the vicious disease, a sort of fungus growth it was thought to be, was destroying the mucous membranes of her mouth and throat and intestines, so that it was painful for her to speak very much or to eat anything but the mildest of bland foods, and this she had hidden from me! I put my arms about her and wept, and she comforted me, saying that she intended to fight the disease with all her strength and get well again now that I was home, and I dried my eyes and swore myself to the task with her. I was glad I had chosen to come home and I was sure that I had decided rightly to leave America. It was not so much China that I chose. It was my mother’s life.

My own life now was divided again. My daily duty, besides teaching in the new boys’ school, and supervising seventeen to twenty young Chinese women who were being trained for various types of work in other schools, was to care for my mother. I took over the management of the house in order to relieve her, and in her place I carried on the work among women for which she was responsible. I could not and would not lead religious meetings, but my mother did not do much of this sort of thing herself. She was too sensitive to impress upon others directly the advantages even of the religion in which she still fervently believed. Her meetings were usually friendly gatherings where the women told of their difficulties and problems and opportunities and needs, and my mother endeavored as best she could to fulfill each demand. I was too young to take her place, but I could listen and promise to get her advice for the next meeting. It was an invaluable experience thus to hear Chinese women open their hearts because of their faith in my mother and I was always touched and moved at their acceptance of me in her place. Beyond this I made a fierce and determined attack upon the disease which threatened my mother, working with the doctors to learn all I could about it. Nothing but diet was then tried as a cure, and we experimented with all the known foods to find the one most suitable to her. Some victims professed to recover upon bananas and my long-suffering mother fed for months upon bananas, never a favorite food at any time with her. Then we heard that fresh strawberries were helpful and we set about the cultivation of strawberries. Milk, however, fresh raw milk, seemed to be the most approved food and how to get fresh raw cow’s milk became my problem. I do not know whether it is only Chinese milkmen who are the most wily of their kind or whether milkmen everywhere are below the average of human beings in integrity. But certainly in those days it seemed impossible to find an honest milkman. The Chinese had never been used to drinking cow’s milk, indeed the very idea of it was repulsive to them, partly because Buddhists considered that to drink milk was to rob the calf of its life, and partly because of the cow smell of those who drank milk, or so they declared. Yet cow’s milk was beginning to be thought of as a Western source of health, and the more modern among the Chinese eagerly bought canned milk from American stores in Shanghai for their children. Human milk the Chinese had always considered beneficial for young children and old people but it was expensive and not suitable for the average person. A few enterprising Chinese therefore bought a cow or two and sold raw milk to foreigners. Sometimes the cows were only water buffaloes, and although their milk was good, it was scanty and very high in butter fat, too high for my mother’s delicate digestion. All milk, of course, had to be boiled, and this destroyed much of its value. Also, boiled milk is very binding to the bowels and to exist upon a boiled milk diet is to complicate the system. How to get clean unwatered raw milk was my task, and knowing nothing about cows at that time, I conceived the idea of having the milkman lead his cow up the hill to our back yard and there milk her product into a pan before my eyes, after I had seen his hands scrubbed with hot water and soap and dipped into disinfectant. We did this for a few days, and still the milk seemed disconcertingly blue and thin. It was our faithful cook who asked me to observe closely one day that the milkman’s dirty cotton sleeves hung down over his wrists. I did so, and discovered a thin rubber tube under his right wrist, and from that wrist ran a small stream of water into the milk pail. I stooped and twitched back the wide sleeve and disclosed a rubber hotwater bag which he had bought from some servant of a foreigner. It was filled with water. I was speechless and for a moment I could only look my reproach.

He was ashamed enough, though only for the moment, too, I fear, and then he said, “But I boiled the water, Little Sister — truly I boiled it, knowing that foreigners always drink only boiled water. Besides, the milk is so rich I feared it would make your honored mother ill.”

We gave up on raw milk after that, and experimenting further we worked out a diet of rice gruel and fresh fruit juice and soft-boiled eggs and liver which served at least to prolong my mother’s life, though she was never really well again during her few remaining years. Now, of course, doctors of tropical diseases know that sprue is a deficiency disease, and while the bananas and fresh strawberries and raw milk and liver were useful in providing some vitamins, far more were needed. But the knowledge came too late for my mother.

Outside this home battle I lived another life. I was intensely interested in my teaching, for my students were not children. They were senior high school students, and far more mature than Western boys of the same age. Many of them were already married men and some had children. I could treat them as adults, although I was not much older than they were. My task was to teach them English and in this tongue we attempted to carry on conversations upon the profound subjects which interested them. They taught me far more than I taught them. For, as I said before, while I had been away at college great things were happening in China. I had left in a period of confusion. The weak little Emperor Pu Yi sat upon the throne but with the passing of the doughty old Empress Dowager there had been no real ruler and the Manchu dynasty was near its end. As usual in such times, the Chinese people were waiting philosophically for a new head to appear and various local leaders were developing into war lords. It was a process thoroughly Chinese and essentially democratic, and tradition compelled the new ruler to do the best he could to comfort the people in order that his seat might be secure. The throne was seldom secure in the first generation, however, for the Chinese were accustomed to criticizing their rulers and they did not revere easily, any more than Americans do. By the second generation national affairs settled down, and the dynasty began to rise towards its full power.

This historical process I now found was disturbed. The war lords were swarming as usual when the dynasty came to an end, but there was no throne for a prize. While I had been peacefully at college a real revolution had been going on, fed by a dozen fires, but chiefly by the intrepid Sun Yat-sen. His name, of course, I had long known, but it was always surrounded by doubt, for no one knew what to think of him. He was the son of a village farmer in South China, but he had been sent to a mission school and when he was only a boy he had been taken to Honolulu by his elder brother, who was a merchant there. There, too, he had attended a Christian school and had seen American government at work. He was no mean missionary himself, for he soon conceived the vast notion of modernizing his country, not by education or by writing essays and translating books as the two famous scholars, Liang Ch’ih-ch’ao and K’ang Yu-wei, were doing in exile, but by inciting other Chinese to help him overthrow the throne and set up a republic based on the constitutional form of the Government of the United States. With this idea as big as a melon in his head, he had given up his profession as a doctor of medicine and set out as a sort of patriotic pilgrim to find Chinese in every part of the world and collect funds from them for his revolution. Meanwhile he hoped to persuade foreign governments to help him with the new China.

It was one of those mad dreams which can succeed only when the mood of many people is at the point of readiness to accept any hope of improving their state. The foreign governments, as was to be expected, only shrugged Sun Yat-sen off, but the Chinese overseas gave him all they had and put their faith in him. Exiled as they were by the demands of business, they were patriotic Chinese still and they longed to see their country strong and great and safe from colonization. They agreed with Sun Yat-sen that only modernization could save them.

The story of this remarkable man has been told so often that I am not inclined to repeat it here. In my sophomore year in college he did actually succeed in his dream. While he was travelling in the United States collecting his funds, the revolutionaries he had left behind him in his own country became impatient and rose up and overthrew the dynasty representatives in the province of Kiangsi and declared Sun Yat-sen the first President of the Republic of China. He saw the news in an American newspaper while he was on a train in one of the Western states. No one recognized him, of course, and it is fascinating to imagine his thoughts as he read that paper and saw his own name in great headlines while he sat in the dingy day coach, lonely and unknown. The anger of the Chinese people, meanwhile, had risen to its height and everywhere they killed the Manchus whom hitherto they had protected in contempt. In a letter my mother had written to me in 1911 she had said, “I look from the window this morning and see poor Manchu women and children hiding for their lives behind the graves on the hillside. I shall have to go out and see what I can do.”

It was characteristic of my parents that while the American Consul had warned all Americans to leave for Shanghai until the trouble was over, lest the revolution take its usual anti-foreign turn, my parents did not go, and it is characteristic, too, that the Chinese said nothing when my parents helped the Manchus to escape death. It was a good deed, according to Chinese ethics as well as Christian, and they did not reproach my parents for saving the very people whom they themselves were killing. The paradox is part of Chinese human nature, but the explanation is that they believed that religion and religious acts were entirely individual responsibilities and privileges.

All these doings had seemed vague enough to me while I was at college, and I had not mentioned them to my college mates because it would have taken too much explaining. I should have had to go far back in world history and begin with the Portuguese sailing vessels pushing their way across the oceans in search of treasure in the East, and laying lasting hold on Goa in India and Macao in China and I should have had to tell of Spanish ships snatching the Philippines, and how, long after Americans drove the Spanish out, the Filipinos supposing meanwhile that we intended to give them independence, we had stayed for half a century bringing both good and evil to those islands. And I should have had to remind them that Columbus himself did not want to discover America, that it was only an accident in his search for the jewelled treasures of India, and I should have had to tell them that we Americans would not so easily have freed ourselves from the English in 1776 had not the East India Company at that very hour been discovering the extravagant wealth of India, so that England concentrated her effort there instead of upon thirteen little stretches of wilderness in an uncivilized continent. “You Americans owe us a great deal,” my Indian friends are fond of saying to me today. “If the English had not discovered how much richer we were than you were in 1776, you would still be part of the British Empire.” It may be true for all I know, for certain facts of history point in that direction. And I would have had to explain to my college mates the whole disgraceful story of the Western Powers and how they were still robbing the great peaceful countries of Asia, which on principle had never developed the use of gunpowder and modern weapons, and I should have had to explain about the Opium Wars and the Boxer Rebellion and the Unequal Treaties, the extraterritoriality whereby any white man walked the earth of China free from arrest by a Chinese authority. He could commit murder and rape and sometimes did and yet he could not be arrested because all white people had what amounted to diplomatic immunity. I should have had to explain the arrogance of the white man in Asia, unmatched, I believe, since the days of the cruel Roman Empire.

And how could I have explained the evolution of this history, clear though it was from the very first days of rapacious tradesmen and bigoted priests? My college mates had nothing in their experience wherewith to understand. All that they knew about China was that they had heard a missionary beg for money in a church so that he could teach the Chinese or feed them or buy Bibles for them and they thought of the great and beautiful country as a land of beggars and savages instead of the most ancient existing civilization in the world, with a culture older than any in Europe. So I did not explain. I read my mother’s letters alone and pondered the changes which she described so vividly and then I put them aside to face when I returned.

Now, however, the struggle of Sun Yat-sen was a matter of daily study in the newspaper and daily talk with my Chinese friends. Could he organize a republic or not? If not, what would then happen? Would we have a throne again and a new Emperor and if so, who would he be?

Meanwhile as usual in the midst of political confusion the life of the Chinese people went on in its accustomed ways, with no ferment and no uproar. The greatest change that I could see outwardly was that the men and boys had their queues cut off, and their hair cut in Western fashion, since the queue had been a sign of subjection to the Manchu dynasty and that dynasty was ended. Even so, many a Chinese peasant clung to his queue and did not want to cut it off. He did not know why he had it, but his father and forefathers for generations had worn the queue and therefore it must be good. But peasants were overcome by the strong forces of revolution and young men, some of them my own students, stationed themselves at the city gates through which the farmers had to pass to carry their vegetable baskets and bundles of fuel to the markets, and when one wore a queue they sat him down on a stool and lectured him and cut off his appendage, even though he wept while they did so. In a matter of some years all the queues seemed to be gone, although when I was living in North China after my marriage a few years later, I still occasionally saw dusty-haired farmers from the back country with modest little queues curled under their felt caps, and now and then I found an old woman who did not know that the Empress Dowager was dead although she had been in her jewelled tomb for twenty years. I considered this ignorance remarkable at the time but have discovered since that it was not. The New York Times recently published the results of an American history test given to thousands of college freshmen throughout the United States. Among other amazing discoveries were these: that thirty percent of them did not know Woodrow Wilson was President during the First World War; that only six percent were able to name the first thirteen colonies — many even listed such states as Texas and Oregon; and a third of them did not know who was President during the Civil War. People everywhere do not concern themselves much beyond the common round of everyday, and this is the chief problem for a democratic government, whose success depends upon an informed and responsible citizenry.

There were many conservative and well-educated old Chinese, however, who heartily disapproved of Sun Yat-sen and the revolution and all the doings of the young people, and who wished the Throne back again. Some of them were friends of my parents, and while I heard the arguments of the young during the day in my classes, I had the other side from these older Chinese. I was hard put to it sometimes to answer the questions which the students asked in class. One of their favorites was to demand of me in halting English, which nevertheless improved daily, “Why does not your country give freedom to the Filipinos?”

I did not know why, but later the rising ambitions of Japan helped me and I could then reply, “If Americans leave the Philippines, the Japanese will come in. Would you rather have the Japanese?”

They had to acknowledge that they would not. At that time the United States was the most popular of the Western nations. In spite of resentment against our demand that we share the benefits of extraterritoriality and trade agreements, the Chinese did not fear us as an imperial power, for that was before the days of Communism, but they did very much fear the new strong Japan.

Yet even that Japan had, I knew, its roots in the old evil of empire and colonization. I had Japanese friends who insisted, to me that the only way to insure Japan’s continuing freedom was to make her too strong for any Western power to colonize.

“You must remember, my dear young lady,” Mr. Yamamoto said to me one day. He was a rich merchant who had a home in our town as well as in Japan and he was responsible, as were others like him, for filling the Chinese shops gradually over the years with a plethora of cheap but remarkably good merchandise and driving out to the same extent the more expensive products of Britain and the United States. “You must remember,” he repeated, wagging a long pale forefinger at me, “every Asian country has either been seized by a Western power, as India has been, or it has been despoiled and weakened by excessive demands and the Unequal Treaties and frightful indemnities as China has been. Only Japan remains free, and we are in great danger. We could never tolerate colonization. It is necessary, therefore, for us to make ourselves an empire as Britain has done, and China is the logical place for us to begin. We will develop China, we will not despoil her — it would not be to our interest.”

What could I say? It seems to me now, looking back, that I spent those first years of my return in almost complete silence. I listened and could not reply. Sometimes even my father, impatient because of the lack of central government and the confusion of rising war lords and revolutionists in China, would exclaim that “it might be a good thing if Japan came in and cleaned China up.”

To this I could and did make retort that I was sure it would not be a good thing. The Japanese and the Chinese are as nearly opposite in their national characteristics as it is possible for human beings to be. There is more difference between them than there is between any two peoples in the white race. Their geography has shaped their history, and their history could not be less alike. The Chinese are actually much more like the Americans, also a continental people, than they are like the Japanese who are an island people, and I knew that the Japanese, much as I liked and admired them and do still, would be tyrants if they were able to rule in China. They could never understand the Chinese, and not understanding, they would, out of fear and insecurity, try to rule by force and that, of course, the Chinese could not tolerate.

Many years later, on a bright Sunday afternoon in December in Pennsylvania I heard that Japanese bombs had fallen upon Pearl Harbor. I remembered instantly the words of Mr. Yamamoto, spoken so long ago, and again I saw the path of history clear from the very first Portuguese vessel that sailed the seas to maraud on the coasts of Asia to the Japanese ships of the air flying to destroy as much as they could of the strongest Western power in the world. Step by step, cause always preceding result, history marches on.

Young as I was in those early years, and filled with conflicting and youthful interests and impulses, I tried very hard to understand what was taking place in my worlds. I was lonely in many ways. My years in college had separated me from the Chinese girls with whom I had once been such close friends. They were all married and busy with household affairs, and they felt strange with me, perhaps because I had been away to college. They asked me a thousand questions for, unlike the Americans, the Chinese are full of curiosity about other peoples and will stop at nothing in the way of intimate detail, and I answered as best I could. Invariably our sessions together ended with the one important question they put to me anxiously, a very personal question—“When are you going to be married?”

“I don’t know,” I always replied.

The next question was also invariable and concerned. “Are your parents doing nothing about finding a husband for you?”

Without exception their parents had found husbands for them in the approved old Chinese fashion. It was still too soon for the later wave of impetuous rebellion of youth against traditional marriages, and a Chinese girl or young man would have been astonished and embarrassed to be told that she or he must find a mate. Marriage was a family affair, and the parents pondered with much care upon the nature of their child and the sort of person that should be found to complete his or her life. It was also essential that this person fit into the family group, for where the generations lived together in the old Chinese custom, it could only bring unhappiness if the new person did not fit into the circle, both in birth and breeding. The results of these arranged marriages were usually good. Most of them were happy, an even higher percentage, I think, than in the individualized and romantic marriages of the West. This is only to be expected, for marriage, after all, is basically a practical matter and romantic aspects pass into solid love and companionship. Usually love did develop after marriage, sometimes romantic and passionate love, but it was not an essential. Such marriages had perhaps the greater chance for survival because the expectations of romantic love were not as high as they are in the West.

At any rate, my Chinese friends were happily married and busy with babies, and although I was young enough they were troubled about my solitary state. As far as my own race went, I had no possible friends except my English Agnes, and she, alas, I had outgrown. The nearest American woman to me in age was thirty-five years old, a missionary’s wife and the mother of three children. It was another generation. Nor was I allowed to accept the attentions of any of the few young white men in the British Concession in our city. Among them were even two or three Americans with the Standard Oil Company or one of the tobacco companies. I did accept their invitations at first without thinking, until one of the older missionary women in the narrow circle lectured me one day severely. “You cannot continue in both ways of life,” she said solemnly. “If you go with the business people you must leave the missionary circle.”

“I am not a missionary,” I insisted. “I am a teacher.”

“You are a teacher in a missionary school,” she reminded me, “and your parents are missionaries.”

“My parents don’t mind,” I persisted.

“The rest of us do,” she retorted.

For the sake of my parents I refused all invitations from then on and scheduled my days severely between work and home. I began to study Chinese books and as my mother’s health grew a little better I travelled about the country within walking and riding distance. My Chinese friends, however, were still concerned, and I know they talked with my parents about arranging a marriage for me. This resulted in a curious argument between my father, who had become far more Chinese in his mentality and feelings than he was American, and my mother, who remained American to the core. My father, it seemed, would have been pleased to have me marry a young Chinese gentleman of his own choice but my mother was wholeheartedly against it. I listened and reflected and did not take sides, for I saw no danger from the handsome and brilliant Chinese whom my father had in mind, since his family would not have tolerated his marriage to an American, even though she were my father’s daughter. I decided, instead, since my mother’s health was better, that I would like to go to some other part of China, and carve out my career alone.

I knew in my heart as I had always known, that someday I would be a writer, but I was not yet ready. I still felt empty. I know now, of course, that emptiness is the normal state of youth. No writer, I believe, should attempt a novel before he is thirty, and not then unless he has been hopelessly and helplessly involved in life. For the writer who goes out to find material for a novel, as a fisherman goes out to sea to fish, will certainly not write a good novel. Life has to be lived thoughtlessly, unconsciously, at full tilt and for no purpose except its own sake before it becomes, eventually, good material for a novel.

I did not want to travel to other parts of China to find material for writing but I did want to find more life. I was caught in too small a circle and I wanted to break away, as all young people do and should, from the childhood environment. I wanted to move out from being the child of my parents and make my own place among strangers. Yet it did not occur to me to go back to America, partly because I did not want to leave my mother at such a distance, for her malady was only better and not cured and it would never, I feared, be cured. Therefore I must be within distance of possible return. Beyond this, however, I was genuinely part of my Chinese world again, a new world changing from day to day, and China was destined, as even then I could see, to be a pivotal country in the future. She had always been a source country in culture, and India alone, although completely different, could be her rival. Now I wanted only to be free to live in China as I liked, in some place where I could escape the confines of dogmatic religion. Casting about I thought of a woman who had stirred my imagination ever since I had first heard of her. She lived alone in a distant and ancient city of the province of Yunnan, itself, I had always heard, a supremely beautiful part of a beautiful country. I sat down one day at the little Chinese desk in my room and wrote to Cornelia Morgan and asked her if she would let me come and work with her. Somehow or other, weeks later, her friendly reply fell into my mother’s hands and then I saw a new aspect of my mother. She broke down and wept and said that if I went away she did not want to live and why was I dissatisfied here, where everyone loved me so much? And what would the Chinese say if I deserted my parents when they believed in filial piety?

I said, “But you left your home when your father did not want you to do it. Grandfather even forbade your marriage.”

Her dark eyes were tragic. “I know it,” she said, “and I did wrong. I wish I had obeyed him.”

This was a terrifying revelation, and I was struck speechless. I neither promised to stay nor insisted upon going. I was simply silent, and a few days later she fell seriously ill again and the doctor said that someone must take her up the mountains of Lu, to Kuling. There was no one to do that except me, for my father would not have thought of leaving his work. I asked for leave of absence from my school and my mother and I boarded one of the clean little English river steamers and set sail for Kiukiang, where we would take sedan chairs for the climb up the mountains. My fate, at least for the time being, was settled.

The importance of Kuling in the lives of the white people in the central provinces of China must now be explained. There were other summer resorts, but none of them, we felt, compared with Kuling. It was much more than a summer resort, it was a lifesaving station, especially in the early years of my childhood before it was known how some of the worst of the tropical diseases, against which white people seemed to have no immunity whatever, were carried. I can remember the devastation of malaria, for example, from which the Chinese suffered and grew thin and yellow but from which they recovered far more often than the white people did. At the first rumor that mosquitoes were the carriers my father had promptly nailed cheesecloth over all the windows of our house, and people thought he had gone insane. As soon as he could buy wire screening from Montgomery Ward ours was the first house to have it. Cholera, the autumn menace, we knew was somehow carried by flies, and certainly conveyed by mouth, and I can remember how terrified my mother was lest we eat any raw fruit or anything indeed which had come from the Chinese markets until it was cooked, and how when an epidemic was raging, which was every autumn during my childhood, we never used even eating utensils until they had first been placed in briskly boiling water, and this at the table where my mother could supervise the process, and dishes and silverware were wiped with boiled dish towels kept by my mother. Yet none of us was easy from the middle of August until the first of October, and we children learned, on pain of death, not to put anything in our mouths, not even fingers, until boiling water or soap and water and disinfectant had been applied.

The death of children had really compelled white parents to find some place where families could go for the worst months of our tropically hot summers, and my father had been one of the little group of white men who explored the famous Lu mountains, where old temples had existed for centuries in a climate so salubrious that it was said the priests lived forever. I can still remember the day when I was a small child that my father came home from the expedition and reported that high in those mountains, six thousand feet above sea level, he had found the air as cold as early winter, though the season was midsummer. There was a rough stone road up the mountainside, carved no one knew how long ago by priests and pilgrims, and bamboo mountain chairs were available and the bearers were the neighboring farmers.

“The air up there is like the Alleghenies,” my father said, “and the brooks run clear.”

This was enough for my mother. Her joy in the thought of escaping the torrid months of summer and particularly the hot rainy season, when the rice fields were flooded and the mosquitoes swarmed, was something I can still see. We were among the first, then, to buy a plot of ground after negotiations had been made with the Chinese for us to do so — a long lease it was, actually, for foreigners could not own the soil of China. I remember our first little house, made of stone, for stone was the building material on those mountaintops where only low trees grew. The temples, too, were of stone and the pagoda on a neighboring peak was of stone.

As a child I took Ruling for granted, and every summer I gave up my birthday party in order that we might go there. My mother disliked leaving my father alone to cope with housekeeping in addition to his work, but her struggle always ended in favor of the children. I knew, each June, when the rice seedlings were transplanted from the dry beds to the flooded fields, that the time had come for Kuling. It was a time I loved at home, too, for the valleys were beautiful, green lakes in the sunshine and mysterious by night under the moon. It was heaven for the frogs and the chorus of their croakings and pipings could be heard clearly even at our house.

The whole process of the growing of rice is a cycle of beauty, from the seedbeds, greener than any green on earth, to the last harvested golden sheaf. I was charmed always by every change, and especially by the transplanting, when the dry fields were filled with water and the farm family rolled up the legs of their blue cotton trousers and waded into the water and planted the seedlings neatly and exactly spaced over the fields. The rice grew swiftly while we were gone during the summer and when we came back in late September the fields were dry again and the grain stood high and yellow. Then came the harvesting when once more the farm family sallied forth and with hand sickles cut the sheaves, and tied them and stacked them and carried them to the threshing floors in front of the farmhouses. There the sheaves were spread and men and women lifted the swinging bamboo flails and beat out the grain. Women swept up the grain and spread it in winnowing baskets and men tossed it up for the wind to clean. When at last the rice was harvested it was piled into vats made of clean rice straw woven into matting and shaped and tied into containers. There was poetry in every movement of the blue-clad peasants, and I see it all clear in my mind today, a series of exquisite and symbolic pictures, memorized through half my lifetime.

Only in Java, years later, did I see the process whole and simultaneous, for there upon the richest soil and with the finest rice climate in the world, planting and harvesting went on in adjacent fields, the earth in continual production so that while some farmers transplanted seedlings into the water others bore home the sheaves. When I think of Java, I see handsome brown men carrying on their shoulders sheaves of rice, heavy-headed and cut as exactly even as strands of yellow silk.

Between planting and harvesting we stayed in our little stone house in the mountains. Other white people, missionaries and tradesmen and their families, joined those of us who had pioneered and gradually, as years went on, a beautiful little town developed there in the top of the mountains. A church was built and at one end of the property shrewd Chinese merchants opened shops. Farmers from the plains below carried up the mountains baskets of eggs and fruits, fowls and vegetables, and we had an abundance of food. Near our house was a clear spring bubbling up from under the top of the mountain and this water we drank without boiling and considered it pure luxury.

As time went on many white people seized the chance to escape from China for a few weeks and mingle with their own kind. Missionaries held meetings and conferences and businessmen and their wives had bridge parties and dances, and everybody went on picnics and walks. Each summer there was a tennis tournament and a sacred concert, where my mother sang in The Messiah or in some other oratorio. Each week, too, there was a meeting only for amusements, where amateurs did their best with whatever talent they had. Besides such arranged entertainment there were tea parties, dinners and much visiting, while people who had no chance to see one another during the year could meet here and compare adventures and children and share their news. Kuling did indeed mean many different things to different people, but to my mother it meant first of all a place where her children were safe and the air was clean and where she could renew her own soul. For me, as I look back, I realize that it meant a kind of beauty I knew nowhere else, the beauty of clear brooks and wild ferns and lilies, a place where I could wander safely and explore to my own content. Each morning during the years when I was small it was my task to climb the mountain behind our house and come back with fresh ferns and flowers, and never have I seen so many flowers growing wild as I found there. The little fireplace in our living room my mother filled with bracken, and she wanted the delicate ferns for her pots, and the tall white Madonna lilies, the red, black-spotted tiger lilies or the white ones with red spots were always welcome. Yellow and orange day lilies grew everywhere, and since they lasted but a day, I did not pick them except for our amah who cooked the buds into a delectable dish for her midday meal. Grass-of-Parnassus and club moss were special finds, and my mother loved, too, the long leafy strands of wild clematis, set with hundreds of little white stars of flowers, and this she twined along our mantelpiece. The simple house became a fresh bower, and not for anything would I have missed that morning climb and the return laden with treasures for my mother’s joy. There was only one danger, and it was the short slender grass-green snake that climbed the trees and hung down like a swaying branch. Its bite was fatal, and I kept my eyes sharp as I walked along the trails or climbed the grey rocks.

One fearful aspect of those beautiful mountains of Lu was the flash floods. Springs at the top of the mountains had through the centuries cut deep gorges into the soil, and since the forests had long ago been destroyed, a cloudburst on the top of a mountain could pour water into a gorge so suddenly that within minutes a great wall of water was built up, although below the sun might be shining. Every summer some lives were lost in these flash floods. Picnickers enjoying their meal by the side of a small and peaceful brook looked up to see descending upon them a mass of water twenty feet high. Before they could escape they were swept away, sometimes over high falls. I remember the tragedy of a neighbor, an American woman whose husband was dead and who had only one child. Upon the child’s sixth birthday she had put their supper in a basket and the two of them had gone to a nearby brook to make a little celebration. In the midst of their meal she heard a roar and looking up she saw the flood rushing toward her. In her fright she seized what she thought was the child’s frock and clambered up the side of the gorge only to discover that what she had grasped was her own skirt and that the child was gone. The possibility of death always at hand lent an undertone of terror to the pleasantest summer day in Kuling.

All that was in my childhood, and now when I went to Kuling with my mother, one early June, before even the rice fields were flooded, I went back as a young woman. Kuling was changed, too. I had caught rumors of it in my parents’ talk. Wealthy Chinese wanted to buy land there and it had become a point of hot disagreement between the white people as to whether Chinese could or should be kept out any longer. In the early years no Chinese had thought of coming but now they wanted to buy in the white concession and not in the Chinese section outside the Gap where tradespeople lived. Kuling had developed very much, I discovered when I reached the top of the mountain and I did not like it so well, although the journey up the mountain had been even more beautiful than I remembered. We had left the ship at the river port the day before and had gone by riksha to the resthouse in the city to spend the night on our own bedding rolls spread upon Chinese bed bottoms resting upon two wooden benches. Early the next morning we were waked as usual by the chair bearers, clamoring to get off, and we rose and ate a hearty breakfast of rice and eggs prepared by the resthouse cook, and then we climbed into our chairs, much improved now, and made of wood and rattan instead of bamboo. Thus we set off across the plains and up into the foothills to the second resthouse, where other chairs waited with mountain bearers, for the plainsmen could not climb. Now came, as always, the magical part of the journey. One caught the first hint of it when a clear mountain brook tumbled past the resthouse and the village houses were made of stone instead of the gray brick of the plains. We seated ourselves in our chairs and four bearers carried each chair, suspended by ropes from poles across their shoulders, and thus they mounted the first flight of stone steps with light rhythmic stride. Up the mountain we climbed and soon the frothing bamboos changed to pines and dwarf chestnuts and oaks and we were on our way. The road wound around the rocky folds of the cliffs, and beneath us were gorges and rushing mountain rivers and falls. Higher and higher the road crawled, twisting so abruptly that sometimes our chairs swung clear over the precipices as the front bearers went on beyond the rear ones, still behind the bend. One misstep and the chair would have been dashed a thousand feet into the rocks and swirling waters, but there was never a misstep. In all the years I never heard of an accident, even though the bearers went at an astonishing speed, every step in rhythmic movement.

Somewhere near the top of the mountain we turned a certain corner and were met, as I had remembered, by a strong cold current of mountain air. Until then the air had gradually cooled, but at this spot it changed suddenly and the bearers welcomed it with loud hallooing calls and a spurt of running, the chair swaying between them. It was still exciting. As a child I could never keep from laughing, and this time, although I was grown up, I still felt exhilaration. The air of the plains had been hot and heavy, breathed in and out by millions of human lungs, but here on top of the mountain it was charged with fresh cold purity, and one breathed it in like lifesaving oxygen.

So we reached the same little old house, my mother and I, and very small it looked to my grown-up eyes, but the trees were big and the ferns had grown thick on the terrace walls. The two servants we had brought with us cleaned the house swiftly and we settled in, my mother to rest in bed for a while and I to care for her and read to her. I studied my Chinese books while she slept and every day I went for a long and solitary walk. There were few people to be seen and most of the houses were still closed, for the season had not begun, but it was interesting to walk about the settlement and see the changes. A sanatorium had been built for tuberculosis patients, all white, and Russian traders had developed a separate piece of land beyond the mountain and named it Russian Valley and outside the settlement limits rich Chinese had built immense stone houses for themselves. The streets were named and the trees had grown tall and arched above them and the atmosphere of the place had become worldly and cosmopolitan.

My mother and I talked together about it, and she admitted the change and said, symbolically, that she no longer dared to drink the spring water unboiled because houses were built above it now. Then she said, “We must let the Chinese come in — I can see it. Perhaps we white people ought never to have built a separate place for ourselves but we did it so that we could keep our children. We lost so many little children.”

She could never mention the lost children without thinking, I knew, of our four, buried in little walled cemeteries, three in Shanghai and one in Chinkiang, who died when I was six. The eldest, my sister Edith, my mother considered her most beautiful and brilliant child, and she was the one who had died of cholera when she was four. There was a portrait of her in my mother’s bedroom in the mission house, a handsome sturdy blue-eyed child, her dark hair in bangs across her fine forehead and hanging in thick curls on her shoulders.

“Someday,” my mother was saying, “the Chinese will take everything back again.”

And so they did, though not until she was dead.

During the two years of her convalescence in Kuling she rebuilt the house, tearing down the old one and putting up one larger, though still modest, because she wanted it big enough, she said, for my sister and me when we married and had children. But when she was dead, and my father dead, and China was changing indeed and all that belonged to the white people was being taken from them or they were giving it back for the sake of their own consciences, then my sister and I sold the house to a good Chinese family and so for us Kuling was returned. By that time it had become a stronghold for Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek and Madame Chiang and their many relatives, and the new officials were more rigorous than the white people had been about keeping out the poor Chinese. But it was no more our business.

I felt, that year when I was alone there with my mother, that the end was inescapable, as she had said it was, but I did not fear it. I wanted more than ever to be rid of the burden which had weighed upon me all my life, the burden of knowing that my race had been unjust to another. It is easier to receive injustice than to inflict it, for conscience is a fox gnawing at the vitals. Then, too, I had forgotten by that time the hatreds of the old Empress Dowager and her followers against foreigners, and feeling again the warm friendliness of the Chinese people, the easy courtesy and unfailing consideration, I longed to see every inequality between us removed, and all people living with equal opportunities for self-development. Rich and poor there would always be, of course, and some people would be clean and some dirty, some educated and some ignorant, but these inequalities were fluid and natural, and depended to a large extent upon individuals themselves. What I wanted to be rid of, merely as a burden, was the declared discrimination between the dominant white and the rebellious Chinese. They were right and we were wrong in that particular matter. After all, we were still only guests upon the Chinese soil, not rulers and not even citizens.

But I was removed again from life, for the time being, by our return to Kuling. The First World War was raging, but I knew nothing of it except through the newspaper which reached us weekly from Shanghai, an English paper which gave very little report of American forces. I had no idea, indeed, until years later when I was visiting Europe again, how many Americans had fought in the First World War and had died on foreign soil. I learned it then as I wandered through the vast memorial halls which had been built as monuments to the American soldiers who had died and had never been found. There on walls high and wide were carved in small print the myriad names of the missing. And I wandered through the cemeteries in France and elsewhere and saw little white crosses set as closely as human bodies could lie, and the magnitude of what my country had done overwhelmed me and I wept belated tears for the young men whose flesh was already dust.

We stayed the summer through in Kuling, our old friends and many new ones returned to their summer homes, and my sister came from boarding school in Shanghai and we took up much of the old childhood life, except that I was no longer a child. An English doctor had my mother in charge, and he changed her diet again, so that she fed now upon an obnoxious mixture of boiled liver and spinach, consuming it with a fortitude that was amazing. She was slow to get well, and after my father had come for his brief vacation and gone, and my sister had returned to school, my mother and I stayed on while the frost turned the leaves scarlet and the chinquapin burrs burst and dropped their small sweet nuts. Then, because so few white people remained, we were asked to move lower into the valley where it would be easier for the doctor to visit my mother and easier to reach supplies of food and coal. We moved into the house of a Swedish friend, a pink and white cottage, and I began what was to be the loneliest winter of my life, so far as human beings were concerned. The nearest person to my age was a young man in the sanatorium recovering from tuberculosis, but he was only a boy to my newly adult eyes, and our friendship was brief, ended indeed by the alarm of his missionary parents at his growing interest in a young woman. My own mind was concerned with far different matters. I was struggling with the decision of what I was to do with myself. My problem was the variety of my interests, all leading someday of course to writing, but not yet. I enjoyed too many employments.

Meanwhile, as winter passed my mother was better. My school was clamoring for my return, and so with the doctor’s permission and on her own insistence, I left her surrounded by a few good friends and cared for by our servants, and one cold February day I walked down the mountain.

It was strange to get back to the mission house and take charge of it alone, my father its only other occupant, strange and a little exciting to be my own mistress, to go to classes and teach and to come home and study Chinese literature with my own teacher, order the household affairs and plan our simple meals, and even invite a few guests now and then. I enjoyed my independence, in spite of my great love for my mother, and yet I knew all the time that this was not permanent, neither this place nor this time. Something else lay ahead but I did not know what. While I waited I busied myself.

There was plenty with which to be concerned. The year 1914, in which I was graduated from college, had been a year of importance in much larger matters. Many young Chinese were being graduated from other American colleges and universities at about the same time, young men who were destined to clarify the new age by their writings. Sun Yat-sen and his followers were still struggling with political problems, for Yuan Shih-kai, the military leader, had finally assumed the Presidency of the new Republic of China as a compromise between the old guard who rejected Sun Yat-sen, and the impetuous radicals who would not acknowledge Pu Yi as Emperor. Sun Yat-sen had been set back, but he had accepted the situation with Chinese grace. Now, however, it became apparent that the ambitions of Yuan Shih-kai were leading him to try to establish the Throne again with himself as the First Emperor. It was still doubtful whether the people would allow this, for if I could judge from my own students and young Chinese friends, the revolutionary stimulus constantly applied, not only by Sun Yat-sen, but also by Liang Ch’ih-ch’ao and K’ang Yu-wei and others, had permeated the people more than one might guess was possible when eighty percent of the people could not read and write. The Chinese are a very articulate people, however, always curious and mentally awake, and hearsay and rumors ran fast over the nation, and it was evident that they would not tolerate the setting up of a monarchy, especially under old Yuan, who carried with him quite a stink from the dead regime, for it was he who had betrayed the Young Emperor to the Old Empress and was therefore morally responsible in the end for his death. The people did not forget.

It was a wonderful time in which to live in China, and I was at the right age for it. Young, interested in all that went on around me, able to read Chinese as well as English, surrounded by friends far beyond the Christian circle of missions, I found myself stirred and stimulated by many events. True, the center of new movements was far from our quiet rather old-fashioned city and countryside, but we knew what was going on. Even the Church was growing, and my father was surprised at the number of businessmen and farmers who were interested in becoming Christians. None were scholars of the old-fashioned sort, and few were young students in schools and colleges and this grieved him, for if he had a snobbish tinge it was in the direction of the literate rather than the illiterate person. There was no hiding the fact that when he baptized an educated man, whether old or young, he felt such a one was worth at least a baker’s dozen of the ordinary uneducated sort. Yet a solid group of Chinese was becoming interested to some extent in the Christian religion, and it was, I am sure, although my father refused to agree with me, because this religion did give promise of creating a new society where all men could be equally valuable as human beings.

The mission schools, too, had a very strong part in the revolution. I do not know how missionaries liked the idea that they helped to bring about chaos in China, but they did, nevertheless. It was more than that they insisted upon unbinding the feet of girl students, that they taught Western subjects including science and mathematics rather than the old classical and literary subjects of Chinese schools. More even than these was the fact that they taught the revolutionary and world-shaking principles of Christ. The wonder is that none of them, at least in that day, realized how revolutionary those principles were. They had been reared in the Western atmosphere where church members do not take literally the teachings of Jesus, and practice them only as far as is convenient in the total framework of their society. The Chinese, however, tended to be practical even about religion, and the result was often very upsetting indeed.

But perhaps the most powerful force came, after all, from the graduates of mission schools, who had not been allowed to compete in the old Imperial Examinations and even after these were abolished in 1905 were still not considered sufficiently educated in Chinese ways to apply for high political positions. There was a deep jealousy between the two groups of scholars, the old traditional ones who had earned their Chinese degrees by dint of knowing the classics, and the new ones who had Western degrees but were deficient in the classical and traditional requirements. Each group held the other in contempt, and the young new scholars were determined to build a society where they and not the men they considered old fogies would be in power. Sun Yat-sen had many of these young men among his followers.

What troubled me, however, as I looked upon my Chinese world with my own young and too idealistic eyes, was that really first-rate minds were not turning to Christianity. I was troubled, not for my own sake, but for my parents’, for I feared that the good which they and others had undoubtedly brought to China with their living expression of Christianity would be outweighed by the evils that had accompanied it, and eventually the whole structure would fall. I did not foresee how soon it would fall, but I knew enough to understand that in China coming changes would be shaped by the best minds. The Chinese people had for centuries revered learning and there was little danger that they would live under the leadership of ignorant men for any length of time. Confucianism had built itself too strongly into the mental and spiritual texture of the people, and Confucius had dinned into them the qualifications of the superior man. The failure of missions and of Christianity, insofar as they have failed in China, was that no first-rate Chinese minds joined the Christian movement. I make this statement without qualification. Liang Ch’ih-ch’ao, who was the spiritual and mental leader of the young in that period, declared openly that religion, and especially Christianity with its record of meddling in the political life of many Western nations, would always be the weapon of the State.

No fundamental change in any people is sudden, however, and change in China was not sudden, either. Chinese educated in the West had been returning since 1880, bringing with them ideas of other ways of life. Laborers and merchants had gone to Hawaii and the United States in large numbers and had also brought their versions of Western ways. Most tragic and amusing of all, some of the so-called “coolie” labor corps, which was China’s contribution to the First World War, were bringing back French wives or concubines, whose stay was long or short depending upon the conditions they discovered in a man’s home when they arrived. Of course the “coolie” lovers had assured the French women that life in China was comfortable and modern. Railways? Certainly China had railways. The French women wanted to be sure they could get away easily if they did not like what they found. As a matter of fact, there were a few excellent railroads. One of them, connecting Shanghai with Peking, ran through our city. It had been opened when I was twelve years old, and I remember the excitement it had caused, because a tunnel had to be built under the hill upon which the fort stood, and our whole community was in a state of distraction, lest the spirits of the dead people buried in the graves on that hill would be disturbed by the roar and rattle of the trains shaking their bones. Those were the days when the Old Empress was feeling her defeat, however, and trying to prove how modern she intended to be, she favored railways at last, or said she did, and so the tunnel was made and the trains ran.

Nevertheless, prudent French women, and most of them were prudent, did not give up their French citizenship by marriage, and they kept tucked away enough money to get home again, and these, with the cooperation of French consulates, were no trouble, except for the one problem they left behind them. This was that a Chinese uneducated laborer could and did boast of having been married to or at least connected with a white woman and his stories destroyed even more of the prestige of the white race.

The two men whose names were magic at this time, to me as well as to my young Chinese friends and my pupils, were still K’ang Yu-wei and Liang Ch’ih-ch’ao, who had been tutors of the Young Emperor. Both had been exiled after 1898, and of the two, Liang Ch’ih-ch’ao during the years had gradually assumed the stronger position. This was not, I think, because he had the better mind, for it would have been difficult to find in any country a mind so versatile and yet so profound and original as that of K’ang Yu-wei. K’ang had a breadth of understanding and vision which made partisanship impossible, and he early saw that East and West, if they would cooperate in friendship and mutual benefit, could help each other in complementary ways. He was stimulated by Western history and science and was not abashed by any false sense of Chinese inferiority. But after he went into exile in Japan he never again had the same influence, mainly, I believe, because he did not approve the radical trend of the revolution. He was convinced that China ought not to be a republic, and that her people were not ready for this form of government. He was right, of course, but he was unpopular, as those who are right at the wrong time always are, and so Liang Ch’ih-ch’ao became the idol of the literate young.

As early as 1902 Liang Ch’ih-ch’ao had begun his remarkable writing. Hu Shih in his autobiography describes the profound influence which he and others like him felt when they read Liang’s essays, published then in Japan in the Ming Pao, or People’s Newspaper. There Liang set forth a doctrine which was different indeed from the old Chinese belief that civilized man is never aggressive or even active except in passive ways. Instead he told the young Chinese, who were longing for activity and change, that Darwin had proved the theory of the survival of the fittest, that this in itself declared aggression to be the law of nature, and it was because Western peoples were aggressive that they had conquered. Therefore Chinese must make themselves into a new and aggressive people.

Everywhere this phrase, the new people, became fire set to tinder. Sun Yat-sen had thought that when the Manchu dynasty was overthrown, the people would then inevitably become “new.” Like the Nationalists in recent years, however, the Manchus were overthrown too easily and quickly, before anyone had had time to think out exactly how to make the people new. Rueful indeed did I feel when I heard from a Chinese friend in Hong Kong a few years ago that the Communists were actually alarmed when Chiang Kai-shek’s soldiers surrendered so readily. “We had counted on five years of struggle,” the Communist general is reported to have said, “and we needed those five years in which to learn how to govern the people. Now victory has come so quickly that we are not ready for it. We shall make many mistakes.”

The same thing had happened after the revolution of 1911, when the rotten defenses of the Manchu rulers, even with their three million Bannermen clustered in villages about Peking to protect them, and in every province capital as well, gave way to the revolutionists. What does one do with a vast country and hundreds of millions of people without rulers? No one had a plan, and it was doubtless due to this planlessness that Sun Yat-sen was able to put forth his ideas of a republican form of government. At least, people said, such a government could be organized without the usual era of civil wars and the trouble and expense of setting up a new dynasty. The common man, peasant or merchant, was glad to think that he would not be taxed any more to keep up expensive palaces and pleasure gardens for officials. There was a great deal of democracy in China, deep and inherent in the people. They had accepted their Emperors, follies and all, as necessary government, but when it appeared that there were countries which had none, a change seemed sensible to them. When Yuan Shih-kai dreamed of setting up the imperial system again, they decided against it. So decided were they that it permeated even his bemused brain that the people not only did not want him, they did not want any emperor at all. They wanted some form of modern self-government.

As a matter of fact, the Chinese had always governed themselves. They distrusted and even held in contempt governments. They were cynical to the last degree about official honesty and considered it inevitable that every official was corrupt. Their ancient adage is that the best government is the one that governs least. A country folk song runs thus:

When the sun rises I work;

When the sun sets I rest.

I dig the well to drink;

I plow the field to eat.

What has the Emperor to do with me?

And the Chinese people were quite capable of self-government. Their traditional family system, wherein every individual man, woman and child belonged to a clan and each clan was responsible for all individuals in it, was a sound basis for a new kind of modern democracy. It is hard for Americans to realize the soundness of the family clan as the unit for democratic government, but indeed it is so. In China before Communism began its destructive work on the family system, there was no need, for example, for the expense of institutionalism which lies so heavily upon our own democracy. There were no orphanages, for no child was orphaned, since the family as a whole continued responsible for the care of the child who had lost his immediate parents. There were no insane asylums, for the family cared for its insane. As a matter of fact, there were very few insane, for the family system provided individual security without disgrace and thus removed one of the main causes for modern insanity, the lost individual. There needed to be no relief rolls, for again the family as a whole cared for its members who were jobless. Only in times of widespread famine and catastrophe did there have to be outside help, and even then the family stayed together. Business was stable in a large middle class, for the generations carried it on in the same family. Nepotism, it is true, tended to be a problem, since it was natural that a man would try to get jobs for his relatives. Yet I do not see the difference between family nepotism in China and political nepotism in the United States, and of the two, family nepotism in China seems the less dangerous to society because the family still remained morally responsible for each of its members, and the disgrace of any member was a family disgrace.

Could Sun Yat-sen and his followers, and this includes the later Nationalist government under Chiang Kai-shek, have understood the value of the family system and have built upon its responsible democracy, there is little doubt that Communism would not be ruling in China today. One proof of this is that the Communists, wishing to establish their political theory, have made their main attack upon the family system, and the measure of the length of their stay will be to the degree to which they are able to separate the members of the family from each other and thus to destroy the fabric which has kept China alive, functioning and vital for centuries after her contemporaries in history were dead.

The failure of the early revolution was not evident at first, of course. Sun Yat-sen continued to struggle for political unity although the country was drifting toward the old trend of war lords, helped this time by the rising tide of militarism in the West. I suppose few Americans, then as now, thought about China at all and fewer still could have realized that events in the West were working with an old historical process to produce the Chinese war lords, called “generals,” who began to be the real rulers in their own regions. I lived under war lords for many years in that period, and peacefully enough, although we had always to watch the mood and the temper of our local war lord. He was usually uneducated and he was given as much to pleasure as to war. After a combat, whether he were victor or vanquished, he tended to settle down for a while, take a few new concubines and perhaps yield to opium or some such diversion and so we would have peace again until the next time. War lords seldom disturbed white people, because they did not want trouble with Western governments, but they had another vice, maddening to the young radicals, which was that they needed endless amounts of money to support their ever-increasing armies of ne’er-do-wells and malcontents, and needing money they sold off bits of their country to Japan, who was during the First World War making great hay. She had joined the war on the side of the Allies, and thus had been in a position to take over the German holdings in China, gaining a foothold for later aggressions. She leased or bought mines and ports and concessions from greedy war lords, and became indeed our ogre and portent.

Educated Chinese despised the war lords, but ordinary folk were, more often than not, amused by them so long as they kept off bandits and let other people alone, and the war lords were usually strong, wilful, humorous, rough-and-ready individuals, afraid of no one, and often very funny. One of our neighboring war lords was famous because of the three things he did not know — how many soldiers he had, how much money he had and how many wives he had. I remember the war lord in the province next to ours who was twice defeated by another war lord. At last he declared in loud and public tones that he intended to fight once more and if he were defeated he would come home in his coffin. We all waited the outcome of this much-touted battle, and when it ended as the others had, in defeat, an elaborate funeral was prepared for the return of the body. The funeral went off in high humor with every detail complete, except that instead of a corpse in the enormous coffin, the old war lord, very much alive though vanquished, was seated therein, dressed in his best robes and grinning at the astonished crowds while he smoked a large foreign cigar. The people burst into roaring laughter and instantly forgave the old ruler all his sins because he had made such a good joke, and this is characteristic of the Chinese, then and now, for they love laughter. My own father saved his life more than once by a quick-witted joke.

Meanwhile young Chinese, many of them the husbands of my friends, or even my own students, were trying their best to create the new China. Unfortunately, instead of beginning with reality, and this was to know and understand what they had in their own people upon which to build, they tried to apply Western ideas cold. For example, they began to believe in the necessity of militarism, since, they argued, the strength of the West lay in its armed forces and weapons, and certain young reformers attached themselves to the war lords and tried to modernize their large and irregular armies. Others felt that the strength of the West lay in its standards of law and that China was weak because her government did not depend upon law but upon individuals and their human relationships, and such young men studied law abroad and then came home and tried to build up a legalistic government, modeled after the American and the French. Their attempt failed because Sun Yat-sen insisted that the parliament thus set up must be the ruling body of the country whereas the old-fashioned Yuan Shih-Kai, while he was President, determined to keep power in his own hands. Provincial assemblies were actually set up but the war lords soon put an end to them as they continued to rise to power.

It was a fantastic era. I felt sometimes as I read the newspapers that I was a juggler trying to keep a dozen balls in the air at the same time. Here were the Western-educated young, quarreling over parliaments and legalities and mechanistic theories as opposed to the old idealistic philosophies, and here were the crude, hearty, entirely selfish war lords building up their little separate empires, and here was imperial Japan gnawing diligently at the land and resources and preparing for her future empire, and here was the desperate Sun Yat-sen, fighting bravely without money or army for his own ideals, and here was old Yuan Shih-kai, determined to restore the monarchy. The air became clear to some extent when Yuan understood that the people would not have him, and so plain was this made that he had to back down, or resign and acknowledge his mistake, a disgrace which he did not long survive. When he died in 1916 we were all relieved.

The aspect of the revolution which interested me most, however, was still the literary one. While the country was struggling to find a political form suitable to the modern age, a profound change was going on in the writing and reading of books. Before I begin to describe this part of the revolution I must make clear, or as clear as I can, the place which books have had in China ever since the era of Confucius, five hundred years before Christ. If there was an aristocracy in China it was one not of birth or even of wealth, it was of scholarship. The Imperial Examinations had been open to all candidates and those who passed them most successfully could even be the sons of peasants. They often were, for if a village recognized a boy genius among its inhabitants, it was quite usual for all the villagers to join together and provide for his education, in the hope that if he passed the Imperial Examinations he would bring honor to the home village and would also give the villagers a return for their investment in him. Automatically the young scholar joined the elite of the intellectuals and thereafter never put his hands to any menial labor. He was a scholar and lived a scholar’s life, rich or poor. Even if he never achieved fame he never lost his position, and he could at least support himself by opening a village school. Whether he became an advisor to the Emperor or only a village schoolteacher, he received respect as a scholar. This national attitude of reverence for learning made the task of teaching young Chinese a pure pleasure, for instead of lackadaisical lounging in the classroom or childish absorption in sports, my pupils were alert and eager to learn all they possibly could, since academic achievement was the key to success in Chinese society. There were practical rewards for the intellectual.

As long as the Manchu government stood and especially as long as Imperial Examinations continued, strength remained with the old classical scholars, who would not recognize Western university degrees. When the Examinations ended, however, and the Throne fell, the old scholars were at a loss. Their protection was gone as well as their jobs, and so the young Western-trained scholars became powerful through the political revolution they had created. It was characteristic of these young intellectuals that instead of tackling the practical problems of the country, which were political and economic, they plunged with fervor into a literary revolution. Fully eighty-five percent of the Chinese people could not read and it is doubtful if more than five percent read with ease, and among the five percent were all the scholars, both old and new. Yet here the young intellectuals spent their energies. They attacked first the written language itself, the language of the old scholars, the classical wen-li, which was the only language used for literature. Fiction, or “wild writing” as it was called, was not considered literature. It was pastime reading, and a true scholar of the old school was ashamed to be seen reading novels, although all read them in private. This classical language, however, did prevent the ordinary Chinese from getting information, much as Americans might be prevented if Latin were used instead of English. Years of study were necessary in order to learn proficiency in wen-li, and the young intellectuals, who had spent those years in studying science and other Western subjects and therefore were poor in classical Chinese, declared themselves against wen-li. The language of the people, the spoken language, they said, should also be the written language. It was more than language — the old literary tricks of allusiveness and allegory and parable were also to be sternly rejected. From now on, young intellectuals said, they would write with simple clarity in the vernacular. Ts’ai Yuan-p’ei, the renowned president of the National University in Peking, headed the revolutionary movement, and he enriched his teaching staff with first-rate minds from among the new group. Among them I think before all others of Ch’en Tu-hsiu, brilliant, bold, and radical, who was later lost to Communism. His magazine, Ch’ing Nien, or Youth, was an inspiration to thousands of restless young Chinese, and when in 1916 the magazine took up the cause of the literary reform, the flame of new intellectual life spread everywhere through China.

Old scholars, of course, and even average conservative minds, literate or not, were horrified at what they considered the destruction of the literary past while discussion went on in scores of new little magazines, in newspapers and in teashops. When Hu Shih, in an article in Youth magazine, startled us all by the brilliance and persuasiveness of his argument for the use of the pai-hua, or vernacular, as against wen-li, we recognized a fresh force in modern China.

Both Ch’en Tu-hsiu and Hu Shih based their arguments not merely on Western literature, which had obviously influenced them strongly, but also upon the revolutionary spirit of the West. Older Chinese minds were revolted by what seemed to them the foreign and unpatriotic attitudes of the two young men and those who flocked to follow them, but the fact is that Ch’en Tu-hsiu and Hu Shih did search the history of their own people and did find there the periodic appearance of the same revolutionary spirit which had changed their country, too, again and again, as well as the culture of Europe, and this revolutionary spirit, they felt, was simply the renewed determination in progressive generations of human beings, wherever they lived, to do away with old clutter and meaningless phrases and to try instead to approach freshly and directly the problems of life.

The greatest interest for me in all this was the fact that these modern intellectuals were considering for the first time the Chinese novel as literature instead of the despised possession of the common people, through wandering storytellers and theatrical groups, and which, if it was produced by a scholar, was always done under the cover of anonymity or a pseudonym because it was always written in the vulgar spoken tongue. Now Hu Shih came forward with a stimulating essay on the Chinese novel, a theme never before taken up by a scholar, and I myself, who had never quite dared, under the tutelage of Mr. Kung, to acknowledge how much I enjoyed reading stories and novels, found that Mr. Kung was dead indeed, for not only did all the young people of my age begin to read fiction and feel it quite smart to do so, but they began to write fiction, not in the old classical allusive fashion, but straightforwardly, with unashamed self-revelation and emotion.

This was an enormous release to educated men and women. To be able to say what one felt and thought without having to think whether it was written in a rigid and antiquated style was to free an energy suppressed for centuries. The new intellectual life began to flow with a strength and an influence far out of proportion to the numbers who were actually engaged in it or were able to understand and profit from it. It was still the five percent of the population who were concerned, and yet they were the leading young minds, and from them even the illiterate and the ignorant caught something of the new China. It was a wonderful hour, young enough to be still pure. The young Chinese lost their animosities and prejudices for the time being and they searched the world in their hunger for new ideas, new forms, new intellectual companionship. So alive were they that I felt myself filled with their enthusiasms, and my faith in China was born again. At this rate, I thought, she would run ahead of all other countries, and compared to the vivid articulate world — questioning minds of my young Chinese friends, both men and women, my American college mates seemed puerile indeed.

One of my own particular absorptions was a most unusual man named Lin Shu. He knew not a word of English, but he happened one day by chance upon a Western novel, and moved by curiosity, he engaged a friend to read it to him, translating it as he read. Lin Shu was charmed by the story. I wish I knew what novel it was that he first heard. I think, although my memory is not sure, that it was one of the novels of Sir Walter Scott. Whichever it was, he demanded that it be read to him again, and while he listened to the rough translation of the reader, he rewrote it in his own beautiful Chinese style. In this fashion he translated the novels of Scott and Dickens, of Conan Doyle and Victor Hugo and Robert Louis Stevenson, Tolstoi, Cervantes, and others, until he had translated ninety-three English books, nineteen American ones, twenty-five French, and six Russian. Rider Haggard was perhaps his favorite Western writer. He translated for his own pleasure at first but he soon found that Chinese readers enjoyed the foreign novels as much as he did and in the end he became wealthy by this innocent piracy. Of course other Chinese writers, always poor, and particularly the young, were quick to copy his example, and, I must say, not always acknowledging foreign authorship. By this means Western literature was made known even to the average Chinese reader, since it was no longer a disgrace to read fiction, at least foreign fiction.

Years later when I began to write, I found myself subject to the same honor, or annoyance, depending upon how one wishes to think of it, and my books, too, were cheerfully pirated over and over again. I remember that I saw seven different translations, some in full and some in shortened versions, of The Good Earth, and on two of them my name did not appear at all and the translator’s name was given as that of the author. Young writers lifted certain incidents and characters out of the book and wove amplified stories about them and sold them as original works. The same fate befell others among my books, but nothing could be done about it. There were no copyright laws to which to appeal. I doubt whether the situation has changed under the Communists, since in Russia herself, although I know that my books have been translated there freely, no permissions have been asked and no royalties given me. International altruism may move one to accept a certain amount of the inevitable, but not, I think, the assumption of authorship by a translator.

From all this fascinating new life I was suddenly removed, or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that I suddenly removed myself, by my marriage to a young American, not strictly speaking a missionary since he was not at all religious, so far as I could see, but who was employed as an agriculturist by the Presbyterian Mission Board. The time had come for marriage, as it comes in the life of every man and woman, and we chose each other without knowing how limited the choice was, and particularly for me who had grown up far from my own country and my own people. I have no interest now in the personal aspects of that marriage, which continued for seventeen years in its dogged fashion, but I do remember as freshly as though it were yesterday the world into which it transported me, a world as distant from the one I was living in as though it had been centuries ago. It was the world of the Chinese peasant.