My Several Worlds

III

Forest Haunt, Vermont

THE LANDSCAPE OUTSIDE MY big window this morning is a forest clearing, and beyond the pines and the maples at its edge green mountains rise in rounded peaks. Our simple house is the result of a plan and the plan is the result of a mild revolt on my part. These American children of mine were growing up without knowing how to use their hands. On the farm the boys rode tractors and fastened the milking machine to the cows. They sat on a combine and harvested the grain and called it farming. It is farming, of course, the American way, but I was dissatisfied with it. They had no touch with the earth direct, and I feel that there must be the direct touch, hands upon stones and earth and wood, in order that life may have stability. My own life has been spent in many places, but it has not lacked continuity or stability because everywhere I have made gardens and lived on farms and planted and harvested in the unchangeable turn of the seasons.

And the houses people build nowadays! The old strong farmhouses in our Pennsylvania community still stand, but I see bulldozers sweep them down as though bombs had fallen, and in their place upon the raw and bleeding earth machines have built little metal boxes a few feet apart, and they are called homes and twenty thousand families crowd into them. When I saw them I knew that I wanted my children to know how to build a real house.

We went to Vermont one spring to see maple sugaring by helping to make it, and while we were there my revolt took sensible shape in a plan. Land covered with forest was cheap on the mountainside, a little more than two dollars an acre. We bought some high acres far from the road, and the next summer upon an old clearing where a farmhouse had stood a century ago, the boys began housebuilding under the direction of a Vermonter who knew how to do his job well. Thereafter each summer the boys went to the mountain and worked. Foundation, walls of stones mortised in cement, a beamed roof, two big fireplaces, windows and doors, a well-laid stone floor, these slowly came into being. The work was finished by a fine German workman whose passion for perfection was irritant and stimulus to the young Americans but joy to me, for I despise shoddiness of handwork, believing it to be accompanied always by shoddiness of mind and soul.

Slowly, slowly the learning went on, and at last the house was done, and here we are in our mountain house. Water has to be carried from the brook, lamps have to be cleaned and filled with oil, there will never be a telephone, I cook our meals on the fireplace and think it the best way of cooking in the world. Around us the forest folk come and go, squirrels and deer and sometimes bear, and we always watch for Brother Porcupine who will eat his way through anything, especially enjoying rubber tires. The house has cost us a third of what the new metal boxes in Pennsylvania cost, and the boys now know how to build for themselves and the girls know how to keep house anywhere and still be civilized. As for me, I have this big window, the fir trees and the mountains, and blessed relief from Pennsylvania ragweed.

Next to people, I remember landscapes, and though at this moment I look at green forests in Vermont, I can remember as clearly as what I see the northern Chinese town to which I went after my marriage. The decision to marry was the result of one of those human coincidences which cannot be explained except to say in the words of the wise man of Ecclesiastes that there is “a time to marry.” When this time comes in the life of any healthy and normal creature, marriage is inevitable, whether it be arranged by parents or by the individual, and to the most likely person who happens to be in the environment. My parents did not approve my marriage and while they maintained an amazing silence on the subject, for they were an articulate pair and silence was not usual, nevertheless I discerned their disapproval because they were united in silence, and this was also unusual. Since I was on more intimate terms with my mother than with my father, I took her aside one day and asked her why they disapproved. She replied that they felt that this young man, while himself a good sort of person doubtless, would not, however, fit into our rather intellectual family. His interests were obviously not intellectual, she said, and when I reminded her that at least he was the graduate of an American college she retorted that it was an agricultural college and this was not what our family considered education.

“You two are behaving like Chinese parents,” I said. “You think whomever I marry has to suit the family first.”

“No,” she declared, “it is you we think of. We know you better than you imagine, and how can you be happy unless you live with someone who understands what you are talking about?”

I was as wilful as any other member of our wilful family, however, and so I persisted in my plans and in a few months was married, with very simple ceremony, in the garden of our mission house and soon thereafter I was settled in my own first home, a little four-room Chinese house of grey brick and black tile within the walled town of Nanhsüchou, in Anhwei province, many miles north of my childhood province of Kiangsu.

It was a complete change of scene. I had never lived in North China before, and the very landscape was strange to me. Instead of our green valleys and the lovely blue hills beside the wide Yangtse River I now looked from my windows upon a high embankment where stood the city wall, foursquare, with a brick tower at each corner, and surrounded by a moat. Huge wooden gates braced with iron were locked against bandits and wandering soldiers at night and opened in the morning. Outside the walls and beyond the moat, the countryside stretched as flat as any desert, broken only by what appeared to be heaps of mud but which were actually villages whose houses were built of the pale sand-colored earth of the region. In winter there was no green of any kind. Earth and houses were all of one color and even the people were of the same dun hue, for the fine sandy soil was dusted into their hair and skin by the incessant winds. The women seemed never to clean themselves, and this I found was purposeful, for if a woman was tidy, her hair brushed back and coiled smoothly and her garments any color but the universal sand color or faded blue cotton, then she was suspected of being a prostitute. Honest women took pride in being unkempt as a sign of not caring how they appeared to men and therefore virtuous. It was impossible to distinguish between the rich and the poor, for a rich lady wore her satin coat underneath the dull cotton one and was no better to look at than any farm woman. It took me some time to adjust to what seemed to me downright ugliness in my landscape, and I remember being discouraged by the sameness around me and complaining that there was no use in taking a walk, for one could go ten miles beyond the city gates and still everything looked exactly the same.

But it has always been my weakness or my strength, and to this day I do not know which it is, to be easily diverted by and absorbed in whatever is around me, and I soon found plenty of amusement and occupation. I discovered that I liked housekeeping and gardening, and to arrange the simple furniture about the four rooms, to hang curtains of yellow Chinese silk at the windows, to paint some pictures for the walls, to design bookshelves and grow flowers were all enjoyable activities. I was glad that I lived in a little Chinese house with a black-tiled roof instead of a foreign style mission house. It had no upstairs and the garden seemed part of the house. The climate was too dry for the many flowers in my mother’s southern garden, but chrysanthemums grew well in autumn and the golden Shantung roses in May and June.

In the spring the whole landscape suddenly grew beautiful. The bare willow trees around the villages put forth soft green leaves and the wheat turned green in the fields and the blossoms of the fruit trees were rose-colored and white. Most beautiful of all were the mirages. I had never lived in mirage country before, and when the earth was still cold but the air was warm and dry and bright, wherever I looked I could see mirages of lakes and trees and hills between me and the horizon. A fairy atmosphere surrounded me, and I felt half in a dream. The enchantment of moonlight, too, upon the city wall and the calm waters of the moat outside is still in my memory, half unreal, and it was in this little northern town that I first felt the strange beauty of Chinese streets at night. The dusty streets were wide and unpaved, the usual streets of northern Chinese towns, and they were lined with low one-story buildings of brick or earth, little shops and industries, blacksmiths and tinsmiths, bakeries and hot-water shops, dry goods and sweetmeat shops, all the life of a people confined geographically and therefore mentally and spiritually to an old and remote area. I walked the dim streets, gazing into the open doors where families gathered around their supper tables, lit only by thick candles or a bean oil lamp, and I felt closer to the Chinese people than I had since childhood.

It was in a way a solitary life, for what my parents had feared proved to be true, and my inner life was lived alone. There were only two other white people in the compound, a missionary couple much older than I, and with them no companionship was to be had, especially as they were in delicate health and for long periods of time were absent and then we were the only white people there. I remember as I say this that we did have for a short time an American doctor and his young wife, but the poor wife hated the Chinese and would never stir from her house. Though they lived next door, she never visited us or anyone, and we all took it for granted that she could not be herself so long as she remained in the alien country. It was not long before they returned to America to stay.

Now when I remember that American doctor I think of one experience we shared together. I had often to help him in one way or another, and one night, long after midnight, I heard a knocking on my door. When I opened it, there stood the doctor, a tall thin American figure with a lighted lantern in one hand and in the other his bag.

“I’ve had a call to go to a young woman who may be dying in childbirth,” he said. “I’ll have to operate and I need someone to give the anaesthetic. But especially I need someone to explain things to them.”

His Chinese was limited and an operation was a dangerous risk if the people could not understand what he was doing. I had never given an anaesthetic but he could tell me what to do. I put on my coat and went with him and we walked through the silent streets on that bitter cold night to a cluster of small houses crowded with people. Everybody there was awake, it seemed, and smoky oil lamps were lit and faces stared at us out of the darkness. All was silence, too, and I knew that such silence was not good. It meant that the people did not trust the foreign doctor. I followed him to the very back of the alleyway and there a young husband met us and with him an old woman, his mother, and various relatives.

He was distracted with terror, for, as he soon explained to me, a wife was expensive for a man in his situation, and he had only been married a year. If she died, the whole business of another wife, a wedding, and so on, had to be undertaken afresh. Moreover, his parents were old and they wanted the assurance of a grandson before they died. I expressed my understanding and sympathy, and asked that the doctor be allowed to see the patient. He led the way and we all crowded into a small unventilated room, where upon a big wooden bed, behind heavy curtains, a young woman lay near her death. The agitated midwife stood by her, declaring that no one could save the woman, and that the child was already dead. When I asked her how she knew this she fumbled about in the straw on the floor and produced the child’s arm which she had pulled off in her efforts to assist the birth.

“You see the child is dead,” I told the young husband.

He nodded.

“Then it is only a question of saving your wife,” I went on.

“Only that,” he agreed.

“You also understand that she will certainly die if this foreign doctor does nothing,” I said next.

“I do understand,” he said.

This was not enough, and I asked all the relatives, who stood silent and watchful, if they also understood. They nodded. Last of all I asked the mother-in-law if she understood that she was not to blame the foreign doctor if it was too late to save the young wife. She too agreed that he could not be blamed. With so many witnesses it was safe to proceed, and the doctor, who had been chafing at the necessary delay, handed me his bag and told me to sterilize the instruments while he prepared the patient.

Sterilize them! I had not the faintest idea how to do that. But I saw I was not expected to ask questions, and so I went into the courtyard and found a few bricks and built a fire of some straw and charcoal between them. Then I put a tin can of water on the bricks and sat down to wait for it to boil. Around me in the cold darkness stood the family, fearful of what was to happen. There was no use in trying to explain germs to them at that moment, and so I merely said that we wanted to get the instruments clean with boiling water, and this they understood. The water boiled quickly and I dropped them in and let them boil and then took them, tin can and all, into the stuffy bedroom again where the doctor was ready. The unconscious woman lay across the bed, her head to the wall, and he gave me my instructions.

“Pour off some of the water into a basin,” he said, as though I were a nurse in the hospital and I tried to obey like one as best I could.

He looked around the little room impatiently. “Can’t you get these people out?” he demanded.

“We can’t get them all out,” I said. “We must have witnesses.”

After some argument the relatives did go out, however, except the husband and the mother-in-law.

“Now,” my doctor said to me, “get back to the bed and put this cotton lightly over the patient’s nose and begin dropping chloroform from this bottle.”

“How shall I know when she has too much?” I asked, trying not to be afraid.

“Watch her breathing,” he ordered. “And don’t ask me anything. I have enough to do. I have never seen such a mess.”

He worked in silence then, the husband and the mother leaning to see what we did. I concentrated only on the woman’s breathing. Was it weaker? Surely it was more faint. I could not spare a hand to try to feel her pulse. Once the breathing stopped.

“She’s dead,” I whispered.

The doctor reached for a hypodermic and stabbed her arm and she began to breathe again unwillingly.

The ordeal came to an end somehow and there was the little dead child.

“A boy!” the mother-in-law wailed.

“Never mind,” I said. “She will get well and bear you another.”

It was a rash promise, but it was fulfilled a year later. The incredible strength of the Chinese woman pulled the young wife through that night. We stayed until she came out of the anaesthetic and then we let the husband feed her a bowl of hot water with red sugar melted into it. By morning she ate a raw egg in rice gruel. It was enough. If a person can eat, the Chinese believe, he will not die.

And yet I was never really lonely. The Chinese were delightful and of a kind new to me. Their language fortunately was still Mandarin, and I had only to make a few changes of pronunciation and tone to understand and be understood perfectly, and soon I was rich in friends. As usual the people were ready to be friends, intensely curious about our ways, and since my little house was so accessible a fairly steady stream of visitors came and went, and I was pressed with invitations to birthday feasts and weddings and family affairs. I enjoyed it all and soon was deep in the lives of my neighbors, as they were in mine. I played with their babies and talked with the young women of my own generation and they told me their problems with their mothers-in-law and other relatives and as usual I felt profoundly the currents of human life.

Since the man in the house was an agriculturist, it was natural that I accompanied him on his trips into the country. I must confess that I had often wondered secretly what a young American could teach the Chinese farmers who had been farming for generations on the same land and by the most skilful use of fertilizers and irrigation were still able to produce extraordinary yields and this without modern machinery. Whole families lived in simple comfort upon farms averaging less than five acres and certainly I had known of no Western agriculture that could compete with this. I knew better than to reveal my skepticism, however, for I had been well trained in human relationships, among which it is important indeed that, if she is wise, a woman does not reveal her skepticisms to man. Therefore I walked with what I hoped was my usual amiability from farm to farm, and while the man talked with farmers I amused myself with the women and the children, except when language broke down between the American and the Chinese men and I had to be called in as interpreter. It became more and more apparent as time went on that it would be difficult to find concrete ways of helping the farmers of the region, who had learned to cope with drought and high dry winds and long cold winters, and it was disturbing to any American man, I am sure, to find that he had more to learn than to teach.

No such danger faced me. I could merely enjoy and feel no special duty, for being nothing more now than a wife, I had no conscience whatever. Nothing was demanded of me, or almost nothing, and so I busied myself in house and garden, I began to keep bees for their honey, and I experimented with jams and jellies made from the abundant dates of our region and the dark red haws that are a cross between damson plums and crab apples. I was in and out of neighbors’ houses, as they were in and out of mine, and I enjoyed again the wonderful deep sense of the richness of friendships. More than once I almost began to write, but each time I put it off, deciding to wait yet a little longer until mind and soul were fully grown. Strangest of all, the vivid intellectual and political turmoil of the country did not reach us here. We lived as serenely as though the nation were not in revolution. Without exception none of my friends knew how to read or write and felt no need of either accomplishment. Yet so learned were they in the way of life that I loved to listen to their talk. An ancient people stores its wisdom in succeeding generations, and when families live together, young and old, each understands the other. Moreover, I delighted especially in the humor of my Chinese friends and in their freedom from inhibitions. These made life a comedy, for one never knew what the day might bring forth. One morning, for example, we found that thieves had broken into the Christian schoolmaster’s house and had stolen the school funds.

“Didn’t you get up?” our elder missionary demanded.

Astonishment broke upon the fat placid face of the schoolmaster. “What — I?” he retorted. “I am a scholar, and naturally I have no crude courage. I told my wife to get up, but by the time she had put on her outer garments the robbers were gone.”

No one in our town blamed him, for physical courage was not admired and certainly not expected of learned men. “Of the thirty-six ways of escape,” a Chinese proverb preaches, “the best is to run away.” It has been part of the revolution in China to repudiate this proverb and to lift up the soldier from the traditional position in society given him by Confucius and make him into something more nearly resembling the Western soldier, who is given the honor and glory that make easy heroes of our military men. Which conception is right? I can only say that in old Asia where the soldier was given no honor and war was without glory, there arose a culture which emphasized learning and wisdom and which produced no great and soul-racking world wars.

When my mind returns to the years I lived in that small northern town, I see people not in masses but individual and beloved. Madame Chang remains as one of the greatest women I have ever known. She lived just down our street, the matriarch of a large family, a tall and ample figure, dressed in a full skirt and a knee-length coat, as old-fashioned as a family portrait, her hair drawn tightly back from her round kind face. She was a Christian, at least she was a church member and a sincere one, but even the elder missionary took no credit for this. She had been a leader among the Buddhists before she became a Christian, and she was still a Buddhist. She joined the Christian church, she once told me, as a kindness to the foreigners, who were strangers in the town and whom she wished to encourage when she perceived that their works were good. Madame Chang was a widow, and like so many strong good women, she had been married to a weak and lazy man. He died when she was still young and the Buddhist priests in the temple told her that he had not gone to heaven but had been detained in purgatory. It was her duty, they told her, to release him by prayers and gifts to the temple, and for some years she had spent herself on the project of getting the poor man out of his misery. Bit by bit, the priests assured her, he was being freed, until he was held only by his left foot. Christianity then came to her aid to the extent of convincing her that the priests were hoaxing her, and wherever her husband was she let him remain thereafter. Strangely enough, this story of purgatory, common enough to dishonest Buddhist priests, I later heard in Ireland from a Catholic priest as a joke.

Madame Chang was a jolly kind-hearted soul, and every good work in the town had her support. Whenever something new was begun, the universal demand was “Does Madame Chang approve it?” If so, then the people got solidly behind it. There were no barriers between her and other human beings, and sometimes when my own heart ached for reasons I could not reveal, it did me good just to lay my head down upon her broad soft shoulder and be still for a bit. Never did she ask me what was the matter, but in her wisdom I felt she knew.

My neighbor to the left, Madame Wu, was entirely different. She was a thin beautiful woman, past middle age but still beautiful, and she ruled her big household with an absolute authority. Gossip told me that she had driven to suicide her eldest daughter-in-law and this out of sheer jealousy because her eldest son, her favorite, had fallen in love with his wife after marriage. This enraged her, for she had purposely married him to a girl not beautiful so that her own hold over him would not be threatened, and she had made the young wife so miserable that the poor creature hung herself from a rafter one day in her husband’s absence. The young husband had not spoken to his mother since except in the barest necessity of filial speech. If Madame Wu felt this, she gave no sign of it. She was as proud as ever and she chose another wife for her son. Yet she was a friend to me, and from her I learned much about the ancient and time-honored ways of a family such as hers. She had exquisite clothes, garments of hand-woven satins and silks and many kinds of furs from the North. She even had a coat lined with fine Russian sable, which had belonged to her grandmother. She taught me a great deal, giving me instruction in correct local manners among other things, and from her I learned much Chinese poetry. She too could not read, but she had been a precocious child, an only daughter, and her father had taught her poetry.

We had many beggars in our town, professional beggars usually, and they lived not so much on charity as on the Buddhists who for the sake of their souls would perform deeds of merit, among which was to give money to the poor. I was annoyed especially by the number of idle young men among these beggars, and one day upon my entering a side street to visit the house of a friend, a particularly impudent and bumptious beggar boy of about seventeen demanded alms. I stopped and looked at him hard.

“Why are you a beggar?” I asked.

He was taken aback by this and hung his head and mumbled that he had to eat.

“Why don’t you work?” I asked next.

“Who would give me work?” he retorted.

“I will,” I said firmly. “Follow me into our gate and I will give you a hoe and you can hoe out the weeds in my garden.”

This I did, amused to observe his sad face and reluctant hands as he took the hoe.

“How long am I to work before I am paid?” he asked.

“Work until noon and I will give you money enough to buy yourself two bowls of noodles for your dinner,” I told him. “Work until the end of the day and I will give you a day’s wage. Come back tomorrow and I will give you another day’s wage at nightfall.”

I left him and returned at noon to find a meager effort the result of his morning’s work. Nevertheless I gave him the coins for his noodles and bade him come back when he had eaten.

He did not come back. I never saw him again until about six months later, when I happened to meet him in another street on the opposite side of the town where I seldom went. He put out his hand to beg, and when he saw who I was horror spread over his brown face. Without one word he darted away and after this time I truly never saw him again.

One Christmas Eve I heard a childish voice at our back door, and opening it, I found there on the doorstep a little boy of perhaps eight, thin and starved, and clad only in a cotton shirt. He was a pretty boy, unusually so, and he looked at me with huge dark eyes.

“Why are you here?” I asked.

“They told me it was your feast day and I thought you might have some scraps for me to eat,” he said plaintively.

“Where are you parents?” I asked.

“I have none,” he said.

“You must have a family,” I remonstrated.

“I have no one,” he said in his pathetic voice. “My father and mother and I were walking south to escape the northern famine and they fell ill and died and so I am alone.” It was true that there was a famine in the North that year and the boy looked honest. At any rate, my heart was soft with Christmas sentiment, and so I brought him in and bathed him and put warm clothes on him and fed him. Then I made up a cot in the small study and put him to bed. Nothing was hidden in our life, and of course the two servants we employed soon spread the news about the orphan and the next morning my first visitor was Madame Chang. She heard the story and then she inspected the small boy. He looked back at her in apparent innocence, answering her questions while she stared at him thoughtfully. After a while she sent him to the kitchen and she cogitated and then spoke.

“I distrust this child,” she said. “I think someone is taking advantage of Christmas and your good heart. What do you plan to do with him?”

“I haven’t thought,” I confessed. “I suppose I’ll just keep him here, send him to school and so on.”

She shook her head. “Keep him but not here,” she advised. “Let him go and live with the mission farmer.”

Outside the city there was a small farm where the man in the house was experimenting with seed selection and a farmer lived there in our employ. I respected Madame Chang too much not to obey her, and we took our orphan to the farm, giving directions about his care, that he was to be sent each day to the village school and that he could learn to help about the place. Alas, after three months or so of this life, although he grew fat and cheerful, our pretty orphan ran away and we never saw him again either. The farmer was cheerfully philosophical about it. “That small one could never work,” he remarked. “Eat and sleep and play he could do very well, but ask him to take the broom and sweep the threshold and he runs away.”

The farmer was a kind man and his wife was a motherly woman who had taken the orphan as one of her own brood and she mourned over him, but he was gone, I suppose to join the band of beggars or thieves who had sent him to me in the first place.

Those were the years, too, when I travelled far and wide over the back country where sedan chairs were the only way for a woman to go. I went of course with the man in the house who was restless, I think, about studying Chinese and liked to escape his books. At any rate we travelled, he on bicycle and I in the usual sedan chair. It was enclosed and down the front hung a curtain of heavy blue cotton cloth. I rode with the curtain up while we went along open roads, but as we neared villages and towns I let it fall in order to escape the curiosity of crowds who had never seen a white man or woman. Even so, I did not count on some one who might pass me, walking or donkeyback, and who, reaching a town ahead of us, would cry out on the streets or in a teashop that a strange sight was soon to arrive. More than once when we reached the gates of a walled village or town a crowd would be there waiting, and in such an intense state of curiosity that they could not keep from pulling the curtain aside to stare at me. At first, trying to be like a Chinese lady, I fastened the curtain. Then reflecting that I was not Chinese, and that I had better satisfy their curiosity since it was friendly enough, I put the curtain aside and let them stare. Staring and pressing about me they would follow me to the inn and only an irate innkeeper could make them leave.

“What are you gaping at?” he would bawl at them. “Is it anything but a man and a woman with eyes and arms and legs? Are not all around the four seas one family under Heaven?”

He would make a great ado of pushing them out, but actually he was as curious as they, and soon they were all back again. When I went to my room and shut the wooden door, they would bend down to the ground where for six inches or so there was no door and stare at me upside down. If the windows were papered, they licked their fingers wet and melted holes in the soft rice paper and applied an eye to watch me. Only once was I frightened and that was when our baggage did not arrive and the man went back to find it and left me alone. As soon as they saw he was gone the crowd began to batter at the barred door, and I was uneasy because I had noticed a number of rough young men among them. I drew a heavy wooden chair against the door and sat down in it with my feet drawn up so that they could not see me, and waited until the baggage arrived.

Out of these travels still other friends were found, and as time went on and I became familiar with new places, I used to visit in families where no white person had even been, proud old families who had lived in remote walled towns and in the same houses for many hundreds of years, and sitting with the womenfolk, young and old, I listened to them talk and learned about their lives. One such house I remember especially in a fine old city, small and totally untouched by modern times. The family was surnamed Li, and I became friends with the wife of the youngest son, a woman about my own age.

She was intensely curious about me and about the life I lived, and yet she never spoke a word in the presence of her husband’s mother and her elder sisters-in-law. I always noticed her sweet and gentle face, however, and always smiled at her. One day she came to my room alone and begged me to go to the part of the vast compound where she lived. We went through small lanes and hidden ways, for obviously she did not want anybody to know that she was monopolizing me, and at last we reached the little courtyard and the rooms where she and her husband lived. No one was there and she seized my hand and led me into her bedroom and barred the door. It was an old-fashioned Chinese bedroom, such as I had seen many times, the enormous bed, hung with embroidered curtains of red satin, filling one entire end of the room, tables and chairs placed against the wall, and the usual pigskin chests, varnished red and locked with huge brass locks.

“Sit on the bed so we can talk,” she begged.

She stepped up on the footstool, for the bed was high, and patted the red satin mattress, and I sat down beside her. Immediately she took my right hand in both hers with friendly affection, and then she began her questions.

“Tell me,” she said earnestly, “is it true your husband speaks to you in the presence of other people?”

“Quite true,” I said.

“Not shameful?” she persisted.

“We do not consider it so,” I assured her.

“Ah,” she sighed enviously. “I dare not speak to mine except at night here. If I am with the family and he comes in then I must leave the room, otherwise it would be shameful. How many years do you think I have been married?”

“Not many,” I said, smiling. “You look so young.”

“Two,” she said, holding up two slender fingers. “I have been here two years, yet I have never once spoken to my father-in-law. I bow to him if we meet and then I must leave the room. He does not notice me.

“I have never met my father-in-law nor my mother-in-law,” I told her. “They live across the sea in America.”

She looked astonished. “Then how was your marriage arranged?”

We talked a long time then about the differences between our peoples, and she showed a lively intelligence. Without the slightest help she had thought a great deal, although apparently her young husband was fond of her and sometimes answered her questions. She adored him, I could see, and she was only sorrowful because they could be together so little, for when he came home at night from the family business, duty compelled him to spend hours with his parents and it was always late when he came to bed, and she was afraid to ask him for too much talk. And yet there was no one else, except the bondsmaids and servants who were more ignorant than she, for custom forbade her to speak to the elder women unless she was spoken to. This rigorousness of family decorum was of course not to be found except in the oldest and richest and most conservative families. Among the poorer people and certainly among those who were more modern there was much freedom. Eventually even my friend would have more freedom, for when her mother-in-law died and her elder sister-in-law became the head of the inner family, her own position would improve until someday she herself might be the head, with daughters-in-law of her own. I am sure it was hard to wait, and she listened enchanted to what I told her about American women.

The longer I lived in our northern city, however, the more deeply impressed I was, not by the rich folk but by the farmers and their families, who lived in the villages outside the city wall. They were the ones who bore the brunt of life, who made the least money and did the most work. They were the most real, the closest to the earth, to birth and death, to laughter and to weeping. To visit the farm families became my own search for reality, and among them I found the human being as he most nearly is. They were not all good, by any means, nor honest, and it was inevitable that the very reality of their lives made them sometimes cruel. A farm woman could strangle her own newborn girl baby if she were desperate enough at the thought of another mouth added to the family, but she wept while she did it and the weeping was raw sorrow, not simply at what she did, but far deeper, over the necessity she felt to do it.

“Better to kill the child,” this was what she thought.

Once in a small gathering of friends, and not all of them poor or farm folk, we fell to talking of killing girl babies. There were eleven women present and all except two confessed that at least one girl child had been killed in each home. They still wept when they spoke of it, and most of them had not done the deed themselves, and indeed they declared that they could not have done it, but that their husbands or mothers-in-law had ordered the midwife to do it because there were too many girls in the family already. The excuse was that a girl when she marries becomes part of another family, and poor families could not afford to rear too many children who brought nothing to the family and indeed took from it to go to another family when they married. Yet daughters when they lived were tenderly loved and death had to be done at birth or it was not done at all. A few hours, a first glimpse at a little newborn face, could move the hardest woman to realize that she could not destroy her child. Orders were given before the birth, so that the instant a midwife perceived the sex of the child, were it a girl, she could put her thumb to its throat.

I have heard proud young Chinese abroad declare that such things never happened in their country, and when I hear such talk, I hold my peace. They did happen, for I saw it and heard of it, but these young modern Chinese do not know why it happened, and if they cannot understand the life of their own people and some of the tragedy behind it then let them say what they will. In the same way I have heard them deny that Chinese women have had bound feet in recent decades. Perhaps, living only in the foreign cities of Shanghai or Tientsin or under the Manchu influence of Peking they really have not seen bound feet. But I, living only a few hours from Peking in a town on the railroad, within my adult life have seen girl children with bound feet and most of the women, in both city and country, had bound feet. Our Madame Chang had bound feet, and though they were not small, being six inches long instead of the traditional three, yet she had suffered enough and when she walked it was as though she went on pegs. Madame Wu had always to lean on two bondsmaids when she came to see me, and her feet were only three inches long and she wore beautiful little satin shoes. Yet the granddaughters of Madame Chang and Madame Wu were not having their feet bound because they were going to school. Madame Chang put it in practical terms when she said one day, “I am glad for every girl who does not have her feet bound, for I spent my nights in weeping when I was a girl before my feet grew numb. Yet if she is not bound-footed she must be educated, otherwise she will not get a husband. A small-footed girl can get an old-fashioned husband and a big-footed girl, if educated, can get a new-fashioned husband, but small feet or schooling she must have, one or the other.”

It is true that in certain areas of China there never were bound feet. I remember once travelling in the province of Fukien in South China and discovering there that the countrywomen went freely about with natural feet. They were beautiful strong women, and it was the wise local custom to marry sons to countrywomen so as to bring clean new blood into the family. These daughters-in-law were not ladies of leisure. Instead they did all the work of the family, very much as though they were maids, and the whole family depended upon them and they were always stronger than their husbands. I remember visiting in the family of a friend who lived in Amoy and although it was a scholar family we were waited upon at dinner by a handsome country girl with bare brown feet thrust into cotton shoes. She smiled when her mother-in-law introduced her to us as her daughter-in-law, and she busied herself, managing everything well, joining in the conversation and yet never sitting down with us.

And among the people in my childhood region in mid-China the farm women seldom had bound feet. It was only the city families who bound their daughters’ feet. But there we were on the main road of new China, and few of my generation were binding the feet of their girl children. One hears many stories of how this custom grew up in China, all of them mostly myth. It was in my time merely a matter of custom and beauty, exactly as the young Chinese are fond of saying, as westerners used to bind the waists of their women in corsets or as young Western women today preposterously exaggerate their breasts. People do strange things for what they consider beauty.

And speaking of cruelty, this is perhaps the place to mention the cruelty to animals which shocks so many foreigners when they visit China. There is indeed a vast difference between the way in which animals are treated in China and the way in which they are treated in the West. Animals are not petted and fondled and made much of by the Chinese. On the contrary, Chinese visitors in the United States are usually shocked and disgusted by the affection with which animals are treated, an emotion which the Chinese feel should be reserved for human beings. I believe in kindness toward animals and human beings and I used to wonder why my Chinese friends, whom I knew to be merciful and considerate toward people, could be quite indifferent to suffering animals. The cause, I discovered as I grew older, lay in the permeation of Chinese thought by Buddhist theory. Though most Chinese were not religious and therefore not Buddhist, yet the doctrine of the reincarnation of the human soul influenced their thinking, and the essence of that theory is that an evil human being after death becomes an animal in his next incarnation. Therefore every animal was once a wicked human being. While the average Chinese might deny direct belief in this theory, yet the pervading belief led him to feel contempt for animals.

Another seeming cruelty among the Chinese, also very shocking to Westerners, was that if a person fell into a danger, as for example if he fell into the water and would be drowned if not pulled out, no other Chinese, or only a very rare one, would stretch out his hand to the drowning one. Cruel? Yes, but again the pervading atmosphere of Buddhism through the centuries had persuaded the people generally to believe that fate pursued the sufferer, that his hour had come for death. If one saved him, thus defying fate, the rescuer must assume the responsibilities of the one saved. A man, however kind, might hesitate if by saving a person who had fallen into the danger of death, he had thereafter to care for this person and even perhaps his whole family because he had made himself responsible for giving new life to one who was supposed to die.

Time went on in our quiet northern town, and at last we, too, became embroiled in the national troubles. War lords had the country firmly in their rude clutches by now and in our own region battles began to break out between them. It was never called war but always “attacking the bandits.” This is, each war lord would claim that he was the real ruler and the other one was the “bandit chief.” At least once or twice a year bullets would fly over our town in brief but alarming scuffles, and the little hospital would be filled with wounded soldiers from both sides. We learned when the bullets whistled over the roof to run for the inner corners of a room and stand there until the battle moved on and certainly never to remain near windows. At sundown the battle usually ended, or if we were lucky enough to have a rainstorm come up, the soldiers on both sides prudently called a truce and returned to their encampments outside the city wall so that they would not get their uniforms wet. The city fathers never let either side camp in the city. When a battle threatened, the main gates were barred and the wounded were brought in through a small wicket gate.

Those old-fashioned wars were often amusing rather than dangerous, provided one stayed out of the range of gunshot, and since war lords themselves did not enjoy a strenuous battle they made various excuses for truce. Actually they preferred treachery and strategy to open warfare, and sometimes over a dinner table when the terms of a truce were to be discussed, there was a surprise assassination of the guests, and so was ended the danger of more war for the time being, at least. I learned to take such skirmishes as part of life, and used precaution without being afraid.

One further change came to my life, and it was the building of a new house. My little four-room Chinese home was needed for expansion of the boys’ school and the mission bought a piece of land outside the city and we were told to design a modest house and build it. I wanted a Chinese house all on one floor but this I was forbidden by the mission authorities. No, it must be a two-story house after the Western fashion, and although I disliked exceedingly the idea of this monstrosity on the flat northern landscape, there was no recourse. I planned a story-and-a-half structure, very simple, but still with stairs, and when it was finished my city friends and country neighbors came to see the foreign house. They were fascinated and terrified by the stairs. They went up fairly easily but looking down that steep decline they could not risk it.

“This is the way I shall do it,” Madame Chang declared, and she sat herself without more ado on the top step and gravely bumped her way down the steps on her seat, her padded winter garments protecting her nicely. And after her came all the other ladies without the slightest self-consciousness, until the last one was safely on the first floor. The most delightful quality the Chinese had, I do believe, was the total lack of self-consciousness in all they did. It did not occur to them to wonder or to care what anybody else thought. It was only in Western-educated Chinese that I began to see self-consciousness, allied with a pitiful false shame of their own people. How sorry I felt for them then, for indeed they ought to have been proud of a nation so civilized by the centuries that its people could behave without self-consciousness! Only royalty in England can equal them in the West, with perhaps the recent addition of Sir Winston Churchill himself.

The years passed tranquilly in our town in spite of the sporadic skirmishes between war lords and my days were absorbed in small human events. There is much humor in Chinese life when it is fully shared, and this comes from the sense of drama which is natural to almost every Chinese. The least quarrel, a festival or a birthday, provided rich entertainment, and a birth, a death or a wedding was enough for days of talk and enjoyment. The raw humor of peasants and the jollity of merchants and their families were never entirely overcome even by occasional and inevitable tragedy. How can I ever forget the trials of old Mr. Hsü, our town’s rich man, whose life was enlivened and beset by his four wives, and the clamor with which they surrounded him! When he travelled on the train to Pengp’u he dared not do what he wished, which was to take only his youngest and therefore his favorite concubine with him. She was a pretty woman in her late twenties, the only one still slender enough to wear the long, tight and very fashionable Shanghai dress. Each journey he began with the determination that he would take only the youngest woman with him, but he was never allowed the luxury. It was impossible to keep anything secret, and so each woman complained until he had unwillingly agreed to take all four. For economy’s sake, however, he distributed them through the train, the third and the youngest concubine with him in second class, the second in third class and his wife and the first concubine in fourth class. Alas, he still had no peace, for the three who were in the lower classes were continually around him, demanding the same food and tidbits that he bought for his favorite. The harassment of Mr. Hsü made town talk, embellished with local witticisms.

Suicides among young women were not uncommon and I shall never forget the one next door. She was my friend, a young woman of my own age, and so I knew that she was not happy with her husband or his family. She was a sensitive intelligent girl who longed to go to school, and much of our time together was spent with books, for she had an insatiable thirst for knowledge. I had been afraid that she might end her own life, for she had no escape, and gradually she had given up hope. I was sent for one bright sunny day at midmorning, and when I reached her room, the family had only just cut the rope by which she had hung herself. I took her hand and it was still soft and warm. She lay there on the tiled floor, limp as a child, her face not marred, and I could not believe she was dead. I begged them to let me try first aid, but her mother-in-law would not allow such foreign ways. The Buddhist funeral priests had already arrived and the death chant had begun. I met hostile looks when I persisted and Madame Chang, who had come soon after I did, hurried me away.

My chief intramural interest, if one may so speak of our compound, was the girls’ school for which I was responsible, and I invited as head teacher one of my old girlhood friends from Chinkiang. She was an able teacher, young and enthusiastic, and I hoped for much accomplishment from her. Alas, as so often happens in China, although she liked the job and the friendly community and especially her eager pupils, she was defeated by the northern food. The Chinese are strangely insular in the matter of food, probably because of the importance that they attach to eating, and she could not make the change in diet from the rice of mid-China to the wheaten bread and millet of the North. She lost weight and vitality, not because she did not digest the new diet, but because it was too strange to eat bread instead of rice, and at last I yielded and acknowledged defeat.

All during these years I lived deeply and narrowly in one community where an age-old peace had never been broken in spite of the World War raging in Europe. True, Mrs. Liu, a tall thin woman with a very yellow face, was in much suffering because her husband, a “good-for-nothing,” as she frankly called him, had gone to France as a laborer during the World War and she had then heard through another friend, whose husband had also gone to France as a laborer, that her “good-for-nothing” was living with a French woman. Mrs. Liu was torn between grief and pride.

“To think,” she cried, the tears streaming down her face, “that my old good-for-nothing should have got himself a foreign woman! But what sort of woman, I ask you? Anyone can see that my old piece-of-baggage is no use. Why, I was even glad when he came home last year from Shanghai and said he was going for a soldier! And now he has got a foreign woman! What if he brings her home? How can we feed her? What do French women eat?”

The term “good-for-nothing,” I discovered, was the usual name for a husband in our region, where women prided themselves on their virtue. “My yao-yieh,” or “my good-for-nothing”—the women began most of their sentences with these words. It was true that generally speaking the men were inferior to the women, and this I suppose was because boys were so spoiled in Chinese homes, whereas the girls knew from the first that they had their own way to make and would get very little spoiling indeed. Whatever the reason, the Chinese woman usually emerges the stronger character wherever she is, and out of this fact comes a rich vernacular humor which American men and women could understand without the slightest difficulty. Chinese women are witty and brave and resourceful, and they have learned to live freely behind their restrictions. They are the most realistic and least sentimental of human beings, capable of absolute devotion to those they love and of implacable hatred, not always concealed, toward those whom they hate. The Communists could never have taken China, I believe, if they had not prudently given so much advantage to Chinese women. I remember seeing a few years ago the manuscript account of two young American fliers who had been forced down within Communist territory in China and were later released. During the weeks they spent in a Communist village, they observed with interest and pity how ardently the women supported the new regime and this, they said, was merely because the Communists gave the women help with their children, a meager amount of medicine and food, and yet it was enough to touch the hearts of those who had never been given help before. “How much better we Americans could have done it,” the young fliers commented, “had we only known!”

The quiet and intensely interesting years in my northern town came rather abruptly to an end one day when the man in the house announced that there was a vacancy in the University of Nanking and that he intended to apply for it. He had been floundering, as I well knew, unable to find a way of applying Western farm methods to an old and established agriculture. It would be better, he now said, to join a group somewhere rather than to work alone. He could teach agricultural students in a university and let them make the practical application.

I was sad to leave my northern town where I had been so warmly befriended, and yet in a way I was glad to get back into the midst of modern China. I had almost lost touch even with the literary revolution except to know that it was still going on. True, Nanking was not the center of change, and certainly then I could not foresee that in less than ten years it would be the capital of Chiang Kai-chek’s revolutionary new government. When I went there to live, it was still an ancient and conservative city and, by its own tradition, was even the stronghold of a school of old-fashioned scholars who opposed the “common language” of the young Western-trained intellectuals’ school, the “riksha-coolie-talk school,” as Lin Shu liked to call it. Nevertheless, Nanking was also a center of historical Chinese life, the capital for a long time of the fabulous Ming dynasty, and now it had two Christian colleges, one for men, one for women, and the Chinese National University also.

In my northern home town there were feasts and farewells and exchanges of gifts and considerable weeping and many promises to visit before finally I closed the new brick house, in which I had supposed I would spend the rest of my life, and took the train southward.

Island Beach, New Jersey

Our old Coast Guard house stands bleak and unimproved on the New Jersey shore. I came here today in the early morning, bringing nothing with me except a little food. A few worn dresses hang in the closet from one year’s end to the other, a couple of bathing suits and some sandals, and depending on the season I get into dress or bathing suit and go down to the sea. On the other side of the narrow tongue of sandy soil is the wide bay where my American children played safely through their summer months when they were little, an old rowboat securely tethered to the rough dock for the center of imagination. They fell out of it into the shallow water and climbed back into it a hundred times a day, they crabbed and fished and rowed as far as the rope would go. Then suddenly they outgrew the bay and we moved our quarters to the Coast Guard house on the oceanside, and the bay was useful only for serious crabbing and later for the first outboard motor.

To the sea I go with love and terror, for actually I am afraid of water and I know why. I crossed the Pacific too often and too young, and I am never deceived by calm under sunshine or even under the moon. The madness is there, hidden in the depths of unknown caverns. And yet I go back to the sea again and again, although I do not want to stay long and there are certain times of the year when I would not be near it for any reason.

The beach is wide and deserted today except for a few fishermen who do not turn their heads to see who passes. It is as private here as any lonely coral isle could be, white sand, blue sky and a sea more blue. The children have gone out to sail, the house is empty and quiet, and memory flows unchecked as I sit alone by the seaward window.

…I had been in Nanking only once before I went to live there and that had been as a girl when I visited a school friend. My memories of it were vague and overlaid with later experiences, and now I saw the city with fresh eyes. It lies seven miles from the Yangtse River, a vast walled area, and its city wall is one of the handsomest in China, made of large brick as strong as stone, and so wide at the top that several automobiles can travel abreast. This wall is twenty-five miles in circumference, and I was to know it later for various reasons, one of which was that during the famines which befell North China periodically the refugees flooded into Nanking and lacking other space built their matting huts on top of the city wall where the winter winds were the most bitter. One of the few angry discussions I ever had with a Chinese friend was with a young woman of Nanking who had been graduated from the University of Chicago, where she specialized in social service. We had a famine that first winter in Nanking, a very bad one, and I tried to do my share in getting food and clothing for the thousands of wretched people huddled on the city wall. Thus I went to Mrs. Yang, only that was not her name. She was a young and very pretty woman — pretty, that is, in a sort of hard smart modern fashion. Her satin dresses were Chinese, but cut tight to her slender figure, and her hair was short. Her house was a two-story, Western brick building, furnished in semi-foreign fashion. In the neat little living room with flowered carpet, curtained windows, formal modern landscapes in gilt frames on the wall, I told her of the plight of the refugees on the city wall. She would not believe that conditions were as I portrayed them for her, nor could I persuade her to climb the city wall and see for herself. The street in which she lived was the most modern in the old city and she never went far from it.

“I saw such things in Chicago slums,” she said complacently, “but I am sure that they are not here.”

Nor would she stir herself to find out the truth. In my memory she is embalmed as the typical Western-educated Chinese who is no longer Chinese. She had created a little tight nice world of her own, whose citizens were all like herself. They lived in neat little brick houses, their husbands had university jobs and their children went to an exclusive kindergarten. Beyond this they did not want to know. Perhaps they were afraid to know. China had its vast and frightening aspects.

The city wall was more than a place for refugees, however. In the spring when they had gone back to their land, it became a pleasant place to walk and I could gaze out over the countryside and the mountains. One mountain stood high and clear against the sky, Tze-ch’ing Shan or Purple Mountain, and it became a resort of delight as I came to know my city better. Temples were hidden in the mountain, beautiful shaded spots of repose, and near there, too, were the tombs of the Ming Emperors, approached by avenues of huge stone beasts and men on guard. There were many stories still told about the Mings. No one, it was said, knew where the emperors were actually buried, for at the time of an Imperial funeral, nine processions, all exactly alike, proceeded at the same time from the nine gates of the city. Stories were told also of fabulous treasures buried in the tombs but I doubted that. Too many tombs had been looted during the centuries, and probably all that was left was the human dust, and that much disturbed.

I cannot but linger on Purple Mountain, even at this distance of time and space, for many of my happiest hours were spent there. Its crest rose to a peak, and I climbed it alone one day in July and reaching the cliff I looked over it. There on the northern flank of the mountain, before my astonished eyes spread a field of royal-blue wild monkshood, all in flower. I went to the mountain top each year after that to see such beauty, and I shall never forget the sight.

Bamboos grew upon the southern side of the mountain and pines and trees of every kind, and among them were pleasant stone-flagged walks which the priests had made for pilgrims. I loved the ineffable peace of the temples, and although I did not worship the gods there or anywhere, I liked to sit in the quiet of their presence, or perhaps only in the presence of lost prayers, still lingering in the fragrance of the incense that burned unceasingly before the images, a symbol of yearning human hope.

The countryside was surpassingly beautiful around Nanking and I reveled in it after the flat northern landscape, for I am one of those whom any city confines unbearably and am compelled to escape, although in Nanking there was much to enjoy even inside the walls. The site of the old Porcelain Pagoda, for example, which had been one of the wonders of ancient China, was a beautiful spot, and one could still find bits of the bright enameled tiles of which it had been built, many-colored, but mainly green. The Porcelain Pagoda is said to have been the most beautiful of all the pagodas in China. It was built in the early part of the fifteenth century by Yung-lo, the third Ming Emperor, as a thank offering to his Empress. Only nine of its originally planned thirteen stories were ever completed and even so the building took nineteen years. It was nearly three hundred feet high and nearly one hundred feet in diameter at its base, and it tapered gracefully as it rose. One hundred and forty lamps lit the brilliantly colored tiles by night, and when the sun fell upon it by day, it was truly a spectacle. Of course popular superstition surrounded such a fabulous building and all sorts of magic qualities were attributed to it. The lamps were said to illumine the thirty-three heavens above and to prevent disaster to all around. The pagoda had been destroyed in 1856 by the Tai-p’ing revolutionaries because they feared that its strange geomantic powers would work against them, and so all I could see of it in reality was the base and the bits of broken tile gleaming in the wild grass.

Near the site of the Porcelain Pagoda was a small but beautiful temple famous for its great bronze bell. This was the Temple of the Three Sisters, and the resonant echo of the bell was the result, an old priest told me, of the flesh and blood of the three young girls. They were the daughters of the bellmaker who, in spite of all efforts, could not persuade the metal to give forth a pure tone. The whole family was in distress, for the Emperor had commissioned the bell. One night the bellmaker’s three daughters dreamed that a goddess came down and told them that if they would leap into the molten metal the next time the father melted the bell to cast it again, the tone would come out a deep pure music. Without telling their father they determined to sacrifice themselves, and when he melted the bell, they leaped into the cauldron without his knowledge. What was his wonder, when the bell was recast, to hear it give forth a magic voice! It is a story I have heard of other temple bells and so often that there must once have been such devoted daughters somewhere, if not at the Temple of the Three Sisters in Nanking.

And I remember Lotus Lake outside the city wall, where I was to spend so many happy afternoons and evenings. There in summer at the end of a long hot day I would go with a friend or two and engage a little boat, in which we sat as long as we liked while the boatman rowed us through the watery lanes of the lotus plants. The great rosy blossoms lay open upon the surface of the lake until the sun set and they slowly closed, their fragrance lingering sweetly upon the air. In the dusk the boatman would reach under the huge heavy leaves and pluck off lotus pods for us secretly, for the concession for lotus seed was rented out, such seeds being a delicacy used for feast dishes. In the moonlight we pulled the pithy pods apart and peeled the seeds hidden in them, nuts as big as almonds. If we were really hungry the boatman’s wife would cook a dish of noodles for us, and while we ate we listened to the sounds of singing over the water, a pretty courtesan, perhaps a “flower girl,” strumming her lute for her lover.

I remember, too, The Drum Tower, a handsome and ancient edifice near to the house that had been allotted to us for a home. The Drum Tower was a vast square building, painted red, upon which stood the squat tiered tower. A wide high tunnel made the building a gateway through which the main street to the river ran, and in those shadowy depths beggars took shelter in winter, and in summer the melon vendors sat there to keep their melons cool.

But indeed the old city was full of beauty and there is much to remember, too much to tell. I was grateful when I found that my windows opened to Purple Mountain, and I chose for my own an attic room from which I could look over the compound wall upon the near view of vegetable gardens and a cluster of brick farmhouses and a large fish pond. Beyond these, on the left, were the curved roofs of the university and beyond them a pagoda and the city wall and then the mountain. The city was full of trees and gardens, and this was because it had been designed from the first, centuries ago, to contain within its walls sufficient space so that if enemies attacked, the gates could be locked and the besieged could live indefinitely upon the land inside.

Within my own wall was a grey brick house surrounded by plenty of lawn, a bamboo grove and a vegetable garden, while the servants’ quarters were in one corner at the back of the house. I set myself joyfully to make a flower garden and especially a rose garden, for the lovely Chinese tea roses had refused to grow in the dry northern climate. The gardener, who had been on the place before, begged to be kept on, which I was willing to do, and he led me about the place explaining its difficulties. When we came to the bamboo grove he gave me grave looks and sighed.

“There is something very strange about these bamboos, Learned Mother,” he said.

“Indeed,” I replied with interest. “What is peculiar?”

“They never have sprouts,” he replied sadly. “Each spring I look for the sprouts and, alas, there are none.”

“That is strange,” I agreed. “I have lived in China since I was very small and never did I hear of bamboos with no sprouts in the spring. We must get up early in the morning when the season comes again and perhaps we shall find them. I like to eat bamboo sprouts in the spring.”

He gave me the flicker of an eye and nodded, and thereafter we had no trouble at all about sprouts. Each spring they came up thickly and inevitably, and the cook made delicious dishes from them. As for the gardener, he stayed with me faithfully for the next years until a revolutionary army drove all white people from the city and then he disappeared and I never saw him again. With him, I was told, disappeared various valuables, and I suppose that he paid himself back for the bamboo sprouts he no longer ate. But I was fond of him for he made me laugh very often, rascal and wild-witted fellow that he was, and his wife, a small harassed woman, was my devoted friend. She was older than he, and nothing that either of us could do could prevent him from gambling his wages away, so that I often gave her secret money to keep her children from starving. They lived in a hut outside the wall, for he did not want the trouble of his many children trampling the flower beds, and much to his own and his wife’s misery, they averaged more than a child a year. Indeed, as the poor little bedraggled mother said to me once, “It is mercy that we women must have nine months to make a child, for if it were only a day, I should have a new one every day, that man being what he is.”

During the long hot summers there was always a new and ailing baby to keep alive somehow, and the mother’s milk never was enough and each morning I made up bottles of formula and the mother came for them. Each year I remonstrated with the gardener and urged self-control, and he agreed with all that I said, but the new baby arrived as promptly as ever. At last I could only look my reproach, for words were useless, and one day he came in and said he had a favor to ask of me.

“Please, Learned Mother,” he said plaintively, “find me a job on the opposite side of the city so that I cannot come home.”

I knew too well what this meant.

“Which is it this time?” I inquired. “Boy or girl?”

“Both,” he said in a whisper.

“Twins!” I gasped.

He nodded his miserable head, speechless.

It was another world, familiar and yet new. My parents were not too far away, only two hours by rail, and I went home as often as I could to see them. My mother was plainly fading, though she came of a long-lived family and was not yet old, and I was increasingly anxious about her.

My child was born that first year in Nanking, too, and after that I was not so free to come and go as I had been. I did not mind, for to have a child was a miracle to me and I did not dream of the dark future in store for us both. Mercifully I was to have nearly four years of happy ignorance about her. During that same year my mother died, not suddenly, but slowly and unwillingly, and I am glad that she never knew what lay ahead for me. But let me tell of the year of birth and death.

It was 1921 and I was in full touch again with what was going on in China. Japanese militarists had made great profit from the World War, for in 1915 Japan began the conquest of China in earnest. While the Western Powers were busy with the war, she made the infamous demands which would have reduced China almost to a colony, until the nine-power Washington conference, in 1922, was to return the province of Shantung to China and restored a measure of her independence. It soon became evident, however, that unless China could organize herself somehow and establish a unified government, she would eventually be swallowed up by Japan. Responsible Chinese were anxious, as one irresponsible war lord after another continued to borrow money from Japan and to give national resources as surety.

I began almost immediately to teach English literature in the National University but my students were distracted from their studies because of their rage, equally given to the Japanese aggressors and to their own indifferent and ignorant war lords. In Nanking itself we lived under a war lord who was only slightly better than those in the North, and his lack of energy in betraying his country was due to opium rather than to patriotism. It was a strange double sort of life which reminds me of the way we live now at this moment in the United States. While the President and his cabinet tell us that we may at any moment be annihilated, and while we realize the validity of the warning yet we all go on living and planning the details of our days exactly as though no threat hung over our heads. We know, we realize, we are not apathetic, but the monstrous potentiality of our times is too much for us. We cannot act as though the bomb might fall, or else we could not live at all.

So it was in those days in Nanking, when it was clear to everyone and especially I think to the young Chinese intellectuals what horrors lay ahead, and yet we went our daily way. The seasons changed, my garden bloomed, the markets were filled with fine foods and flowers and crowded with buyers, we did our work carefully and well, we went to the hills for picnics and weekends, the city seemed happy, the people were content and prosperous, our war lord was not oppressive, and yet we all knew that at any moment it might and perhaps it must end, because no one knew what to do to prevent the future before it became inevitable.

My friends now were entirely different from the ones in my northern town. They were my neighbors, young couples, both Chinese and American, who were ultramodern in their education and outlook, and my students who came from all over China. Some came, too, from Korea and it was in them that I discovered the source of the deepest hatred against Japan. These young Koreans were the sons and daughters of Korean families who had not been able to endure Japanese rule in their own land, and had therefore left the country, some to come to China, others to go to Manchuria and still others to Russia to rear their children. From their parents the young Koreans had learned rebellion, and so I first began to understand the causes whose results have led straight and inevitably to the Korea of today.

Three dates are monuments in my memory of the next decade. In October of that year of 1921 my mother died, after a last long illness. She had apparently recovered from sprue, but actually she had never recovered. The mucous membranes of her intestines were scarred, I suppose, and she could not absorb sufficient nourishment to maintain her health, whatever her diet. I wanted to take her to the United States but she was convinced that she could not survive the incurable seasickness which no remedy could allay and she would not cross the ocean. More than the conviction, I think she felt it was too late to lead another life than the one she had so long lived. She could not begin again, even in her own country, and so she quietly began to die and, although the dying took months, its end was soon clear and inevitable. She did not want to die, that was plain, too, but there was no help for it. I was with her almost constantly. But I could not hide from myself that she was doomed, and I tried to face a world in which I could never see her face again. I had learned to live my own life and yet it was rooted in my deep relationship with her. The relationship was sometimes irksome because of the very fact that I loved her so well and understood her and recognized in myself certain qualities which were hers. There were even moments, the parting being inescapable, when I longed for it to be over and in the past. This is the cruelty of youth, and there is no one who is not guilty of it sometimes. I look now at my own children and reflect that I must neither love nor be loved too much if I want them to enjoy their freedom while I am alive and not anticipate it before my death. Yet there must be enough love, too, for growth.

When on a grey October afternoon the nurse told us, my father and my sister and me, that my mother was dying it was I alone who could not go to her bedside. Had she been conscious, I would have compelled myself and indeed might have wanted to go and see her last conscious looks and hear her last words. But she was in coma, and whether I went or not she would never know, and so I let them enter her bedroom without me and I stood in the hall outside and gazed out of the window at a landscape dimmed by tears. When I think of her dying I still see that landscape, the bamboos swaying below the window, the valley beyond, the small farmhouses and the tawny fields, the late gleaners moving slowly across them, women and children in their peasant blue, and beyond them again the distant mountains. Those were long minutes in which I felt my very flesh being torn from hers. I longed to go to her and I could not. My father opened the door at last and said in a strange calm voice that she was gone and then he walked wearily down the hall and the stairs to his own study, and a few minutes later my sister came, but I cannot remember beyond that.

The next day a neighbor missionary coaxed me to go in and see her before the coffin lid was closed.

“She looks beautiful,” the neighbor said in a tender voice. “You’ll be sorry if you don’t take a last look at your mother.”

I went in unwillingly, nevertheless, and glanced at the waxen figure which I could scarcely recognize and then rushed away. And I wish, even at the length of these years, that I had not to remember that waxen doll, who was only someone strange.

The funeral was the next day, a grey autumnal day, dripping rain, and the little procession made its way down the hill and across the valley to the small walled cemetery of the white people. Oh, those sad cemeteries of the white people in alien lands! We used to walk about those very paths, my mother and I, when we came to bring flowers to my dead baby brother, buried there years before, and I knew by heart the verses on the tombstones. The earliest graves were more than a hundred years old, and beneath their green moss lay the dust of three white sailors, nationality unknown. I still remember the verse upon their common tombstone:

Whoe’er thou art who passeth by,

As thou art now so once was I.

As I am now, so must thou be,

Therefore prepare to follow me.

What my mother always saw, however, were the many graves of babies and small children and the many graves of women who died in childbirth. I remember her refusing to look at the tall shaft on the grave of a famous English missionary, who lay buried in a pleasant plot, surrounded by three of his successive wives and several of their children.

“The old reprobate!” she had said indignantly.

But here we brought her, too, to lie, and I was only glad that at least her grave was dug in an empty corner, where the sun shone down and wild purple violets clung in the crannies of the high brick wall.

Elsewhere I have described that day, and I cannot live it again, although it is as strangely clear against the years as though I had but just returned to the empty house.

When I went back to Nanking and to my new home there, I was filled with the need to keep my mother alive, and so I began to write about her. I thought and said it was for my own children, that they might have a portrait of her, since they were too young to remember her as she had been when alive. I did not know that this portrait, so carefully made from my exact memory, was to be my first book. I did not even think of it as a book until years later. It was for my children, and when it was written I put it in a box and sealed it and placed it in a high wall closet to wait until they were old enough to read it for themselves. I did not dream, either, that because I put it so securely away it was to escape the revolution which broke over our heads a few years later so that it was almost the only possession that survived. It went to America with me eventually and was put away again in my farmhouse to wait still longer, for by then I knew that my eldest child would never be able to read it, and I have told her story in a little book, The Child Who Never Grew. When a family need arose, after still more years, I thought of my mother and how she would have wanted to help and, as though she had said so, I remembered her portrait and dedicated it to the cause and it was published as a book under the title The Exile. It was the seventh of my published books, but actually it was the first one to be written.

When it was done I found I wanted to keep on writing, and the summer after my mother’s death, while I was in Kuling with my sister and my child, I remember quite clearly one August afternoon that I said suddenly, “This very day I am going to begin to write. I am ready for it at last.”

Though it was the hour sacred to the semi-tropical siesta, an hour which, however, I always devoted to reading, I sat down as I was, in my robe of blue Chinese silk, and I cannot tell why I remember such foolish detail, but that is always the way I see whatever I am thinking about, and I wrote a little essay, light enough in its touch but expressing some of the experiences of my world at that time. I typed it as best I could and that means badly for I have never mastered a machine, and sent it off to the Atlantic Monthly, which I suppose is the usual goal of the beginner. When this was done I enjoyed a delightful exhilaration. At last I had begun to do what I had always known I would do as soon as I felt rich enough in human experience. And after the essay was accepted and published, I had a letter from the Forum, asking for an article.

Since neither of these essays has ever been reprinted in any of my books, I include them here not only as part of the record but also as pictures of China in those days. The year was 1922, and I was thirty years old. It was high time, indeed.

And here is the essay, just as it appeared in the Atlantic:

IN CHINA, TOO

It is rather alarming, even sitting in one’s armchair on the opposite side of the world, to observe the youth of America and England through the various newspapers and periodicals of the times. Especially when one’s days have been spent, placidly enough, among the ultra-conservative parents and grandparents of a remote spot in the Far East, where the covert glance of a man for a maid is an outrage, and the said maid is at once fastened yet more securely behind barred courtyard doors!

Dancing on six inches or so of floorspace, the discussion of knees and necks and petting parties, the menace of the movies and the divorce question, are a far cry from this tranquil corner of my cool, wide veranda. I look through the shady screen of drooping mimosas and bamboos, upon the quiet street of a small town in me far interior of China. High brick walls almost hide the curving roofs of the staid, respectable neighbor homes about me. All I can see of the flapper age of maiden within is when a curtained sedan chair stops behind the spirit wall protecting each great carved gateway. If one watches keenly enough from the corner of one’s eye, one may see a slender figure in peach-colored, brocaded silk, with tiny embroidered shoes, and smooth jet hair decorated with seedpearls, slip shyly through the gate. Fragile, long-nailed fingers stained a deep rose, a satin-smooth, painted cheek, and dark, downcast eyes — an instant, then the curtains are drawn, and the chairbearers go trotting down the street.

Sometimes it is a ponderous dowager, in plum-colored satin, with proud drooping eyelids, opium-stained teeth, and a long bamboo pipe, silver-tipped, which she uses as a cane. She leans heavily on two girl slaves, and is supported into the chair. If her eyes fall on one, their glance passes haughtily through to the space beyond. What! Notice a foreign devil! A flash of ruby and the curtains are drawn close, and the chair-bearers trot off again — albeit not blithely, under the royal weight.

I never see, on this narrow, cobbled street, the barbarous sights whereof I read in the modern magazines. Yet all day long, people are passing. In the early morning, blue-coated farmers, and sometimes their sturdy, barefoot wives, come to town, carrying on either end of their shoulderpoles great round baskets of fresh, dewy vegetables, or huge bundles of dried grass for fuel; caravans of tiny, neat-footed donkeys patter past, with enormous, cylindrical bags of flour or rice crossed upon their backs, swayed down from excessive burdens borne to early. Sometimes their nostrils have been slit, that they may pant more rapidly under the weight of their cruel loads.

Wheelbarrows squeak shrilly along; the more loudly the better, for each wheelbarrow man cultivates his barrow’s squeak assiduously for good luck’s sake. They are brawny men, with swelling muscles, bare to the waist, their backs dripping and brown in the heat of the morning sun; a length of blue cotton is thrown lengthwise across their shoulders. Sometimes the barrow’s load is a substantial country mother, in to shop or to visit a town relative, herself on one side of the wheel, and her bedding, a couple of cocks, a bundle of garlic, a basket of cakes, an immense oil-paper umbrella, and an odd child or two, on the other side. Sometimes an unearthly squalling racks the air, and it is a wheelbarrow with a stout middle-aged hog strapped firmly on either side of the wheel, with his legs waving violently, and squealing in the utmost agitation and outrage. A wheelbarrow, in short, may carry anything, from a lean itinerant missionary, with a six weeks’ supply of bedding, food, and tracts, to a double basket of squawking fowls — geese, perhaps, with yards of neck protruding from the loosely woven reeds, and viewing the passing landscape excitedly.

Smiling, snag-toothed old men hobble along my street, with wrinkled brown faces, and sparse white queues braided up with a good deal of black string. They pass the time of day with each other by solicitous inquiries as to when the last meal was enjoyed — a curious outgrowth of a land of frequent famines.

Everywhere are fat brown babies tumbling about in the dust, for the most part naked and glistening in the warm sun, and grubbing among the cobbles and gutters. They ought to die, when one considers the amount and quality of the dirt they constantly consume from grimy fingers and unspeakable faces, not to speak of immensely long cucumbers and great turnips, gobbled rinds and all. But apparently they live to grow fat; although I have occasionally called one by his name of Little Two, to be answered with a broad grin that he is Little Three, Little Two having died of an excess of watermelons the previous summer. But where one drops out, two spring up to fill his place.

They play about promiscuously in the grime, until, in a few miraculously short years, the boys turn out in long gowns, and the girls in embroidered coats, with smooth black bands of hair about demure faces. They have apparently forgotten their playtime together, and ignore each other with the most perfect good breeding. The little girls go into seclusion with apparent docility, until such time as the great red bridal chair shall call them forth to the rule of a mother-in-law; and the boys turn to school or an apprenticeship, depending upon the family means and social position.

All a very placid and well-regulated existence! Yet I am vaguely troubled by a sort of undercurrent of changes; as, for instance, yesterday, when little Hsü Pao-ying came to visit me. I have known her since she was a mite, with a fat, solemn dumpling of a face, with no nose to speak of. At that time, her feast-day garb was a pair of ridiculously small red-cotton trousers and a little coat to match; a pair of shoes made to resemble improbable tigers, and a cap like an embroidered doughnut, with a tiny pigtail done up in cerise yarn sticking through the hole. Her parents are of the good old conservative type, not believing in overmuch book-knowledge for a girl, and with an eye to a good husband and mother-in-law for the child. An older married sister, advanced in views through a five years’ residence in Shanghai, had teased them into sending Pao-ying to a boarding-school in the nearest city. When the child left last for school, last autumn, she was a tractable, meek, sweet-faced little thing, rather frightened at the prospect of leaving home. She had the patient air which all little Chinese girls have who are enduring footbinding. I have never heard her volunteer a remark, and in my presence she had always been particularly awed and reverential — an attitude I have ever found very pleasing in the young.

Yesterday she came in a delicate blue satin of a more fashionable cut than I had ever seen; her feet were unbound and in little clumping, square, black leather foreign shoes. She was evidently very proud of them; they looked like shoes for a very rough little American boy, and had steel taps on the heels. They stuck out most oddly from her exquisite brocaded skirt.

After we had exchanged polite remarks, and had taken our first sip of tea, she was so evidently conscious of her feet that I could not but comment on her unusual footgear.

“It is the very latest fashion,” she replied with great satisfaction. “You know that, of course, in the big cities like Peking and Shanghai, the really fashionable girls do not bind their feet any more. At the boarding-school they don’t either; and so, when I came home, I cried for three days, without food, until for peace they unbound my feet so that I might wear these beautiful American shoes. My feet are still too small, but I stuff cotton in the toes.”

Here was change, indeed! I fell back astounded in my chair. There she sat, slim, exquisite, and complacent, but no longer one to be condescended to, and not at all reverential. I felt slightly dashed. And in the course of the afternoon’s conversation, I noticed several other things: a little superior smile at her honored mother’s lack of worldly experience, as the present generation sees it; a petulant wish that her honorable father would smoke cigarettes, as everyone else did, instead of that absurd, old-fashioned water-pipe; a hint of a suffragist meeting attended, in the city where she had been at school for the year. One year ago, oh, my soul! and Pao-ying had been a shy little thing, with eyes eternally cast down, and never a word to say unless pressed to answer a question, and then so faint a voice! And now this young person chattering away of school and cigarettes, and what not!

“What do you know of suffrage, pray?” I asked in great amusement.

“Oh, a great deal, teacher,” she cried eagerly. “I know that only in this country are women so helpless; why, in other countries, I have heard, they do everything they like! They may go out and take walks and play games, and never bind their feet. It is even said they walk with men,”—here a delicate flush—“but of course I do not believe that. Although this year, teacher, for the first time, we had men at the Commencement exercises — but only old ones. I looked when nobody saw me, and they were very old. Some of the girls at school are very wicked, and say they will not marry unless they are allowed to see their husbands first. But, of course, that is very bold!”

She shook her head virtuously. Then she looked up at me from under her eyelashes and asked shyly —

“Of course, in your honorable country, the girls do not walk and talk with young men?”

I cleared my throat at that, and hesitated an instant. I thought of the magazine I had just been reading.

“Well, my dear,” I said, “times and countries change, and I have not been back there for many years.”

“I should like to know,” she said wistfully. “Of course, one must not be bold; but really one’s parents are too stupid about anything a little different from what they used to do. I am sure that, just because they never did, is no reason why it is wrong.”

And this young sprig of modern Chinese womanhood looked very indignant and injured, as she uttered this heresy against all Chinese tradition. O eternal and unchangeable youth, the world over!

After she had gone, I sat in my old easy-chair and looked upon the quiet cobbled street, and thought of her and of those for whom she stood. Her grandmother and mother had been my friends — well-born, cultured ladies, and accounted well educated in their day. They sewed and embroidered exquisitely, and were skilled in the preparation of sweetmeats.

“How do I spend my days?” one of them had once said in answer to a question. “I rise late. My maid brings me the lacquered bowl of perfumed water for my bath. I eat a slight repast of sweetmeats. My hairdressing, gowning, the artistic painting of my face and finger nails, consume the time until the noon meal. In the afternoon, I embroider at the portrait of Li P’o, upon which I am working. That, and a little gossip with the other women and drinking of tea, and it is time for the evening meal. After that, I visit friends, or they come to me and we gamble a little, and it is time to retire.”

Her granddaughter is up betimes at boarding-school, and goes through a stiff morning’s work in science, history, literature, languages, and mathematics, with sewing, music, and gymnasium in the afternoon. To be sure, she has lost the delicate, swaying grace and the beautiful courtesy of her grandmother. She walks with sturdy feet well planted, and clips her words: she has her grandmother’s eyes; but they look one calmly and widely in the face.

I am rather breathless over it all, having had my main outlook on life the last quarter of a century from this quiet corner of my veranda in a little interior city of China. We are really very conservative here yet, the rare visitors from an outside world tell us. Vague rumors of coeducation, of men and women dining together in restaurants, of moving pictures, and even imported dances, float in from the port cities. I know that I sometimes see the inhabitants of such places pass through the abominably ugly railway-station, which has just been foisted upon our old-fashioned little old town; and they look scandalous women to me, with their wide, short trousers and short sleeves and tight coats; but I suppose I am behind the times. I confess that I like my old Chinese friends better, with their courteous speech and gracious manners. I dislike the acquired abruptness of these young creatures. I dislike the eternal cigarettes, and the blasé, self-sufficient expression on young faces, which I am accustomed to seeing timid and reverential.

But — and but again — how much of my displeasure is dislike of the irreverence of my own pedantic old self, and discomfort at having my opinions, fixed by years, questioned and even flouted? How much of it, I wonder, is middle-aged stiff-neckedness? What if, after all, these young upstarts are the beginnings of a new growth out of the decadent soil of an old civilization insufficient for this day and time? The universe of space and time is not comprised within this old street, with its secluded, shaded courtyards, and spirit walls guarding dragon-carved gateways.

If these young things let the sunlight into the courtyards, and tear down the spirit walls in unbelief, and even desecrate these marvelously wrought dragons with modern paint and plaster — if, I say, it is done in the name of a new era of general enlightenment and clear thinking, and of a struggle for better things and conditions in this sleepy, unhygienic, ignorant old town and country, to the winds, then, with my slow, conservative soul and love of old-time reverence and manners!

For the world is marching on!

And my second article, in the Forum, follows below:

BEAUTY IN CHINA

It is only an American, born and reared in an alien country, who can appreciate fully the amazing beauty of the American woods in autumn. Inexplicably, no one had prepared me for it. I had lived all my days in a calm Chinese landscape, lovely in its way with delicate, swaying bamboos, curved temple roofs mirrored in lotus pools. It was gently colorful, too, in blues and greens, with a semi-tropic effulgence of sunshine, and a piercing starriness of night. But when summer was gone, and chrysanthemums had glowed and faded, the colors were put away for the most part, until the next spring. The trees dropped their leaves softly, turning the while to a quiet, neutral brown, without any great ado about it, and almost overnight we were in decent and sober winter garb. The earth took on a dull monotony of hue, which the little thatched farmhouses of adobe did not relieve. Even the people retired into enormous padded garments of dark blue and black. Thus, when after a loitering journey eastward, I stepped into sweet English country, I was entranced with its mauve and tawny shades of late summer. Could its hedgerows be lovelier, even in primrose time! There was a dreamy stillness about it which lifted cares away and left one quite content with quiet, well-tilled fields and ancient grey stone cottages, with their slow smoke drifting imperceptibly upwards in the motionless air. An exquisite rest lay over the earth in England as of one lying down to well-earned sleep.

In such a mood as this I crossed the Atlantic, and was thrown straight into New York. Who except one accustomed to the leisurely traffic of trams and rikshaws and wheelbarrows can realize the astounding activity of New York! Where one dodged one vehicle, a thousand sprang up to take its place, and crossing the street was a wild adventure, compared to which bandits in China are a mild affair. There was the bewildering clatter of elevated railways to dizzy one’s mind, and subterranean roars from the bowels of the universe, apparently. I was fascinated with the yawning earth, which swallowed up people by the hundreds in one spot, only to vomit them up, restless as ever, miles away. Personally, I could not commit myself to the subway, and clinging to a trolley strap, thought regretfully at times of jogging peacefully along on a wheelbarrow, watching the lazy ducks swimming in the ponds by the roadside and stooping to pluck a wild flower for babies tumbling brown and naked in the dust.

But if New York shook me out of my quiescent dreaming, even New York did not prepare me for the shock of the American woods.

A week later I found myself walking through a wood in Virginia. How can I put the excitement of it into words! No one had told me how paganly gorgeous it would be. Oh, of course they had said, “the leaves turn in the fall, you know,” but how does that prepare one? I had thought of pale yellows and tans and faint rose reds. Instead, I found myself in a living blaze of color — robust, violent, vivid beyond belief. I shall never forget one tall tree trunk wrapped about with a vine of flaming scarlet, standing outlined, a fiery sentinel, against a dark rocky cliff.

There was a maple walk which might have been the pathway to the golden streets of the New Jerusalem. Wandering anywhere, above one’s head were interlaced boughs, bursting with orange and red, crimson and seal brown, and yellow of purest quality. One walked on a carpet of hues which an emperor’s wealth could not buy in a Peking rug. Even the quite tiny things, small vines and plantlets that must have been meek little things in summer, expressed themselves in the most outrageous and unrestrained colors.

Well! There can be nothing like it on this earth. Do the Americans realize it every year, I wonder? I shall not soon be astounded at anything now, I believe. Not at Aurora Borealis, which I have yet to see confirmed, not at Vesuvius, and I have my doubts even about that day when the skies shall roll away to the tune of Gabriel’s trump. I don’t believe there can come to a human being a more intoxicating revelation of beauty than that which fell upon me, straight from quiet, sombre things, when I walked for the first time in my life in American woods in autumn.

Thus it was that I fell to thinking again about beauty. It has long been my pleasure to note particularly bits of loveliness about the world, and to see how differently the peoples of the earth have expressed themselves in ways of unconscious beauty. I do not mean by that the great sights which tourists run to see. Seldom are the people of a country really to be found there.

I found France not in the Louvre, but in an old woman in a blue gown and white kerchief, kneeling to beat clothes beside a tinkling stream. Such a patient, enduring, loyal figure, I thought; suddenly she lifted her head and bewitched me with the eternal spirit of humor and coquetry in laughing, restless eyes, forever young and vivid with life in a wrinkled old face.

The Swiss is not truly expressed in the majestic pageant of the Alps, white and remote against blue skies. I found him, painstaking and slow, in his frugal plot of ground, carefully nailing his pear tree against the wall and counting the clusters of grapes on a vine trained to run as little to leaves as possible. Everything about him was neat and compact, and in its way, pretty. I doubt he looked twice a year at the Jungfrau, towering eternal above his minute possessions.

Strange how I never thus think of the peoples of the earth without my thoughts leaving me and twisting about the world until they come to my adopted country, China!

How many folk have greeted me as they stepped from the first brief train journey from Shanghai, “Ah, China is not beautiful like Japan, is it!”

I smile, and bide my time. For I know the beauty of China.

Japan is exquisite. Not only in the lovely porcelains; the brilliant, graceful kimonos; the pattering, charming children. These are for every man to see. Not only in the tiny terraced fields climbing up the hillsides, the clean, fragile buildings, the microscopic fairyland of life as it appears to the casual eye.

The great beauty of Japan is in the spots that you and I, if we be mere passersby, never really glimpse.

It is the beauty which moves the veriest coolie, after a day of crushing labor, to throw aside his carrying pole, and after a bit of fish and rice, to dig and plant in his garden the size of a pocket handkerchief. There he works, absorbed, delighted; his whole being resting in the joy of creating beauty for himself and his family, who cluster about him to admire. No one is without a garden. If fate has denied a poor man a foot of ground, he buys a big plot for a penny and slowly, after hours of labor pleasant and painstaking, he constructs a miniature park, with a rockery, a tiny summerhouse, a pool, with bits of moss for lawns and grass heads for trees and toy ferns tucked into crevices for shrubbery.

It is the quality of beauty, too, which moves a Japanese host to place in his guestroom each day for the delight of his guest one single exquisite note. From his precious store he selects today a watercolor, in black and white, of a bird clinging to a reed, painted with charming reserve. Tomorrow it will be a dull blue vase with one spray of snowy pear bloom arranged in such a way as to be a living invitation to meditation. Sometimes it is a piece of old tapestry, with a quaint procession of lantern bearers marching across its faded length.

I hear a deal of talk about Japan these days. There are those who begrudge them the possession of even quite ordinary human qualities. As for me, after hearing such tales, I reserve judgment until someone can reconcile these two qualities for me: utter depravity and the gentle love of all beauty which is to be found almost universally in rich and poor alike in Japan. Where there is such a willingness to spend oneself for beauty, often without any thought of money value, must not a little truth be hid? If it be true at all that beauty is truth?

Now the dainty loveliness which is so apparent in Japan is certainly not to be seen spread about in China. I really cannot blame those friends of mine who at first glance proclaim her ugliness. Doubtless it has been the economic urge which has driven the poor to think first and last and always of their stomachs and the wherewithal to fill them completely. Certainly there is an appalling lack of beauty in the lives of the ordinary folk.

Said I to my coolie gardener one day as he was digging and delving upon my perennial flower border: “Now, wouldn’t you like some of these flower seeds to plant in the plot in front of your house?”

He eyed me distrustfully and hoed vigorously. “Poor people have no use for flowers,” he answered briefly. “These things are for the rich to play with.”

“Yes, but it won’t cost you anything,” I persisted. “See, I will give you several kinds, and if the land is poor, you may take fertilizer from the compost heap, and I will give you the time to take care of them for the good of your soul.”

He shook his head. He is a conservative creature. None of his ancestors had planted flowers for pleasure and he couldn’t imagine himself at it. Besides, what would he do with the flowers when he had them?

He stooped to throw out a stone. “I’ll plant cabbage,” he said briefly.

The poorer Chinese does without doubt place a financial value on all his possessions. In one interior spot where I had lived for a time, I asked a farmer’s wife how they spent or saved the money surplus of a good year’s crops.

She smiled at the recollection. “We eat more!” she exclaimed, ecstatically.

In lieu of a trustworthy savings bank, they deposited their bits of reserve fund in the safest place possible in a land of banditry and transformed it into extra flesh. At least no one could rob them of that! And heaven knows their bones were the better for it.

In wandering through Chinese cities one is struck with their ugliness — the lack of sanitation, the congestion, the foul streets, the filthy and diseased beggars showing their vile stock-in-trade and whining parasitically, the mangy dogs skulking about. A glance into the small shops and homes depresses one with the strictly utilitarian aspect of life. Bare tables, stools apparently designed for discomfort, boxes, beds, and rubbish, the primitive cooking apparatus — all are crowded into an unbelievably small space, and the result is one of utter lack of repose or of any attempt after spiritual values to be expressed in beauty.

The other day I stood on a mountain top in Kiangsi. I looked over a hundred miles of lovely Chinese country. Streams glittered in the sunshine; the Yangtse wound its leisurely way along, a huge yellow roadway to the sea; clusters of trees cuddled cosily about little thatched villages; the rice fields were clear jade green and laid as neatly as patterns in a puzzle. It seemed a scene of peace and beauty.

Yet I knew my country well enough to know that if I could have dropped into the midst of that fair land I should have found the streams polluted, the river’s edge crowded with little wretched, mat-covered boats, the only homes of millions of miserable, underfed waterfolk. The villages under the trees would be crowded and filthy with flies and garbage rotting in the sun, and the ubiquitous yellow curs would have snarled at my coming. There, with all that sweet air free for all, the homes would be small and windowless and as dark within as caverns. The children would be dirty and unkempt, and their noses would be unspeakable, for they always are! Not a flower anywhere, not a single spot of beauty made by man to relieve the dreariness of life. Even the bits of ground in front of the cottages would be beaten into threshing floors, hard and glaring in the sunlight. Poverty? Partly, of course, but often laziness and ignorance, too.

Where then, is the beauty of China? Not on the surface of things, anyway. But I bide my time. For it is here.

Some of the rarest bits of beauty in the world I have found in this old country, so reserved, so indolent for centuries, so careless of what the world thinks of her.

For China does not express herself in show places. Even in Peking, that bourne of all tourists to the Far East, the things that one sees are not show places. The Forbidden City, the Temple of Heaven, the Lama Temple — these and a host of the others were built up slowly out of the life of the people, for the people themselves, with no thought originally of tourist eyes and dollars. Indeed, for decades, no amount of money could purchase a glimpse of them.

The Chinese have naturally little idea of exhibition and advertising. Go into any one of the great silk shops in Hangchow and you will find a decorous, dark, quiet interior, with shelves and shelves of neat packages folded away, each with its price tag symmetrically arranged. There are no pedestals with gorgeous satins folded cunningly to catch the light and entice the buyer. But a clerk comes forward, and when you have made known your wishes, he selects carelessly half a dozen packages from the shelves and tears off the paper wrappers. Suddenly before your eyes bursts the splendor of stuffs whereof kings’ robes are made. Brocaded satins and velvets, silk of marvellous brilliance and delicacy of shades are massed before you in a bewildering confusion. It is like a crowd of magnificently hued butterflies released from dull cocoons. You make your choice and the glory is all shut away again into the dark.

That is China.

Her beauties are those of old things, old places carefully fashioned with the loftiest thought and artistic endeavor of generations of aristocrats, and now like their owners, falling gently into decay.

Behind this high wall, which looms so grey and foreboding upon the streets, one may step, if one has the proper key, into a gracious courtyard, paved with great square old tiles, worn away by the feet of a hundred centuries. There is a gnarled pine tree, a pool of goldfish, a carven stone seat whereon is seated a white-haired grandfather, dignified and calm as an old Buddha in his gown of cream-colored silk. In his pale, withered hand he holds a long pipe of polished black wood, tipped with silver. If you are his friend, he will rise with deep bows and escort you with a most perfect courtesy into the guest hall. There in a high chair of a carved teak you may sip his famous tea and marvel at the old paintings hung in silken scrolls upon the walls, and meditate upon the handwrought beams of the ceiling, thirty feet above. Beauty, beauty everywhere, stately and reserved with age.

I mind me of a great dark guest hall in a temple, which faces out upon a tiny sunny courtyard, where a peony terrace is built up of faded grey brick. Here every spring the great pink shoots push up, and when I go there in May, the sunlight is pouring down upon the deeply tinted peonies, glowing in reds and dusky pinks, and in the center creamy ones with golden hearts. The terrace is cleverly placed so that the guests must needs look upon it from the dimness of the interior. What words could be spoken, what thought shaped in such a place, save those of purest beauty!

There are old paintings, old embroideries, potteries and porcelains and brasses, hidden away preciously by families who owned them before America was thought of; indeed, perhaps they are of an age with Pharaoh’s treasures — who knows?

It is one of the sad things of the present change in China that either poverty or careless, ignorant youth is learning the money value of things which are really too valuable for any sale; things which because of their sheer beauty are too great to belong to any individual and which should be reverently possessed by the nation. But their time of understanding is not yet.

Indeed, not the least of the crimes committed against China by foreign countries has been the despoiling by eager curio seekers and globe trotters and business firms of her stores of beauty. It has really been the robbing of the ignorant, for she has not known that what she thought to sell for thirty pieces of silver could not truly be sold at all.

Moreover, one shudders at the crude stage through which so many of the modern young Chinese seem to be passing. It is inevitable, of course, that in their distrust and repudiation of the past, they should apparently cast off the matchless art of old China and should rush out to buy and hang upon their walls many of the cheap vulgarities of the West. Indeed, to those of us who see the passing of much that was characteristic of the country we have loved it has become a poignant question; who is to preserve the ancient beauties of China? For instance, with all the degradation that has unquestionably followed in the wake of idolatry, must we, along with all the discard, lose the exquisite curves of temple architecture?

Yet I am at times comforted. There must come out of all those beauty-loving ancestors a few to whom the pursuit of beauty is a master passion, and who will pass it on to calmer times.

I went the other day to the studio of a famous modern Chinese artist. My heart sank lower and lower as I passed the copies of posters, of old-fashioned Gibson girls, of lurid suns setting into the vilely colored ocean — dozens of perpetrations in oils. But away in one corner I found a little watercolor. It was only of a village street, misty blue in the sudden rain of a summer evening. Slanting lines of pale silver fell across it. Dim candle-light shone out of the windows of snug homes, and a lonely man’s figure under a paper umbrella walked along, casting a wavering shadow over the glinting wet stones.

I turned to the artist and said, “This is the best of all.”

His face lighted.

“Do you think so? I, too. It is a picture of my village street as I have seen it many times. But,” regretfully, “I painted it for pleasure. It will not sell.”

If I really have a fault to find with the beauty of China, however, it is that it is too secluded, too reserved. It does not permeate enough to the uttermost parts of the people to whom it belongs. It has been kept too much in isolated family or religious groups. The knowledge of the value of beauty has been withheld from many who have suffered from the lack. The poorer and more ignorant classes have been allowed for centuries to grow up and to die in utter indifference to all the subtle and necessary influences which flow from the essentially beautiful. The opportunity to pursue beauty has been too much the prerogative of the wealthy and leisured. Consequently the poor man thinks of it only as one of the pastimes of the rich and hence impossible for him.

What the average Chinese needs is an eye educated to see the beauty which lies waiting to be freed about him everywhere. When once he grasps the significance of beauty and realizes that it does not lie at all in the hideous lithograph for which he must pay the prohibitive price of forty cents; that it does not lie, solely, even, in the priceless possessions of the rich; but that it is in his dooryard, waiting to be released from careless filth and indolent untidiness, a new spirit will walk abroad in the land.

Anyway, I know that man cannot live by bread alone and that is what thousands of these folk have been trying to do here, submerged under unspeakably difficult economic conditions. To see the beauty in fresh air and natural loveliness, to know the joy of sunshine streaming on clear water and the graciousness of flowers, — these beauties free for all are what we need sorely.

I said this to my old Chinese teacher the other day, and he replied with a proverb which runs something like this: “When a man’s barns are filled and his appetite appeased, then may he take heart to think upon the things of the spirit.”

Which, I suppose, is true.

Yet I am sure the gardener has had a good supper last night when, as I sat musing under the bamboos, he was working cheerfully away on the lawn. Startled by an unaccustomed light, I glanced up and was smitten afresh with the sunset sky.

“Oh, look!” I called.

“Where — where?” he cried, seizing the hoe.

“There, at the wonderful color!”

“Oh, that!” he exclaimed in great disgust, stooping to the weeds again. “I thought when you called out so, that it must be a centipede crawling on you!”

To tell the truth, I don’t believe that a love of beauty is based altogether on a well-fed interior. Plenty of gourmands are only gourmands still. Besides, if the proverb were true altogether, how could I explain deaf old Mrs. Wang, poorest of poor little widows, who sews hard all day to make a bowl of rice, and yet who manages someway to have a flower the whole summer long in a broken bottle on her table and who wept with delight when I pressed upon her a little green vase?

Or the tiny tobacco shop, whose cheerful, toothless old proprietor is always coddling along a plant of some sort in an earthen pot? Or the farmer outside my compound who lets a mass of hollyhocks stand as they please about his house? Or the little “wild” children of the street who press their faces against my gate sometimes and beg for a posy?

No, the love of beauty waits to be born in the heart of every child, I think. Sometimes the hard exigencies of life kill it, and it is still forever. But sometimes it lives and grows strong in the silent, meditative soul of a man or a woman, who finds that it is not enough to live in a palace and to dine even with kings. Such know that after all they are eternally unsatisfied, until in some way they find beauty, where is hidden God.

I had no illusions about the importance of these two little essays, they were trifles, but their acceptance induced a mood of happiness and I began to write in earnest on what was to have been my first big novel.

It was natural to me to tell no one about the novel. This was not secretiveness, for if there had been any one to tell I would surely have told, but I had no friends on this level. Friends aplenty I had and have always had, but I learned long ago to meet them where they are. And I had no friends or relatives to whom I could speak about my writing, and it did not occur to me that this was strange or even a deprivation. I was long ago used to living in many mansions.

Meanwhile I was also enjoying quite a different sort of life. First of all were my house and garden. Though I can live anywhere, be either rich or poor with equal acceptance, I have to have a setting, and if there is not one, I make it. I subdued, therefore, the too large and somewhat graceless grey brick house where I lived, and within the limits of a small amount of money, I did as my mother had taught me to do and created as much beauty as I could. The garden furnished plenty of flowers, and well-designed furniture of cheap materials could be cushioned with the inexpensive but beautiful Chinese stuffs. Wicker and rattan I had wearied of, but the Chinese about that time were weaving cash string, a thin robe made of grass, upon strong bamboo frames, and such chairs were comfortable and substantial. Old Chinese blackwood tables could be bought cheaply, and there were always delicate and beautiful bowls and vases in the chinashops. One day in a silkshop I found yards of faded silk going at a bargain price and I bought it for curtains and dyed it in different colors. Matting rugs upon the floor gave good effect and sunshine and flowers did the rest. I enjoyed the whole process and have often thought to myself that if I had not wanted to write books I would have liked to build houses and decorate them. But then I like to cook, too, and my children know that if I did not want to write books above all else, I would be a cook in a big family, perhaps in an orphanage, and make delicious dishes for everybody. But there are many persons I would like to have been — for example, again, a sculptor — had I not wanted to write books. I am fortunate that I had not to make the decision. At that I once wrote a novel about a woman sculptor, entitled This Proud Heart, and there, I suppose, in the curious way writers have, I fulfilled a dream.

My life in my northern town had been simple indeed compared to the one I now led. I taught classes not only in the Christian university but also in the provincial one, and had therefore two entirely different groups of students. The young men in the Christian university were the sons of Christians and had scholarships or they were the sons of the rich who could afford to pay substantial tuition fees. All of them understood English at least fairly well and usually they came from port cities and were somewhat cosmopolitan and certainly conservative in their family backgrounds. The students in the National University, on the other hand, were nearly all poor and they knew little English and they paid no tuition. Most of them had not much to eat and they wore a sort of blue cotton garb later known as the Sun Yat-sen uniform. In winter they were bitterly cold, and so was I, for we had no heat in the buildings and when window panes were broken they were not replaced, whereas in the Christian university everything was in good order and we had central heat and much comfort. Yet I enjoyed my work in the provincial university far more, because there my students were desperate for learning and they waited eagerly for my arrival and tried to keep me from leaving at the end of our classes. Their English was almost unintelligible and had I not spoken Chinese I could not have taught them. Yet they yearned to speak English, and so we struggled along. They were young men and women, thinking and questioning and alive, and I learned far more from them than from the suave and acquiescent men students in the Christian university. I came away frozen with cold in my body but warm in my heart and stimulated in mind because between me and those eager young students, so thinly clad and badly fed, there were no barriers. They wanted to talk about everything in the world, and we talked. Even now I get letters from some who have escaped Communism, though most of them are dead in the wars and revolutions that have swept over us all.

In those days Sun Yat-sen was still alive and still working to bring unity to the country, but he was in retreat in the South. In Nanking we lived under the war lord, Sun Chuan-fang, a temperamental man younger than most of the war lords who divided the country into fragments, and in some ways less oppressive, but still he was a war lord. We were not disturbed, however, unless our war lord undertook a battle with some neighboring war lord, and the period of what is called, historically, fragmentation, seemed natural enough to the Chinese and to me. China, as I have said, always went into fragmentation under war lords in the periods between dynasties, and the people were patient as usual and waited for things to work themselves out. Without being religious, the ordinary Chinese had a vague faith in Heaven and believed that nothing could succeed without its will. This meant that whoever finally assumed the leadership of the nation would be the best one under Heaven’s design. Meanwhile family life went on, the center and the core of the nation as it had always been, and our war lord did not interfere with our affairs.

My own interest has never been in politics but in the thoughts of men and women and so I continued to be deeply concerned with the literary revolution. By 1920 the spoken language had become the accepted written language of the new times. The question was, could real works of literature be written in the vernacular? Older scholars still insisted that it could never express allusive meanings as did the wen-li, or classical style of writing. The young scholars, Western-trained, had to prove that it could. Hitherto it had been used only for magazine and newspaper writing. Here again Hu Shih was the leader of the new school, for he now began to write his monumental work, Outline of the History of Chinese Philosophy. It was never finished, alas, but the first volume proved again that the Chinese spoken language could also be a beautifully clear and graceful written language, flexible and alive, expressing the most profound meaning and thought.

Once Hu Shih had shown the value of the new written language, young Chinese writers rushed to follow his example, and a mass of experimental material got into print. Most of it was bad, I must confess, and there were reasons enough for this dismal fact. The young Chinese who called themselves modern were burning with unclarified emotions, rebellious and ambitious, but actually they still had nothing to say. They had cut themselves off too abruptly from their traditional roots and had been trained too quickly and superficially in Western cultures. It was inevitable that when they began to write they wrote imitatively, and since they refused to imitate their own literary figures of the great Chinese past, they imitated the Western writers, who were foreign to them in spite of their determination to be modern, or Western. There were no modern Chinese in fact, there were only Westernized Chinese. How wearisome it was in those days to open one much-praised Chinese novel after another only to discover that it was all but plagiarized from a Western one! What a disappointment to go to the new modern theater to see an eagerly anticipated play by a famous young Chinese playwright and discover that it was a Eugene O’Neill play, scarcely disguised by Chinese names!

Since there was little original work, it was inevitable that much of the outpouring of the new writers soon became literary criticism of each other and of Western books, and shallow stuff that was, too. Goethe’s Sorrows of Werther was the novel which seemed to suit the mood of most of the young Chinese and in my effort to understand them I read hundreds of Chinese “Sorrows.” It became ridiculous, and yet so serious were these young men and women that one dared not laugh. It even became the fashion to ape the Western poets in person and one handsome and rather distinguished and certainly much beloved young poet was proud to be called “The Chinese Shelley.” He used to sit in my living room and talk by the hour and wave his beautiful hands in exquisite and descriptive gestures until now when I think of him, I see first his hands. He was a northern Chinese, tall and classically beautiful in looks, and his hands were big and perfectly shaped and smooth as a woman’s hands, and guiltless, I am sure, of any real manual labor. For our young Chinese scholars maintained the old traditions in one respect at least. They did no physical work whatever. Our Chinese Shelley died young, I am sad to say, for he had a sort of power of his own, and could he have outgrown the Shelley phase he might have become himself. But in his desire to have wings he was among the first to take to airplanes and he died in an accident.

The sickening romanticism purified itself gradually, however, and the strongest minds began to return to their own people. Chou Shu-jen, or “Lu Hsün,” as he called himself, was perhaps the first to perceive that although his inspiration might come through Western literature, yet he could escape imitativeness only if he applied his newly found emotions to his own people. Thus he began to write sketches and stories and finally novels about the simple everyday people. Kuo Mo-jou became my own favorite and in spite of a cynicism that was sometimes only destructive. I think of that brilliant mind, whose habit was the utmost candor and whose passion was truth, and I wonder how he can live as he does nowadays under the Communist government in his country. Is he silenced, I wonder, or has he succumbed, as others have, to writing the extravaganzas of convulsive and surely compelled adoration of the new Magi? And I can scarcely believe that Ting Ling and Ping Hsin are changed, those two intrepid and fearless women writers, who used to make me so proud. But who can tell me? It is another world and one that I do not know. It is useless now to put down the names of all the brave young Chinese men and women who led the awakening minds of their compatriots, and who are either dead or in a living death, cut off from our knowledge by the present division of the globe. What I remember is that they provided for me the clearest mirror of the world we then shared, and through them and their books I understood what otherwise might have been inexplicable.

It was revealing that their books were short. Even their novels were short as though they had no time to make long books. Each fresh rush of emotion, each new perception, was hurried into a book, and there was scarcely time to write one before another pressed. Publishing houses sprang up and the bookstalls in my city were crowded with the cheap little paper-backed volumes. I could buy a basketful for a dollar or so and read for days, and this generous fare has made me impatient ever since of expensive books. I am never better pleased than when I know a book of mine can be bought for fifty cents or, better still, for twenty-five. No people can be educated or even cultivated until books are cheap enough for everybody to buy.

There was one interesting aspect of the literary revolution which has had lasting effect upon the Chinese modern mind. In the effort to repudiate all Confucian tradition, these young modern writers became rigorously candid, and they repudiated utterly the old moralistic essays of the past. I suppose that the revolt against Confucius which became part of the first trend toward Communism, began in this invincible determination of the young to refuse all pretense of being moral because their elders seemed to them such hypocrites. They began to reveal themselves in the most intimate moods of their minds, and they reveled in descriptions and declarations of themselves, their feelings and their actions, which shocked to the soul their parents and older relatives. Yet it was a therapeutic process. So long had they been taught and trained in the moralistic patterns of the past, that it was almost as though they now felt compelled to tear off their clothes and walk the streets naked. It is interesting to compare their violent denial of Confucius with the Communist rejection of religion, for indeed Confucius, though he was a philosopher and no priest, had shaped Chinese society and posterity in an ethic religious and moral in its effect. It will be a long time, I fear, before the balance is restored, and Chinese will again realize how much they owe to Confucius, their greatest figure. Yet it must not be supposed that this revolt was against ethics or morals, as such — quite the reverse. Confucianism had become almost entirely superficial after many centuries, its morals too often mere pretense, and the angry young revolted against these qualities in their elders and in their revolt they threw Confucius out the window, too. The corruption and hypocrisy of the orthodox church in Russia were similarly the understandable reasons for the violence of that revolt against religion. For the soul of man is born fresh in every child, and there is an age in every creature, unless he is debased too young, when for a time he sees clearly the difference between truth and falsehood, and hypocrisy infuriates him. He cannot forgive those who should be true and instead are liars. This fury, I believe, is the first cause for revolutions throughout history.

I must speak here of the extraordinary place of newspapers in the literary revolution. When I was a child, we had only English newspapers to read, printed in Shanghai. My father read The Chinese Imperial Gazette when he could get it, but it contained little except court news. Beyond that he read the wall newspapers, which were simply bulletins pasted on the walls near the city gates. Now, however, newspapers modeled on Western ones sprang up in every large city, and since the spoken language was also the recognized written language, they were easy to read. The effect of this was that literate men began to read newspapers, and would talk about the news to others who could not read. It became quite usual in a crowded teashop for one man to read a newspaper aloud to a score or more of men who had never learned how to read. Indeed, until the literary revolution made it worth while, reading was a luxury pastime and a practical man had no need for such an esoteric skill. Now that newspapers were printed in the vernacular, however, so that what was read could also be understood, every man wanted to be able to read, and the desire for this means to knowledge spread even to women. I was moved to the heart in those days to see old women as well as young striving to learn a few characters in order to feel, and to say, that they could read. The newspapers often were unreliable and biased, but at least one could get a Chinese point of view on events and interests. Some of these newspapers were put out by the writers themselves, just as many of the young publishing companies were merely groups of writers, but they were none the less valuable for that. The writers were, I remember, forever organizing themselves into societies and clubs and it seemed to me they wasted their energies in disagreement in their newspapers and magazines. Yet I could feel a rising feeling of larger unity among them, in spite of their dissensions, and I was afraid. Total revolution was more clearly ahead than ever and I could not discern its form. Indeed the disturbance in young Chinese minds, articulate in the new publications, was sure to rush headlong into some sort of violence and older people were becoming more and more bewildered as they watched their sons and daughters whom they could no longer control. If a father could not quote Confucius without seeing his son flare into contempt, then where could he turn for help?

The public scorn of the young was not only for their own traditions. The first blind and romantic attachment to Western literary figures died away after the end of the First World War and a general disillusionment arose. Of what value were even the Western cultures, young Chinese asked in newspaper editorials and arguments, if Western peoples clashed in murderous and devastating wars as cruel and uncivilized as the battles of savages? Not in Europe, they now declared, were to be found the ideals the Chinese people sought, but if not in Europe then where?

As if in reply, the Russian revolution burst at the end of the First World War upon a wave of crude and dangerous idealism. In Russia, as the young Chinese watched, young intellectuals, like themselves, declared the peasants their allies, and with the force of combined revolt, they overthrew the traditional government in the hope of shaping a new culture and life. “Feudalism,” the pet devil, too, of the Chinese modern writers and thinkers, had been ended, and with it, the Russian Communists declared, “capitalistic imperialism.” How weary did I grow of those words, shouted by children on the streets as they used to shout “foreign devil” when a white man or woman passed! “Ta Tao Ti Kuo Chu I,” “Down With Imperialism!” The children thought it was a curse, and the young people inflamed themselves with the hatred it contained. What it meant I daresay few of them knew, but they had a vague idea that all the poor in Russia were now rich and that the rich were doing the dirty work in city streets and country fields.

They were confirmed in this belief, for, ever since the Bolsheviks had come into power in Russia, there had been hundreds of pitiful White Russian refugees streaming southward in China and settling into the port cities. Even when I had lived in Nanhsüchou I had known them. Sometimes there was a knock on the door and when I went to open it I saw on the threshold a sad little group of men and women, perhaps children, too, aristocrats of Russia, who were exiles. They were bewildered and lost and yet even while they begged they showed a proud discontent with what they were given. “Have you no better shoes than this?” they inquired or they examined disconsolately a dress or a suit. All their lives they had been served and cared for and now it was an evil dream that their great houses and easy comforts were gone forever.

The young Chinese exulted thus to see the rich white people brought so low, but old Chinese were usually kind, comprehending, it may be, the portent of what they saw. I remember once, in the northern country where I was visiting in a wealthy home, very ancient and famous, that the old grandmother one day led me outside the great carved gateway and showing me a deep ditch she said:

“There I have twice had to hide, once with my parents when the peasants on our land turned against us, and again when my own children were small.”

Her old forefinger with its long curved fingernail did not tremble as she continued to point. “And there,” she went on, “yet again will my children’s children hide, for the poor are always against the rich.”

Ah well, so those White Russian aristocrats filtered down through the Chinese cities. They lived in poverty and they sickened and died and their beautiful daughters became dancing partners hired in cheap cafés in Shanghai and Tientsin and the young Chinese modern men learned from them to tango and foxtrot while the tall handsome White Russian boys became chauffeurs and bodyguards for the war lords and the wealthy Chinese merchants, protecting their lives and keeping their children from being kidnapped when they went to expensive private schools. Meanwhile, Chinese revolutionists were saying the Red Russians were the only people in the world who had been brave enough to rise up and take the land from landlords and corrupt rulers, to overthrow the old superstitious religions and in place of God to set up Science. The modern young minds in China in those days admired Russia extravagantly and it began to be uncomfortable to be a plain American who did not like what she heard of Communism and its doings.

There was some reason, I confess, for this urge of interest in the Russian revolution, although those of us who knew history remembered only too well the ancient desire of Russia toward China. The young Chinese, however, were as impatient with the lessons of history as our young Americans are, and they heeded only what was taking place in their lifetime and therefore within their own knowledge. Like the Gaderene swine, they could not be prevented from rushing to their own destruction.

This brings me to the second monumental date of that decade between 1920 and 1930. Again it is the date of a death. In the year 1925 Sun Yat-sen died in Peking of cancer of the liver. He had gone there in the hope that at last he could unify the country with the help of a successful war lord, Feng Yü-hsiang, that burly, gigantic, half-humorous figure who had conquered, at least temporarily, the other northern war lords, and then suddenly declaring himself for a republican form of government, had invited the revolutionary leader to come and help him. Alas, before the meeting could bear fruit, Sun Yet-sen was dead.

The story of this man has been told many times, and it is not needful, surely, to tell it here again. In his way Sun Yat-sen had been to me as distinct a figure as the Old Empress once was, but the romantic elements were entirely different. Sun was a typical product of Christian schools, although he was not an average man, at least in the vital energy of his unselfish idealism. Yet no great man appears as a solitary star, unrelated to what has gone before, and alone Sun Yat-sen could never have achieved what he did in his brief lifetime. He was the crest of a wave of revolution, and such a wave is always the rise of a deep ground swell of human events, and Christian missionaries themselves continued to increase that ground swell, without knowing what they did. They were men and women of single mind and one purpose, and when after a hundred years Christianity still seemed to take no root in the vastness of Chinese life they cast about to discover why this was. The cause of their failure, they decided, was not so much in the strength of other religions as in the whole Chinese culture which was so strong, so closely knit, so solidly united that it had to be attacked at its very foundations. Attack it they did, therefore, and in much the same way that the modern Communists are attacking it again. The missionaries set up schools and they taught the Chinese children that their own religions were superstitions, and that their elders were not to be obeyed before the Christian God, for this God was the one true God. They enforced these teachings with the practical benefits of Western life, such as hospitals, modern medicine, famine relief, unbound feet for girls, free choice of mates in marriage. The impact of these ideas was terrific and radical.

Like the missionaries, Sun Yat-sen was both a Christian and a realist. That is, he prayed and sometimes got what he wanted. When he did not, he went to work for himself. What he owed to the foreign religion was very much, nevertheless. It was more than an education, it was a fierce dedication to the benefit of his own people through modern reforms. He did not begin as a rebel, but as a Christian who wished to serve. He saw misery and injustice everywhere about him, and he wanted to change what others said was unchangeable. He trained himself as a doctor and a surgeon and established a successful practice. Then the intolerable slowness of his task overcame him. In a lifetime of incessant labor he could help but a few people among the millions who needed help. Only a good and modern government, he concluded, could change his country. He gave up his profession then and spent his life in the simple determination to overthrow the Manchu government and help his people set up another better one, under which China could be strong.

To look back now upon this single-hearted man is to feel pity and sorrow and an unwilling admiration. He was a man who won the affection of all who knew him, a man of goodness and unshakeable integrity, qualities remarkable enough in a corrupt age. There was never a wind of evil rumor about Sun Yat-sen. No one suspected him of accumulating riches for himself. Chinese gave him money everywhere he went in order that he could help their country, and no one doubted his honesty. He gathered men to him, particularly the young modern intellectuals who had nowhere to find employment, since their traditional place in government administration was no longer open to them, for, since the first graduates of mission schools were not educated in the traditional subjects of literature and philosophy and history, and government posts were denied them, it was natural that they flocked to Sun Yat-sen, whose purpose was to overthrow the government itself and establish a republic, modelled after the United States. If he were successful, the Western-educated youth would fill its posts.

And Sun Yat-sen welcomed them, at home and abroad. One of his gifts was that of impassioned speech. He was a born orator, for he believed always that what he said was true, that what he dreamed was possible. All over China he set up cells of revolution among the young intellectuals, and he remained their leader through years of struggle and disappointment and defeat that ended too soon in death. The story of his life is that of a consecrated, tragic and lonely man, a failure, it must be said, for the orator and the revolutionary leader is seldom and perhaps never the organizer and the man to make his own dreams come true.

While I write these words the autumn rain falls quietly over my Pennsylvania hills. The lake is grey and by its edge under the yellowing willows the heron stands in his accustomed place upon one leg, head drooping. Years have passed, yet clearly as though it were this morning I remember the day upon which Sun Yat-sen died. He was not so great a man as Gandhi, and sometimes I thought that his people had forgotten him. But when he died they remembered him and all that he had dreamed for them which he had not been able to bring to pass, and they mourned for him. Who now would take his place? There was no one. He became a Lenin for the Chinese revolution. People told each other stories about him, how he had suffered, how he had been always poor for their sakes, and they read the newspapers that detailed his last hours. He had gasped out those tragic words—“I thought I would come here to set up our national unity and peace. Instead I have been seized by a stupid disease and now I am past all cure…. To live or die makes no difference to me as a person but not to achieve all that I have struggled for through so many years grieves me to the very heart…. I have tried to be a messenger of God — to help my people get equality — and freedom. You who live, strive — to put into practice—”

In China the last words of a good man are precious. They are carved upon wood and written into the records. But a foreign doctor had begged Sun Yat-sen to rest and he fell asleep for a while. When he woke in the early evening his hands and feet were cold. Yet he lived through the night still clinging to his dream. They heard him murmuring, “Peace — struggle — save my country—” He died in the morning. His young wife was with him, and upon her his last look rested.

We read those last words again and again and wept and we forgot that he had not been able to do all that he dreamed. What he had done was to give himself, and his figure remained a symbol of hope. Yet, now, while I gaze out over the American landscape, I cannot but ponder the quality of his influence. His goodness and his integrity stand unimpaired, but we know that those qualities, essential as they are, were not enough. He had too little knowledge even of his own country. In spite of his devotion to his people he was basically an uneducated man and his ignorance did them hurt. He had no understanding of history and therefore no judgment for his times. When Soviet Russia alone offered her friendship, he declared that it was to Russia the Chinese people must henceforth look.

For after the First World War the Western nations lost prestige in China, partly because the Chinese considered major war a proof of moral disintegration, and further because they suffered directly from the effects. Imperial Japan, who had allied herself with the so-called democracies, took over Germany’s possessions in China and proceeded to establish herself upon the Chinese mainland. So outraged did the Chinese people become that the Chinese delegate at Geneva did not dare to sign the Treaty of Versailles. By 1920 the Russian Communists had consolidated their hold on Russian territory and then they made a clever and farsighted move. They offered to renounce extraterritorial rights in China, and henceforth to treat China as a respected equal. Adolph Joffe came as the Russian envoy to Peking to announce the news, and while the foreign ambassadors ignored him, the Chinese common people and intellectuals alike welcomed him with feasts and friendship. Meanwhile no Western power had paid any heed to Sun Yat-sen’s appeals for help. In 1921 he ceased asking and instead he met Joffe in Shanghai and there formally he accepted the aid of Soviet Russia. China would not have a Communist government, Sun said, for he did not believe that Communism, in the Soviet sense, was suited to his people. But the Nationalist party would accept the help of the Soviet, would allow a Chinese Communist party to be strengthened and would accept its cooperation. This party had already been formed among young intellectuals and also among Chinese students in France. With the aid of Russian advisors the Kuomintang, or Nationalist party, was now completely reorganized on the Communist pattern, with the same discipline, the same techniques of propaganda, and the same ruthless political commissars. We heard no more talk of democracy or of a republic. Instead it was accepted that a one-party rule must be set up in China and that a long period of training, or “tutelage for the people,” would be established.

I remember how deeply concerned I was when I read such news in the Chinese papers. The English papers said very little and I saw no mention of it in the American magazines and weeklies that came from the United States. I did not know why I was afraid, except that I had always felt the powerful shadow of Russia. I had never forgotten our visit there before the revolution when the inevitable shape of events was already ominous, nor had I forgotten my father’s prophecy, that out of Russia would come what he called the “the Antichrist.” I did not know what that meant, either, but the words carried a terror of their own. And now Russia was to be the friend, and not my own country, America! How desperately I longed in those days to have a voice, to be able to cry out and tell my own people what was happening, and yet what would I have said? And who would have listened?

It is interesting to know that at that very moment there was a certain young man, the son of a well-to-do peasant, who was working as an assistant in the library of Ch’en Tu-hsiu’s university, in Peking. His name was Mao Tse-tung. And in Paris Chou En-lai was a member of the first Chinese Communist group of students. A third man, Chu Teh, the son of a wealthy landlord and an officer in a war lord’s army, was in Germany learning modern military science, and there he too became a Communist. As for me and my house, in spite of my fears, we had two more years of strange peace after the death of Sun Yat-sen.

I do not know why I did not plunge wholeheartedly into my own writing during these years, except that the very events which were taking place prevented me from the dispassionate view which is necessary to a writer. These events were not only in my outside world but also within my home. After my child’s birth there was a brief visit to the United States for certain medical care not then to be had in China. I spent some weeks in a hospital and a few more recuperating weeks in the idyllic quiet of a simple farm in northern New York before I hurried back again to China. After my mother’s death, it was necessary, too, to arrange for my father, then seventy years old, to come and live with me. This meant a great deal more than mere living, for he had no idea of retirement and his work had to be moved with him. The breaking up of our old home with all its associations and furnishings was a sad task, and the new life for my father had to be most delicately and carefully arranged, for it did not occur to him that he might not be the head of any house in which he lived. The illusion was not lessened by the unfortunate fact that he did not like his son-in-law, and made no bones of letting me know it by considerable private I-told-you-so conversation, which only my deepening affection for him and sense of humor made endurable. I had been reared with the Chinese sense of duty to my parents, however, and this helped me very much. One does not argue with one’s older generation nor does one say words or behave in any way to make a parent unhappy. I can remember only once when I allowed my occasional impatience to escape me. One hot summer’s afternoon, when the sun had set, I opened the windows to allow the cool air of an approaching but still distant typhoon to make the house comfortable before we had to close all doors and windows against the storm. As soon as I opened one window my father quietly followed and closed it, and upon discovering this I turned and said a few reproachful words. His mild reply was that he felt chilled as he rested upon a couch and then I heard him repeat the old words he used to speak to my mother when her robust temper got the better of her. “Oh, don’t talk that way!” I did not let him get beyond the “don’t,” for all my conscience rose against me. I flew to him and embraced him and begged him to forgive me and promised that the windows would be closed. It is a small thing, and yet to this day, I wish it had never happened. Life is so pitifully short, the years with parents especially so short, that not one second should be misused.

My house seemed filled with problems in those days, for beyond the growing fears about my child I had the necessity also of helping her father to find his own place and work. It was still not easy to know how to teach agriculture to Chinese, and it was not enough merely to teach American agriculture from American textbooks. Yet what else was there to teach? It seemed obvious to me that one could not teach what one did not know, and I suggested, one worrisome evening when there seemed no solution to this problem, that perhaps the wisest plan would be to discover first the facts about Chinese farming and rural life. No questionnaires had ever been used on the subject of Chinese farm economy, and yet the Department of Agriculture at the Christian university was full of students who had come to learn. I, who had grown up among Chinese farms and country people, realized how much there was to learn and how remote our young Chinese intellectuals were from their own rural life. The sons of farmers did not come to universities, and the students were at best only the sons of landowners. Actually they were nearly all the sons of rich merchants or college professors or scholars. They not only knew nothing about their own country people, they did not even know how to talk with them or address them. My blood used to boil when a callow young intellectual would address a dignified old peasant with the equivalent of “Hey, you—” The contempt of the intellectual for the man who worked with his hands was far stronger in our young Chinese intellectuals and radicals than it had been in the days of their fathers. I felt a passionate desire to show them that the peasants were worthy of respect, that peasants were not ignorant even though they could not read and write, for in their knowledge of life and in their wisdom and philosophy they excelled at least the modern intellectual and doubtless many of the old scholars as well.

This desire moved me to help as much as I could with the project which gradually shaped itself. Chinese students were given questionnaires on rural life, which they took to Chinese farmers, and when the replies came in, the material was assembled and organized and its findings put down in a small book on Chinese farm economy. When this book was published by the University of Chicago, it drew the attention of the Institute of Pacific Relations and was the beginning of a wider and more significant study of Chinese rural life.

Before that time came, however, much was to happen. Living quietly in beautiful old Nanking, I had a deep and unspoken premonition that so peaceful an existence could not continue. Rumors floated across the ocean by traveler and by books and magazines that the Western world itself had been jarred and shaken by the catastrophe of the World War. The old stable American life I had barely glimpsed in my brief college years was no more what it had been. Americans had withdrawn from a world too alarming to share and they had made a desperate effort to return to what they thought of as normal life. It was they themselves, alas, who could never again be normal, although they had withdrawn from the League of Nations almost entirely except for some of the technical and humanitarian parts of it. My brother, for example, was spending half of each year in Geneva as an advisor on the shaping of an international public health service. His own experience in the field of national public health had been successful and notable. Through him I learned much of what was going on in the League, even after it was crippled by the resignation of the United States. He believed with Woodrow Wilson that the withdrawal was at worst a disaster and at best only a postponement of what must one day be established, if only as a matter of common sense, in a council of cooperating nations. All this interested me intensely. I know so little of my native land that I was always fascinated by the gleanings I could gather and I pursued shamelessly the few Americans I knew, who were able to understand the complexities of the United States. Yet my daily concern was still with China, I kept myself informed of every movement that went on, and more and more clearly I discerned the rising ground swell of a new phase of the long-continued revolution. It is strange to remember that in spite of increasing dread I busied myself as though the daily life I lived were to be eternal. I planted my flower beds with lilies and larkspur and snapdragons, and in the autumn I spent hours over such chrysanthemums as filled my heart with pride. The gardenia bushes were my summer delight, and early in the mornings the fragrance of their white flowers, opening gemlike against the rich dark green of the leaves, could actually wake me from sleep. How often did I look from my open windows then to see other women who shared my treasure! My Chinese neighbors, half ashamed, could not resist the temptation to steal in through the gate before I came downstairs and pick a few blossoms apiece for their hair. The scent of gardenia seemed to intoxicate them with pleasure, and though they knew I did not mind their coming, they were careful, not knowing that I watched, to pluck the flowers that grew under the leaves, so that on the surface the shrubs seemed still in full bloom. In silence they plucked, each one thrusting three or four flowers into her knot of smoothly oiled black hair, and then as noiselessly as they had come in they stole away again, and this went on year after year. They knew, of course, that I knew, but they knew, too, that not for anything would I let them know I knew, and so the amenities were observed.

Yet I suppose I did realize somehow that the beautiful quiet life could not go on forever, for I was restless within. I went no more to Kuling, enduring the torrid heat of the summer months because I wanted to be among the people, to catch what went on, to continue my friendships and my teaching. The colleges closed, but in the evenings I taught English literature to a group of young men in business and in the arts, and from them I learned much of what such men were thinking. They too were moved by the same subtle dread and we spoke in hushed voices as we sat outdoors to catch the first breath of the night winds. The lawn was on two levels, but we sat on the upper one so that we could see over the compound wall. I remember forever the stars of those soft dark summer nights, so mellow and huge and golden. We sat in a circle as though in a heavenly theater and waited for the moon in its time, and it came up enormous and stately over the pagoda beyond the wall, and whatever we were talking about we fell silent to watch that majestic appearance.

Ah, but a hundred small memories sweep over me, none somehow having anything to do with myself, for I did not live within myself in those days, there being in me nothing but sorrow, perhaps, and that must be avoided. But I remember the roses blooming by the hundreds because the gardener emptied the night soil into their roots every day, human night soil that is the finest fertilizer in the world. It pains me to this day to know that the wonderful treasures of night soil from our great cities are not used. I visited a few years ago an exhibition in Grand Central Station in New York and saw there a model of the underground of the city. What horror to discover that the invaluable wastes were all sorted out into clear water and residues, the water to be drained into the river, and the precious solids, the materials for nutrients of the earth, carried out to sea in barges and there thrown away! I came away quite distracted by such folly.

In the midst of one of those waiting summers in Nanking, I remember, too, a strange foul odor which rose over the compound wall and I supposed it to be night soil applied too fresh. But no, it persisted night and day until at last I inquired of a neighbor and was told that a man’s body lay dead and rotting among the rushes on the edge of a pond. He had been a woman’s lover while her husband was away, and when the husband came back he was discovered. The husband killed both wife and lover but he buried his wife and threw the lover’s body into the rushes. There it lay and no one took it away, although the lover’s family knew it was there. The crime merited the punishment in those days when men and women still had to obey the ancient laws of the family. The dogs, I suppose, did the scavenging then, for after a few days the stench was no more. And one has to understand how stern that justice was and how frightened young men were of such a fate, how much more frightened than newspaper headlines and television trials seem to make them nowadays.

In the autumn the other white people who had gone away for the summer returned again and the universities opened and the students came back in a flood of youth and earnestness. In those days the young were not gay, certainly not the ones who went to the colleges. They felt the weight of the future upon them, I think, and they were too earnest and too argumentative. If one wanted gaiety one had to find it in the streets and in the fields, and there I did find it. I loved to go outside the city and spend hours and days among the country people who did not fear the future because they had been through so much in the past. And especially did I still love, too, the city streets at night, the old winding cobbled streets of Nanking, lined with little shops all open and revealing by glimmering candlelight or flickering oil lamps the solid family life of the people within. In summer when the evening meal was over they moved bamboo couches and chairs out upon the street, there to gossip and drink tea and at last to sleep under the sky. Each little shop had it own kind of merchandise. There were no department or consolidated stores. Every family had its own business, and if there were foreign wares they were usually Japanese. The growing power of Japan was manifest in the many varieties of industrial goods to be seen everywhere through China in those days.

In spite of the infamous demands and rising oppression of Japan the Chinese people themselves were slow to anger, and were not easily roused even by the slogans and passionate anti-Japanese speeches of the students and young intellectuals. Had the military leaders and great industrialists who were then in control of the Japanese government been wise enough or informed enough they would have understood that by trade and patience they could have assumed a unique place in the development of a new and modern China. Instead they chose the already obsolete methods of war for empire and so lost all they had gained or might have gained. It was a mistake of judgment which resulted in Japan’s defeat in the Second World War, and her future now seems merely the choice between disasters. It is sorry reflection to remember how easily all might have been averted had England and the United States joined to stop the first aggressions of Japan in Asia, and yet even those aggressions were the fruit of earlier ones when England was not yet ready to think of the inevitable and rapidly advancing end of her own colonial empire.

Meanwhile my life, as usual, was maintained on several levels. In my home I was a housewife and nothing more, or so I felt. To my father I was only his daughter, as much as I had been when I was a child myself, while to my children I was mother. Among the white community I tried to take my place as neighbor and friend. Yet I was increasingly conscious of the years of separation from my own people. My childhood had not been theirs, nor theirs mine, and I think at this time that I felt toward them a real envy, for under the life of everyday I knew that the old cleavage was deepening. My worlds were dividing, and the time would come when I would have to make a final choice between them. This was true in spite of the fact that my reality, the warm and affectionate relationship between human beings that alone makes life, was still with my Chinese friends and neighbors, and, in a different way, also with my students. When something was too much for me, it was to Chinese friends I went for encouragement and friendship. The decencies kept us from self-revelation, but Chinese are wise in comprehending without many words what is inevitable and inescapable and therefore only to be borne. In their homes, or when they came to my home, I found healing in their very presence, in the humane and gentle kindliness which was their natural atmosphere.

It was a comfort to me, too, when they came to me for something of the same comfort. In the midst of a certain sorrow of my own, it did give me comfort, for example, when a dear neighbor, not a highly educated one, and not one of those who had been abroad, but a sensible good woman, turned to me when her little son died. We had lived next door to each other, she and I, for a long time. She had been in the northern country with me, her husband a teacher in the boys’ school, and later, by invitation, they had come also to the University of Nanking. For a long time the couple had no children, and then to their joy they had a little son. He was a beautiful baby, and I shared him, enjoying with my friend his growth and health and intelligence. One day a messenger came running into my gate to say the baby was dead. I could not believe it, I had seen him only that morning in his bath, and I dropped whatever I was doing and ran down the street. The moment I opened the door of the small grey brick house, I knew the dreadful news was true. There sat the parents, side by side on the wicker couch, and upon their knees lay the little boy in his red cotton suit, his crownless hat upon his head, all limp and lifeless.

How could I keep from weeping with them? In the midst of our sorrow I heard the story. He had had a touch of dysentery a week before and my friend, his mother, had been taking him to the mission hospital for injections. He had recovered easily and today had been the day for the last injection. After his noon feeding she had taken him to the clinic. A strange doctor, not the usual one, had come out of the office to give the injection.

“I noticed,” she sobbed, “that the needle bottle was full of medicine. Usually there was only a little in it. I told the doctor that it was too much, and he was angry with me and said he knew what he was doing and that I was only an ignorant woman. I had to let him put the needle in my baby’s thigh. Ai-ya — the child went stiff and was dead in a few minutes!”

“Was it the American doctor?” I asked.

“No, a Chinese,” she sobbed.

We all wept again, but this tells of the deepening division in my worlds — though my heart ached, I was glad that the doctor had been Chinese, and not American. I continued to be glad for that as my friends came to stay with me for a few days so that they could recover themselves enough to face their own lonely house, but I was angry again at the intellectual, the Chinese doctor, who had told the mother rudely that she was only an ignorant woman and then in the pride of his superiority, as he had thought, he had killed her child. It was typical of the contempt of his class for their fellow countrymen, and I write it down here to be remembered, because this attitude was responsible for what Lin Yutang later, in a moment of complete honesty, once called “the failure of a generation.”

And still another Chinese friend I remember especially, among all the ones I loved and still do love, although I have no means now of communication with them. For I dare not write to them nowadays, since a letter from an American might endanger their lives in the strange Communist China I do not know. And no letter ever comes from them any more, to tell me how the children grow and which is being married and which married ones are having grandchildren. One wintry morning, then, somewhere in those years of uneasy peace after the death of Sun Yat-sen, I heard a knock at my door. I opened it and saw a woman standing there, a ragged dusty figure whom I could not recognize. She came from the North, that I could see, for her half-bound feet and baggy trousers, her old-fashioned knee-length padded jacket and rusty disheveled hair could only belong to a northern peasant.

“Wise Mother,” she said, “do you not remember me?”

“No,” I said, “but please come in.”

She came in then and sat on the edge of a chair and told me who she was. In the North I had had for a while a rascal of a young fellow for a gardener. He knew nothing and worked as little, and we soon parted company. He was her husband, she now told me, but he had run away and left her when the famine came down. It was a famine year; I knew, and we were expecting refugees before many months, but this woman had come early. And she was pregnant, that I could now see.

“Have you no children?” I asked.

She patted her belly. “Only this one. The others all died of the ten-day-madness — five of them.”

This ten-day-madness was simply the convulsions of tetanus, a disease from which many Chinese babies died within the first fortnight of their lives. It was the result of infection at birth, and yet was easily prevented. I had spent a good deal of effort in teaching young Chinese women how to boil the scissors and the bits of cloth or cotton which they used for the children when born. In the North, however, scissors were not used. Instead a child’s cord was cut with a strip of reed or leaf, peeled from the inside. By some sort of experience the women had learned not to use metal and the reed could be clean or not, depending upon its handling.

“I came to you,” the woman said, adding with touching and I must say annoying naïveté, “I have no one else.”

I cannot pretend that I was at all happy about this naïveté or that I was in the least flattered by her confidence. Where could I put a pregnant peasant woman in my already too complex household? She could not live outside the compound, for a woman alone and without relatives would only be molested by any idle man in the neighborhood, and we had plenty of such in these times of war lords and unrest and wandering soldiers. The old peaceful security of my own childhood was entirely gone and even my children could not wander about the countryside as I had once done.

My guest must have seen what was going on in my mind, for she said humbly, “There is a little house behind your garden, Wise Mother. I saw it when I came in the gate. I could live there until the child is born, not troubling you or anyone except for a handful of rice, and then when I am able I will find work.”

The little house was a hen house and in no way fit for a human being and I told her so. Besides, there was another room, used for storage but quite good, and it could be prepared for her. “But you had better have your child in the hospital,” I concluded. “Then you will have good care.”

Mrs. Lu — there is no reason why I should not tell her true name, for she is dead now, good soul, and there are as many Lus in China as there are Smiths in America — was a sweetly stubborn woman, as I was to discover. She wanted the chicken house, where she could be alone, and she would not, under any persuasion, go to a foreign hospital. She had had so many children, she insisted, that she knew exactly what to do and she wanted no one with her when the baby was born. I yielded at last, for she would not yield, and the hen house was cleaned and white-washed, the two windows scrubbed free of dust and cobwebs and the floor re-laid with fresh clean brick. I put a bed and a table and a chair or two in the little room and curtained the windows so that men would not look in at night and gave her a strong padlock for the door. With a little money I gave her she bought herself a pottery charcoal brazier, to be used for both heat and cooking, an earthen teapot and two bowls and a pair of chopsticks, and a small store of food. Thereafter Mrs. Lu was part of the compound and she remained almost unseen while she waited for the child. Meanwhile, troubled that she would not go to the hospital or even have our good amah with her, I made up a small sterile kit for her, containing bandages, scissors, and a bottle of iodine.

One crisp December morning the amah came with good news. Mrs. Lu had come out of her little house long enough to tell her that the baby had arrived during the night. I ordered the usual nourishing food and liquids for the mother, first a bowl of hot water strongly mixed with red sugar, and followed in an hour or so by chicken soup and noodles. This was accepted northern practice, the red sugar supposedly replenishing the blood, and the chicken and noodles insuring a good supply of milk. Then I went to visit mother and baby. It was a pretty sight. The little room was clean and warm, for Mrs. Lu had made everything tidy after the event, and she was lying in bed, her large flat face rapturous, and, wrapped in the clean baby blankets I had given her was a small very fat boy. She had put on him the usual Chinese arrangements for diapers and then he was encased in the blankets. All seemed in order and I gave her a birth gift for congratulations of two silver dollars wrapped in red paper. She was so grateful that she made me uncomfortable and I left as soon as I could.

The next day while I was at breakfast the amah came in to tell me that the baby was dying. I could not believe it. “Didn’t she use the boiled scissors to cut his cord?” I asked.

“Oh, yes, Wise Mother,” the amah said. “But his belly is burned.”

What mystery was this? I went out at once to the little house and found the baby very ill indeed. Mrs. Lu unwrapped the swaddling garments and there upon his tiny belly I saw burns around his navel. They were iodine burns.

“But I told you not to pour the iodine on the baby,” I exclaimed.

“Ah, so you said, Wise Mother,” Mrs. Lu moaned. “But I thought, if the medicine is good, why not use it all?”

I said I would take the baby at once to the hospital but this Mrs. Lu would not hear of, nor would she have the foreign doctor touch the child, not for a moment. But she let me take him to my own house and there I did the best I could for him. After a few days in my bedroom his robust peasant ancestry came to his aid, he decided to live, and I could return him to his mother. Before he was a month old his father, the runaway husband, appeared at the gate and the family was united again. I found a job for him on the university farms and Mrs. Lu rented a small earthen house, two little rooms, just over the compound wall.

Once again the baby came near death before he was a year old. It was after the summer, and Mrs. Lu walked in with him one day weeping and declaring that the child was doomed to die for some past sin in another incarnation. She turned him over to display his naked bottom and there I saw broken blisters and raw flesh.

“How is it he is burned again?” I inquired, astounded.

“He is not burned, Wise Mother,” Mrs. Lu said. “I said to myself that now he is so big I should not use the water cloths you gave me but lay him on a bed of sand as we do in the north country, so that when he wets, there is no washing. But here there is no sand as we have in the North and so I laid him on ashes from the stove.”

Ashes? Of course the urine had combined with the wood ashes to make lye. Again I took Little Meatball, as his milk name was, and after a few weeks of nursing he was well again.

All this is of no importance in itself, but it is very important because of the last of the three dates which I remember as monuments of the events in that decade between 1920 and 1930, and which changed my world. This third date was March 27, 1927.

While thus my life continued within my house, I was continually mindful of what was happening outside. It was difficult sometimes to know exactly what was going on except from the Chinese newspapers which printed brief undigested items which had somehow to be connected by pondering and guessing and then connected again with the grapevine of students’ confidences and complaints. In Peking the huge blustering peasant war lord Feng Yu-hsiang, with whom Sun Yat-sen had hoped to make alliance before his death, had been defeated by the despotic war lord of Manchuria, Chang Tso-lin. Yet we all knew the Chang regime could not last, and it was tolerated only because everybody waited to see what the new Kuomintang revolution, then shaping up in Canton, was going to do. It was rumored and then confirmed not only that the Nationalist party had been reorganized, that Communists were now allowed to be members and that Russian advisors were being employed, but the new party was very different, we heard, from the old one. It was organized under military discipline and carried on with all the spirit of a crusade. When the time was ripe, we heard, this army would march north against the war lords and conquer them and unify China. We were troubled but not frightened, for it was questionable, and certainly the white people thought it so, whether the “Cantonese,” as they liked to call the Kuomintang then, could win against the tough and reckless old war lords in the rest of the country who were doggedly pursuing the historic Chinese techniques of fighting each other until a final victor could and would set up a new dynasty. The students and intellectuals, however, passionately believed in the new revolution and worked for it, while the vast mass of people in both city and country simply waited for what was to happen, not indifferent but passive until the traditional steps were accomplished.

Though Sun Yat-sen was dead, in a powerful way he was more than ever the leader. He had, after his rapprochement with Soviet Russia in 1921, sent a gifted young soldier to Moscow for further military and revolutionary training. This man was Chiang Kai-shek. He had returned and had set up the new military college of Whampoa. There the officers of the future army were being trained. This Sun Yat-sen had planned, convinced at last that only by military means could China be unified. By his death, then, Sun Yat-sen accomplished far more than by his life. Alive, he had made many mistakes and had often alienated even those among his own people, but dead, he could be made perfect, and this the Kuomintang proceeded to do. His last words, his famous will and his portrait were printed everywhere, and the very sight of his pictured face inspired the students to fresh patriotism and revolutionary fervor. A little more than two months after his death, for example, an incident occurred in Shanghai that was worth a dozen victorious battles to the new leader, Chiang Kai-shek. There had been a strike in a Japanese-owned mill and the police in the International Settlement had arrested some of the strikers. A huge crowd of students from many schools gathered together in a demonstration one day soon after, to protest the arrest, and they refused to heed the warnings of the police. They would not disband when ordered to do so. Finally the police fired and several students were killed. Instantly resentment spread over the whole country. There were demonstrations everywhere, and boycotts were set up against Japanese and British in one city after another from south to north. Hong Kong was entirely boycotted and so many angry Chinese of all classes left that English colonial possession that its life was literally hamstrung until the anti-foreign fever died down again. Few foreigners could read Chinese newspapers but those who could were really terrified, and many white people were recalled by their consuls from the interior where they could not be protected.

My own sympathies were entirely with the Chinese, for though the police were within their rights as foreign-controlled police, yet it should have been remembered that they were in China and that the traditional Chinese attitude toward law was entirely different from that of the West. In China law was only for criminals, to punish them for their crimes. A person who was not a criminal could not be reached by law. Therefore when the police shot down innocent people even after due warning, and especially young students and intellectuals, who were traditionally recognized as valuable and upper-class persons, it was the police who had committed the crime of murder, the people said, and not the innocent young people who were only trying to be “patriotic.” The incident was sadly typical of the differing points of view of my two worlds. There were many such differences and their number and ferocity were to rise to such volume that they fed directly into the Second World War, with its continuing war in Korea.

The May 30th Incident, as it came to be called, was a wonderful aid to the Kuomintang revolutionists. The war lord government in Peking was everywhere denounced as “running dogs of imperialism,” and the revolutionaries in the South, building upon the anger of the people, planned their expedition for the next year much earlier than they might otherwise have been able to do. In 1926 began that triumphant northern march, Chiang Kai-shek leading it and flanked by Communist Russian advisors, both political and military. They found no resistance. The war lords of the southern provinces made a pretense of resisting, then fell to bargaining and then to yielding and “joining” the revolution. In the second summer after Sun Yat-sen’s death the revolutionary forces had reached the very heart of China, and had occupied those three vital industrial cities of the middle Yangtse, Hankow, Wuhan and Hanyang. It was far more than military victory. As soon as a region fell the Communist organizers, under Russian direction, spread through the country and organized the peasants against the landlords and the workers in the great factories of the cities against their employers. I say Communist and yet I do not believe that Communism itself was meaningful in those days to the Chinese revolutionists. They had been told by their dead leader that Soviet Russia was their friend and that since the revolution in Russia had been successful in overthrowing an ancient and tyrannical government and organizing a new one — whose tyrannies, alas, were too little known anywhere and to the Chinese unknown — they, the Chinese revolutionists, must be guided by the Russians. The driving force in the Chinese, however, was not political unrest, which was only secondary, and not even class conflict. It was a passionate determination to get rid of the foreigners who had fastened themselves upon China through trade and religion and war, and set up a government for the reform and modernization of their country.

I pause here to reflect. Over and over again in recent years Americans have said to me with real sadness that they cannot understand why the Chinese hate us “when we have done so much for them.” Actually, of course, we have done nothing for them. They did not ask us to send missionaries nor did they seek our trade. There has been individual kindness on both sides. Americans have sent relief in times of famine and war. I am sure the Chinese would have done the same for us, had our positions been reversed. Individual Americans, usually missionaries, have lived kind and unselfish lives in China, but again they came of their own will and they were appreciated. Individual Chinese have risked their lives and sometimes lost them for missionaries and other white folk in time of revolt or war.

The Chinese attitude toward the whole business of the missionary may best be exemplified from a little incident I once saw take place in my father’s church in an interior city. He was preaching earnestly and somewhat long, and the congregation was growing restless. One by one they rose and went away. There is nothing in Chinese custom which forbids a person to leave an audience. He saunters away from the temple, the public storyteller or the theater when he feels like it and a sermon is an entirely foreign notion. My father was disturbed, however, and a kindly old lady on the front seat, seeing this, was moved to turn her head and address the people thus: “Do not offend this good foreigner! He is making a pilgrimage in our country so that he may acquire merit in heaven. Let us help him to save his soul!” This reversal so astonished my father, and yet he so perfectly understood its sincerity, that he begged the pardon of the assembly and instantly stopped his sermon.

It did not occur to the Chinese, actually, that missionaries were in China for any purpose except their own, and being an incomparably tolerant people, accustomed to individualism, they interfered only when the missionary was personally objectionable. Moreover, it must constantly be remembered that while Americans took no part in the wars and Unequal Treaties, beyond having a punitive force in Peking at the time of the Boxer outbreak and keeping war vessels in interior Chinese waters, yet whenever any other country, usually England, forced a new treaty, we demanded that its benefits be extended also to us. The famous Open Door Policy of the United States was useful to China but certainly it was as useful also to us. In short, it would be hypocritical for us to claim anything but self-interest, enlightened though it might be, and the Chinese, who are accustomed to all sorts of self-interest and hypocrisy, even in the subtlest forms, are not and never, have been deceived about anybody, including the Americans. We have therefore no honest claim to gratitude from them. It is true that we have always liked the Chinese people unless and until they are Communists, but for this we are scarcely to be thanked since it is impossible not to like them when one understands them. They are almost universally liked and likeable.

An interlude in these years was one that I spent in the United States, and I had almost forgotten to mention it for it seems to have no relevance to my life. It was necessary, nevertheless, for the sake of my child. In 1925, the year in which Sun Yat-sen died, I went to the United States and took my child to one doctor after another, and when I was told of the hopelessness of her case, I felt it wise to plunge into some sort of absorbing mental effort that would leave me no time to think of myself. The child’s father had also been granted a year’s leave of absence and he decided to spend it at Cornell University. Thither we went, the three of us. We found a small house, very cheap, and I, too, decided to study, and for my Master’s degree.

It was not altogether an empty year. First I learned to know what poverty can mean in a society as individualistic as that of the American people. In China I had earned my own living by teaching but now I did not earn it. This meant that I had to contrive to live on the single salary of the man, in order that I could study while he did, and this meant an economy so severe that only the most rigid care could pay our meager bills. For example, I bought eggs enough for two a day, one for the child and one for the man. Once a week I bought a small piece of meat. Instead of buying vegetables and fruit at the grocery, I paid a farmer to bring me a cartload of potatoes, onions, carrots and apples and these I piled in the cellar to provide the winter’s food, except for a quart of milk a day and a loaf of bread. The only other expenditure was a small sum paid to a kindly neighbor woman to stay with my child two or three times a week for an hour, when I had to be at classes. Fortunately the professor under whom I majored in the English essay and novel was wise enough not to demand that I attend many classes. He left me to my own research, and this I could do at night. Once the child was in bed, and her father at his own books in the next room, I was free. Then I walked a mile through the woods, along a path that ran at the edge of a gorge and. a rushing stream to the university where I went at once to the library. The joys of that library! I worked alone in the stacks, free to read as many books as I liked, free to think and to write. Sometime in the night I left off, unwillingly even then, and walked home again by moonlight or by lantern. No one was ever seen or heard at that hour, and I walked alone, the damp mist from the deep cold gorge wet upon my face and hair.

Even my stringent economy, however, was not enough for life, and after Christmas I saw that something had to be done to earn some money. I had no warm coat, for one thing, and besides I knew I must take back a few necessities to China in the summer. So, casting about in my mind, I thought of a story I had written on the ship coming over. We had taken the cold northern route to Vancouver because it was the shortest and whenever my child slept I had not gone on deck but had found a corner in the dining saloon. There with my notebook and pen I had begun a story, my first, and had finished it before we landed. I thought it sentimental and not good, and I had done nothing with it. Now, however, driven by anxiety, I got it out and tightened it up and copied it. Since it was the story of a Chinese family whose son brings home an American wife, I sent it to Asia Magazine and waited. It was a marvel of good fortune that I did not wait long, for almost at once, as such things go, I had a letter of acceptance from the editor, then Mr. Louis Froelick, and the promise of a payment of one hundred dollars. That sum seemed as good as a thousand. The problem was, should I buy the coat with part of it or use it all to pay school fees and bills? I decided to let the coat wait, and to start another story, a sequel, carrying on the first.

Meanwhile, the weather was bitterly cold. The landscape around Ithaca was a strange one to me and very dreary and I felt chilled in heart as well as in body. The hills there are not sheltering, but long and rolling and they are cut by deep dark gorges which conceal rivers and lakes. I was depressed especially by the lakes, which looked bottomless, and indeed there were ghostly stories about young men and women who had gone out together in canoes or rowboats and had been drowned, their craft overturned, and their bodies never recovered. Indian legends enhanced the horror of the grey waters, and I was never happy there. Yet, in honesty, I must admit that perhaps part of my sadness came from my own circumstances.

Nevertheless, Ithaca contributed at least one glorious memory. It was the year of the total eclipse of the sun. Partial eclipses of sun and moon I had seen in China more than a few times, and they could scarcely be forgotten, because the people were terrified by them, and, believing that the source of light was being swallowed by a heavenly dragon, they rushed into the streets beating gongs and tin pans to frighten the dragon away. In Ithaca the eclipse was magnificent not only in beauty but in dignity. I watched it from a hilltop. Fortunately the day was gloriously clear, it was winter, and I looked over miles of snow-covered landscape, feeling an expectancy beyond any I had ever known. I love the theater, and the moment before the curtain goes up is always an experience, but this time the drama was of the universe, and the solemnity immense. Soon a shadow crept over the land, a mild but ever deepening twilight; strong waves of darkness streaked with light seemed to make the earth shiver, until at last the sun was entirely obscured and the stars shone out of a black sky. Upon my hilltop I felt as lonely as the last human being might feel were the sun to burn itself to ash and leave the earth in darkness forever. How glorious was the reassurance when slowly the light returned again to the full brightness of the day! I have never forgotten that hour and its meaning.

The second story went slowly, burdened as I was with schoolwork and housekeeping and caring for the child, and I began to despair of being able to finish it. I cast about then for another way to make some money and remembered certain money prizes which the university offered. Quite cold-bloodedly I asked which was the largest and found that it was awarded, as I now remember it, for the best essay upon some international subject. My professor told me, however, that it was always won by a graduate student in the history department and he discouraged me from trying for it.

I did not tell him then that I had decided to try for it anyway. It was for two hundred dollars, and this sum of money would see me safely through the year, even though I bought my coat. There were a few weeks between terms when I could work on the essay, and I chose as my subject the impact of the West upon Chinese life and civilization. My essay grew into a small book before it was finally finished. All manuscripts were handed in without names so that the judges could be impartial. Our names, of course, were given to the office. A fortnight passed and I began to think I had failed. Then someone told me that he had heard that a Chinese had won the prize, for only a Chinese could have written the winning essay. A weak hope rose in my bosom but I repressed it, for there were several brilliant Chinese students at Cornell. In a few days, however, I received a letter telling me that I had won the award, and what a pleasure that was, especially when after my next class I went to my doubting professor and showed him the letter!

Ah well, it is not often that need and grant meet so neatly and at a time when a certain human spirit had fallen very low in hope and joy. My heart recovered itself, and I finished my story in good mood and sent it to Asia Magazine and again it was accepted. Now I was quite rich, and I bought my warm coat, a soft dark green one that lasted me until I lost it in the revolution, of which I shall tell hereafter. And I got back my faith in myself, which was all but gone in the sorry circumstances of my life, and I went to China in the summer, not only with what I needed in material goods but also with a second child, my first little adopted daughter, a tiny creature of three months whom the orphanage had given up the more readily because she had not gained an ounce since she was born. Nothing, they told me, agreed with her, and so I said, “Give her to me,” and they did, and as soon as she felt herself with her mother, she began to eat and grow fat. How easily happiness can be made, and when it is made how wonderfully it works!

One other small thing I did in that year in Ithaca. I discovered that the Asian students in Cornell were usually isolated and lonely. Only a few of the more attractive and brilliant ones found American friends. Many of them, mostly Chinese, lived to themselves, absorbed in their books and too poor to spend anything on fun. It was serious, I felt, that they learned nothing at all about American life. For that matter, the Americans, too, were missing a rich chance to learn something about the Chinese, for even then I was beginning to perceive that unless there could be understanding between East and West there would someday be terrible conflict between them. I spent time, therefore, in trying to persuade the women of Ithaca through their clubs and organizations to open their homes to Chinese students and see to it that the young people who had come from so far could go home again with knowledge of even one American town and its citizens. I did not make much headway. The ladies were kind but they were absorbed in their own affairs, and some of them were reluctant, alas, to let Chinese mingle with their sons and daughters. They could not foresee that such sons and daughters would mingle anyway, through war, if not through peace.

Summer came, we took ship again, and returned to China. It was still home.

Green Hills Farm, Pennsylvania

The long Indian summer in which I have been writing has broken overnight. We do not have typhoons here as we used to have in China but we have hurricanes and blizzards and northeasters and the effect is almost the same, and yet not quite. There is still nothing as terrifying as a typhoon, unless it be a Western cyclone, a sight that I have never seen. This is a northeaster. Somewhere out at sea a whirligig of a wind began and enlarged itself to include our region, and so this morning, too early in November for our climate, which is, as someone has said, “the far thin edge of the tropics,” I see a thick soft snow spread over the landscape. In the court beneath my window the little Italian statue of a boy who stands above the pool holding a big shell in his arms bravely bears a burden of snow on his shoulders. Beside him the coonberry bush is stripped of its dying leaves but the bright red berries are redder, than ever against the snow. The usual events of a winter’s day lie ahead. Breakfast is made in a hurry so that skis can be found and shovels brought out for clearing the paths, and at the farm the snowplow is hitched to the tractor.

Breakfast over I cross the court into my workroom and beyond it the flowers in the greenhouses shine through the glass doors like gems in the white twilight of the snow lying on the roofs. Against the exquisite shadow the carnations and roses glow and snapdragons glitter like candles. The chrysanthemums, bronze and red, are embers. The greenhouses are my avocation, and when a story halts and its people refuse to speak, an hour’s work among the plants will often melt the most stubborn material into something alive and responsive.

My life, flung so far around the world, has in a way been unified in my gardens. The scarlet coonberry bush is a remembrance of the red berries of the Indian bamboo which grew thickly about the terrace of the house in Nanking, and they, too, were beautiful under the light snows of those past years. Chinese artists for centuries have loved to paint red berries under snow, and, whatever the government under which they now live, perhaps this ancient love is permanent, with all that it signifies.

Easily today my mind goes back to those other days. The winter after my return to China, the fateful year of 1926–1927, had been a usual one, mild as most of our winters were in the Yangtse Valley, and yet we had enough snow to enhance the green bamboos and leafless branches of the elms and the prickly oranges that made a hedge to hide the compound wall. Yet it was, I recall, a strange uneasy winter. The revolutionary, forces had dug in around The Three Cities, and we waited for the spring when they would march again. Newspapers were cautious and I was reluctant to trust the rumors which came by word of mouth. White people were hopeful or distrustful, depending upon their feeling for the Chinese people. The missionaries were guarded but ready to welcome whatever came if they were allowed to continue their work undisturbed. My sister was married and her little family was in far Hunan, and the Communists had settled across the lake from her home. Nobody knew exactly what the Communists were. Bandits and brigands had joined their ranks, but bandits and brigands were an inevitable part of all war lord regimes. What we heard about the Communists was what we had always heard about the bandits and brigands. Which was which? No one knew.

The spring was slow that year of 1927, and this in spite of the mild winter. The la-mei trees bloomed after the Chinese New Year, and they had never been more fragrant or more beautiful. Those fairy cups of clear and waxlike yellow blooming upon the bare and angular branches were always my delight. There is no perfume equal to theirs, and yet I have never seen them in any other country than in China. They were scarcely gone, I remember, when word came from my sister that she and her family were leaving their home and coming for refuge to my house in Nanking. In a few days they were with us and unharmed, for nothing had actually happened, except that they had heard disquieting stories of the anti-foreign behavior of the revolutionary troops, who were on the march again, and planning to come down the river.

I was glad that we were all together, my father and my sister and I and our families, while the strange waiting went on. The Three Cities were a long way off, and there was still time to watch and try to guess what we should do. My father, always tranquil, refused to believe that the new revolutionists would also be anti-foreign, for by this time he refused to believe anything evil of any Chinese, and had become far more Chinese than American. Yet I remembered. In spite of all my friends, I remembered the refugee days in Shanghai and the sudden look of hate upon the man’s face whose queue I had once pulled when I was a naughty and impatient child, and other such looks, fleeting enough, but which nevertheless had not escaped me. Most of all, I remembered the many reasons why the Chinese should hate the white man and I feared that if hatred were now to flare again none of us could escape. And all this went on underneath the everyday life of coming and going, of pleasant communication between my pupils and me, and between friends and neighbors. Nobody said anything to make us afraid. There was no animosity even on the streets.

The Chinese New Year came in due season and guests filled the house. I served tea and many kinds of cakes and sweets, and our children exchanged gifts. Ah, it was so exactly like every other year that it was hard to believe that the comfortable house was not the safe and pleasant place it had always been! The servants, I remember, were even more considerate and helpful than usual, and my Chinese women friends were tender in their goodness to my children. The festival season passed, and after it the days and weeks until the last of March.

When I remember the fateful morning of March 27, 1927, I see it in a scene, as though I had nothing to do with it. A little group of white people stands, uncertain and alone, on the early green lawn of a grey brick house, three men, two women, three small children. The wind blows damp and chill over the compound wall. The sky is dark with clouds. They hold their coats about them, shivering, and they stare at each other.

“Where can we hide?” This is what they are whispering.

One of those women is me, two of the children are mine. The other woman is my sister. The two younger men are our husbands, and the tall dignified old gentleman is our father. The nightmare of my life has come true. We are in danger of our lives because we are white people in a Chinese city. Though all our lives have been spent in friendly ways, it counts for nothing today. Today we suffer for those we have never known, the aggressors, the imperialists, the white men of Europe and England who fought the wars and seized the booty and claimed the territory, the men who made the Unequal Treaties, the men who insisted upon extraterritorial rights, the empire builders. Oh, I was always afraid of those white men because they were the ones who made us all hated in Asia! The weight of history falls heavy upon us now, upon my kind old father, who has been only good to every Chinese he has ever met, upon our little children, who have known no country except this one where now they stand in danger of death.

“Where shall we hide?” we keep asking, and we cannot answer.

The pleasant house which until now has been our home can shelter us no more. The rooms stand as we left them a few minutes ago, the big stove still burning in the hall and spreading its heartening warmth, the breakfast table set, the food half eaten. I was just pouring the coffee when our neighbor, the faithful tailor, came running in to tell us that the revolutionists, who in the night had captured the city, were now killing the white people. He stood there at the table where we were all sitting, happy that the battle was over, and he wrung his hands and the tears ran down his cheeks while he talked.

“Do not delay, there is no time — Teacher Williams lies dead already in the street outside the gate!”

Dr. Williams? He was the vice-president of the Christian university!

My father had breakfasted early and was gone to his classes at the seminary, but only just gone, so immediately the houseboy runs to bring him back. My sister and I know only too well now that death is possible, and we get up quickly and find the children’s coats and caps and our own coats and we all hasten outside the house that is no longer a shelter, and here we stand in the chill wet winds.

Where can we hide?

The servants gather around us, half fearful for their own sakes. They know that if they are found with us they too may be killed. Nobody knows the ferocity of the revolutionists. We have heard such stories.

“There is no use in hiding in our quarters,” the amah says. “They will find you there.” She falls to her knees and puts her arms around my child and sobs aloud.

Oh, where can we go? There is nowhere. We hear the sound of howling voices in the distant streets and we look at each other and clasp the children’s hands. My old father’s lips move and I know he is praying. But there is nowhere to go.

Suddenly the back gate squeaks on its hinges, the little back gate in the corner of the compound wall, and we all turn our heads. It is Mrs. Lu, who lives in a cluster of little mud houses just over the wall in a pocket of an alley off the street that runs in front of the house. She comes hobbling toward us on her badly bound feet, her loose trousers hanging over her ankles. Her hair is uncombed as usual, rusty brown locks hanging down her cheeks, and her kind stupid face is all concern and alarm and love.

“Wise Mother,” she gasps, “you and your family, come and hide in my little half-room! Nobody will look for you there. Who would harm a woman like me? My good-for-nothing has left me again and I and my son are alone. Come — come — there is no time!”

She pulls at me, she embraces all the children at once, and we follow her blindly, half running, leaving the gate open behind us. There are no houses very near, we have lived in one of the open spaces of the city, and we run across two or three acres of grassland and old graves and between some neat vegetable gardens until on the far side of our wall we reach the handful of mud houses, in one of which Mrs. Lu lives. The people are waiting for us there, the kind poor people, and they receive us, her friends and neighbors, and they hurry us into the dark little half-room which is her home. It is indeed only half a room, barely big enough for the board bed, a small square table and two benches. There is no window, only a hole under the thatched roof. It is almost entirely dark. Into this narrow place we all crowd ourselves and Mrs. Lu closes the door.

“I will come back,” she whispers. “And if the children cry, do not be afraid. We have so many children here, those wild soldiers will not know if it is your child or ours that cries.”

She goes away and we are left in the strange silence. Our children do not cry. No one speaks. We are all trying to realize what is happening. It has been too quick. Then my father looks out of the little hole under the roof. We can see a light, a glow from a reddening sky.

“They are burning the seminary,” my father says. It is where he goes every day to teach and to do his work of translating the New Testament from Greek into Chinese. Nobody answers him. We are quiet again.

This is what I see, this is what I remember.

And yet, strange and unexpected as it was, it was all familiar. Sitting there on the edge of the bed beside my sister, each of us holding a child, I told myself that I had always known it would happen. The wild winds had been sown and the whirlwinds were gathering, and it was only chance that I had been born in the age of whirlwinds, chance alone that I was reaping what I had not sown. Call it chance, too, that I was born of the white race, but I could not escape that, either. I sat in silence, pondering over these things, as I knew each of us in his own way was pondering, my old father with all his years spent now and gone, my young sister and her little boy, and I with my own eternal child, and the little daughter I had adopted and brought from America, the two Americans my sister and I had married. None of us could escape the history of the centuries before any of us had been born, and with which we had nothing to do. We had not, I think, ever committed even a mild unkindness against a Chinese, and certainly we had devoted ourselves to justice for them, we had taken sides against our own race again and again for their sakes, sensitive always to injustices which others had committed and were still committing. But nothing mattered today, neither the kindness nor the cruelty. We were in hiding for our lives because we were white.

I remember thinking on two levels. One was the world and the centuries of history, and I felt nothing but sympathy for the Chinese who knew only the evil of the white man and none of the good. Were I a young Chinese, had I been taught only what the white man had done to my country, I too would have wanted to be rid of him forever. I could not blame them. But on the other level I was thinking of this very moment, and of the children. My father would meet his fate with calm and with peace. I had no fear for him. He had lived his life. The two young men must handle themselves as best they could when the last minutes came. My sister and I were strong enough, too, to bear ourselves proudly and without showing fear. But what of the little children? My helpless child was only seven, my little adopted daughter only three, my sister’s little boy also three. These could not be left. Somehow we two mothers must contrive to see them dead before we ourselves must die.

For by now the mobs had risen and outside the little hut we heard the firing of guns and the howls of the crowd. There is always a crowd in any city, in any country, when order breaks down. There are the thieves and the looters and the fire lovers and the men who are afraid to kill in times of peace but who let their lust for blood blaze out when there is no peace. We began to hear screams and loud laughter, yells and sounds of blows. We heard the heavy front door of our house beaten in and then the shout of greedy joy when the crowd burst into the hall.

I could see it as clearly as though I stood there watching. I saw the rooms as we had left them, the rooms I had made and loved, my home, as warm and pretty a place as I could contrive, the yellow curtains at the windows, the dull blue Chinese rugs on the floors, the Chinese furniture and the few comfortable chairs, the flowers on the tables. I had nursed for weeks the bulbs of the white sacred lilies and they were in full bloom, scenting the house. A coal fire burned in the grate under the mantelpiece in the living room. And upstairs were the bedrooms and the children’s nursery, and in the attic was my own special place, where I did my work. And I remembered that on my desk in that attic room was the finished manuscript of my first novel.

It was all gone. The crowd was surging through the rooms, snatching everything they could take, quarreling over garments and bedding and rugs and all else that had been mine. And I, by some irony which almost made me smile, was sitting here on a board bed in a hut wearing my oldest clothes and not even my good American coat. I had planned, this day, to clean the attic thoroughly now that my novel was done.

Hour after hour went by. No one came near us for a long time and we made no sound. Even the children were silent, not crying, not whispering, simply clinging to us as we held them. It was strange to be left thus alone, for we had not been alone at all for days. As the revolutionary armies drew near to the city and battle became inevitable, our war lord had declared that he would fight, and he had locked the city gates and prepared his soldiers. I had foreseen a siege and so as in other such times I had laid in canned foods and dried Chinese foods and fruits and grains. We had a little chicken yard and the children would have eggs, and I had bought some cases of American canned milk, some Australian tinned butter.

The battle had begun three days ago and only the children had slept since the first guns were fired, for all of us knew that this battle was not like any other. The Communists had organized the forces and they were the leaders. Even Chiang Kai-shek was with the Communists, we were told. These were not only Chinese, therefore. Something new and dangerous had been added. The Communists were building upon hate, the hate for the foreigner, the injustice of the past. Never before had the old hatreds been organized.

As usual in times of war, the city Chinese had flocked to our house. I do not know whether other houses like mine were full of them, but every room in our house was overflowing with Chinese. With us were our Chinese friends, their families, and their friends. Everyone was welcome at such a time. They brought what food they had and we had all shared our resources during the three days. But downstairs the big cellars, inevitable in the semitropical houses, were filled with unknown people from the streets. We did not keep them out. If there was any safety to be found with us, we were only glad, and until now there had always been safety with the foreigners, for the Unequal Treaties protected the Chinese friends of the white man, too. I had always hated those treaties, and never for myself would I ever willingly accept their protection, yet actually I was helpless against them. Wrong as they were and now bearing the bitter fruit of a hatred accumulated through generations of Chinese, I had been protected by them in spite of myself, but at least I had shared my safety. I remember the night before, I had laughed and told my sister that the cellars were so full of people I felt as though the floors were heaving. The people tried to be quiet but the subdued noise gathered and mounted to the very roof in a stilled roar. I had sent tea and bread loaves downstairs lest they were hungry.

We had gone upstairs to bed at last longing for the morning as we went, for the rumor was that the battle would end before dawn. In the morning, we had told ourselves, we would be at peace again. There would be new rulers, for by now it was obvious that our old war lord must be defeated. All the youth and the idealism and the patriotism were on the other side. I knew, for that matter, that my own students and most of my friends, certainly the young ones, were on the side of the revolutionists. Our war lord’s soldiers were only mercenaries, and they would desert as soon as defeat was plain. But we were used to battles and changing rulers, and we were only hoping that the new ones would be better than the old. Almost anything would be better than the war lords, each greedy for himself and a sore burden for the patient people.

That night I slept from exhaustion and was wakened early, not by noise, but by a silence so deep that at first I was bewildered. It was barely dawn, I could see only the outlines of familiar furniture and the grey rectangle of the window. The guns were stopped, the booming of the old-fashioned cannon was ended. A solid silence filled the room. But what silence? There was not even the sound of a human being. No child cried, and the rumble of voices from the cellar was dead.

I got up and dressed myself and went downstairs. The rooms which I had left full of our friends and friends of friends were empty. There was no sign of a bedding roll or a garment. I opened the cellar door and went downstairs. No one was there, not a soul. The place was clean, nothing left behind. Only in the kitchen the cook was stirring about dubiously, red-eyed and pale-cheeked.

“What has happened?” I asked.

“They have all gone,” he said. “Everyone went away in the night.”

“Why?” I asked.

“They are afraid,” he said.

But it did not occur to me even then that they were afraid to be found with us. I did not dream that the white people could shelter no one again, not even ourselves.

In the crowded hut we sat the hours through while the noises mounted outside. One foreign house after another went up in flames and we said nothing. The door opened at last and Mrs. Lu crept in with a teapot and some bowls.

“Your house is not burned,” she whispered to me while she poured the tea. “The wild people are looting, but they have not burned your house.”

“It doesn’t matter,” I whispered back.

She whispered again. “The cook and the amah and the gardener — they are pretending to loot but they are taking the things for you. I and the neighbors here — we have taken too, but it is for you. You understand that it is not for ourselves?”

She patted my cheek. “You helped me when I had no home. Twice you saved my son’s life.”

It may sound strange but at this moment I felt such a peace come over me that I remember it still. Here was a human being who was only good. At the risk of her life she was saving ours. What comfort to know that there was this human being!

Yet did she realize her own danger? “You know that if we are found they will kill you, too?” I asked whispering.

“Let them try,” she said robustly under her breath. “Just let them touch me, the wild beasts! Not knowing the difference between good people and bad!”

She hugged my child. “Little precious,” she whispered tenderly, and went away again.

The day dragged on, and the madness continued unabated. Once again the door opened. This time it was my friend’s husband, the one who had lost her baby by the hypodermic. He came in to whisper that many Chinese were working for the white people. They had gone to the Communist Commander-in-Chief, they were waiting upon him, they would beseech him to spare us.

“Take courage,” he told us. “We are trying to save you.” He hesitated, I remember, and then he said. “I have been a long time finding you because Mrs. Lu trusts nobody. She would not tell even me where you were until a few minutes ago. One does not know now who is friend and who is enemy — these Communists!”

He went away and the hours passed. Again the door opened and a kind Chinese face peered in, an old woman who lived in the cluster of huts, a stranger to me then. She came in with bowls of hot soup and noodles and set them on the table.

“Eat,” she said in a loud whisper. “Eat, good foreign devils, and let down your hearts. They will not find you. Nobody here will tell where you are. We are all true. Even our children will not tell. And if your children cry let them. If I hear your child cry I will smack my grandchild and make him cry outside the door so that no one knows who cries. All children cry the same noise—”

She went away, nodding and smiling to reassure us, and we fed the children and again the day dragged on.

Alas, the madness grew. We could not hide from ourselves that the uproar and the frenzy were worsening, and with the night ahead and the darkness our chances were small. What, I wondered, was happening to the other white people in the city? Many would have friends as we had, but many perhaps were already dead for lack of such a hiding place as ours. For the first time in my life I realized fully what I was, a white woman, and no matter how wide my sympathies with my adopted people, nothing could change the fact of my birth and my ancestry. In a way, I suppose, I changed my world then and there, in that tiny dark hut. I could not escape what I was.

No one opened the door now, not even Mrs. Lu. I knew that this was not disloyalty but protection of us. The soldiers must be very near, so that she dared not make the slightest move to betray our presence. We could hear the rude voices, the hoarse chanting of the Communist songs and the endless crackling of the burning houses, the rumbling of falling walls.

Sometime in the afternoon, before twilight fell, the door did open once more. It was the young Chinese again, the husband of my friend, he who had come in the morning. He entered now and fell at once on his knees and before us he made the ancient kotow.

“We can do nothing,” he told us, the tears wet upon his cheeks. “We are helpless. We have been told that all will be killed before nightfall. Forgive us, forgive us, we have greatly harmed you, we sin against you.”

He kotowed again and again and we begged him to get up, saying that we understood that he had done all he could for us and indeed had risked his own life. He was not alone in trying to help us. University professors and students and neighbors and friends, all were trying to save our lives.

“Thank you,” we said, bowing to him as he bowed to us. He went away and now indeed we were alone. Each of us in his own way tried to face what lay ahead. It was impossible to speak. My sister and I sat clasping each other’s hands, and then realizing that she had her husband, I turned to my father. He sat on a bench, his face calm, his spirit unmoved. I had never loved him as much or admired him more. As for the children, they were small and they would never know. As for me, I would see that they went ahead of me.

In this strange speechless waiting the afternoon wore on, the dreadful wild noise unabated. It grew dark in the hut. It was five o’clock when we were last able to see our watches. Then I took off the little gold watch I wore and slipped it under the pillow on Mrs. Lu’s bed. At least she would have that. Loud feet passed and repassed the door and at every instant we expected to hear it burst open and it would be the end of this day. In the midst of this desperate waiting suddenly we heard a frightful noise, a thunder, rumbling over the roof. What was it? It came again and again. It could only be cannon. But what cannon? The Chinese had no such cannon as this, deafening us, roaring above the human shouts and cries. Again and again it came and again and again.

Foreign cannon — the warships in the river! Suddenly everyone thought of the same thing. Of course, what else? We had not imagined such a possibility. The river was seven miles away, but the powerful weapons were dropping their loads not far from where we were hidden.

The booming lasted for what seemed a long time but was only a few minutes. When it was over we heard no sound whatever. The shouting had ceased, the footsteps were gone. Only the falling of a burning beam from some house, or the crumbling of a wall, broke the sudden silence.

What now, we asked ourselves? How I wished Mrs. Lu would come in! But no one came. We remained alone in the silence for two hours or more, so we guessed, but it was hard to know in the darkness how slowly the time went. And what did the silence mean?

The door opened at last and by the light of the flame of a torch flying in the night wind, we saw again our Chinese friend. He was surrounded by soldiers, Communist soldiers we could see by their uniforms. He stepped across the threshold and stood in the doorway. He did not bow or show any formal politeness.

“You are all to go to the university buildings,” he commanded harshly. “All white people are to gather there by command of the new General.”

In the light of the torch I saw his lips move and his eyebrows lift. His harshness meant nothing except protection. “Forgive me,” his lips were silently saying.

I rose at once, understanding, and taking a child by each hand I led the way out of the hut. In the shadows outside I saw Mrs. Lu among the watching people. She was crying and the torchlight shone on her wet cheeks. But all the others made no sign, and we spoke to no one, lest by recognition we mark them as our friends and bring suffering on them later when we were gone. Out of the little cluster of houses we went, and along the narrow paths between the vegetable fields, all their cabbages and onions ruined by the feet of the mob, and then over the grassy gravelands to the road which led to the university. In the darkness my helpless child grew impatient and pushed against the young soldier who was ahead. He turned on her with a frightful snarl, his bayonet pointed.

“Please,” I cried, as once my mother had cried for me. “She is only a child. I ask pardon for her.”

We went sullenly on then, and thus led we entered the campus and marched between enemy guards to enter the big university building where other white people were already waiting. But as we passed, the light of the flaming torches fell on the faces and I looked to see what sort of men the revolutionists were. They were all young, every face was young, and I saw among them not one face I knew. They were ignorant faces, drunken faces, red and wild-eyed, and perhaps they were drunk with wine, but perhaps only with triumph and with hate. They glared back at us, and they grinned with a dreadful laughter, for what they saw was the downfall and the humiliation of the white people who had for so long been their oppressors. I knew, I knew what they felt, and I could not hate them and so I returned to my old thoughts. The winds had been sown and these were the whirlwinds, so long foreseen, inevitable, inescapable, and it was only accident of time that here was I.

We went upstairs and into the big room and there we found the other white people, men, women and children, some safe, some wounded by gunshots, some hurt by manhandling and rough usage, and when we had been welcomed we heard the varying stories of the tragic dead. All these alive had been rescued by heroic Chinese who had worked steadily to save the lives of the white people without thought of their own danger and future punishment for taking our part. It was a wonderful and joyful meeting, and never had I felt so near to my own people. Never, either, had I loved the Chinese so well or honored them so much. Somewhere and sometime, I was sure that my two great peoples would come together in understanding and enduring friendship and so the dreadful day closed in exhilaration of spirit. We bedded the children down in overcoats and quilts that the Chinese had gathered and at last we slept.

What remains to be told? We stayed there that night and all the next day, still not knowing whether we were to be released or held for an unknown purpose, but there was nothing lonely about our imprisonment. One by one through the night and the next day the few remaining white people who had not yet been found were brought to join our number. We knew now the dead, and among them was a gentle old Catholic priest, an Italian, who had been a teacher at the Chinese university where I too had taught. There we had often talked together while we waited for our classes to gather.

But what kept us from being lonely or isolated was the steady flow of Chinese friends who continued to brave the harsh revolutionary guards to bring us food and changes of clothing and toothbrushes and money and combs and warm clothes and everything they could think of for our comfort. They came weeping and heartbroken and we had to cheer them up and thank them over and over and assure them that we bore no one ill will for what had happened. And indeed this was true, for we had all been heartened and warmed by the friendship they had shown us.

Still we did not know what was to happen, although we heard rumors that the commanders on the foreign warships were negotiating for our release. Late in the afternoon of that second day, however, we were told to gather ourselves together and come out of the building. We were to march to the Bund, there to be taken off on the warships. When we reached the gate we found that several broken-down carriages had been provided for the old people and women with little children, and so I with other mothers climbed in and drove off down the familiar streets. How strange, how strange it was, and still it seems strange to me, even after all these years, and I remember it all as though there were no years between. The streets were lined with watching silent people, but the scene, so familiar, had changed overnight. Would I ever see the city again? I did not know, and yet I could not imagine never coming back. The miles were slow, but at last we reached the river’s edge and there we were met by American sailors, who took us aboard the gunboats. And almost at once we learned that we had had a second narrow escape, this time at the hands of our own countrymen. Here is the story. The American Consul, John Davis, an old friend of mine, whose father had been a missionary and a friend of my father’s, was on board the man-of-war, whence the American Commander was directing our escape. The Communist military officers in the city had been given a time ultimatum for our arrival, and if we failed to appear by the set hour, six o’clock I think it was, the city would be bombarded in earnest, not at all like the firing of the day before which had been carefully planned for the empty spaces within the city wall, so that only two or three people were killed. At six o’clock we were still not in sight and the American Commander was about to order the bombardment to begin. But John Davis, knowing that exact hours meant nothing to Chinese, begged for a fifteen-minute delay, and when, at the end of that time, we were still not in sight, for yet another brief delay. Still we were not in sight and the American officer was ready to give orders, when a third time John Davis besought him to wait only a few minutes more. Within those minutes the first of our ragged caravan appeared at the river’s edge. Had the cannon fired, undoubtedly we would have been killed by our own fire. As it was, we went aboard the ships safely.

All my life I had seen those gunboats on the river, and I had wished that they were not there. I had felt they should not be there, foreign warships in Chinese interior waters. Now such a ship was saving me and mine and taking us to a refuge. I was glad not to die, but I wished that I had not needed to justify, against my will, what still I knew to be wrong. There was no use quibbling now, however, and I turned toward my own countrymen. They were only the sailors, young and crude, from aboard the destroyer, but I longed for a friendly word from them. Alas, they were not friendly to anyone. I suppose they were tired, I suppose they were disgusted with us because we had not left Nanking when the Consul warned us, months earlier, of the dangers from the revolutionary Chinese army. Certainly those young American sailors could not understand our being in China at all, and it was only weariness that we were there to be cared for. At any rate, they were harsh and some of them even contemptuous, and I shrank away from them and felt lonely indeed. Yet I had to accept their help for the sake of the children, and so on the ship at last we gathered about a bare table where plates and forks and spoons were heaped, and a sailor ladled out some sort of stew. Everybody ate except me and I could not eat. It was more than mere exhaustion. The exhilaration of spirit was gone. The Chinese who had been our friends were far away, and here were only these rough young men who did not smile, even when they looked at the children.

In the night we had one more catastrophe. Into a cabin designed for six sailors, fourteen women and all their children were crowded. Some of the women had come from the mission hospital with newborn babies, and they were given the best berths. Others slept on the floor. I was given a berth for my children, and I put them to bed in the same clothes they had worn, the only ones they had, and I sat down beside them to rest for a moment. Then I saw that my helpless child was feverish and somewhere I borrowed a thermometer and took her temperature. She was fretful and bit the glass to pieces and I had to be sure that she swallowed none of it. It was just then that I noticed a greenish look on other faces and suddenly my younger child vomited and other children began to vomit. In a few minutes women and children were in violent nausea, except me, and a missionary doctor, called to attend them, staggered into the cabin, himself violently ill, to report that everybody was ill. The stew, it seemed, had been made from old tinned meat, long held in reserve, and it had caused ptomaine poisoning.

What a night that was! I ran back and forth with various vessels, emptying and washing and holding them again to be refilled. We had only one toilet, but fortunately it was a flush toilet and so somehow we managed. Once when I went in, loaded with pots, I found a friend, a woman who had been my neighbor, earnestly searching the toilet contents. She had swallowed her wedding ring the day before when a Communist soldier had tried to take it from her and now she was trying to recover it. It was part of the absurd nightmare of that night that she did recover it, thanks to her determination.

When the worst was over and it became apparent that nobody was going to die and when my own children were asleep at last, it was near dawn and the destroyer was racing down the river toward Shanghai. Then I sat down on the edge of the berth again and wished that I had something to read, anything to take my mind away from this pit of horror and to keep me from thinking of an unknown tomorrow. There was not a book in sight. Some sixth sense made me put my hand under the berth, however, and there in an open canvas bag I felt the outlines of a book. I pulled it out and by the light of the sturdy oil lamp on the wall I read the title. It was Moby Dick, and I had not read it before. Never say the gods are not kind! While the others slept away their fever and their pain, I sat in good health and restored calm and read for the rest of the night.

I had a curious sense of pleasant recklessness when I stepped off the ship at Shanghai. There is something to be said for losing one’s possessions, after nothing can be done about it. I had loved my Nanking home and the little treasures it had contained, the lovely garden I had made, my life with friends and students. Well, that was over. I had nothing at all now except the old clothes I stood in. I should have felt sad, and I was quite shocked to realize that I did not feel sad at all. On the contrary, I had a lively sense of adventure merely at being alive and free, even of possessions. No one expected anything of me. I had no obligations, no duties, no tasks. I was nothing but a refugee, someone totally different from the busy young woman I had been. I did not even care that the manuscript of my novel was lost. Since everything else was gone, why not that?

I cannot advise the deliberate wooing of such a mood, for what it meant was that my roots were abruptly pulled up, and never again was I to put them down so deeply. Anyone who has lost all his habitual environment by sudden violence will know what I mean, and those who have not, cannot possibly understand, and so there is no use in trying to explain. Simply the fact was that nothing was ever as valuable to me again, nothing, that is, in the way of place or beloved objects, for I knew now that anything material can be destroyed. On the other hand, people were more than ever important and human relationships more valuable. My mind was crowded with all the different people I had met in the last forty-eight hours, from the moment our tailor had come to warn us and my loved Mrs. Lu had come running across the fields to save us, down to the last surly young sailor. Surly they remained, too, for not one of those sailors showed the slightest responsibility for the poisoning nor any pity for a child.

When the destroyer docked I stared at the crowds on the Shanghai Bund who had gathered to stare at us, and felt neither shame nor concern. Plenty of Chinese were there who did not conceal their pleasure at seeing a crowd of white people as dirty and weary refugees, but others were there, too, who were kind and good and wanted to give us food and shelter. I had already learned that any crowd will contain the same contrast, wherever it gathers. Room had been found for us all, and so indifferent was I that I cannot now remember where we went or even how long we stayed, except that it was not long. We bathed and put on fresh garments collected for us, and then I felt that Shanghai was even more intolerable than usual and that I must go away.

I wanted to go somewhere into high mountains, where there were few people, and if possible no one that I knew, and where I could review all that had happened to me and see what it meant that I had been pulled up by the roots. What did one do with roots that were no good any more, and were roots necessary, after all? If not, why put them down again? These were questions that had to be answered and I said to my family:

“Let’s leave. Let’s go to Japan, into those mountains above Nagasaki and the sea. We could rent a little Japanese house.”

I cannot remember how it was done except that the mission head let us draw on salary for funds, nor do I remember how we got the house nor any of the other means whereby I achieved just that end. But, we found space in a crowded little Japanese ship and we crossed the sea to Nagasaki, on the island of Kyushu, Japan. In those days Nagasaki was a clean and charming place, familiar to me, for we had visited it often as we came and went across the Pacific. There, too, my eldest sister had been taken ill to die upon a ship at six months of age, when my parents were taking her home to China after a holiday, long before I was born.

What comfort it was to walk on quiet clean streets again, to go to the small inn and settle into peaceful rooms, to have a Japanese bath, long and soaking and hot, a delicious Japanese meal and then sleep, hours of sleep! I remember how I savored every moment of such restoration. And when we woke we walked the streets among friendly courteous people, and we watched the evening mists gather over the mountains that seemed almost to push the houses into the sea. Up in those mountains was hidden the little Japanese town where I hoped we could find a home for a while until we knew what we wanted to do.

It was all so easy, so safe, so free from strain. A Japanese cabman drove us up the winding roads into the mountains and we took rooms at an inn until we could find a house and settle into it, and that inn I remember because of the hot springs in the baths, wonderful clear warm water, medicinal and soothing. The mountainside was pierced with such springs, little curls of steam rising from the rocks, and Japanese woodcutters and tourists cooked their eggs in the steam and heated their rice and vegetables, and I packed picnic baskets and did the same for the children.

My sister and her family went on to Kobe, for she expected a child and needed to be near a doctor, and my father, enlivened by his unaccustomed freedom from work, decided to go to Korea by himself and so there were only the four of us in Unzen. I tired quickly, as usual, of living in a hotel, and within a few days we moved to a little Japanese house across the valley and on another mountain. It was made of wood as all such houses are, and it was deep in a pine forest. The house itself was one big room whose whole front could be slid back into boards at either side, and behind it were three cubbyhole bedrooms, and a tin room with a large oval wooden tub for a bath. On the narrow back porch a rough table provided my kitchen, and upon it stood a charcoal stove which was only a pottery jar under a grate, and there I cooked my meals.

In this simple space I found healing. The scent of the pines pervaded the air, and the stillness of the forest was peace itself. I did not want a servant nor any stranger in the house, and indeed there was nothing to do except to prepare the meals and sweep the floors with a bamboo broom and when this was done to wash our few garments in the brook. The nights were long and still and in the morning I was waked by the soft rustling and whispering of the crabwomen. When I had washed and dressed I went out and found five or six old souls, in worn cotton kimonos, very clean, and sitting in a row on the edge of the floor of our living room as it opened directly into the trees. They had been too kind to wake me, but once they saw me they held up their baskets of fresh crabs and fish so that I might make my choice for the day. I tried to buy from one and the other, in justice to all, and they made no complaint, but they always came together and went away together, leaving me with a grass string of frantic crabs or pulsing fish in my hand. Rice boiled dry and flaky, and a green of some sort was enough for a meal and we grew healthy and clear-eyed on the fare.

Sometimes we made sandwiches of bread I baked once a week and then we went off for the day, to climb a mountain or explore a valley and often we found ourselves part of a procession of tourists, picnicker and people on walking tours, for the Japanese love their mountains and beauty spots and are indefatigable about picnics. I must have been very happy and idle for I cannot remember anything else about our month in the mountains of Japan, except once when I was taking my daily bath in the wooden tub, my glance happened to fall upon a familiar knot hole in the wooden wall and I saw it not green, as usual, with the immediate forest, but filled with an unblinking black eye. I stared at the eye for an instant, and then put my forefinger into the knothole, where upon it withdrew. I pondered upon the sex of the eye’s owner, but could come to no conclusion. When I had finished my bath and had dressed and come out again, however, I found that the eye belonged to a young woman with six eggs which she wished to sell. She had heard the splashing of water in the tub and had merely wanted to know if I was at home.

I enjoyed doing my own housework, or supposed I did, but one morning before I got up I heard a loud familiar female voice from the back porch, and slipping into a kimono, I went out and found one of our faithful womenservants from Nanking. This hearty and indomitable creature had decided that it was her duty to find me, because, she said, she was sure that I needed her. She had gone to Shanghai, had inquired of friends where I was, and then with her own money she had bought a steerage ticket and found her way, not speaking a word of Japanese, to our mountain top. I have no idea how she accomplished all this, but when I saw her standing there on the back porch in her blue cotton jacket and trousers, her belongings tied up in a flowered kerchief and her round lively face all smiles, I suddenly knew that I did need her, and that I was glad to see her. We fell into each other’s arms and within minutes she was managing everything as usual.

The story of this woman is too complex to tell here, and perhaps no one could understand it in detail who had not heard her tell it and explain all that had happened. Years later she became the material, in the very rough, for my novel The Mother. In those days, however, even I did not know her whole. The first time I saw her was when she was employed as an amah in a missionary’s family. We had shared a summer cottage with that family once at Peitaiho, a seaside resort in North China, which somehow I have not mentioned, perhaps because I forget it unconsciously since it was the place where I first knew that my child could never grow. At any rate this woman, Li Sau-tse, and I shall have to write her name because of after events, decided that she wanted to work for me, because I could speak Chinese as well, she declared, as she could. I had refused to hire her, however, out of fairness to her mistress, and so the summer had ended. Besides, I needed no amah, having my own faithful one.

A few months later Li Sau-tse appeared in Nanking, determined to work for me. She had given up her job, she told me, and would not go back, and when I said that I needed only a table boy, my own having had to go home to care for his old parents, she said she would be a table boy. As table boy, then, she stayed. It became evident, in spite of her padded winter garments, as the days passed, that she was going to have a baby. Since she had long been a widow, this was astonishing and upsetting in our Chinese society. I felt compelled to mention the matter to her before much longer, whereupon she wept loudly and declared that she had been waylaid by a soldier in the kaoliang fields of the north country, and she had been forced, etc. It sounded doubtful, it looked doubtful, for she was a tall strong creature, able, I thought, to defend herself against anyone, but soldiers did sometimes do such things, as I knew, and so I accepted her story, whereupon she became immediately cheerful, and assured me that I need not trouble myself about anything, that she would attend to the child when it was born and bring it up outside the compound. I said she could keep it in the compound, and we let matters rest. A few weeks later when the house was full of important guests, some sort of an investigating group from America, she did not appear in the morning to serve breakfast. The other servants went around with pursed lips, and the amah suggested that I go myself to their quarters. I did, and upon opening the door of Li Sau-tse’s little room, I stepped literally into a pool of blood. She had made an abortion for herself, but far too late, and the violent Chinese drug she had swallowed had produced a frightful hemorrhage. We got her to the hospital at once and there she stayed for weeks with blood poisoning. When she recovered, nothing could separate her from me. She declared that her life was mine, and although there were times when I wished it belonged to anyone else but me, for she was an opinionated, devoted, loud-voiced person, yet I knew her loyalty. When we had hidden in the little hut on the day of revolution, it was she who tried to save as many of our possessions as she could, risking her life, the lovable and ridiculous woman, upon such follies as kitchen cooking pots and umbrellas and pillows, and leaving to the rabble my fine old French china and the silver my ancestors had brought from Holland.

At any rate, there she was in Japan with us, as madly devoted as ever, and insisting upon doing everything, so that I was compelled to idleness, and, since she had no one to talk to except me, I had to listen to her long monologues on the Japanese, who, she declared, were much better than the Chinese.

“In China I heard nothing except how bad the Japanese are,” she would say, “but here I see they are good, and much better than we Chinese are. Look, Wise Mother, when two Chinese riksha men bump together, what do they do? They curse and howl and one calls the other’s mother dirty names, but when two riksha men bump together here in Japan, what happens? They stop, they bow to each other, they are not angry, each says he is wrong, and then they go their way. Is this not better than the Chinese?”

I always agreed with her as the easiest way to silence.

Yet somehow the atmosphere of the little house changed after this good soul came. She was one of those women — and there are such men too — who battle whatever they do. Thus when Li Sau-tse cleaned a room, she not only made it clean but in the process she opposed every article of furniture, she attacked it and compelled it to be clean, and the floor was nothing short of an enemy. A spider web in the beams of the ceiling demanded ferocity to exterminate it and mutterings and threats, and before she had been with me a week the local police had visited us three times. She had done nothing wrong but in her zeal to civilize my habitation she had burned the dead pine needles at the door and thus smoke had ascended and the police came to investigate a possible forest fire. Again they came because they discovered that she had no passport, and it was true that in her innocence she had not thought of it and had somehow managed to bustle her way through the authorities. The third time they came because she had sullied the stream with bits of garbage, and the farmers below us complained.

By this time my sister’s baby was born and she and her family needed a place to stay, and so after a little time together in the small house, I decided upon a sight-seeing journey. It was not to be a tourist journey. In the first place I was too poor to go in luxury, and in the second place I wanted to see the Japanese as they travelled, and that was not in first-class coaches. One fine morning my children and I set out, therefore, on a pleasure trip, and such it proved to be. We took a train, any train, and all through the lovely autumn days we sat with travelling companions who were Japanese, kind and courteous and interested and interesting. When we were hungry we bought little lunch boxes at a station, cold rice and pickle and a bit of fish daintily packed in a clean wooden box with a pair of new bamboo chopsticks, and bottles of hot pasteurized milk for the children and persimmons and pears and small red apples for dessert. Sometime before darkness we got off the train, just anywhere, and found a Japanese inn, clean and welcoming, and there we stayed the night, sleeping after a hot bath as I had not slept since I was a child.

It was like a dream to wake in the night and lie there under the soft quilts upon the tatami mats, and gaze into the dim moonlight of the garden. There was always a garden and we always drew back the paper-paned sliding doors, so that the soft damp air of outside filled the little room where we slept. To gaze awhile at the misty branches of the trees and the vague outlines of the rocks, to hear the tinkle of a small waterfall and then fall asleep again was pure peace. And in the morning we waked at the minute sounds of the maid, bringing in the breakfast trays of rice congee and fish and pickled radishes. In all the weeks of our journey we had not a single misadventure or one unkindness. I remember the wonderful controlled beauty of Japan, not only in such places as the island of Miyajima, where the beauty was sophisticated and planned, but I remember especially the everyday beauty of the little inns and villages, and above all, I remember the kindness of the people. Their self-discipline was exquisite and it broke only when a man was drunk. Then to my surprise, instead of growing mellow and humorous as the Chinese do when drunk, the Japanese turned wild and ferocious. I learned not to go abroad on Saturday nights, even on the country roads, when the farmers, usually so well-mannered, were coming home from market singing and roistering after they had spent part of their profits on hard Japanese liquor.

Green Hills Farm

In these days while I have been writing of the months I once spent in the mountains above Nagasaki, there has been a little figure wearing kimonos of dove grey or soft plum color with wide embroidered obis of dull blue or gold stealing about the rooms of our old Pennsylvania farmhouse. She is from Japan, a gentle friend, visiting our country again after twenty-seven years away. Long ago she came here as an honor student from a Tokyo university, who had won an award to a scholarship to Wellesley, but after her American college years were over she went home again to Japan, married and lived the life of a Japanese wife and mother, struggling against poverty all the while, and trying to keep alive the life of mind and heart stimulated and broadened by her years in America. She went through the war years, lost her home in the bombings of Tokyo, survived with her family nevertheless, and was one of the keenest observers of the Occupation. Its faults she saw, but she feels, she has told us, her voice so mild, her English precise and beautiful, that the Americans brought to her country something glorious and unforgettable, a warmth and an outgoing which the repressed Japanese needed.

We have listened to her in long evenings by the fire, trying to see the postwar Japan she portrays, and seeing it at least in her own slender and exquisite person and in her sad and lovely face, whereupon are carved the lines of a terrifying and tragic patience, which is also of Japan.

It is quite by chance that my Japanese friend’s visit has coincided with the moment when I had reached Japan in this book, a fortunate chance, for in this woman I see both the old and the new of Japan, the narrow isle, the broader way. She sees no great hope now for her country, situated midway between East and West and coveted by both. How, she asks without expecting an answer, can Japan survive? She belongs with Asia, with the peoples of India and China and Indonesia and the Philippines, and from them she was cut off by her own militarists, and now again by the new alliance to the United States, which the Japanese fear and yet dare not reject.

I ventured the remark one evening, “How tragic that your militarists insisted upon a war of conquest in Asia! Actually, your country had a position in China, at least, which was far above that of any country. Wherever I went in those days, into whatever little interior city and town of China, I saw Japanese goods, exports from less than a penny in value to more than a thousand dollars. The Chinese had vast quantities of raw material they wanted to sell to Japan and Japan needed raw material desperately. Indeed, the whole of Asia wanted to sell Japan raw material, and the Japanese had a strategic opportunity, because they could manufacture so cheaply and so well.”

“We know now,” the little figure from Japan sighed. “But at the time we were completely deceived by our militarists. And we are so frightened lest we are being deceived again. The people have no way to know the truth and we have no one we can trust.”

It is the predicament of all peoples that we have no way to know the truth and no one whom we can wholly trust. Even in those years so long ago I could feel the doubt of the Japanese people as I travelled through their country. The shape of the future was already clearly drawn. The army was being increased, families were having to give up their sons, Japanese were encouraged to move to China and above all to Manchuria. Industrialists were making plans with the militarists in the old dangerous combination, and everywhere I felt the reluctance of the people, who had no way of finding the truth because they had no way of reaching the other peoples.

Yet I could not stay in Japan to follow that fate. We began to hope that white people could safely return again to China, for the Nationalists, under the new leadership of General Chiang Kai-shek, were setting up a government in Nanking, my home city, and it was only a matter of months, we were told, until order would be restored enough for our return. For, as all now know, Chiang Kai-shek separated himself from the Communists in 1927. While we were hiding in Mrs. Lu’s hut, he was already in Shanghai negotiating with Chinese and Western bankers and other influential men. He had disliked the increasing arrogance of the Russian Communists, and was determined to drive them out of China, and put an end to Chinese Communism. To this end he declared himself friendly to the West, and invited foreigners to return to Nanking, which was to be the capital.

It was good news, and yet I felt sad to leave Japan, where I had found shelter and peace and friendliness. I should like to set up a monument here to the people of Japan, a modest monument, for I have not the means of making anything more. I should like to say that living among them as I did, without pretensions and in real poverty, I found them finer than any people I have ever known, in their own particular way. Other peoples have been more articulate, more demonstrative, more aggressively kind, but the Japanese were so delicate in their understanding of sorrow, so restrained and yet so profound in their sympathy, so exactly right in the measure of their comfort, which never demanded and never expressed itself, but simply was there. They did not fear long silences when one could not speak. Silences were not hastily filled with needless talk. Mere presence was enough. This same quality of silence has been a part of our evenings here at the farm with our Japanese friend. She can sit quite at ease without speaking, not because she has nothing to say, but because she waits to discover what one of us might wish to say. She responds upon our own level, her remarks gentle and penetrating. Often she presents some new and even original idea but in the same quiet voice. This can be a very soothing atmosphere.

And I am forever grateful for the beauty of Japan, for the wooded mountains, rising so sharply above the most beautiful coastline in the world. I remember warmly the twisted pines and the rocks and the incoming curling tides. The people built their houses as a part of the landscape, the roof lines conforming to the planes of rock and coast and mountain, and within the houses I found the same treasurable discipline of beauty and restraint. I know no other country where beauty is so restrained that poured into one clear mold it emerges in the form of an ecstasy. And I admire above all the fortitude of the Japanese upon their dangerous islands. For they never know when fierce earthquakes will destroy their homes or typhoons attack them or tidal waves sweep over their coastal villages. They live literally in the presence of death and this they know and yet they are calm.

Never did I conceive it possible that the Japanese people could be an enemy to me nor I to them. War was an agony to be endured while one remembered that the ones who made war, who committed crimes and atrocities, were not the Japanese people, but those who deceived them. I remember the day after Pearl Harbor was bombed that I sat in my office in New York, and Yasuo Kuniyoshi, the great Japanese artist, was announced. He came in and I rose at once to receive him.

“Sit down, please,” I said.

He sat down in a chair opposite me, speechless, the tears running down his cheeks. He did not wipe them away, he did not move, he simply sat there gazing at me, the tears running down his cheeks and splashing on his coat. “Our two countries—” he whispered at last, and could not go on.

“I know,” I said. “But let us remember that our two peoples are not enemies, no matter what happens.”

There was nothing more said. He wiped his eyes after a few minutes, we clasped hands and he went away. We were continuing friends, understanding each other, whatever the day’s news was.

One other such person I knew, months later, perhaps even years later, for I have never been able to measure time, and this person was an American woman, quite average at that. It was in Los Angeles, where I had gone to make some speeches for war relief. The Japanese-Americans had already been sent to the detention camps, and some sort of argument was going on about the confiscation of their property. Suddenly one day I received a hurry call from the American Civil Liberties Union to go and testify on behalf of the Japanese-Americans before a State senatorial committee then meeting in Los Angeles. Without delay I put on my hat and went to the hall. There I was called almost immediately, and I argued that it would be gross injustice to confiscate the property of persons whose guilt had not even been proved. And when, I asked, had it become legal in the United States to confiscate property? I came from Pennsylvania where there were many German-Americans. Indeed, the center of the secret Nazi Bund had only recently been discovered in a town less than five miles away from our home, and a neighbor’s barn was burnt because she had said something publicly against Hitler. While it was burning she received a telephone call, and an unknown voice had said, “This’ll learn you to talk about the Führer!” Yet there had been no talk about confiscating the property of German-Americans, and no thought of doing so. To discriminate thus even between enemies was not just, I said.

When my testimony was finished a middle-aged plain-looking woman asked to testify also on behalf of the Japanese-Americans. She was allowed to do so, and she said very simply that she did not think it was fitting for Americans to take peoples’ houses and land just because they were Japanese in ancestry. She said that some of her neighbors had told her she ought not to speak for the Japanese because her son was at that moment fighting them in the Pacific.

“But,” she said, her face honest and good, and her eyes clear, “I tell them that my Sam ain’t fightin’ the same Japanese. I know Mr. and Mrs. Omura and they’ve always been kind good people and nice neighbors, and I don’t think we ought to take their property. They’ll need it when they come back. Anyway, it’s theirs.”

A scattered hand clapping followed her testimony, and two or three others got up and dared to endorse what she had said. I don’t know that any of us had influence enough to impress the row of hard old faces behind the table, but at any rate the Japanese-Americans were not robbed, and later their sons proved their loyalty by fighting and dying for America in alien Italy, while in the concentration camps their families lived with dignity and grace, creating gardens in the desert and works of art out of sagebrush, roots and stones.

I did once make another little monument of a sort, too, to the Japanese people. It was carved from a day spent in Kobe, a day which threatened to be lonely and sad because I was then lonely and sad, and which instead was an experience which I have placed among the most treasured of my life. I put it into a small book for children, entitled One Bright Day, which was exactly what it was.

Ah well, I needed a memory crammed with tenderness and beauty when I went back to China that next winter. We were still not allowed to return to Nanking, after all, and so we had to find quarters somehow in Shanghai, a city more repulsive than ever that year, filled as it was with refugees of every sort, and it was the more repulsive because of the war lords and the rich people and their families living in magnificence in the French and British concessions. They rolled along the streets in huge cars chauffeured by sad-faced White Russians, and when they came out of cars to enter expensive English and French shops they were guarded by tall young White Russians, in uniforms. These were, as I have said, the sons of nobility and intellectuals driven from Soviet Russia, and their sisters were trying to earn their living as hostesses in the new night clubs. Sometimes in despair, for there was no future for them, Russian girls even became the concubines of the war lords, and joined the heterogeneous households of women and children. It became fashionable for a war lord who had made his peace with the revolutionaries at a price and had retired to Shanghai to take a beautiful White Russian girl as a concubine, and soon the wealthy merchants and bankers began to do the same thing.

One of the most repulsive aspects of Shanghai life grew out of the promiscuity among the decadent Chinese intellectuals. The city had many rootless young Chinese, educated abroad, who did not want to involve themselves in anything more trying than art and literature, the artists from the Latin Quarter in Paris, the postgraduates from Cambridge and Oxford in England, the Johns Hopkins-trained surgeons who did not practice, the Columbia Ph.D.s who could not bear life in “the interior,” the graduates of Harvard and Yale who kept their hands soft and spent their time in literary clubs and poetry-making, who published little decadent magazines in English and pretended that the common Chinese did not exist. In such groups there were also a few American women who had come to China for adventure, women who took Chinese lovers and about whom the Chinese lovers boasted, so that what an American might fondly think was secret was in reality everywhere known. There were always, too, American hostesses in well-to-do homes of American business tycoons, who thought they were seeing “new China” when they invited such mixed groups to their homes, but were in reality only seeing the expatriates, who knew little indeed of their own country.

There was nothing healthy or good about Shanghai life. Its Chinese city was filthy and crowded, and the foreign concessions were hiding places for criminals of all countries, behind their façades of wealth and magnificence. Upon the streets the beggars and the struggling people pushed and hurried. If I had to draw a cartoon of Shanghai at that period, I would draw a wretched riksha puller, his vehicle piled with five or six factory workers on their way home after work, being threatened by a tall English policeman, or a turbaned Sikh in the British Concession, while he made way for a car full of satin-clothed people of any nationality that one might mention, but usually Chinese. I am not one of those who think the poor are always right, for I know they are often stupid and wrong, and the rich are not wrong merely because they are rich. Yet that is what I see when I think of Shanghai.

A friend recently sent me a copy of a letter which I wrote from Shanghai to her in White Plains, New York, on December 26 of that year 1927. I include it here because of the prophecy it contains, a prophecy I wrote twenty-six years ago. I do not claim to be a prophet, at that. If I had any advantage over other white people in those days, it came from a life centered in China and the Chinese instead of in the constricted foreign circle of my own race. The few foreigners who had lived as I had certainly knew at least as much as I could know. Here is the letter:

1056 Ave. Joffre

Shanghai

Dec. 26, 1927

Dear—

Your letters to others I happened to see last night and today being the day after Christmas and the children still absorbed in their toys, I am moved by an unaccustomed sense of leisure to write you solely in the selfish hope that you will write to me.

Your letters mirror a delightfully placid existence in your American home. I feel in some ways like a poor little girl looking into a shop window full of unattainable pleasures. Like the same little poor girl, however, I have my compensations. Living in China these days is like being the spectator at a tremendous melodrama, with the Communists as villain and the Nanking government as the fair damsel in distress. The crisis is fast approaching and the spectators, as well as the heroine, are beginning to look frantically about for the hero, who, as yet, has not appeared, and may not even yet be born! Meanwhile the villain is waxing bold and furious and no one can foretell the end….

As for China itself, it is very difficult to speak of the future here. We stand by from day to day. If this were any other country one would say such a condition of chaos could not possibly continue, but in China anything can continue indefinitely so long as people gather together enough food to keep from starvation. Tremendous crops and poor transportation have combined this year to make rice in central China unusually cheap and therefore chaos is the more philosophically endured.

You will have read of the Nationalists’ endeavor to get rid of the Soviet. They have returned the Russian Consul and all the Red Russians they could get hold of. Many Russians have been treated most brutally in Hankow and Canton. I hate Bolshevism, but I hate brutality, too. Everyone has been shocked by the brutality of the Chinese in this affair.

The hardest thing about living in China these days, however, is the spirit of disillusionment and despair which is everywhere growing. The best Chinese are so sad over the failure of the Nationalists, already apparent, that it is heart-breaking. The Nationalists are using the old militarist methods — heavy, illegal taxes, corruptly spent. Same old thing! Chiang Kai-shek could retire a rich man, we hear, and whether true or not, the gossip implies disillusionment.

All this is hard to bear. The leaders in the Nationalist party are returned students, for the most part. It is a shock to those who have believed that in modern education lay the salvation of China. The hopefulness in the whole thing is, however, that this despair and disillusionment may be the beginning of sober self-realization and facing the fact that the roots of China’s troubles are in the moral weakness of her upper classes, and in the helplessness of the peasants. Full humility and facing of truth is the only hope I see for this country. Many are realizing it. But here in Shanghai I am appalled by the wanton extravagance and carelessness of Chinese rich people. I feel as though I were living at the capital of Louis of France before the French revolution broke. The streets are crowded with hungry, sullen, half-starved people and among them roll the sedans and limousines of the wealthy Chinese, spending fabulous sums on pleasure, food, and clothes, wholly oblivious to others. This cannot go on forever. Personally I feel that unless something happens to change it, we are in for a real revolution here, in comparison to which all this so far will be a mere game of ball on a summer’s afternoon. Then it will be a real uprising of the ignorant and poor, against those who own anything. When it will come, no one can tell. Good crops put it off awhile. But the people are very restive and angry now….

Shanghai is swarming, too, with destitute White Russians. They keep pouring down from the north, anxious for money or work or anything. They do the most menial labor, and are oftentimes the most pathetic of creatures. The night watchman at a Chinese house near us was once a professor of literature at a Russian university — a cultured gentleman. One’s heart gets so surcharged with the sorrows of the world here sometimes that one breaks….

As ever,

Pearl

As for my own bit of the city, it was a small third-floor apartment in a fairly comfortable house which I shared with two other American families. Of those months I spent in Shanghai there is not one incident worth telling except a pleasant day after Christmas. Somewhere during that time I wrote a story and it was sold by my agent in the United States. Yes, I had an agent by then, because it took so many months to wait for rejections. A month perhaps, to write a story and type it, a month to send it to New York where all magazine editors and publishers seemed to live, two or three months for a lagging decision to reject, another month for the rejection to reach me, made me foresee an eternity of waiting. One day when I was walking past Kelly and Walsh’s bookstore, I went in and among some secondhand books I found a dingy little book called The Writer’s Guide. It was published in London, but I searched the index and found the names of two literary agents who had offices also in New York.

I wrote to them both. One of them replied after two months that he could not consider material from me because “no one was interested in Chinese subjects.” The other, David Lloyd, replied that he would like to see my material. I sent him my two stories once printed in Asia Magazine, with the suggestion that they might make a novel. As a matter of fact, Brentano’s had already written me about the first one, asking me to enlarge it into a novel, but upon reflection I had decided that the story was too slight to enlarge and they had declined the second story as a possibility for combination. For a long time no further word came from Mr. Lloyd, and I all but forgot the stories.

But some other small story was sold, somewhere, I don’t remember where. That Shanghai Christmas was the most dismal and wretched I had ever had, and added to the general sadness of my situation, I received not one gift which had any meaning. I am not one to care for gifts, nor to be ungrateful, I hope, for thoughtfulness, but that year I needed just one real gift.

The day after that dark Christmas I decided upon what, for me, amounted to a crime. I decided to spend my little store of money, and thus entirely selfish, I sallied forth on a grey December day and bought Christmas gifts for myself.

I wish that I could say that I felt afterwards a sense of shame but even now I feel nothing but satisfaction. For those few objects of beauty which my dollars could purchase had such a restorative influence upon my soul that from then on my courage was renewed. And of that winter in Shanghai I can remember nothing else, wilfully of course, for there was plenty in our crowded house.

No, wait — I do remember Li Sau-tse and her romance, which in its small way was contemporaneously connected with the romance of Chiang Kai-shek and Soong May-ling, then a young Shanghai debutante.

The redoubtable Li Sau-tse had of course accompanied us from Japan and she had established herself in the basement kitchen of our three-family house and proceeded to cook our meals. With the three amahs, she declared, she could manage, although she might in the future want a table boy, but it would be one of her own choosing. We were willing to be managed and gave no more thought to the table boy. One morning, however, we heard a violent noise in the basement where Li Sau-tse lived, a man’s voice protesting loudly. A man? Our servants were all women. I sent an amah for Li Sau-tse and after a few minutes she came up breathless and red-faced while the man’s voice continued to bellow from below.

“Li Sau-tse,” I exclaimed, “what is going on?”

She explained. Since these were modern times, she had fallen in love with the table boy of a neighbor the winter before and there had been some amorous passages and promises. Then the man had disappeared.

“It was those Communists,” she declared. “When they came and you all left, my man went crazy. Everything was upset, you understand. There were no law and custom any more. In this time another woman seized him from me, and he could not be found. So I went to Japan to serve you. But yesterday when I was at the market to buy your vegetables, I saw the woman, older than I am and uglier. He was with her and I seized him before her eyes and brought him here and locked him in my room. We are going to be married.”

“Bring him here,” I said. “I will talk with him and see whether he wishes to marry you. We cannot have this noise in the house.”

She looked unwilling but she went away and returned soon with a tall good-looking young man.

“How is this?” I asked him as severely as I could.

He was quite willing to tell me how it had happened. “It is difficult for me now that we are having a revolution,” he said. “Two women want me for a husband. They are both widows, it is true, but such women are shameless nowadays.”

“Do you want either of them for a wife?” I asked.

“Either would do,” he said quite honestly. “And I would like a wife, although to get a virgin still costs money. A widow can be had for nothing. I am willing.”

“But which?” I urged.

“Li Sau-tse is as good as the other,” he replied. “Yet I do not wish to be locked up.”

Li Sau-tse, who was supposed to be in the kitchen, now thrust her head in the door to bawl at him, “If I do not lock you up, you good-for-nothing, you will go back to the other woman!”

The man grinned rather nicely. “Let’s get married,” he suggested.

This was all entirely unorthodox, but it was symbolic of the upset times, at least in coastal China. Marriages were being made independently, divorces were easy, a mere newspaper notice was enough, and the incident in my own house made me realize suddenly that the old China was really gone.

So they were married, we gave the wedding feast, and for a few days all went well. Li Sau-tse managed the table boy who was now her husband as she managed everyone, and since she had the best heart in the world, I let it go. Alas, the other woman’s charms became brighter in the bridegroom’s memory as he continued to live under Li Sau-tse’s oppressive love, and one night he told her he wanted to leave. She locked him up immediately, and we were wakened at dawn with his shouting and thumping on the door.

Once more I summoned the strong-minded bride. “You cannot keep a grown man locked up,” I protested.

She looked grim and folded her arms across her full bosom. “Do you know what he wants?” she demanded. “He wants the other woman, too — both of us!”

“Many Chinese men have more than one wife,” I reminded her.

“No,” she said impressively, “not since the revolution. And he is only a common man. He is not Chiang Kai-shek.”

While this kitchen romance had been going on, the much more important one had been taking place in the new national government. Chiang Kai-shek had been pursuing his courtship of Soong May-ling, and although it was supposed to be private, everybody knew everything. They knew that old Mother Soong objected, as a stout Methodist Christian, to his already, reportedly, having three wives. The young lady herself, reared in America, also objected, one heard, to this old-fashioned competition. She insisted that she must be the only wife. Her elder sister had made the same demand of Sun Yat-sen. The three earlier Madame Chiangs were not only to be put away but divorced, gossip said, although Chiang Kai-shek it seemed, was reluctant to be so severe, and public opinion was with the older ladies who were blameless and loyal. Compromise was being talked of, however, not by the Soong family, but by the interested nation. It was this compromise which disgusted Li Sau-tse. A Chiang Kai-shek could have what he wanted, the old and the new, but not her common fellow. The upshot of it nevertheless, was that she released her bridegroom upon my insistence, and he fled instantly and she went about weeping for several days. Suddenly, when she had given up hope of ever seeing him again, he returned one day without explanation, and from then on was an exemplary husband.

It was a happy ending, and quite unexpected. When last I saw Li Sau-tse she was the proud mother of a child, not her own, for the terrible abortion had made motherhood impossible for her, to her great grief. In necessity she returned to the ways of old China. She chose a nice ugly concubine for her husband, and the obliging girl promptly produced a fine baby boy whom Li Sau-tse instantly appropriated for her own. She adored him and kept him beautifully dressed, exhibited him with maternal conceit and boasted of his intelligence. At the age of six months, she declared, if she whistled in a certain insinuating way he would immediately make water, and she was prepared to prove it to anybody at any time and anywhere.

As for Chiang Kai-shek, whose high romance coincided with this simple one, he was obliged to sacrifice his wives, or so we were told, and there was a great wedding, very fashionable and Christian, and Soong May-ling became the First Lady of the land. They made a handsome pair, he so straight and soldierly in his bearing, and she proud and beautiful. I said to a Chinese gentleman after the wedding, “What do the people think of this marriage?”

He looked at me astonished, “Does it matter? A man’s marriages are his own business.”

Ah well, it was a man’s point of view!

Meanwhile, far more important than romance was what was happening now in the nation. Chiang Kai-shek was in Nanking consolidating his government. It was a time of weighing and testing to see which elements in the revolution would follow the right wing which he led. The Three Cities upriver were uncertain, then they decided for him and we were all hopeful. The Communist party was firmly expelled from the Kuomintang and was forbidden even to exist in China. All Soviet advisors were sent back to Russia. Moreover, the Nationalist army forced its way triumphantly to Peking and drove out Chang Tso-lin, the last war lord in that seat of empire, and victory was announced.

This was all very satisfactory for the white people, at least, who felt Chiang Kai-shek was the best leader on the horizon, and certainly one who would not demand too much from them. They wished to do their part, and so they gave up some of the smaller of their advantages. The Concessions at Hankow and the lesser ports were returned to the Chinese, although the really important ones were kept, as were the extraterritorial rights. This was compromise and both sides so understood it.

The Communists, however, were not so easily vanquished. Part of the Fourth Army, under the leadership of Chu Teh, mutinied against Chiang in Kiangsi, and was immediately organized into the Red army, dangerous because it provided a nucleus around which all discontented persons could gather. Still more dangerous was the fact that while most of the intellectuals, the Western-trained scholars, left the Reds and flocked about Chiang Kai-shek who promised them government jobs, the peasants had nowhere to turn. Those who had been organized for the first time by the Communists, remained for the most part with the Communists, for to peasants Chiang Kai-shek had made no promises. This division between peasant and intellectual was the first threat to the new government. Never in Chinese history has any government succeeded if there is division between peasant and intellectual.

But this I did not comprehend immediately. The American Consul had granted us permission to return to Nanking and I had to think of making a home again. Our house, I heard, had been vacated at last after having various occupants and fortunately it had not been burned. But it had been used recently as a government cholera base and it would have to be thoroughly cleaned and disinfected. My kind Chinese friends helped me again, they whose little son had been killed by the overdose through hypodermic. I have not used their surname because it might be dangerous in these strange days under the Communists if I write it down, even though now I am thousands of miles away and an ocean lies between us, and all the years besides. Let me call them Chao, because it is not their name. At any rate, they invited me and my little family to stay in their house as long as we needed to do so, while I made the other house home again.

We went back, the first American family to return, although my unconquerable old father had returned alone some months before and had been living quietly with a Chinese family in the city. How strange it was to ride again into the city gates which had been shut so finally behind us when we left, homeless and possessing nothing! I saw no visible change, the carriage was as dirty and decrepit as ever, the horse as disconsolate after the revolution as before, and the streets were as crowded and filthy. Nothing else was changed, either, not the great city wall, nor the monumental gates, the pagodas and the temples and above all the soaring crest of Purple Mountain.

I say nothing was changed and yet the carriage had not passed through the city gate before I felt a change. It was in the people. The city was crowded with new people who looked at us with curious and unfriendly stares. I saw familiar faces, too, the peanut vendor who had always stood at the corner of The Drum, Tower was still there, the gatekeeper at the Li Family Gardens, an occasional riksha puller, passers on the street. But they did not smile nor did I. It was too early yet to know if old friends could be recognized.

And so we went jogging along with our few bags to the Chao house, a modest place in a valley below the university buildings, and there we found Mr. and Mrs. Chao and their recently born baby girl and their old parents waiting for us. They were in the tiny living room, and I felt that they were still uneasy and had not dared to come outside to greet us. But they were kind and as warm as ever otherwise, and Mrs. Chao led us to two small rooms set aside for us.

We stayed there a month, and I shall never forget the unfailing daily courtesy of this Chinese family. If they were inconvenienced or in danger from our presence they never let me know. If my two children were troublesome, I heard nothing of it, except that one day my amah told me that the elder child had thrown mud into the jar of soy sauce, that prized possession of every family. Mrs. Chao, being an old-fashioned housewife, made her own soy sauce and it always stood for a whole year fermenting in the yard under the eaves of the house, the jar covered with a wooden lid.

“Do not speak of it,” the amah said. “She made me promise not to tell you. But I do tell you because it will be necessary to show her some special kindness in return when the opportunity comes.”

The opportunity came a few days later when I happened to see in the glass-covered foreign china closet of Mrs. Chao’s living room a fine large platter which had belonged to my set of Haviland china. There it was, quite obvious, and when I first noticed it, I almost cried out, “Oh, where did you find my platter?”

Remembering my amah’s warning, however, I kept silent, and as the days passed, I found other possessions which had once been in my house, a set of teapots, a sewing machine, a victrola and records, and so on.

“Where did she get them?” I asked my amah in the privacy of our own rooms.

“She got them honestly by buying them at the thieves’ market,” the amah said. “That is where the looters sold the foreigners’ goods when the Communists came in.”

“Isn’t it strange she doesn’t ask me if I want them back?” I inquired. I had thought that I understood my Chinese friends, but this was a new experience.

The amah looked surprised. “But you lost them,” she reminded me. “They do not belong to you any more. And she is your friend — why should they not belong to her?”

I could not explain why this seemed wrong reasoning, and yet it did. I was more American than I thought. “I don’t mind anything except my Haviland platter,” I said stubbornly. “I do want that back.”

“Remember the soy sauce, please,” my amah advised. “If you are patient,” she added, “someday you may be able to have the plate again without losing friendship.”

I knew the amah was right. To lose friendship is a human disaster, and so I held my peace and pretended not to see the platter. Meanwhile every day I spent in my own house, superintending repairs, and when I was not satisfied with the work, getting down on the floor myself to scrub and sand and disinfect every crack between the boards. All the walls had to be whitewashed and every bit of woodwork and stone scrubbed with lysol. The house smelled hideously but at last it was clean and safe to live in again, and I began to gather some furniture and to hang new curtains.

Some of the household objects which our good servants had saved for us were returned from their hiding places in friends’ houses, enough so that here and there were remembrances of what had been before. And speaking of this, I must speak, too, of the manuscript of The Exile, which I had put into a wall closet. There it had been overlooked by the mobs but discovered later by students of mine who had gone to my house to salvage my books. They saved many books and these now stand upon the shelves of the library here in my American home, their pages torn and their backs soiled, but they are precious to me. I even have ten of the old Dickens volumes which I read so often as a child. Among these books when they were returned to me I found my manuscript quite safe and indeed still in the box in which I had left it, and not a page was missing.

And it was next to the last day, I think, before we left the Chad house, when absent-mindedly I let my eyes rest on the Haviland platter. I was not thinking of it any more, but unguardedly my eyes had fallen upon it and Mrs. Chao noticed. She said in her sweet calm voice, “I bought that big platter of yours so that I might have a dish upon which to place a whole fish. But it is too flat — the sauce runs off.”

“You have been so kind to us,” I said, trying to seem indifferent. “Let me buy you a big fish plate in the china shops in South City.”

“Do not trouble yourself,” she said. “Are we not friends?”

It was true that our friendship was deeper than ever. We had enjoyed the month together, and not by the slightest sign had the Chinese family showed the least weariness, although there must have been times when our presence was a burden indeed. I doubt that any but a Chinese family could have been so unfailing in courtesy, for no other people, perhaps, are so trained in the art of human relationships.

We moved at last to our own house, leaving gifts behind us, and among the gifts was a fine big fish dish which my amah had gone to South City to buy for me. The day after we moved, Mrs. Chao’s amah came up the hill with my Haviland platter.

“My mistress asks me to thank you especially for the fish dish,” she said as she stood before me. “She asks me to say that since she now has the fish dish, she would like to present you with this plate.”

With both hands she presented to me my plate, wrapped in red paper, and I received it with both hands as a valuable gift, and certainly as one which I had never seen before.

“You see,” my amah said, later, “if relationships are conducted with honor, the reward is sure.”

“Thank you for teaching me,” I said.

My friendship with Mrs. Chao continued throughout the years, we discussed the most intimate details in one family crisis or another, yet never did we violate the courtesy of the platter that had been mine, then was hers, and now was mine again. It was an incident, slight in itself, and yet for me it has been unforgettable. Through my Chinese youth I had learned that the proper conduct of human relationships is the most important lesson of life. Now the learning was crystallized. I perceived a technique as well as a text. The technique is mutual consideration and deference, applied with patience and in the certain conviction that there is reason in every man and woman, a cause for all that is said and done. Such cause must be known and understood before judgment can be made and action proceed. Great lessons are learned usually in simple and everyday ways. So it was in the case of the Haviland platter and the fish dish, exchanged between my Chinese friend and me. At this distance of years I have forgotten the hardships of that return to the despoiled house in Nanking. What I remember is the lesson of friendship. That is a permanent possession.

I am an inveterate homemaker, it is at once my pleasure, my recreation, and my handicap. Were I a man, my books would have been written in leisure, protected by a wife and a secretary and various household officials. As it is, being a woman, my work has had to be done between bouts of homemaking. Thus to establish again my Nanking house and garden took solid months. I am not a perfectionist, I do not like floors that cannot be walked upon or books that cannot be left about, or untouchable tables and chairs. But a strong sense of design, and a love of ordered beauty are essentials of life not only for my family, as a duty, but for myself as a background. I cannot live anyhow. In one room, if it is all I have, I am compelled as instinctively as a bee to create order and produce a home. I cannot settle myself to writing books unless I have first made this background of life as complete as I can. The necessity is a curse and a blessing, separately and together, but so it is.

Before I could look about me, then, to see what was happening, I had to settle my house and establish the routines. My father came back to his own rooms, my children were happy in their nurseries, the kitchen was in order, the servants re-engaged, all except the incorrigible gardener who went with the Communists, and to all appearances my life was as it had been before, except that it was not and never could be again. We were living in another world, not the old world of our war lord and our ancient city. As soon as I bestirred myself to go out of my house I saw that a government was here which was like none I had known. It was the Nationalist government of China, and its head was Chiang Kai-shek, a spruce sharply straight figure whom we seldom saw. But he was already a presence in the city, a force, a personality. I heard him talked about on the streets as well as in the homes of my friends. Once, for example, there was to be a procession for a visiting prince from Europe, and vast preparations were made, even to the extent of tearing down hundreds of the mat huts in which the beggars lived along the foot of the city wall, clustered together like wasps’ nests. But the old shops and slums could not be torn down and so walls of mats, thirty feet high, were built to hide the worst of the ancient buildings from the eyes of the foreign prince. Oh, how ashamed the young Chinese Western-trained men and women were, in those days, of their country and the people whom they loved so much, and how touching and pitiful was this shame! Well, on the morning of the day of the procession I went out early to escape the crowd. I needed a length of raw silk to make a curtain for the dining room. The common people were already gathering for the show, and on my way back I was caught in the crowd and had to stand until they moved. Next to me was a vendor of small bread loaves. He held his basket on his arm, and over the loaves was the usual filthy grey rag to keep the dust and flies away. As usual, too, he talked. Everybody always talked to anybody on the streets, and it was one of the delights of living in China.

“This old Chiang Kai-shek,” the vendor declared, “he is winning all the battles with bandit war lords. As soon as the foreign prince is gone he will fight in the North.”

“Will he win?” I inquired.

“It depends on the weather,” the vendor replied judiciously. He was an ancient man, a few sparse white hairs stood out on his withered chin and his eyes were rheumy with trachoma.

“The weather?” I repeated.

“Certainly the weather,” he replied. “This Chiang is a river-god, reincarnated in a human body. How do I know? He was born by a river in Fukien. Before he was born that river flooded every year. Since he was born it has not flooded once. Therefore if the sun shines he always loses in battles. If it is a rainy day, he always wins. We shall have to wait and see what Heaven decrees.”

Chiang Kai-shek had already become a legend, then! There were more legends and stories every day, not only about him but about his new young wife, too. The people of Nanking, like other Chinese, were lively in humor and curiosity, and they were well aware of the problems which a Chinese military man, who had never visited the West and who was still essentially old-fashioned in his outlook, would have with a spirited and beautiful young woman who, because she had lived in America since she was nine years old, was considered a foreigner by her countrymen. She could not speak good Chinese and she did not know Chinese history. She was Western in her habits and in the way she looked and moved. Worst of all, in Chinese opinion, she was dominating and outspoken, and their sympathy was therefore with her husband. Servants from inside the Presidential Mansion described incidents exciting and amusing, and the whole city relished the situation of a strong man, old-fashioned, married to a strong woman, new-fashioned. Bets were made as to who would win on anticipated occasions. Would the lady be allowed to attend the sessions of the executives in the government? Bets were almost even and only slightly in Chiang’s favor. The guards had been ordered not to admit the lady but when the final moment came and she stood face to face with them would they dare to refuse her? She would be too clever to arrive with her husband. She would come later, when he was busy, and then, unsupported, would they have the courage to tell her what he had commanded? Which did they fear the more, the male or the female tiger?

It was impossible not to be amused, and in this particular incident it would not be fair to conceal the outcome. Those who bet on Chiang Kai-shek won. After that, the bets were always in his favor. He lost once again, however, years later, when the lady wanted to visit the United States. An eyewitness, whose name cannot matter, told me that one day the great man came out of his personal rooms looking pettish.

“Such trouble,” he said in effect. “Every day it is the same thing. She wants to go to America.”

My friend looked sympathetic but said nothing. One does not interfere between tigers.

That morning, the great man went on, she had produced a new argument. The President of the United States, she told him, allowed Mrs. Roosevelt to go anywhere she pleased. This was because the President of the United States was a modern man. At this very moment, she said, Mrs. Roosevelt was disporting herself in England, having a wonderful time. Whereas she, surely no less low in position than Mrs. Roosevelt as the First Lady of another great republic, could not go anywhere abroad to have a good time! The great man then told her to go, but he made more than one word out of it.

My friend ended his story with relish. The great man, he said, had afterwards been astounded at the regal tour of his lady, especially when she was even invited to address the Congress of the United States, since he had supposed she meant only to make of it a pleasure trip and shopping tour. But it may be that even a queen is only a woman in the chamber she shares with the king. Who knows?

My fears for the new government came one day to a climax. We had heard much talk of the new city that was to be made from our old Southern Capital. We were proud that Nanking had been chosen as the capital of the new government, in spite of the grumbling of the foreign legations who had been so long and comfortably established in Peking, the seat of Empire. A clear break with the past was good, we felt. Moreover, the last true Chinese dynasty, the Ming, had made its capital in Nanking and outside the city there still stood the ancient stone monuments. It was true that later in their dynasty the Ming rulers had moved the capital to Peking, but this only provided a precedent for Chiang Kai-shek when he had conquered all the war lords who still lingered in various parts of the northern country, if he should after all decide upon Peking. Meanwhile Nanking, we were told, was to be made into a modern city with wide streets and electricity and telephones and automobiles and great department stores. New public buildings would be built, and motion picture theaters and government houses, and there was even to be a modern sanitation system and city water. We listened and wondered. Our city was as old-fashioned as ancient Jerusalem. Its cobbled streets were narrow and winding and if a riksha and a sedan chair had to pass, the people were obliged to flatten themselves against the walls of the houses. Gutters ran on both sides of the cobbles and into them the householders poured the waste water of kitchen and washtubs. A faint reek of urine usually hung in the air, particularly in rainy season, for while the women and girls used decent wooden buckets in the privacy of their bedrooms the common man stepped lightheartedly out of his front door and stood against the wall, and babies were held over the gutters at regular intervals. And what about the shops? The heaps of vegetables and fruits and fish and meats were piled to the very edge of the streets and any space left was taken by the tables of fortunetellers and secondhand booksellers’ stalls. What was to happen to all these necessary aspects of daily life? We did not know.

I heard rumors, but then one could always hear rumors in a Chinese city lacking daily newspapers and regular reporters. I could not imagine how a modern city could be made from our old capital. Then one day I understood. Our tailor, he who first had come to tell us of the Communists’ entry into the city, and he who, by the way, and I may as well say it here, was later the tragic hero of my short story “The Frill,” came to tell me that “they” were pushing down the homes of the people with a monstrous machine. “They” by this time meant the new government.

“Please explain,” I said, unbelieving.

“I cannot explain,” he replied. “It is being done.”

I put on my jacket and went out to see for myself. We lived not far from the main road into the city and a few minutes’ walk brought me to the spot. There I saw the monster machine, something I had never seen before nor heard of, and therefore which I could not name. A man rode upon it, a young Chinese man, not a workingman but a Western-educated man, and he was guiding it slowly along one side of the street and then the other. What was he doing? He was pushing down the houses. Those old one-story houses, made of hand-shaped brick and cemented together with lime plaster, had stood well enough for shelter through hundreds of years, but they had been built long before such a machine had been conceived in the mind of Western man, and they could not withstand the assault. They crumbled into ruins.

Had this been in my earlier world, I would have stopped the man and asked him what he did and why. But this was another world, and I did not ask. I was a foreigner, I knew it now, and I dared not ask. I stood among the Chinese people, watching, silent, stricken. And the young man said not a word, not even when an old grandmother who had lived in a house since she was born, began to cry wildly and aloud. I asked her son in a whisper if the families were paid for the loss of their homes, and he whispered back they had been promised pay, but none of them trusted promises. I never knew whether they were paid. I think it likely that some were paid and some were not, depending upon the personal honesty of those through whom the government dealt with individual owners. But no money could pay for the homes that were gone, with all their inherited traditions and memories.

I went back to my own resurrected home with a heavy heart indeed, for I knew that from that day on the new government was doomed in the end to fail. Why? Because it had failed already in understanding the people whom it purposed to govern, and when a government does not rule for the benefit of those ruled, sooner or later it always fails, and history teaches that lesson to every generation, whether or not its rulers can or will understand. And the Communists in China gained their first victory that day, even though they were then in apparent flight. True, the people did not know who the Communists were, true that the name was still only a name, but when the young Nationalists sowed these first wild seeds of the winds of resentment in the hearts of their own people, they prepared for the whirlwinds which would compel the people to turn to their enemy merely because it was the enemy of those whom they resented. It is a natural human impulse, individual as well as general, that when one hates, the hatred becomes a benefit to the enemy of the hated one. Thus before the new government was even well established, it had alienated the people.

And yet, cursed as I always am with the necessity to see two sides of a question, I felt deeply for the young Nationalists and especially for those who had been educated in the United States. They came back so eagerly to their own country, proud of their honors and their degrees, sincerely patriotic, too, but in the years while they had been away they had forgotten what their country was, enormous, illiterate, mediaeval, or as they loved to call it, “feudal.” To me who had always lived there it was beautiful in spite of its ancient filth, its illiteracy, its age. Nay, it was beautiful because of its age, and the vast accumulation of its wisdom. A people so reasonable, so ready to change when they understood the need, could easily have been persuaded and led, but they were the last people on earth to be forced. Chinese were born, it seemed to me, with an accumulated wisdom, a natural sophistication, an intelligent naïveté, and unless they were transplanted too young, these qualities ripened in them. To talk even with a farmer and his family, none of whom could read or write, was often to hear a philosophy at once sane and humorous. If ever I am homesick for China, now that I am home in my own country, it is when I discover here no philosophy. Our people have opinions and creeds and prejudices and ideas but as yet no philosophy. That, perhaps, can only come to a people with thousands of years. And the sad and frightening fact was that the young and uprooted Chinese, who had been trained in Western universities or in missionary schools and other modern schools in China, had lost the Chinese philosophy. They belonged neither to East nor to West, and they were pitiful, for they were dedicated to the improvement of their own country, and yet they could not understand that it was impossible for them to save their countrymen because they themselves were lost. They still did not know how to speak to their countrymen. I cringed when I heard an earnest young Chinese, the milk of his American doctorate still wet behind his ears, haranguing a Chinese crowd on a street in our city, or in a village where I chanced to be that day. He was so thin, so intense, so filled with missionary zeal as he talked about sanitation, or better farming, or the new government, or foreign imperialism, or the Unequal Treaties, or whatever cause lay upon his soul, and he did not know that with every word he spoke he was destroying his own hopes. Why? Because he spoke to the wise old people as though they were serfs, stupid and ignorant, and he was angry with them in his heart because they stood before him unmoved and they laughed when the sweat ran down his poor young cheeks. He was so angry that he could scarcely keep from weeping, and I am sure that he would have been glad if lightning had struck them dead. But Heaven never helped him, and the rain continued to fall and the sun to shine upon them as well as upon him and by such divine injustice the best of reformers are confounded.

And I, having learned my lesson of silence, could only go away feeling more sorry for the young man on the machine than for the people, because the people were strong and he was not and in the end I never doubted that the people would win. Later I put the making of the new city into a short story called “The New Road,” and the touching and earnest young man and all the thousands like him went into another entitled “Shanghai Scene.”

In these days, too, a strange change was taking place upon the flank of our beautiful Purple Mountain. From my distant attic window I could see what looked like a white scar daily growing larger among the pines and the bamboos. It was the tomb of Sun Yat-sen, for the new government had decided that Sun’s embalmed body was to be brought from the North and laid to rest in the southern capital. The cornerstone had been laid on the first anniversary of his death. I went out to look at the mausoleum now and then during the years of its making, and watched it progress from a dislocation of rocks and earth to a monument so hybrid that people did not know whether to repudiate it as something foreign, or be proud of it because it was partly Chinese. A gatehouse, or sort of p’ailou, stood at the foot, and from there a vast flight of white marble steps led up to the mountain. I climbed those steps so many times during the next decade that I thought I could never forget how many there are, yet I have forgotten, for my feet since then have carried me to many other countries and to far places. At the top of the marble flight was the memorial hall and behind it the tomb itself. The blue-tiled roof curved upward in the old temple style and the marble terrace in front of the building was impressive, for from the balustrades one could look over many miles of countryside. To the right was the winding city wall and within it were the roofs of houses, laid closely together.

The climax of that building was on a hot summer’s day — the day of Sun Yat-sen’s funeral, in 1929, four years after his death. Preparations had been going on for months, and among the more difficult was the necessary, if temporary, reconciliation between Madame Sun Yat-sen, the widow, and the rest of her family, which now included Chiang Kai-shek himself, for Madame Sun was pro-Communist, as she believed her husband had been. Would she come to the funeral or would she not? She did come, and everybody was relieved. To bury The Leader without having his wife present to honor the occasion would have been unthinkable. Yet even so there were many stories among the people and rumors that though she came, she would not speak to any of the family. Nevertheless, the preparations went on.

And my two guests during those days of the pomp of Sun Yat-sen’s funeral were Dr. Alfred Sze, the Chinese Ambassador in Washington and father of Mai-mai Sze, who has become well known in the United States, and Dr. Taylor, the missionary physician who had embalmed the body of Sun Yat-sen.

Dr. Sze was a tall handsome man, polished in the cultures of East and West alike, and he could scarcely conceal his dismay at the discomforts of Nanking. I had been asked to entertain him because our house was more comfortable than some, and yet we, too, had no electricity or running water or any of the modern conveniences to which Dr. Sze had become so used in his years abroad. The glimpses he gave me of my own country were extremely enlightening and entertaining, and I in turn tried to modify his discouragement about his own. But what I remember most clearly was a brisk after-dinner conversation between me and the unquenchable Li Sau-tse, still managing our household in spite of her relatively reduced position as kitchen help.

“It is a pity,” she said in her loud practical voice, “that so pretty a man as this guest of ours was fed too many chicken feet when he was little.”

“How do you know he was fed chicken feet?” I inquired.

She was cleaning up in the kitchen as usual, the cook, after the manner of overlords, having departed, leaving the dirty work to her.

“Don’t you see how his hands tremble all the time?” she inquired.

“True,” I replied. Dr. Sze’s hands did tremble in a slight nervous palsy.

“That,” Li Sau-tse declared, “is because he was fed too many chicken feet when he was little.”

“Indeed,” I observed. I knew better than to contradict her. She would cheerfully spend hours to prove that I was wrong, did I disagree, and the time was late.

As for Dr. Taylor, I remember only his anxiety lest Sun Yat-sen’s embalmed body might not hold together in the June heat. There was much consternation because the people wanted to see their dead hero, and this meant that the coffin had to be open for a matter of hours. Could the sacred body endure the ravages of the air? Nevertheless, in spite of Dr. Taylor’s agitation, the coffin was opened for a few hours and Sun Yat-sen did hold together except for his hands, but gloves were put on those, and so all went well.

My own memories of the funeral itself are from the modest viewpoint of a bystander, but that, after all, is perhaps the most interesting. I stood among the crowd which gathered for miles along the road upon which the cortège was to pass, and was pressed on one side by an odoriferous beggar and on the other by a stout and lively country housewife. I peered between clustered heads in front and was pushed by unknown persons from behind while the stately procession passed. Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts in uniform, exhausted with waiting, the sweat running down their faces, students and young people, representatives from all organizations, soldiers and bands, the endless procession went on. Finally I saw the dignitaries from other countries, the handsome and impeccably garbed British, looking cool in spite of their morning clothes and tall silk hats, the Europeans with their brightly striped ribbons and honors across their bosoms, the tall turbaned men from India, the small Japanese men in Western clothes too big for them, the businesslike Americans looking more like clerks than officials. They passed in silence and order and last of all the great casket, draped in flags and silks, passed in slow pomp, followed by the family and the Chinese honoraries.

We had stood for hours, and now we got what conveyance we could and drove outside the city wall to stand again through the funeral. The rather small mausoleum was crowded with dignitaries, and again I chose my place at the foot of the marble steps among the vast crowd. I do not remember what the program was, except that there were speeches in various languages, presentations of wreaths, singing of songs, all conveyed to us through loud-speakers, the first I had ever seen. What I do remember is that the program broke down somewhere about the middle, and we waited and waited. I wondered what had happened, and in spite of all, I fell into my old habit of identification with the Chinese and worried lest some mistake should spoil the occasion before the foreigners. As though my thoughts were premonition, over the loudspeakers came a Chinese whisper, loud and urgent and perfectly audible.

“Hurry up — hurry up — the foreigners must not laugh at us!”

Whoever was delaying matters hurried, and in a few minutes the program went on again. Meanwhile I did not look at any Chinese, pretending that I had not understood the whisper. I suppose most foreigners did not understand, since most of them spoke little or no Chinese.

When the program was over and nearly all the people had gone away, I climbed the marble steps and went into the reception room of the mausoleum. At that moment Chiang Kai-shek came out of an inner chamber. He wore the Nationalist uniform, upon his breast a row of honors and medals, and, his eyes straight ahead, he strode across the marble floor and stood in the wide doorway, looking out over the valleys. I stood near, watching his face, so strangely like that of a tiger, the high forehead sloping, the ears flaring backward, the wide mouth seeming always ready to smile and yet always cruel. But his eyes were the most arresting feature. They were large, intensely black, and utterly fearless. It was not the fearlessness of composure or of intelligence, but the fearlessness, again, of the tiger, who sees no reason to be afraid of any other beast because of its own power.

He stood a long time in the blazing afternoon light, and I stood in the shadows, very near, and did not move. What, I still wonder, was he thinking of and what does he remember now, exiled upon that island whose people to this day do not think of themselves as part of China or the Chinese?

I have no memories of peace under Chiang Kai-shek. He had severe problems to meet and he was not equipped by his education to solve them. He was a soldier and he had the mind of a soldier, and neither by nature nor experience, either, was he fitted to be a civilian ruler of a republic. I read that today the Old Tiger gets up early and says his prayers. They say he likes to walk quietly along the roads of Formosa, his wife at his side. Well, he is getting old. I hear that he reads poetry and he meditates. If so, he is following the tradition of the war lords. Old Wu Pei-fu, as arrant a war lord as ever lived, in his declining years used not only to read poetry but to try to write it, and he yearned in the wistful fashion of so many aging Chinese militarists to be remembered by posterity not as a man of battles and wars, but as a human being, wise and kind. Deep in the hearts of the Chinese people the ancient ways still hold. It cannot be otherwise, for people do not change in a day or a night from what they have been for centuries. And long ago Confucius decreed that the ways of peace are the honorable ways, that the superior man does not fight and kill, but governs himself first and then his household and at last his nation.

I remember no peace, for those were the years when Chiang Kai-shek’s army was pursuing the Communists across the country and into the far Northwest. The pursuit stretched far but it began in our own city and I saw it even in my classes. More often than I care to remember there were vacant seats in the schoolroom, and when I inquired where my missing pupils were, the others made significant looks and gestures which told me that the unfortunate ones were under arrest as Communists. Sometimes I tried to save them from death, if not from jail, and sometimes I could but usually I could not. I suppose that there were Communists among them, but they were very young and perhaps they could have been brought back again. If so, they were given no chance. It was easier to kill them. But many of them were not Communists, as I very well know. They were arrested for reading liberal magazines, for associating, perhaps accidentally and without knowing it, with a classmate who was a Communist, or for criticizing the new government. Thousands of young men and women who were not Communists were thus killed all over China in the name of Communism, and we were all helpless unless we knew the name of the individual student soon enough to intercede in his behalf. I will not dwell on that sad time, for the bones of those young men and women are already dust. But I learned then that the same cruelties can be committed by any man who has the will to crush those who oppose him, or who even appear to oppose him, if power is his ambition and his satisfaction, and I learned then that the noblest end is lost if the means are not worthy of it. With every injustice thus committed, the Nationalist government was further weakened and as early as 1930, behind closed doors and in the villages, the people were singing their secret songs of revolt. They were not Communists, but they were against injustice, knowing that a government built upon injustice to its people cannot stand, whether it be Communist or Nationalist, or any other.

And so in silence and with bland faces the people in our city and in the countryside watched the brave young officials, the Western-trained specialists and earnest intellectuals, the students and the ardent reformers, go the way of all flesh. Law in China was traditionally for the criminal and not for the good citizen, and certainly not for the government official, and so traditionally the new officials and intellectuals broke the very laws they made. They did not even obey the new speed laws for automobiles, for they were grown haughty and domineering and there were already whispers of widespread graft. The old evils were still with us. I had an example in my own classes, in the handsome son of a high government family. He came every day in an American car, chauffeured by a White Russian. The tall youth wore a uniform and he had a “Lieutenant” before his name, and he arrived every day after the others, his bright spurs clanking as he walked. When the end of the term came he did not appear for his examination and I failed him on the semester’s work, especially as he had not handed in class assignments on time or at all. He was hotly indignant.

“Do you not know that I am a lieutenant in the Nationalist army of the Chinese Republic?” he demanded.

“As far as I am concerned, you are merely one of the students in this university who happens to be also in one of my classes,” I replied.

“My father is—”

“That makes no difference to me,” I said, and proceeded to give him a briefing on democracy in a modern state, while I tried not to laugh at the proud and incredulous young face.

He was one of many. And somehow the Chinese people could not forgive the new officials because they were so much like the old. They had hoped for more than a new government. They had hoped for a new world.

In the midst of these years I made a swift journey to the United States to put my invalid child into a permanent school. The decision had been hastened because I foresaw a future in China so uncertain in terms of wars and revolutions that the only safety for a helpless child was in a life shelter. It was during those few months in the United States, in 1929, that I heard my first novel, East Wind: West Wind, had been accepted for publication. I had sent that slender manuscript off to David Lloyd in New York a year before, and then so much had happened that I had all but forgotten it. I was visiting in a friend’s house in Buffalo when a cablegram from David Lloyd reached me, forwarded from China, and telling me that the book had been taken by the John Day Company, and that I was asked to come to the company office to discuss some revisions. This news came one morning when I was feeling very desolate at the prospect of a future of separation from my child, and while it did not compensate, nevertheless it brightened life in its own way. I am told that both agency and publisher were astounded at the calmness with which I replied, and at the fact that I waited weeks before going to New York. I suppose my habitual casualness about time is the result of having lived so long in a timeless country.

In time, however, I did go to New York and there I met David Lloyd whom I had never seen, and went with him to the offices of the John Day Company, where I waited patiently upon a long Pennsylvania Dutch bench which stood in the vestibule and which, incidentally, now stands in our dining room as a keepsake. The president of the John Day Company was late in coming back to work after lunch that day. When he did come I was interested to hear that it was he who had decided to publish my little book, since his editorial staff was equally divided for and against it and he had cast the deciding vote, not, he told me quite frankly, because he thought it a very good book, since he did not, but because he believed that he saw evidences there of a writer who might continue to grow. I had already been told by David Lloyd that my manuscript had been sent to every publisher in New York and that had the John Day Company not accepted it, he would have withdrawn it. I was therefore in a properly humble frame of mind, but long ago Mr. Kung had already seen to that, and I was neither downcast nor uplifted. Almost immediately I returned to China.

The house in Nanking was empty without my little elder daughter and not all the friends and family could fill it. This, I decided, was the time to begin really to write. So one morning I put my attic room in order and faced my big Chinese desk to the mountain, and there each morning when the household was in running order for the day I sat myself down to my typewriter and began to write The Good Earth. My story had long been clear in my mind. Indeed, it had shaped itself firmly and swiftly from the events of my life, and its energy was the anger I felt for the sake of the peasants and the common folk of China, whom I loved and admired, and still do. For the scene of my book I chose the north country, and for the rich southern City, Nanking. My material was therefore close at hand, and the people I knew as I knew myself.

In all my books I have made such mixture. Years later, for example, I put into Kinfolk bits of the same northern country. Uncle Tao’s tumor, which he kept so proudly in a glass bottle for everyone to see, grew first and actually in the stout body of Madame Chang. She too mustered the courage to have it cut out, and she too put it into a bottle of alcohol and kept it on the table in her main hall for everybody to see. “Are your characters real people?” A hundred times and again I am asked that question and of course they are real people, created from the dust of memory and breathed upon by love. Yet not one of them lived outside my books exactly as they do within them.

How long the days were, in the separation from my child, although I crammed them full! In the afternoon I taught my classes in the new government university, and when I came home at four o’clock there were always guests for tea, young Chinese intellectuals, old Chinese friends, young Americans and English from the Language School which had been opened in Nanking by cooperating mission boards. Still the days were too long, for there were the evenings and the weekends and the long hot summers when schools were closed, and I did not care to go to Kuling any more. In the summers I had even more time, for my father always spent the two hottest months of summer with my sister’s family in the mountains, and the house was emptier than ever. It was then that I decided to begin my translation of the great Chinese novel Shui Hu Chüan, which later I called All Men Are Brothers. The Chinese title is meaningless in English, although allusive enough in Chinese, where robbers and pirates have always gathered about the watery margins of river and lakes, and the Chinese words refer to them. Four years I worked on the translation of that mighty book, spending upon it the hours when I could not write my own books and when I did not teach. It was a profound experience, for though the book was written five centuries ago, the pageant of Chinese life was still the same, and in the Communists, fleeing now into the Northwest, I saw the wild rebels and malcontents who had risen against government in the old days of Empire.

The same? No, there was now something much more dangerous. Those early bandits were not organized under a sinister new banner. They had been only Chinese rebels, angry against other Chinese who ruled them unjustly, and they had a rough sense of justice which made them help a good man and destroy a tyrant, whether he were an official or a village bully. But I knew by now that the Communists were part of a world movement, and when the Chinese malcontents and rebels allied themselves with Russian Communism it was something that we had never seen before.

Yet I was still only a bystander. No foreigner had any influence in those days among the young intellectuals except the advisors who were hired from abroad, for example, Bertrand Russell from England who came with Dora Black and put our young men and women into a furor of upset, and soon they were all talking free love, by which they mean the right to choose their own husbands and wives, until my elderly Chinese friends, their parents, were appalled.

“Is this what it means to be a republic?” Thus my old neighbor Madame Wu, inquired of me at least twice every time we met, and I could not reply, for I did not myself know then what it meant to live in a republic.

Paul Monroe and John Dewey came to help in the organizing of the new public schools, and they did sound work in planning for a university in every province, a high school, or middle school as we called it, in every county, and a grade school in every city. It was still impossible to speak of compulsory education, for there were few teachers ready to teach in modern schools. For another generation, at least, seventy-five percent of China’s children must go without schools. Now, after having seen years of public schools in my own country I sometimes question, however heretical that is, whether a compulsory school system is all that our fathers planned it to be. The task of the teacher in the United States is very hard. I see classrooms of lounging unwilling adolescents, and schoolrooms where noisy and troublesome children must be taught whether they wish or not, the elements of learning. And most difficult of all, I see bricklayers and truck drivers and mechanics, good men but certainly ignorant, get more pay than the teachers themselves or than most brainworkers can command, and then I do not blame the American children for their confusion. Perhaps indeed it is true, as a certain young adolescent remarked to me the other day, that there is no use in going to college when one can make much more money than a college professor by stopping his education after high school and undertaking a career as a truck driver. In China the brainworker, the intellectual, always commanded the highest salaries, for there knowledge was valued, not only for its own sake, but because it is the source of wisdom in the conduct of life, and for this technical knowledge was not considered enough.

As a bystander, therefore, I watched my Chinese world change before my eyes. Government bureaus by the dozen were established, manned by clever young Chinese who could speak English or French or German better than they spoke Chinese. I remember sitting beside one such young man at a great dinner one night. He asked me what I had been doing that day by way of diversion, and I told him that I had ridden horseback out into the country to a distant village to see the ancient stone lions of the Liang dynasty. It had been a beautiful autumn day: the air golden and still. The Chinese countryside is never lovelier than in autumn, after the rice has been cut and the gleaners, in their blue cotton garments and carrying their bamboo baskets, go out over the stubbled fields to pick up the grain that has been left. Behind them in turn come the inevitable flocks of white geese to find the single grains that the gleaners leave. I had ridden happily and alone along the earthen paths that followed the ancient stone paved roads and so I had come to the Liang Lion Village, and there had dismounted. It was a gay place after the harvest; young women were playing with the children on the threshing floors, now swept clean, and old women were spinning in the doorways. I had not been there before, but I had long known of the stone lions from Western books on Chinese sculpture, and so I recognized them at the end of the village street, although they were at the moment covered with the village wash. From under ragged blue coats and trousers the noble beasts looked out with the patient gentle air of life endured for centuries. The villagers knew very well that they were Liang sculptures, and they gave me a lively and fairly accurate account of their history.

This I relayed that evening to my dinner companion. He was a spruce young man in a well-cut Western business suit. I could see that his mind was on other matters while I talked, for he drank tea, drummed his fingers on the table, coughed and moved restlessly in his chair. When I had finished he said decisively, “There are no Liang stone lions near Nanking.”

I was startled at his rejection of history, and I protested mildly. “Western scholars have long admired the stone animals, and you will find photographs and data—”

“There are no Liang stone lions near Nanking,” he said again more loudly than before.

Already I had learned that we had minds among us which could not be informed, and so I held my peace. Now when I think of the young men who manned the bureaus of our new government I think always of that incident, and I offer it here as example, if not proof, of the dangers of ignorance. As for the Liang lions, I am sure they still stand there as they have for hundreds of years and I am sure, too, that the village women still hang their faded garments upon their stone shoulders and haunches, and this though Mao Tse-tung reigns today in Peking, even as Chiang Kai-shek reigned in those days in Nanking.

Reigned? Well, something like it, for he was having a hard time to preside as a president of a republic. He knew nothing about modern democratic government, or perhaps any government except a military one. He was used to men who came when he said come and who went when he said go. The education of a military man is the same the world over, and our President was a military man. He had, however, a number of wilful civilians in his cabinet and they often opposed him manfully. When he could not thunder them down he began to kill them. Such a protest was aroused by this highhandedness that he paused, in some astonishment, to discover that evidently a president is not an emperor. He earnestly wanted to be modern, I do believe, in spite of not having the education for it, for certainly his year in Moscow and his other years in a military school in Japan did not educate him for democracy. It is to his credit that he modified his ruthlessness then to imprisonment, and at last even to a fairly pleasant imprisonment. There was a hot springs resort not far from Nanking, where he had made a house for himself and his wife. This house he turned over to be a place of confinement for the members of his cabinet who disagreed with him. There they went and there they stayed until they saw reason, and I remember passing sometimes when I was riding outside the city wall and asking the villagers who was now in prison. They always knew. As for younger offenders, there were either none who dared to oppose our President or he disposed of them in ways less polite.

I do not propose to blame him now for these doings. He had risen to a place of great power suddenly and without previous preparation, and it was inevitable that he behaved in the only ways that he knew, which were the traditional ways of the military conqueror who kills his enemies if they will not bargain with him, and tradition had not really been changed very much even by the Communist advisors whom Chiang Kai-shek had once obeyed and then rejected. Modern communism itself is not new, perhaps, shaped as it is by the tyrannies and cruelties of ancient Russian rulers. Chiang Kai-shek sincerely did the best he knew, but he did not know enough. I do not know whether ignorance can be called a crime. If so, then many in this world are guilty, and I see them here in my own country, too, in high places.

Meanwhile I was writing The Good Earth. This I did in three months, typing the manuscript twice myself in that time. When it was finished I felt very doubtful indeed of its value, but to whom could I turn for judgment? My brother was in China that year on a mission from the Milbank Memorial Fund in New York, to look into the Mass Education Movement headed by James Yen, with a view to giving a large grant to that admirable work. He had only a few days to spend with me, and during that time I mentioned shyly indeed that I had written a novel. He was kind as always, he expressed interest, but not enough for me to feel I could ask him to take his valuable time to read my manuscript and tell me if it were any good. My old father certainly could not tell me, and there was no one else. So I tied up the pages and mailed them off to New York myself, and prepared to wait while I busied myself with other work.

At this period of my life and of China’s history I was keenly aware of the Chinese peasant, his wonderful strength and goodness, his amusing and often alarming shrewdness and wisdom, his cynicism and his simplicity, his direct approach to life which is the habit of a deep and natural sophistication. It seemed to me that the Chinese peasant, who comprised eighty-five percent of China’s population, was so superior a human group, that it was a loss to humanity that he was also voiceless because he was illiterate. And it was this group, so charming, so virile, so genuinely civilized in spite of illiteracy and certain primitive conditions of life that might very well be merely the result of enforced mental isolation from the currents of modern thinking and discovery, whom the young moderns, rootless and ruthless, proposed to “educate.” Nothing in Communist theory enrages me more than Trotsky’s callous remark that the peasants are the “packhorses” of a nation. Who made them packhorses? And to what heights may not these “packhorses” rise if they are considered human beings instead of beasts of burden? For in all my years in China I never ceased to feel intolerable pain and anger when I looked into the thin intelligent face of some Chinese peasant twisted into sheer physical agony because on his back he bore a burden too much even for a beast. I have seen his slender legs quiver under the weight of a two-hundred-pound bag of rice, or under the huge wardrobe trunk of some travelling foreign tourist. Edwin Markham’s poem “The Man with the Hoe,” discovered late by me, gave me a wonderful catharsis of the spirit. Here was an American who could have understood the whole problem of Asia. And my continuing regret concerning Asian leaders is that so few of them have understood the quality of their own peasants, and therefore few have valued this mighty and common man of the earth. And among them the Communists are the most guilty, for with all their talk, I do not see that they have valued this man, either, and their condescension to him makes my soul sick. Yesterday in New York a young Chinese woman sat in my small living room and told me breathlessly of the great and marvellous changes that the Communists are making in China. And in her words, too, I caught the old stink of condescension.

My mind could not rest after I had finished The Good Earth and almost immediately I began to write another novel, The Mother, in which I portrayed the life of a Chinese peasant woman, but more than that, I hoped, it was the life of such a woman anywhere, who has been given no fulfillment except her own experience and understanding. Everywhere in the world there are such women and by the million. I had supposed in those days that certainly they were not in my own country, but when I came here to live I found her here, too, in many a farmhouse not far from where I write these pages, and certainly in the Deep South where she is often Negro, or on the deserts of the Western states, where she must travel miles to meet another human creature, or shut away in the mountains of New England. That woman in China, however, was too remote from the book readers in my own country, and certainly from the minds of the critics and reviewers for them to understand her — a strange thing, I thought, until I remembered how alien to me are the warped and twisted people in the novels of William Faulkner, I never saw such people in China, but I take it for granted that he lives among them here since they make the stuff of his famous books. But abroad, in France, and in Italy and in other countries where the peasant woman is strong and alive, my readers knew her and my book was understood. It is one of the compensations of the writer that somewhere there is always the reader who understands. I remember an honest critic in New York said once of my book Pavilion of Women that he did not “get” what it was about. Why should he, how could he? But from all over the world women have written to me and comforted me for their understanding of that book. Yet it would not be fair of me if I did not record here that, when I had finished The Mother, I was far from pleased with it and I threw it in the wastebasket beside my desk. There it lay and it was only chance that it was not thrown away permanently. The houseboy happened to be away for a few days and the baskets were not emptied, since one servant did not presume to do the work of another lest it appear he envied him the job, and before the houseboy returned, I had retrieved my manuscript to examine it again and see whether I was wrong. Eventually it was a book, although I put it away for several years before I offered it doubtfully to my publishers. That houseboy, by the way, had a curious habit of triumphing over fate and gods. He was a tall pallid melancholy silent fellow, a dogged pessimist at all times. One day he appeared so phenomenally pallid that his yellow countenance was actually a pale moss green and I inquired if he were ill. He was not, he said, but his wife had typhoid fever and he had to care for her and the baby and got no sleep. I was properly terrified since he handled dishes and silver and waited on the table and helped the cook. I begged him to take his wife to the hospital, but he refused, saying that nobody went to a foreign hospital unless he expected to die. I knew better than to press the matter since if the woman did die, I would be held responsible for having insisted, and so I merely said that he had better stay at home and care for his wife until she was better. He reflected upon this for a while, standing stock-still before me, his disconsolate head drooping, and at last he said that he would take her to the hospital, since there was no one to look after the child anyway in the daytime, and he could not care for both wife and child even though he stayed at home, since he had not slept for six nights. So to the hospital she went, and after apparent recovery one day she took a turn for the worse. The houseboy came to tell me that she was dying, as he had feared she would if he put her in the foreign hospital, and that he wanted to take her home now. Since the message was that she was near death, I begged him to leave her in peace, but no, his mind was made up, we were all helpless and he took her home in a riksha, unconscious, saying that he would let me know when he could come back to work. I half expected never to see him again, since it was quite probable that in his habitually debilitated condition he would have the disease himself.

In two weeks or so, to my astonishment, he returned, looking rested and fatter than I had ever seen him and certainly less melancholy. His wife, he said in triumph over me and all my kind, had recovered. As soon as he got her home he laid her on the bed and stayed in the room with her and the child for five days, feeding her broth and rice gruel and keeping her warm. “They washed her too much in the hospital,” he explained. “They were washing her life away. I did not wash her at all, and she got well and now she is doing everything as usual.”

I expressed my pleasure and said no more. Far too often I have seen doctors confounded and science defied by just such love and determination.

The year of 1931 was a monumental one in many ways for me. In that year my dear old father died in the eightieth year of his life. In that year the Yangtse River swelled with unusual rains and flooded our whole countryside, a sight no one living had ever seen before, and in that year the Japanese empire builders seized Manchuria, and all thinking Chinese and a few white people comprehended the full portent of this act of aggression. Mr. Lung, the old Chinese scholar who was working with me on my translation of Shui Hu Chüan, said to me often and anxiously, “Can it be possible that the Americans and the English do not understand what it means that Japan has taken Manchuria? There will be a Second World War.”

I said that neither English or Americans could understand this.

For me, of course, the most moving event was my father’s death. His story I have told elsewhere, and, therefore, I will not repeat it here. During the last two years his tall ascetic frame had grown more and more frail, his nature more completely the saint, and I feared, observing these changes, that he had not many more years to live. That summer, however, he went to my sister in Kuling as usual, and spent a happy two months with his old friends and with her little family. It was when he was preparing to come back to me again that he was suddenly seized by his old enemy, the dysentery. He weakened rapidly and in a few days was gone. I could not even get to his funeral, for the river was flooding at a frightening speed and all ships were delayed. With my father’s death the last of my childhood life was gone, and I was from then on living in the new world of struggle and confusion. His steady faith that all things work together for good was removed from my house.

Once upon a platform in Sweden, I was comforted by hearing Per Hällstrom, in his citation, mention the biographies of my father and mother. Actually I did not tell my father’s story until years after he died, when I wrote Fighting Angel; Portrait of a Soul. I wrote that book because some of my American readers were so bemused by my mother’s story in The Exile—for by then the manuscript I had written for my children was published — that they thought I did not love my father. On the contrary, I had learned to love him with warmth and reverence when I grew old enough to understand and value him. His soul can perhaps be best expressed in two quotations I placed at the beginning of my book about him:

ANGEL — One of an order of spiritual beings, attendants and messengers of God, usually spoken of as employed by him in ordering the affairs of the universe, and particularly of mankind. They are commonly regarded as bodiless intelligences.

Century Dictionary

Who maketh his angels spirits

And his ministers a flame of fire.

The Epistle to the Hebrews

And that monstrous flood of 1931—how strange it was to see the yellow waters climbing over the walls of the Bund seven miles from the city, and then come creeping and crawling through the streets and spreading into the fertile fields outside the city wall! The road to the mountain was built high enough above the fields so that the water did not cover it, and I rode out to Purple Mountain often to gaze upon a landscape which had become a muddy sea. Our own people now were refugees, a strange experience, and we had to set ourselves to the task of local relief, a heavy one until the waters receded again. Land people became boat people, and farmers who had always got their living from the soil now housed their families on boats and lived on fish and crabs, and all this with the utmost calm and good nature, blaming no one for the disaster. True, I heard some mutterings that had Chiang Kai-shek not been a river-god in his previous life, we could scarcely have so great a flood, but by this time our President had established such a reputation that few dared to complain in public any more, and such discontent as there was took the form of street ballads and impromptu songs, which blind musicians sang to the accompaniment of their two-stringed violins, or jokes which were whispered behind hands from mouth to ear. Incidentally, everybody feared a blind man, for it was thought that the blind had divining powers to compensate for their darkened eyes, and no one dared to rebuke one blind. It must be said that a blind man sometimes made the most of such a reputation and was often indeed a very mischievous creature.

In spite of the wickedness of that flood and the enormous damage it did, I could not but enjoy its wild beauty. The colors of the sky were reflected upon it, and to sit as sometimes I did upon the crest of Purple Mountain and survey the scene was to be lifted up to strange heights indeed. To the right the huge and noble city wall was mirrored in the water. Lotus Lake where we often spent our summer evenings in a pleasure boat was merely an arm of the new sea, and when the sun set behind the distant hills, the whole sea was illumined, its muddiness forgot, transfigured into rose and gold. When I came down from the mountain I had to take a boat to where my horse waited, tied against a tree at a solitary farmhouse built high enough to live in, and the boatman was a waterman who lived even in dry times upon the canal which ran outside the city. That boat was in normal years a coal barge, and though profitable now as a ferry, it was as black and dirty as ever, and so was the boatman. He grew thirsty on the way and he dipped his pottery bowl into the water and drank the floodwater just as it was, filthy with dead animals and every vile effluvium of the countryside.

“Are you not afraid you will fall ill?” I inquired.

He was a hearty fellow and he gave a hearty laugh. “You would fall ill if you drank it,” he assured me in a loud cheerful voice. “But it is safe for me. The river-gods know that I trust them for my living and they would not let me die from drinking their waters.”

I said nothing, smiled, and let him think I was impressed, for I had learned long ago how vain is preachment. And who knows what an accumulation of germs had done for him? Germs war one against another within the battlefield of the human body, we are told, and the result is immunity — that is, provided the body is not killed first.

And speaking of Lotus Lake, it was there and in that same flood year that Charles and Anne Lindbergh arrived in their plane all the way from the United States, to help in relief. What an event that was, and how the people crowded our streets and roadsides to see the brave young couple who had come so far! As usual, I stood among the crowds to see what was to be seen, and I watched the faces of the Chinese and listened to their talk as the two Americans came walking by, Lindbergh looking very tall and his wife small and gentle and kind. Yet it is not the Chinese that I remember when I recall that scene, but a little American boy of eight or ten, who stood near me, his face white with excitement and his blue eyes blazing. Lindbergh was his hero, as anyone could see, and in all his world there were for the moment only the two, his hero and himself. At exactly the planned moment, when Lindbergh was within a foot of him the little boy shouted in a mighty voice, “Hello, Lindy!” Lindbergh looked down blankly into the boy’s face and went on without speaking. He was, I suppose, absorbed in his own thoughts and observations, and doubtless the boy’s voice did not reach his conscious mind, but how could a child know that? What I remember is the stricken look on the face of an American child in an alien land, whose American god had not answered him. Ah well, I suppose we are all guilty some time or other of inflicting such wounds upon the innocent!

The Lindberghs did in fact perform a great service to those of us who were devoting ourselves to flood relief. They flew their plane over the entire area and mapped out the isolated villages and thereby many lives were saved. And they all but lost their own lives at that, for when they left it was from the swollen Yangtse River and their plane nearly capsized, or so we heard. Our hearts stopped, for few are the human beings who have ever fallen into that river and survived.

My further memories of the Lindberghs, however, center about a dinner our American Consul gave them upon the evening after their arrival, where I was a guest invited to meet them. Lindbergh was restless and absorbed, his mind single upon the task he had come to perform, and most of the evening he spent poring over a map of the Yangtse river bed. But Mrs. Lindbergh was charming and sensitively aware of every current of thought and trend of talk in the room, and I sat watching her mobile face, so changeful and yet so controlled. Whenever I read one of her rare books even now I see her face as it was that night and I hear her voice, and though it was long before the great tragedy of her lost child fell upon her, yet somehow there was already tragedy in her face and bearing.

During the floodtime that year, I had a message from another American, Will Rogers. He telegraphed from Shanghai that he would like to come and see me, and if I had no idea then of his significance in the American scene, I knew enough about him to await his coming with expectation. The flood, alas, prevented his arrival and so I did not see him then, but two years later when I was in New York he and Mrs. Rogers came to have tea with me at the old Murray Hill Hotel, and they stayed a long time, and how warmly I enjoyed being alone with them, for by then I knew what he was and how much he had done for me in praising The Good Earth, and in words he afterwards wrote and said about me, which still make me blush when I think of them because they were all too kind. There was something honest and homespun and yet alert and shrewd in the best sense about Will Rogers so that instinctively one trusted him, not only for honesty, but common sense. And he made me laugh so much that I still thank him most of all for laughter. In those days to be able to laugh was wonderful for me, and I was learning it again, and Will Rogers had the genius of making me laugh because what he said was truly funny, and not contrived or sarcastic. Blessed be his memory!

And I remember, too, the visit of yet another American in that flood year, but it was earlier, before the flood had reached its height, and traffic was still clear between our city and the coast. That American was Lewis Gannett, and I remember thinking that it was the first time I had ever seen a live critic. He looked kind, a pleasant, very American man, and I have always been glad that he met my father, for afterwards when he reviewed Fighting Angel in the New York Herald Tribune he recalled my father and was able to write of him as “that Lincolnesque figure.” And so he was.

I ought to say that in the spring of this same year of 1931, on March 2, before my father died and the floods came, The Good Earth was published. I remember when the first copy of it reached me and I felt shy about it, since nobody knew of its being, or knowing had forgotten it, and I went to my father’s room and showed the book to him, not expecting much, to be sure, since he read no novels. He was very kind about it, he complimented me upon the appearance of the book and inquired when I had had time to write it, and then a few days later he returned it to me saying mildly that he had glanced at it but had not felt equal to reading it.

“I don’t think I can undertake it,” he said. So much for the book in that distant world of mine.

No, there is a little more. I remember, although I have forgotten it these many years, that my first letter from the United States about the book was from a worthy Christian, an official in a mission board, who sent me several pages of blistering rebuke because I had been so frank about human life. He used another and dirtier word, but let it go at that. And, reared as I had been in the naturalism of Chinese life, I did not know for a long time what he meant, but now I know. The worlds in which I have lived and grown have made me what must be called a controversial figure, as I have been told often enough, and this is because inescapably, by experience and nature, I see the other side of every human being. If he be good, then there is that other side, and if he be evil, there is again another side, and if the ability to comprehend the reasonableness of both seems confounding to those who are content with one dimension, to others as to me, it is an endless source of interest and amusement and opportunity for love and life. We have no enemies, we for whom the globe is home, for we hate no one, and where there is no hate, it is not possible to escape love.

The flood did not help the people to like the new government any better. They were too reasonable to blame Chiang Kai-shek for an act of Heaven, and yet, as other peoples do, they felt resentment at the general hard times, and, irritable and impatient, they muttered that something could be done and must be done to make life more bearable. Beyond the local disaster of the flood, there was also the gnawing awareness of the greed of the Japanese militarists, now firmly entrenched in Manchuria, and when next they moved into the vital province of Jehol, these aggressions taking place in the years 1931–1933, the Nationalist government still did nothing. The Chinese Foreign Office merely busied itself with complaining against the Western Powers and the old Unequal Treaties and the Concessions, and such complaints kept the people angry and restless, for they saw themselves friendless in the world. Finally Japan virtually took over North China, basing her attacks from Shanghai, where large sections of the city were burned and ruined. No one knew when or whether they planned to advance up the Yangtse.

The American Consul now advised all American families in Nanking to send their women and children away, and, mindful of the ever-rising anti-foreign feeling, I took my little younger daughter and went to Peking. I had always wanted to stay there for a time and I hoped, too, to do some research into ancient editions of Shui Hu Chüan, with the hope of finding old illustrations of which I had heard. Those months seem, at this distance, only an incident, one of the pleasant interludes which somehow always seemed possible for me to find in the vastness of Chinese life, and I was entirely happy for the time being, absorbed in history and sight-seeing and meeting men and women of many nations. Peking has been written about so much and described so often that it is idle to repeat here what may be found elsewhere. For me, however, the experience was recreative, focusing my mind again upon the deep roots of China’s past and giving me perspective upon the rapidly changing present. It was in Peking, too, that I became convinced that sooner or later I must leave China and return permanently to my own country, for such wars and upheavals lay ahead that no white people would be allowed to remain. It was becoming obvious that Chiang Kai-shek’s policy of “internal unification before external attack” was doomed to failure, for while Japan continued her aggressions with all the strength of her army, led by officers trained in Germany, Chiang Kai-shek was still fighting against the Communists, who had simply retreated strategically to the Northwest where he could not reach them. He was right of course in believing that Communism was the basic enemy to the Chinese way of life, but what he did not understand was that by ignoring the terrifying growth of Japanese domination he was alienating his own people, who did not yet gauge the dangers of Communism, especially when the Communists in this case were themselves Chinese, but who did very well perceive the danger of their own weakness and Japan’s increasing strength. Chiang thus was losing even more of his people’s support, and years later when he needed them very much to rally to his side against the Communists, they were already lost.

As for the Communists whom he was pursuing at all costs, they, too, behaved stupidly while under Russian advice. The Russian Communists, before they left China, had advised the Chinese Communists and especially their military leader, Chu Teh, to capture the cities where, they said, the factory workers or “true proletariat” would gather to their aid. But few Chinese cities had factories, there was no proletariat in the orthodox Communist sense, and moreover the Chinese people, still under their doughty old war lords, had no intention of being captured by Chu Teh, whom they did not know. When he attacked Changsha and Canton and then Amoy, the people helped their local armies and destroyed huge numbers of the Communists, who in the end were completely routed so that they were compelled to hide in inaccessible mountains. There in a famous meeting place, Chingkangshan, Chu Teh, the militarist, much depressed at his losses, met Mao Tse-tung, the civilian and son of a well-to-do peasant, and together they reorganized the Chinese Communist party, this time without help and advice from Soviet Russia, who indeed had by now withdrawn from the scene, dismayed by Chu’s defeats after Chiang Kai-shek’s repudiation. The reorganized Chinese Communist party under Mao and Chu proceeded then to entrench itself in the peasantry, for as Chu said, “The people are the sea, we are the fish, and as long as we can swim in that sea, we can survive.”

All this was contradictory to orthodox Communism as defined by Soviet Russians, and it is interesting now to remember that they for a long time repudiated Mao Tse-tung wholeheartedly. The rejection, however, was only gain for the Chinese Communists who were thus thrown upon the knowledge and experience of their own people, and they determined to do all they could to win the favor of the peasants. This they did by announcing as their enemies those whom the peasants traditionally considered their enemies, namely, landlords, tax gatherers, moneylenders and middlemen. The peasants were won by such a policy and they helped the Communists in every way they could, telling them when the Nationalist soldiers were coming and generally defeating the purposes of Chiang Kai-shek, without really knowing what they did. The peasant anywhere is a direct and literal-minded human being and he helps those who help him, an axiom the young intellectuals who guided the affairs of the Nationalist government never did understand. By now I saw what everybody could see, that neither Nationalist nor Communist could win at present, since neither had the necessary support of both peasant and scholar in the ancient and invincible combination, and therefore that a long struggle lay ahead, especially as at the same time Japan was bent upon conquest while China was thus divided.

Whether Communist or Nationalist would finally win, I believed, depended upon which one first recognized the menace of Japan. Unfortunately it was the Communists who were the first to do this and who virtually compelled Chiang to fight Japan, although their own declaration of war upon Japan was ridiculous in its weakness and was obviously only propaganda. Nevertheless in forcing Chiang to realize the danger with Japan they had an immense advantage, which after the Second World War remained with them in the renewed struggle with the Nationalists, still under the leadership of Chiang Kai-shek. Against this advantage no Western influence could prevail, or could have prevailed, unless Chiang Kai-shek could have changed his habits and his policies completely. This of course was too much to ask of him. He had grown old in his ways, and no one could reach his mind any more, not only because it was fixed, but because it was his fatal weakness to surround himself with people who dared not tell him the truth. A Chinese friend told me that he had heard it said in Nanking, after the Second World War, when the inflation was at its absurd and dangerous height, that Chiang Kai-shek even then did not know the reality of the situation and when he was told cautiously by some visitor in secret about the rise of inflation he declared that he would go out and see for himself, whereupon he ordered a meal at a public restaurant. But his coterie were terrified and sent word ahead that the prices were to be the same as before the war and that the restaurant keeper would be reimbursed. The great man therefore dined complacently at prewar prices, convinced that what he had been told was false. Whether this is a true story or not, it was believed by Chinese and the effect was the same upon the people. This is not to accuse Chiang alone of wilful ignorance. It is impossible for any man in so high a place to know the truth about anything. There are always those about him whose interest it is to hide the facts since, when a regime falls, many fall with it.

The Chinese Communists now, therefore, had cleverly made full use of Chiang’s internal policy, and as they had capitalized upon the peasants’ hatred of landlords they next proceeded to capitalize upon the hatred of the Chinese people for the Japanese aggressors. They adopted as their new watchword, “Chinese do not fight Chinese,” meaning that they were willing to be unified with the Nationalists in order to fight the common enemy and knowing, I am sure, all the while that the Nationalists would not yield to them.

It was tragic in those days to watch the decay of the new government, but it was impossible not to see it, for while the nation was torn in dissension and struggle, the people bewildered and angry at what was going on, the intellectuals and party members were still only quarreling among themselves over such paper work as a constitution and new laws and what form labor unions should take, all good concerns but irrelevant in the face of immediate and tragic danger. It was, in its way, a manner of fiddling while Rome burned, and yet our young men were not Neros, but very earnest and well-meaning ignoramuses. Meanwhile Chiang Kai-shek, also irritated and desperate, was trying to establish some sort of order, not only among his own government officials, but among rebellious war lords whom he could not actually conquer and with whom therefore he had to bargain, and they were not men of honor, for as they saw his position weakening they demanded new bargains. Dissidence had risen to such a point that the wild and wilful man, Feng Yü-hsiang, still the most spectacular among the war lords, had in 1930 withdrawn from all bargaining, and had set up a rival government in Peking, further to confound the agitated President.

While I was in Peking, then, two years later, it became clear that unless I wanted to spend my life in a turmoil which I could neither prevent nor help, I would have to change my country, and with it my world. I dreaded the change, for I deeply loved China, and her people to me were as my own. I remember how long I pondered in those days of the Peking spring. The dust storms of the northern deserts blew down over the city, and the winds were cold and dry, and yet I spent my afternoons, when my morning’s work was done in the excellent National Library, in wandering about the city and renewing my knowledge of the past. It was a good place in which to make the decision of whether I should leave China, for nowhere is China greater and more manifest in beauty than in Peking. I felt the nobility of the wide streets, designed for a princely people, and the palaces and tombs remained as splendid monuments. Yet the monuments were falling into decay, and I remember my sadness one day when I visited the very palace where the Old Empress had liked best to live. It was under guard, for the new government, as we still called it, was conscious of its national treasures and the great imperial buildings of the past were all under military guard.

On this day I had lingered long in The Forbidden City, the idle soldiers staring at me curiously, and at last one of them beckoned me to follow him around the corner of a palace. Thinking that he wanted to show me something I had not yet seen, I followed. But when I reached the place where he stood, he put up his hand and pulled down a magnificent porcelain tile from the edge of a low roof, a tile of the old imperial yellow, stamped with a dragon.

“One silver dollar,” he said in Chinese.

I shook my head, trying to decide whether I would accuse him or be silent and go away. I went away. What use was it to make the accusation? He did not feel the idealism which alone would have made him perform his duty. Idealism? There was the weakness. The new government never gave its people an idealism to live by, and the Chinese, like all of us, cannot live on bread alone. Mere nationalism was not enough. There had to be something to live for. There had, above all, to be a leader whom they could reverence. The judgments of people are often cruel, and perhaps no man could have been strong enough or great enough to organize China in time to save her from her troubles. Be that as it may, Chiang Kai-shek was not strong enough nor great enough and now the people knew it. Others have pointed out that the Chinese do not object to a dictator, if he is strong enough as a man to command their respect. It is true that their conception of democracy is totally different from that of the Americans, for their conception of a nation is different. The head of the Chinese government, whether emperor or president or Communist dictator, stands in the position of the father of the people. As a father he must be worthy of their honor and obedience, a brave figure, wise, inflexible and yet reasonable, strong to command and to enforce his commands, yet just and free from pettiness of temper tantrums and hostilities. If in addition to all else he has also a sense of humor, then his hold is absolute, but always by the will of the people. If he fails in these qualities, they desert him and seek another. He must also be a good provider as the father of his people, for the Chinese proverb has it, “When the price of rice is beyond the ability of the common man to pay, then Heaven decrees a change of rulers.”

In short, the Chinese people do not at all mind the role of voluntary subject if their ruler is a man whose powers they respect and admire, but they will not follow a lesser man, and especially one who cannot keep order in his own party. Twenty years ago, alas, the Chinese people began to reject Chiang Kai-shek, not suddenly nor spectacularly, but none the less absolutely. The failure to recognize this fact was the primary failure of later American policy. Had we recognized it in time we might have prevented the appearance of a Communist leader who was able to seize power because he was comparatively unknown, or at least untried. The whole process was in accord with the tradition of Chinese history. A decaying dynasty fell with the inadequacy of the rulers and new rulers arose to whom the people gave allegiance until it was proved that they too were unworthy. Corruption and dissolution began when it was apparent that Chiang could not hold the people. This corruption was not the cause of the people’s defection nor even of the downfall of the Nationalists, although it has often been said that it was. The truth is that any declining government falls into corruption, and the very fact is a proof of its approaching end. There was no idealism left, no hope of a better life for the people, and this despair gave China to the Communists. All other causes were lesser and concomitant.

This became plain to me that spring in Peking, when the Japanese were threatening every major port in North and Central China, and yet never had I loved China so well. I moved among my friends with renewed pleasure, visiting some I had not known before, and others whom I had always known. Thus I remember a notable luncheon party in the home of Owen Lattimore, who had just returned from a long journey into Mongolia and Manchuria and from whom I earnestly wished to hear of the effects of Japanese conquest. He and his wife and small son were living in a charming Chinese house, where that day we dined with his Mongol friends upon Mongol meats, eaten from a low table while we sat on the floor. The Mongols and our host, too, smelled stoutly of goat’s meat and milk curds, and I remember finding the aroma difficult, in spite of my admiration for the tall Mongol men and my enjoyment of their rollicking hearty laughter and ready wit. Owen Lattimore spoke their language fluently but he translated as easily and I was able to share in the conversation through English, for the Mongols did not speak Chinese, either. My interest in Mongols has continued to this day, for they are a brave and handsome people, and I have come to understand something more of their nature through my friendship with the Dilowa Hutukhtu, or the Living Buddha, a man of high place in the Tibetan religion, whom Owen Lattimore saved a few years ago from being killed in his own country by the invading Communists. The Dilowa, being a man of his own mind and of invincible spirit, had refused to obey the Communists when they came, and he was thrown in prison. Only the devotion of his people compelled the Communists to free him, but on the threat that if he opposed them again they would kill him. Owen Lattimore helped him to come to the United States, and with him brought two young Mongol princes and their families, also endangered by the Communists as reactionaries. Here the three Mongols have lived safely if not always happily, for prejudice from Americans ignorant of their race has occasionally made them uncomfortable. They overlook this with characteristic grace, however, and are only grateful for hospitality.

And one of my happiest days in Peking was spent with the great Chinese actor and female impersonator, Mei Lan-fang, in his beautiful house. He talked of many matters, and he sang and played upon his lute for me, and showed me his priceless collection of musical instruments. And his cook, one of the most famous in Peking, prepared delicious Mongol sweets for us, and dainty Chinese pastries, and Mei Lan-fang ate them with conscience-smitten enjoyment, for he was already getting plump, and the willowy heroines he impersonated were essential to the ancient Chinese opera. During the war with Japan he went to Shanghai, I heard, and there he refused to act or sing and even grew a beard and moustache, in order to make it impossible for him to play the part of a beautiful woman, and so be compelled to perform for the conquerors. When the war was over he returned to Peking and his great house and he shaved off his whiskers and once more began to delight audiences in his ageless fashion. Now he heads the actors’ organization under the Communists, I am told, and I wonder if he, too, like other great dramatic and literary figures, is compelled to play the Communist party line. We have no more communication now, and I dare to write this about him only because he is great enough, I believe, to hold his own under any government. And by now he must be really old, but still beautiful upon the stage, I am sure, for his beauty was of inner grace.

Ah, when I think of Peking, my heart still dissolves, for the very soul of the Chinese people was there and it is no wonder that many a foreigner went to visit and stayed to live, and, now driven forth, is forever exiled. My joy was not in the cosmopolitan life of foreigners, however, although they were kind enough to me. My joy was to wander the streets alone, to linger in the palaces and the gardens, and sometimes to ride outside the city among the bare mountains and gaze at the Summer Palace, deserted and empty. My joy was to listen to the people talk, in that purest of Chinese Mandarin, the aristocrat of languages, and to watch them as they came and went, the proudest race upon the earth.

And as I write I do remember one thing more. That spring a little dramatic group among the foreigners gave a play for the English-speaking community. It was The Barretts of Wimpole Street. I do not remember the other actors but only the little frail creature, whose name I have forgotten, but who played the part of Elizabeth Barrett. She was a missionary, I was told, a shy virginal woman, not young, not old, whom nobody knew. But she had great dark sad eyes and a small olive-skinned face and heavy dark hair, and a soft stealing footstep. Upon the stage she became Elizabeth herself, the beloved of a poet, and before our amazed eyes she gave a performance so passionate, so true, so utterly astounding in the perfection of its sensitive comprehension of a poetic love, that I have never forgotten it. And indeed when later I saw our own great Katharine Cornell play the same part in a revival, I felt the little missionary had surpassed even her performance. Yet when the play was over that small creature shrank away again, and when she was tried in another play was quite mediocre, I was told. Something in that play and in that one character fitted, I suppose, the emotional need of her own life at the moment. Years later I wove the incident into a short story.

I did not decide quickly or easily to leave China, and in fact the decision was not final for two years. We had a sabbatical year in 1932 and were spending it in the United States, and those months, I felt, would give me time to know what the future should be. I seem not to remember much about the departure, but I did return from Peking to the house in Nanking and it was put in order for my absence, and farewells were said to all the Chinese friends and the faithful servants. I was detached enough not to grieve as I might have done in earlier years, and besides I had the joyful expectation of seeing my elder child, from whom I had been absent for nearly three years. She, too, would have her part in my decision to stay in the United States. I do not even remember the journey across the Pacific Ocean, except that my chief concern was a brief case containing my completed translation of Shui Hu Chüan together with the photographed copies of hundreds of illustrations from a very ancient text in Peking. I did not then know the difficulties and the cost of illustrations in books, and I hoped to use all the pictures, making the English translation as nearly as possible like the best Chinese version. Two or three times the precious brief case was mislaid in the various changes of the journey, and every time all else was stopped until it was found again.

I had been told that upon this visit to the United States I would find another world awaiting me and different from the one I had known so casually before, but such remarks had made no special impression upon me, since I could not imagine that future. My American publisher met my train in Montreal with a car and a list of questions to be decided, and it was not long before I saw that the year I had thought of as somewhat idle and certainly very free was to be neither. But it is of no interest even to myself to recall the events which are almost standardized for the author of a best seller, as The Good Earth had proved to be. The dinners, the cocktail parties, the invitations to see and be seen, to lecture, to give opinions on everything, were mildly interesting in themselves, but what deeply I searched for was not to be found in such activities. I wanted first of all to know my own people, for until I did, I knew that I could not put down roots in my country, and second, I hoped to find a circle of congenial friends in my own field of the arts.

To change countries is an overwhelming and it may be a crushing experience. I have accomplished it during the years that have passed since I left China, and my respect for all immigrants and my understanding of them have grown steadily. To move from an old established society, and the Chinese were that and have remained so in spite of the upheavals of revolution and temporary governments, into an effervescent and a fluid new society, such as the American still is and must remain for many future decades or perhaps centuries, is to do more than change countries — it is to change worlds and epochs. Moreover, I did not then understand what later I found to be true, that the naturally changing quality of our American culture, compelled by scientific discovery and invention to move so rapidly from a pioneer stage to high industrialism, was violently shaken by the First World War. The effect of that war is not yet fully comprehended or assessed, either materially or psychologically, but we are not only a changing people in the normal course of our national life, we are a changed people as a result of the World Wars.

I was ill-prepared for all this. My parents had left their own country in 1880, many years before I was born, and they had never lived long enough again in the United States to understand its development. My mother used to ponder the American papers and magazines that reached us, concerned over the waves of immigrants that came into America and how they were affecting the national life. But she could tell me no more than we read. I had had no home during college and thus I had never become a part of the American scene. True, the isolation had made me understand very well how it was that Chinese students could spend four years and sometimes seven in American universities without comprehending in the least the structure of our nation or the character of our people, and I had seen the disaster of not knowing the life of a country in which one lived or was educated. Many white people, indeed most, I suppose, lived in China, too, in a remote fashion without understanding either the culture or the customs, or even the language of the Chinese. I did not want to be such a person in my own country. Yet I soon saw that it would be very easy to live as an expatriate in the United States. In so large a land it would be easy merely to choose a pleasant spot to call my home and there to spend my life in various gentle interests. I did not want to do that, I wanted to be an American in the fullest sense of the word.

While I spent my first year, then, in a round of literary and social affairs, mainly in New York, my real interest was in the many kinds of people I saw, met or came to know. I soon perceived that there was no circle of literary people, in the European or even in the Chinese sense. The brilliant young group of literary revolutionists headed by Hu Shih and others certainly had no counterpart in my own country. One of my first acquaintances was Alexander Woollcott, a man who occupied men a peculiar place in American letters, eclectic rather than creative, and critical rather than original. He invited me to come to dine with him alone, and I was advised that I had better go, since in his way he was a little king. He lived in a charming apartment and I could scarcely resist his library, where I should have liked to spend the evening alone, had I dared to risk such discourtesy. As it was, I sat listening for two or three hours to his running comments on the American literary scene, in which I gathered that he had the place of leading critic. It was amusing and therefore delightful, and when I left I felt I knew him much better than he knew me, but that was perhaps the more important knowledge for us both. One after the other I met writers and critics, and I soon discovered that far from mingling in comradeship and interchange American writers tended to draw away from each other, and to work alone at places far from any center. When they came together they seemed cautious and prudent, reserved toward the very ones with whom I had imagined they would be free. There was little frankness of talk between them, and I often pondered this and wondered why it was so. It could not be jealousy, for many of them were far too great for so small a vice. It may have been their insecurity in our fluid society where the economics of a writer’s life are dependent upon a changing public taste, which nevertheless at all times holds the intellectual in mild contempt mingled with fear. It may be, too, that the writers wisely know that their sources are not in each other but in the common life of the country, and this is so varied and so rich that there is enough for all. Yet I feel something is lost when creative minds cannot meet and discuss freely and easily the thoughts and questions upon which we brood. Brains need to sharpen brains, not with wit and wisecrack so much as in serious interchange.

Among second-rate and third-rate writers there was plenty of coming and going, but since that was the age of the speak-easy it was considerably muddied with liquor ill digested. I went once, that winter, to a speak-easy as an invited guest and saw my first dead-drunk man. The Chinese drink quantities of hot wine but with their food and so I had never seen drunk men in China. In Japan I had seen wildly drunken men coming home from the city after a weekend, but they were excited and not dead, and I had seen plenty of sailors from foreign war vessels on the Yangtse River drunken in my childhood city, but they too were far from dead. I thought at first, therefore, when I saw a man suddenly stiffen and then collapse in the cellar of a speak-easy in New York, that he had died, and I exclaimed because no one seemed to care. My host, Christopher Morley, laughed vastly at this, and explained the circumstance, ordinary enough, whereupon I ceased to be amused and went no more to such places. I have never learned to view with unconcern the loss of control over one’s faculties. It is to me terrifying and repulsive, and I suppose this, too, goes back to the days of Mr. Kung, who instilled in me the old Confucian ethic that a superior person does not lose self-control, either in temper or drunkenness.

And yet I knew, too, that Li P’o, the beloved Chinese poet of the eighth century and the T’ang dynasty, was a drunkard. I had often visited the temple outside Nanking that is dedicated to him, and there had heard the priests tell of his life. From the cliffs beyond the temple one could see the famous spot upon the flowing yellow waters of the Yangtse where, it was said, one night when he was boating with his friends he was drowned because he leaned too far to grasp the image of the moon, reflected upon the current.

Of this poet a courtier spoke thus to the Emperor Hsuan Tsung, then regnant, “I have in my house the greatest poet that ever existed. I have not dared to speak to Your Majesty of him, because of his one defect, impossible to correct. He drinks and sometimes to excess. But his poems are beautiful. Judge them for yourself, Sire!”

And he thrust the manuscript into the Emperor’s hand.

“Fetch me this poet and at once!” was the Emperor’s reply, and from then on Li P’o was under royal patronage, drunk or sober. He lived surrounded by friends for the rest of his life. Ah me, those were pleasant times!

This year of my return, 1932, was the year of the Great Depression in the United States, and yet it is significant that I did not notice it. My fireside critic, when I said this, exclaimed, “Do you not remember the men on the streets selling apples? Do you not recall the beggars?” The fact is I had always lived where beggars were an accepted group in society, providing by their very existence a means for merit for other folk who wished to perform good deeds as a requisite for a career in heaven, and so I did not notice the beggars on the streets of New York, except to marvel how few they were. Had the great rich city been in China or India, the beggars would have been many times more. And I was used all my life to seeing vendors selling small stores of fruit on the streets of any city and so I did not notice the few apple peddlers in New York that year. The first real understanding I had of the Depression was the day that Franklin Roosevelt, the new President, closed the banks in order to reorganize the nation’s finances, and then indeed I saw crowds of anxious frightened people. But even banks had not been of importance in my experience, and I did not comprehend the basic nature of their existence in our economic structure.

That day, I remember, was a morning bright and clear, the air clean from the sea as sometimes it can be in New York, and I had risen in good spirits to spend the hours ahead filled with interesting engagements and pleasurable excitements. After breakfast I walked on the streets, as I love to do, and soon I came upon a great throng of people pressing about a closed building. Why, I thought, should they be gathered there, and why were they all silent and anxious? I made myself part of the crowd as I had used to do in China, and soon I learned that they were afraid because they thought their savings might be gone, the bits of money they had accumulated from hard work, for these were working people, as I could see from their clothes and their hands. Their security, I thus discovered, was not in family and in human relations but in something as cold as a bank, and a bank could shut its doors upon them and upon what belonged to them. It was deep relief when later our financial system was revised so that, hopefully, such disaster can never happen again.

And I remember, when I think of crowds, my first motion picture and the palatial theater in which I saw it, or it seemed a palace to me, for I had seen a few motion pictures in Nanking since the revolution, mainly comedies by Charlie Chaplin and Harold Lloyd and I had enjoyed them vastly, but I saw them sitting on a hard backless wooden bench in a big mat shed. Around me were crowded Chinese audiences and part of my enjoyment lay in their running comments upon what they saw, their roars of laughter at the jokes, their lively horror at the kisses, the old ladies decently holding their sleeves before their eyes, and peeping from behind while they exclaimed with delighted repulsion at the disgusting sight of mouth upon mouth. So that was the way foreigners behaved! How pleasant then, the audience implied, to be a Chinese and a superior person!

My discomfort at first in American theaters, however, was not because of what I saw but of what I smelled. I had lived so long among Chinese and had eaten their food so consistently, since I preferred it to Western food, that my flesh had become like theirs. Like them I abhorred milk and butter and I ate little meat. Therefore among my own people I smelled a rank wild odor, not quite a stink, but certainly distressing and even alien to me at the time, compound as it was of milk and butter and beef. I remembered how my Chinese friends had used to complain of the way white folk smelled, and so they did. Sometimes before the picture was ended I was quite overpowered, especially if the air were heated, and then I had to leave the theater in spite of my earnest desire to see the finish of the story. It was only after a year or so of consuming American food, though still without milk to this day, that I was able to endure an evening among my own kind, and this is because now I smell like them. There is no validity whatever to the absurd theory that races smell differently from some inherent cause. Unwashed people of all races smell unwashed, and beyond that their odor depends upon their food. I remember that Mrs. Li, my neighbor in Nanking, complained very much to me when her son came back from his four years at Harvard because he smelled like a foreigner. It took a year or so to make him smell Chinese again.

Feasting and feting and pleasure there was aplenty for me, much kindness and generous praise, but what I remember are not these. I remember first an invitation in New York to view an exhibition of paintings by Negroes. I went from curiosity and what I saw confounded me. The paintings were of unimagined horrors. I saw sad dark faces, I saw dead bodies swinging from trees, I saw charred remains of houses and tragic children. I saw narrow slum streets and slouching poverty-stricken people, I saw patient ignorant faces. And in the crowd there to welcome me I saw the sensitive intelligent faces of educated Negro men and women. Of them I demanded an explanation of the pictures and they explained them to me. What I saw was what they had lived. I heard about prejudice and segregation and denial of opportunity to these citizens of the United States because they were dark. I heard about lynching.

It was a blow from which I could not recover. To me America had always been the heavenly country, the land where all was clean and kind and free. I had seen white men cruel to dark people in other places, but those white men had not been Americans, and so I had somehow from childhood supposed that no Americans were cruel to people whose only difference was that they were dark of skin. And I had known so well the horrors and dangers of race prejudice! Had I not, because I was white, suffered from it even in my childhood? It seemed to me, as I listened now to the Negro men and women who explained to me the pictures, that I remembered all that I had purposely forgotten, how as a child I had heard other children call me a foreign devil because I was fair and they were yellow-skinned, and how they had called my blue eyes “wild beast eyes,” and when I sat in a Chinese theater to watch a play or in the court of a temple to enjoy wandering minstrels and actors on a summer’s day, how always the rascals and rogues in the plays had blue eyes and red hair and big noses and I was vaguely wounded because it meant that the Chinese thought my kind was evil. I remembered how since the revolution I had sometimes been spat upon in the streets by Chinese who did not know me except that I was a foreigner. Above all, I remembered the day when I had all but lost my life because I was a foreigner, though I had spent my life in China and spoke Chinese better than English. And above all I remembered that in the whole world it was still the white people who were the minority, for most of the world’s people are dark.

Yet what broke my heart was not that I had suffered any of these things, but that my own people could commit such offenses against others, and that these others were their fellow citizens. Americans could do this! I stood there before the ghastly paintings that day and gazed at them, and listened to their meaning, and my heart simply filled up. I had to speak or to weep, and I suppose I did both. I cannot remember what I said, but somehow or other I found myself speaking to a group of people, white as well as colored, who had gathered about me, and to them, who were strangers to me, and yet all my own people, I poured out my heart. I tried to tell them that unless we Americans fulfilled our destiny, unless we practiced the great principles of human equality upon which our nation was based, those principles which are our only true superiority, we would one day have to suffer for the sins of white men everywhere in the world, we would have to bear the punishments of Asia upon the white man. And that we might prove our difference from those white men, whom we were not, we must begin here and now to show, by our actions to our own citizens who were not white, that we and they were one, that all were Americans alike, the citizens of a great nation, the members of one body.

Something like this I said, trying to make those Americans understand not only how none in Asia would believe us if at home we degraded people merely because of skin color, but also how we betrayed ourselves and our high calling as a free people if we did not accept all human beings as our equals. When I had finished speaking, I went away at once and remained alone for several days, not wanting to see anyone or to hear a human voice until I had faced and understood the full meaning and portent of this monstrous situation in my own country, a situation which involved us in the whole danger of the white man in Asia, though it was on the other side of the globe. Thereafter I read everything I could on the subject, and I came to know many Negroes, men and women, and I made up my mind that if ever I did return to my own country to live, I would make them my first concern. I know now that this primary disillusionment hastened my decision to return to China, and so to postpone the final question of whether I ought to leave Asia.

There was a final pleasant event. It was a visit to William Lyon Phelps and his wife in New Haven. There I went at Commencement to accept an honorary degree from Yale. It was a warm June day, and when I stepped from the train it was to find myself in a crowd of well-dressed and happy parents, relieved and eager to see their sons graduated at last. Not a porter was to be found to carry my rather heavy bag, and when I approached tentatively a large Negro, he brushed me off saying that he had too much to do. I picked up the bag and was staggering off with it when Dr. Phelps himself, in his cream-white suit, came hurrying to meet me with delightful cries of joy, for he had the gift of making every guest feel welcome. The stately porter, observing this, immediately dropped the innumerable bags he was carrying and hastened across the platform to snatch my own and to glare at me with reproachful eyes.

“Whyn’t you tell me you was comin’ to see Mist’ Billy Phelps, lady?” he demanded. “I always tends to his company first.”

I went off in triumph, Dr. Phelps hauling me along by the arm, and we got in his car, the porter delaying to see us go and to lift his cap. Thence down the street we went, Dr. Phelps talking without let and his car dashing and darting about most alarmingly until he pulled up with a jerk before the handsome red brick house which was his home. Inside his wife Annabel waited for us, as cool, as sweetly sharp as usual, and I was sent up to a big square bedroom where the bed was so high that I had to step up on a stool that night when I went to bed.

One never went to bed early, however, if one could help it, in that charming house. The big living room downstairs was also the library and there I spent a fine evening looking at rare books, and saw for the first time the autographs of my favorite English authors, most of them long dead. Thus I saw the handwriting of Charles Dickens and Robert Browning and Thackeray and Lord Byron and George Eliot, and Dr. Phelps recounted to me the wickedness of book thieves and how he had lost valuable books to various persons whom he had supposed honest. And this, he went on, in spite of his keeping a large tableful of books by the door to which anyone could help himself, only they were all modern books and so not precious, sent to him free, he admitted, by publishers who wanted his praise if possible, knowing how generous he was to praise. For William Phelps, if he was too kind to be a critic, was so because he had all but missed being a writer himself. He had the writer’s temperament and understood very well what it is to make a book and see it destroyed in a moment by someone who is unable himself to write so much as a bit of fiction. Writers are usually poor critics, I do not doubt, certainly of themselves, but the vice versa of that is still more true. Yet William Phelps was shrewder than he seemed, and he could gauge very well the final measure of a book, and when he did not like it he ignored it altogether.

It was a glorious evening, I enjoyed all of it, and never did a brilliant restless witty man have a more perfect wife than his Annabel, who loved him and humored him and scolded him mildly and thought him all the while the most attractive man in the world, which he knew. At the dinner table he had mumbled grace at top speed, and had told with relish the anecdote of how his Annabel had complained once that she could not understand a word of what he said at grace, and how he had retorted, “I wasn’t talking to you, my dear!” He ate at top speed, his nervous energy burning up the calories he consumed, and the rest of the evening was spent again at the books and in greeting a few friends who came in and went away again, then he resumed his talk at once exactly where he had left off until it was obviously time to go to bed, what with tomorrow’s events ahead. And on that tomorrow how much I valued walking beside him in the procession and again how proud I was to stand and listen to his all too generous citation on the platform of the assembly hall — proud because I knew and valued his high spirit and his warm heart and all his vast humanity, clothed in the seeming simplicity which is the final sophistication. He could have talked with anyone from any country and found relish in the conversation, for his interests were as wide as the whole world. When he died a few years later, I lost one of my best American friends.

And still another last event of that year was the dinner given me by Chinese students from Columbia University. By this time I knew that some young Chinese intellectuals were not pleased at the success of The Good Earth. They reproached me for writing my first successful book about the peasants of China instead of about people like themselves, and while I was in the United States that year one of them even undertook to reproach me through the New York Times. His letter was so interesting and expressed so well the feelings of the intellectuals that I give it here below, in part, and do myself the justice of reprinting, too, my reply.

“Chinese pictorial art long ago attained its high stage of development, and the masterpieces of the Sung, the Tang and even as early as the Chin dynasties have been, since their introduction to the West, a source of inspiration to Western artists and art connoisseurs, but Chinese paintings, except wall decorations and lacquer work, are always executed with ink and brush on silk or paper either in black and white or in various colors, and there has never been a painting in oil in China. The ancestral portrait, which is painted when the person is alive but is completed posthumously for the worshiping by future generations, is especially a subject of detailed convention and definite technique. The person represented must be shown full face, with both ears, in ceremonial dress, with the proper official rank indicated, and seated in the position prescribed by tradition.

“Once a Chinese mandarin sat for his portrait by an artist of the Western school. After the work was done he found his official button, which was on the top of his cap, was hidden and, moreover, his face was half black and half white! He was very angry and would never accept the artist’s explanation and apology, so vast was the difference between their conceptions of correct portraiture and the use of perspective.

“It arouses in me almost the same feeling when I read Pearl S. Buck’s novels of Chinese character. Her portrait of China may be quite faithful from her own point of view, but she certainly paints China with a half-black and half-white face, and the official button is missing! Furthermore, she seems to enjoy more depicting certain peculiarities and even defects than presenting ordinary human figures, each in its proper proportions. She capitalizes such points, intensifies them and sometimes ‘dumps’ too many and too much of their kind on one person, making that person almost impossible in real life. In this respect Pearl Buck is more of a caricature cartoonist than a portrait painter.

“I must admit that I never cared much to read Western writers on Chinese subjects and still less their novels about China. After repeated inquiries about Pearl Buck’s works by many of my American and Canadian friends, I picked up The Good Earth and glanced over it in one evening. Very often I felt uneasy at her minute descriptions of certain peculiarities and defects of some lowly bred Chinese characters. They are, though not entirely unreal, very uncommon, indeed, in the Chinese life I know.

“She is especially fond of attacking the sore spot of human nature, namely sex. Some of her skillful suggestions make this commonplace affair extraordinarily thrilling to the reader. It is true that life is centred in sex, and it is also true that analytical studies of sex life show it as plain and necessary as food and drink, but nasty suggestions are worse than hideous exposition. This is why thin stockings and short skirts display more sex appeal even than a nude model. I do not wish to uphold any conventional standard of sex morality, but I do believe that the less the sexual emotion is stirred the better it is for individual and social life. A natural, sound and free sex expression is much to be desired for our younger generations but not the pathetic and unhealthy kind that is chiefly presented in Pearl Buck’s works.

“In her works she portrays her own young life in China as much under the influence of Chinese coolies and amahs, who are usually from the poorest families of the lowest class north of the Yangtse-Kiang Valley. There are, of course, among them many honest and good country folk, hard working and faithfully serving as domestic helpers. Their idea of life is inevitably strange and their common knowledge is indeed very limited. They may form the majority of the Chinese population, but they are certainly not representative of the Chinese people.”

My reply to this letter, requested by the New York Times and published in the same issue, January 15, 1933, was as follows, again in part:

“I am always interested in any Chinese opinion on my work, however individual it may be, and I have every sympathy with a sincere point of view, whatever it is. In that same spirit of sincerity I will take up some of Professor Kiang’s points.

“In the first place let me say that he is distinctly right in saying that I have painted a picture of Chinese that is not the ordinary portrait, and not like those portraits which are usually not completed until after the death of the subject. Any one who knows those portraits must realize how far from the truth of life they are; the set pose, the arranged fold, the solemn, stately countenance, the official button. I have dealt in lights and shades, I have purposely omitted the official button, I do not ask the subject if he recognizes himself — lest he prefer the portrait with the official button! I only picture him as he is to me. Nor do I apologize….

“But far more interesting to me than matters relating to my books, which are, after all, matters of individual opinion, and not of great importance, is the point of view expressed in Professor Kiang’s letter. It is a point of view I know all too well, and which always makes me sad. When he says ‘They’—meaning the common people of China—‘may form the majority of the population in China, but they certainly are not representative of the Chinese people,’ I cannot but ask, if the majority in any country does not represent the country, then who can?

“But I know what Professor Kiang would have: there are others like him. They want the Chinese people represented by the little handful of her intellectuals, and they want the vast, rich, somber, joyous Chinese life represented solely by history that is long past, by paintings of the dead, by a literature that is ancient and classic. These are valuable and assuredly a part of Chinese civilization, but they form only the official buttons. For shall the people be counted as nothing, the splendid common people of China, living their tremendous lusty life against the odds of a calamitous nature, a war-torn government, a small, indifferent aristocracy of intellectuals? For truth’s sake I can never agree to it.

“I know from a thousand experiences this attitude which is manifest again in this article by Professor Kiang. I have seen it manifest in cruel acts against the working man, in contempt for the honest, illiterate farmer, in a total neglect of the interests of the proletariat, so that no common people in the world have suffered more at the hands of their own civil, military and intellectual leaders than have the Chinese people. The cleavage between the common people and the intellectuals in China is portentous, a gulf that seems impassable. I have lived with the common people, and for the past fifteen years I have lived among the intellectuals, and I know whereof I speak.

“Professor Kiang himself exemplifies this attitude of misunderstanding of his people when he speaks so contemptuously of ‘coolies’ and ‘amahs.’ If he understood ‘coolies’ he would know that to them it is a stinging name. ‘Amah,’ also, is merely a term for a servant. In my childhood home our gardener was a farmer whom we all respected, and we were never allowed to call him a ‘coolie,’ nor are my own children allowed to use the word in our home now. Our nurse we never called ‘amah’ but always ‘foster-mother,’ and she taught us nothing but good, and we loved her devotedly and obeyed her as we did our mother. It is true she was a country woman. But if her idea of life was ‘inevitably strange’ and ‘her common knowledge limited’ I never knew it. To me she was my foster-mother. Today in my home my children so love and respect another country woman, whom they also call, not ‘amah’ but by the same old sweet name, for this woman is not a mere servant but our loyal friend and true foster-mother to my children. I can never feel to her as Professor Kiang does.

“The point that some of China’s intellectuals cannot seem to grasp is that they ought to be proud of their common people, that the common people are China’s strength and glory. The time is past now for thinking the West can be deceived into believing that China’s people look like ancestral portraits. Newspapers and travelers tell all about China’s bandits and famines and civil wars. There is no incident in ‘Sons’ which has not been paralleled within my own knowledge in the last fifteen years. The mitigating thing in the whole picture is the quality of the common people, who bear with such noble fortitude the vicissitudes of their times….

“But I have said enough. I will not touch on Professor Kiang’s accusation of obscenity in my books. The narrowest sects of missionaries agree with him, and I suppose this fear of normal sex life is a result of some sort of training. I do not know. Suffice it to say that I have written as I have seen and heard.

“As to whether I am doing China a service or not in my books only time can tell. I have received many letters from people who tell me they have become interested in China for the first time after reading the books, that now Chinese seem human to them, and other like comments. For myself, I have no sense of mission or of doing any service. I write because it is my nature so to do, and I can write only what I know, and I know nothing but China, having always lived there. I have had few friends of my own race, almost none intimate, and so I write about the people I do know. They are the people in China I love best to live among, the everyday people, who care nothing for official buttons.”

Pearl S. Buck

On the following day the New York Times commented on this exchange as follows, on its editorial page, in part:

“Professor Kiang Kang-Hu gave his own case away by his ‘ancestral portrait’ illustration. Though painted when the subject is alive, it is completed posthumously and must be treated with a certain technique. The person represented must be shown in a prescribed posture—‘full face with both ears’—and in ceremonial dress. Certain conventions must be followed — even if they prevent a faithful likeness and violate all rules of perspective and light and shade. In the case of a mandarin the ‘official button’ must be visible. Professor Kiang’s criticism of Mrs. Buck’s pictures of Chinese life is that the conventions have not been observed by her: that China has been painted ‘with a half black and half white face,’ and that the official button is missing.

“Mrs. Buck admits that she has not painted the conventional portrait. She used lights and shades in presenting the Chinese individual as she saw him in her life, both among the common people and the intellectuals. As to accuracy of detail, she is able to furnish abundant evidence from the region of China in which she spent many years from childhood up. Local custom varies so widely in China that no one can lay down a sweeping statement. She verified her localized accounts by reading them to her neighboring Chinese friends. Professor Kiang’s criticism is that she depended too much upon Chinese ‘coolies’ and ‘amahs,’ rather than the ‘handful of intellectuals,’ as she characterized those who speak so contemptuously of the common people, from whom they are separated by a portentous gulf that seems to her impassable.

“To Mrs. Buck they who form the great majority of the population of China are rightly representative of the vast, rich, somber, joyous Chinese life, the splendid common people, living their tremendous lusty life against the odds of a calamitous nature, a war-torn government, a small indifferent aristocracy of intellectuals.

“They are China’s strength and glory, bearing with notable fortitude the vicissitudes of their times. One does not have to read old texts, as Professor Kiang deems necessary, in order to understand and interpret the China of today. No conventionalized painting of the life there can persuade the West that the people really look like the ancestral portraits which Professor Kiang would have us accept as truly representative of the Celestial Empire. Mrs. Buck has enabled us to witness and appreciate the patience, frugality, industry and indomitable good humor of a suffering people, whose homes the governing intellectuals would hide from the sight of the world.”

To return to the dinner with the students in New York — it was a delightful occasion, but my intuitive sixth sense, developed through years of living among the Chinese, warned me that it had a deeper purpose than mere courtesy. This purpose would be revealed in the final speech, of course, and so I waited in amused anticipation. In due time the last speaker arose, a handsome earnest young Chinese whose name I have forgotten, and after much flattery and congratulation the pith of the evening was revealed. They did not want the translation of Shui Hu Chüan, or All Men Are Brothers, to be published for westerners to read. And why? Because, the young man said, there are parts of it which describe a renegade priest eating human flesh, in his desperate hunger.

“The westerners will think we Chinese are uncivilized if they read this book,” the handsome young man said, flushing very red.

It was difficult to refuse their request after so fine a dinner, and I replied as politely as I could, but firmly. I begged them to consider that the book was hundreds of years old, older than Shakespeare. Had the English wished to suppress Macbeth, for example, because of the witches, what a loss to literature everywhere in the world! Surely the greatness of China, and so on—

What made me sad was that here gathered about the long table in New York I saw the same young Chinese men who at home were earnestly and unconsciously destroying their own country and its culture. Yet they could not understand what they were doing, for they could not believe it when told. I had already learned that people can be taught only what they are able to learn. It was a lesson I needed to remember years later in my own country. By that time Dr. Kiang had died in a Communist prison in China and Communists were the rulers there.

I returned to China that year by way of Europe, lingering in England and the exquisite Lake Country. A lovely haze hangs over the memory of that prewar England, a succession of scenes and experiences. In quiet towns and old villages the Second World War seemed as impossible as once the First World War had seemed, and the countryside was steeped in beauty.

One day leaps forward to be remembered. The Sidney Webbs had invited me to luncheon and I had accepted. They were already old and living in the country, and though they had given me meticulous driving directions, I lost my way once or twice and was a little late. At last I turned into the probable lane, and there at the far end I saw two figures who surely could never have existed except in England. Upon a wooden bench, immobile and waiting, they sat together, Sidney Webb with his hands crossed upon the gold knob of his walking stick, his beard upthrust as he gazed steadfastly down the lane, and beside him Mrs. Webb very straight and rigid in a full-skirted grey cotton frock and a white mobcap, also gazing down the lane. When they saw my car they rose, side by side, waved vigorously and then walked ahead as guides, Mrs. Webb turning now and then to shake her head to prevent me from stopping the car to descend and then waving again to indicate that I was to follow. In a few minutes we reached a neat lawn and a modest-looking house. I stopped and got out and we shook hands.

“You lost your way,” Mrs. Webb said in an accusing voice.

“I did,” I replied, and apologized.

“Surely the instructions were clear?” she said, still severely.

I explained my habitual stupidity in the matter of directions, which they accepted without contradiction.

Everybody was waiting, two maids, a dog and another guest, an American man, and almost at once we were seated at the table, Mrs. Webb still in the mobcap, whose ruffle hung over her face to the extent of reminding one of the Marchioness and Dick Swiveller. Of that memorable day I actually remember only these, to me amazing, incidents. In the middle of the luncheon conversation which consisted of a duet between the Webbs while the two guests listened, the American, a rather stolid and humorless young man, new to England, startled us all by mishandling the siphon bottle of soda water and accidentally releasing a volume of fizzing water full into Sidney Webb’s face. He was talking at the time, and the American was so aghast at what had happened that he could not instantly remove his finger from the siphon. Streams of water dripped down Sidney Webb’s cheeks, wet his beard and fell into his plate. He gave one subdued gasp and then went straight on as though nothing was happening. Mrs. Webb, too, sternly ignored the incident, her attention to her food resolutely unshaken, while one maid snatched the bottle from the American and the other seized Sidney Webb’s plate. Mrs. Webb then took over the conversation with courage while Sidney Webb wiped his face surreptitiously with his napkin, his interest fixed politely upon what she was saying. The American was speechless and so continued to the end of the meal.

After it was over, Mrs. Webb announced that we would take a walk, for her husband’s health. He looked unwilling although he prepared to obey, and when we went out allowed the Americans to go ahead with his wife while he muttered to me that he did hate these walks. We went on, nevertheless, Mrs. Webb at a tremendous pace and stopping every few minutes to turn and beckon us on. After an hour of this we went back to the house and I prepared to take my leave. Mrs. Webb, however was not quite ready to let me go. Still wearing the mobcap, she shot out her forefinger at me.

“Now why,” she said in her most positive voice and fixing me with a gaze piercingly clear, “why didn’t you put any homosexuality into your Good Earth? Because it’s there, you know, among the men!”

I was too startled to reply more than feebly. “I never thought of it.”

“Ah, you should think,” Mrs. Webb said reproachfully.

I gathered myself together. “Really, Mrs. Webb, I have no information on the subject, I’m afraid. And if you ask my opinion, I should say that there is less homosexuality among the Chinese than among any other people.”

“Now, now,” Mrs. Webb said, still with the forefinger outstretched, “You’ve just told me you have no information.”

“No, but just thinking aloud, Mrs. Webb,” I went on, “Chinese families marry their sons so early, you know, and besides, there is never much homosexuality in countries where there is no real militarism, where the young men are not segregated young when their sex impulses are most strong, into camps and so on.”

She capitulated suddenly, her forefinger retreating. “Perhaps you are right,” she said abruptly.

I left, and the American with me, and at the end of the lane we paused to look back. The endearing old couple had walked after us and were sitting on the bench again, side by side, Sidney Webb’s hands crossed on his gold-headed cane, and Mrs. Webb upright, the snowy ruffle of her mobcap fluttering in the breeze.

From English countryside I went once more to London, purposely to discover its Dickensian past, which first I had discovered long ago on the wide southern veranda of our bungalow on the Chinese hill. I remember one day, while wandering about the city, that I came upon The Old Curiosity Shop, exactly as I had imagined it, and I stood gazing at it for many minutes in a dream of pleasure, obstructing the sidewalk where I stood and creating a human eddy so that pedestrians were obliged to part on one side of me and come together again on the other side, which they did with dogged English patience. In the same way Charles Lamb came alive again, too, in the dim and narrow streets of the Inner Temple.

From London I went next to Sweden, and found a country so crisply modern that in many ways it made me think of the United States, except that being a smaller country it was better organized and governed. The advantages of a small country are enormous in times of peace, and even in times of war I suppose that Switzerland, and Sweden, too, have proved the positive possibility of a neutral and prosperous existence, provided that the country is not in the way of conquest. On the other hand, the swift rise of Hitler could never have taken place except in a small, relatively homogeneous country. Nowadays, when I view with frequent unease certain events in my own nation which remind me of Germany before the Second World War, I reassure myself merely by reflecting upon our size and variety. It would take more than a mastermind to shape us into totalitarianism, I still believe. But I was uneasy enough at the end of the war, although Hitler had blown himself to bits, to inquire of an intelligent German woman who had seen the rise of the Nazi drama, to explain to me exactly how the whole brutalizing process had taken place in Germany and I put what she said into a book, which I called How It Happens. And the last lines of that book are these:

“A long silence fell between us.

“‘Have we finished our book?’ I asked at last. She lifted her head and I met her grave grey eyes. She said,

“‘I want to tell one story, about an American girl who comes from a small town. I like her very much. She is full of good will, she has become a social worker, and she wants to help. She is so open-minded — that is what I like about Americans, they are so open-minded, even if they don’t understand. This girl’s boy friend was in Germany and on the day when the armistice with Japan was declared, she came to see me and she said, ‘Now it’s all over!’ She was happy and glad, as we all were, that the terrible war was over. But the very next moment she said, ‘Let’s forget about it as quickly as possible!’

“‘Then I said. “No, let’s never forget about it! Let’s remember it forever. Let’s learn how it happened so that it can never happen again!’”

“‘That is what I want to say to all Americans.’”

The Second World War, the rise of Hitler, the continuing evil influence of Fascism were undreamed of in those days, however, at least by me, and Sweden was a holiday. When I left there, I took my first journey by airplane, destination Amsterdam, and discovered that I am irrevocably ill when I am in the air, proving that I am what I have always known myself to be, an earth-bound creature with no heavenly aspirations. I lingered again in Holland, for my mother’s ancestors had come from Utrecht, and then I went to France, through Belgium, and in France I remember again the fields of small white crosses of the American dead, and the mausoleums upon whose walls, as I have said, are engraved the tens of thousands of names of the lost youth of our country, and I reflected even then that if our country could be drawn into a European war at such cost what would be our loss if ever we were drawn into a war with Asia? It was impossible to ignore the portent, for I was now haunted by the similarity of the condition of the Negroes in my own country and that of peoples in colonial Asia. So many of the stories I had heard as I stood that day in New York before the Negro paintings were what I had already known on the other side of the world, and I saw how the minds of the Negroes, revealed in the paintings, were obsessed with the same deep injustices and cruelties that had burned in the minds and hearts even of the Chinese revolutionists. I determined before I returned to my own country to live, if I ever did, that I would travel to India and to Indo-China and Indonesia and see for myself the full measure of the feelings of the peoples there, in order that I might have a world view of the relations between the races of man.

My European journey ended in Italy, for after a stay in Venice I took ship to China again, by way of the Red Sea. Of that journey upon a handsome Italian ship little remains to remember. I spent my time, mostly in solitude, reviewing all that I had learned during the year in my own country, and preparing myself for the year ahead. If, I told myself, I had indeed only one more year in China, how should it be spent? Surely in nothing but learning and writing. And during the long hot days on deck while the ship ploughed its way through a placid sea to the coast of India, I conceived the idea of a series of novels, each of which should reveal some fundamental aspect of Chinese life, even perhaps of Asian life, if I could accumulate that knowledge. But China I knew to the core of heart and the last convolution of my brain, and what was happening in China could and might happen in any country of Asia, unless some unforeseen wisdom in the West could prevent it by understanding in time. Thus I planned my next novel, which I decided to center upon that key figure in Chinese history, the war lord. Surely I knew him, having lived under his rule for decades. This was the beginning of my next novel, Sons.

I went ashore at Bombay and again in Colombo but I made no effort then to see much of India, for I knew that I would come back. I was not returning this time only to China but to all of Asia. It was an Asia as ancient as ever, as mediaeval, and yet in its strange aspects, piercingly new.

Before I reached Shanghai, while I was still aboard the ship, I received an invitation from an American lady to meet the staff of the China Critic at a dinner at her house. This magazine was a weekly, put out by a very modern, Western-educated little group of Chinese literary figures, among whom was Lin Yutang. I had not then met him, but I knew his writings in Chinese as well as in English in the China Critic. He was an essayist, a wit, a humorist, never profound, his rivals said, yet I felt a shrewd accuracy in his pungent jokes and sharp thrusts. In those days he was criticizing Chiang Kai-shek and the Nationalist government with such alarming honesty and fearlessness that his friends besought him not to “twist the tiger’s tail.” He was always lighthearted, however, reckless with a laughing courage that no one seemed to take too seriously, and yet all were grateful because he said much that they only dared to feel.

I accepted the invitation for dinner, mainly to meet him, and passed one of those amazing evenings, where an exotic international intelligentsia poured forth a potpourri, not always fragrant, of wit and scandalous gossip. I listened as usual and said little and accepted a dinner invitation from Lin Yutang to come to his home and meet his wife. The only other guest was to be Hu Shih.

This second evening was even more interesting, for at his house I met Mrs. Lin Yutang, a warmhearted thoroughly Chinese lady, and with her their little daughters. The dinner was delicious, and while I enjoyed it I listened again, this time to interchange between the two notable but curiously contrasting Chinese gentlemen. The lack of understanding between the two men was already plain, Hu Shih being slightly scornful of the irrepressible younger man. He left early, and then Lin Yutang told me that he himself was writing a book about China. It was to be the famous My Country and My People.

I left the house late, excited by the idea of a book in English by a Chinese writer and one so fearless. Its influences, I felt, could be boundless, and I wrote to the John Day Company in New York at once, recommending their immediate attention to this Chinese author, unknown as yet to the West.

The grey house in Nanking stood as I had left it, and I must say that when I walked in the front door it looked empty to me. The servants had done their best and all was neat and clean, but somehow it was no longer home. I had changed more than I knew. Well, to be fair, I must make it home again, I thought — lay down the new rugs I had bought in Shanghai and open doors to a terrace, and even, if I were extravagant, put in central heating. If I had grown too easily used to the luxuries of American life, I would have a few of them here, so that the issue of leaving China would not be confused with the fact that living in America was perhaps physically more pleasant.

I know now that it was a habit of my woman’s nature to plunge deep into housekeeping and gardening whenever I had mental and spiritual problems to face and solve. For the next months, therefore, I did no more than make the house pleasant, bring back my garden to its accustomed flourishing condition in fruit and flowers, renew my friendships with my neighbors and listen to all the news of the city and the nation that was poured into my ears.

The outlook was not good. I found an ever-deepening gulf between the white people and the Chinese. Both groups of the white people, businessmen and missionaries, were alike unhappy. The new government had set up a regime which, however justifiable its rules, antagonized even their white friends while it made the unfriendly furious. Mission schools were forced to comply with the government regulations of obeisance before the portrait of Sun Yat-sen, required to hang on every chapel or assembly hall wall. The famous Will, now a sacred document, had to be read aloud once a week, the audience standing. To the missionaries this smelled of worship before other gods, yet they had to comply or face the possibility of closing their schools. In the Christian churches the Chinese members were pressing for self-government and control of foreign funds, although among many missionaries there was still a hidden distrust of all Chinese — or at least a sense of responsibility toward their home churches, who had collected so painfully the money sent abroad for foreign missions.

In business circles there was the same hostility, for different reasons. Foreign businessmen and their firms knew that the Western nations did not want to take over China, or to conquer her in a political sense. What they wanted was more trade, special concessions perhaps, and guarantees of safety for their personnel. None would have wanted the responsibility of governing China and so assuming the burden of her confused affairs. Indeed, since the end of the First World War no Western power had the strength for such a feat. England was groaning even under the management of India. Colonialism for any nation was nearing its end as a profitable possession. Yet the Nationalist government continued to harp upon the aggressions of the past and to ignore entirely the new and dangerous aggressions of Japan, who, it was obvious, did want to take over China and annex her as she had annexed Korea. Had the Nationalist party, or Kuomintang, understood in those days the true position of the changing West and the real danger from rising Japan, the war with Japan would certainly, I believe, have been impossible, for by siding with the West and moving against Japan, the Nationalists could have prevented the attempts for the Asian empire planned by Japanese militarists and industrial interests in combination. The Nationalist government therefore must take the primary blame, for what happened later. It should have been obvious that the end of Western aggression in China, and indeed in Asia, was already in sight. Britain was yielding her concessions, the special rights were under discussion for change, and it was only a matter of setting up adequate Chinese courts for the extraterritorial rights also to be abolished.

Soviet Russia, however, had earlier confused the Chinese leaders by voluntarily relinquishing her special rights, and at the end of the First World War the fact that the Germans had been forced to yield all special rights further influenced the new Chinese. Chiang Kai-shek would have none of Soviet Russia, of course, but he did display a special friendliness toward Germany, especially as Fascism rose to power there. It was obvious that Fascism appealed to him, and roused in him the old Chinese tradition of the despot, crystallized so long ago at the time of Christ under Ch’in Shih Huang, the First Emperor, a fascist ruler in the fullest sense. It was this Emperor who even at that early time had repudiated the benevolence of Confucius, the great philosopher and intellectual, and had ordered the burning of books, in order that Confucianism could be ended forever. The new and growing Chinese army was put under the advice of German military men, and we saw preference given to German white people over the rest of us. This meant that other Western powers were alienated and so they stood aloof as they watched Japan encroach further and further upon Chinese soil. Let the Japanese solve the massive problem of China, they said to one another. Thus when the war actually broke, China had not a single Western ally and Germany was on the side of Japan! The Nationalists had guessed wrongly.

It was plain by the beginning of the year 1934 that the Nationalist government, still called the “new government,” could not endure. It had never faced the basic problems of the nation, and the peasants were still suffering under the old evils of landlordism and even higher taxes than they had endured before. Thus when I wandered about the countryside beyond the walls of Nanking, as I had used to do, everywhere the farmers and their wives complained that whereas under the old regime they had only one ruler to whom to pay taxes, now there were many little rulers, all demanding taxes, and they were worse off than ever. Democracy? They did not know its meaning, they said, although young men were always spouting the word at them. People’s rights? What were they? There was nowhere they could appeal for their rights. The new roads? Yes, there were new roads but only for motorcars, and who had motorcars except the officials and a few rich men? When those cars roared past, every farmer, carrying his loads to the markets on his shoulders, had to get out of the way. There was no democracy, if by that one meant rights and benefits for the people, and how could a government succeed if it did not practice what it preached? Even the young relatives of the rulers rode through the streets like lords, scattering the people before them. In the old days they would not have been allowed thus to behave.

A thousand such complaints were poured into my ears, and it was impossible not to conclude that the new rulers had indeed failed to understand the necessities of the people. They had tried to stop the revolution without discovering its causes and removing them. They had declared that the Chinese people should believe in and practice a new nationalism and all the while they were allowing the Japanese aggressions to go unchecked. An explosion from the people must be the result, unless Japan attacked China first and I believed, after much listening and observation, that Japan would attack before the people could rebel. The Chinese are long-suffering and patient, and moreover there was no one to lead them in rebellion. The intellectuals were busy in the government, in their own pursuits, and anyone among the people who showed the slightest sign of unrest was instantly disposed of as a Communist. Yes, it was time for me to leave China forever, for sooner or later all white people would have to leave. History had mounted too high, a debacle was inevitable sometime in my life years. If I could have prevented its arrival in any way, I would have stayed to do it, but no one could prevent the inevitable, and any individual would be simply a straw. And I was a woman, at that.

There were personal reasons, too, why I should return to my own country. It is not necessary to recount them, for in the huge events that were changing my world, the personal was all but negligible. My invalid child, nevertheless, had become ill after I left, and it was obvious that for her sake I should live near enough to be with her from time to time. The grey house, too, had ceased to be a home for family life, in spite of my efforts, for the distances between the man and the woman there had long ago become insuperable. There were no differences — only a difference so vast that communication was impossible, in spite of honest effort over many years. It was the deep difference which my parents had perceived long before I did, and which had made my mother try to persuade me against the marriage. I had not heeded her and although sadly soon I had known her right, I had been too proud to reveal myself wrong. Now the difference had come to include the child who could not grow and what should be done for her, and there was no bridge left to build between. It was time for me to leave China.

Yet I had decided that before I finally went I would travel in the countries of Asia as far as I could go, and gain at least a swift view of the position of the colonial peoples at this critical moment of history. I began therefore to travel, first in parts of China that I had not seen, and then further to Indo-China and Siam, to India and Indonesia. I planned, in fact, a journey of exploration into empire, to see how the peoples did under colonialism and to discover, if I could, how the future lay, in timing, if not in event. When, for example, and how, would India get her freedom?

For me the journey could only be a business of looking and listening. I wanted to see no officials, even if I could have met them, and I wanted as little as possible to do with white people. Their point of view I knew already. I wanted to move about a country in my own half-lazy fashion, stopping where I liked, enjoying everything and learning as much as possible. It would be idle now to detail such a journey for many others have travelled in those countries and it has become quite a matter of course even for American officials to take the Grand Asian Tour.

What do I remember, then? I remember first the beautiful province of Fukien, in South China. It is a seacoast province, its undulating shores infested with pirates, their nests centuries old. The little steamer that carried me had a strong iron fence and a barred gate on the stairway between the upper decks where the white folk travelled and the lower decks where the rest of the world ate and slept. Fence and gate, the English captain told me, were made so that if pirates were hidden among the lower deck passengers, the white people could defend themselves from above. What, I asked, if the pirates set fire below?

The Captain shrugged. “We have the lifeboats.”

I was glad to get ashore from that vessel and settle myself for a few days in a pleasant but certainly not immaculate Chinese inn. And from there, with Chinese friends, I travelled slowly by bus into the back country through the handsomest citrus groves in the world, the trees rich with oranges and pumeloes which the kindly farmers plucked for us as we passed. We went as far as the inner mountains, and there the bus stopped, for the mountains belonged to the Communists hiding there, or if one preferred, the “bandits.” The bus driver was a daring, not to say a wild man, in spite of his calm face and miraculous sense of humor. The bus was an old American castoff, and every hour or two it broke down and we all got out and waited while the driver patched up the engine with bits of wire and string. It always started again, he shouted and we climbed in and went on. Once while he tinkered I observed that there was no hood to the engine.

“Where is the hood?” I asked.

He looked up, his face streaked with oil. “That lid,” he said with contempt, “it was take — it — up, take — it — down, and for what? I took it off altogether.”

The engine burst into loud snorts, he yelled, and we climbed in.

And travelling south through the rich province of Kwangtung, I learned for the first time how the heavy brown sugar was made which I had eaten since childhood as a delicacy. The cane is crushed by a press pulled by slow-moving water buffalo, and a stream of thin whitish-green sweet water pours from a spout into buckets. This water is boiled down very much as maple sugar water is boiled in Vermont, until it is thick and dark. Then it is poured into huge shallow tins and cut into squares like fudge. We ate quantities of it, hot and strong, and then we saw it cooled and crushed again into the coarse sugar we all knew.

And what a scene it was, the beautiful lush green countryside, the thatched roof of the circular mill, open on all sides, the buffalo yoked together or single, pulling the heavy wooden beam across their shoulders, the blue-coated peasants feeding the sugar cane into the press, and then the sugar boiling on the earthen stoves, and the children dancing about, licking their fingers, while wasps and bees droned in the warm air — it all comes back to me still, wrapped in a daze of sleepy content, the fragrance and the heat and the dancing children. They were far from the new capital, those people of the South, and when it was spoken of they were indifferent and cynical about it as about all governments. Only in the cities did I see the new and bitter slogans pasted on the walls of the buildings and the city gates, forever crying out against the “Western imperialists.”

And so southward to Canton, and I am glad that I have seen more than once the old Canton before it was “improved,” for in the old city I could walk the ancient narrow streets where the ivory dealers, the jade lapidaries, the gold and silversmiths, had their one-story shops. Each trade had its own street, in its own area, and one could watch an ivory carver use his delicate instruments to shape a tusk into the graceful flowing figure of a Kuan-yin, or make a huge ivory ball, containing within it eighteen other balls, each separate from the other, and each rolling free from every other, a magic I have never been able to comprehend, in spite of seeing it often with my own eyes. And the jade of every color, yellow, or rust red, blue, or green as spring rice, mottled as marble, or smooth and cold and white as mutton fat, every variety exquisite and put to exquisite use! I had seen triumphs of such art in the palaces of Peking, whole landscapes carved from a single huge lump of jade, but here in a Canton street I saw it actually done, a lifetime spent upon one work. The southern jades came usually from Burma, whereas the jade in Peking was brought by camel from Turkestan. It was a Chinese in the thirteenth century A.D. who discovered the mines in Burma, but not for a long time, in fact not until the latter part of the eighteenth century, did the Chinese jade lovers consider the Burmese gem as valuable as their own variety, and indeed there is a difference, the Burmese jade being a jadeite and the Turkestan a nephrite. But Chinese jade miners and Burmese alike believe that jade has miraculous qualities. The Kachins or Burmese hillmen locate the mines by a bamboo divining rod, set afire, and then, when jade is found, they perform the old rituals and ceremonies for opening the mines.

But why should I divert myself here to speak of jade? It is a subject for many books, from the moment of mining the boulders encrusted with earth and hard rock, their hollow hearts lined with the precious and various stone to the final setting of the stone as jewel or objet d’art. Jade became in China a divine gem in the time of Ch’in Shih Huang, for whom the first great Imperial Seal was made, and that seal was preserved throughout the dynasties, so that whoever was strong enough to gain it and to keep it became by that very sign the Heaven-ordained ruler. It was this seal that the old Empress Dowager carried with her whenever she fled into exile, knowing that so long as she held it, her people would not recognize another on the throne and I wonder where that seal is now. Indeed jade is a possession to be cherished by anyone who can find it or buy it or steal it. Chinese women ask for jade ornaments for their hair, for jade bracelets and rings, and old men keep in their closed palms a piece of cool jade, so smooth that it seems soft to the touch. Rich men buy jades instead of putting their money in banks, for jade grows more beautiful with age. When men die, their families put jade in the tombs with them to keep them from decay and the orifices of their bodies are stopped with jade for purity. The poorest courtesan has her bit of jade to hang in her ears or to use in a hairpin, and the most successful and popular actresses wear jade instead of diamonds, because jade is the more sumptuous jewel against a woman’s flesh. And so enough of jade.

The journey westward into Asia was one of discovery and is now one of remembrance. I went to see what was to be seen, and though every land had its extraordinary and peculiar beauty, it was to see the people that I went.

In Indo-China I found the old familiar signs of colonialism, and the sign which is most unlovable, perhaps, is that colonial people grow too selfish and self-centered. Since they have no responsibility for governing themselves they take little responsibility for anything outside themselves and their families, and when some misfortune comes, they blame anyone except themselves. Otherwise this interesting and beautiful tri-state country of Indo-China was charming, and when it is free and responsible for its own welfare, it may become a tropical Switzerland. For Indo-China is really three small territories, or states, combined to make a nation. Vietnam is mainly Chinese, Cambodia is Indian, and Laos is Siamese. The three languages are quite separately spoken, and French is the common unifying tongue. There are no large cities except Saigon, which is very much French, and where the white community leads an active life in street cafés and night clubs, and where there is less segregation than in other colonial countries. On the streets I saw the mixed, the half-whites, French father and any woman for the mother, and their children as lovely as wild flowers but lost, growing by the wayside, belonging nowhere, intelligent, oversensitive, always wounded. Nevertheless I say still that there is actually less race prejudice among the French than among any Western people, and a beautiful French woman had Indo-Chinese lovers as easily as her own kind.

Colonialism degraded the French rulers, too, as it degrades everywhere, and the French in Indo-China were often unlovely in thought and behavior, inferior nearly always to the ones at home in France. In spite of this, the Chinese have liked them better than other white men, because they do not act unjustly merely because of race difference. It was, however, an unworthy colonialism that I saw in Indo-China, without pretensions of nobility or goodness. Its purpose was altogether commercial and its goal was money, got anyhow and anywhere, and the only shrewder businessman than the Frenchman was the Chinese.

I went to Cambodia because I wanted to see Angkor Wat and I do not know to this day whether I am glad or sorry, for I hold that place in my memory so deeply that even now sometimes when I wake in the night to instinctive and unreasonable dread, I see the dead palaces, ruined and yet standing in the clutches of vast trees, rooting themselves not in the earth but like serpents entwining the stones. The very approaches are serpents and the balustrades of bridges are the thick bodies of stone cobras with poisonous heads uplifted and hoods flaring. I walked for hours through the desolate and empty palaces that none can explain, for they were lost so long in the jungle. They were built for the Khmer rulers, we are told, but why, and by whom? Tradition says that it was all done by slave labor, that stone upon stone the slaves piled up the palaces for their despotic kings, who treated them with such cruelty and callous inhumanity that at last the slaves rose in insurrection and destroyed their masters, and the deed must have been evilly done, for the reek of evil was everywhere, though slaves and masters alike are long dead. I am not given to superstition, yet there are certain places in old Asian countries where human beings have been born and have lived and died for so many generations that the very earth is saturated with their flesh and the air seems crowded with their continuing presence. Never have I had the same consciousness here in my own country, a new land, scarcely settled in terms of old Asia. But I felt that crowded air in Angkor, even though the jungle pressed about, and I knew that it was evil. The soft sweetish stink of death was everywhere, even the rooms in the hotel smelled of it, the sheets and pillows, the closets where my clothes hung, so that when I got away I put everything into the hot and tropical sunshine to burn out the reek of decay. It conveyed in its own way the old fearful threat, as potent today as a thousand years ago, that when men do evil to other men, when men deal unjustly and without mercy and count others lower than themselves and therefore of no worth, they create for themselves the certainty of downfall.

Yet there were strange and amusing incidents, too, as I continued my journey. In Bangkok, the capital of Siam, I had two experiences entirely new. At a Rotary Club dinner, where the speaker was a prince of the royal house, I sat through a meal as American as meat and potatoes could make it, and after it was over the Prince read a speech of such extraordinary dullness that I could not believe my ears. All through the dinner he had been sparkling in wit and laughter and we had been charmed. But what, I thought, was this speech? When he had finished it he lifted his head, which he had held doggedly to his page, and the sparkle was shining again in his voice and dark eyes.

“Excuse me,” he said. “I have performed a duty. This speech was written in American headquarters and sent here from Chicago.”

Mighty laughter then, and we all roared and applauded, and he sat down with as wicked and sophisticated a twinkle as a handsome face could create. And after this we were led down the corridor into a darkened theater room for the entertainment, also canned and shipped from the United States, and I saw my first Walt Disney film, Three Little Pigs.

But what I really remember about Bangkok, aside from a curious fruit called a durian, so hard that I used it as a permanent doorstop in my hotel room, was the life on the streets, the yellow-robed priests sauntering everywhere, the magnificence of ancient temples, rising in golden steps from a vast and solid base, exactly as modern buildings rise today in steel and glass, but not so high, and the beautiful smooth-faced women and little children, and the gentle-looking men. Small houseboats drifted slowly on the glassy opaque waters of the canals, the families who lived upon them clean and beautiful, and surely the Siamese are among the world’s most handsome creatures, not large, but smooth-skinned, cream-colored flesh covering small smoothly shaped bones, the eyes large and oval and not slanted, dark brown instead of black, and the hair soft and smooth again and dark but not black. These were a free people. And they looked free, their heads lifted, frank and inclined to friendliness instead of hostility, and what lovely hands and feet and slim round bodies they had, men and women and children, all of them!

A few days ago I saw a little half-Siamese boy, born in the United States and therefore an American, a guest in my house, put his arms about his adoptive mother’s neck, she a white American, and loving this child as dearly as though she had created his body within her own. Remembering his other country and all the Siamese ancestors behind him, I knew her blessed. The heritage is good.

India had always been part of the background of my life, but I had never seen it whole and for myself until now. Yet the stories that our Indian family doctor and his wife told me when I was a child had woven themselves into my growing dreams, and I had long read everything that I could find about that country. From my father I had learned of it through Buddhism and the life history of the Lord Buddha. I had seen the opposite face of India, too, in the tall turbaned Sikh policemen in the British Concession in Shanghai, who did not hesitate to beat a luckless Chinese riksha puller if he got in the way of traffic or disobeyed the imperious demands of the turbaned ones. India was not all of a piece! And through young Indians I had learned about the colonial empire of England, some of its evil and some of its good.

China and India are as unlike as two countries can well be. The life philosophies of the two peoples are different and this in spite of the fact that they share a universal attitude toward all mankind. Both peoples are peace-loving, but for different reasons, the Indians because their religions teach them that life is sacred and must never be destroyed, and the Chinese because they know from their superb common sense, inherited and congenital, that war is folly, and that a wise man prevails by his wisdom. Thus the Chinese have accepted even into their blood stream all their invaders, insofar as the invaders themselves have allowed it. The Jews, for example, for centuries took refuge in China, entering first through India and by the ancient trade routes from Asia Minor, and settled in the inner province of Honan, making their headquarters in K’aifeng-fu. Yet of the Jews as a separate people there is no trace left in China. The Chinese never persecuted them and instead by sheer kindliness and active commercial interchange they absorbed them and were the better for it. Often when I found in China an artist of unusual talent, or a mind more vivid than others among my students, the chances were good that he had Jewish blood in him. It is a creative strain. Once, I remember, a portfolio came from Peking to Asia Magazine, in New York, of drawings signed by various names. The editor chose for publication the ones he thought the best, and later he discovered that all but one were actually by the same artist, a young Chinese Jew. But the story of the Jews in China I have already told in my novel Peony, which in England is entitled The Bondmaid.

In India the Jews have not been absorbed. It is not India’s way to absorb. Instead she has allowed peoples to remain separate, although a part of her whole. Thus the Parsis, that affluent and influential people, who came from Persia centuries ago, have remained intact, their religion still fire worship and their burial grounds the splendid Towers of Silence near the city of Bombay. And in the south of India there remain the black Jews, burned dark by the Indian sun shining upon them for so many generations that they have lost their own color.

The very word color reminds me of the variety of hue that is Indian life, as various as our own American human scene. In Kashmir, where the white barbarian invaders from Europe long ago penetrated India, the people are often fair. Auburn-haired, blue-eyed women are beauties there. A young Indian friend of mine has recently married a Kashmiri man who, though his hair is dark, has eyes of a clear green. The skin color of the Kashmiri is a lovely cream and the features are as classic as the Greek. But all the peoples of India must be reckoned as belonging to the Caucasian race, whatever the color of the skin in the South, though it be as black as any African’s.

And India has an amazing way of appearing unexpectedly in other life, as for example, today in the life of South Africa, the Indians make a third group between the South Africans, and the black and white. For that matter there was our Indian family doctor, and why should there have been an Indian doctor in a Chinese port to tend an American family? And rumors of India persist, for they are a memorable people, dramatic and passionate and finding dramatic lives. Years ago an Irish maid, long with our family during the peripatetic life between New York and Green Hills Farm, happened to mention, when we were expecting an Indian guest, and this only after years of serving us, that she herself had once been in India. Upon my exclamation of surprise she said yes, that her father had been in the British Army, and that his family had gone out there to be with him. She had been only three or four years old and could remember very little.

Whereupon I asked, “How did your father like India?”

And she replied absently, her mind obviously upon sheets and towels. “He liked it well enough, mum, except burnin’ them Hindus.”

“Burning the Hindus?” I repeated, stupefied.

“Yes, mum,” she said, still absently. “They took ’em prisoners by the wagonload and didn’t know what to do with ʼem. But it was narsty, burnin’ ʼem, mum.”

I did not and still do not believe the story, and all my inquiries have since denied the validity of this tale, but it shows how rumor can become stark as reality. The British did commit cruelties, as all colonial masters must if they are to maintain their power over such powerful peoples as the Indian. Thus the famous remark of the English captain, who when he heard of the devastation committed by bombs upon Warsaw in the Second World War cried out in anguish that this European city had been treated as though it were nothing but a Pathan village in India. Pathan villages might, it seemed, be bombed when the inhabitants disobeyed their colonial masters, although, as the Englishman said solemnly in vindication, not until the inhabitants had been duly warned in time to leave their homes.

And then, after the war, a young American ex-GI became our gardener, and after months of pleasant work together over asparagus and roses and such, I discovered that he, too, had been in India and had mightily enjoyed the experience. He had volunteered in the Second World War for foreign service, and he was sent to Asia, his ship crossing the Atlantic first to Africa and thence around the Cape, because of the German submarines and the Japanese also, for by then the Japanese were already using the small one-man or two-man submarines, designed for suicide. Small enough to be cast from a ship, the submarines went down to seek for their target of an Allied ship. When it was found, man and submarine both crashed against it. Suicide is the right word, for if no target were found, the small craft used up its gasoline supply and the man within died anyway. And that also reveals an aspect of the eternal Japanese character.

Around the Cape of Good Hope our young Americans went during the first year of the war and then to Karachi. So there was where my gardener landed, he tells me, and for four years he lived in Lahore, Bombay, Calcutta and New Delhi. He was sensible enough to appreciate the opportunity and he learned to know Indians so well that he was invited to weekends in their homes.

“How did they entertain you?” I asked.

“They took us to American movies,” he replied, seeing nothing strange in this. True, he added, sometimes he was taken also to see dancing girls. Wherever he was I am sure that he was a simple and good American, the son of a Pennsylvania farmer, friendly and accepting each Indian as a friend.

“I’d like to go back now that it’s peaceful,” he said the other day when we were working in the camellia house. “I’d like to see how things are going. I could manage all right living there.”

You see how India has a way of permeating human life? And consider how India has managed, merely by maintaining her independence, and yes, by producing superior individuals, to influence the world in these few short years of freedom. They have put to good use the benefits the English gave and left, the knowledge of the West, the pure and exquisitely enunciated English tongue of men and women educated on both sides of the globe — witness Nehru and with him a host of men learning how to govern, and the first woman to be President of the General Assembly of the United Nations a woman of India, and the man in charge of the prisoner exchange in Korea an Indian general, who won trust from all. Even the blustering and accusations at home and abroad have not changed the quiet confidence of the new India, and this confidence, founded in unyielding idealism, permeates our world life.

I entered India, then, in 1934 and at Calcutta and went straight to the home of an Indian friend. Bombay is the great twin city on the other side of the continent, but Calcutta is not so spruce, nor so English. I reached there in the evening, and the sidewalks were all but impassable with the outstretched bodies of sleepers — the homeless, the vagrant, the wanderer. And I confess that it shocked me to see the depredations of the sacred cows, especially upon the stalls of the vegetable vendors, although the shrewdness of the Bengalis did often devise an outwitting even of the godly cows.

What did I go to India to see? Not the Taj Mahal, although I did see it and by moonlight, not Fatehpur Sikri, although I did see it, and not the glories of empire in New Delhi, although I did see them. I went to India to see and listen to two groups of people, the young intellectuals in the cities and the peasants in the villages. These I met in little rooms in the city, in little houses in the villages, and I heard their plans for freedom. Already the intellectuals believed that another World War was inevitable. They had been bitterly disappointed after the First World War by what they felt were the broken promises of England. The English, they declared, had no real purpose to restore India to the people. I could believe it, fresh as I was from China, where the period of “People’s Tutelage” seemed endless and self-government further off every year. “When you are ready for independence,” conquerors have always said to their subjects, et cetera! But who is to decide when that moment comes, and how can a people learn to govern themselves except by doing it? So the intellectuals in India were restless and embittered, and I sat through hours, watching their flashing dark eyes and hearing the endless flow of language, the purest English, into which they poured their feelings.

The plan then was that when the Second World War broke, India would rebel immediately against England and compel her, by this complication, to set her free. They would not be forced, as they declared they had been in the First World War, to fight at England’s command.

“And then?” I asked.

“And then,” young India said proudly, “we will ourselves decide whether we wish to fight at England’s side — or against her.”

What they did not reckon on, when the time came, was the savagery of Nazism and the aggressions of Japan in Asia. When they perceived that they must choose between the Axis and the English, they chose the English, aware that in spite of many injustices they were choosing between barbarism and civilization. They postponed their plans for freedom, Gandhi meanwhile doing his work within his own country until the war was over, and by then the wisest minds in England, understanding the new world, returned India to her people, in spite of all opposition from Englishmen and others who did not have sufficient understanding of Asia to know what wisdom was. Not even Churchill’s prophecy of a blood bath, partly fulfilled at that, could prevent the inevitable. India had waited as long as she could, and peasant and intellectual were on the same side in the old invincible combination. It was Gandhi’s strength that made him know very early that both peasant and intellectual must be won to work together for their country, his hold was equally strong upon both, and so he achieved his end, without war. Perhaps we Americans do not yet fully understand the great lesson that India has to teach in thus winning her freedom. Beside her mighty triumph of a bloodless revolution our War of Independence shrinks in size and concept. India has taught humanity a lesson, and it is to our peril if we do not learn it. The lesson? That war and killing achieve nothing but loss, and that a noble end is assured only if the means to attain it are of a piece with it and also noble.

The real indictment against colonialism, however, was to be found in the villages of India. There was rot at the top, too, in the thousands of young intellectuals trained in English schools for jobs that did not exist except in the limited Civil Service. The towns and cities were frothing with unhappy young men, cultured and well educated, who could find no jobs and were not allowed by the old superstructure of empire to create them. But the real proof of evil, I say again, was in the miserable villages. I thought I had seen poverty enough in China, yet when I saw the Indian villages I knew that the Chinese peasant was rich in comparison. Only the Russian peasant I had seen years before could compare with the Indian villager, although that Russian was a very different creature, and inferior in many ways. For the Indian peasant was like the Chinese in being a person innately civilized. The maturing culture of an organized human family life and profound philosophical religions had shaped his mind and soul, even though he could not read and write. And the children, the little children of the Indian villages, how they tore at my heart, thin, big-bellied, and all with huge sad dark eyes! I wondered that any Englishman could look at them and not accuse himself. Three hundred years of English occupation and rule, and could there be children like this? Yes, and millions of them! And the final indictment surely was that the life span in India was only twenty-seven years. Twenty-seven years! No wonder, then, that life was hastened, that a man married very young so that there could be children, as many as possible before he died. I loved England, remembering all the happy journeys there, but in India I saw an England I did not know. And I was forced to see that if the English, in many ways the finest people on earth, a people who blazed the way for all of us to achieve the right of men to rule themselves, if colonialism could so corrupt even these, then indeed none of us could dare to become the rulers of empire.

It seemed to me, as I lived with Indian friends, new and old, that all the ills of India could easily have been mended if there had been a government whose purpose was first of all to benefit the people rather than to live upon them. The desert-dry country, for example, the fruitless land between Bombay and Madras, was already famished although it was only February and the sun hot enough to fertilize any seed had there been water. And why was there not water? Why not sink artesian wells, or even dig shallow wells, since, I was told, the water table was high? But the enervated and exhausted people had not the strength to take such initiative after the years of colonialism. It was more than that. The worst result, perhaps, of the colonial system was to provide the subject people with an infinite excuse against work and so against helping themselves. “You are responsible for me,” is always the sullen attitude of the subject to the ruler. “You have undertaken to feed me and clothe me and govern me. If I die it is your fault.” There were always the British to blame, and certainly the blame was not always just. Yet essentially perhaps it was, for when the heart of a people is gone, their spirit dies with it.

In India, I found, any one who had Indian blood was Indian, although three-fourths of his blood might be white, and this policy added to the numbers of the discontented. In the first years of colonialism English women did not follow their men, and even until the end young men did not marry, or married late. It was inevitable that a large group of human beings existed, neither English nor Indian, yet uneasily belonging to both. They were almost invariably superior to the stock they came from, on both sides. The men were handsome, the women beautiful, and both were, more often than not, superior in intelligence. Scientists tell us nowadays that a mixed people, hybrid, if you like, are usually a superior people, even individually, as the hybrid rose and hybrid corn are superior in the vegetable world. We are told that the richest cultures, the most vital civilizations, come from the hybrid peoples, and surely the American is hybrid enough, drawing even his Caucasian blood from as far north as Sweden and Finland to as far south as Italy.

In Indonesia I found a curious difference in attitude toward the hybrid individual. There whoever had a drop of white blood was counted as white. This wise colonial policy made the stoutest Dutchmen of men of mixed blood, removing the discontented half-and-half of India. In Indonesia he had, if not a total equality, at least a surface one which salved his pride. Indeed, if the prudent Hollander developed a colonialism in any way superior to that of India or of Indo-China, he did this mainly through his relatively enlightened racial policy. True, Indonesian intellectuals, too, were chafing to be free even then, but the movement was calm, almost unnoticeable as yet among the people, whereas in India the ferment seemed ready to burst.

Between such serious study and observation, I took much pleasure in the different landscapes, in wandering as far as I could about the countryside of each nation I visited. I had my first taste of true jungle in Sumatra, although I had seen jungles too in Indo-China, but even from the air the jungle in Sumatra looks dangerous, the muddy rivers crawling through the livid green like sluggish serpents. And when the plane came down how sickish sweet was that humid air with something living and yet fetid! I am not one for jungles.

Looking back, I find that among the many impressions of the people of India, absorbed while I lived among them, and still clear in my mind, is their reverence for great men and women. Leadership in India can only be continued by those whom the followers consider to be good — that is, capable of renunciation, therefore not self-seeking. This one quality for them contains all others. A person able to renounce personal benefit for the sake of an idealistic end is by that very fact also honest, also high-minded, therefore also trustworthy. I felt that the people, even those who knew themselves venal and full of faults, searched for such persons. Gandhi had among his followers many faulty men and women, and he himself was not free from certain petty dominations, as those who lived with him continuously knew very well. Yet they devoted themselves to him because he had made the great renunciation of personal gain and benefit.

The devotion given nationally to Gandhi and finally even internationally is well known, but I found the same homage paid to local persons who in their measure were also leaders because of their selflessness. Thus I remember a certain Indian village where I had been invited to visit in the home of a family of some modern education, though not much, and some means, though not wealth. The house was mud-walled and the roof was of thatch. Inside were several rooms, however, the floors smooth and polished with the usual mixture of cow dung and water. The active master of the house was not the head of the family, but a younger brother. This I discovered when I arrived, for before we entered the house, my host led me to a curious sort of cage standing well above the ground on four posts. Inside the cage, made of wire netting, I saw to my amazement an aging man, lying on his back, his head supported by a pillow.

“My eldest brother,” my host explained. “He has had a stroke of paralysis, and though we beg him to live in the house, he chooses to live out here so that he may be ready to listen to the villagers when they come to him.”

My host spoke fair English, but the elder brother spoke none, and we could only exchange greetings and look at each other with friendliness. What I saw was an intelligent, thin, pain-sharpened face, whose eyes were at once wise and piercing. The body was quite helpless, but it was scrupulously clean and the cotton garments were snow-white. We exchanged a few remarks, and then a group of villagers approached, not to see me but to talk with the elder brother, and so my host led me into the house to meet his young wife and children.

All during my stay I watched that cage, and seldom indeed did I see it except surrounded by people, and never, as long as daylight lasted, without at least one man squatting on the ground, talking earnestly and then listening. My host said,

“My brother has always been our wise man. Now he is our saint.”

My host, I observed, had his own place, too, in the village life, for twice while we were eating our luncheon that day he rose from his corner of the room and went out, to answer a shout, apparently from a neighbor. When he came back he made the same explanation.

“I was called to kill a dangerous snake.”

The luncheon was plain country fare, lentils, rice, spinach boiled very much, condiments. Before we ate, an old cousin brought in a brass ewer of water and a clean homespun towel for us to cleanse our hands with, a necessary preliminary to eating with the fingers. Chopsticks I had used all my life and preferred them to knife and fork, but after I had got used to eating with my right hand, I liked it as well. After all, what is so clean as one’s own right hand, washed? And from babyhood the Indian children are taught that the right hand is for clean services, such as eating, and the left hand may perform the more lowly tasks.

Another cleanliness was that our food was served on fresh green banana leaves instead of plates. Well-cooked rice piled on a broad green leaf is a pleasant sight and stimulates the appetite. In any household where caste was observed the food was placed on such leaves or in dishes of fresh pottery, broken after we had finished with them. My host fulfilled the requirements of his caste by eating in the opposite corner of the room, and sitting on the floor with his back to us. By now I had learned to overcome my first feeling about a distance such as this. It was simply a private devotion to a religious feeling and not inhospitality.

Religion is ever-present in Indian life, in its best as well as in its worst aspects, for there, as elsewhere, fanaticism reaches into evil. I liked the simple acceptance of religious motive, however, and the perfect freedom to behave as one’s religion moved the soul. Thus in my first Indian family, an intellectual and fairly well-to-do one, while I sat and talked with my hostess in her living room an Indian gentleman came in without speaking to us and moved gracefully to the far end of the room, his bare feet silent upon the floor. There he knelt, his head bowed, and so remained for perhaps a quarter of an hour. When I glanced at him curiously my hostess said in a manner entirely casual:

“It is my husband’s eldest brother. He comes here during the day at his prayer times, since his own home is at some distance from his place of business.”

When the prayer was over the brother went away again, and it was not until later that I met him, and then it was outside of prayer hours.

My life has been too crowded with travels and many people for me to put it all within the covers of one book, however, and indeed all my books have not been enough to tell the things I would like to tell. Years after I left India I wrote Come, My Beloved against its background. Strange, the Americans, except for a few, have not understood the real meaning of that book, but the Indian readers understand. We have not lived long enough, perhaps, to know universally that the price of achievement, whatever the goal, is an absolute. In my book I chose three Christian missionaries to prove it, for of all the people that I have ever known the missionary is, in his way, the most dedicated, the most single-hearted. He believes that God is the One, the Father of mankind and that all men are brothers. At least the Christian says he so believes and so he preaches. Then why has he failed to change the world in spite of his sacrifices? Alas, they have not been enough, and he has not been willing to pay the full price for faith. He pays only part, unable to accept utterly the full meaning of his creed. I see the same refusal here in my own country, over and over again, and not only among Christians. But the people of India know what it is to be willing to pay the last full measure of the cost of an idealism. They understand, and to them my book is not a puzzlement.

To China I returned with all that I had accumulated of knowledge and experience, and I stayed awhile, sorting over these treasures and pondering upon my own future. In Nanking again, a stone’s throw from the Nationalist government, I still saw no change for the better, no vision, no understanding of the real problems to be solved, and the people were increasingly sullen. The Communists were soon to be locked in the far Northwest, the Long March taking place in 1935, but the war lords were still not conquered, not all bought and bargained with, and Japan was ominous indeed. All this and more — bad news from my child across the sea, and in my house the deepening difference, finally made up my mind. I would leave China, if not forever, nevertheless as the country of my youthful heart and childhood life. I would go back to the land of my ancestors and make another life. The decision brought me closer than I had ever been to those ancestors. Once they, too, had left the known to go across the sea to the unknown. In my case there was a reversal — I had grown up alien and made a strange land mine, and now I was to return to the land of my ancestors. The uprooting was the same, whatever the direction.

Before I left I went once more to Peking, simply to see it, simply to impress upon my memory the last scenes of what had been the heart of my childhood China. It was not a private return, for by that time too many people knew me and there were invitations I could not refuse. I do not remember them now — what I do remember is the blind musician I met one twilight evening in a lonely street. I was walking just for pleasure when I heard the melody of an accomplished hand upon the two-stringed Chinese violin, and there against the light of the hutung was the figure of a big man in a long grey cotton robe. His massive head was high, his dark eyes wide-open but blind, as I could see when he came near. He held his violin across his breast, and as he played upon two strings with his bow he strode along, too absorbed to feel my presence. I have never forgotten that man, nor his melody.

And I have not forgotten the hours in the old well-known inns, the Moslem inn where roast mutton was the dish, the Peking inns where one called for duck, and chose it alive and waited for the finished dishes. I made the rounds again too of the old palaces, and stayed very long one day in the rooms where once the Old Empress had lived. And a day’s journey away from Peking, I walked upon the Great Wall of China, now so useless, although still the enemy was to come down from the North, and I spent another day near the Jade Pagoda so that I might remember it forever.

Thus I filled my cup full, perhaps for all my life, for who could know whether it would ever be possible to return even for a visit? War was certain, war with Japan if not a world war, and by now a world war lay upon the horizon, and much larger than a man’s hand. In that war, Japan, I knew, would not be on our side but with the enemy. Yet when the last moment came, the final departure from house and garden, I took nothing with me. I could take nothing. I felt compelled to leave it all exactly as it was, as though I might be coming back when summer was gone and as in other years I had come back. And thus, in the spring of 1934, I went to my own country.