My Several Worlds

IV

Green Hills Farm

FOR ME MY COUNTRY was a new one, although I was an American by birth and ancestry. The first half of my life was spent, but the better half, the longer half, since there is much waste in the childhood years, yet remained to me. I was a mature person, healthy, alive to every new sight and sound and experience. My kinsmen had fought bravely in three wars, the War of Independence of 1775, the Civil War of 1861, the First World War of 1914. In each of these wars the purpose had been the same, an idealistic one, to make and keep the United States a united and a free nation. In peacetime my kin were professional men — preachers and teachers and lawyers and landowners. Culture was our family tradition, and education was taken as a matter of course. Parents held their children’s noses to the grindstone of school, whether or no until the young ones learned to like it, and excellence was expected. All this simply meant that I came to my country without the burden of the individual in a classless society. I had no reason to worry about myself. I had always been able to do what I wanted to do, and this meant freedom from self — that is, freedom from fear of failure and also from conceit. I commend the mood, since it gives all one’s time for observation and thought, work and enjoyment.

My first summer I spent in New York, and the result of it was that I learned that I could never understand my country unless I became a part of it somewhere else and not merely a city visitor. This meant a home, and home meant a house, and where does one live when there is a vast country from which to choose? The choice may be merely geographical, and I saw many places delightful enough in which to remain, the bare beauty of Western deserts, the enchanted high plains of Kansas, the mountainous states of the Rockies, the close hills of New England. I set aside the Deep South. I could not live where the colonial atmosphere prevailed, and where I would have always to look at signs to see where I belonged in railroad stations and restaurants. Besides, I planned at last for more children, for here, I thought, was a safe country for children, and I did not want the responsibility of having them instilled with color prejudices which I knew would be dangerous to us in the world of the near future.

After some musing and travelling, I decided on a region where the landscapes were varied, where farm and industry lived side by side, where sea was near at hand, mountains not far away, and city and countryside were not enemies, a big rich state, a slice of the nation — Pennsylvania. And where in Pennsylvania? That was decided by the sort of house I wanted. It was to be old, for I was used to old places, I liked their solidity, their soberness, their size. The houses of my Chinese friends were ancient houses, the beams enormous, the walls thick, the gardens aged. I admired the white and green houses of New England and New York, but they seemed ephemeral. Wood burns too easily. In China the houses even of the poor had thick earthen walls. Only in Japan had I lived in a wooden house, and that was because of earthquakes, averaging more than two thousand a year, if one counts the small ones. But they burned. No, stone if possible, please, for red brick I did not like after the quiet grey of the Chinese brick.

I found the stone houses in Pennsylvania, and farms were cheap then, at the end of the depression. Country was my place, although I enjoyed a city for some reasons, but not for living in and doing my work. So a farm, then, whether I farmed the land or not, a quiet place somewhere in a moderate landscape, a house on a hillside, a brook, trees and gentle hills. Extravagant landscapes are sights to be stored in the memory and to see again and again, but not to live with, I think.

How does one choose one’s house? It is first built in the imagination. I saw mine very clearly, rough fieldstone, brown with glints of gold and red, a big chimney. It was not a tall narrow house, but a wide one, at least a century old, low-set against the earth, a wing perhaps leaning against the main building, many windows, a mild view toward forests and hills and the brook. There it was. It remained only to be found. One day in a crowded downtown New York street I saw the sign of a Strout Farm Agency and I sauntered in.

“Do you have any small farms in Pennsylvania for sale?” I asked, exactly as though I were buying a pair of gloves in a department store.

A yawning clerk pointed with his thumb to a pile of little folders on a table. I took the top one and saw a picture no bigger than a postage stamp, in the lower right-hand corner, of my house, exactly as I had planned, a wide main building and then a wing, all stone, big chimneys, set pleasantly on a hillside, a brook, trees, even an old three-arched bridge over the brook, forty-eight acres of land, forty-one hundred dollars.

“Thank you,” I said. Then, holding my breath and pointing to my house, “Is this sold?”

The lazy clerk looked up something in a file. “No,” he said indifferently.

“Thanks,” I said.

I went away, impatient that it was too dark to set forth that day to claim the house. But at dawn next day I started, breakfasting somewhere along the way, and in a few hours I had reached my destination, missing the road a good many times at that. It was a summer’s day, very green and still, the sky gently overcast for coming rain. I found the local Strout agent, a Pennsylvania Dutchman, and under his guidance we turned down a country road, dusty as any Chinese path, and soon we crossed the three-arched bridge.

“Dere it iss,” he said.

He pointed toward the shallow hill. I looked, and there it was, exactly as it had been in the postage stamp picture. We turned to the right along a still narrower road, the old mill road, he said, that ran between the house and the enormous red barn. Then we stopped and got out. I had seen plenty of better houses and to this day I cannot tell why I insisted upon that one, although I have never regretted the choice. But I tried to be prudent, I paid the down fee, and said I would let him know in a couple of days. He grunted a Pennsylvania Dutch grunt, and said he would show me some more houses if I liked, and since I felt I should in common sense see as many houses as possible, I spent the rest of the day in looking at them, and with difficulty restrained myself from buying mine instantly. Then I went back to New York and could hardly bear to wait the necessary days until I could get back. Had it not been a weekend, I could not have waited. Three days later I owned the house.

Books have been written many times in the intervening years between then and now by people who have done just what I did, and I have enjoyed all the books, reading avidly to see what others did. The only difference is that they seem to grow caustic, little or much, over the many trials of making an old house into a home for living. But I had no such trials. Everything was pure joy for me, perhaps because this house was my own first possession, or perhaps because I should have been an architect. Of course, did I build a house it would not be like the one I bought. It would be functional, shaped to the landscape I might choose, in the way that Chinese houses are built, or more truly, the Japanese houses. Frank Lloyd Wright knows exactly what I mean, for he has used the same philosophy and has often found his inspiration in Japan and Korea. The older a people grows, the more it absorbs its own landscape and builds to it.

Yet there was something fit for me in the stone house I bought and have lived in ever since. I do not know what instinct led me to the part of Pennsylvania where my paternal ancestors first came, two hundred years ago. They left it, to be sure, after the War of Independence, and bought lands in the Shenandoah Valley in Virginia, but here my paternal family had its American beginning, nevertheless, and the knowledge was solid behind me. I believe in family, ancestors and all. The individual is a lonely creature otherwise in this changing world.

There were more than ancestors, there were traditions that came with my Pennsylvania house, and first of all the tradition of William Penn and his fair and just treatment of the red Indians. Rascality there sometimes was — I know it, for near my house is the storied Indian Walk where, a century and more ago, it was agreed between white man and red Indian that the white man could have as much land as his legs could cover in a day. The amiable Indian thought this meant honest walking with time out to rest and eat, but the shrewd white man trained himself to walk at a fierce pace and covered such territory in the day that the Indian was hotly indignant. “White man lun — lun — lun all day—” thus history records his remonstrance.

English Quaker and German Mennonite saw to it, however, that cheating and killing were kept at a minimum, and the tradition is still strong here that peoples are to be treated alike and with generosity, though of course generosity is always sensible rather than extravagant. Pennsylvania Dutchmen are not extravagant, and neither, I must say it, are the English-blooded Quakers. They live harmoniously together, firm in their belief in the value of money and land and good cows. Solidity is the habit in our region and Republicanism is our natural trend, yet when we like a man we can forsake all for him.

For myself I was pleased to discover that I had bought land belonging once to Richard Penn, William’s brother. And it was interesting that twice when we pulled up a vast dead tree we found coins mingled with its earth, not of great value, but once Spanish coin, and again English. I liked the evidence that earlier people had lived here before me. It was even pleasant to discover a ghost belonging to our house. In China ghosts are nearly always women, the vapory souls of beautiful women, part fox, part fairy, who incarnate themselves again in living female bodies. Our ghost, however, is a Pennsylvania Dutchman, Old Harry, politely called, but usually Devil Harry, whose remains lie in the Lutheran churchyard of the nearest village. I have never seen our ghost, but our hired man insisted that Devil Harry walks every Christmas Eve at midnight from the barn to the bridge and back again, and that anybody who knew what he looked like can see him plainly. Our Mennonite maid believed in him, and when a dish sprang from a cupboard and broke itself, or a door slammed on her finger, she cried out, “It’s Old Devil Harry again!”

And the mason, who built the walls of the new wing after the children came told me that Devil Harry was so obstreperous, being given at times to liquor, that one night when he came home drunk his own wife decided to make an end of him. He threw himself on the kitchen floor in a stupor, whereupon she tied the end of a rope around his neck and pushed it through the stove hole in the wooden ceiling into the bedroom above and then went upstairs and hauled him clear, as she thought, and tied the rope to the four-poster. After waiting a suitable length of time she went down again expecting to find him dead. But the mischievous old man was sitting in the rocking chair in fits of silent laughter. He had come to, and comprehending her purpose, he had tied the rope around the leg of the iron kitchen stove, which she had hauled up and which was now swinging clear of the floor. And once the very ancient man who cut the grass in the cemetery paused above our ghost’s grave to talk with me and his chief complaint against him was that in life, he had heard, Old Harry had a way on “thrashing” days of rushing to the dining table ahead of everybody and getting a start on the food. Farm wives outdid themselves to feed the “thrashers” well, and it was considered only just and decent for all hands to wait outside the door and go in together, seat themselves at the same time and then fall to without talking for the first fifteen minutes.

The ghost has never molested us, however. Man, woman and children, we have lived peacefully and happily in the house, enlarging it as the babies grew tall and independent. In one such change, we felt it necessary to take the two top panels from the old double door in the south wall of the living room and put in glass. When the panels were removed we found between the inner and outer layers these words written in soft black pencil:

“I, Joseph Housekeeper, made and work this door. August, 1835, I married Magdaleine, my true love.”

Thus Joseph Housekeeper, who married his true love, is our tradition, too, although we know no more of him than the hidden words he wrote with his own hand so long ago.

Our ghost brings to my memory two other figures of our countryside, but they are not ghosts for I saw them in the flesh with my own eyes. Yet they were such strangers in a modern age that they might as well have been ghosts.

The first was a little hunchbacked man, a traveling preacher, a small figure always dressed in black and wearing a wide black felt hat, whom I used to meet when I walked in the back roads and lanes. He had a white, thin face and when I spoke to him, he only raised his bony hand in reply and plodded on. He carried a canvas bag slung from his shoulder, and every mile or so he stopped and took from it a hammer and nails and a strip of cardboard whereon was printed in large uneven letters a Bible text, and he nailed it to a tree. This was his way of preaching his gospel, so that wherever people went they would be confronted with the solemn words he could not speak. “Ye must be born again” must have been his favorite, for I came upon it often and in the most unexpected places, even in the deep woods.

The little preacher is dead now and it is ten years since I saw him last and then it was in a thunderstorm. He was walking slowly, against a driving rain, and in a direction opposite to my own. The texts he nailed upon the trees have rotted away. I never knew his name nor ever met anyone who knew it.

The other figure is a woman and I saw her only once. It was on a warm afternoon in late spring and I was going down our long lane to see if the wild strawberries were ripe by the big ash tree. Suddenly I saw her coming up the lane toward me, a woman in a black dress, very full in the skirt and so long that it swept the ground. Her sleeves were long, her collar high, and she wore a close black bonnet. When she came near I saw that she was old and that she looked frightened. Her full round face, white and softly wrinkled, was unsmiling, and her dark eyes were like a child’s in terror.

“Can I help you?” I asked.

She shook her head. “I just did want to see the place,” she said. “I was born in the house. People say you have made it nice and have planted much shrubbage.”

“Please go wherever you like,” I said.

We passed, and when I returned with my bowl full of wild strawberries she was gone. I asked my neighbors about her but none knew who she could have been. Our hired man simply insisted that she was a ghost, too.

For myself, I am indifferent to jewels and personal adornment, but I must have roses and a vegetable garden, and some years ago I indulged myself to include camellias, for these flowers, formal and exquisite, are Chinese in origin and were in China one of my favorites. Such roots I put down for myself, for roots are what one must put down, if one is to live. My roots were deep in China, and when they had to be pulled up it was necessary to put them down again as quickly as possible if life were to go on in growth. I have learned that any tree can be transplanted and live, if roots are not left long unsheltered in the drying air. Roots are meant to be in the earth, and quickly, quickly plant them there, pile the common soil around them, stamp it down and water it, and life goes on. But let a tree wait, unplanted too long, and it never roots. It makes a half-hearted attempt, a few leaves are put forth, and inexorably the top begins to die and after it the branches and then one spring there is no green. The laws of life are the same for every kingdom.

My American home, then, has been the root place of my American life, and my first years were absorbed in its building. For the making of a home is a profound educational experience. Thus I grew to know my community as I could never have known it had we not been building together. The workmen, the mason, the plasterer, the plumber, the carpenter, the well digger, the groceryman and garageman, have taught me more than they can imagine. I had the vast human experience of the Chinese behind me, and so trained I could appreciate every likeness and every difference between these citizens of my new world and those of the old. The likenesses were amazing. For some time I could not account for the fact that Americans and Chinese are so much alike. It is not imagination, since the Japanese, for example, are very different from us, and so are the people of Korea. As for the people of India, our temperamental differences are so great that I sometimes fear our permanent misunderstanding.

How are we alike, the Chinese and the Americans? We are continental peoples, for one thing; that is, we are accustomed to think in space and size and plenty. There is nothing niggardly about either of us — there seldom is about continental peoples, possessing long seacoasts and high mountains. We both have the consciousness that we can always go somewhere, we are not hemmed in, we need not be cautious. We are careless, easygoing, loving our jokes and songs. True, the Chinese have existed for so long that they have achieved a naturalism toward which we are still struggling. Ernest Hemingway did much for us in daring to be abruptly naturalistic toward life, and in writing pure naturalism. It was a revolution for the American mind, at first a shock and then an adoration, but to anyone brought up in the Chinese common tradition there is neither shock nor adoration, nothing indeed very new in what is simply a truthfulness, limited only by individual taste. Thus I had since childhood seen as everyday sights and events the life between man and woman, birth and death, starvation and feasting, disease and health, beggary and wealth, superstition, hypocrisy and religion. Superstitions have always interested me, especially, as the unconscious revelations of inner fears and hopes, and it was amusing to discover among the Pennsylvania Dutch farmers of our region many of the same superstitions that I had found among Chinese farm families. I find, too, the same literal and rather casual attitude toward deity. And how it is I do not know, but in the castlelike museum of our county seat, an inspired monstrosity built by one of our local great men — and I say monstrosity because I have never seen another such building, and inspired because there is something beautiful about it and we are proud of it — anyone can see the extraordinary likeness between the tools the early Pennsylvanians used and the tools which the Chinese used and do still use. Our great man saw the likeness and sent his own explorer to China to bring back the evidence, and there it is, and I am not imagining it.

Green Hills Farm

Here are our people at their best. It is two weeks before Christmas of this year, and the weather has turned suddenly cold. I know how cold it is, for when I get up in the morning I always look from my open window into the stone courtyard to see how the rhododendrons are. This morning at six o’clock their leaves were curled tight in little rolls and the hoarfrost upon them was like snow. When I came down to breakfast my good friend in the kitchen told me that during the night a little wooden house on the other side of our hill, which sheltered man, woman and nine children, the youngest seven months and the eldest eighteen years, had burned to the ground and everything with it, including the Christmas gifts. What will they do? Neighbors have taken them in and will keep them until the house can be built again. And when will it be built? Immediately! All the contractors hereabouts and their workmen are beginning at once on the building and they will have a roof on it and equipment enough for living before Christmas. Our whole community, which can be as quarrelsome and divided over certain issues as any in the world, has united instantly in time of need for one of its families. There was never a more generous or spontaneously unselfish people than the Americans, and this same spirit would work, I am sure, if it had the freedom and the knowledge, anywhere in the world. It is said abroad that we Americans are wonderful in an emergency but that we have no sustaining power and never carry through to the end of a problem. This is often true, for we are easily diverted and are swept by many winds of opinion. It is also true that we grow quickly impatient when we detect signs that those whom we help do not also help themselves. I like, nevertheless, on this cold morning with Christmas on the near horizon, to remember the new house springing from the ashes.

There are many qualities that I like about my neighbors. For example, on the day, now nineteen years ago, when there was something difficult to tell and so we wanted to tell it ourselves. What would our quiet farm community and the little village a mile away over the bridge think of us when they knew that our house was not to be only my house but was to be a family home for a new family, after two divorces were made?

I shrank from the telling and so the man took on the task. He said to our kindly neighbor, who was also the perfect plumber and so continued until his death last year:

“We want you to know, and perhaps you will tell the others, that we have a very difficult experience ahead of us, and we undertake it only out of the deepest conviction that it is right for us. We are getting divorces and plan to be married and live here. We hope you will understand.”

The plumber was peering into some recess in the cellar and he came out, dusted his hands together and then held out his right one. “Don’t you worry,” he said. “It’s none of our business. What you are is all we’ll care about.”

He said this exactly as though he were talking plumbing, with the same slow friendliness and detachment, and when I heard it my roots took a deep plunge down into the earth beneath my feet. This was where I could live.

I packed my bags soon after that and took the long journey westward to a small city named Reno in the beautiful Western state of Nevada, and there settled myself to the strangest six weeks of my existence. I had plenty of time, for I discovered the first day that I could not work at my writing. Everything was too strange, place and situation and people, but mainly the situation, and I had only my decision to stand upon. That was sure and long considered and unchangeable. Yet how persuade the hours to pass, especially as I had by now observed the insatiable need for news in the reporters whose ears were already stretched to windward? I did not blame them, for I had already learned that newspaper reporters are the most tolerant of persons and have less personal curiosity than any other human group. If they are relentless it is because they have their bread to earn, and twenty years ago a divorce was still news. See how we have grown since then! Last week I read in the back pages of a great New York daily a small paragraph stating in dignified terms that a certain well-known man, a high official in the government, had been granted a divorce from his wife. What progress! We have caught up with the Chinese gentleman who, when Chiang Kai-shek divorced three wives at the moment when he was rising to his first height, still said that it was only “private business.”

Twenty years ago we Americans were not so advanced and my dread was not of the six weeks of isolation, for I can always find diversion and I had the companionship of my future mother-in-law, with whom I was entirely congenial and in whose approval I basked. No, larger almost than happiness was the day of abhorrent publicity which I knew that I could not avoid. Reflecting, however, that since I could not escape it, and that there was no need of living it every day before it arrived, I determined to enjoy my enforced stay and learn as much as I could about the Western corner of my country.

After consultation with a lawyer, who made a specialty of such business and performed it with astonishing suavity and ease, I took his advice and settled myself comfortably in the biggest hotel in town, where nobody would expect me to be, and then cast about to find out how I could learn about Nevada. My eyes at that moment fell upon a card under the glass top of the bureau in my bedroom. It announced Madame Kolak, who was prepared to take pounds from any human frame by the most modern methods. Ah, I thought, and why not from my frame? Here was something to show results, even if I could not work at my novel then in progress. I was sixteen pounds above my college weight, and I would take all those pounds from my bones. I called upon the telephone for Madame Kolak and heard a large husky voice reply. Yes, she would come, that day at twelve. Sixteen pounds in six weeks? Yes, if I would help with diet and exercise. I would, and so the bargain was made.

At twelve o’clock I heard a heavy knock upon the door. I opened it and fell back, stupefied. The largest woman I had ever seen stood there in the doorway, not only tall but broad. That is, she was fat, very fat. Her big square face wore no make-up, her hair was drawn straight back and she loomed like a snow-covered mountain in her white uniform.

“Come in,” I said faintly.

She came in, very businesslike, and snatched off an untrimmed battered straw hat. “Lay down,” she said in the husky telephone voice. “If it hurts, tell me.”

I lay down on the bed, and pulling up her sleeves she proceeded to batter the flesh from my resisting skeleton. The method is familiar and doubtless has improved in the years since, for I see many women far slimmer than I was able to stay. What I remember is not the process nor even the hateful dieting, for Madame Kolak put me at once upon a vegetable soup of her own recipe, making me promise to eat nothing whatever except five large cups a day of the watery stew. She told me afterwards that she would not have been so severe except that she supposed of course I would cheat as her ladies “most always did.” I never thought of cheating, having been reared to severe honesty when my word was given, and so I starved myself heroically — too thoroughly, alas, as I was afterwards to discover, for during the next year I had to combat a protein deficiency which all but wrecked me for a while, and undid most of our combined efforts, she coming twice a day to pound, and I exercising rigorously between her hours and swallowing the abominable soup.

What I remember clearly now is the incomparable character, Madame Kolak. She was the very embodiment of the American West. She had always lived there, she dabbled in gold mines, she had ridden — in the days when she could still hoist herself on a horse — all through the desert, and she loved it. Sometimes when she was pounding away and both of us were dripping with sweat, she of effort and I of endurance, she would close her eyes and say something like this—

“You know what I saw once? I was ridin’ home from a gold mine. It was night but there was a moon, shinin’ soft-like. And ahead of me was a little lake, maybe not more than a big pool. An’ you know what I see? Nine white horses, drinkin’ at the pool, and with ’em a coal-black stallion. Wild horses—”

She smiled, her eyes closed, and we both gazed at those horses drinking from a pool in the moonlight, nine white horses and a coal-black stallion.

“Do you mind,” she said one day, while she screwed a pound from my right hip, “if I call my new mine The Good Earth? It might bring me luck.”

She had not, I surmised, much luck with her mines except for endless excitement and outdoor pleasure. And in those exacerbating days she shared with me, she explained the countryside and the city as well, she described the nature of rattlesnakes, she named the wild flowers, and she told me, bit by bit, the history of the region through the drama of her own life. It was she who whetted me to the point of wandering about the streets of the fabulous derelict, Virginia City, so that, undernourished though I was, I became familiar not only with its present, but with its incredible past.

Twice a day she weighed me, I would not have dared to show less than the prescribed loss. She granted me a reward about halfway through, when I dreaded going on and yet could not bear to give up.

“When you get down to the bottom,” she said, “I’m goin’ to take you around to the fancy gamblin’ places. We’ll dress up and I’ll bring my husband dressed up and we’ll go to all the swell joints.”

And so we did on the last memorable night, when, my evening gown hanging on my emaciated frame, I waited, for Madame and her husband. They telephoned from the lobby and I went down and there she stood, immense and handsome as the Rock of Gibraltar in a long black satin gown of indeterminate style but massively décolleté and with plenty of shining stones. With her was a trim neat man, rather small, whom I recognized from her descriptions. He was Mr. Kolak. We had a wonderful evening. She urged me to eat all I wanted and was pleased when I wanted very little, my stomach having been properly shrunk. We went to half a dozen places and she, not at all shrunken, ate everywhere and very generously and recommended the wines, and the waiters all knew her and called her “the Duchess.” She did, as a matter of fact, look like the Duchess in Alice in Wonderland, only a good-natured one and much broader. I went to bed exhausted, although she was fresh as ever, and prepared for the next day, which was the dreadful one when the news would break, and the man would arrive.

And then how maddening it was when he did arrive to have him stare at me with unappreciative eyes, although a very pretty white silk suit had been fitted to my thin figure only the week before, taken in, as Madame said proudly, “inches,” and how many I have mercifully forgotten! I had kept the whole process from him to be a delightful surprise, and now he looked peevish. “This is not what I bargained for,” he said or something like that, and then stubbornly, “I liked you the way you were.”

“I’ll be that way again, doubtless,” I said gloomily.

Then we laughed. It was a glorious day, the greatest day of our lives, a day, to be sure, which we had both tried to prevent for several years, under the conviction that divorce was horrible, which it had been, and that furthermore nothing was more unfortunate for a publisher than marrying an author and vice versa, thus mixing business with everyday life — and this, thanks be, has been proved not true.

I have heard marriage argued from two contrary points of view, the one that it is wiser for opposites to marry, the other that there should be common interests, hobbies and vacations. My life has proved, for me, at least, the latter point of view. Observing the similar marriages of others, I add this caution — that cooperation and not competition must be the watchword.

Madame Kolak of course had her share in the day, after the court process was over. She and I had escaped reporters through a back exit while they waited on the front steps with poised cameras. We went straight to the back garden of a parsonage where my mother-in-law was waiting for us, and there Madame Kolak and her husband were witnesses to a small quiet wedding. After it was over she handed to the bridegroom a basket which she said was our picnic supper and which later, proved delectable in every detail that evening beside Lake Tahoe. But, best of all, when we were in the car and trying to drive away from the parsonage Madame Kolak stood in the middle of the road like a wall and prevented an avalanche of reporters in cars, cameras still poised, from running us down. While she stood placidly outspread, we escaped.

For years after that day Madame Kolak sent to me at Christmastime two large fruitcakes of her own making, one dark, one light, showing her tolerance in the matter of weight and certainly helping to undo all our joint labors. During the war such cakes became impossible and communication ceased between us, for Madame Kolak found letters difficult. Alas, only the other day a woman who had also been to Reno, said, “Did you know Madame Kolak? Oh, my dear, she’s dead!” And together we mourned our friend.

The attitude toward divorce has changed somewhat in the many years since I knew Madame Kolak, and slowly our laws and prejudices are coming nearer to the realities of life. This humanizing process would have been more rapid except for the violations of taste and principle on the part of the few who have made of monogamy a progressive polygamy, and, as elsewhere, the outrageous behavior of a few has compelled restrictions upon all. But modern psychology is moving toward the perception that it is impossible to insist that two people remain together physically when communication of mind and heart has proved impossible. Indeed, no law can compel the frantic creature to remain in this prison far more horrible than iron bars and a locked gate. I hope it is not selfish of me now to say, upon long reflection, that I believe one divorce should always be socially and morally accepted as the acknowledgment of a mistake, perhaps merely youthful, but that the second divorce should be made very difficult indeed and that a third should be taken as evidence of lack of seriousness or as proof that the individual should not marry at all, since it becomes obvious that he, or she, is unable to be happy in marriage. There are persons who cannot for temperamental reasons be close to another human being, and to such the marriage relationship is impossible for long.

The condition known generally as incompatibility, or “mental cruelty,” has been delicately and devastatingly portrayed by John Galsworthy in The Forsyte Saga. There Soames Forsyte, the irreproachable, the successful businessman, whose character as it is revealed has its profoundly moving aspects, but who is simply unlovable for inescapable and yet indescribable reasons, cannot understand why his wife, Irene, does not love him. He has heaped her with gifts, he adores her with terrifying singleness of heart, and though we never hear Irene’s side of the story from her own lips, yet we feel the loathing she cannot utter, and we imagine the dreadful midnight scene to which she is compelled again and again, and from which she cannot escape. She spends her days in waiting for her husband to go out, and he knows it, and it is the genius of Galsworthy that we pity Soames and we do not blame him, for he is what he is, and yet we know why Irene cannot love him. We comprehend that love cannot be compelled, for in a woman sensitive and of quick intelligence, and with a dreaming heart, the flesh is not separate from mind and heart. The three are one, and cannot be divided from their whole. When this is understood, and perhaps only the sensitive and the warmhearted and the intelligent can understand it, then there is no cause for condemnation or forgiveness. And it is to be remembered that sometimes it is the man who is the sensitive and intelligent and warmhearted one, and then it is he who must escape or die.

For me a house without children cannot be a home. I do not know why the people who love children are so often prevented by accident from having them, but, God be thanked, there are many who have children and leave them, for one reason or another, and then others can take them for love’s sake. My friend, Margaret Sanger, has served humanity well in beginning the great work of birth control, but for honesty I have always made it clear that my devotion is to her as a woman and not to her cause, and this is not that I do not believe her right, for of course she is when it comes to populations. In my case, however, it would be hypocritical to speak for the cause of birth control when other women, without such restraint, have given me wonderful children.

When the house, then, was finished in its first stage, the rose garden planted, a small swimming pool dug under the shade of the big black walnut tree, we approached our one adopted child, then eleven years old, and asked her what she thought of our adopting two little boys as soon as possible, and then a year or so later, a girl and a boy. She reflected for some weeks and then months, and we gave her plenty of time, and when she felt adjusted to her new home, she decided that it would be “nice” to have babies. The three of us then proceeded to an excellent adoptive agency and made ourselves known and began the process necessary to prove ourselves good parents and a “nice” family. It did not take too long in those days, the process was courteous and civilized, and in due course the big third-floor bedroom became a nursery, but without a nurse, for we wanted to take care of the two lively babies ourselves. A year and a half later they were joined by a small but equally lively boy and girl, each a few weeks old.

That was eighteen years ago. The four of them are now in late adolescence and are all but over the last even of that. In the rich years between the day they came home and today I have kept myself abreast of developing adoptive practices as well as a layman can, and have taken an active part as a member on the boards of three adoptive agencies. My interest in this subject is far more than personal. I doubt I am a good mother in the old-fashioned “mom” sense. I love children from the moment they are born until they die of old age on their way to a hundred. The newborn child is to me first a human being and only second a baby. I am not a peasant mother — that is, not an instinctive one. I do not wish to mother the world. I am not infinitely maternal. But I have enjoyed being a mother to my children.

Aside from this, my deep belief is that all human creatures deserve a happy childhood as a right and as a prerequisite to normal adulthood, and that the first essential to happiness is love. I have observed that if a child does not have a wholehearted love from and for someone before he is five years old he is emotionally stunted perhaps for the rest of his life. That is, he is unable to love anyone wholeheartedly and is to that extent deprived of a full life. This loving and beloved person is hopefully father or mother or both, but lacking these, a kindhearted maid or nurse or grandmother will do, but it should be someone who has the physical care of him, so that through the daily washing and dressing and feeding and play he feels the pervading and continuing presence of love. It has to be real love. The professional coddling that a trained nurse or attendant gives a baby in a foundling home or hospital does not fool even the baby. It takes more than a clock-watching employee to make a child feel secure. It is amazing how discerning a baby can be. A child in the care of a good but unloving foster mother soon sinks into impassivity and begins to fade. Love is the sunshine of his growing soul, and when there is no sun, the soul stops and body and mind begin to lag. That is why children in orphanages and boarding homes look dull and are either too silent or too noisy. Babies used to be kept in hordes in orphanages until it was discovered how quickly they died of nothing at all, apparently. Of course they died for lack of true love.

I hardly know where to begin with the many things I want to say about American children. In the first place, I feel that they are the least happy children in the world, outside the war-torn countries, and the unhappiness concentrates in the homeless children, those born outside wedlock and those orphaned and deserted. Next to the segregations and degradation of the Negro in our society I was shocked to discover the way in which our homeless children are cared for, the heartlessness of our methods, the callousness of those to whom the children may be entrusted. I want to say even before this how cruel it is that there are so many homeless children. In the China in which I grew up there were no children born out of wedlock. Perhaps there were a very few but I never saw them or heard of them. If a man wanted a woman and a child was to be born she came into his house as a secondary wife and the child had a family and a surname, and his position was legitimate. At least the child was not punished for the passions of his parents. Children were valued above all else and love was poured out on them however they were born. They were humored and played with and they went everywhere with the family. If parents died, the larger family treasured the child and took the place of the parents, and thus no child was orphaned.

True, there were horrible abuses. Children were sometimes sold into slavery, though, as I have said elsewhere, usually to save their lives in famine time. True, there were individuals who were wicked enough to pander to the white slave trade; true, girl babies were killed at birth sometimes because the head of the family did not want them, or could not care for the extra mouth.

Yet the Chinese are always as shocked as I was, when they find that living newborn children in our country can be abandoned to strangers. Oh, the countless little American children who are left with agencies and in institutions, sometimes for adoption, sometimes just left and visited once or twice a year, or never visited and yet never relinquished! Where are the grandparents, if the parents have disappeared, and where are the aunts and the uncles and the cousins? The child belongs to them, too, and in China they would have kept the child with them. Here, alas, we have no longer the large family feeling that shares responsibility for all its members. It is the child in our society who bears the brunt of the fragmentation of our family life. I was talking the other day with Madame Pandit of India, and I begged her to see to it, as far as she could, that the family system of Asia is not lost as her country modernizes itself. She replied that her people are beginning to recognize the value of their ancient system. And how much it saves the people in taxes! There need be no orphanages, no old people’s homes, no institutions for the blind, the insane and the mentally retarded. Yes, my Chinese friends felt it cruel also to put such helpless persons in the care of strangers, and I agree with them. I have visited many institutions and I have seen good employees and bad, but most of them are neither good nor bad. They are unloving, and that is the most cruel of all.

We need therefore to reconsider the whole basis of family life. Since it is obvious that we cannot change our system to one like the Asian, where the generations live together, not usually under one roof, but in small separate houses connected by courtyards, and where each generation is responsible in turn for all the others, we ought nevertheless to make it impossible for the child to be deserted for any reason whatsoever. Certainly the child should not be forced to bear the entire burden of the illegitimate action of the parents. An American man has no responsibility for his child born out of wedlock, unless forced to pay something for its maintenance if paternity is proved. He has none of the blame, he has none of the emotional burden. The mother bears all that. She can retire to a secret place for a while, unknown to her friends, give birth and leave the newborn child to an adoptive agency, and return again to her former position. But the child is the one whose whole life is changed by the fact of his birth. The child is the one who has to find a new place, new parents, a new home among strangers. Sometimes he is carelessly placed by a doctor or a friend or by some relative. The chances are as much against him as for him. Sometimes he grows up in an orphanage where the vested interests of employees, churches and welfare organizations keep him a prisoner without chance of adoption. A well-run orphanage where the children grow up clean and obedient is a wonderful show place. I cannot bear to go into an orphanage. What I see is not the clean faces, the good clothing, no uniforms any more — we have advanced so far — I see only the children’s eyes, their wistful looks, the strange still patience, or the belligerence that hides a breaking childish heart.

What about the adoption agencies? Their function is to get children adopted. Alas, they are too often so involved in their professional standards, their lists of questions, their self-interest, that sometimes I fear more children are prevented from finding homes than are ever placed by them. I find a long delay in the boarding homes, far too long. Children ought to go as quickly as possible from birth mother to adoptive parents. Let us say that sometimes this speed would mean a mistake. Even so, I believe, the damage would not amount in total to that which the long delay now causes. There is a fearful lag in the average adoption agency. Workers put in their eight hours a day faithfully enough, I daresay, but far too much of it is spent at paper work and filing and red tape, and this is made necessary to some extent, I know, by the differing and even exclusive laws of the individual states. A child is often limited to one state or one area in chances for adoption, each agency serving only an area without possibility of interchange between areas, and again the child bears the brunt of his sad condition. He continues to wait upon laws and professionalism and bureaucracy. And the prospective adoptive parents wait, eating their hearts out, anxious lest the delay is because they do not measure up to some perfectionist demand of the social worker, that the “matching” in religion or race is not perfect, that the house is not quite big enough, that one bathroom is insufficient, that the father is not a college graduate, or that he is a college graduate, that their marriage is not perfect in its adjustment and security, that they themselves are not perfect but only ordinary human beings.

And the boarding home where the baby waits? There he is probably one of several, all waiting for adoption or else a mixture of the family’s own children and the boarding children. Let us bear in mind the significant fact that boarding mothers make money by caring for homeless children. It is true that nearly always they are kind good women, but they are also nearly always ignorant women, not at all suitable for adoptive mothers, and the social worker would not consider them so. Yet the social worker leaves the child there for an indefinite period, seeming to think that because the boarding home is an approved and licensed one, the child is doing well. Meanwhile, during the first months of a child’s life, the all-important months, he is without a real mother. For no boarding mother can take the place of the adoptive mother any more than she takes the place of the natural mother. Moreover, I have often found that while an agency may be an excellent one, its supervisor enlightened and well meaning, the social workers all graduates of the best schools, the pediatrician skilled, yet none of this guarantees the child anything. The child has to live in the boarding home alone without any of these officials present. The boarding mother receives from the doctor, for example, a diet list and instructions. More likely than not, being ignorant, and often the mother of many children dead and living, she puts the list in a drawer, saying that she reckons she knows how to take care of a kid, after all she has raised — or lost — so many. And the child is fed noodles and macaroni instead of meat and vegetables and fresh fruits. It is only human nature to save money if possible. And starch fattens a baby and makes a nice show, does it not? And the marvel to me is that many professional social workers know so little about children. They seem not able to see the difference between firm healthy muscular flesh and flabby fat. But too many social workers have never married and have no children of their own to teach them. To my thinking one who works with babies or little children should not be without experience in the daily care of a baby. Even being married is not always enough. There has to be the loving heart.

Yet it seems that the loving heart is the one possession which the social worker is taught to avoid as the disqualifying possession for a professional. Social workers must be “detached.” And this is the basic stupidity, for how can one have the right to care for children and place their destinies if one is “detached?” I understand very well what is meant by the term. Emotional clinging to a child is, we are told, the great sin. The social worker must act like God, who pours down rain upon the just and the unjust with equal indifference. A child must therefore simply be a case, “a referral,” if you please, and it is very important to have just the right terminology, if you are a social worker, so that other social workers will know that you belong to the gang. The profession is becoming a hiding place for small people, too timid to break petty rules and come out for the great principles of child life. And the greatest of these and the first commandment is love. Everybody who comes near a child or who influences the life of a child in any way, must be capable of love, a love so generous that every child is dear, and every child is a valuable treasure. I have known social workers by the score, and once in a while I do meet one who is right, a warmhearted, generous, loving woman — always a woman, so far — and always one who has known great personal love, given and returned. When I find this one, I sit down and we talk, and she tells me what she thinks and I tell her what I think, and what we think is the same. It is my considered opinion that the whole profession of social workers needs cleaning out, and a new start made. And as I write these words my conscience smites me, for I know a social worker who is sent from heaven in mercy to lost children, and I have the joy of working with her in Welcome House. She is no longer young, and though she has been to schools of social work and knows the rules and laws and jargon, she has forgotten all except the understanding of a little child and what sort of parents he needs, and she has a heart of love and a mind of wisdom, and with these sacred lamps, she searches and finds the parents for the child, and the child for the parents. She is the blessed exception to every rule, and because of her I know there must be many like her, working quietly and doggedly and devotedly in far more places than I know.

I do not say that social workers as a profession are insincere or wilfully cruel or even selfish — not that at all. On the contrary, they are for the most part too conscientious, too careful, too critical — and too self-conscious. They are perfectionists in a far from perfect situation. They complain because doctors and friends and relatives place children for adoption, they give instances, true, I am sure, of misplacements, but they ignore the damage their own failure to solve the problem does to the waiting child, or the “unadoptable” child. I believe there is no unadoptable child. There are always parents to be found for every child. People need education to help them to accept the so-called “unadoptable” child, but there are always people to be educated, although not all people can be educated, but as it is now, again the child is the one punished for parental unreadiness. Sometimes I have even found in professional social workers a strange hostility toward the adoptive parents. I doubt they know it, but some of them do have it, and the adoptive parents feel it, even when they are approved. It may be the unconscious jealousy of a lonely woman who can never have a child. I have also seen the same strange jealousy in men social workers who are homosexual. Certainly they would deny it, the more hotly if they have it, and will not recognize it.

The social worker has, indeed, a power over human lives which demands a largeness seldom found. She — or he — sits in judgment upon two people, weighing them, examining them, peering into their private lives, and it is this social worker who decides whether or not they shall have a baby. Even God has not such power. Any man and woman who come together, whether they are fit parents or not, may bring a child to life. The child comes according to the law of nature, and if detachment is wanted, here it is. No questions asked, but if healthy people copulate, they have children. But the couple, denied children and wanting a baby more than all else, who submit to the perfectionist’s process, are frightened to offend the almighty lest they be refused the joy they long for and to which they are usually entitled.

It will be seen by now that I am angry. I acknowledge it. I have seen too much. I have gone too deep. And I find that it is harder to adopt a child nowadays, thanks to the development of the profession of social work, than it was twenty-eight years ago, when I found my little daughter, or eighteen years ago when our blessed Big Four came home. And I doubt that my husband and I would have passed at all nowadays, as adoptive parents, and certainly we would not have been given more than one child. Yes, the professional gods actually parcel out the children, saying that it is not “fair” for one family to have two children when others have none. What validity the argument might have is destroyed when one visits the orphanages. One such orphanage I know has exactly three hundred children.

“Why exactly three hundred?” I inquired of my guide.

“We are required to have a minimum of three hundred in order to receive our full quota of funds,” she replied honestly but without understanding the frightful import of her words.

And I remember the day when a little timid woman, herself a social worker, stole into my office in New York City. She had come from another state to tell me that something had to be done for the children there, because twenty-seven children in an institution or in boarding homes constituted a job and salary for a social worker, and therefore too many of these workers did not want to free the children for adoption, since it meant finding other children to replace the ones adopted.

“I keep seeing their little faces,” she said. “Please, can’t you do something?”

I could not. The mountain I could not move, for in that state it was imbedded in the corruptions of political life. And so I am glad we began our family before the latter-day social workers had a chance at us, for we have had a glorious life with our children, making plenty of mistakes with them, I am sure, and losing patience on a grand scale occasionally, and they with us, but we have had a glorious time nevertheless, and thank God for every minute of it.

We need social workers, if by that we mean persons devoted to the happiness of children. In a society like ours, where children can be easily lost and ill-treated, there must be organized care for them. But the organization must be watched and criticized continually and rebelled against individually and collectively by those concerned and by the lay public, or else the organization becomes a vested interest. And when children are property, then we have slavery as real as anywhere in the world. The lay mind must always remain in control of the professional, exactly as the civilian mind must remain in control of the military, for once the organization takes over, danger looms. The professional is the specialist, employed to advise and to perform but always under the supervision of the lay mind, for the specialist is too narrow, and made so by his education, to be also the administrator. This is the basic principle upon which alone the citizens of a democracy are safe. For the curse of the professional in any walk of life is his perfectionism. It is all very well to want to be perfect but such heights are achieved only after due process, and the purpose fails if there is such delay that people grow impatient. I read much of the black market in babies, and certainly I do not approve it, but I know the black market in any commodity exists and flourishes only when the proper sources of supply are inadequate for the demand. It is ideal to complete a perfect adoption, taking time to prepare both child and parents, so that one child has a good home and every chance for happiness. But what of all the other children growing too old in the boarding home or orphanage while the one is being perfectly placed, so that many lost children never find adoption?

This is an old war of mine, this war against perfectionism in an imperfect world. I used to fight it in China against the American doctors and the Western-trained Chinese doctors. While millions of people died of preventable disease and millions more went blind from trachoma, the doctors went on with their high professional standards. That is, anyone who practiced medicine must be a graduate physician. But there were few who could be graduates, it was too expensive and there were too few medical schools. To go abroad was prohibitive indeed. I used to argue — why do we need such high training for everybody? Why not train field workers who could give quinine for malaria, treat ulcers and wounds, swab eyelids for trachoma, yet who could realize when a malady was beyond their knowledge? These serious cases could be sent to a medical center and if there too the illness was too grave sent still further to a central hospital. It would mean that the time of highly paid expensive professionals would not be spent upon familiar diseases, easily recognizable, and best of all it would mean people were being cured.

But no, I was told, this was the absurd idea of a layman. I am now enduring considerable secret agony when I hear that the Communists in China are doing exactly what I had hoped could be done by our earlier professionals, and are getting full credit for it. The manner in which a job is done is certainly very important, and the methods should be the best possible. I put only one aim above it — to get the job done, for if one group fails to accomplish it, another group will take over. In the United States the black market in babies flourishes and will flourish, in spite of efforts to control it, until the supply meets the demand. Human nature always prevails.

One personal note I insert here. When I bought the house which became a home for me and mine, my dear elder brother bought the small stone house across the brook. If we stepped out of our front doors together we could wave across the hills. It was our comfortable dream that after being separated all our lives, for he had left our Chinese home for college at fifteen, when I was only four, we could live the rest of our lives side by side. We were still peculiarly congenial, friends as well as relatives. And I think of him here, because I remember how he laughed when we showed him our first two baby boys, then six weeks old! He loved babies and he had a magic with them. I have seen him on a train lift from a mother’s arms a fretful crying baby whom he had never seen before and talking gently and half humorously persuade the little thing to quiet contemplation of his kind face, and then to sleep. I could see the adoring uncle in him when he looked at his tiny new nephews and then he decided immediately that since we were spending the winter in New York, only weekending in the country, the babies must have his sun lamp. He was then at the height of his distinguished career in vital statistics and health work, sought in various countries for his wise advice, yet he found time from his busy offices in Wall Street to get the lamp to us that very day.

The next morning he was stricken with a coronary thrombosis as he was about to go to a meeting of his board of directors, and without recovering consciousness he died that day, and with him went our dream.

I have kept his little ancient house all these years, completing its restoration as he had planned and using it to house friends from far countries who needed a home for a while, before moving on.

And while I think of those early years when we still lived in New York and only weekended here at Green Hills, let me remember, too, the kindly men who helped us convey four little children up and down eighteen floors to our apartment. I had been told that children are not welcome in New York apartments but I have not found it true. There was never a complaint when twice a week the doormen and elevator men helped two little boys and two babies into cars and out of them. Once when I spoke my thanks a cheerful elevator man replied, “Shure, ma’am, we’d rather have kiddies than dogs in the house.”

And once, I remember, when my husband had left us at his downtown office and had turned over the car full of children and nurse to me, I was stopped at the crossing by the immense policeman at our corner. And oh, dear, I thought, what have I done now? For I was never the best of drivers, being congenitally absent-minded, but the policeman held us there with the flat of his hand against us, while traffic came and went, and the babies began to show signs of hunger. On the second red light, while the cars waited like crouching tigers, he sauntered over to us and leaned amiably into the open window behind me.

“I just wanted to see how the kids are doin’,” he explained.

Then he waved us on.

And why do I speak gratefully of elevator men and policemen, and not of the one above all men? For three years of babies my husband, halfway on our way to New York or halfway home, stopped at a wayside diner to heat bottles of milk for those hungry babies of ours. The diner man got to know us well and he took vast interest in the twice-a-week event. But what I remember is my husband’s affectionate half-humorous patience as he brought back two bottles of warm milk to insert them gently into the waiting mouths.

When at times I tend to grow impatient with my fellow Americans, and I am only impatient when it comes to large world affairs, at which it seems to me we are still rather stupid, I remember the infinite goodness of my fellow citizens, taken one by one, and the personal kindnesses of daily living, over the years.

During the forty years I lived in China I had kept myself aware of what was going on in the rest of the world, and especially in my own country. I had learned from childhood to recognize the peoples of the earth as members of one family, known or unknown, and had realized the practical meaning of this Chinese view of the globe, first instilled into me by Mr. Kung, as history unrolled before me, enfolding me as it went. So now, living the second half of my life in the United States, I keep close touch with what is going on in China, the country that I have left, and yet which will always be a part of me, in spite of the fact that I am persona non grata to the Communists at present in control.

In 1938, therefore, although I was living deeply in my peaceful American farmhouse, I was still close to my other country. Ten years had passed since Chiang Kai-shek set up his government in the old Ming capital of Nanking. They had been difficult years for him and his government, and four severe floods with the inevitable famines following, and one severe drought, had made them no easier. The depression that wrought such havoc with the American people had been, far more than we realized, a world depression, and China in 1933 had all but succumbed to her share of it. Yet the government had pulled through disasters, and in some ways had made progress. The Communists were steadily beaten back into the Northwest, and one province and leader after another gave allegiance to the new Central Government, as it was now called. Anti-Western slogans were dying down, and the influence of the Western-trained officials was growing stronger. Chinese businessmen were eager to increase trade with Western countries, and experts in industry, road making, and scientific research were invited to China to give their advice. An air service was begun and one could fly from the North to the South, from East to West. Many westerners were surprised to see how readily China took to modern modes of travel, but that was because they did not understand the literal and practical nature of the Chinese, who are always ready to improve themselves. It was amusing, even in the days when I was still living in China, to see a stout businessman, his clean extra garments in a small pigskin trunk, mount as confidently into an airplane as he had once climbed into a riksha. Railways, greatly increased, made it possible to travel by train from the coast to as far west as Sian-fu in Shensi. Motor roads were built and buses in various stages of collapse and disrepair bumped along their way into the interior and back again to the ports, although private cars still belonged only to the very rich and to government officials. Perhaps the most notable contributions of the Western-trained Chinese were in the area of roads and railways. The weakness of the young government, however, was still in its remoteness from the peasants who, it must always be remembered, were eighty-five percent of the population. Motor roads and even railroads did not benefit them, and taxes steadily increased. Central control still did not reach far beyond the large cities, and local bullies, in the posts of officialdom, too often exacted levies as they liked. For the peasant there were no courts of appeal. To maintain an enormously increased officialdom he groaned under fresh burdens. Behind Chiang Kai-shek and his government, however, were the Chinese bankers of the port cities, mainly Shanghai. In spite of the slogans of anti-foreignism upon which the Nationalist government rose to power, the fact is that this government owes more to westerners than it has ever been willing to acknowledge and some of it was because of the treaty ports, where in concessions guarded by Western police and soldiers, the banks and treasuries could be maintained in safety. There, too, the bankers and their families were safe, their children educated in Western schools. The sons of Chinese bankers and other rich men did indeed become the vanguard of a national movement toward Westernism, and through them much of the old Chinese tradition was dying. Young men, growing up in the cosmopolitan cities of Shanghai and Tientsin, wore Western clothes and went to Western dance halls where the hostesses were not only lovely Chinese girls in their slim gowns fashioned on Western lines, but French girls and beautiful White Russians, and even a few English and Americans were available to all alike. A modern theater movement flourished in those cities, and such stars as the Chinese Butterfly Wu, vying with pretty Janet Gaynor of Hollywood, the favorite American star, made motion picture theaters everyday pleasures. Young couples began to want “small family” homes instead of living in the traditional manner with the clan, and much of the literature one read in Chinese magazines and books of the period had to do with the sorrows of young lovers parted from each other by family betrothals. It became acceptable for a man, married by his family, to leave his wife in the ancestral home in the country and to take another wife of his own choosing for his business life in the city. The Chinese is always able to accommodate his principles to the needs of the hour, and for this reason, more than any other, there was never a clean-cut, thoroughgoing revolution in China, let it be said, as there was in Russia. New mores developed, but never abruptly. Even the houses changed, and instead of the graceful old dwellings of the past, conforming to landscape, hideous square two-story structures sprang up to mar the ancient Chinese scene. It became fashionable among the modern-minded to be Western in all possible ways, and the effect was often distressing indeed.

Such news and much more reached me here in my pleasant Pennsylvania home, and in the letters of my Chinese friends I read of so many changes — many, it seemed, for the good — that I began to wonder if indeed it had been necessary to leave my childhood land. Not that I regretted the choice — I was entirely happy in my own country, and was already absorbed in the daily discovery of its life, its people, and its manners. But I remembered what my Chinese friends had said when I left. “Go back to your country and discover your ancestors, for this is good,” they had told me. “But when you are old, you will come back to us.” I had denied this in my heart, for I felt if I left China for the reasons that I had, then I would never return. Yet could I resist? Sometimes I wondered. China was the ideal country for the old, a pleasant place where one achieved honor merely by growing old. How often had I come upon a village, anywhere in China, to find sitting outside the door on a bench at the edge of the threshing floor, a comfortably dressed old man or woman, dozing in the sun, pipe in hand, idle without reproach, loved and cared for and made much of, merely because he or she was old! Old people were treasures and no one was afraid to grow old. When an aged one spoke the others listened, eager for the wisdom of his accumulated years.

It had been a shock to discover how differently the old are treated in my own country, and how pathetically they try to hide the number of their years and pretend themselves still strong and able to do a full day’s work. Worse almost than the injustice to homeless children was it to find white-haired parents and grandparents in old people’s homes and even in mental institutions, often without mental illness beyond the gentle and harmless decay of age. I suppose that the uncertainty of economic life and the insecurity of the individual alone in his struggle to maintain himself, his wife and children, make thoughtful tenderness too rare between young and old in our country. The aging feel their children’s dread and they try to care for themselves and are guilty if they cannot, and so the generations pull apart in a mutual fear which stifles natural love.

I listened not long ago to the conversation of a good elderly man who had for many years been the head of a local bank. He took an interest in an old men’s home in a nearby city, and he told me how the superintendent of this old men’s home would find upon a doorstep in the early morning an old man left there by son or daughter, abandoned and under injunction not to reveal his family’s name. Yes, this happens.

Yet somehow our society must make it right and possible for old people not to fear the young or be deserted by them, for the test of a civilization is in the way that it cares for its helpless members. Thus when Hitler began to destroy the old, I knew that his regime could not last in a civilized world. It was an anachronism, and the laws of human evolution would provide its end — and how quickly did that end come!

To return, however — what might have happened in China had Japan not chosen this hour to enlarge her dream of empire no one can tell. Chiang Kai-shek had not counted upon the speed of Japan’s advance and he had continued his policy of internal pacification, encouraged by its seeming success. One by one the provinces had aligned themselves with his government as he drove the Communists to the northwest corner of the country. True, the Communists had set up a rival government there, independent from the rest of China, small but enough to irritate Chiang Kai-shek, determined as he was to unify the country politically. He decided in December, 1936, to make one last march against them, using as his base the city of Sian in Shensi, and as his army local soldiers and the men under Chang Hsüeh-liang, the son of the old Manchurian war lord, Chang Tso-lin. Chang Hsüeh-liang and his men had been exiled ever since Japan seized Manchuria, and now they were discontented exiles, longing to fight Japan but with no heart to fight against the Communists, who were, after all, Chinese. Chiang Kai-shek had heard of their disaffection, and thither he flew by air with his staff on the seventh day of December, 1936, to unite his forces and lead the attack against the entrenched Communists.

What was his surprise, on the twelfth day of the same month as he was resting at a hot springs resort near the city, to find himself taken prisoner by Chang Hsüeh-liang, his ally! The story need not be retold here, so well known is it, for indeed the whole world was shocked by the incident. Yet perhaps the motives behind it may not be so well understood. Briefly, Chang Hsüeh-liang proposed that the Nationalist government make peace with the Communists and join with them immediately in resisting the Japanese, who were daily taking over more northern territory and obviously planning for the whole of China. It may be assumed that the young Marshal, as he was called, saw in the defeat of Japan his only hope of return to Manchuria, and felt there was no sense in a war with the Chinese Communists while foreign Japanese ate up the country. Chiang Kai-shek, a man of well-known and mighty temper, was too angry to listen to such arguments, and insisted upon defeating the Communists first — that is, he insisted upon his own way. In Nanking not only his family but his government were terrified. It soon became clear that the Nationalist party was splitting upon the issue of the Old Tiger himself. Some members even appeared willing to sacrifice Chiang in order to bring about party unification. Others felt that the whole Nationalist regime would fall if Chiang fell. The family decided to settle the crisis and rescue their hero at all costs, and Madame Chiang then flew to her husband’s side.

Meanwhile Chou En-lai, that suave Communist, had talked with the honorable prisoner, and he had put forth a compromise in the best Chinese tradition, albeit one with a big stick behind it. If their terms were accepted, Chou En-lai said, then the Communists would bow to Chiang Kai-shek as their head and the head of the state. The terms? The “rebels” were to be forgiven, an armistice was to be arranged between Nationalists and Communists, and together they were to fight the Japanese. The big stick? That if Chiang did not agree he would be killed at once. Chiang did agree, very reluctantly, and the terms were fulfilled. He was freed again, he was given apparent honor as the accepted head of a united China, and resistance against Japan was planned.

Yet privately everyone knew that the Communists had won a victory and for the first time the young intellectuals, even those in the Nationalist party, began to be interested in the Communist movement. Were there really Chinese who were willing to sacrifice themselves and their own interests to save their country from a foreign enemy? It was something new, and idealism, so sorely weakened under the years of Nationalist rule, stirred again. People began to talk about “agrarian revolutionists,” and the Communists themselves took up the term. “We are not like the Russian Communists,” they proclaimed. “We are agrarian reformers, and we are Chinese.” It was cleverly done, undoubtedly part of a long-laid plan for future conquest, and no one knows whether Chiang Kai-shek understood its full significance. I think he did, for he always denied the validity of the term from the very first. And he was always uneasy in his enforced alliance.

For Americans, too, it must be understood that this was the first victory of the Communists in China, and yet it was a Chinese victory over Chinese. There is little evidence, indeed none, to show that Soviet Russia had any part in it, unless the withdrawal was deliberate, in order to stimulate local or national Communism. The Russians had seemed to repudiate Mao Tse-tung for his separatism, and during the Second World War they were careful at all times to acknowledge Chiang Kai-shek as the head of the Chinese government. Later, when they saw the inevitable fall of the Nationalists, they came forward to ally themselves with the Chinese Communists and thus consolidated their position in Asia by isolating the Chinese from the Americans. Into this plot, if it was a plot, we Americans threw ourselves wholeheartedly, ignorant of what was happening and in our ignorance doing all that we could to help Russia, whom even then we considered a potential enemy.

But I am ahead of my story. Undoubtedly the Chinese Communists wanted a war with Japan, for while they loudly talked of resistance, actually they resisted very little and the brunt fell, certainly at first, upon Chiang Kai-shek — indeed, this was true until Pearl Harbor when the Americans entered the war. It was the hope of the Chinese Communists, of course, that the Japanese would not only destroy the Nationalists but also the old traditional China, that there would be, in short, such destruction and confusion everywhere that the Communists could then step in and offer the only possible organized leadership out of chaos. This was the strong web they wove, and in it Chiang Kai-shek was helpless from the first. Perhaps he knew it, for certainly his resistance to Japan at the beginning was surprisingly strong and successful. His one hope was success in the war against Japan, for if he emerged victor in the struggle, then the people, grown lukewarm and indifferent, would flock again to his side. Thus by victory against Japan he would defeat not only Japan but also the Communists in the Northwest. Both sides were playing against each other, using Japan as the means to victory. The difference was that the Communists counted on the defeat of Chiang by Japan as their means, and for Chiang it was necessary that Japan be defeated. Therefore Chiang would certainly ally himself with the West, for this time the West would be against Japan, and in a Western victory he too would be victorious. This was the situation in which the Chinese found themselves in the year 1938, in the month of November.

In that same year, at the same time, I was in Sweden, where I went to accept the award of the Nobel Prize in Literature.

The preparation for such a journey had been hurried, not only for myself, but also for our family of children, five of them, the eldest twelve and the four babies less than four years old. Though we had a good nurse and a staunch housekeeper, yet I had never before left the children for more than a night or two at a time, and now it was to be for nearly a month, I was determined not to be away at Christmas, and so by careful calculation we planned that we could get home in time for it, although this gave us only four days in Sweden, since it was necessary to have some days in London, and a stopover in Denmark. Though so notable an occasion lay ahead, it was a wrench to leave home for a whole month, and especially to put the sea between children and parents. We went aboard the Normandie one grey November day in New York, my husband, my pretty stepdaughter Betty, then just twenty, and I. I have never been happy on the sea, in spite of enjoying it very much from the shore, and I saw with foreboding that although we had not left port, the chairs and tables and heavy furniture were already roped, as though the crew took bad weather for granted. I found, later, that it was only the Normandie they took for granted. She was built so slenderly, her breadth too narrow for her length, that she rolled upon the calmest sea. We sailed, and my comfort was the miracle of hearing the children’s voices by radio telephone that evening, over the already lengthening miles of water. They sounded cheerful and happy and all was well.

Within a very few days after my arrival in London it was obvious that war in Europe was much nearer than we Americans had thought. Ominous news of course I had heard, and I knew it ominous, even when others seemed indifferent, merely because my life had been spent in the atmosphere of revolution and war, and I could smell strife from afar. In London, however, the portent became certainty, although the comfortable hotel was as luxurious as ever in the staid English way. There was no luxury like traditional English luxury before the last war, and newer hotels, in spite of splendor and dash, cannot equal the subdued richness of the really good London hotel. The bathtubs were vast, the plumbing massive, the water boiling hot, the towels as thick as quilts and as big as sheets. I am one of those, too, who likes the traditional English food, and I ate it that November with a pleasure, a melancholy and a nostalgia, almost foreseeing. Someday, I was sure, there would be no more such thick steaks, such roast beef and Yorkshire pudding, nor even the huge cabbages boiled too long, or the legs of mutton and browned potatoes and rich gravy, the trifles and savories and cups of tea as strong as lye.

For it was already clear that Germany was preparing for war, and the Jews who were wise were leaving that country. Yet everywhere in the London streets there were still the signs left over from the last war, the shelter signs, defense against the bombs. The past was still there, and the future was formidable. Someone much worse than the old Kaiser was now in Germany, someone far more evil. Anxiety was stifling in the air, a sober anxiety that would yield to the last inch of honor, if by so much yielding there could be peace. But the last inch would never be yielded. That, too, was clear.

In Denmark it was different. The people there knew their country was small as Belgium had been small in the First World War. They had no hope of standing against the new German war machine, and it was already decided that Denmark would not resist. She would give but she would not break. She would allow the conquerors to come in but she would never accept them. It was the only way that they could escape total destruction, Danish people told me. And all this went on, this thinking and planning, while the beautiful Danish cities and the rich countryside were calm as ever. When I had last been in Denmark, only a few years earlier on my way back to China, I had visited farms, as I like to do, and I remembered their quiet, their age, their fruitfulness. I had come upon a farmer in his barn one sunny afternoon, and he was busy painting, not woodwork or floors, but upon the whitewashed walls scenes of green trees, fields of grain and still waters. Very convincing scenes they were too, and when I asked why he put them on the walls of his barn instead of upon canvases, he replied:

“It is for my cows, Madame — in the long winter they like to look at these walls and think of the summer. It amuses them.”

I could understand why such farmers preferred to yield for the time being rather than to see their homes and barns destroyed.

Nevertheless, the atmosphere oppressed me and I could not enjoy my visit. When an invitation came to me to visit Germany I refused it, and the next day in the Copenhagen newspaper I saw the following report:

“Pearl Buck says, ‘I do not wish to visit a country where I am not allowed to think and speak freely.’

“‘Wouldn’t you like to visit Germany?’ we asked.

“‘Yes,’ she replied, ‘in one way I should like to see how the Germans live now but I think they would not welcome me there. And I don’t want to visit a country where I am not allowed to think and speak freely as I am doing here. I am an individualist and a democrat.’

“Pearl S. Buck has said this in a low and gentle voice, but nevertheless we understand that it has been very important for her to mention it here in Copenhagen.”

In Copenhagen I was much depressed, too, by talk with Chinese friends, who, though themselves Nationalists and loyal to Chiang Kai-shek, were nevertheless alarmed at the growing weaknesses of his government. I answered the inevitable questions of newspaper reporters as honestly as I could in the light of my own information. At such a time of crisis in the world, it would be wrong, I felt, to be less honest than I could be. Therefore when asked about China, I said that I did not see peace there for many years to come — yes, perhaps not real peace for as long as fifty years — and what China needed above all just now was a strong central government, able by its acts of concern to win and hold the loyalty of the people. No, I did not believe that Chiang Kai-shek could make such a government — he had lost his opportunity. Was China as poor as ever? Yes, although Chinese diplomats and other Chinese abroad might try to give another impression of the country, the common people were as poor as ever. I would not say that all officials were corrupt but alas, many were, and at least most of them were not concerned for the welfare of the people.

Such plain speaking might perhaps have been avoided, but I have never believed that truth can be safely ignored, and so I followed my usual habit of speaking as honestly as I knew. The result was that Chinese Nationalist officials in Sweden were offended, and withdrew their presence from the occasion of the award in Stockholm. I was sorry for that, but it was perhaps inevitable. It would have been difficult for me to accept their presence with the grace of ignorance. In politics I have no interest and governments exist, I believe, only to better the life of their peoples. What other good reason have they to exist?

Sinclair Lewis had said to me, “Don’t let anyone minimize for you the receiving of the Nobel Prize. It is a tremendous event, the greatest of a writer’s life. Enjoy every moment of it, for it will be your finest memory.”

I went to Stockholm with this advice, and it was good and true. I have had much happiness in my life and splendid events have come my way, but, aside from the continuing joys of home, the four days in Stockholm in the year 1938 remain my most perfect single recollection. The award came, as I have said before, at a time when I needed it most. I had met that difficult period of a writer’s life, when the reaction, which the American public invariably bestows upon anyone whom it has discovered and praised, had set in. Since the praise is always too much and too indiscriminate the opposing criticism and contempt are also too much and too indiscriminate. My head had not been turned by the praise and its excess had only amused and touched me, but the rudeness of unjust criticism, a sort of stone-throwing which became merely imitative once it had begun, did temporarily destroy my confidence. The warmth of the Swedish people, combined with their dignity and their calm, restored my soul. It was good to be received, not with adulation, but with respect and affection. I cherish that memory.

In November Stockholm is almost dark, the sun barely near the horizon at midday, but the city blazed with lights and gaiety. We were met at the train and taken to the Grand Hotel and given the royal suite there, charming and comfortable rooms. Service was perfect and everything had been done to make our stay pleasant. That year there were only two persons to receive Nobel awards, and the other person was a gentle little Italian scientist whose name was Enrico Fermi. I had not heard much of him, but he was pleasant to meet and so were his pretty wife and two dark-eyed children. Later he came to the United States, and now everyone knows his name for the work that he has done in developing the atomic bomb. But I could not then have imagined that he had anything to do with the deadly weapon. The fission of the atom? At that time it meant nothing to me.

As soon as we were settled in our rooms, we were called upon by a handsome young man, a Swedish attaché, who brought our schedule with him, and who instructed us with exact courtesy in what would be expected of us. He was a little uncertain of me, I could see, not knowing exactly how an American, the citizen of a republic, would behave in a formal setting. For Sweden combines in the most delightful fashion the utmost modernity within the framework of tradition, and I enjoyed both aspects of this most civilized of nations.

“Tell me, please,” my young instructor said somewhat anxiously in his perfect but accented English, “is it possible that you will object to moving backward from our King after you have received the award? A Soviet citizen did not do so upon a similar occasion.”

I assured him that of course I would not turn my back upon the King. A sigh of relief was my reward for this decision.

He then proceeded to instruct me further, reading aloud from a typed sheet, explaining each detail of the progress planned for the next four days, and I listened with my whole attention, determined to show myself favorably as an American as well as a writer.

The result of such attention is that I remember perhaps in needless detail the procedure of those days. Yet the most memorable hour was of course that of the presentation of the awards, on the evening after the day of our arrival in Stockholm.

When I entered the great Concert Hall the scene was magnificent. Upon the wide platform, decorated with flags and evergreens, the dignified members of the Academy were seated in semicircular arrangement. In the front rows of the crowded hall the royal family, jewelled and splendid, waited in royal calm, while trumpets blared from the galleries.

I sat at the end of the front left row, from whence I could see the whole assembly, and not understanding the preliminary speeches, which were in Swedish, I had time to reflect quietly upon what I saw and to enjoy the occasional music. I shall never forget that scene, yet what I remember most clearly was the instant, half an hour later, when I stood before the dignified and aged King to receive the award, and having made my curtsy, I looked full into his face. In that instant I saw not the King’s face, but the face of my old father, long dead, and everything else I forgot. It was incredible that two men could look so much alike. The tall slender figure, the lean face and strong jaw, the frosty blue eyes, the white moustache cut to the shape of the lips, even the hand that held out the big envelope, were like my father’s. I was so startled that I could scarcely say, “Thank you, Your Majesty,” and I all but forgot my promise not to turn my back. I did not forget, but it was in momentary confusion that I mounted the steps and then backed across the wide stage to my seat. I mention the resemblance here publicly for the first time, but when we were home again I found my father’s portrait and showed it to my husband, and he saw the likeness as clearly as I had. It was no more than accidental, of course, or perhaps there was some reason based on geography, for landscape and climate have a way of creating likeness in the human beings who live upon the same bit of earth, and it is true that my own paternal ancestors came two hundred years ago from the same section of Germany from which the King’s family had come, for the present royal house of Sweden is not an ancient one. Yet it was strange and certainly meaningful for me to have felt my father come alive for me at the great moment.

I remember next the dinner given that night, by the Crown Prince. It took place in the handsome City Hall, very festive with flowers and fine silver. I enjoyed everything but most of all my conversation with the Crown Prince, who, I found, knew a great deal about China, and had a collection of Chinese art objects. We talked at length about that country, so much that I do not remember at all what I ate, and then we talked of the future, he very guarded, of course. But by this time I had listened to enough people in Stockholm to realize that the gathering resolution in Sweden was of another pattern from that which I had perceived in Denmark. Sweden had all but made up her mind to be neutral when the new war broke. There were some who felt that it would be wise to side with Germany, others that such allegiance was impossible. Decision was trembling in the air, and because I felt it deeply important that as an American I must speak with what strength I could for the cause of human freedom, when it came my turn after dinner to make a brief address, I rose and took my place behind a small lectern and there I made my little speech of acceptance of the Nobel award, a speech of no importance to anyone except myself, I am sure, and yet it had to be made, and here it is, as part of my record.

YOUR ROYAL HIGHNESSES:

LADIES AND GENTLEMEN:

It is not possible for me to express all that I feel of appreciation for what has been said and given to me. I accept, for myself, with the conviction of having received far beyond what I have been able to return through my books. I can only hope that the many books which I have yet to write will be in some measure a worthier acknowledgment than I can make tonight. And indeed, I can accept only in the same spirit in which I think this gift was originally given — that it is a prize not so much for what has been done as for the future. Whatever I write in the future must, I think, be always benefited and strengthened when I remember this day.

I accept, too, for my country, the United States of America. We are a people still young and we know that we have not yet come to the fullness of our powers. This award, given to an American, strengthens not only one, but the whole body of American writers, who are encouraged and heartened by such generous recognition. And I should like to say, too, that in my country it is important that this award has been given to a woman. You who have already so recognized your own Selma Lagerlof, and have long recognized women in other fields, cannot perhaps wholly understand what it means in many countries and even in my own, that it is a woman who stands here at this moment. But I speak not only for writers and for women, but for all Americans, for we all share in this occasion.

I should not be truly myself if I did not, in my own wholly unofficial way, speak also of the people of China, whose life has for so many years been my life also, whose life, indeed, must always be a part of my life. The minds of my own country and of China, my foster country, are alike in many ways, but above all, alike in our common love of freedom. And today, more than ever, this is true, now when China’s whole being is engaged in the greatest of all struggles, the struggle for freedom. I have never admired China more than I do now, when I see her uniting her peoples against the enemy who threatens her freedom. With this determination for freedom, which is in so profound a sense the essential quality in her nature, I know that she is unconquerable. Freedom — it is today more than ever the most precious human possession. We — Sweden and the United States — we have it still. My country is young — but it greets you with a peculiar fellowship, you whose earth is ancient and free.

Afterwards, Dr. Fermi’s speech following mine, a burst of singing from the huge court below the hall told us that the evening’s dance was about to begin and the students were already marching in from the university. My pretty stepdaughter had been invited by the son of the Crown Prince to open the dance with him, and like a little Cinderella in her white gown, her eyes shining, she floated down the broad stairway upon his arm and we stood on the balcony above and looked upon the scene, lovely with gaiety and youth.

The crowded happy days followed fast upon one another, and the chief event of the next day was the dinner at the palace with the King. In the interstices of our full program there were visits and newspaper interviews, as a matter of course, and from each of these I gained further knowledge of Sweden and its remarkable people and was thus provided with a background of understanding for later days. A century and more ago Sweden, worn and consumed by its many wars and conflicts with neighboring peoples, had been compelled to face its own condition and to decide whether it would allow itself to be destroyed by the burdens of war, laid upon the people by military leaders whose career was war, or, on the contrary, deny the leaders and build a life of peace, based upon an unchangeable policy of neutrality in all times of war. They chose peace, and in the decades since that fundamental decision, which every nation must make sooner or later if its people are to survive, Sweden has grown steadily in wisdom and prosperity. Neither wisdom nor permanent prosperity is possible for a nation in the constant turmoil of war.

With such ideas crowding my mind, I proceeded on the evening of that day to the palace and found at its entrance many school children waiting for me. I could not forbear lingering and talking with them until the guards at the gate grew a little impatient with me and urged me on so I mounted the wide curving staircase to the rooms where I was to wait, with Dr. Fermi, for the two who were to escort us to the banquet hall.

My memory of that banquet hall is not very clear, I suppose partly because I had already become accustomed to magnificence. Behind every chair was a steward and across the table from me sat the King between two elderly Princesses, the only ladies of sufficiently high rank to be next him. But the vagueness of my memory is partly, too, because I sat next to the King’s brother, Prince William, an explorer and a hunter of big game, a man of wide knowledge and experience, and I became entirely fascinated with his conversation and especially by the account of his visits to the pigmies in Africa. One delicious dish after another was placed before me, the pièce de résistance being reindeer steak, I remember, and suddenly, before I knew it, the meal was over. That is, the King rose. The entire extraordinary menu had been served in forty-five minutes! The reason? Court etiquette demands that when the King finishes with a course all plates are removed with his. Some dishes, I fear, I never tasted, for I found my plate gone before I had lifted my fork. The King, a Court lady explained to me afterward, did not usually talk much with the two Princesses, whom he knew very well and had to sit between on many such occasions. Therefore, without conversation, he ate rapidly and hence the fine banquet was soon ended.

In the reception room afterward, we all stood until it pleased the King to seat himself, and I heard a stout Court lady next to me sigh and whisper. “It does seem as though our dear King likes to stand longer every year!”

At last, however, he sent for me as I had been told he would, and seating himself on a couch he bade me sit beside him and then everybody could take seats. I felt at ease for it is the rule that a King must begin a conversation, and this time responsibility was not upon me. Meanwhile his coffee was served in a gold cup, mine in a porcelain one. He stirred in his sugar and kept silence, and I had time to see again how exactly even his profile resembled that of my father. But it would not have been becoming to mention it, and so I did not. After a moment of stirring and sipping, he began to talk, asking me a few questions which I do not remember. What I do remember is that suddenly he leaned forward, his frost-blue eyes mischievous, and glancing affectionately and half ironically about the room, he told me how weary he often was of being a king, and how little freedom a king has, how he must assume not only the heavy responsibilities of state, but also the burden of meticulous personal behavior, so that none of his subjects are hurt in their feelings. But once a year, he told me his blue eyes still sparkling, he had a vacation from being a king. Then, incognito and known only as Mr. G., he went to the Riviera or wherever he liked, and had a holiday, not a king at all, but a gay old man, enjoying his tennis and other games, while his son, the Crown Prince, took over the royal duties. He loved tennis, he told me, and he related with relish a game he had played with the French champion, Suzanne Lenglen. He had missed the line when he served to her, and she had called across the net to him, “You should move a little more to the left, Your Majesty!” To which he had retorted, “Ah, that is what my ministers are always telling me!”

In a little while he rose, we all rose, and the evening was over.

The next day I had somewhat dreaded, for it was the custom for recipients of the Nobel Prize to address the Swedish Academy, a distinguished group of scholars. What did I know to present to them? I had by then lived only long enough in the United States to realize that I knew too little of my own people, that it would take years of living and observation before in our patternless society I could discern the causes behind what we felt and said and did. It would be presumptuous to try to speak so soon. Moreover, I had been reminded often enough of my ignorance. Even when the Pulitzer Prize had been awarded The Good Earth, certain critics had objected to so American an award being given to a book about Chinese peasants, written by a woman, and worse than that, a woman who had never lived in her own country.

My address therefore before the Swedish Academy was upon a subject I did know well, and about which very little is known by most westerners. The title of my address was The Chinese Novel, and the address itself was later published in a little book under the same title.

From the end of that hour and for the rest of my stay in beautiful Stockholm, the events were pure pleasure, to be enjoyed without responsibility. I must mention, however, that I met at a luncheon given me by Mr. Bonnier, my Swedish publisher, Selma Lagerlöf, a great woman and writer whose books I have loved. She was already very old but still strong in mind and speech, though simple and modest in manner and looking very pleasant in her grey silk dress and a scarf of violet velvet. She told me that the two biographies of my parents had decide her vote for the Nobel award for me that year, and to hear this of course made me happy. I like to think that the bold and original lives of my father and mother were part of those Stockholm days, as they have been of all my years.

Perhaps this is the place to share a bit of amusement of my own. When the Nobel award had first been announced in the United States it was mistakenly thought to be for The Good Earth alone. This was not true. It was awarded for the whole body of my work, then mainly composed of my Chinese novels and the biographies. My American publishers corrected the mistake, whereupon orders began to come in from bookstore customers for a book, purportedly by me, entitled The Body of Her Work.

On the morning of the twelfth of December, the day before we were to leave Stockholm, I rose early, having been gently forewarned, and wrapped myself in my dressing gown and went back to bed to receive a guest. The door opened at eight o’clock and a pretty girl entered wearing a crown of lighted candles on her head, and bearing in her hands a silver tray with coffee cups. She walked with slow and graceful steps, singing “Santa Lucia” as she came. In every home in Sweden, suppose, a similar scene was going on, the Lucia being always the youngest daughter or sister. Thus opened the Santa Lucia Festival, o the Festival of Light, so significant in a winter-darkened country. On that day the sun has reached its lowest point upon the horizon an thereafter the light increases. It is the custom, too, to choose a Lucia for the whole city, and for that year of 1938 Ingrid Lohman, a pretty employee in a furrier’s shop, had won the prize. In the evening there was to be a great banquet in the City Hall to celebrate the festival and to crown the queen, and I was invited, too.

I found it a fascinating contrast to the occasions of state which had preceded it. The vast hall was crowded with people sitting closely packed around the simply set tables where we dined. Music and laughter and speeches went on in enjoyable confusion while the pretty queen was crowned, and I saw a different Sweden, a popular one, very free and easy and gay. I liked it and said good-bye reluctantly at the evening’s end.

The next morning early we boarded the train that was to take us to the sea again, and it was touching to find at the station a group of Americans. They had come to see us off, and after greetings and handshakings they began to sing as the train moved away, and the sound of their voices in harmony floated after us as they sang:

Home — home on the range,

Where the deer and the antelope play.

Where seldom is heard,

A discouragin’ word,

And the skies are not cloudy all day.

We gathered speed under the dark northern skies of Sweden and the haunting melody caught my heart, homeward turned.

The home-coming was the best of all. The sight of the beloved house upon the hill as we drove across the bridge and up the lane, made the heart beat fast. Why did I ever think I had no roots in my own country? I had already put down deeper roots here than anywhere in the world, and never would they be pulled up again for any reason. We were at the end of the lane now, and there were the great red barn and the sturdy stone house. Christmas wreaths were hanging on the doors and at the windows. Four small figures in red coats and leggings came running over the snowy fields to meet us, and here the heart stopped! What embracings and kisses and cries of surprise and how big the four had grown even in a month and how rosy were the cheeks and bright the eyes! Yes, coming home was best of all, the happy end of every journey.

Yet underneath all the joy and peace of home and family at that Christmastime of a memorable year I was acutely mindful, as I shall always be, of what was happening on the other side of my world in Asia. War had begun in deadly earnest, and previous engagements were only skirmishes in contrast. The Japanese armies attacked at Marco Polo Bridge, near Peking. The Nationalist forces, centering their strength around Shanghai and the Japanese aggression there, resisted with more strength than expected, while still the Communists did almost nothing. Alone the Nationalists were to continue resistance through 1939, but failing all along the way to hold their ground. Nanking had been lost in 1937, and the government had retreated up the Yangtse to Hankow, only to lose that city, too, in 1938. The whole coast was indeed too quickly lost, proving what we had sadly feared, that Chiang Kai-shek’s hold upon the people was rootless. Thus the richest and most important part of the country fell into enemy control, the industrial areas of the great cities and the fertile plains of the riverland, and Nationalists retreated into the ancient regions of that mountainous West so untouched by modern life. Universities followed the government, which finally settled in Chungking, there to remain for the duration of the war. The Nationalist party was by now divided into two groups, one favoring continued resistance to the Japanese even if only by the guerrilla tactics the Chinese Communists were beginning to use in the North as Japan came close, and the other favoring compromise. It is to Chiang Kai-shek’s honor that he refused all compromise with the foreign enemy, as he had with Communism. He continued his waiting position, still hoping that a world war would demand that the United States become deeply involved, this time against Japan, and that in the universal conflict China would emerge on the side of the victorious nations. He did not doubt that the combination of the United States and Britain would be invincible.

How well I remember the day war began in Europe! We had taken a house in Martha’s Vineyard that summer, a comfortable place next door to Katharine Cornell’s beautiful house on the bay. The water was perfect for our children, shallow, warm and clear, and they tumbled in and out all day, fat and brown and merry. We ourselves spent the day between work and play, my husband devoting himself to the delightful but difficult task of editing Lin Yutang’s monumental novel, Moment in Peking, and I at work upon my own novel, Other Gods. One morning, however, unable to work, and oppressed unreasonably, I hoped, by premonitions of war, I joined the children on the beach earlier than usual. A few minutes later I saw my husband hurrying down the dunes. It was to tell me the fearful news from the radio, that war had been declared in Europe.

It seemed impossible, in spite of certainty. The sun shone upon the calm sea and upon the smooth white sands. Our two babies, hand in hand, were running up and down the beach in the shallow water, while the two little boys dug for sand crabs. Farther up the coast where the sea swept in a great curve, people were swimming in front of Katharine Cornell’s house. She had been to visit us, handsome and brown with sun and wind, her dachshunds trailing after her. We had met a few times in New York, without quite becoming well acquainted, each shy, I think of the other. I have always kept my Chinese trait of reverence for great people — a trait not suited to my American world, where no one is embalmed in reverence. We had talked but not easily, and she said that it was difficult for her to make speeches, I remember, or even to converse easily, because actors use the words of others to express themselves. But she had told me a little of her early life in the city of Buffalo, an incongruous name for the home town of such an elegant and sophisticated woman.

Upon this scene in spite of all its grace and calm, the war broke that day and we knew, my husband and I, that our life would never be the same again, for war would change our country and our people. It would change, indeed, the whole world.

Why, on the other side of that world, did not Chiang Kai-shek do what the Communists did, arm the peasants and bid them fight the invaders? The answer is that he feared the peasants armed. He knew they were not for him, that his government had failed them, and he dared not trust them. He preferred to leave them as they were, defenseless, rather than to give them arms which someday they might use in rebellion against him. He waited, hoping and longing, while Americans remained neutral and unwilling.

And would we remain neutral? Could we? I hoped so. I had seen too much of war to believe in it as a means of permanent victory. And this war would be the worst, I knew, for it would unleash in Asia all the angry forces of the peoples. Each Asian people would use world war to further its own passionate determination for freedom and independence. And after the war, what? Certainly no victory!

I remember a hot day in 1940. My husband and I were driving across the high plains of Kansas. It is one of my favorite states, and I return to it again and again as the heart of our country, its people honest and excellent, intelligent and civilized, while living in simple houses. We were vaguely anxious that day, for President Roosevelt was to make an important speech. At the hour we drew up in the scanty shade of an angular tree so that we might listen with whole attention. We turned on the radio and the rich eloquent voice came rolling over the air. It brought no declaration of war — not yet. It was the famous “quarantine” speech. But I knew, as I heard it, that war was inevitable, and over the sunny golden landscape the shadows fell.

We continued our journey, sober and silent, we shortened it not at all, turning northward to the Dakotas to visit my sister and her family then living in Pierre, South Dakota—“Peer,” as everyone called it. And when we arrived, I remember, I found my small nephews excited with all the other small boys, because on a dry hilltop near the town a huge petrified fish had been found that very day, a creature the size of a whale, and I went with them and there it was, complete in soft stone. It was lifted and taken to the museum, but bits fell off and I brought one home with me and put it beside our pool. It turned quickly to dust, however, as all flesh does, when subject to sun and wind and time.

That was a good journey to make in such a year as 1940 for we wandered through the stupendous Badlands, the Needles and the Black Hills, and again the variety and the beauty of our country were impressed upon me, and not only of landscape, but more than that, of people. In Pierre I wished to find the artist who had made a favorite painting then hanging on our living room wall, a dark red sun setting over the desert and a ruined empty cabin. I found her in a tiny restaurant making potato chips for a living. The reason? People here were too poor to buy paintings, she told us, but she could not leave the magnificent landscapes. She had learned painting in Paris and had thought that she would always live there until she had found South Dakota.

And so we went home again, our memories filled with glorious scenes and good people. We spent another year quietly at home and busy with our usual work, yet always uneasy in the world. In December of 1941 we were enjoying a quiet Sunday afternoon in my stepdaughter’s house across the road from our farmhouse. Mutual friends were guests, and we were talking about anything and nothing, while their adolescent son sat outdoors in their car to hear a football game over the radio.

Suddenly he rushed into the room, panting with terror and excitement.

“The Japanese,” he gasped, “they’ve attacked Pearl Harbor!”

My stepdaughter reached for the radio. She turned it on and the news came flooding into the quiet cozy room. It was true. War was certain. We had become part of the whole world. Instantly I thought of China and of Chiang Kai-shek. How happy must he be, far off there in Chungking! Who could blame him? He loved his country, too.

The war years we all know too well for them to be retold again. My task was to keep the children as free from fear as possible, to continue my work, to maintain what is called an even keel. It was a familiar atmosphere, but one I had never expected in my own country. As in China, however, I determined not to allow the war to shadow my existence, nor to prevent me from getting the most possible out of my daily life.

Much of my life in those days centered about the school to which the children were going, a staid Quaker day school conducted in a beautiful old stone schoolhouse, where it had continued for nearly two centuries. Next to it was an equally historic meetinghouse. We had always planned to educate the children in Quaker schools, for the philosophy of the Friends was the nearest I had found to the Asian one in which I had grown up. Never shall I forget the first morning I took our little sons to school. They went trustingly and with enthusiasm, believing, alas, that they were about to comprehend immediately the wonders. Thus one, the fair-haired, said joyfully, “I am going to learn how to make an airplane.” My heart ached, I confess, when he began to understand how long the road, how weary the hours would be until that day could arrive. But my heart has often ached for such little scholars, their sweet enthusiasm dying in the daily grind. I will not criticize our schools, for I do not know how to make compulsory education pleasant, yet to me learning, learning anything, but especially something I want to know, is the most joyful occupation in life. I do not know when it is that the joy fades out of school for most children, so that they end not only by hating school but even worse, by hating books, and this is grave indeed, for in books alone is the accumulated wisdom of the whole human race, and to read no books is to deprive the self of ready access to wisdom. Even in China such wisdom was relayed generation to generation through centuries until the people were permeated with the sayings of poets and philosophers. But in our mixed ancestry there are no such clear streams, and it is only in books that we can discover what we are, and why we are that, and thus self-knowledge, as well as knowledge of others, is achieved.

It was not only my children who were educated by going to school. Through them as school children, I, too, have been educated, by force if not always by conviction. By background, of course, I am not fitted to have American children. I have nothing to prepare me for the problems they face. My childhood world was spent in an old and sophisticated society, and therefore in one completely natural and simplified as only an ancient society does simplify itself. Take, for example, the matter of tattling. Before the children went to school and we were all at home together every day, I had established as a matter of course the Chinese principle that when something wrong was going on, it was the duty of any child to report to the adult in charge, usually parent or teacher. It was not right to run about telling other people of a person’s wrongdoings, but for the sake of order it must be reported to the one who could correct it. This went very well.

Picture my surprise, however, when upon the children’s reaching school age and moving out into their larger American environment, they came home to tell me that I was wrong! One of them had duly reported to the teacher misbehavior on the part of a fellow pupil, and she had scolded the little reporter for something called “tattling.” I investigated and found that this was true.

“But how,” I remonstrated with the teacher, “can you maintain law and order in your school if the law-abiding ones may not report the lawbreakers?”

She evaded this. “It is hateful to tattle,” she said.

“Then the children will grow up believing that it is hateful to report a murder to policemen. This would also be tattling,” I said.

“I cannot answer that,” she replied in a positive voice.

I was to learn that this refusal to face the practical is sometimes characteristic of our people. We act upon emotion — she hated tattling — and upon prejudice — she disliked tattlers — without reference to the very practical question of how a child is to help keep order if he cannot report disorder, and what the confusion is in his own mind if he must remain silent about something he knows is wrong. To what principle is he to be loyal? I am convinced that much of our so-called American lawlessness goes back to this stifling of the child’s perfectly right impulse to tell if someone is violating a common rule, accepted by all, and his confusion if he is reproved for obeying the impulse.

Yet when I expressed my conviction the other day to an American friend, he was quite violent in his disagreement with me. I was, he said, “off my base.”

“Your argument,” he said, “if carried to its logical conclusion, would mean that Soviet children are justified in reporting their parents to the government. Any possible good that might come out of ‘tattling’ would be more than offset by injury to the child and the community. The informer, at least in Western society, is universally abhorred and even those who use him despise him. There is no way to draw the line and it is better to accept the apparent, immediate evil than to face a much greater one later.”

I have reflected much upon his words, and I realize the validity of his point of view in the United States, at least. Yet my own argument holds, too, or so I believe. Perhaps the difference in the two societies, Chinese and American, on this point, lies merely in their organization. Our society is not ordered as the Chinese was. A child reported only to the adult in charge of his little world and when he was grown his primary loyalty was by tradition still to his family and not to the state. Perhaps it is basically a question of primary loyalty, and on this matter of loyalty we Americans are indeed confused. It does seem contradictory to me that we elect representatives to make laws and enforce them and yet absolve ourselves of responsibility when we see those laws broken. There is something wrong in the logic, and in the result, too, since we are the most lawless of all nations, and our rate of individual crime incredibly high. It is, as the King of Siam said, “a puzzlement.”

Green Hills Farm

“Please,” my youngest daughter said to me this morning, “come with me.”

Should I or should I not? In trying to be a good American mother how often I have asked myself the question. Where exactly is the point for a parent to stand back so that the child may be independent? In China the parent was always welcome, the parent always went. She is sixteen, this child, and she is near the end of high school. She wants to be a kindergarten teacher and she had decided, quite by herself, that she would go into our public school system, and therefore the State Teachers’ College is the place for her next year, after high school. The formalities had been finished, many papers signed and questions answered, and today was the day for the interview.

“Please,” she said again.

“Sure you want me?” I asked.

“You could sit outside,” she said.

So I have come and here I am outside. That is, I am sitting in a large pleasant room, the reception hall of the college, in a comfortable chair, alone, while my daughter is being interviewed somewhere in the bowels of the building. She went off bravely with a group of young women, looking serious and independent, though she is a small girl, very blue eyes under dark brown hair. I watch the people who come and go while I wait, a pastime which I always enjoy. Meanwhile I meditate upon the passage of life. This daughter of mine, whom I remember clearly as she was when I first saw her, a minute creature, perfect in detail, the same great blue eyes, already black-fringed, but so small that she fitted comfortably into the crook of my arm, is now a young woman with a mind of her own. She has rejected a fair amount of the education offered her, as most American children seem to do, and until she reached high school I did not know whether to be exasperated with her or with her teachers. Why, oh, why can learning not be made more exciting, more rewarding? I was exasperated with her teachers when she came trudging home from school, weary and pale with too many hours out of the sunshine, and yet with a pile of books under her arm. What wickedness, I cried in my heart, to keep a child sitting on a hard bench all day and then crowd the night hours, too, with homework! The children of Europe sit through long hours, too, but they have more to show for it than our children have. They achieve a prodigious amount of book learning, they can speak several languages, they understand mathematics and the abstractions of philosophy, but our poor children end their school days with pitifully little in the way of sound knowledge. I rebel against the waste of time, remembering my own free childhood, the lessons quickly learned and then the hours of sunshine and play and pleasant freedom. Not until I reached college did I study at night, except for the one year at Miss Jewell’s School in Shanghai where what I learned was not in books.

And I cannot remember at all when I learned to read. I know I read quite comfortably at four, because on my fifth birthday I received a small book as a gift, entitled Little Susie’s Seven Birthdays and I envied Susie for having seven instead of five. Yet my American children learned reading with strange difficulty, and I am shocked at the number of our people, men and women, but especially men, who read slowly, word by word, and are never comfortable in reading and do not enjoy it, although the purpose of education should be to make reading as simple and easy as listening to a voice, for only when a person can really read will he surely continue his own education. And examining into the cause for this slow and painful reading I am convinced that it is chiefly because we have wasted the value of the alphabet. Today’s children — or perhaps it is yesterday’s, since my own, except for the one whom we call our little Postscript, are past the early grades — are taught reading as though each word were a separate entity, exactly as Chinese children are taught their ideographs, or characters, of which five thousand must be separately learned before one can read, and for this reason the Chinese need two more years than we do with our alphabet language in order to complete the same work. The Koreans have an alphabet even more compact than ours and profited thereby until the Japanese conquerors made Japanese the language of the schools, and Japanese is no better than Chinese for learning to read. But English is a matchless language, and the alphabet, each letter with its own sounds, is the key, yet in this generation the teachers have thrown the key away. I rebel, I say, though very little good does the rebellion of the lay mind do against the professional, and this dominance of the professional is a weakness in our civilization, for the professional gets no over-all view of the people and the culture, and we are only torn hither and thither by one professional opinion and another.

When our Postscript came along, a little German war child, I taught her secretly at home how to read, but I knew better than to mention it abroad. Her teacher, an excellent one incidentally, told me the other day that our child, though only in second grade, is reading fifth grade books and needs no help whatever. I smiled and kept my counsel. Of course she knows how to read, and knowing she enjoys it. She learned as I learned, easily and unconsciously, for I gave her the key to reading, as my mother gave it to me, by teaching her how to use the alphabet.

But upon education one can write many books. Examinations, tests, grades, competition, these are all obstacles to true learning. Were I young again — how many things I would do if I were young again and in my own country! I would create a school where children could drink in learning as they drink in fresh milk. They drink because they are thirsty, and children are always thirsty for learning, but they do not know it. And in schools sources of learning are fouled with tensions, anxieties, competitive sports and the shame and fear of low marks, and it is no wonder that we are not a book-loving people. We have been made to hate books and therefore to scorn, with private regret mixed in, the educated man because he is an intellectual. Compulsory education? I doubt the wisdom of it, and certainly the use of the word compulsion is not wise. Education, yes, but not this sausage mill, this hopper, into which our children are all tossed at the age of six, and from which they emerge, too many of them, in dazed confusion, somewhere along the way, as rejects or as mass products.

Education? It is now a Saturday morning, after breakfast, the hour sacred to homework — work before play, and so on. But Rusty, the frivolous cocker spaniel widow, has foolishly neglected to get to the kennel in time to have her current batch of mongrel pups, and waiting greedily at the kitchen door for her morning meal she was overtaken by nature. Instead of retiring in prudence, she continued to wait but the puppies did not, and my second son, a six-foot adolescent, opened the door on her. Seeing her plight, he immediately rushed to her aid. Fresh straw in the kennel, a bowl of warm milk, a blanket-lined basket for the puppies shivering in the raw January air, and then Rusty herself, transported tenderly in his arms into the dry comfortable kennel — all this has, I am sure, taken most of the study hour. He will have to make it up, of course, but meanwhile, absorbed in life, he is learning. I daresay he will do more reading for the next few days than he has done in a month. He will want to know. And probably as a result he will fail his chemistry test on Monday. And his teacher will complain. And the irony is that I can sympathize with her, too. It is hard to teach a boy who has not done his homework, especially a charming boy of whom one is fond, and especially if one is a teacher with a conscience.

Part of the home education of the children has certainly been in the many visitors from abroad who have come to our house and they are too many to mention by name, and many of them have come again and again until our house seems linked to the other countries of the world by the memories of known and unknown friends, their faces, their voices, their letters. At this moment I recall an incident during the war, actually before Pearl Harbor. I had written some articles, quite strong ones, against Japanese militarism and I knew of course that they had reached Japan. But Japan was on the other side of the world, cut off from me, I imagined, by what had happened. Yet here is the story.

One cold winter’s night we sat by the living room fire in our home. The snow lay on the ground, deep and unploughed. No one could come in, none go out. It had been a wonderful day, the snow falling, the wind blowing, the children playing outside until they were half frozen, and in the evening after their supper we had popcorn before they went to bed. They were bathed and read to and tucked into their snug covers, and the father and I had settled ourselves to our books before the fire when suddenly the telephone rang. I answered unwillingly, wondering what neighbor could be calling, and acknowledging my name to the operator. Then I heard her say excitedly, “Hold on, please — Tokyo calling!”

Tokyo? But how did Tokyo have my unlisted private number?

“Wait,” I said, and I called my husband. “Will you take it for me?” I said.

I felt a strange unaccustomed fear. Could Tokyo reach across the sea like this and pluck me out of my house on a faraway hillside, in my own country, and in the darkness, too, of a winter’s night? And for what reason?

He took the receiver from my hand and listened. Then he laughed. “It’s only a newspaper—The Mainichi,” he said. “They want to wish you a happy New Year and ask you a few questions.”

I need not be afraid, then? But still I was, a little. Nevertheless, I took the receiver from him, and almost instantly heard my name called and a very Japanese voice wishing me a happy New Year, quite as though Japan had not attacked China, and then the questions. They were the usual ones. What do you think of Japanese literature? What is your next book? Have you some message for us, please? Ah, sodeska! Thank you very much. Good-bye. Exactly as though there were no war going on! I put up the receiver, feeling dazed, and went back to my chair by the fireside. No, I paused on the way and looked out of the window. The snow was still falling. I could see it by the glare of the snowplow just now turning into our lane from the road, and throwing great clouds of frothing white into the darkness. Around us were miles of white countryside, miles of plains and valleys and mountains and beyond them miles of ocean between this house and Japan and yet Tokyo had reached across them all and found me! And the voice was friendly, though nations were at war! There was a moral somewhere, but I let it lie. For me the fact simply was that I could not escape any of my several worlds.

And so the visitors have continued through the years to come and to go and to come again, faces, voices, letters. James Yen, the great simpleminded Chinese, once stayed long enough for us to write a little book together, entitled Tell the People, and it is made from his own words spoken to me while I listened, and it tells of his work in mass education in his own country. Many years he carried it on, and now he is exiled but his methods are being used by the Communists in their effort to make the people quickly literate. And that little book, he tells me, has gone far and wide over Asia, where other peoples want to learn to read because reading is the key to learning, and they have never had the key. And Nehru’s nieces came to us in the summers that Madame Pandit was in India and they were here at school, and we learned to love the beautiful warmhearted girls. They are married now and all but the youngest have children. I remember that youngest one because sometimes when I rested in the evening on the couch she stroked my feet with such gentle skilful movements of her palms that the weariness went out of me, and I felt rested even in my spirit. It is an Indian gift, natural in a country where the people go barefoot and walk many miles because they must. Uday Shankar, the Indian dancer, and his wife and Ananda, their little boy, have been our guests, and they, too, were so beautifully gentle and graceful that we all watched them in fascination.

Madame Pandit has come many times, and the memory of her statuesque beauty recalls itself, and I remember especially the evening of the day when her brother, Jawaharlal Nehru, left the United States after his visit here. We had talked with him alone, had dined with him, had met as best we could his long weary brooding silences and the sudden outpourings when a remark stirred some interest of his own. The deep affection between brother and sister was touching. Two lonely people, obviously, they shared their memories and each was better for the other’s presence. When he had gone, she was alone again and in our house I saw that it was a loneliness that could not be healed. Life has set them both apart, as great men and women are always set apart, and therefore lonely perhaps because they know too much, have felt too much, and can never do enough of what they see needs doing to satisfy themselves or even others.

Josuè de Castro of Brazil came here after writing his brilliant book, The Geography of Hunger, and what power there was in his strong and flashing mind! Shizue Masugi, the woman novelist of Japan, was another guest, and Sumie Mishima, and Lin Yutang and his family many times through the years, and Wang Yung and her husband, Hsieh, and Toro Matsumoto, now master in a famous school in Japan, and with him, too, his family. I must not forget Mbono Ojike, now an official in Nigeria. Ojike, a tall, merry fellow, told us many tales and made us laugh very often. His father was an African chieftain who had ten wives, and the old man, deciding to become a Christian, went to church one Sunday, with all his wives behind him in procession. At the door he was met by the Christian missionary who in consternation cried, “But you cannot come to church with ten wives!”

“Why not?” Ojike’s father asked. “They are all good women!”

“It is not Christian to have ten wives,” the missionary objected. “You must choose one and send the others away.”

The chieftain retired to the shade of a tree to consider the matter, his ten wives waiting in a circle about him. How could he dismiss nine good women? He could not be so cruel. Beckoning to them to follow him he went home again and gave up church and Christianity.

Ojike, by the way, went travelling for The East and West Association, creating mirth and joy wherever he went, a proud gay creature, tall and black. In some Midwestern city where he was scheduled to speak, he arrived by train and seeing a large hotel whose sign was “The Chieftain,” he decided it was appropriate for his stay, and so he strode into the lobby — with that graceful jungle panther stride of his — and asked for a room.

The clerk looked at him sidewise. “We don’t have a room for you,” he said at last.

“Why not, sir?” Ojike demanded.

“We don’t take colored people,” the clerk said.

Ojike’s great eyes flashed. He drew himself up to his most tall, haughty as the prince he was. “Sir,” he said majestically, “I am not colored. I am black!”

“Colored,” in his country was an insult. “Colored” were people mixed with white blood, and he had no white blood in him. He would not budge and demanded that the leading citizen who had arranged his visit with our office be called for. Much telephone conversation followed and at last the clerk, dazed and stammering, found a room and Ojike went upstairs in majesty, his bags carried by a bellboy. Next morning so he told us, when he came out of his room to go to the dining room for breakfast, a Negro maid in the corridor fell on her knees at the sight of him.

“Oh Jesus,” she babbled, “Lord Jesus Christ done come!”

“Get up, woman,” Ojike said with dignity. “I am not Jesus. I am Ojike.”

“Jesus,” she insisted, “you must be Jesus! They wouldn’t let no black man sleep in this hotel unless he was Jesus come again.”

Pages I need to write down the names of the men and women and the children who have come to bless our house and bring the world to us here, so that our children, wherever they go, will see no face which seems strange to them, for such faces are their lively childhood memories and among the happiest they have. This also has been their education.

And if I have shared my friends from other worlds with family and neighbors, others have drawn me deep into my American world. My first friend was Gertrude Lane, then editor of The Woman’s Home Companion, and she was the first American woman that I knew well. Gertrude Battle Lane — I write her full name because it suited her. She had come as a girl from a little New England town, and with a single ambition, she told me, which was to work for that magazine. Her first job was errand girl, office girl, the lowest possible, she said, and at the beck and call of everyone. And from that place she rose by sheer ability to be the editor and the highest paid woman in the United States. She loved to tell the story of it, not only because it was her story but because it was an American story, for where could it have happened except in our country? She was not young when I first knew her, her hair was grey, her face and figure no longer youthful, but her spirit was dauntless. She loved good talk and good food and she had a shrewd wisdom, not intellectual but practical and sound. We met often for luncheon and it was characteristic that she chose quiet expensive places and pondered over the menu. And I had pleasant visits in her country house and with her friends.

I came to know Dorothy Canfield Fisher, and visited her, too, and through her another American life revealed itself to me, and in as American a home as was ever built, founded nearly two centuries ago, and still maintained in the same Vermont town. In a strange sorrowful way my worlds met again through Dorothy Canfield, for she lost her son in the Philippines during the war, a brave young doctor who gave his life for his fellow Americans when he went to rescue American troops. For a monument to him, his parents brought to this country the young Filipino doctor and his wife, also a doctor, who had been the son’s best friends while he was with them, and the parents gave these two the opportunity for postgraduate study which enabled them to return to their homeland and set up their own hospital.

Thus my worlds meet again and again, until the several are fused in one. Oscar Hammerstein and his wife Dorothy, world citizens, our friends and neighbors, have stood beside me in the work for Welcome House, and not only they, but others as steadfast here in our own community. James Michener, friend and neighbor, too, world citizen again in spirit and in act, and others who have never left this American world and yet have had hearts as wide as the globe, and minds as free, these who have stood with me in the work for Welcome House are my friends. And now, I suppose, it is time to tell of Welcome House, for the children of Welcome House do indeed unite my worlds in one.

It all began one Christmastime and I have already told that story under the title “No Room at the Inn,” and here I shall compress the years into a few pages.

I have never, I believe, willingly undertaken a job outside of my home and my work, which is writing novels. I have inherited no crusading blood and I dislike publicity with a fervor which may as well be called hatred, for that is what it is. When I have undertaken a task which has nothing to do with home or my writing, it has always been with reluctance and only after a period of desperate search for someone else, anyone else, to do it. Certainly I had no thought of opening a child adoption agency in the United States and this after I was fifty years old. Yet that is exactly what I did.

I had long since ceased to think of adoption agencies. My own children were all but grown up, and my interests were in their age group. Then suddenly one cold December day, when our house was all in ferment with approaching Christmas and long-legged boys and girls with their skis and their dances and glorious hodgepodge of Christmas presents and holly wreaths, the postman brought me a special-delivery letter from a distant child adoption agency, asking if I could help them place for adoption a little baby, the son of an American white mother and an East Indian father, but rejected by both families on both sides of the globe. Do not ask why a child is rejected, for I cannot understand it, whatever the reason. The agency workers had exhausted every possibility in the whole of the United States, they told me, and they had even tried to place him in India, but no one wanted him. They enclosed his picture. I looked into the sad little face of a lonely child, and the happy world in which I lived dropped away. What I saw was hundreds of little faces like his in India, hundreds and thousands of young men and women, born of the white man and the Indian woman, not wanted by either and therefore lost, for the unwanted child is always the lost child. But this little boy was American, born here in my own country, and for me it was unendurable that he should be lost here as he would have been lost in India. I hastened to the telephone and called every friend I had who was Indian, or partly Indian, everyone, too, whom I knew who had been to India and might know other Indians, and over and over again I told the baby’s story. Still nobody wanted him. The agency letter said, “If we cannot place him by the first of January, then regretfully we shall have to put him permanently in a Negro orphanage where he does not belong because of course he is Caucasian on both sides. We have no prejudice against the Negro but we are reluctant to put upon any child’s shoulders the burden of prejudice which they bear and which he might be spared.”

Yes, I understood that. Hastily I gathered my family around me and told them the story. What should we do? There was not one dissenting voice, from the father to the youngest daughter. All of them said, “Bring him here. If we can’t find a better place for him, we will keep him.”

Thus authorized, I telephoned the agency. Soon after Christmas in the darkness of a winter’s night, a small dark boy was deposited in my arms, his enormous brown eyes quietly terrified and he utterly silent because his thumb was buried permanently in his mouth. The people who brought him went away again, and I took him upstairs to the crib we had prepared and I put him to bed. He did not sleep much that night and neither did I. He did not cry aloud but now and then he cried in a small voice subdued by fear, and then I held him until he slept.

Astounding as this advent was, yet another came and in the same month. A friend wrote me that a little half-Chinese child was to be born in a certain city hospital. The child had nowhere to go, for the Chinese father, already married, could not acknowledge him and had returned to China, and the American mother had no way to keep him. Could the child be sheltered with me until I could find some family for him? The local adoption agency could not accept him. By now I felt that I was under some guidance I did not understand. My family said, “We may as well have another,” and so, on a cold January day, we brought home from the big city hospital a little baby boy, nine days old, literally naked, for we took clothes with us to put upon him. And he, too, began to live with us.

We all took care of our babies together, except at night when they were my responsibility, and we all shared the joy of seeing them grow strong and happy. The little American-Chinese never knew anything but love and he thrived from the first, but the little American-East Indian had to be won into believing that we loved him. Yet that did not take long. The months passed and our family did a great deal of thinking. If there were these two children there must be many others. I began to inquire among child adoption agencies and found indeed that the American child of Asian or part-Asian ancestry was their greatest problem, greater even than the Negro child. Many agencies would not accept them at all, feeling their adoption was impossible. What became of them then? Nobody knew. A child can be lost here in the United States more easily than in countries where the big family system still prevails.

I reported back to my family. Behind our two babies were perhaps hundreds of others. Were we to do nothing about them? I had now a special concern. No one perhaps can love his country so logically and deeply as the person who has lived away from it for many years and returns with ardent patriotism. I could not bear to see in my country the same evils that I had seen in others. That is, I could not bear to believe that these beautiful children could find no adoptive homes because of their mixed origins. I would not believe it. The job was simply to find parents for them.

Yet suppose I could not? Hundreds of agencies had tried and failed. I could not take all the children, that was obvious. Also, as I reminded our grown children, their father and I were too old to start another family of babies. These little American-Asians needed special love and care right through the years and we were no longer young. We must plan for a sound future. Then I asked myself — why not then find younger parents in our own community for our two American-Asian babies, and let theirs be the home center while we helped as grandparents? And why not plan for all such children until other agencies were convinced that they are “adoptable”? Our community has many generous and kind people in it, and perhaps they would help. I invited our leading men and women one evening to talk over the plan. “If you will stand behind it with us,” I said, “I believe we can do something really useful not only for this, after all, rather small group of American children, but for our nation. Communist propaganda in Asia says that we Americans despise people with Asian blood. But we will show them that we care for these exactly as we care for all.”

The man who keeps our general store spoke for everybody. He was a big Pennsylvania Dutchman, our oldest citizen and our most respected and influential. He said, “We won’dt only be willin’, we will be proudt to have the childtern.”

Thus began Welcome House, Incorporated. It has grown through the years to gather many children. A few live permanently in our community, established in two families before the adoptions began, but the others, the babies, now go to adoptive parents. For there are many parents who want the American children of Asian blood. Some of these parents are white Americans, some Asian, some part-Asian. All of them are people who have unusual background, advantages in understanding and education and experience. We are particular about our parents. They must want our babies for what they are, they must value the Asian heritage and be able to teach the child to value it. Once a prospective mother, looking at a lovely little girl whose Japanese mother had given her Asian eyes, asked me, “Will her eyes slant more as she grows older?” My heart hardened. That woman would not be given one of our children. She had to think the tilted eyes were beautiful, and if she did not, then she was not the right one. Plenty of people do think such eyes beautiful. We have at last a list of waiting parents who want our babies. And when they are approved, our babies go with them into their communities and make their way, without fail. For the blood of Asia adds a gentle charm to the American child and there is no gainsaying this fact.

The job has not been easy. Has it been worth doing? Yes, and for many reasons. For me it has been deeply satisfying to find Americans who are generous and wide-hearted, who help to find the children, help to support them, and help to place them with good adoptive parents and thus insure good lives. It has been worth while, too, to discover the Americans of different caliber, the small-minded narrow-hearted prejudiced ones, the men and women unworthy of the great name they carry, the un-American Americans. I find it as useful to know these as the others. Not all the people even in our community are the right kind of Americans — the kind that I can be proud of before the whole world.

And I hope I am not too selfish in finding comfort in the children for myself. At night in the solitary hours before dawn, when, wakeful, I find my wilful mind dwelling upon the problems of the world and particularly upon our American problems, which seem increasingly severe, I find myself thinking of all our Welcome House children, each one of them belonging now to an American family, loving and loved, and I remind myself that thousands of people, maybe millions of people, in Asia know about them, too. As I write these very words, I was stopped by the ringing of the telephone and when I answered it, I heard the voice of a man from Indo-China, a Vietnamese, who broadcasts regularly to his own country against Communism and for democracy, and he put a familiar question to me. “May I come and visit Welcome House? I want to know all about the children, how they get adopted into American families, so that I can tell my countrymen about it. This is what they ought to know about the United States.”

“Come,” I said as I always say. “We are glad to tell you everything.”

Yes, and Welcome House is worth while, too, not only for what it does now, but for what it proves to other adoption agencies — that no child is “unadoptable” if they find the parents who want that particular child. There are parents for every child born in the United States of America.

Green Hills Farm

We have many exiles with us nowadays, here in our country. I used to see exiles in my Chinese world often enough but they were the white men who could never go home. Sometimes it was their own fault. They had married Chinese women, or had children by them, and the little creatures they had made, inadvertently perhaps, had laid such hold upon them that they stayed until it was too late to leave them. More often they were exiles merely because they could not enjoy living in the small American towns and on the farms where they had been born. The magic of Asia had caught them, the inexplicable richness of ancient life, the ease and freedom of belonging nowhere, and they could not return to the tight circle of family and friends who could never understand the magic.

Today I see other exiles, the Chinese here in the United States, who dare not return to their own land because they have committed themselves against the Communists and now fear for their lives if they go home. It interests me to see how the state of exile affects these people I have known for so many years, the famous as well as the unknown, the rich as well as the poor. Some of the Chinese exiles are very rich. They have prepared against this day by storing away in American banks wealth enough to last their lifetime through. They live here much as they did in China, in comfortable houses or apartments, but waited upon by American servants and deferred to by Americans who sympathize with them. The ladies play mahjong in New York as they did in Shanghai, all afternoon and most of the night, sleeping in the early hours to wake up and play again. They invite each other as guests, travelling in sleek automobiles with Negro chauffeurs. They are not seen often in public and their circle is themselves and the Americans who defer to them.

Others are well-known scholars and writers, exiled because they are Confucianists in an age which rejects the order of Confucius. They live in cities in small apartments, their wives doing the housework and finding it hard. “In China I had three servants,” such a Chinese lady said to me the other day. “Here I cannot afford one. I pity the American women, slaves to housework! Life is too difficult here in America.”

Yes, it is hard for a Chinese exile. In his own country the scholar and the intellectual had honor. Here there is not as much honor for the scholar as for the successful prize fighter or football player or crooner or movie star. And the exile who is a scholar often has his principles. He will accept as his friends only those Americans who believe as he does. Traditionally the Chinese scholar was the administrator of Imperial government and today he reasons, though wrongly, that he who is not for Chiang Kai-shek is certainly for Mao Tse-tung. Tell him that it is possible to reject both equally and he cannot believe you — or he will not. In his narrowed world, for he does not accept the American, either, this exile grows bitter and ill-tempered. “He can be very mean,” the great Chinese novelist, Lau Shaw, once said, and I did not know then what he meant.

But nowadays Lau Shaw himself is an exile of a sort, I suppose, living in Peking, and speaking what he is told to speak, and writing what he is told to write. I see quotations sometimes from his articles and stories. I hear echoes and I marvel at his obedience. But I know he has compensations. He is in Peking, he is in China, and his heart is free. He was not happy here in the United States as a visitor, for nothing could lift the shadow of exile from him. Once when he came to spend a weekend with us, it happened that we had invited a crowd of wounded veterans from the Valley Forge Hospital to a party in our big barn. They were tragic young men, soldiers who had been half blown to pieces in the war by booby traps and hand grenades. Their faces were all but obliterated, and the plastic surgeon was trying to rebuild them bit by bit. Our party was the first time they had been away from the hospital and the officer in charge had warned us not to be shocked. I had tried to explain to the children, but the explanation had been almost impossible. Luckily our cocker spaniel had a litter of puppies at their best and most lovable age, six weeks, their eyes open and mischief beginning to invade. I was a few minutes late for the party and from the house I could see the Red Cross station wagons arriving with the men. The children were already in the barn. I braced myself, dreading the next hours, and then I went over to be hostess.

I need not have feared. With infallible instinct the children had taken the basket of puppies to the barn with them and Rusty, the mother, and Silver, the father, then alive, had gone with them. When I entered the barn what I heard was laughter, the loud self-forgetting laughter of young men and children at play, and what they were playing with was the puppies, and the puppies were performing at their best and funniest. The men had forgotten their faces, forgotten for the moment the war. They had gone back to being boys at home, and the children, proud of the puppies, had forgotten that the boys had no faces. They were all laughing, laughing at the puppies. The evening was off to a roaring success.

What I really wanted to tell about this story, however, was that Lau Shaw was already there, too. I had asked him to speak to the men and I introduced him after the solid refreshments, explaining that he was China’s greatest novelist. I had no idea what he would say. Lau Shaw is really a very old-fashioned Chinese. If he had his way, I am sure that he would like to have lived in China five hundred years ago. He is a sensitive man, over-sophisticated perhaps, instinctively avoiding anything painful, even in conversation. What then would he say to the pitiful young men?

He got up, diffident as ever, he stood before them a moment, and I could see that his eyes were closed. Then he began to speak in his deep gentle voice. What did he talk about? About shadowboxing in old Peking, if you please, surely as alien a subject as could be imagined! I doubt whether one of those young Americans had ever heard of shadowboxing. Of course Lau Shaw knew that, and so he proceeded to explain the art, its meaning, its story, its historical significance, all in the simplest and most charming fashion, and then without the slightest self-consciousness he illustrated his talk himself by making the movements of shadowboxing into a sort of formal dance, a set of stylized motions. I knew the subject well, I had often watched shadowboxers in Chinese theaters, but I was entranced. And looking about me I saw that the men were entranced, too, comprehending without knowing, perhaps, just what it was they comprehended, but fascinated and carried away into another world they had never seen. When Lau Shaw stopped, there was silence, a great sigh, and then wild applause. And this is what I mean by human understanding.

Once again I heard Lau Shaw wield the same magic, this time in New York, before a sophisticated city audience. It was at an East and West Association meeting and he had been very reluctant to speak. He was averse to any publicity, hating to be known, wary of politics and political questions and discussion. He made the same hesitation before he spoke and then he delivered a delightful discourse, exactly as he might have done in Peking. The subject? “Crickets, Kites and Pekinese Dogs and Their Significance in Chinese Life,” and the audience was enthralled.

So gentle a creature as Lau Shaw was of course cheated again and again by the cruel-hearted in the United States, as well as elsewhere. He made friends once in his lonely existence in New York with a man who professed to admire him, and after a month or so of acquaintance, the man, seeming intelligent and well informed, and therefore trusted by Lau Shaw, asked for a twenty-four hour loan of a hundred dollars. It was Lau Shaw’s allowance for the month, but in the Chinese tradition which does not deny a friend he handed the sum to the American who never appeared again. Several such experiences, I am ashamed to say, this Chinese great man suffered. We Americans do not know how often crimes are thus committed against guests in our country. If we knew we would not prate so much of how we are cheated when we go abroad.

Undoubtedly the revolution in China has had a disastrous effect upon Chinese scholars and intellectuals and not one of them has fulfilled his early promise. Even Hu Shih’s great books, so brilliantly begun, have never been finished. Yet the cause, if not the blame, for this rests partly upon us, too, who belong to the West. Hu Shih and Ch’en Tu-hsiu, the two leaders of the literary revolution in China — and it is necessary to remember that in revolutions scholars and intellectuals were always the leaders — had early committed themselves to the West, as I have said. Ch’en Tu-hsiu, indeed, even attacked Confucianism as a denial of human rights and Hu Shih maintained in those days that the culture of the West was not to be considered materialistic merely because it made life easier. Both declared themselves for an outright adoption of Western ways.

Yet the literary revolution, so brilliantly begun by these two young men, failed in its purpose of reaching the people, for the First World War revealed deep faults in Western civilization. War was shocking to them as Asians, to whom civilization meant a universal humanism whose inevitable fruit was peace. After the war, the vitality, even the ferocity, of the Russian revolution attracted the fiery nature of Ch’en Tu-hsiu, for, he reasoned, if violence be the secret of power in the world today, then choose the most violent means to the designed end. He became the founder and leader of the Chinese Communist party. Hu Shih, a man of different character, left his work permanently unfinished and retired into the life of a scholar and cosmopolite.

One is not inclined to blame. The writer suffers in profound ways from the injustices and the griefs of the times. It is inevitable, too, that in the loneliness of exile — for many Chinese will never see their homeland again, I fear, they are too old, and they know it — they feel keenly the indifference of their American neighbors and sometimes even of their American friends, and they cannot love America. We ought therefore to remember them and show them full respect, for we are honored by their presence.

In these years while my personal life was absorbed in home and growing family, I had at the same time been learning about my own people. Life in China and with the Chinese had taught me much about human beings, for in ancient countries humanity and human relationships are the primary concern. To know how a person feels was to my Chinese friends more important than anything else about him, for until one knows how another feels no friendship can be established nor even business carried on with mutual benefit. I applied this education and its skills to those who surrounded me in my new life, to neighbors and to acquaintances and to the casual contacts of everyday. That I might learn more widely, I travelled to various parts of the country, so that I could see the contrasts beneath North and South, East and West, contrasts far more striking than their geographical counterparts in China or indeed in any other country that I had ever seen.

I began to know my fellow Americans for what they are, a generous, impulsive, emotional people, unstable, not only from nature, but also from environment. This environment is historical as well as present. We have changed so quickly from a pioneer and rural culture to industrialism and its consequent urbanism that we are still divided between the two major types of civilization. Our political system, too, abetted and even partly caused the instability of our life. The complete overturn every four years in our central government, or at least the effort to make the overturn, the intervening upset of local politics, the shortness of the term of office, not only for major officials? but for the lesser ones as well, make impossible the development of enduring policies and principles. A sense of haste and hurry pervades our daily life, bred of the necessity for action before the change again, and this permeates our thinking. The safety valves of English democratic procedures, whereby a government remains until the people overthrow it, are not ours. Good or bad, certain men can count upon remaining in office for a certain number of years, to do good or evil or nothing at all. Yet however beneficial the good, it may be impermanent, for in four years or eight, seldom more, the whole regime is upset or can be upset. To this, more than to any other single cause, I began to ascribe the superficiality of American life and thought. We live from day to day, unable to plan for long years ahead, lest a new government bring about far-reaching changes. I cannot sufficiently stress the disastrous effect upon the life of our people of continual political uncertainty, especially when in addition to it we have the heavy task of amalgamating a population which has come from so many varying parts of the world, and so quickly that there has not been time to create the real union to be found not in political organization so much as in the deep human roots of tradition and custom developing through a long common life together.

Thus reflecting, I began to be alarmed in the year 1941, for the future of Americans. I knew very well that at the end of the war we would be the ones on the victorious side, and undoubtedly, too, the strongest among the victors, and therefore the peoples of Asia would be expecting a leadership from us which we would be unable to give, mainly because of our own instability but also because of our ignorance of Asian peoples, their history and their importance in the postwar world. When I say importance I mean not only in potentiality but also in the ferment and trouble and struggle in which we would inevitably be involved in the whole world, but centering this time in Asia because of the coincidence of the Second World War with Asian determination for independent modern life. Try as we might we could not again escape as we did after the First World War, by withdrawal. Asia this time must be reckoned with. Yet how could our people meet such a future with these peoples when we knew nothing about their past? I grew wretched with continual pondering upon such matters, aware as I was of the deep hostilities of Asia against the white man. Could Americans escape those whirlwinds of history? The only hope, I came to see, lay in the possibility that we could establish ourselves as a separate people, a new people, not to be allied even in thought with old empires and colonialisms. We must deal with the Asians as Americans not involved with the past, and we were fortunate in the possibility, since we had indeed waged no active wars for colonial purposes nor established any real colonies, and since our regime in the Philippines had been relatively enlightened, and it was clear that we had no wish even to stay there. We were lucky enough, that is, to have already a great fund of good will in Asia, and especially in China, upon which to draw for the future. Only new and reckless action could forfeit it. This was always possible in a war, when many young men are shipped willy-nilly and without real preparation into a foreign country. We had experienced that in Europe in the First World War.

I have never been an evangelical missionary, and indeed abhor the general notion, and yet I know very well that my missionary beginnings have shaped me to the extent of feeling responsible at least for what I can personally do about a given situation which needs mending. What then could I do, I asked myself, to help my countrymen, even a few of them and even on a small scale, to know something of the lives and thoughts of the peoples with whom they must inevitably deal, either as friends or enemies, in the future and that very near? The one gift I had brought with me to my own country was the knowledge of Asia and especially of China and Japan, gained not only through years of living there but through years of concentrated study, travel and observation. True, I wrote books. But books, even best sellers, reach only a small number of the total population of our country. Do they not reach the leading minds? Yes, but in a democracy such as ours the leading minds seldom achieve a place of permanent influence. And the men who sit in Congress or even in the White House are usually not our leading minds. They are not the thinkers. Still less have they time for reflection, or even for thoughtful travel. In a democracy, I reasoned, it is the people who must be informed.

But how?

For a number of years my husband had been editor of Asia Magazine, a monthly started in 1917 by Willard Straight, then American Consul in Peking. Impressed by the fabulously interesting scene in which he worked, Willard Straight put a portion of his wealth into a magazine designed to inform and amuse and interest the American public by describing in authentic prose and pictures the colorful and powerful Asian peoples. I had a sentimental interest in the magazine because some of my own first writing had been published there, and I had continued to write for it occasionally. Yet it had never been able to find the number of readers it deserved. Americans could not be interested in Asia, it seemed. The magazine, maintaining high standards of excellence, had through the years lost much money annually and only a wealthy family could have continued it, as Mrs. Straight did continue it after Mr. Straight’s death, and after her marriage to Leonard Elmhirst. My husband had steadfastly reduced the loss over the years of his editorship, maintaining authenticity above all, but the number of readers did not greatly increase. There were, it seemed, only about fifteen thousand or at most twenty thousand Americans who were interested in Asian peoples, in spite of the inevitable future looming ahead.

Could this be true? It seemed impossible to me, and in 1941 when Mrs. Elmhirst decided to close the magazine, my husband and I wished to continue it for a while to see whether this small interest could be increased. There was no other magazine in the United States which carried full and authentic information about Asian life. At that moment it seemed folly to end the last means of informing our people and providing the knowledge essential to their own safety and welfare. It was as near a missionary impulse as I ever had, and my husband shared it. We were given the magazine and all its assets in the hope, encouraged by Mrs. Elmhirst, that it could be saved. Suffice it to say that we did keep it going for another five years, until events after the end of the war made it impossible. There was, as a matter of fact, an increase in American interest in Asia during the war years, and had there been enough paper available, the magazine might have become self-supporting.

In those ten years, too, I founded The East and West Association and from it learned enough for many books. Even a magazine, I could see, did not educate our people. They learned better from hearing than reading, and best of all from seeing. Why not then, I thought, bring to them men and women of Asia who could speak for themselves, show what they were, explain their own history and civilization? Why not devise a sort of Asian adult education for American communities? In this way our people could get firsthand, from Asian citizens, the story of Asia, without bias and without persuasion. The idea was very simple. In the United States were many pleasant and learned visitors from various countries. I was interested especially in Asians, but if there were such visitors also from Europe why not include them, as well? The world of peoples, I had early learned from Mr. Kung, was indeed one family under heaven. If average Americans could see themselves as part of the human race, they might be stimulated to curiosity and thus to interest and thus to understanding. It was the usual technique of learning.

We set up a small organization, secured tax exemption and a good list of sponsors, and began our work with an opening dinner in Washington, followed by a large meeting in New York, to explain the purpose of the Association. Wendell Willkie made the main opening speech in New York, and it was there that I first heard him speak of his one world. Hu Shih, then Chinese Ambassador to Washington, spoke, too, and various dignitaries from other Asian embassies. The job was begun. It was not to be carried on by such meetings, of course, but by men and women travelling far and wide over the country, sometimes alone, sometimes in couples, or in groups if they were entertainers, and their task was never to be political but always cultural, and even culturally it was first of all to be simple and friendly and vivid. They were to speak of everyday life in their own countries, of their ways and thoughts and hopes, illustrating what they said with costumes, pictures, instruments of music or drama. We chose good people, not necessarily famous or even highly skilled, and indeed I preferred not to have the very famous. I wanted our average Americans to see men and women of Asia who were like themselves, teachers and students and technical men here to learn American methods. One of the best men we ever had was a quiet little Indian professor, here on his sabbatical year, who visited many communities and spoke to all kinds of groups and stayed in American homes and answered questions over the dinner table and around the evening fire. Expenses for such visitors were paid by the local groups, and I was touched and amazed to find that I had been wrong in thinking that Americans cared nothing about the people of Asia. Asia, it is true, roused no interest as such, but a man or woman from Asia, in the flesh and in their own town, speaking in the high school auditorium, or from the pulpit on a Sunday, staying over the night and cooking an Asian dish for supper, and helping to wash the dishes, making himself human and friendly, Americans were very much interested in him. Nor was the interest one-sided. The visitors themselves came back with shining eyes to our little East and West Association office in New York. Not only had they told the Americans about their countries and their peoples — and how they appreciated the opportunity to do this — but they learned about Americans as they had never had a chance to do before. It was so different, they said, from living in a hotel, from walking the streets of a strange city, even very different from living in a university dormitory and sitting in a classroom. They had stayed in American homes, they had played with the children, they had helped with the chores, they had met real people in the school auditorium and had answered thousands of questions. They had showed American women how to wear a sari, how Korean women put on full skirts and jackets, how to cook Chinese food; they had talked with businessmen and teachers and preachers and workingmen. Now they could go back to their own countries and tell their own people how friendly and good the Americans really are — different indeed from politicians and officials.

One year we even rented a bus and sent out a troupe of young Chinese actors and actresses to give plays of their people, old and new. Their opening performance was given for Mrs. Roosevelt and some friends at the White House, and there Wang Yung first gave her remarkable roles of Chinese peasant life. This young actress was a star of modern motion pictures in Shanghai, before the war, and when the Japanese attacked she had joined her fellow artists in organizing a travelling theater whose purpose was to educate the peasant into resistance against the Japanese. The group had divided into several units in order to cover the Chinese countryside as well as they could, singing and acting in impromptu plays for propaganda, as well as performing historical plays. Wang Yung and her troupe walked over many provinces of China. In Hong Kong at last she escaped capture by the Japanese, disguising herself as a beggarwoman, and though she was young and pretty, she prepared herself down to the very dirt on her skin that an old beggar would naturally accumulate and so saved her own life. Safely out of China the troupe played again in Malaya and Burma, and when it finally disbanded Wang Yung was allowed a visit to the United States as a reward. Here she came to see me and then to give her talents to The East and West Association. She was an unusual young modern in that, belonging to a good old family, she was also thoroughly rooted in Chinese tradition and grace.

I do not know whether even Mrs. Roosevelt knew how accurately and richly Wang Yung portrayed the Chinese peasant woman that night in the stately East Room of the White House, but I felt a deep happiness as I watched. Here at last, in the very heart of my own nation, a Chinese woman revealed her people. And I had the same happiness months later in New Orleans, where I went to meet the troupe on its journey. In that wonderful and beautiful city, where the old life of Europe mingles with the modern world we Americans have made, again I saw our young Chinese appear before a great audience to give a play of just such intermingling of old and new in China.

The American audiences could not of course appreciate the delicate nuances of the Chinese play and I did not expect it. But they caught, perhaps, the reality of life and love in conflict between old and new, and this human struggle is the same everywhere. I wish that we could have continued with our travelling troupe, for their work was vivid and true, but expenses are always high for such a venture and even generous gifts from Chinese in America, whose sympathies were with the Nationalists, could not maintain the troupe and so its work came at last to an end.

By such simple means good people from Asia went into many American communities, and though I had thought primarily of my own people, it gave me satisfaction that the visitors took back to Asia new understanding of Americans, too, and a very favorable one. Our “East and West” visitors were not always Asians, but sometimes white men and women who had special knowledge of Asia and occasionally of other parts of the world. But Asia was my primary concern, naturally, because it was the field of the most profound American ignorance.

Why did that most interesting and, I hope, valuable work ever end? For after ten years I did suspend its activities, although it had been an education for me, too, for it had brought me to many communities, myself, and into contact with large numbers of Americans whom I might otherwise never have met. There were two reasons, one financial, for though local communities paid their own expenses, the growing demand for the Asian visitors, as speakers and entertainers and friends, made necessary an increased office staff, and for this I was never able to get any help. Foundations give for research or charity, and The East and West Association was neither. It was an educational experiment, designed for friendship and mutual understanding between the peoples, especially of Asia and the United States. There was nothing very daring or even very new in the idea, but the practical application of an ideal, however old, may be alarming to persons who have not thought of such a possibility before. There was another reason. It was too late, and so I had feared even as early as 1946, when our chief American representative announced at the San Francisco conference in the presence of many distinguished Asians, that American policy for the future would not concern itself with the independence of colonial peoples in Asia.

What a death blow were such words to those Asian peoples who knew our history far better than we did theirs, who had glorified George Washington because he fought for the freedom of his country from an imperial power, who had revered Abraham Lincoln because he had freed dark-skinned slaves! Their hopes, their own ideals, they had found expressed in our American Constitution and Bill of Rights. And now, they heard, these were not principles for all peoples, as they had supposed, but only for Americans. I knew instantly the words were spoken that nothing anyone could do now could prevent the inevitable future. China at least would be lost to our leadership, and perhaps the whole of Asia. It was incredible to me that the words could have been uttered, that any man could be so incredibly naïve and ignorant of the world, both historically and in the present, as to utter them at such a moment in such a place. I went into mourning for many months, literally. If I did not wear black garments on my body, my mind was clothed in shadows and my heart was desolate. We closed Asia Magazine in 1946, and four years later, convinced that there was no way to bring about human understanding in our dangerous age, I closed The East and West Association. The organization remains, if ever the time comes to revive it again, but it is inactive. Yet here and there groups of people still gather by their own efforts, under its name, determined to learn understanding by knowing men and women from Asia. But they are independent.

Had I been able to foresee the strange atmosphere that has pervaded my country since 1946, where good men and true scholars have lost their jobs and their reputations because of their knowledge and their understanding of the areas which, without American leadership, have gone over to Communism, I should have been confirmed in my decision. For though The East and West Association never sent a Communist or political figure to any American community, yet today it is dangerous even to declare belief in the brotherhood of peoples, in the equality of the races, in the necessity for human understanding, in the common sense of peace — all those principles in which I have been reared, in which I do believe and must believe fearlessly until I die. No, but I would have closed The East and West Association also because I would not have been willing to subject my friends from Asia to the lies and suspicions and false accusations so rife in our times. Yet I am grateful for those ten years in which we were able to meet each other face to face, good citizens from Asia and good citizens in the United States, and now and then the seed sown still bears its fruit.

Much of my life, my thought, my time, my money for ten years went into this work. Through it I, too, learned a lesson. A nation, like a child, cannot comprehend beyond the capacity of its mental age. To teach calculus to a child of six is absurd. One has to begin at the beginning, one has to wait for maturity and it cannot be hastened.

It was increasingly difficult as the war years went on to gain even for myself a true picture of what was happening in China. There was much pleasant propaganda about our Chinese allies, but the sad truth, as I discovered from honest Chinese friends who in rueful talk admitted what I had feared, was that in the positional war which Chiang Kai-shek was waging by remaining in Chungking without much active resistance, the armies under his control were gradually deteriorating. Poor food, irregular pay, a stagnant life were combining to take the heart out of the men. They were growing impatient and bitter as well as idle, while they waited for the World War to decide their fate. Inevitably, too, corruption set in and secret and unlawful trade with the enemy began to flourish. The West would win, they were told, and since they were the allies of the West, it remained only for them to wait until Japan was defeated. The Communists meanwhile carried on a brisk war, and not entirely unselfishly either, for they were consolidating the peasants behind them in the rural areas, penetrating even into Nationalist-held territory. The two parties had no communication with each other, except in a formal fashion in Chungking between Communist representatives and those of the Nationalist government, and they made no mutual military plans. Since neither told the other what it was doing resistance was divided. Their very hopes were divided. Chiang wanted a quick end to the war while his position was still strong enough to claim the leadership in peace, whereas the Communists hoped for a long war, because in the interval they could consolidate more and more territory under their control in the guise of resistance to the aggressive enemy. Civil war was actually being waged, though undeclared, and thus it continued until 1945 when Germany surrendered.

Japan did not surrender at the same time and Chinese of both parties thought that the war would still go on perhaps for many years, the Nationalists fearing, the Communists hoping for such a situation. I remember that my Chinese friends in New York argued with me that the United States must certainly send forces to land upon the Chinese coast and face Japanese troops in hand-to-hand battle. If this were done, they promised, the Nationalist troops would be at their side. The Communists, I reasoned, for I had no means of knowing, would do their best against such an outcome, for by it the whole southeast area which they had begun to penetrate through their guerrillas would automatically be restored to the Nationalists.

My Chinese friends were wrong, as any American might have guessed they would be. We did not, and doubtless never had planned to land American troops on the Chinese coast to meet the Japanese face to face. Instead, as everybody now knows, the Japanese forces were much nearer collapse than had been supposed, and when suddenly and without warning to anyone the atomic bombs were dropped, the end came. Chiang Kai-shek acted with speed. With the power of his office as Commander in the China Zone, he demanded that his troops be taken by American airplanes to the occupied areas and that the Japanese not be allowed to surrender to the Chinese Communists, but only to his own representatives. Upon this the Civil War flared into the open.

We Americans were in an embarrassing position. We were obliged to fulfill Chiang Kai-shek’s demands, and yet by so doing we put ourselves on the side of the Nationalists as against the Communists, and this made impossible the atmosphere of neutrality essential to the position we assumed later as arbitrators. That is, the compromise so heroically worked for by General Marshall was always hopeless in view of what had already taken place. The situation was only the first of others that were to follow, the most notable and dangerous one being our support of France as a colonial power in Indo-China. I am convinced that such a position is abhorrent to all good Americans, for in spite of confusions and betrayals we are committed by conviction and by choice to the independence of peoples, and yet, because we stand against Communism, we feel ourselves compelled to accept as allies those with whom we are most deeply incompatible. It has always been and is now, however, a mistake to assume that we are actually compelled to such compromise. An enlightened leadership by men informed of the actualities of life in Asia would have found an alternative that could have given to American democracy its true expression. I say American, and yet the power and the attraction of our way of life, based upon the deep principles of the human heart, lie in the fact that what we believe in is what all mankind craves, the freedom of the individual within the limits of universal law. Had we been able to fulfill ourselves, we might have found world friendship and peace far easier to achieve. Instead we have slipped unwillingly into the place of the burden-bearers of Asia, responsible for old sins that we never committed.

General Marshall went to China in 1946, therefore, with a vain hope. He faced two lawless parties, each equally lawless, for neither was the elected of the people. Chiang Kai-shek had never made a real — that is, a constitutional — government, and the members of his Cabinet were merely his lackeys, without security of tenure except as they were loyal to his person. Long ago the hope of any organized government had been taken from them. Chiang Kai-shek remained a military leader and no more.

But the Communists had nothing better, either. They also were not elected by the people. They, no more than the Nationalists, had set up an organized legality, within which the people could express their choice. The framework of the nation was gone, the old patterns were destroyed. Had there been no revolution, no Sun Yat-sen, at least there might have been the throne to seize, the Imperial Seal to possess. Even the Old Empress had been careful, however often she fled, to take with her the sacred seal, which alone could prove her right to rule.

Our brave old American general faced two groups of warring men, neither of them with the right to rule a great people, for the people had not spoken and could not speak. Even though a compromise were reached, a government had still to be made. It was indeed a hopeless task, and thinking of it in these days I wonder if he knew it. And why, I wonder, did not our own government know it? A few educated Chinese clung to a vague shred of remaining hope that if a short working compromise could be made they themselves could plunge into the effort of creating a government. They were older and wiser than they had been in the first years of the Nationalists, and though now they no longer believed in Chiang’s government, they were not yet won to the Communists, either, and in their no man’s land they kept their resolution and tried to form a new group, the Democratic League. The only result of this was to be called pro-Communist by the Nationalists and pro-Nationalist by the Communists, and the little effort soon faded, although it was courageously begun.

Between these two equally selfish forces, the people were all but lost. War-torn and weary, their homes destroyed, the remnants of their families gathering again, they wanted only peace — peace from foreigners, peace to save what they could of their old life. The Communists made quick propaganda for that end. The Americans, they proclaimed, were backing Chiang for their own purposes. A new imperialism was growing in the West. The old European and English empires were ended, but the United States was a rising young power, white men again hungry to possess the world. As loyal Chinese, the Communists declared, they would fight if the United States handed China back to Chiang Kai-shek. Even if this meant years of civil war, they would never yield.

The weary people counted their cards. They cared nothing for Communism and knew very little about it anyway. But they did not want civil war. If Chiang took over the government, civil war would drag on year after year, for the Old Tiger was stubborn and would not acknowledge defeat so long as he lived. Had he not carried on such a war for years before the Japanese attacked? But the Communists promised peace.

The people chose peace, even though it was only a promise, against the certainty of war. And when the people of any country choose peace at all costs, not even generals can make war. The people chose peace, not Communism. It is what Americans must remember, now more than ever, for in this one fact lies the hope for our future friendship in Asia.

When it became clear to me that we had lost, as day after day the Nationalist armies surrendered without battle, handing over their American-supplied arms to the Communists, I spent much thought upon what could next be done. I had no blame in my heart for those yielding soldiers. Soldiers? They were not soldiers. Chiang’s real army had been kept intact and would retreat with him to Formosa as had been planned long before. No, the soldiers who faced the Communists were for the most part just country boys, sent in from the provinces upon order. They had been seized, impressed into army service as in the American Civil War our own men were impressed, taken by force if no consent were given, tied with ropes and chained and compelled to march perhaps hundreds of miles, to the battle scene. There guns were thrust into their hands and they were told to fight. But why should they fight? What had the Nationalist cause ever done for them or for their families? They were the sons of average Chinese parents, home-loving and hating war. Of course they surrendered easily and why should they not? Perhaps they did not even know how to fire the American weapons they held.

No, there was no use by now in blaming anyone. The question remained, how could American democracy prevent Chinese Communism from following the harsh Soviet pattern? Much was in our favor. Mao Tse-tung, the acknowledged Communist leader of China, had never been really persona grata with Soviet Russia, or so one heard. At one time it was even rumored that he had been expelled from the International party for insubordination to Communist principle and discipline. Certainly he had followed a pattern of his own. Moreover, I could not believe that the good record of Americans in China for a hundred years had been forgotten. American boys living in China during the war had, it is true, left behind them mixed impressions. The intelligent and civilized ones were liked and became good ambassadors for their people. But many of them were not civilized and intelligent and being mere children in years, for what man is mature before twenty-five at least, they had acted like naughty boys, drinking too much and insulting women and sometimes behaving like criminals. I had grieved about this for a while, hearing directly as I did in those years from Chinese friends, and then I reflected that perhaps the time had come for the Chinese and the Americans to know each other exactly as we were, good and bad. On the whole, the record, I say, is good.

I felt, then, that we should capitalize upon the good and should immediately strengthen every tie with the Chinese people by trade and benefit and interchange of goods and citizens, hoping that the American influence would be stabilized before the Russians could step in. As a matter of fact, all during the war there was very little direct Russian influence in China and this remained so for a considerable period after the war during which time we might indeed have consolidated our position as friends of the Chinese, so that the new government would come to depend upon us for trade and technical help, instead of upon Soviet Russia. Our policy, however, developed in quite the opposite direction when Chiang Kai-shek was defeated. We cut ourselves off from the Chinese people, withdrew our citizens, and retired from the Chinese scene. Once again the new Chinese rulers turned to Soviet Russia, as Sun Yat-sen had done in his time, so many years before, for the necessities of their existence.

In the intervening years of increasing tension and the outbreak of the Korean war, I pondered much upon the history of China in my lifetime. I have come to the conclusion at last that it is dangerous, perhaps the supreme danger, for persons or parties to destroy the framework of government which a people has built for itself, not consciously or by sudden choice, but by the slow and profound processes of life and time. The framework is the structure upon which people hang their habits and their customs, their religions and their philosophy. An old house can be changed and strengthened and remodeled and lived in for centuries if the essential framework holds. But once the whole structure is pulled down into dust it may never be rebuilt, and the people who lived in it are lost and wandering.

A revolution, therefore, inevitable in the history of any people when living conditions become intolerable, should always stop short of total destruction of the framework. Thus Sun Yat-sen, when in desperation he overthrew the Manchu dynasty, should not, I have come to believe, also have overthrown the form of government. The Throne should have been upheld, the system maintained, and within that framework reforms carried out. The Chinese people, like the British, were accustomed to a ruling figure. They had developed their own resistances to tyranny, and with increasing knowledge of Western democracy and its benefits they would have assumed modern manners of their own. The English system might have provided better guidance for them than ours. We are not an ancient people. The Chinese background is very different from ours.

This will seem a heretical conclusion, doubtless, not only for many westerners but also for a considerable number of Western-educated Chinese. Nevertheless I maintain it. Sun Yat-sen was an honorable and selfless man, whose integrity is beyond doubt. He deserves the homage of his people. He is not to be blamed that in his burning desire to serve them he destroyed the very basis of their life, which was order.

It is dangerous to try to save people — very dangerous indeed! I have never heard of a human being who was strong enough for it. Heaven is an inspiring goal, but what if on the way the soul is lost in hell?

When I reflect upon the years that I have spent in this American world of mine, I discover that against the quiet steady background of home and work, they divide into what I have done over and beyond my daily life. For example, our farm—

Twenty-one years ago — it is as long as that — when I first saw my house, postage stamp size on a real-estate folder, I scarcely realized its environment. I saw the sturdy thickset old stone building on the hillside, flanked by the tall black walnut tree on one end and the maple on the other, and across a grassy road the big red barn. Forty-eight acres of woodland and meadow went with the house, edged by the brook. They seemed then as wide as an empire. In China the average farm is less than five acres. At first I contended with what seemed rank wilderness. The land had not been tilled for seventeen years, and weeds and briars covered it like a blanket. I attempted the unattainable. I tried to make those woolly acres look like a Chinese farm, neat and green and fruitful. I coaxed the old apple trees, but they remained unresponsive, I tried to confine the brook, and it remained rebellious. An old neighbor looked doubtfully on, and said, “It’s a vild critter, that there run.” For a while I thought he meant “vile,” but then I discovered that it was Pennsylvania Dutch accent. Wild our brook was and wild it still is, as mild as milk in summer, but when the spring snows melt, or after a thunderstorm, it imitates the raging Yangtse. No retaining wall is strong enough. We built a dam fit to hold back a monster, and that alone compels it into a small lake where the children can boat and fish and skate in winter.

Eventually, of course, I realized that American land is rebellious, and, besides, our own land had been ill-treated. Generations of farmers had neglected to fertilize, and had further robbed the earth by planting nothing but corn, until the shale and clay pan that underlie our shallow topsoil emerged like skeletons from old graves.

I had been taught in my Chinese world that earth is a sacred possession and I was horrified at what I saw I had. How could I replace what had been lost before I came? I longed to buy cattle and treasure the manure for the land. But those were the days when no one was encouraged to farm, the incredible days when people were actually making a living by not farming the land upon which they lived. Government subsidy was for nonproduction, and my neighbors, all farmers, divided themselves into the good and the evil, the good men refusing to let their fields lie idle even when times were awry, and the evil, who had more cash than ever before, because they were only too ready not to work. It was no time to begin a farm, at any rate. Therefore I planted trees, thousands of them, upon our hillsides. After my brother died, I planted trees upon the land which he had left, and then, that our right flank might be protected against small bungalows, I bought still another farm as derelict as either of the others, and planted trees there, too.

This went on until the war came, and then I felt that the time had come really to farm, as I had been secretly longing to do. For another reason, the children were drinking quarts of milk every day, and I was not satisfied with the milk supply. To live in the country and drink pasteurized milk as one must in the city, seemed absurd. The precious vitamins of raw milk, so essential to children, are too often destroyed or all but, by pasteurization, especially if it is well done. If it is carelessly done as it may be, then such milk is more dangerous than raw milk, for the process gives the excuse for all sorts of milk to be poured into the vats, certainly not all of it clean. And I am prejudiced against dirt, dead or alive, in food. I wish that my countrymen were all clean, but the truth is we Americans are not a very clean people, not nearly so clean as the Japanese, for example, or the Swedish, or several others. Our farmers are content too often with dirty barns and dirty cows hastily swabbed around the udders before milking time. I did not at all like what I saw on farms, and this, too, moved me to have my own. Rejoicing when war directives urged the raising of food, I hastened to obey. It meant the buying of three more run-down farms adjoining our land. The average farm in our region is fifty acres. Each of the farms had on it a good stone house, though without modern conveniences, and a good-to-middling barn. One good stone barn remodeled would do for the herd, the other barns were left for storage.

I plunged into the job, deciding that I must learn myself before I could know what should be done, for this was the United States and not China. For two years I listened, read, observed and worked. My neighbors said, “Be you goin’ to do real farmin’ or book farmin’?” This, I discovered, meant was I going to try to have a Bangs-free herd? Our state requires herds to be free of tuberculosis but not yet of Bangs. Therefore if I wanted to have a clean herd I would have to work alone. None of my neighbors approved the effort. In kindliest spirit they warned me that one could lose a whole herd if he got the idea of not having any Bangs. Best thing, they said, was just to pay no heed to Bangs. There was no law against it. I listened and smiled and said nothing, determined for the children’s sake to have a clean herd, and so we began by being clean, and have so continued, tested constantly, unceasingly watchful, but successful. I look at my hearty brood of children now, much taller than I am, and reflect that all these years they have been drinking the best milk that can be produced, raw milk as fresh as the morning, all the vitamins intact, and rich with yellow cream. Through the war I made our own butter and we did not take our share of the nation’s supply. Last spring when there was a glut of milk on the market for a month or two and we could not sell all we had I made butter again, in quantities to last for months, and we raised extra pigs on the skim milk, and gave it to the chicks and they came through in prime shape. The price of our grade of milk is high enough so that usually it pays to sell it whole. Yet I am sufficiently irritated in true democratic fashion when I see the difference between what we get for our clean excellent milk wholesale and what the consumer has to pay for it bottled after the middlemen are through with it. The boys urge me to go into the retail milk business, and run a milk route, but that I refuse. My concern is for the children, and the land is showing a satisfactory return to what good land should be. The marginal acres we still keep in trees, and will always do so, replanting as we cut each year. The cows have done well enough. They take prizes at shows and so on, and I have more than my share of ribbons and silverware. But I am not much interested in such goings on. I feel that unless a cow can produce milk and manure, her good looks are useless. Pretty is as pretty does, my mother used to say. Unless the help wants very much to show a cow or bull we have bred and of which they are proud, my eyes remain upon the milk and crop records.

Farms with hired help are not, of course, for making money. Yet, all in all, I feel we have done well with our farm, better than we feared, and I refuse to count the money alone. Besides milk, the farm has given the children an endless source of interest and pocket money. There is always work to be done, free or for pay, and the boys have grown up farmwise. They know how to milk, they know the care and feeding of the herd, they understand the soil, they can use farm machinery and care for it as a capital possession. They know the urgency of harvesting and of work that has to be done long after hours because hay and grain will not wait upon a storm. The farm has given us family roots, not only in the community, but in the very earth itself. It has even sifted human beings for us. We have learned to know a rascal from an honest man, whether he be farm manager or hired hand. We have had both kinds, at all levels, and it has taught the children lessons they cannot learn in school. They have learned, too, that kindness to animals pays, as well as to human beings, not only spiritually but materially. It is true that a contented cow gives better milk and more milk than an unhappy one, and she is only contented when she is kindly treated. We have fired men because they pushed the cows around.

There are the lesser creatures, too, on a farm like ours, the turkeys that we raise for ourselves and our farm people and our relatives at Christmas. Turkeys are temperamental birds, and they cannot have their feet on the ground, for they die of reality. They must be maintained in cages above the earth, and carefully fed. And American chickens are delicate, not at all the robust brown creatures that scratch in the dung and the dust of the Chinese threshing floors and country roads and take care of themselves. Even the pigs here are inclined to pettishness unless they are carefully tended. Pigs I did not know very well in China, for there I saw them merely as farm scavengers, prized because they would eat anything and then could be butchered to provide food in turn for the farm family. It was only when we began to keep a few pigs here on our American farm for our own ham and bacon and sausage that I took time to watch them and reflect upon their personalities. They are interesting creatures, not at all simple, as I had supposed.

Yet I doubt if I could have understood fully how complex and intelligent pigs are had it not been for Tiny, a runt in one of the litters, who amused us by his insistence upon life, midget though he was born, so that when I saw him doomed merely by size as he fought with his mates for his dinner at the trough, I felt nature had been unjust and, yielding to the children’s pleas, I let them bring him to the house. Such was Tiny’s intelligence that it was a matter only of hours before he realized that he was, so to speak, in clover, and began to impose himself upon us in the most astounding manner. I used to wonder why it was that Chinese farm families allowed their pigs to roam in their houses, and my mother told me that in Ireland, too, the pigs were in the farmhouses. I thought it a deplorable habit until I discovered that pigs anywhere are so determined that they do whatever they wish. In two days Tiny was clamoring at every door to get into our house, and only the screen doors kept him out. I say clamoring, but the proper word is screeching, or screaming, or loud bawling in a high key. The microscopic creature, standing only three inches or so above ground and no larger than a kitten, had a voice of such volume and discord that it was distracting beyond any I had ever heard. I used sometimes on Chinese roads to speak reproachfully to a sweating Chinese farmer transporting two fat pigs to market, tied by ropes on either side of the central wheel of his barrow. Their noise was so appalling that I am sure they were in severe pain, and I begged him to loosen the ropes somewhat to relieve them. No farmer ever did more than grin at me and go on his way. Once a farmer did stop to wipe his sweating brow with his blue cotton girdle cloth, “Foreigner,” he said, while he paused, “it is the noise pigs make.”

I discovered that he was right. Tiny made the same noise, not because he was tied or confined, for he ran about the lawns like a puppy, but because he was not continuously waited upon or petted or noticed or fed, or because he was lonely and wanted to sleep in someone’s lap. Once every hour, regularly, he trotted to the screen door of my own study where I was busy writing a book and stood there squalling until I came out and poured his dish full of milk. Sometimes he came back to squall again merely because he wanted to be with me. There were times when I let him sleep on my lap to stop his raucous cries while I worked. If we took a walk he would scamper after us and then squall because we went too fast for his three-inch legs. He grew fat but not much bigger, and within a month had become such a tyrant that even the children agreed he had to go. We missed him in a queer relieved half-regretful fashion. He was so full of personality that we still laugh when we remember him, but too much personality is not good, at least in a pig. In fact, it was impossible to live with him and in this reflection there is a moral, I suppose, but let it be.

Cats and kittens of course belong to a farm and we had as many as thirteen at the house one spring, not to mention the barn cats necessary for keeping down the rats and mice. We have always had dogs and puppies, both wanted and unwanted. Our pair of cocker spaniels, a little husband and wife, produced beautiful purebred puppies for some years in an ideal monogamy. The little female never looked at a male except her mate. One day, always self-confident, he stepped across the road to speak to a neighbor dog and was run over by a car and the female was left a widow. Her degeneration has been almost human. She mourned for a while and seemed inconsolable. Suddenly she threw sorrow to the winds, grew plump and pretty and left off her homekeeping ways. Within a few weeks she was on the lowest terms of good fellowship with every canine Tom, Dick and Harry in the township and mongrels are now the order of her day, and ours.

Our farm abounds in pleasant wild life, new to me. The hills about my Chinese home were populated by wild boar and wolves and slim mountain panthers, and there were pheasants and wild geese and ducks and cranes. Now I live among squirrels and muskrats and ground hogs. The pheasants are the same, however, the beautiful Chinese ring-necked pheasants, and since I could not tolerate the trespassing ways of city hunters who cannot remember that all land belongs to someone and certainly not to them, we have a state game preserve on our land. And the pheasants abound and also the deer. A few months ago as we sat at luncheon in the dining room, we saw under the locust trees three deer, the buck statuesque and on guard, while the does nibbled the azaleas. Though I am angry for a moment sometimes in the garden to see lettuce beds destroyed or our best early strawberries consumed, I remember that life has to be shared with somebody and that I have chosen the hunted and not the hunters. Rabbits dash over the lawns, their white tails flying, and the boys trap them alive and sell them to the state to transplant to other places. And here, as in my Chinese home, the herons come and stand beside the pool in the shade of the weeping willow trees, and when I see them, I feel my roots reach around the world.

New York City

A cold grey day in this city, where I make a transient home when business demands it. Today’s business is the Academy of Arts and Letters of which I am now a member. Each honor that has been given me has come with the shock of surprise and pleasure, for each has been unexpected, and none more so than the invitation to join the Academy. I accepted for my own enjoyment, and though I feel stricken with a familiar shyness when I enter the great doors, I am pleased, nevertheless. I am ashamed of this shyness, and perhaps it is not really shyness, for surely I am accustomed by now to being anywhere and with anyone. Perhaps it is only the slight sense of strangeness with which I still enter any group of my own countrymen. In this case the gender is correct, for I am the only woman who attends the meetings, thus far. There is one other such member, I am told, but she never comes. I am pleased, too, that the chair assigned me was occupied before me by Sinclair Lewis. His name is the last on the plaque, and when I take my seat I reflect that after his name will one day come my own.

The hall where we meet is a place of dignity and beauty. While the simple ceremonies are performed, I gaze from the great window on the opposite side of the room, upon a city hillside, inhabited not by living human beings, but by the dead. It is a graveyard, well kept and permanent, the resting place, I suppose, of comfortable persons who in their lifetimes were also well kept and permanent until death carried them on. A great tree spreads its aged branches across the window, and in the winter, on such a day as this, the graves stand severely plain. When spring comes the tree puts out small green leaves, not hiding the dead but interposing a delicate quivering screen. In summer the graves are all but hidden.

Most of us are old who sit in the seats whereon are the names of the dead. I am, I believe, next to the youngest member, and I am not young. I put my vote the other day for several younger than I, so that new life may come in and early enough to enjoy the company of the learned. For there is no doubt that the Academy is the company of the learned. I keep a respectful silence most of the time, for the learning of these learned men is not profoundly my own. They are the musicians, the painters, the writers, the architects of the United States. I am still studying the subjects which they have made theirs long since and in which they are eminent, while I can never be but an amateur. I comfort myself with the thought that there are also many things I know which they do not.

For example, although they discuss so beautifully the symbolism of Mallarmé, do they know the symbolism of the famous essayists, or the hidden novelists, of China? These are never discussed. And for another example, among The Hundred Books, those classics which Western scholars have chosen to represent the sources of human civilization, there was not one Asian book, although in Asia great civilizations flourished long before our day and still exist in revitalized strength. “Why,” I asked an American scholar, “are there no books from Asia in The Great One Hundred?”

“Because,” he said quite honestly but without the least sign of guilt, “nobody knows anything about them!”

Nobody? Only millions of people! Ah, well—

Meanwhile I like very much to be in this company of the learned, deservedly or not. They are truly learned men and therefore without conceit and bombast. They are simple in manner, kind and mildly humorous, and they are careful not to wound one another. This is because they are civilized as learning alone can civilize the human being. I like to hear them speak even of unfamiliar subjects, for their voices are pleasant and their language often quite beautiful. Whatever their appearance, they have the gentle look of scholars, not dead but living in a pure and vital atmosphere. They jest now and then about the graves outside the window, for they are aware of their destination, but none is afraid. They are part of a stream, a river, that, broadening, carries mankind toward a vast eternal sea. Each knows his worth and yet his humble place. In this atmosphere I feel at home, for it is the atmosphere of scholars in every country and, I daresay, in every age.

Today it is winter, the tree will be bare against the grey sky and the tombstones will stand stark. But the next time we meet it will be spring.

When I look back over the twenty years that I have now lived in my own country, I realize that I still do not see my people plain. The years are rich with living, but life does not flow here in a river as it did in China. I see it as a series of incidents and events and experiences, each separate, sometimes complete, but always separate. The parts do not yet make a whole. And I am quite aware of the historical fact that our national life broke in two pieces in 1914, when the First World War began, so that what we were before we never can be again. There is no normalcy for us, no point of return. We can only go on, whatever the risks of the future.

Take the subject of women, for example. American women always absorb my interest, I watch them everywhere I go, I ponder upon them, I observe the way they talk and think and behave. Years ago I wrote a little book called Of Men and Women. So changeful is the American scene that while the book remains true in principle — that is, as it pertains to the relationship between men and women in the United States — yet women have changed very much since I wrote it. The present generation of young women, the daughters of the mothers about whom I wrote, are not “gunpowder women” as I called their mothers then. They are almost Victorian in their desire to marry, to be supported by their husbands, to have children, to do nothing outside the home. In spite of the fact that these young women are compelled to do a great deal outside the home, they seldom enjoy it, and they want now above all else, it seems, to be given an excuse, a moral reason, why they should give up outside interests. They want big families to provide the reason, they proclaim boldly that they take jobs only because they must. In this generation a girl is not ashamed to say that she wants to marry, and she appraises every man she meets, married or not, as a possible husband for herself.

Perhaps men do not accept marriage as necessary to a man’s estate as once they did. Military life, it is said, does a damage to normal life for a man. It not only increases the number of homosexuals, but it persuades men to consider life without marriage as good enough. In military life men find their companionship with men, and sex becomes a physical rather than an emotional experience. Once in so often a man needs a woman physically, and when that time comes he can go out and find her easily enough and often without paying money for it. Why, then, the emotionally dwarfed man inquires, should he burden himself with the responsibilities of wife and children? The number of men who find civilian life unsatisfactory and return to the shelter of the armed forces has never been made public but it is worth study, and women ought to be the students. If they crave home and family as they now seem to do, they had better find out how to fulfill their longings.

The pursuit of men by women is not healthy. It is a portent of totalitarianism. In prewar Germany homosexuality was rife as it usually is in militaristic societies, and women, knowing or not knowing, felt that they were not desirable in the old ways and they became abject and fawning before men. I do not like to see American girls in this generation give up their own individualities in order to attract men, for if men can be attracted by such behavior, then it is alarming. And it is alarming that girls stake so much on marriage so that if they do not marry they consider themselves failures, even though marriage should be the proper goal of men and women alike, an inevitable and desirable state, if society is in balance.

There will come a time, I daresay, when a sensible means will be developed for men and women to marry and as a matter of course, so that any one who wishes to marry will have a dignified and sane opportunity to meet persons suitable for marriage, and when, if individuals need help for the final arrangements of betrothal and wedding, it can be provided. In China this was done by the parents of both boy and girl. Who, the Chinese used to say to me, can know son or daughter better than his own parents, and who therefore is more suited to find a proper mate? Americans, unless family life becomes much broader and more stabilized than it is at present, will scarcely accept the parental control of marital fate, but it may be that our increasing trust in scientists will lead us to put our faith in those who may specialize in matching mates. Adoption agencies make great ado about matching adoptable children to the color, creed, environment, temperaments, the race, and the likes and dislikes of adoptive parents, thereby incidentally forcing many good people to remain childless because their individual peculiarities are not reproduced in children available for adoption, any more than they would probably be if they gave birth to a child. I have known parents with red hair and freckled complexions who gave birth to a black-haired, black-eyed child, and no one took the child away from them. Indeed I once knew a Canadian storekeeper in China who was brunette, and so was his wife, and in honorable matrimony they had six children, two black-haired and black-eyed, two red-haired and green-eyed and two yellow-haired and blue-eyed, with complexions to match the three varieties. Yet they were allowed to keep all these children, the ones that matched them and the ones that did not. But social workers are trained to be careful of their colors and their creeds, and I daresay that as time goes on we shall develop social work still further and then we shall find ourselves in the hands of matchmakers in marriage as well as in adoption. Men and women being born in about the same assortment, however, some shuffling will doubtless result in everybody finding the right person, scientifically at least, to marry.

Meanwhile I feel sorry for the women today who want to marry and cannot. Their mothers were the gunpowder women of yesterday, bursting out of their kitchens, and here are their daughters trying to get in again. I sat one evening in our living room and listened to a fine young woman, a little too tall and a little too old for the average marriage market — the girls grow up so quickly nowadays that a child of twelve or thirteen is already beginning to be competition to the woman of eighteen and twenty, and she in turn to the chances of the woman of thirty and this one was thirty-five. She talked and I listened, and she told me of the plan upon which she and two of her friends were working. They had made a list of the marriageable men they knew, and had divided the men between them in terms, first of preference, and then of possibility. A certain number they gave up as impossible. One was too attached to his mother, another was a confirmed bachelor, the result of being more handsome than needful for a man, another was stingy, another had tantrums, and so on. A year later I received a wedding announcement from her. She had married number four, the last of her list of preferences. I could have wept for her. But I hope, oh, I do hope, that she has lovely children!

Green Hills Farm

Yes, I remember the American years in scenes, unconnected. For example, when the war stopped, we were at New Bedford, in a hotel with all our children for the night, and expecting to get to the island of Martha’s Vineyard in the morning. And that very night the news came that the war was over and everybody in the town went crazy and took a holiday, and even the steamer’s crew was drunk next day. But we had to leave the hotel because our rooms were engaged by other people and so we were quite without a shelter over our heads, while men and women went mad and got drunk and fell into fights, all because of joy. At last we were able to persuade a fisherman in Woods Hole to take us across the Sound in his motorboat and so we arrived, starved and tired and dazed with all we had seen and heard.

And I remember the day I spent with the children on a set in Hollywood. It was my only visit there, and I went because my novel Dragon Seed was being made into a picture with Katharine Hepburn in the leading role and I was secretly distressed because she wore a man’s Chinese jacket instead of a woman’s, and when I inquired of someone in command why this was allowed, I was told that she liked the lines of the man’s jacket better than the woman’s. Just as she would not cut off her bangs, although anyone who knew China would know that a farmer’s wife would not wear bangs. They are plucked out the night before her wedding, as a sign that she is no longer to be a virgin. And the bridge they had on the set was all wrong. It was the sort of bridge they used in South China but not in Nanking. And, worst of all, the terraces should never have been on the mountains. The rounded hills outside Los Angeles are very much like the hills outside Nanking, but for Dragon Seed they were terraced with bulldozers, whereas there is no terracing on the Nanking hills, and what confounded me most was that some of the terraces ran perpendicularly like great ditches up and down, impossible to imagine except in Hollywood, for terracing prevents erosion and the ditch provides it. When I inquired why the ditches, I was told that they made a contrast to the terraces running horizontally, and this only confounded me further.

Yet why dwell upon such matters now? Pictures improve, I daresay, and later in that same day the people on the set had their chance to laugh at me, too, when they produced the water buffalo which had been an important character in the filming of The Good Earth and now had become a sort of pet. I suppose they thought I would fall affectionately upon the beast’s neck but I did not. I remembered that water buffaloes in China have a deep prejudice against white persons and will always attack if they can. It was as much as I could do to put my hand on this one’s horn for a photograph. We eyed each other with mutual distrust, I because he was a water buffalo, and he eyed me because he smelled my fear, and was stirred by ancestral antagonisms. Meanwhile the Americans watching us laughed heartily and I let them laugh. And this brief and single visit to Hollywood brings to my memory the strange story of the filming of The Good Earth. I have always disliked mystery stories in which the villain is an Oriental of unknown and sinister character, just as in my childhood I used to dislike the crude Chinese plays where the villain was always a Western man with blue eyes, a big nose and red hair, yet — well, here is the story, and in time it properly begins in that last winter which I spent in the old city of Nanking.

When the stage version of The Good Earth, prepared in 1932 by Owen Davis, was sold by the Theater Guild to Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, I wished very much that the chief characters in the motion picture could be played by Chinese actors, for the stage play had convinced me that it was impossible for Americans to portray the parts of Chinese with any reality. Nazimova, who took the part of O-lan, was a brilliant exception, but she had some background in Eastern Europe which gave her an almost Asian grace of movement and pose. I was told, however, that our American audiences demand American stars and so I yielded the point, as indeed I had to, for I had no control over the matter.

As soon as I reached Shanghai, the representative there of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer came to see me in a state of despair. He had been sent to take preliminary photographs of scenes and people and he had found himself frustrated at every attempt. Finally his studio was burned down by unknown persons and he was giving up and returning to the United States. There are “forces,” he said, who did not want the picture made at all.

“Forces?” I inquired, unbelieving.

He nodded and went away without explaining. Later, I heard that he had committed suicide before reaching the United States, although not, I believe, from artistic frustration but from some private and domestic tragedy of his own.

I discovered, as the months passed, that the “forces” were familiar enough, for they were simply the prickly inverted patriotism of some members in the new government who did not want an authentic film made of Chinese villages and peasants lest it might provide unflattering views of China to foreign audiences abroad. I had a certain amount of sympathy with this, and so I declined at once any association with the making of the film, for friendly relations were more important to me than its success. Nevertheless, during the winter I heard a great deal about the making of that film, and I read of it, too, in Chinese newspapers. For a company was sent from Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer complete with cameras and technical equipment, and the story of their travail was relayed to me regularly by my friend the American Consul, who was compelled in the course of duty to be the mediator between the American motion picture group and the Chinese authorities, who objected at every step, and even after mediation, unwillingly acceded to, insisted upon dressing up the villages before pictures were allowed. Every woman, I heard, had to appear in clean clothes, and wear a flower in her hair, the rugged streets had to be cleaned and the houses decorated. The authorities even tried to substitute a modern American tractor, a machine that few Chinese had ever seen, for the redoubtable water buffalo who was an essential character in my story. If I heard the American side of the troubles from the Consul, I had the other side from editorials in the Chinese papers, which ran something like this:

“We fear that in spite of our government’s every precaution, there will be some child in this film with an unwashed face or some farmer’s wife with a dirty apron.”

My sympathies were with both sides by now, and I kept a prudent silence and followed my usual pursuits. It was only after the motion picture was finished and shown and I was living in the United States that I heard of the incredible ill luck that dogged its making. One misfortune followed another until the tale became a legend. It was told to me by a member of the company, and proceeded from minor accidents too numerous to mention to the major disaster of discovering, when the company left China to come home, that most of the film material brought back from China in tin containers had somewhere along the way been destroyed by acid, so that of the entire length of a long film, as it was eventually shown, only about twelve minutes was composed of the original photography taken in China. Even the famous locust scene was made in one of the Western American states, where an opportune locust scourge supplied the necessary local color. The final tragedy was of course the death by sudden illness of the brilliant director, Irving Thalberg, leaving the picture uncompleted.

His successor confessed to his own secret fears one evening when the picture was finished, or so I was told, and at the moment he happened to be standing by a chimney piece in his house, or in some other, and as he spoke an immense and heavy-framed portrait fell from above the mantelpiece, narrowly missing his head.

My own memories of the film are not so sinister. I did not go to the opening although I was in New York at the time, for I dreaded the fanfare and publicity. I waited for a few days and then my husband and I went quietly to the theater and took seats in the gallery. It is an amazing experience to see the characters one has created come alive on the screen, and I was much moved by the effort that had been made, especially by the incredibly perfect performance of Luise Rainer as O-lan. She not only looked like a Chinese woman but she moved like one and every detail of action, even to the washing of a rice bowl, was correct. When I asked her how she had accomplished this, she told me that she had chosen from among the many Chinese employed on the set for the crowd scenes a young woman whom she thought most like O-lan. She had then followed this woman everywhere, watching her until she felt identified with her. When later the film was shown in China, as well as in other Asian countries, where incidentally it was a great success, Chinese friends wrote to me of their surprise and appreciation of Luise Rainer, marvelling, as I had, at the miracle of her understanding.

As for the evening at the New York theater, when I got up to leave my seat after the picture was over, I heard a gusty sigh from behind me and a hearty male voice said: “Well, it’s a good show, but I’d ruther see Mae West.” I knew what he meant. I had seen Mae West, but in a small crowded theater in Java, and hearty males had enjoyed her there, too!

Now and again during these years I have taken the children to see the house where I was born in West Virginia. It stands back from the road in the shelter of the mountains looming behind it, and it belongs to another family, a friendly one, to whom my first cousin went in sad distress, decades ago now, when speculations forced him to sell the homestead he had inherited from my eldest uncle who had it from my grandfather, in old-fashioned primogeniture. I am glad that friends live there but nevertheless the house is sorely changed. It needs paint and carpentering and the great old trees are gone, although the wisteria vine still hangs from the pillared portico. Inside, the house is entirely changed, only the shape of the rooms remaining. The formal old life that I can remember is no more.

But much is gone that is no more and it would be ungrateful of me to be sorry. And I remember instead that the young son of the family who lives in the house now came back a captain from the Second World War, as his father did from the First World War, and as his grandfather did from the Civil War, but this young captain has lost half his body. We were shocked — nay, our children at first were terrified — when he came rolling out of his car that day of our first visit, a stump of a man with no legs. For some impatience in him had made him to decide to live as he is, without artificial legs if he cannot have the ones he was born with, and thus he goes about his business, making his living and managing with the help of friends even to go fishing, a pastime that he loves. He has a good young wife and he has fathered two children, and he told me on a later visit that the only time he cannot bear his loss is when one of his children asks him to do something which he cannot and then he must explain that he has no legs. He has plenty of courage, nevertheless, and I am glad that my sons know him. It takes courage indeed to live as he does, and to wonder sometimes, as I am sure all young men must, whether there is not common sense enough somewhere in the world so that the folly of such loss can never be again.

What else do I remember? One winter I was charmed by radio, and I planned a novel written for that fine medium, so new to me then, and I went quietly to a class at Columbia taught by an excellent radio writer, and there, unknown among young men and women green to the craft, too, I learned and wrote my assignments until the professor’s sharp eye picked me out, and then he told me I had learned enough and there was no more he could teach me. I never wrote the novel, but I wrote a few radio plays during the war, one of which was included in the anthology of that year. Now television has come, and sometimes I ponder how a novelist can use that magic medium, too. It remains to be discovered. Meanwhile, I learned not only from the professor but from those young men and women who were my fellow students.

The young American entices me to ask many questions. I observe him everywhere, in my own house and on the streets of the village and the city, everywhere I go. There is a basic lack in his life, I feel, although I cannot define it. Our young are strangely insecure. I ascribe this, primarily, after much thought and observation, to the general lovelessness of their life as children. In old countries, France, for example, in Europe, and anywhere in Asia, the child is so well loved that he can survive any disaster of his life in childhood, except death itself, because he is always with his family, and in later life because he has had his foundations laid in love. Only in Germany did I see harshness to the young, and I wonder how much that early harshness had to do with their life-unhappiness, the restlessness, the discontent which have forced them into war again and yet again, and compelling them, perhaps, to find a kindly father in any leader who promises them good things.

Our Americans are not harsh to their children so much as indifferent and withdrawn, or anxious and critical. The parent world is too far separated from the childhood world, there are too many absolutes conflicting one against the other, so that our children grow up uncertain of their own worth as human beings. I am amazed when sometimes an unperceptive foreigner tells me that Americans are proud. Bombastic sometimes, yes, and boastful, but this is because we are not proud, but secretly self-distrustful and doubtful of what we do and say and think. A man who knows his own worth does not boast, is not self-seeking, will not domineer or force his own opinion upon others, respects his fellow man because he respects first himself. When we Americans fail in these virtues it is because somewhere we have lost our faith in ourselves, and this happens, I believe, in early childhood. How I wince when I see a mother, or a father, but more often a mother, because American men do not usually take their proper share of responsibility for their children, jerk a child’s arm upon the street, slap the little creature, shout at him, walk too fast for small legs! I long to have the courage to speak, to tell the mother to be careful what she does, because it is by such cruelty that she will lose her child’s heart. I have never dared to speak because I discover that to the American parent his child is a private possession, to deal with as he likes, and this is not as it was in China, where the child belonged to all the generations, and was always defended from parental injustice.

Our children, I say, are not treated with sufficient respect as human beings, and yet from the moment they are born they have this right to respect. We keep them children far too long, their world separate from the real world of life. In towns and cities, for example, the young are not allowed to take responsibility. Is this not also a form of disrespect? The opinion of children is a valuable point of view and should be put to use. They are part of the community and they have their thoughts and feelings. The energy, too, of children is an asset which should be expressed for the benefit of the community. I see dirty streets, filthy areas, evidences of careless if not of bad government in most communities, yet the children do not consider it their business. But if I were the mayor of a town, I would want the children to have a voice in putting me in that place, and I would hold the young, at this level, as responsible as the elders at theirs, for the conduct of community life. Americans are citizens from the moment they are born, and not when they become twenty-one years of age. By then, if they have not performed the acts of a citizen in a democracy, it is too late. They remain irresponsible and therefore immature. From the first grade on, the child should be taught his duties as a citizen, and given his voice in municipal matters and then in state and nation. But here I begin to ride a hobby and I dismount.

In the years during which I have lived in my own country the greatest advance, perhaps, has been made in race relations. I say this in the full knowledge that the advance, measured in terms of the goal, is still very small, but it has begun in the minds of the white people, and in the determination of the Negroes. We do learn, we Americans, though the process is slow and we are not always willing to admit that we are changing. Perhaps the outspoken criticism of Asians whose skins are not white, and of South Africans, black and colored, has made us think. I believe that prejudice in the American, as a matter of fact, is very shallow, and could easily be cast away altogether.

I am the more inclined to this belief when I see the generous praise and respect given to Negroes who prove themselves great artists and great human beings. When Negroes ask me, “What would you do if you were a Negro?” I always reply, “I would devote myself to the discovery of the most gifted and most intelligent children among my race and I would collect money somehow to educate them to their fullest development, and with responsibility for others.”

The intelligent men and women of India and Pakistan have in recent years, too, had much to do with our realization that people with brown skins can be wise and cultivated, in the ways of the West as well as of the East. I hope that such voices will not allow themselves to be silenced, for Americans are human beings first of all, and we can be won by humanity wherever it is shown. The extraordinary patience and grace with which the leaders of India, in particular, have borne our rash speeches and newspaper articles have increased their influence over us, in spite of loud and raucous cries from certain public figures here. Dignity is a wonderful weapon when it is consistently used, and if never lost, it always wins.

Many friends have helped me know my country. Dorothy Canfield, for example, means Vermont to me, and knowing her inspired me to build our small house, our sons learning by helping to build it, Forest Haunt in the Green Mountains. There we face the Wilderness. Much as I love people and find my life among them, I like sometimes to sit in our forest-circled cabin and know that for thirty-five miles to the north of us, there is no man or woman living, but only woods and brooks and silence. Each state in this great union lives for me not only in landscape and experience, but in the people who belong there and have taken me with them to their homes, if not in body, then in letters.

Of my American family, next to husband and children, I remember my dear mother-in-law, now dead. Reared in China, I could not but respect her position in my life. It was essential to me that she like me and approve me, but what if she had not? She did, however, and from the first the relationship was what it should be, honor from me and love, and from her an affection, kind and easy. I do not know why at this moment I see her on a certain morning here at our farmhouse, where she often visited us, but would never live, somewhat to my hurt at first, for I would have liked to have her live with us and give our children the benefit of a grandmother in the house, the grandfather being dead and so beyond the reach of our daily life. But no, she would only come for visits, and on one such morning, as we lingered over the breakfast table after the children had finished and gone away, we talked of England and the royal family in whom, as one born in England, she took much personal interest. She was a handsome white-haired lady, substantially built and always well dressed and cheerful, afraid of nothing except mice. She sat with her back to the big window at the end of the table, my husband on one side of her and I on the other, and behind her the sunlight fell upon the polished red brick floor.

Suddenly, as she talked, a kangaroo mouse darted out from the logs piled in the fireplace which was not lit, and without an instant’s hesitation, the fragile lively mite rose upon its hind legs, its front paws waving like little hands, and began to dance in the sunshine. The sight was so exquisite, the dance so minutely dainty and graceful, that my husband and I caught each other’s glance, longing to speak. Yet did we speak, the mouse would be revealed to our mother, and then the dance be broken. In silent ecstasy we watched while our elder talked, until the mouse had finished its dance and fluttered back into the fireplace. I see the scene yet, like a painting on a wall, except that no painting could convey the fairy movement of the little wild thing behind our mother’s chair.

And still another memorable picture in my intermingling worlds is of a cold November day in New Jersey, the twenty-third, to be exact, and at Freewood Acres. The occasion was the consecration of a Lama Buddhist Temple. Actually it was a garage made into a temple, and there is something strange and fascinating about the very idea of such a transformation, the first in the history of our country, I am sure. But it was a true temple, for all that, and made by a devout people now becoming American citizens. They were the anti-Communist Kalmuks, more than a hundred of them, men, women and children, and they had worked on the building themselves, the woodwork, the masonry, the plastering. The asphalt shingles they had painted a bright yellow, the sacred color of Buddhism, but over the door was a huge American flag as well as the red and yellow flag of their religion.

The Kalmuks are the descendants of the Mongolian warrior-followers of Genghis Khan, who conquered much of Asia and Europe in the thirteenth century. They settled on the steppes between the Don and the Volga rivers, and after the revolution in Russia they were formed into the Kalmuk Socialist Soviet Autonomous Republic. In spite of this fine name they never were friendly with the Kremlin and during the Second World War many of them were taken, or allowed themselves to be taken, by the German armies, and thus they found their way into DP camps, whence they were brought to the United States, mainly through the efforts of Protestant Christians. In New Jersey now they work in carpet factories, on farms and on construction jobs.

We arrived early that day, the air very frosty and cold, and were met by friendly representatives who led us into a crowded small room in somebody’s house, made festive as a guest room, and there we were offered cakes and tea. Though it was so early, the entire population, even the children, looked clean and rosy, the babies amazingly fat and round-faced and wrapped like little papooses against the cold. After two hours or so the services began. We were invited into the tiny temple and given places of honor behind ropes at the right side of the altar.

How strange the familiar Buddhist gods looked to me that day! I had never seen them before in an American setting, or even in so simple a building, but here they were, sitting in a row behind the altar, and before them were heaped the offerings of the people, food of every sort including boxes of crackers and breakfast cereals, and I daresay the gods had never been given such gifts before, either. Of course, actually, they were gifts to the lamas. But it was all very solemn and to me inspiring as well as touching. My old friend, the Dilowa Hutukhtu, who is the eighteenth recorded incarnation of the Indian saint Tolopa and is therefore the primate of all the Mongol Buddhists in our country, officiated in the brief half-hour ceremony. To his right and slightly lower sat nine lamas, who had come, I think, with the Kalmuks. The Dilowa himself is a tall man, now growing old, and his wide Mongolian face is as peaceful here as though he were not an exile. On that day in the little garage temple he was quietly radiant, though once he had been the head of nine hundred lamas in three great lamaseries, one in Outer and two in Inner Mongolia. But that was in the days before the Communists drove him out and before Owen Lattimore saved his life.

Now in the new little temple he put on his yellow silken hat, which signified his rank, comparable, perhaps, to the red hat of a cardinal in the Catholic Church, the Dalai Lama in Tibet being comparable to the Pope. He sat cross-legged on a high seat when we came in, then he rose and walked slowly to the altar, his robes flowing about him. He sounded a delicate small bell, and the other lamas gathered beside him and in chorus they began the sacred chants. When this part of the service was ended the Dilowa made a short sermon, and these, translated, are among the words he spoke:

“This day, by the saving grace of Buddha, is a day of great rejoicing for the completion of a deed of blessed merit.

“All ye Kalmuk Mongols of pure faith did succeed in escaping from the dreadful circumstances of Red Russia, where false beliefs prevail, and did come to this great America where peace and happiness are broadly based and you have built a new temple in the pure sincerity of your devotion, to affirm your faith in the Buddha, which you held from of yore, and now invoke its consecration. That you have founded a congregation of the faith, that verily this day you have completed a palace of the Lord Buddha to be his dwelling, to uphold and accomplish that which is in the heart of Buddha, a place of prayer and sacrifice, a place for the sowing of the harvest of blessedness, is your reward because in previous incarnations you were valiant in the faith….

“Upon all of you, the Kalmuk Mongols, who, in raising this temple, have perpetuated in it the name of Arashi Gimpling, your temple in your ancient homeland, I invoke this blessing: That, having fulfilled all that you sought and all that you hoped for, in the fulness of the Law and to your heart’s desire, your happiness may be overflowing, your words of merit ever increasing, your very rebirth bring you together with the religion of the Buddha, and that speedily and in peace and without toil you may be united with the pure saints on high.”

When the services were over we all went out into the cold and brilliant sunshine, and there on the tiny porch of the temple I saw a pleasant sight. Five-year-old Sally, the small but extremely beautiful daughter of my friend, the Mongol prince, had paused to give voice to the exuberance of her soul. She was dressed in gorgeous red and green satin robes from her throat to her feet, as were all her family, and thus attired she stood beneath the American and the Buddhist flags, and overcome with religious feeling, she burst into spontaneous song. The hymn? It was “Jesus Loves Me.” I retired behind the building and enjoyed private and soul-shaking laughter, but the Kalmuks seemed to find nothing either amusing or strange in the incident.

“How nicely Sally sings,” they said, admiring this little Sunday-school princess.

The next event was a mighty dinner, given by the White Russian colony at Rova Farms to the Kalmuks and their friends. We sat down, three hundred of us, to a feast such as only Russians know how to provide, and while excellent food and drink progressed from course to course, speeches began and went on. Russians rose and spoke with great vitality and vigor, and I listened, unable to understand except as a neighbor translated hastily. What was most moving, however, was the final speech which the leading Kalmuk gave, a sturdy moonfaced man in a grey business suit. He held a paper before him and after he had expressed his thanks for the dinner and also for the great kindness otherwise shown the new colony by the White Russians, he went on to give thanks to the gods that his people had been brought safely to the United States, where, he said, they were doing well. Not only, he told us, had they built the temple consecrated this day, but thirty families owned their own houses, more than twenty had cars, and, he was glad to say, more than fifty had television sets!

Tremendous applause followed these figures of achievement, and after the speeches people really fell upon the food.

It was a wonderful, heart-warming, soul-inspiring day. My many worlds came together for the space of it, at least, and I think something like this happened to us all. The Countess Alexandra Tolstoi was there, and we clasped hands, and looking into her honest and good face, I saw reflected my own feelings.

And I remember, like another painting, an evening when Asia was in my house again, this time in the shape of beautiful young women who had come to contribute their presence in a fashion show that my friend and neighbor Dorothy Hammerstein was giving for the benefit of Welcome House. They had spent the afternoon at her house, had modeled their stunning costumes on the platform by the swimming pool, and having visited the Welcome House children had come to spend the night with us. Japan had given me Haru Matsui and the famous young actress, Shirley Yamaguchi, on her way to Hollywood to make a film. Both were lovely to see, but Shirley Yamaguchi had a French grandmother, and the foreign blood had made her eyes larger and more lustrous than any I have ever seen, her skin pure cream, and her features clear as carved marble, but still all Japanese. A pretty girl from Pakistan, a big handsome Chinese girl, the daughter of a famous war lord, a graceful Indonesian, a tall young beauty from India — they grouped themselves on the couches in the living room after dinner, and no men being present they prepared themselves for female chatter and good talk, eagerly turning to one another to ask how life was in their separate countries. The Chinese girl was the least cultivated, I suppose, not because Chinese girls are so, but being the daughter of a war lord, she had not had the advantages of scholars and artists in her lineage. She came of the plains people of the North and her big body, her handsome heavy features, her broken English, for English was their only common tongue and all the others spoke it with silvery perfection, set her somewhat apart. I noticed that she was restless, and I asked her if she were not feeling well. She replied that she had eaten too much. The night before, in New York, friends in exile had made a feast for her because her father was a high general in Formosa, and tonight she had enjoyed the fried chicken and rice at my dinner table, and now her girdle was too tight.

“Go upstairs and take it off,” I suggested. “We are only women here.”

Upstairs she went, and came back looking much relieved, but only for a few minutes. Then she rubbed her midriff ruefully. “I am still too full,” she said frankly, in Chinese. I translated and the other young women were all mirthful sympathy.

“A little bicarbonate of soda in hot water?” I suggested.

She was willing to try anything, and so I mixed the brew and she drank it, relieving herself thereafter at regular intervals by loud unblushing belches, which startled and shocked the others, but not at all the war lord’s daughter.

“How did you come to America?” I asked at last, to change the situation, for shock had given way to laughter scarcely controlled behind the pretty ringed hands of India and Pakistan, Japan and Indonesia.

The war lord’s daughter answered with hearty honesty. “When the Communists came,” she said, “it was time for my father to go to Formosa. But he has a very large family, several wives and more than thirty children. Which should he take? The sons, he said, could watch over their own wives. His youngest and prettiest concubines and daughters he took with him to Formosa. The ugly ones he left behind because, he said, they would be safe even from the Communists.”

“But how is it you are here?” I inquired.

She was quite literal and quite without rancor toward the old war lord who was her father. “I am not pretty, also not ugly,” she replied, “and so my father sent me to America to school.”

Flooding my living room with irrepressible music came gales of laughter from Asia.

Postscript to this story: The beautiful woman from Indonesia arrived that afternoon in a state of such polished calm that I was sure something had gone wrong. Upon questioning, she confessed that it had. She had decided to model at Dorothy Hammerstein’s garden party a formal costume of her country, to which jewels were an essential decoration, and so she had brought her jewelry bag with her — and had left it in the taxicab in New York! With magnificent fortitude she had come on without the jewels, had told no one, since she did not want to disturb her hostess, had modeled her gown without the jewels, trusting that the American audience would not know the lack.

Now, however, she fervently asked for help. The jewels were priceless — rubies, pearls, diamonds and emeralds in ancient and heavy gold settings. We telephoned at once to the taxicab office in New York and found that the bag had been turned in a few minutes before by the driver. He had opened the bag and had decided the contents were worthless. “Some show girl’s stuff,” he had reported, “Costoom jew’lry—”

The very rugs I walk upon in this American house of mine remind me of Asia. They are good Peking rugs, bought in the year before I left China never to return. I left them where they were when I shut the door in 1934, for the last time, lest I might change my mind, or unchanging, that my last sight would be what I had always known. Six years later, knowing that the Japanese were probably in occupation of all such houses in Nanking, I wrote to a friend asking if it were possible to have the rugs sent me. I doubted it, but the impossible is sometimes possible. So it proved to be again. In an incredibly short time bales of rugs arrived safely. Chinese friends had sent them to me across two hundred miles of Japanese-occupied territory. The Customs officers in New York asked that the goods be checked before release, because there were oil stains on some of the bales. They were checked, and not one rug was stained or missing, and I asked that they be sent on by express to our farmhouse.

When they arrived here five bales were gone. I reported the matter to the Railway Express Agency office in New York and was told in a courteous letter to write to the Philadelphia office, stating the money value of the rugs, and the sum would be sent me. My temper, usually calm, rose up in a truly American fashion. I wanted the rugs. I wrote a letter saying that the rugs had been sent across miles of enemy-occupied China, across the Pacific and to New York. Why, then, should they be lost in the eighty miles between the New York Customs and our farmhouse in Pennsylvania? The reply to this was another courteous letter saying that if I would state a sum, etc. Whereupon I wrote to the president of the company on the theory that the best man is always at the top. He was, at least in this case. I got back not only a courteous letter but a sensible one, telling me that the rugs would be found and asking me to wait. I waited for months. Now and then a telephone call would come, asking me to wait a little, longer, that the search was going on. At last after half a year or so, the missing bales arrived. Where they had been I shall never know.

When I had laid the Chinese rugs upon my American floors, still the century-old floors of wide old oaken boards, I was astonished to see how new they looked, as though they had scarcely been used. Yet for six years the Nanking house had been lived in, first as a bachelor quarters for American professors at the university, and later by strangers. The mystery was explained some years afterward when I met one of those professors.

“How,” I inquired, “did you keep my rugs so new?”

He laughed. “Don’t think we were allowed to use them! Your too faithful servants rolled them up as soon as you were gone and put them in the attic, packed in camphor. Once a year we saw them, when the servants brought them down and sunned them. Then they were rolled up and put away again, for you.”

I tell this story here in gratitude to a fidelity beyond the call of duty, for those faithful servants I have never seen again, nor can we ever meet, but God go with them always.

Other feet beat a path to my door, too, not because I have made excellent mousetraps or anything else that surpasses the products of others. No, it is because of something that my invalid daughter has done for me. I open the door and there stand two parents, mother and father, and with them a child, a little boy or girl, and I look at the child and I know why they are here. The child is retarded.

“Come in,” I say.

They come in and I open the big old French armoire in the living room that serves as a toy closet for the Welcome House children when they come to spend the day, or for grandchildren and neighbor children, and the little child amuses himself while the parents tell the story I know too well. It is part of my own life, repeated again and again, and when it is told, we consider together what the child’s future shall be, where and how. So much, so tragically much, depends upon money. If the parents are poor and if they cannot keep the child at home, then the only place will be a crowded state institution, and I brace myself for their instinctive cry against it. They have been to see it and they cannot bear to think of their child left in so lonely a place, lonely because who will love him, who indeed will have time to love him there, where there are too many children and too few people to care for them?

Most of the parents are too poor to afford the fees of a private school, and even if they can afford them, can they also afford to arrange for the terrifying future when perhaps they are dead and the child lives on? We talk for hours, the child growing hungry, and I fetch cookies and milk and we talk again. There is no solution and I know it, but still we talk.

For the most neglected children in our entire nation are these little ones whose minds have been injured by some accident before, during, or after birth, the ones who cannot grow. Public schools too seldom carry the classes which would teach them what they could learn, for all of them can learn something and be the better and happier for it, and with what relief to their sorrowing families can scarcely be expressed. But the Boards of Education are oblivious or hard pressed, budgets are strained, and so nothing, or very little, is done for these American citizens. Children with polio, children with heart disease, children with cerebral palsy, children with cancer, children with every possible handicap have their foundations, their hospitals, their shelters, but not yet the little ones who will always be children and innocent. And when their parents leave them they are left to shift with unwilling relatives and hostile communities, and they live and die in a daze of misery.

I have seen with my own eyes what it means in a society like ours, where the family is only father and mother, sisters and brothers, when a child who is physically handicapped in the brain instead of in some other part of his body, is left alone. Lost children these, often used by clever ones to do the evil deeds that we call juvenile delinquency, and so it will be until the parents together rise up to defend their own. I appeal again to the family, for family must be the individual’s stronghold, his safety and his shelter, and there is no welfare agency or state institution or public organization which will do so well for the needy child, or adult for that matter, as the concerned family. Somehow the American family must be taught responsibility for its own again.

Yes, when I survey the memories of the twenty years that I have lived in my country I see very much and yet I realize that still I see no finished story, nor even consecutive pages of the years. I see my America in scenes and episodes, experiences so varied that I scarcely know how to put them together. The daily life goes on, rich and deep and good, and I am rooted in it, but I know that it is only as much of America as one family can live upon one farm in one community, from which it is true, paths lead around the world. When a visitor from Asia presses me to tell him what Americans really are, that he may have the key to our hearts, the clue to our minds, I shake my head.

“I have to take my compatriots one by one,” I tell him. “I have no key, I do not know the clue — not yet.”

I say that I see no unifying thread which ties together these rich and varied American scenes of my present life, and yet I feel a unifying spirit abroad in our land. In spite of our incredible differences in thinking, our seemingly irreconcilable conflicts in action, we have a unity of spirit, the American spirit. It is difficult to define, and yet I feel it steadfast, the deepening and strengthening expression of a people still in growth, still in the process of welding a new nation out of human material, from everywhere in the world. Whatever were the motives of our ancestors in leaving old countries to come, to this continent, and the reasons were as various as themselves, good and bad, we who are their descendants are creating something unique in our own selves, a nature native to our soil, a character peculiarly American.

Our contribution to the solutions of the world’s problems will come only from the working of the American spirit. Our approach will be practical, though sometimes impatient; optimistic, though humorously rueful; energetic, though occasionally reluctant. In short, if I am sometimes critical of my own people, it is in excess of love, for I perceive so clearly the needs of humanity and our own amazing ability to aid in fulfilling them, that I grow restless with the delays preventing the realization of ourselves and of what we can do, at home and abroad, to create a sensible and pleasant world.

Yet the advance in our national thinking since the end of the Second World War should pacify and encourage even the most exacting and loving of critics. In spite of embarrassing mistakes and alarming missteps in the process of learning our world lessons, I see the American spirit reaching new levels of common sense and enlightenment. We are already beginning to give up our destructive prejudices in color, creed and nationality, and we are no longer so boastfully sure that we can lead the world. Indeed the idea of world leadership is becoming distasteful to us, and we are considering cooperation instead of leadership. Americans learn quickly and well from experience, if not from preaching or even from books. Our own men, coming home from abroad as soldiers and diplomats, are proving to us that we can like other peoples — not all of them, but enough of every people so that we do not dislike all of any one kind. Given half a human chance, we like rather than dislike, but we are not sentimental about it.

We are not empire builders. How important this fact is no American who has not lived in Asia can appreciate. For a while even I was not sure of it but now I know. We do not want an empire, for we do not enjoy the task of ruling. It goes against our conscience, which is a very tender part of the American spirit. Therefore we are learning how to hold our allies, not by force of arms and government, but by mutual benefit and friendship, So much is already clear. If we have not yet discovered the whole means we search for to persuade others of our common need and benefit, we have persuaded them, or almost, that we do not want their territory or their subjection. By this great negative their fear can be allayed, and when fear is cast out, hope soon takes its place.

I am therefore hopeful. In spite of dismaying contradictions in individuals in our national scene, I feel the controlling spirit of our people, generous, decent and sane.

In this mood of faith and hope my work goes on. A ream of fresh paper lies on my desk waiting for the next book, I am a writer and I take up my pen to write—