My Several Worlds

by Pearl S. Buck

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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