My Several Worlds

by Pearl S. Buck

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

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

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

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

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

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

  He nodded.

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

  “Only that,” he agreed.

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

  “I do understand,” he said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “She’s dead,” I whispered.

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

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

  “A boy!” the mother-in-law wailed.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “Why are you a beggar?” I asked.

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

  “Why don’t you work?” I asked next.

  “Who would give me work?” he retorted.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “Why are you here?” I asked.

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

  “Where are you parents?” I asked.

  “I have
none,” he said.

  “You must have a family,” I remonstrated.

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

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

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

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