My Several Worlds

by Pearl S. Buck

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “Quite true,” I said.

  “Not shameful?” she persisted.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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