My Several Worlds

by Pearl S. Buck

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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