My Several Worlds

by Pearl S. Buck

  He was one of many. And somehow the Chinese people could not forgive the new officials because they were so much like the old. They had hoped for more than a new government. They had hoped for a new world.

  In the midst of these years I made a swift journey to the United States to put my invalid child into a permanent school. The decision had been hastened because I foresaw a future in China so uncertain in terms of wars and revolutions that the only safety for a helpless child was in a life shelter. It was during those few months in the United States, in 1929, that I heard my first novel, East Wind: West Wind, had been accepted for publication. I had sent that slender manuscript off to David Lloyd in New York a year before, and then so much had happened that I had all but forgotten it. I was visiting in a friend’s house in Buffalo when a cablegram from David Lloyd reached me, forwarded from China, and telling me that the book had been taken by the John Day Company, and that I was asked to come to the company office to discuss some revisions. This news came one morning when I was feeling very desolate at the prospect of a future of separation from my child, and while it did not compensate, nevertheless it brightened life in its own way. I am told that both agency and publisher were astounded at the calmness with which I replied, and at the fact that I waited weeks before going to New York. I suppose my habitual casualness about time is the result of having lived so long in a timeless country.

  In time, however, I did go to New York and there I met David Lloyd whom I had never seen, and went with him to the offices of the John Day Company, where I waited patiently upon a long Pennsylvania Dutch bench which stood in the vestibule and which, incidentally, now stands in our dining room as a keepsake. The president of the John Day Company was late in coming back to work after lunch that day. When he did come I was interested to hear that it was he who had decided to publish my little book, since his editorial staff was equally divided for and against it and he had cast the deciding vote, not, he told me quite frankly, because he thought it a very good book, since he did not, but because he believed that he saw evidences there of a writer who might continue to grow. I had already been told by David Lloyd that my manuscript had been sent to every publisher in New York and that had the John Day Company not accepted it, he would have withdrawn it. I was therefore in a properly humble frame of mind, but long ago Mr. Kung had already seen to that, and I was neither downcast nor uplifted. Almost immediately I returned to China.

  The house in Nanking was empty without my little elder daughter and not all the friends and family could fill it. This, I decided, was the time to begin really to write. So one morning I put my attic room in order and faced my big Chinese desk to the mountain, and there each morning when the household was in running order for the day I sat myself down to my typewriter and began to write The Good Earth. My story had long been clear in my mind. Indeed, it had shaped itself firmly and swiftly from the events of my life, and its energy was the anger I felt for the sake of the peasants and the common folk of China, whom I loved and admired, and still do. For the scene of my book I chose the north country, and for the rich southern City, Nanking. My material was therefore close at hand, and the people I knew as I knew myself.

  In all my books I have made such mixture. Years later, for example, I put into Kinfolk bits of the same northern country. Uncle Tao’s tumor, which he kept so proudly in a glass bottle for everyone to see, grew first and actually in the stout body of Madame Chang. She too mustered the courage to have it cut out, and she too put it into a bottle of alcohol and kept it on the table in her main hall for everybody to see. “Are your characters real people?” A hundred times and again I am asked that question and of course they are real people, created from the dust of memory and breathed upon by love. Yet not one of them lived outside my books exactly as they do within them.

  How long the days were, in the separation from my child, although I crammed them full! In the afternoon I taught my classes in the new government university, and when I came home at four o’clock there were always guests for tea, young Chinese intellectuals, old Chinese friends, young Americans and English from the Language School which had been opened in Nanking by cooperating mission boards. Still the days were too long, for there were the evenings and the weekends and the long hot summers when schools were closed, and I did not care to go to Kuling any more. In the summers I had even more time, for my father always spent the two hottest months of summer with my sister’s family in the mountains, and the house was emptier than ever. It was then that I decided to begin my translation of the great Chinese novel Shui Hu Chüan, which later I called All Men Are Brothers. The Chinese title is meaningless in English, although allusive enough in Chinese, where robbers and pirates have always gathered about the watery margins of river and lakes, and the Chinese words refer to them. Four years I worked on the translation of that mighty book, spending upon it the hours when I could not write my own books and when I did not teach. It was a profound experience, for though the book was written five centuries ago, the pageant of Chinese life was still the same, and in the Communists, fleeing now into the Northwest, I saw the wild rebels and malcontents who had risen against government in the old days of Empire.

  The same? No, there was now something much more dangerous. Those early bandits were not organized under a sinister new banner. They had been only Chinese rebels, angry against other Chinese who ruled them unjustly, and they had a rough sense of justice which made them help a good man and destroy a tyrant, whether he were an official or a village bully. But I knew by now that the Communists were part of a world movement, and when the Chinese malcontents and rebels allied themselves with Russian Communism it was something that we had never seen before.

  Yet I was still only a bystander. No foreigner had any influence in those days among the young intellectuals except the advisors who were hired from abroad, for example, Bertrand Russell from England who came with Dora Black and put our young men and women into a furor of upset, and soon they were all talking free love, by which they mean the right to choose their own husbands and wives, until my elderly Chinese friends, their parents, were appalled.

  “Is this what it means to be a republic?” Thus my old neighbor Madame Wu, inquired of me at least twice every time we met, and I could not reply, for I did not myself know then what it meant to live in a republic.

  Paul Monroe and John Dewey came to help in the organizing of the new public schools, and they did sound work in planning for a university in every province, a high school, or middle school as we called it, in every county, and a grade school in every city. It was still impossible to speak of compulsory education, for there were few teachers ready to teach in modern schools. For another generation, at least, seventy-five percent of China’s children must go without schools. Now, after having seen years of public schools in my own country I sometimes question, however heretical that is, whether a compulsory school system is all that our fathers planned it to be. The task of the teacher in the United States is very hard. I see classrooms of lounging unwilling adolescents, and schoolrooms where noisy and troublesome children must be taught whether they wish or not, the elements of learning. And most difficult of all, I see bricklayers and truck drivers and mechanics, good men but certainly ignorant, get more pay than the teachers themselves or than most brainworkers can command, and then I do not blame the American children for their confusion. Perhaps indeed it is true, as a certain young adolescent remarked to me the other day, that there is no use in going to college when one can make much more money than a college professor by stopping his education after high school and undertaking a career as a truck driver. In China the brainworker, the intellectual, always commanded the highest salaries, for there knowledge was valued, not only for its own sake, but because it is the source of wisdom in the conduct of life, and for this technical knowledge was not considered enough.

  As a bystander, therefore, I watched my Chinese world change before my eyes. Government bureaus by the dozen were established, manned by clever young Chin
ese who could speak English or French or German better than they spoke Chinese. I remember sitting beside one such young man at a great dinner one night. He asked me what I had been doing that day by way of diversion, and I told him that I had ridden horseback out into the country to a distant village to see the ancient stone lions of the Liang dynasty. It had been a beautiful autumn day: the air golden and still. The Chinese countryside is never lovelier than in autumn, after the rice has been cut and the gleaners, in their blue cotton garments and carrying their bamboo baskets, go out over the stubbled fields to pick up the grain that has been left. Behind them in turn come the inevitable flocks of white geese to find the single grains that the gleaners leave. I had ridden happily and alone along the earthen paths that followed the ancient stone paved roads and so I had come to the Liang Lion Village, and there had dismounted. It was a gay place after the harvest; young women were playing with the children on the threshing floors, now swept clean, and old women were spinning in the doorways. I had not been there before, but I had long known of the stone lions from Western books on Chinese sculpture, and so I recognized them at the end of the village street, although they were at the moment covered with the village wash. From under ragged blue coats and trousers the noble beasts looked out with the patient gentle air of life endured for centuries. The villagers knew very well that they were Liang sculptures, and they gave me a lively and fairly accurate account of their history.

  This I relayed that evening to my dinner companion. He was a spruce young man in a well-cut Western business suit. I could see that his mind was on other matters while I talked, for he drank tea, drummed his fingers on the table, coughed and moved restlessly in his chair. When I had finished he said decisively, “There are no Liang stone lions near Nanking.”

  I was startled at his rejection of history, and I protested mildly. “Western scholars have long admired the stone animals, and you will find photographs and data—”

  “There are no Liang stone lions near Nanking,” he said again more loudly than before.

  Already I had learned that we had minds among us which could not be informed, and so I held my peace. Now when I think of the young men who manned the bureaus of our new government I think always of that incident, and I offer it here as example, if not proof, of the dangers of ignorance. As for the Liang lions, I am sure they still stand there as they have for hundreds of years and I am sure, too, that the village women still hang their faded garments upon their stone shoulders and haunches, and this though Mao Tse-tung reigns today in Peking, even as Chiang Kai-shek reigned in those days in Nanking.

  Reigned? Well, something like it, for he was having a hard time to preside as a president of a republic. He knew nothing about modern democratic government, or perhaps any government except a military one. He was used to men who came when he said come and who went when he said go. The education of a military man is the same the world over, and our President was a military man. He had, however, a number of wilful civilians in his cabinet and they often opposed him manfully. When he could not thunder them down he began to kill them. Such a protest was aroused by this highhandedness that he paused, in some astonishment, to discover that evidently a president is not an emperor. He earnestly wanted to be modern, I do believe, in spite of not having the education for it, for certainly his year in Moscow and his other years in a military school in Japan did not educate him for democracy. It is to his credit that he modified his ruthlessness then to imprisonment, and at last even to a fairly pleasant imprisonment. There was a hot springs resort not far from Nanking, where he had made a house for himself and his wife. This house he turned over to be a place of confinement for the members of his cabinet who disagreed with him. There they went and there they stayed until they saw reason, and I remember passing sometimes when I was riding outside the city wall and asking the villagers who was now in prison. They always knew. As for younger offenders, there were either none who dared to oppose our President or he disposed of them in ways less polite.

  I do not propose to blame him now for these doings. He had risen to a place of great power suddenly and without previous preparation, and it was inevitable that he behaved in the only ways that he knew, which were the traditional ways of the military conqueror who kills his enemies if they will not bargain with him, and tradition had not really been changed very much even by the Communist advisors whom Chiang Kai-shek had once obeyed and then rejected. Modern communism itself is not new, perhaps, shaped as it is by the tyrannies and cruelties of ancient Russian rulers. Chiang Kai-shek sincerely did the best he knew, but he did not know enough. I do not know whether ignorance can be called a crime. If so, then many in this world are guilty, and I see them here in my own country, too, in high places.

  Meanwhile I was writing The Good Earth. This I did in three months, typing the manuscript twice myself in that time. When it was finished I felt very doubtful indeed of its value, but to whom could I turn for judgment? My brother was in China that year on a mission from the Milbank Memorial Fund in New York, to look into the Mass Education Movement headed by James Yen, with a view to giving a large grant to that admirable work. He had only a few days to spend with me, and during that time I mentioned shyly indeed that I had written a novel. He was kind as always, he expressed interest, but not enough for me to feel I could ask him to take his valuable time to read my manuscript and tell me if it were any good. My old father certainly could not tell me, and there was no one else. So I tied up the pages and mailed them off to New York myself, and prepared to wait while I busied myself with other work.

  At this period of my life and of China’s history I was keenly aware of the Chinese peasant, his wonderful strength and goodness, his amusing and often alarming shrewdness and wisdom, his cynicism and his simplicity, his direct approach to life which is the habit of a deep and natural sophistication. It seemed to me that the Chinese peasant, who comprised eighty-five percent of China’s population, was so superior a human group, that it was a loss to humanity that he was also voiceless because he was illiterate. And it was this group, so charming, so virile, so genuinely civilized in spite of illiteracy and certain primitive conditions of life that might very well be merely the result of enforced mental isolation from the currents of modern thinking and discovery, whom the young moderns, rootless and ruthless, proposed to “educate.” Nothing in Communist theory enrages me more than Trotsky’s callous remark that the peasants are the “packhorses” of a nation. Who made them packhorses? And to what heights may not these “packhorses” rise if they are considered human beings instead of beasts of burden? For in all my years in China I never ceased to feel intolerable pain and anger when I looked into the thin intelligent face of some Chinese peasant twisted into sheer physical agony because on his back he bore a burden too much even for a beast. I have seen his slender legs quiver under the weight of a two-hundred-pound bag of rice, or under the huge wardrobe trunk of some travelling foreign tourist. Edwin Markham’s poem “The Man with the Hoe,” discovered late by me, gave me a wonderful catharsis of the spirit. Here was an American who could have understood the whole problem of Asia. And my continuing regret concerning Asian leaders is that so few of them have understood the quality of their own peasants, and therefore few have valued this mighty and common man of the earth. And among them the Communists are the most guilty, for with all their talk, I do not see that they have valued this man, either, and their condescension to him makes my soul sick. Yesterday in New York a young Chinese woman sat in my small living room and told me breathlessly of the great and marvellous changes that the Communists are making in China. And in her words, too, I caught the old stink of condescension.

  My mind could not rest after I had finished The Good Earth and almost immediately I began to write another novel, The Mother, in which I portrayed the life of a Chinese peasant woman, but more than that, I hoped, it was the life of such a woman anywhere, who has been given no fulfillment except her own experience and understanding. Everywhere in the world there
are such women and by the million. I had supposed in those days that certainly they were not in my own country, but when I came here to live I found her here, too, in many a farmhouse not far from where I write these pages, and certainly in the Deep South where she is often Negro, or on the deserts of the Western states, where she must travel miles to meet another human creature, or shut away in the mountains of New England. That woman in China, however, was too remote from the book readers in my own country, and certainly from the minds of the critics and reviewers for them to understand her—a strange thing, I thought, until I remembered how alien to me are the warped and twisted people in the novels of William Faulkner, I never saw such people in China, but I take it for granted that he lives among them here since they make the stuff of his famous books. But abroad, in France, and in Italy and in other countries where the peasant woman is strong and alive, my readers knew her and my book was understood. It is one of the compensations of the writer that somewhere there is always the reader who understands. I remember an honest critic in New York said once of my book Pavilion of Women that he did not “get” what it was about. Why should he, how could he? But from all over the world women have written to me and comforted me for their understanding of that book. Yet it would not be fair of me if I did not record here that, when I had finished The Mother, I was far from pleased with it and I threw it in the wastebasket beside my desk. There it lay and it was only chance that it was not thrown away permanently. The houseboy happened to be away for a few days and the baskets were not emptied, since one servant did not presume to do the work of another lest it appear he envied him the job, and before the houseboy returned, I had retrieved my manuscript to examine it again and see whether I was wrong. Eventually it was a book, although I put it away for several years before I offered it doubtfully to my publishers. That houseboy, by the way, had a curious habit of triumphing over fate and gods. He was a tall pallid melancholy silent fellow, a dogged pessimist at all times. One day he appeared so phenomenally pallid that his yellow countenance was actually a pale moss green and I inquired if he were ill. He was not, he said, but his wife had typhoid fever and he had to care for her and the baby and got no sleep. I was properly terrified since he handled dishes and silver and waited on the table and helped the cook. I begged him to take his wife to the hospital, but he refused, saying that nobody went to a foreign hospital unless he expected to die. I knew better than to press the matter since if the woman did die, I would be held responsible for having insisted, and so I merely said that he had better stay at home and care for his wife until she was better. He reflected upon this for a while, standing stock-still before me, his disconsolate head drooping, and at last he said that he would take her to the hospital, since there was no one to look after the child anyway in the daytime, and he could not care for both wife and child even though he stayed at home, since he had not slept for six nights. So to the hospital she went, and after apparent recovery one day she took a turn for the worse. The houseboy came to tell me that she was dying, as he had feared she would if he put her in the foreign hospital, and that he wanted to take her home now. Since the message was that she was near death, I begged him to leave her in peace, but no, his mind was made up, we were all helpless and he took her home in a riksha, unconscious, saying that he would let me know when he could come back to work. I half expected never to see him again, since it was quite probable that in his habitually debilitated condition he would have the disease himself.