My Several Worlds

by Pearl S. Buck

  I could not. The mountain I could not move, for in that state it was imbedded in the corruptions of political life. And so I am glad we began our family before the latter-day social workers had a chance at us, for we have had a glorious life with our children, making plenty of mistakes with them, I am sure, and losing patience on a grand scale occasionally, and they with us, but we have had a glorious time nevertheless, and thank God for every minute of it.

  We need social workers, if by that we mean persons devoted to the happiness of children. In a society like ours, where children can be easily lost and ill-treated, there must be organized care for them. But the organization must be watched and criticized continually and rebelled against individually and collectively by those concerned and by the lay public, or else the organization becomes a vested interest. And when children are property, then we have slavery as real as anywhere in the world. The lay mind must always remain in control of the professional, exactly as the civilian mind must remain in control of the military, for once the organization takes over, danger looms. The professional is the specialist, employed to advise and to perform but always under the supervision of the lay mind, for the specialist is too narrow, and made so by his education, to be also the administrator. This is the basic principle upon which alone the citizens of a democracy are safe. For the curse of the professional in any walk of life is his perfectionism. It is all very well to want to be perfect but such heights are achieved only after due process, and the purpose fails if there is such delay that people grow impatient. I read much of the black market in babies, and certainly I do not approve it, but I know the black market in any commodity exists and flourishes only when the proper sources of supply are inadequate for the demand. It is ideal to complete a perfect adoption, taking time to prepare both child and parents, so that one child has a good home and every chance for happiness. But what of all the other children growing too old in the boarding home or orphanage while the one is being perfectly placed, so that many lost children never find adoption?

  This is an old war of mine, this war against perfectionism in an imperfect world. I used to fight it in China against the American doctors and the Western-trained Chinese doctors. While millions of people died of preventable disease and millions more went blind from trachoma, the doctors went on with their high professional standards. That is, anyone who practiced medicine must be a graduate physician. But there were few who could be graduates, it was too expensive and there were too few medical schools. To go abroad was prohibitive indeed. I used to argue—why do we need such high training for everybody? Why not train field workers who could give quinine for malaria, treat ulcers and wounds, swab eyelids for trachoma, yet who could realize when a malady was beyond their knowledge? These serious cases could be sent to a medical center and if there too the illness was too grave sent still further to a central hospital. It would mean that the time of highly paid expensive professionals would not be spent upon familiar diseases, easily recognizable, and best of all it would mean people were being cured.

  But no, I was told, this was the absurd idea of a layman. I am now enduring considerable secret agony when I hear that the Communists in China are doing exactly what I had hoped could be done by our earlier professionals, and are getting full credit for it. The manner in which a job is done is certainly very important, and the methods should be the best possible. I put only one aim above it—to get the job done, for if one group fails to accomplish it, another group will take over. In the United States the black market in babies flourishes and will flourish, in spite of efforts to control it, until the supply meets the demand. Human nature always prevails.

  One personal note I insert here. When I bought the house which became a home for me and mine, my dear elder brother bought the small stone house across the brook. If we stepped out of our front doors together we could wave across the hills. It was our comfortable dream that after being separated all our lives, for he had left our Chinese home for college at fifteen, when I was only four, we could live the rest of our lives side by side. We were still peculiarly congenial, friends as well as relatives. And I think of him here, because I remember how he laughed when we showed him our first two baby boys, then six weeks old! He loved babies and he had a magic with them. I have seen him on a train lift from a mother’s arms a fretful crying baby whom he had never seen before and talking gently and half humorously persuade the little thing to quiet contemplation of his kind face, and then to sleep. I could see the adoring uncle in him when he looked at his tiny new nephews and then he decided immediately that since we were spending the winter in New York, only weekending in the country, the babies must have his sun lamp. He was then at the height of his distinguished career in vital statistics and health work, sought in various countries for his wise advice, yet he found time from his busy offices in Wall Street to get the lamp to us that very day.

  The next morning he was stricken with a coronary thrombosis as he was about to go to a meeting of his board of directors, and without recovering consciousness he died that day, and with him went our dream.

  I have kept his little ancient house all these years, completing its restoration as he had planned and using it to house friends from far countries who needed a home for a while, before moving on.

  And while I think of those early years when we still lived in New York and only weekended here at Green Hills, let me remember, too, the kindly men who helped us convey four little children up and down eighteen floors to our apartment. I had been told that children are not welcome in New York apartments but I have not found it true. There was never a complaint when twice a week the doormen and elevator men helped two little boys and two babies into cars and out of them. Once when I spoke my thanks a cheerful elevator man replied, “Shure, ma’am, we’d rather have kiddies than dogs in the house.”

  And once, I remember, when my husband had left us at his downtown office and had turned over the car full of children and nurse to me, I was stopped at the crossing by the immense policeman at our corner. And oh, dear, I thought, what have I done now? For I was never the best of drivers, being congenitally absent-minded, but the policeman held us there with the flat of his hand against us, while traffic came and went, and the babies began to show signs of hunger. On the second red light, while the cars waited like crouching tigers, he sauntered over to us and leaned amiably into the open window behind me.

  “I just wanted to see how the kids are doin’,” he explained.

  Then he waved us on.

  And why do I speak gratefully of elevator men and policemen, and not of the one above all men? For three years of babies my husband, halfway on our way to New York or halfway home, stopped at a wayside diner to heat bottles of milk for those hungry babies of ours. The diner man got to know us well and he took vast interest in the twice-a-week event. But what I remember is my husband’s affectionate half-humorous patience as he brought back two bottles of warm milk to insert them gently into the waiting mouths.

  When at times I tend to grow impatient with my fellow Americans, and I am only impatient when it comes to large world affairs, at which it seems to me we are still rather stupid, I remember the infinite goodness of my fellow citizens, taken one by one, and the personal kindnesses of daily living, over the years.

  During the forty years I lived in China I had kept myself aware of what was going on in the rest of the world, and especially in my own country. I had learned from childhood to recognize the peoples of the earth as members of one family, known or unknown, and had realized the practical meaning of this Chinese view of the globe, first instilled into me by Mr. Kung, as history unrolled before me, enfolding me as it went. So now, living the second half of my life in the United States, I keep close touch with what is going on in China, the country that I have left, and yet which will always be a part of me, in spite of the fact that I am persona non grata to the Communists at present in control.

  In 1938, therefore, although I was living deeply in my peaceful American farmhouse,
I was still close to my other country. Ten years had passed since Chiang Kai-shek set up his government in the old Ming capital of Nanking. They had been difficult years for him and his government, and four severe floods with the inevitable famines following, and one severe drought, had made them no easier. The depression that wrought such havoc with the American people had been, far more than we realized, a world depression, and China in 1933 had all but succumbed to her share of it. Yet the government had pulled through disasters, and in some ways had made progress. The Communists were steadily beaten back into the Northwest, and one province and leader after another gave allegiance to the new Central Government, as it was now called. Anti-Western slogans were dying down, and the influence of the Western-trained officials was growing stronger. Chinese businessmen were eager to increase trade with Western countries, and experts in industry, road making, and scientific research were invited to China to give their advice. An air service was begun and one could fly from the North to the South, from East to West. Many westerners were surprised to see how readily China took to modern modes of travel, but that was because they did not understand the literal and practical nature of the Chinese, who are always ready to improve themselves. It was amusing, even in the days when I was still living in China, to see a stout businessman, his clean extra garments in a small pigskin trunk, mount as confidently into an airplane as he had once climbed into a riksha. Railways, greatly increased, made it possible to travel by train from the coast to as far west as Sian-fu in Shensi. Motor roads were built and buses in various stages of collapse and disrepair bumped along their way into the interior and back again to the ports, although private cars still belonged only to the very rich and to government officials. Perhaps the most notable contributions of the Western-trained Chinese were in the area of roads and railways. The weakness of the young government, however, was still in its remoteness from the peasants who, it must always be remembered, were eighty-five percent of the population. Motor roads and even railroads did not benefit them, and taxes steadily increased. Central control still did not reach far beyond the large cities, and local bullies, in the posts of officialdom, too often exacted levies as they liked. For the peasant there were no courts of appeal. To maintain an enormously increased officialdom he groaned under fresh burdens. Behind Chiang Kai-shek and his government, however, were the Chinese bankers of the port cities, mainly Shanghai. In spite of the slogans of anti-foreignism upon which the Nationalist government rose to power, the fact is that this government owes more to westerners than it has ever been willing to acknowledge and some of it was because of the treaty ports, where in concessions guarded by Western police and soldiers, the banks and treasuries could be maintained in safety. There, too, the bankers and their families were safe, their children educated in Western schools. The sons of Chinese bankers and other rich men did indeed become the vanguard of a national movement toward Westernism, and through them much of the old Chinese tradition was dying. Young men, growing up in the cosmopolitan cities of Shanghai and Tientsin, wore Western clothes and went to Western dance halls where the hostesses were not only lovely Chinese girls in their slim gowns fashioned on Western lines, but French girls and beautiful White Russians, and even a few English and Americans were available to all alike. A modern theater movement flourished in those cities, and such stars as the Chinese Butterfly Wu, vying with pretty Janet Gaynor of Hollywood, the favorite American star, made motion picture theaters everyday pleasures. Young couples began to want “small family” homes instead of living in the traditional manner with the clan, and much of the literature one read in Chinese magazines and books of the period had to do with the sorrows of young lovers parted from each other by family betrothals. It became acceptable for a man, married by his family, to leave his wife in the ancestral home in the country and to take another wife of his own choosing for his business life in the city. The Chinese is always able to accommodate his principles to the needs of the hour, and for this reason, more than any other, there was never a clean-cut, thoroughgoing revolution in China, let it be said, as there was in Russia. New mores developed, but never abruptly. Even the houses changed, and instead of the graceful old dwellings of the past, conforming to landscape, hideous square two-story structures sprang up to mar the ancient Chinese scene. It became fashionable among the modern-minded to be Western in all possible ways, and the effect was often distressing indeed.

  Such news and much more reached me here in my pleasant Pennsylvania home, and in the letters of my Chinese friends I read of so many changes—many, it seemed, for the good—that I began to wonder if indeed it had been necessary to leave my childhood land. Not that I regretted the choice—I was entirely happy in my own country, and was already absorbed in the daily discovery of its life, its people, and its manners. But I remembered what my Chinese friends had said when I left. “Go back to your country and discover your ancestors, for this is good,” they had told me. “But when you are old, you will come back to us.” I had denied this in my heart, for I felt if I left China for the reasons that I had, then I would never return. Yet could I resist? Sometimes I wondered. China was the ideal country for the old, a pleasant place where one achieved honor merely by growing old. How often had I come upon a village, anywhere in China, to find sitting outside the door on a bench at the edge of the threshing floor, a comfortably dressed old man or woman, dozing in the sun, pipe in hand, idle without reproach, loved and cared for and made much of, merely because he or she was old! Old people were treasures and no one was afraid to grow old. When an aged one spoke the others listened, eager for the wisdom of his accumulated years.

  It had been a shock to discover how differently the old are treated in my own country, and how pathetically they try to hide the number of their years and pretend themselves still strong and able to do a full day’s work. Worse almost than the injustice to homeless children was it to find white-haired parents and grandparents in old people’s homes and even in mental institutions, often without mental illness beyond the gentle and harmless decay of age. I suppose that the uncertainty of economic life and the insecurity of the individual alone in his struggle to maintain himself, his wife and children, make thoughtful tenderness too rare between young and old in our country. The aging feel their children’s dread and they try to care for themselves and are guilty if they cannot, and so the generations pull apart in a mutual fear which stifles natural love.

  I listened not long ago to the conversation of a good elderly man who had for many years been the head of a local bank. He took an interest in an old men’s home in a nearby city, and he told me how the superintendent of this old men’s home would find upon a doorstep in the early morning an old man left there by son or daughter, abandoned and under injunction not to reveal his family’s name. Yes, this happens.

  Yet somehow our society must make it right and possible for old people not to fear the young or be deserted by them, for the test of a civilization is in the way that it cares for its helpless members. Thus when Hitler began to destroy the old, I knew that his regime could not last in a civilized world. It was an anachronism, and the laws of human evolution would provide its end—and how quickly did that end come!

  To return, however—what might have happened in China had Japan not chosen this hour to enlarge her dream of empire no one can tell. Chiang Kai-shek had not counted upon the speed of Japan’s advance and he had continued his policy of internal pacification, encouraged by its seeming success. One by one the provinces had aligned themselves with his government as he drove the Communists to the northwest corner of the country. True, the Communists had set up a rival government there, independent from the rest of China, small but enough to irritate Chiang Kai-shek, determined as he was to unify the country politically. He decided in December, 1936, to make one last march against them, using as his base the city of Sian in Shensi, and as his army local soldiers and the men under Chang Hsüeh-liang, the son of the old Manchurian war lord, Chang Tso-lin. Chang Hsüeh-liang and his men had
been exiled ever since Japan seized Manchuria, and now they were discontented exiles, longing to fight Japan but with no heart to fight against the Communists, who were, after all, Chinese. Chiang Kai-shek had heard of their disaffection, and thither he flew by air with his staff on the seventh day of December, 1936, to unite his forces and lead the attack against the entrenched Communists.

  What was his surprise, on the twelfth day of the same month as he was resting at a hot springs resort near the city, to find himself taken prisoner by Chang Hsüeh-liang, his ally! The story need not be retold here, so well known is it, for indeed the whole world was shocked by the incident. Yet perhaps the motives behind it may not be so well understood. Briefly, Chang Hsüeh-liang proposed that the Nationalist government make peace with the Communists and join with them immediately in resisting the Japanese, who were daily taking over more northern territory and obviously planning for the whole of China. It may be assumed that the young Marshal, as he was called, saw in the defeat of Japan his only hope of return to Manchuria, and felt there was no sense in a war with the Chinese Communists while foreign Japanese ate up the country. Chiang Kai-shek, a man of well-known and mighty temper, was too angry to listen to such arguments, and insisted upon defeating the Communists first—that is, he insisted upon his own way. In Nanking not only his family but his government were terrified. It soon became clear that the Nationalist party was splitting upon the issue of the Old Tiger himself. Some members even appeared willing to sacrifice Chiang in order to bring about party unification. Others felt that the whole Nationalist regime would fall if Chiang fell. The family decided to settle the crisis and rescue their hero at all costs, and Madame Chiang then flew to her husband’s side.

  Meanwhile Chou En-lai, that suave Communist, had talked with the honorable prisoner, and he had put forth a compromise in the best Chinese tradition, albeit one with a big stick behind it. If their terms were accepted, Chou En-lai said, then the Communists would bow to Chiang Kai-shek as their head and the head of the state. The terms? The “rebels” were to be forgiven, an armistice was to be arranged between Nationalists and Communists, and together they were to fight the Japanese. The big stick? That if Chiang did not agree he would be killed at once. Chiang did agree, very reluctantly, and the terms were fulfilled. He was freed again, he was given apparent honor as the accepted head of a united China, and resistance against Japan was planned.