My Several Worlds

by Pearl S. Buck

  And so we went home again, our memories filled with glorious scenes and good people. We spent another year quietly at home and busy with our usual work, yet always uneasy in the world. In December of 1941 we were enjoying a quiet Sunday afternoon in my stepdaughter’s house across the road from our farmhouse. Mutual friends were guests, and we were talking about anything and nothing, while their adolescent son sat outdoors in their car to hear a football game over the radio.

  Suddenly he rushed into the room, panting with terror and excitement.

  “The Japanese,” he gasped, “they’ve attacked Pearl Harbor!”

  My stepdaughter reached for the radio. She turned it on and the news came flooding into the quiet cozy room. It was true. War was certain. We had become part of the whole world. Instantly I thought of China and of Chiang Kai-shek. How happy must he be, far off there in Chungking! Who could blame him? He loved his country, too.

  The war years we all know too well for them to be retold again. My task was to keep the children as free from fear as possible, to continue my work, to maintain what is called an even keel. It was a familiar atmosphere, but one I had never expected in my own country. As in China, however, I determined not to allow the war to shadow my existence, nor to prevent me from getting the most possible out of my daily life.

  Much of my life in those days centered about the school to which the children were going, a staid Quaker day school conducted in a beautiful old stone schoolhouse, where it had continued for nearly two centuries. Next to it was an equally historic meetinghouse. We had always planned to educate the children in Quaker schools, for the philosophy of the Friends was the nearest I had found to the Asian one in which I had grown up. Never shall I forget the first morning I took our little sons to school. They went trustingly and with enthusiasm, believing, alas, that they were about to comprehend immediately the wonders. Thus one, the fair-haired, said joyfully, “I am going to learn how to make an airplane.” My heart ached, I confess, when he began to understand how long the road, how weary the hours would be until that day could arrive. But my heart has often ached for such little scholars, their sweet enthusiasm dying in the daily grind. I will not criticize our schools, for I do not know how to make compulsory education pleasant, yet to me learning, learning anything, but especially something I want to know, is the most joyful occupation in life. I do not know when it is that the joy fades out of school for most children, so that they end not only by hating school but even worse, by hating books, and this is grave indeed, for in books alone is the accumulated wisdom of the whole human race, and to read no books is to deprive the self of ready access to wisdom. Even in China such wisdom was relayed generation to generation through centuries until the people were permeated with the sayings of poets and philosophers. But in our mixed ancestry there are no such clear streams, and it is only in books that we can discover what we are, and why we are that, and thus self-knowledge, as well as knowledge of others, is achieved.

  It was not only my children who were educated by going to school. Through them as school children, I, too, have been educated, by force if not always by conviction. By background, of course, I am not fitted to have American children. I have nothing to prepare me for the problems they face. My childhood world was spent in an old and sophisticated society, and therefore in one completely natural and simplified as only an ancient society does simplify itself. Take, for example, the matter of tattling. Before the children went to school and we were all at home together every day, I had established as a matter of course the Chinese principle that when something wrong was going on, it was the duty of any child to report to the adult in charge, usually parent or teacher. It was not right to run about telling other people of a person’s wrongdoings, but for the sake of order it must be reported to the one who could correct it. This went very well.

  Picture my surprise, however, when upon the children’s reaching school age and moving out into their larger American environment, they came home to tell me that I was wrong! One of them had duly reported to the teacher misbehavior on the part of a fellow pupil, and she had scolded the little reporter for something called “tattling.” I investigated and found that this was true.

  “But how,” I remonstrated with the teacher, “can you maintain law and order in your school if the law-abiding ones may not report the lawbreakers?”

  She evaded this. “It is hateful to tattle,” she said.

  “Then the children will grow up believing that it is hateful to report a murder to policemen. This would also be tattling,” I said.

  “I cannot answer that,” she replied in a positive voice.

  I was to learn that this refusal to face the practical is sometimes characteristic of our people. We act upon emotion—she hated tattling—and upon prejudice—she disliked tattlers—without reference to the very practical question of how a child is to help keep order if he cannot report disorder, and what the confusion is in his own mind if he must remain silent about something he knows is wrong. To what principle is he to be loyal? I am convinced that much of our so-called American lawlessness goes back to this stifling of the child’s perfectly right impulse to tell if someone is violating a common rule, accepted by all, and his confusion if he is reproved for obeying the impulse.

  Yet when I expressed my conviction the other day to an American friend, he was quite violent in his disagreement with me. I was, he said, “off my base.”

  “Your argument,” he said, “if carried to its logical conclusion, would mean that Soviet children are justified in reporting their parents to the government. Any possible good that might come out of ‘tattling’ would be more than offset by injury to the child and the community. The informer, at least in Western society, is universally abhorred and even those who use him despise him. There is no way to draw the line and it is better to accept the apparent, immediate evil than to face a much greater one later.”

  I have reflected much upon his words, and I realize the validity of his point of view in the United States, at least. Yet my own argument holds, too, or so I believe. Perhaps the difference in the two societies, Chinese and American, on this point, lies merely in their organization. Our society is not ordered as the Chinese was. A child reported only to the adult in charge of his little world and when he was grown his primary loyalty was by tradition still to his family and not to the state. Perhaps it is basically a question of primary loyalty, and on this matter of loyalty we Americans are indeed confused. It does seem contradictory to me that we elect representatives to make laws and enforce them and yet absolve ourselves of responsibility when we see those laws broken. There is something wrong in the logic, and in the result, too, since we are the most lawless of all nations, and our rate of individual crime incredibly high. It is, as the King of Siam said, “a puzzlement.”

  Green Hills Farm

  “Please,” my youngest daughter said to me this morning, “come with me.”

  Should I or should I not? In trying to be a good American mother how often I have asked myself the question. Where exactly is the point for a parent to stand back so that the child may be independent? In China the parent was always welcome, the parent always went. She is sixteen, this child, and she is near the end of high school. She wants to be a kindergarten teacher and she had decided, quite by herself, that she would go into our public school system, and therefore the State Teachers’ College is the place for her next year, after high school. The formalities had been finished, many papers signed and questions answered, and today was the day for the interview.

  “Please,” she said again.

  “Sure you want me?” I asked.

  “You could sit outside,” she said.

  So I have come and here I am outside. That is, I am sitting in a large pleasant room, the reception hall of the college, in a comfortable chair, alone, while my daughter is being interviewed somewhere in the bowels of the building. She went off bravely with a group of young women, looking serious and independent, though she is a small girl,
very blue eyes under dark brown hair. I watch the people who come and go while I wait, a pastime which I always enjoy. Meanwhile I meditate upon the passage of life. This daughter of mine, whom I remember clearly as she was when I first saw her, a minute creature, perfect in detail, the same great blue eyes, already black-fringed, but so small that she fitted comfortably into the crook of my arm, is now a young woman with a mind of her own. She has rejected a fair amount of the education offered her, as most American children seem to do, and until she reached high school I did not know whether to be exasperated with her or with her teachers. Why, oh, why can learning not be made more exciting, more rewarding? I was exasperated with her teachers when she came trudging home from school, weary and pale with too many hours out of the sunshine, and yet with a pile of books under her arm. What wickedness, I cried in my heart, to keep a child sitting on a hard bench all day and then crowd the night hours, too, with homework! The children of Europe sit through long hours, too, but they have more to show for it than our children have. They achieve a prodigious amount of book learning, they can speak several languages, they understand mathematics and the abstractions of philosophy, but our poor children end their school days with pitifully little in the way of sound knowledge. I rebel against the waste of time, remembering my own free childhood, the lessons quickly learned and then the hours of sunshine and play and pleasant freedom. Not until I reached college did I study at night, except for the one year at Miss Jewell’s School in Shanghai where what I learned was not in books.

  And I cannot remember at all when I learned to read. I know I read quite comfortably at four, because on my fifth birthday I received a small book as a gift, entitled Little Susie’s Seven Birthdays and I envied Susie for having seven instead of five. Yet my American children learned reading with strange difficulty, and I am shocked at the number of our people, men and women, but especially men, who read slowly, word by word, and are never comfortable in reading and do not enjoy it, although the purpose of education should be to make reading as simple and easy as listening to a voice, for only when a person can really read will he surely continue his own education. And examining into the cause for this slow and painful reading I am convinced that it is chiefly because we have wasted the value of the alphabet. Today’s children—or perhaps it is yesterday’s, since my own, except for the one whom we call our little Postscript, are past the early grades—are taught reading as though each word were a separate entity, exactly as Chinese children are taught their ideographs, or characters, of which five thousand must be separately learned before one can read, and for this reason the Chinese need two more years than we do with our alphabet language in order to complete the same work. The Koreans have an alphabet even more compact than ours and profited thereby until the Japanese conquerors made Japanese the language of the schools, and Japanese is no better than Chinese for learning to read. But English is a matchless language, and the alphabet, each letter with its own sounds, is the key, yet in this generation the teachers have thrown the key away. I rebel, I say, though very little good does the rebellion of the lay mind do against the professional, and this dominance of the professional is a weakness in our civilization, for the professional gets no over-all view of the people and the culture, and we are only torn hither and thither by one professional opinion and another.

  When our Postscript came along, a little German war child, I taught her secretly at home how to read, but I knew better than to mention it abroad. Her teacher, an excellent one incidentally, told me the other day that our child, though only in second grade, is reading fifth grade books and needs no help whatever. I smiled and kept my counsel. Of course she knows how to read, and knowing she enjoys it. She learned as I learned, easily and unconsciously, for I gave her the key to reading, as my mother gave it to me, by teaching her how to use the alphabet.

  But upon education one can write many books. Examinations, tests, grades, competition, these are all obstacles to true learning. Were I young again—how many things I would do if I were young again and in my own country! I would create a school where children could drink in learning as they drink in fresh milk. They drink because they are thirsty, and children are always thirsty for learning, but they do not know it. And in schools sources of learning are fouled with tensions, anxieties, competitive sports and the shame and fear of low marks, and it is no wonder that we are not a book-loving people. We have been made to hate books and therefore to scorn, with private regret mixed in, the educated man because he is an intellectual. Compulsory education? I doubt the wisdom of it, and certainly the use of the word compulsion is not wise. Education, yes, but not this sausage mill, this hopper, into which our children are all tossed at the age of six, and from which they emerge, too many of them, in dazed confusion, somewhere along the way, as rejects or as mass products.

  Education? It is now a Saturday morning, after breakfast, the hour sacred to homework—work before play, and so on. But Rusty, the frivolous cocker spaniel widow, has foolishly neglected to get to the kennel in time to have her current batch of mongrel pups, and waiting greedily at the kitchen door for her morning meal she was overtaken by nature. Instead of retiring in prudence, she continued to wait but the puppies did not, and my second son, a six-foot adolescent, opened the door on her. Seeing her plight, he immediately rushed to her aid. Fresh straw in the kennel, a bowl of warm milk, a blanket-lined basket for the puppies shivering in the raw January air, and then Rusty herself, transported tenderly in his arms into the dry comfortable kennel—all this has, I am sure, taken most of the study hour. He will have to make it up, of course, but meanwhile, absorbed in life, he is learning. I daresay he will do more reading for the next few days than he has done in a month. He will want to know. And probably as a result he will fail his chemistry test on Monday. And his teacher will complain. And the irony is that I can sympathize with her, too. It is hard to teach a boy who has not done his homework, especially a charming boy of whom one is fond, and especially if one is a teacher with a conscience.

  Part of the home education of the children has certainly been in the many visitors from abroad who have come to our house and they are too many to mention by name, and many of them have come again and again until our house seems linked to the other countries of the world by the memories of known and unknown friends, their faces, their voices, their letters. At this moment I recall an incident during the war, actually before Pearl Harbor. I had written some articles, quite strong ones, against Japanese militarism and I knew of course that they had reached Japan. But Japan was on the other side of the world, cut off from me, I imagined, by what had happened. Yet here is the story.

  One cold winter’s night we sat by the living room fire in our home. The snow lay on the ground, deep and unploughed. No one could come in, none go out. It had been a wonderful day, the snow falling, the wind blowing, the children playing outside until they were half frozen, and in the evening after their supper we had popcorn before they went to bed. They were bathed and read to and tucked into their snug covers, and the father and I had settled ourselves to our books before the fire when suddenly the telephone rang. I answered unwillingly, wondering what neighbor could be calling, and acknowledging my name to the operator. Then I heard her say excitedly, “Hold on, please—Tokyo calling!”

  Tokyo? But how did Tokyo have my unlisted private number?

  “Wait,” I said, and I called my husband. “Will you take it for me?” I said.

  I felt a strange unaccustomed fear. Could Tokyo reach across the sea like this and pluck me out of my house on a faraway hillside, in my own country, and in the darkness, too, of a winter’s night? And for what reason?

  He took the receiver from my hand and listened. Then he laughed. “It’s only a newspaper—The Mainichi,” he said. “They want to wish you a happy New Year and ask you a few questions.”

  I need not be afraid, then? But still I was, a little. Nevertheless, I took the receiver from him, and almost instantly heard my name called and a very Japanese
voice wishing me a happy New Year, quite as though Japan had not attacked China, and then the questions. They were the usual ones. What do you think of Japanese literature? What is your next book? Have you some message for us, please? Ah, sodeska! Thank you very much. Good-bye. Exactly as though there were no war going on! I put up the receiver, feeling dazed, and went back to my chair by the fireside. No, I paused on the way and looked out of the window. The snow was still falling. I could see it by the glare of the snowplow just now turning into our lane from the road, and throwing great clouds of frothing white into the darkness. Around us were miles of white countryside, miles of plains and valleys and mountains and beyond them miles of ocean between this house and Japan and yet Tokyo had reached across them all and found me! And the voice was friendly, though nations were at war! There was a moral somewhere, but I let it lie. For me the fact simply was that I could not escape any of my several worlds.

  And so the visitors have continued through the years to come and to go and to come again, faces, voices, letters. James Yen, the great simpleminded Chinese, once stayed long enough for us to write a little book together, entitled Tell the People, and it is made from his own words spoken to me while I listened, and it tells of his work in mass education in his own country. Many years he carried it on, and now he is exiled but his methods are being used by the Communists in their effort to make the people quickly literate. And that little book, he tells me, has gone far and wide over Asia, where other peoples want to learn to read because reading is the key to learning, and they have never had the key. And Nehru’s nieces came to us in the summers that Madame Pandit was in India and they were here at school, and we learned to love the beautiful warmhearted girls. They are married now and all but the youngest have children. I remember that youngest one because sometimes when I rested in the evening on the couch she stroked my feet with such gentle skilful movements of her palms that the weariness went out of me, and I felt rested even in my spirit. It is an Indian gift, natural in a country where the people go barefoot and walk many miles because they must. Uday Shankar, the Indian dancer, and his wife and Ananda, their little boy, have been our guests, and they, too, were so beautifully gentle and graceful that we all watched them in fascination.