My Several Worlds

by Pearl S. Buck

  No, there was no use by now in blaming anyone. The question remained, how could American democracy prevent Chinese Communism from following the harsh Soviet pattern? Much was in our favor. Mao Tse-tung, the acknowledged Communist leader of China, had never been really persona grata with Soviet Russia, or so one heard. At one time it was even rumored that he had been expelled from the International party for insubordination to Communist principle and discipline. Certainly he had followed a pattern of his own. Moreover, I could not believe that the good record of Americans in China for a hundred years had been forgotten. American boys living in China during the war had, it is true, left behind them mixed impressions. The intelligent and civilized ones were liked and became good ambassadors for their people. But many of them were not civilized and intelligent and being mere children in years, for what man is mature before twenty-five at least, they had acted like naughty boys, drinking too much and insulting women and sometimes behaving like criminals. I had grieved about this for a while, hearing directly as I did in those years from Chinese friends, and then I reflected that perhaps the time had come for the Chinese and the Americans to know each other exactly as we were, good and bad. On the whole, the record, I say, is good.

  I felt, then, that we should capitalize upon the good and should immediately strengthen every tie with the Chinese people by trade and benefit and interchange of goods and citizens, hoping that the American influence would be stabilized before the Russians could step in. As a matter of fact, all during the war there was very little direct Russian influence in China and this remained so for a considerable period after the war during which time we might indeed have consolidated our position as friends of the Chinese, so that the new government would come to depend upon us for trade and technical help, instead of upon Soviet Russia. Our policy, however, developed in quite the opposite direction when Chiang Kai-shek was defeated. We cut ourselves off from the Chinese people, withdrew our citizens, and retired from the Chinese scene. Once again the new Chinese rulers turned to Soviet Russia, as Sun Yat-sen had done in his time, so many years before, for the necessities of their existence.

  In the intervening years of increasing tension and the outbreak of the Korean war, I pondered much upon the history of China in my lifetime. I have come to the conclusion at last that it is dangerous, perhaps the supreme danger, for persons or parties to destroy the framework of government which a people has built for itself, not consciously or by sudden choice, but by the slow and profound processes of life and time. The framework is the structure upon which people hang their habits and their customs, their religions and their philosophy. An old house can be changed and strengthened and remodeled and lived in for centuries if the essential framework holds. But once the whole structure is pulled down into dust it may never be rebuilt, and the people who lived in it are lost and wandering.

  A revolution, therefore, inevitable in the history of any people when living conditions become intolerable, should always stop short of total destruction of the framework. Thus Sun Yat-sen, when in desperation he overthrew the Manchu dynasty, should not, I have come to believe, also have overthrown the form of government. The Throne should have been upheld, the system maintained, and within that framework reforms carried out. The Chinese people, like the British, were accustomed to a ruling figure. They had developed their own resistances to tyranny, and with increasing knowledge of Western democracy and its benefits they would have assumed modern manners of their own. The English system might have provided better guidance for them than ours. We are not an ancient people. The Chinese background is very different from ours.

  This will seem a heretical conclusion, doubtless, not only for many westerners but also for a considerable number of Western-educated Chinese. Nevertheless I maintain it. Sun Yat-sen was an honorable and selfless man, whose integrity is beyond doubt. He deserves the homage of his people. He is not to be blamed that in his burning desire to serve them he destroyed the very basis of their life, which was order.

  It is dangerous to try to save people—very dangerous indeed! I have never heard of a human being who was strong enough for it. Heaven is an inspiring goal, but what if on the way the soul is lost in hell?

  When I reflect upon the years that I have spent in this American world of mine, I discover that against the quiet steady background of home and work, they divide into what I have done over and beyond my daily life. For example, our farm—

  Twenty-one years ago—it is as long as that—when I first saw my house, postage stamp size on a real-estate folder, I scarcely realized its environment. I saw the sturdy thickset old stone building on the hillside, flanked by the tall black walnut tree on one end and the maple on the other, and across a grassy road the big red barn. Forty-eight acres of woodland and meadow went with the house, edged by the brook. They seemed then as wide as an empire. In China the average farm is less than five acres. At first I contended with what seemed rank wilderness. The land had not been tilled for seventeen years, and weeds and briars covered it like a blanket. I attempted the unattainable. I tried to make those woolly acres look like a Chinese farm, neat and green and fruitful. I coaxed the old apple trees, but they remained unresponsive, I tried to confine the brook, and it remained rebellious. An old neighbor looked doubtfully on, and said, “It’s a vild critter, that there run.” For a while I thought he meant “vile,” but then I discovered that it was Pennsylvania Dutch accent. Wild our brook was and wild it still is, as mild as milk in summer, but when the spring snows melt, or after a thunderstorm, it imitates the raging Yangtse. No retaining wall is strong enough. We built a dam fit to hold back a monster, and that alone compels it into a small lake where the children can boat and fish and skate in winter.

  Eventually, of course, I realized that American land is rebellious, and, besides, our own land had been ill-treated. Generations of farmers had neglected to fertilize, and had further robbed the earth by planting nothing but corn, until the shale and clay pan that underlie our shallow topsoil emerged like skeletons from old graves.

  I had been taught in my Chinese world that earth is a sacred possession and I was horrified at what I saw I had. How could I replace what had been lost before I came? I longed to buy cattle and treasure the manure for the land. But those were the days when no one was encouraged to farm, the incredible days when people were actually making a living by not farming the land upon which they lived. Government subsidy was for nonproduction, and my neighbors, all farmers, divided themselves into the good and the evil, the good men refusing to let their fields lie idle even when times were awry, and the evil, who had more cash than ever before, because they were only too ready not to work. It was no time to begin a farm, at any rate. Therefore I planted trees, thousands of them, upon our hillsides. After my brother died, I planted trees upon the land which he had left, and then, that our right flank might be protected against small bungalows, I bought still another farm as derelict as either of the others, and planted trees there, too.

  This went on until the war came, and then I felt that the time had come really to farm, as I had been secretly longing to do. For another reason, the children were drinking quarts of milk every day, and I was not satisfied with the milk supply. To live in the country and drink pasteurized milk as one must in the city, seemed absurd. The precious vitamins of raw milk, so essential to children, are too often destroyed or all but, by pasteurization, especially if it is well done. If it is carelessly done as it may be, then such milk is more dangerous than raw milk, for the process gives the excuse for all sorts of milk to be poured into the vats, certainly not all of it clean. And I am prejudiced against dirt, dead or alive, in food. I wish that my countrymen were all clean, but the truth is we Americans are not a very clean people, not nearly so clean as the Japanese, for example, or the Swedish, or several others. Our farmers are content too often with dirty barns and dirty cows hastily swabbed around the udders before milking time. I did not at all like what I saw on farms, and this, too, moved me to have my own. Re
joicing when war directives urged the raising of food, I hastened to obey. It meant the buying of three more run-down farms adjoining our land. The average farm in our region is fifty acres. Each of the farms had on it a good stone house, though without modern conveniences, and a good-to-middling barn. One good stone barn remodeled would do for the herd, the other barns were left for storage.

  I plunged into the job, deciding that I must learn myself before I could know what should be done, for this was the United States and not China. For two years I listened, read, observed and worked. My neighbors said, “Be you goin’ to do real farmin’ or book farmin’?” This, I discovered, meant was I going to try to have a Bangs-free herd? Our state requires herds to be free of tuberculosis but not yet of Bangs. Therefore if I wanted to have a clean herd I would have to work alone. None of my neighbors approved the effort. In kindliest spirit they warned me that one could lose a whole herd if he got the idea of not having any Bangs. Best thing, they said, was just to pay no heed to Bangs. There was no law against it. I listened and smiled and said nothing, determined for the children’s sake to have a clean herd, and so we began by being clean, and have so continued, tested constantly, unceasingly watchful, but successful. I look at my hearty brood of children now, much taller than I am, and reflect that all these years they have been drinking the best milk that can be produced, raw milk as fresh as the morning, all the vitamins intact, and rich with yellow cream. Through the war I made our own butter and we did not take our share of the nation’s supply. Last spring when there was a glut of milk on the market for a month or two and we could not sell all we had I made butter again, in quantities to last for months, and we raised extra pigs on the skim milk, and gave it to the chicks and they came through in prime shape. The price of our grade of milk is high enough so that usually it pays to sell it whole. Yet I am sufficiently irritated in true democratic fashion when I see the difference between what we get for our clean excellent milk wholesale and what the consumer has to pay for it bottled after the middlemen are through with it. The boys urge me to go into the retail milk business, and run a milk route, but that I refuse. My concern is for the children, and the land is showing a satisfactory return to what good land should be. The marginal acres we still keep in trees, and will always do so, replanting as we cut each year. The cows have done well enough. They take prizes at shows and so on, and I have more than my share of ribbons and silverware. But I am not much interested in such goings on. I feel that unless a cow can produce milk and manure, her good looks are useless. Pretty is as pretty does, my mother used to say. Unless the help wants very much to show a cow or bull we have bred and of which they are proud, my eyes remain upon the milk and crop records.

  Farms with hired help are not, of course, for making money. Yet, all in all, I feel we have done well with our farm, better than we feared, and I refuse to count the money alone. Besides milk, the farm has given the children an endless source of interest and pocket money. There is always work to be done, free or for pay, and the boys have grown up farmwise. They know how to milk, they know the care and feeding of the herd, they understand the soil, they can use farm machinery and care for it as a capital possession. They know the urgency of harvesting and of work that has to be done long after hours because hay and grain will not wait upon a storm. The farm has given us family roots, not only in the community, but in the very earth itself. It has even sifted human beings for us. We have learned to know a rascal from an honest man, whether he be farm manager or hired hand. We have had both kinds, at all levels, and it has taught the children lessons they cannot learn in school. They have learned, too, that kindness to animals pays, as well as to human beings, not only spiritually but materially. It is true that a contented cow gives better milk and more milk than an unhappy one, and she is only contented when she is kindly treated. We have fired men because they pushed the cows around.

  There are the lesser creatures, too, on a farm like ours, the turkeys that we raise for ourselves and our farm people and our relatives at Christmas. Turkeys are temperamental birds, and they cannot have their feet on the ground, for they die of reality. They must be maintained in cages above the earth, and carefully fed. And American chickens are delicate, not at all the robust brown creatures that scratch in the dung and the dust of the Chinese threshing floors and country roads and take care of themselves. Even the pigs here are inclined to pettishness unless they are carefully tended. Pigs I did not know very well in China, for there I saw them merely as farm scavengers, prized because they would eat anything and then could be butchered to provide food in turn for the farm family. It was only when we began to keep a few pigs here on our American farm for our own ham and bacon and sausage that I took time to watch them and reflect upon their personalities. They are interesting creatures, not at all simple, as I had supposed.

  Yet I doubt if I could have understood fully how complex and intelligent pigs are had it not been for Tiny, a runt in one of the litters, who amused us by his insistence upon life, midget though he was born, so that when I saw him doomed merely by size as he fought with his mates for his dinner at the trough, I felt nature had been unjust and, yielding to the children’s pleas, I let them bring him to the house. Such was Tiny’s intelligence that it was a matter only of hours before he realized that he was, so to speak, in clover, and began to impose himself upon us in the most astounding manner. I used to wonder why it was that Chinese farm families allowed their pigs to roam in their houses, and my mother told me that in Ireland, too, the pigs were in the farmhouses. I thought it a deplorable habit until I discovered that pigs anywhere are so determined that they do whatever they wish. In two days Tiny was clamoring at every door to get into our house, and only the screen doors kept him out. I say clamoring, but the proper word is screeching, or screaming, or loud bawling in a high key. The microscopic creature, standing only three inches or so above ground and no larger than a kitten, had a voice of such volume and discord that it was distracting beyond any I had ever heard. I used sometimes on Chinese roads to speak reproachfully to a sweating Chinese farmer transporting two fat pigs to market, tied by ropes on either side of the central wheel of his barrow. Their noise was so appalling that I am sure they were in severe pain, and I begged him to loosen the ropes somewhat to relieve them. No farmer ever did more than grin at me and go on his way. Once a farmer did stop to wipe his sweating brow with his blue cotton girdle cloth, “Foreigner,” he said, while he paused, “it is the noise pigs make.”

  I discovered that he was right. Tiny made the same noise, not because he was tied or confined, for he ran about the lawns like a puppy, but because he was not continuously waited upon or petted or noticed or fed, or because he was lonely and wanted to sleep in someone’s lap. Once every hour, regularly, he trotted to the screen door of my own study where I was busy writing a book and stood there squalling until I came out and poured his dish full of milk. Sometimes he came back to squall again merely because he wanted to be with me. There were times when I let him sleep on my lap to stop his raucous cries while I worked. If we took a walk he would scamper after us and then squall because we went too fast for his three-inch legs. He grew fat but not much bigger, and within a month had become such a tyrant that even the children agreed he had to go. We missed him in a queer relieved half-regretful fashion. He was so full of personality that we still laugh when we remember him, but too much personality is not good, at least in a pig. In fact, it was impossible to live with him and in this reflection there is a moral, I suppose, but let it be.

  Cats and kittens of course belong to a farm and we had as many as thirteen at the house one spring, not to mention the barn cats necessary for keeping down the rats and mice. We have always had dogs and puppies, both wanted and unwanted. Our pair of cocker spaniels, a little husband and wife, produced beautiful purebred puppies for some years in an ideal monogamy. The little female never looked at a male except her mate. One day, always self-confident, he stepped across the road to speak to a neighbor dog and
was run over by a car and the female was left a widow. Her degeneration has been almost human. She mourned for a while and seemed inconsolable. Suddenly she threw sorrow to the winds, grew plump and pretty and left off her homekeeping ways. Within a few weeks she was on the lowest terms of good fellowship with every canine Tom, Dick and Harry in the township and mongrels are now the order of her day, and ours.

  Our farm abounds in pleasant wild life, new to me. The hills about my Chinese home were populated by wild boar and wolves and slim mountain panthers, and there were pheasants and wild geese and ducks and cranes. Now I live among squirrels and muskrats and ground hogs. The pheasants are the same, however, the beautiful Chinese ring-necked pheasants, and since I could not tolerate the trespassing ways of city hunters who cannot remember that all land belongs to someone and certainly not to them, we have a state game preserve on our land. And the pheasants abound and also the deer. A few months ago as we sat at luncheon in the dining room, we saw under the locust trees three deer, the buck statuesque and on guard, while the does nibbled the azaleas. Though I am angry for a moment sometimes in the garden to see lettuce beds destroyed or our best early strawberries consumed, I remember that life has to be shared with somebody and that I have chosen the hunted and not the hunters. Rabbits dash over the lawns, their white tails flying, and the boys trap them alive and sell them to the state to transplant to other places. And here, as in my Chinese home, the herons come and stand beside the pool in the shade of the weeping willow trees, and when I see them, I feel my roots reach around the world.

  New York City

  A cold grey day in this city, where I make a transient home when business demands it. Today’s business is the Academy of Arts and Letters of which I am now a member. Each honor that has been given me has come with the shock of surprise and pleasure, for each has been unexpected, and none more so than the invitation to join the Academy. I accepted for my own enjoyment, and though I feel stricken with a familiar shyness when I enter the great doors, I am pleased, nevertheless. I am ashamed of this shyness, and perhaps it is not really shyness, for surely I am accustomed by now to being anywhere and with anyone. Perhaps it is only the slight sense of strangeness with which I still enter any group of my own countrymen. In this case the gender is correct, for I am the only woman who attends the meetings, thus far. There is one other such member, I am told, but she never comes. I am pleased, too, that the chair assigned me was occupied before me by Sinclair Lewis. His name is the last on the plaque, and when I take my seat I reflect that after his name will one day come my own.