My Several Worlds

by Pearl S. Buck

  Tremendous applause followed these figures of achievement, and after the speeches people really fell upon the food.

  It was a wonderful, heart-warming, soul-inspiring day. My many worlds came together for the space of it, at least, and I think something like this happened to us all. The Countess Alexandra Tolstoi was there, and we clasped hands, and looking into her honest and good face, I saw reflected my own feelings.

  And I remember, like another painting, an evening when Asia was in my house again, this time in the shape of beautiful young women who had come to contribute their presence in a fashion show that my friend and neighbor Dorothy Hammerstein was giving for the benefit of Welcome House. They had spent the afternoon at her house, had modeled their stunning costumes on the platform by the swimming pool, and having visited the Welcome House children had come to spend the night with us. Japan had given me Haru Matsui and the famous young actress, Shirley Yamaguchi, on her way to Hollywood to make a film. Both were lovely to see, but Shirley Yamaguchi had a French grandmother, and the foreign blood had made her eyes larger and more lustrous than any I have ever seen, her skin pure cream, and her features clear as carved marble, but still all Japanese. A pretty girl from Pakistan, a big handsome Chinese girl, the daughter of a famous war lord, a graceful Indonesian, a tall young beauty from India—they grouped themselves on the couches in the living room after dinner, and no men being present they prepared themselves for female chatter and good talk, eagerly turning to one another to ask how life was in their separate countries. The Chinese girl was the least cultivated, I suppose, not because Chinese girls are so, but being the daughter of a war lord, she had not had the advantages of scholars and artists in her lineage. She came of the plains people of the North and her big body, her handsome heavy features, her broken English, for English was their only common tongue and all the others spoke it with silvery perfection, set her somewhat apart. I noticed that she was restless, and I asked her if she were not feeling well. She replied that she had eaten too much. The night before, in New York, friends in exile had made a feast for her because her father was a high general in Formosa, and tonight she had enjoyed the fried chicken and rice at my dinner table, and now her girdle was too tight.

  “Go upstairs and take it off,” I suggested. “We are only women here.”

  Upstairs she went, and came back looking much relieved, but only for a few minutes. Then she rubbed her midriff ruefully. “I am still too full,” she said frankly, in Chinese. I translated and the other young women were all mirthful sympathy.

  “A little bicarbonate of soda in hot water?” I suggested.

  She was willing to try anything, and so I mixed the brew and she drank it, relieving herself thereafter at regular intervals by loud unblushing belches, which startled and shocked the others, but not at all the war lord’s daughter.

  “How did you come to America?” I asked at last, to change the situation, for shock had given way to laughter scarcely controlled behind the pretty ringed hands of India and Pakistan, Japan and Indonesia.

  The war lord’s daughter answered with hearty honesty. “When the Communists came,” she said, “it was time for my father to go to Formosa. But he has a very large family, several wives and more than thirty children. Which should he take? The sons, he said, could watch over their own wives. His youngest and prettiest concubines and daughters he took with him to Formosa. The ugly ones he left behind because, he said, they would be safe even from the Communists.”

  “But how is it you are here?” I inquired.

  She was quite literal and quite without rancor toward the old war lord who was her father. “I am not pretty, also not ugly,” she replied, “and so my father sent me to America to school.”

  Flooding my living room with irrepressible music came gales of laughter from Asia.

  Postscript to this story: The beautiful woman from Indonesia arrived that afternoon in a state of such polished calm that I was sure something had gone wrong. Upon questioning, she confessed that it had. She had decided to model at Dorothy Hammerstein’s garden party a formal costume of her country, to which jewels were an essential decoration, and so she had brought her jewelry bag with her—and had left it in the taxicab in New York! With magnificent fortitude she had come on without the jewels, had told no one, since she did not want to disturb her hostess, had modeled her gown without the jewels, trusting that the American audience would not know the lack.

  Now, however, she fervently asked for help. The jewels were priceless—rubies, pearls, diamonds and emeralds in ancient and heavy gold settings. We telephoned at once to the taxicab office in New York and found that the bag had been turned in a few minutes before by the driver. He had opened the bag and had decided the contents were worthless. “Some show girl’s stuff,” he had reported, “Costoom jew’lry—”

  The very rugs I walk upon in this American house of mine remind me of Asia. They are good Peking rugs, bought in the year before I left China never to return. I left them where they were when I shut the door in 1934, for the last time, lest I might change my mind, or unchanging, that my last sight would be what I had always known. Six years later, knowing that the Japanese were probably in occupation of all such houses in Nanking, I wrote to a friend asking if it were possible to have the rugs sent me. I doubted it, but the impossible is sometimes possible. So it proved to be again. In an incredibly short time bales of rugs arrived safely. Chinese friends had sent them to me across two hundred miles of Japanese-occupied territory. The Customs officers in New York asked that the goods be checked before release, because there were oil stains on some of the bales. They were checked, and not one rug was stained or missing, and I asked that they be sent on by express to our farmhouse.

  When they arrived here five bales were gone. I reported the matter to the Railway Express Agency office in New York and was told in a courteous letter to write to the Philadelphia office, stating the money value of the rugs, and the sum would be sent me. My temper, usually calm, rose up in a truly American fashion. I wanted the rugs. I wrote a letter saying that the rugs had been sent across miles of enemy-occupied China, across the Pacific and to New York. Why, then, should they be lost in the eighty miles between the New York Customs and our farmhouse in Pennsylvania? The reply to this was another courteous letter saying that if I would state a sum, etc. Whereupon I wrote to the president of the company on the theory that the best man is always at the top. He was, at least in this case. I got back not only a courteous letter but a sensible one, telling me that the rugs would be found and asking me to wait. I waited for months. Now and then a telephone call would come, asking me to wait a little, longer, that the search was going on. At last after half a year or so, the missing bales arrived. Where they had been I shall never know.

  When I had laid the Chinese rugs upon my American floors, still the century-old floors of wide old oaken boards, I was astonished to see how new they looked, as though they had scarcely been used. Yet for six years the Nanking house had been lived in, first as a bachelor quarters for American professors at the university, and later by strangers. The mystery was explained some years afterward when I met one of those professors.

  “How,” I inquired, “did you keep my rugs so new?”

  He laughed. “Don’t think we were allowed to use them! Your too faithful servants rolled them up as soon as you were gone and put them in the attic, packed in camphor. Once a year we saw them, when the servants brought them down and sunned them. Then they were rolled up and put away again, for you.”

  I tell this story here in gratitude to a fidelity beyond the call of duty, for those faithful servants I have never seen again, nor can we ever meet, but God go with them always.

  Other feet beat a path to my door, too, not because I have made excellent mousetraps or anything else that surpasses the products of others. No, it is because of something that my invalid daughter has done for me. I open the door and there stand two parents, mother and father, and with them a child, a little boy or girl
, and I look at the child and I know why they are here. The child is retarded.

  “Come in,” I say.

  They come in and I open the big old French armoire in the living room that serves as a toy closet for the Welcome House children when they come to spend the day, or for grandchildren and neighbor children, and the little child amuses himself while the parents tell the story I know too well. It is part of my own life, repeated again and again, and when it is told, we consider together what the child’s future shall be, where and how. So much, so tragically much, depends upon money. If the parents are poor and if they cannot keep the child at home, then the only place will be a crowded state institution, and I brace myself for their instinctive cry against it. They have been to see it and they cannot bear to think of their child left in so lonely a place, lonely because who will love him, who indeed will have time to love him there, where there are too many children and too few people to care for them?

  Most of the parents are too poor to afford the fees of a private school, and even if they can afford them, can they also afford to arrange for the terrifying future when perhaps they are dead and the child lives on? We talk for hours, the child growing hungry, and I fetch cookies and milk and we talk again. There is no solution and I know it, but still we talk.

  For the most neglected children in our entire nation are these little ones whose minds have been injured by some accident before, during, or after birth, the ones who cannot grow. Public schools too seldom carry the classes which would teach them what they could learn, for all of them can learn something and be the better and happier for it, and with what relief to their sorrowing families can scarcely be expressed. But the Boards of Education are oblivious or hard pressed, budgets are strained, and so nothing, or very little, is done for these American citizens. Children with polio, children with heart disease, children with cerebral palsy, children with cancer, children with every possible handicap have their foundations, their hospitals, their shelters, but not yet the little ones who will always be children and innocent. And when their parents leave them they are left to shift with unwilling relatives and hostile communities, and they live and die in a daze of misery.

  I have seen with my own eyes what it means in a society like ours, where the family is only father and mother, sisters and brothers, when a child who is physically handicapped in the brain instead of in some other part of his body, is left alone. Lost children these, often used by clever ones to do the evil deeds that we call juvenile delinquency, and so it will be until the parents together rise up to defend their own. I appeal again to the family, for family must be the individual’s stronghold, his safety and his shelter, and there is no welfare agency or state institution or public organization which will do so well for the needy child, or adult for that matter, as the concerned family. Somehow the American family must be taught responsibility for its own again.

  Yes, when I survey the memories of the twenty years that I have lived in my country I see very much and yet I realize that still I see no finished story, nor even consecutive pages of the years. I see my America in scenes and episodes, experiences so varied that I scarcely know how to put them together. The daily life goes on, rich and deep and good, and I am rooted in it, but I know that it is only as much of America as one family can live upon one farm in one community, from which it is true, paths lead around the world. When a visitor from Asia presses me to tell him what Americans really are, that he may have the key to our hearts, the clue to our minds, I shake my head.

  “I have to take my compatriots one by one,” I tell him. “I have no key, I do not know the clue—not yet.”

  I say that I see no unifying thread which ties together these rich and varied American scenes of my present life, and yet I feel a unifying spirit abroad in our land. In spite of our incredible differences in thinking, our seemingly irreconcilable conflicts in action, we have a unity of spirit, the American spirit. It is difficult to define, and yet I feel it steadfast, the deepening and strengthening expression of a people still in growth, still in the process of welding a new nation out of human material, from everywhere in the world. Whatever were the motives of our ancestors in leaving old countries to come, to this continent, and the reasons were as various as themselves, good and bad, we who are their descendants are creating something unique in our own selves, a nature native to our soil, a character peculiarly American.

  Our contribution to the solutions of the world’s problems will come only from the working of the American spirit. Our approach will be practical, though sometimes impatient; optimistic, though humorously rueful; energetic, though occasionally reluctant. In short, if I am sometimes critical of my own people, it is in excess of love, for I perceive so clearly the needs of humanity and our own amazing ability to aid in fulfilling them, that I grow restless with the delays preventing the realization of ourselves and of what we can do, at home and abroad, to create a sensible and pleasant world.

  Yet the advance in our national thinking since the end of the Second World War should pacify and encourage even the most exacting and loving of critics. In spite of embarrassing mistakes and alarming missteps in the process of learning our world lessons, I see the American spirit reaching new levels of common sense and enlightenment. We are already beginning to give up our destructive prejudices in color, creed and nationality, and we are no longer so boastfully sure that we can lead the world. Indeed the idea of world leadership is becoming distasteful to us, and we are considering cooperation instead of leadership. Americans learn quickly and well from experience, if not from preaching or even from books. Our own men, coming home from abroad as soldiers and diplomats, are proving to us that we can like other peoples—not all of them, but enough of every people so that we do not dislike all of any one kind. Given half a human chance, we like rather than dislike, but we are not sentimental about it.

  We are not empire builders. How important this fact is no American who has not lived in Asia can appreciate. For a while even I was not sure of it but now I know. We do not want an empire, for we do not enjoy the task of ruling. It goes against our conscience, which is a very tender part of the American spirit. Therefore we are learning how to hold our allies, not by force of arms and government, but by mutual benefit and friendship, So much is already clear. If we have not yet discovered the whole means we search for to persuade others of our common need and benefit, we have persuaded them, or almost, that we do not want their territory or their subjection. By this great negative their fear can be allayed, and when fear is cast out, hope soon takes its place.

  I am therefore hopeful. In spite of dismaying contradictions in individuals in our national scene, I feel the controlling spirit of our people, generous, decent and sane.

  In this mood of faith and hope my work goes on. A ream of fresh paper lies on my desk waiting for the next book, I am a writer and I take up my pen to write—

  A Biography of Pearl S. Buck

  Pearl S. Buck (1892–1973) was a bestselling and Nobel Prize-winning author of fiction and nonfiction, celebrated by critics and readers alike for her groundbreaking depictions of rural life in China. Her renowned novel The Good Earth (1931) received the Pulitzer Prize and the William Dean Howells Medal. For her body of work, Buck was awarded the 1938 Nobel Prize in Literature—the first American woman to have won this honor.

  Born in 1892 in Hillsboro, West Virginia, Buck spent much of the first forty years of her life in China. The daughter of Presbyterian missionaries based in Zhenjiang, she grew up speaking both English and the local Chinese dialect, and was sometimes referred to by her Chinese name, Sai Zhenzhju. Though she moved to the United States to attend Randolph-Macon Woman’s College, she returned to China afterwards to care for her ill mother. In 1917 she married her first husband, John Lossing Buck. The couple moved to a small town in Anhui Province, later relocating to Nanking, where they lived for thirteen years.

  Buck began writing in the 1920s, and published her first novel, East Wind: West Wind in 1930. The
next year she published her second book, The Good Earth, a multimillion-copy bestseller later made into a feature film. The book was the first of the Good Earth trilogy, followed by Sons (1933) and A House Divided (1935). These landmark works have been credited with arousing Western sympathies for China—and antagonism toward Japan—on the eve of World War II.

  Buck published several other novels in the following years, including many that dealt with the Chinese Cultural Revolution and other aspects of the rapidly changing country. As an American who had been raised in China, and who had been affected by both the Boxer Rebellion and the 1927 Nanking Incident, she was welcomed as a sympathetic and knowledgeable voice of a culture that was much misunderstood in the West at the time. Her works did not treat China alone, however; she also set her stories in Korea (Living Reed), Burma (The Promise), and Japan (The Big Wave). Buck’s fiction explored the many differences between East and West, tradition and modernity, and frequently centered on the hardships of impoverished people during times of social upheaval.

  In 1934 Buck left China for the United States in order to escape political instability and also to be near her daughter, Carol, who had been institutionalized in New Jersey with a rare and severe type of mental retardation. Buck divorced in 1935, and then married her publisher at the John Day Company, Richard Walsh. Their relationship is thought to have helped foster Buck’s volume of work, which was prodigious by any standard.