Letters From Peking

by Pearl S. Buck

  “What I did not like,” Baba was saying, “was that the child longed to live in his mother’s ancestral house. He did not return willingly to me. I suppose that he was given sweets and made much of by servants and lesser relatives. You know how it is.”

  I did know. Those great old ancestral Chinese families adore their men children. In the men children is their hope of eternal life. The boys are guarded and pampered and loved. They are absorbed into the mighty ocean of love, centuries old. Only the strongest and the most self-sufficient can emerge from such love into independent beings. I think my dead child could have been such a one had she been a boy. But she was a girl. Her name was Ruan. I try not to think of her. I have seen many children but never one like her. My firstborn she was, and Gerald was Chinese enough so that I saw disappointment in his eyes when he came into the hospital room. She lay in the crook of my arm, my right arm. How strangely one remembers the small useless details!

  “Your daughter, sir,” I said to Gerald. I was very gay and happy in those days, in love with my whole life, with my husband, my house, the city of Peking, the country of China.

  He sat down beside the bed and he gravely inspected the child. I saw he was doing his best to hide his disappointment.

  “She is quite small,” he said.

  I was angry. “On the contrary, Gerald. She weighs eight pounds. Also she is intelligent.”

  “Intelligent,” he murmured, staring at the round sleeping face.

  “Yes.” I yielded to him nearly always but suddenly I knew I would never yield to him about my daughter. She was to be beautiful, strong and intelligent. And so she was and so she continued to be, until at the age of five she died.

  Oh, let me not think of her death, not upon the anniversary of my wedding night.

  “Baba, you are tired,” I said and I rolled up my knitting. “You must go to bed. We will talk another time.”

  “I have not finished,” he said and did not move. So I waited.

  “I have not told you how Gerald’s mother was killed,” he said.

  No, he had not told me. It was a dread death, that I could see. I saw it in his widened eyes staring at the dark window, the pinched whiteness about his nostrils, his tightened lips.

  “She was shot,” he said. He was trembling again and I could not bear it.

  “Baba—don’t tell me! Don’t think of it.”

  He went on as though I had not spoken. “In the year 1930, in the city of Nanking, she was seized by order of the secret police of the Nationalist government. She was living alone. She had not accompanied her friend, Madame Sun. She had not left with the others on the Long March. For reasons I never knew she had been told to remain in the city. Perhaps she was a spy. I do not know. But she was taken from her bed one cold morning in early spring, before dawn, and she was forced to walk, just as she was, in her night robes, to the Drum Tower, and there, with her back to the wall, and her eyes not blindfolded, she was shot and killed.”

  I wanted to ask no other question. But I had to ask.

  “Baba—how did you know?”

  “She had a servant, an old woman. That woman found her way to me. She said that her mistress had told her to find me somehow—” His voice faded to silence.

  There was no more to tell. His whole frame seemed to shrink. His eyelids dropped over his staring eyes.

  “Come, Baba,” I said. “Come with me. You are too weary.” And I led him to his room and stayed near until he was in bed and at last asleep….

  One more question I wish I had asked. Oh, I wish I had asked Baba if Gerald was ever told the manner of his mother’s death. I think he was. Perhaps it is not necessary to ask. The Chinese tell each other everything. Who can keep a secret there? Even if the old woman never told, and if Baba never told, someone would have told. Gerald knows.

  Yesterday the answer came to the question I did not ask. The postman brought a magazine under Chinese stamps. There are three of them on the magazine. I had not seen these new Communist stamps before. One is orange, one is purple and one is blue. Each carries the face of a young man. One is a soldier, one is a machinist, one is a peasant. There is no name on the wrapper. It merely says P.O.B. No. 305, Peking, China. But I know Gerald sent it. For when I opened the magazine, I found it was dedicated to a martyr of the revolution. She was shot in Nanking on May the fifteenth, 1930. Her name was Han Ai-lan. She was Gerald’s mother. There is a picture of her on the cover. I sit looking at it, here by the window where the light falls clear. The face is calm and austere, a narrow face, the eyes large and lustrous, the hair drawn back from the high forehead, the lips, tenderly cut in youth, perhaps, were stern. I can see Gerald’s face emerging from this face. The lines are the same.

  So my question, unasked, is answered. Gerald knows everything. I do not doubt now that the old woman bore a message to him from his mother. The mother would have told the son how she died and for what cause.

  He did know, he did remember. For it was he who set our wedding day, May the fifteenth. He set the day and did not tell me why, but I know now. He cannot write me a letter, but he has sent me his mother’s picture and the story of her life—not her life as wife and mother, but her life as a revolutionist, after he was born. There is no mention of him here. But he wants me to know. He wants me to know and to understand. Oh, beloved, I try, I try.

  It grows no easier to live alone, woman without man. I feel a certain hardness in me. I am not as tenderhearted as I was. The daily exercise of love is gone and I fear an atrophy. I wonder how other women live, who have had husbands and have them no more. That I must not say of myself, for Gerald still lives. He is not dead but liveth. I do not read the Scriptures often, not regularly, but now I crave spiritual food and I find it wherever the spirit of man has written its travail. This morning, not a day of resurrection, not the cool Easter dawn, but a summer’s day in early June, full of life and burgeoning, the garden forcing itself, the late apple trees in full blossom, the grass new green, I felt my blood running through me, too swift and strong, and my soul cried out for succor. Then I took the small worn leatherbound New Testament which had been my father’s, and it opened to these words. “He is not dead but liveth.” It is enough. I closed the book and went to my work.

  Oh, good hard work that a farm has ever ready—I bless it. I went to the barn and there discovered that my prize cow, Cecily, had in the night presented me with a fine heifer calf. Mother and child are doing well, and Cecily looked at me smugly through the bars of the maternity stall. She is a pink-nosed Guernsey and she is slightly dish-faced, which lends her a saucy air. Her figure is impeccable, by Guernsey standards. She did not rise when she saw me, excusing herself doubtless by her achievement. The calf is exquisite, a fawn, dainty head and good lines of back and rump. Since we are strangers, she stared at me with faint alarm, and her mother licked her cheek for reassurance. All traces of birth were cleaned away. Cecily is a good housekeeper in such matters, and she was complacent. In gratitude I offered her the mash that Matt concocts for such occasions, but she ate it without greed, delicately and as a favor to me.

  I came away cheered, not only by the possession of another fine heifer, but by pleasure. Life flows on, whatever the need of the heart. I turned to the garden and fell upon the young weeds, though of all tasks I hate weeding. The seeds are up, however, and the race is on. I worked hard all day, stopping only to make luncheon for Baba and me at noon. Matt takes his lunch on the outdoor terrace upon such a day as this, and Rennie is in the last lap of his school year and does not come home at midday. He goes to college in the autumn and what that means I do not know. I fear my loneliness but I must not feed upon him. Baba and I will live here together, like two old folk….

  Ah, but I am not old. Tonight when the young moon rose, I could not go to bed. Rennie is away this evening. He is in love, I think. He put on his best dark-blue suit, a white shirt and a crimson tie. He had even polished his Sunday shoes. I do not know who she is. I must wait.

  Bab
a went to bed early. He likes to be under cover, as he puts it, by half past eight. But it is only the beginning of night then, and I came to the narrow terrace that faces the moon, and lay down on the long chair. The air is chill, though it is June, and I wrapped myself in my white shawl and let myself dream of the beloved. I will not let love die, not while he lives, and so I feed on dreams. If the beloved is dead, one must not dream. But I am no true widow. My beloved liveth.

  Therefore my mind floats over land and sea to the city which is his, and like a ghost I creep through the streets, and into the gate where he lives. This I have done again and again in the years we have been parted. They are not many years, actually—only five—and there is nothing eternal about our separation. At any moment he may decide to come here to me. If he does, I will not ask a question. I will not ask why did you, or how could you? I will open my arms and receive him. If we live to be old together yet will I never ask him the question that broods in my heart. It is enough that he returns.

  There hangs the moon! Upon a summer night in Peking we sit in the east courtyard. Our house belonged once to a Manchu prince, not a high prince, but a lowly one, a younger brother. It is not large enough for a palace, but those who lived in it loved it well enough to add beauty here and there. Thus the gates between the courts are moon-shaped, framed in tiles set in lacelike patterns. A lotus pool lies in the east court, and a cluster of bamboos hides the wall. The street is on the other side of the house, and the court is quiet. Moreover, the east court leads into our bedroom, Gerald’s and mine. The huge Chinese bed stands against the inner wall. At first, as a bride, I complained about the bed. It is too hard, I said, a wooden frame and a bottom of woven rattan to sleep upon. I liked the pink satin bed curtains caught back by silver hooks, but I did not like the mattress. Gerald laughed at me and said that I wanted the beauty and not the hardness of Chinese life. And I said why should we sleep on wood and rattan when we could have a spring mattress, and is that a sin? Not sin, he said, but inconsistency. We should be one thing or the other, he said. And this I refused to concede, for why not have the best of both, I said, and so when he went to Tientsin to order supplies for the college year, he brought back an American spring mattress. And it was a game between us that I should pretend to force him to admit its comfort while he pretended to like the old hard Chinese bed bottom. We laughed a great deal in those days, Gerald and I. I do not remember that he laughed with anyone else, not with his pupils or with Rennie or with Baba, but only with me. He was to that degree not like his Chinese friends, for Chinese laugh easily and gaily. But Gerald is grave. He can even be somber. At such times he is always silent. Nothing I could say would make him speak. Only love could bring him back to me, warm physical love, informed by heart and mind. Sitting there alone on the terrace, I stretched out my arms to him across the sea.

  Rennie came home at midnight and found me still on the terrace. “You haven’t been waiting for me, I hope, Mom?” he said.

  Yes, suddenly he is getting to be an American. The stately name of Mother, upon which his father always insisted, has become Mom. I say nothing. What is the use of keeping alive the shadow of his father when the substance is far from here?

  “No,” I said, “I was just thinking about your father and wondering what he is doing tonight—working, probably.”

  So much of the substance I mentioned.

  Rennie did not answer. Instead, rather ostentatiously, he lit a cigarette. I know that he smokes, and he knows that I know, but it is the first time he has done so before me.

  “Give me one, will you?” I said.

  He looked surprised enough to amuse me and held out the pack. “I didn’t know you smoked,” he said and lit my cigarette.

  “I don’t.” I retorted. “But you seem to enjoy it, and why not I?”

  He was embarrassed and I fear the pleasure went out of his cigarette. Perhaps it is necessary for the young to have something to defy. I suspect they hate this modern permissiveness. There is nothing in it to set their teeth against. At any rate, Rennie soon put out his cigarette, but I smoked mine to the end.

  “Not much to it,” I said. “I’d thought there was more.”

  “You have to inhale.”

  “When I have time I will.”

  The moon was sailing high overhead, a sphere of white gold in a pale starless sky. Rennie stretched himself in the other long chair and locked his hands behind his head. I heard him sigh.

  “How old were you when you were married, Mom?”

  This was his question.

  “I was twenty-three. I had just graduated from college the year before.”

  “Gee, that was old.”

  “It didn’t seem so,” I said. “Your father and I were engaged for a year.”

  “Why didn’t you get married before?”

  How much does one reveal to a child? Rennie’s profile in the moonlight was not a child’s. He has grown three-and-a-half inches this year. He is already as tall as Gerald. The bones of his face are hardening and the lines are strengthening. If these are the outward signs of manhood, there must be inward changes, too.

  “Your father was afraid I might not like China. More than that, he wanted to be sure that I could love what was Chinese in him. Until he was sure, he would not marry me. It took time. He doesn’t give himself all at once.”

  This our son pondered.

  “What is Chinese in him?” he asked at last.

  “Don’t you know?” It was a parry. I did not know how to answer.

  “No. I can’t even remember him clearly.”

  “Why, Rennie, you were twelve when we left.”

  “I know—I should remember. I don’t know why I can’t.”

  He does not want to remember his father—that is why. But I cannot tell him so. It would be accusation and I must not accuse him. Let me seize this opportunity to help him remember.

  “You know how he looks.”

  “He really looks Chinese,” Rennie said unwillingly.

  “Then you do remember,” I said. “Yes, he looks Chinese until he is with Chinese and then he looks American.”

  “If he were here he’d look Chinese all right.”

  “What of it? The Chinese are very handsome, especially northern Chinese, where your grandparents lived. Do you remember your granduncle Han Yu-ren?”

  “No.”

  Well, perhaps not. We did not see Han Yu-ren again. He was a collaborator with the Japanese and when Peking was returned he had disappeared. Rennie knows that much.

  “I hope you will never think of your granduncle as a traitor,” I said. “I am sure that he believed he was doing what was best. Perhaps Peking would have been destroyed had it not been for him. I can imagine that in times of war, when the enemy is within the gates, many a true patriot yields for the moment that he may preserve the eternal possession of his country. China has been saved many times by such patriots. Think of the Mongol conquerors, think of the Manchus! Men like Han Yu-ren seemed to yield to them, too. But the conquerors came and went and China remained. Remember always that Peking is not to be destroyed.”

  Rennie said nothing to this. He listened, as the young do listen, in silence, and it is not known how much they comprehend until one sees how they live in after years. I thought of his grandmother, Gerald’s mother. Should I tell him? No, not yet. But I shall keep her picture and the commemorative magazine and the time will come.

  “Is my father more Chinese inside or more American?” This Rennie asked, while he stared at the moon.

  I answered as truthfully as I could. “I should be hard put to it to say. I’ve asked myself that question. I think that when he is Chinese he is very Chinese. There are other times when he is very American.”

  “For example?”

  Rennie has the precise mind of a scientist. How can I answer him? How can I speak of the hours when Gerald and I were man and woman? For it was when we were alone, husband and wife, that Gerald was American. That surely was his true self. Then
he put aside the curtains of tradition and habit and no strangeness came between us.

  “He is really very Chinese when it comes to family,” I said. “He treats you as a Chinese father does his son, gently but with an inexorable loving firmness. He never lets you forget that you are not only his son but you are the grandson, the great-grandson, a thousand times over, of many men before you. The generations are always with you—aren’t they?”

  “Yes,” Rennie said unwillingly. Then he added, after a moment, “But I have other ancestors—yours, Mom—and maybe I’m more like them.”

  “It may be that you are.”

  I knew that he had not reached the real meaning of all this talk. What can one do with the young except wait? Soon he began again.

  “Mom, do you think my being part Chinese will keep a girl from liking me?”

  “An American girl?”

  “Of course.”

  So it is of course!

  “Certainly not.” I said. “It would be much more likely that a Chinese girl wouldn’t like the American in you.”

  “I couldn’t fall for a Chinese girl.”

  “You might. They’re very beautiful, many of them.”

  “I shan’t go back to China,” he told me.

  “You might go back some day to see your father, if he doesn’t come here to us.”

  “Will he come here, do you think?”

  This, this was the moment to tell him about the letter locked in my box upstairs. Sooner or later he will have to be told. I am afraid to tell him. He is too young to understand, too ignorant to have mercy.

  “I hope he will come. Let’s both hope. And who’s the girl, Rennie?”

  For of course there is a girl. All the talk has simply been leading up to it. I was suddenly tired.