East Goes West

by Younghill Kang

  Over the hill and around the valley we went, until we reached a one-story house, or cabin, wooden as though made by an ax, much like Abraham Lincoln’s birthplace. Inside was a single room plastered roughly in mud, with a sloping tent-shaped roof. The family was French. There was a thin dark man with a French whisker, but not in the words of Tennyson, an educated whisker, for he was a simple lumberjack, the kind wearing overalls all the year around except for Christmas and Sundays. And his red-cheeked wife, rather young-looking, stout, with dark hair. Her new percale dress of red and blue stripes had a good deal of material in it, suggesting dresses many years behind the time of those scanty short ones I had seen on the streets of New York. Into the back of her thick hair was thrust a large hefty comb. She wore besides heavy ribbed stockings, and high shoes. They had three children. The youngest—around four—like a big piece of squash, fat all over, looked like one satisfied with any condition in life—but then today was Christmas. His washed state was a marvel to see: a gleaming speckless face, undried, head watered newly, dripping still, brushed down slick with only one hair starting. He wore a tiny new red necktie, but peeked up shyly. The next boy was thin, lively, eager to show off his broken English. He was wearing new knickers and a new sweater with a letter. And then there was the big sister, old enough for a faintly blushing cheek; but her long legs were still in yard-long black ribbed stockings, and she wore a short blue serge skirt and a modest middy.

  The room was fascinating. You kept discovering new things all the time. Everything done by the family was done in this one room. But everything just like the family had been shined up to receive us. Even the cowhide boots and the extra shoes in corners, the dresses, sweaters, big coats on walls, all were precisely straightened. There were two windows, one dark from looking out at the hill which sheltered one side of the house, and the other dark from looking out on the gray opaqueness of the thick-falling snow. An oil lamp was burning—a white one gay with red roses; and a great cooking stove, with pipe going up to the roof, was sending out a great glow and crackle and a savory smell of cooking things. A thick hooked-rug covered the whole of the floor. Near the entrance was a yellow dogskin with head complete. A few pictures without any frames were tacked up; one I remember, General Foch, from the colored supplement of a French newspaper. In one corner was an upright piano. Then there was the Christmas tree, of modest size, hung with some painted cardboard birds, red bells and candy canes—nothing very elaborate. Around the base of the tree waited the humble white paper parcels roughly tied. Ralph had brought some parcels for the Christmas tree too. Gifts for the children and for me. I received from Ralph the book David Copperfield and some knitted socks made by his mother. When it came time for dinner, mother and daughter took away the Bible from the middle of the table. A red cloth with white lines—roughly ironed but very clean—was laid, and some white napkins that did not match one another. We sat down to a large pork roast tied up with strings, mashed pumpkin, browned potatoes, home-canned green beans, and many different kinds of jellies and pickles made by the housewife. For dessert there was apple cake, and after that, tea and cheese.

  Dinner over, Ralph played Christmas carols on the piano. The little girl sang obediently on request. Ralph had been her music teacher. Next he had her play the accompaniment while we sang. There and then he gave her a lesson, pointing out her mistakes patiently at the end of each hymn. Never was Ralph embarrassed to speak of mistakes. As a teacher he was most painstaking and uncompromising. You must do things his way. (I had had my arguments with Ralph. He insisted that I should say “Yes, please” or “No, thank you” on every possible occasion, such as raisins offered in his room or a book handed down for my examination. It was not that I felt the obstinacy of children against moving my tongue to form these polite phrases, but in Korea a constant succession of yes-and-no-thank-you’s is the sign of a yokel. Ralph was firm. To please him I compromised, making my voice as low as possible.) Ralph had the most rigid code of manners, morals, conduct. Yet he himself was the plainest and simplest of men, really living in the kingdom of God. At least, no one would ever doubt that duty, “stern Daughter of the Voice of God,” was his constant companion.

  Later in the afternoon a couple dropped in, a young husband and wife, in whom Ralph was especially interested. The woman was a large French-Canadian—buxom, bigger than her husband, dark, sanguine and strong-featured. She was Catholic. The man was fair, anemic, half-English, and a member of Ralph’s Protestant congregation. He had caused a great scandal by marrying outside his church. And from her church, too, the woman was ostracized for the same reason. The people of this little town were intensely sectarian, somewhat like the early New Englanders. Protestants thought that the difference between going to heaven and going to hell was the difference between going to meeting and going to mass; the Catholics thought so, too, but vice versa. When Ralph first came, this poor couple had been living as social outcasts, shunned and reviled by both factions. Ralph when he saw how matters stood went straight to the Catholic Father, to talk the case over. It was one of the first things Ralph did on taking charge of that congregation. He and the priest mapped things out. After that the couple were immediately remarried in the Catholic Church. The woman was to attend mass as usual, and her husband to go to his own church but either was left free to accompany the other when he or she so desired. Acts like this endeared Ralph to the community. In spite of his youth, he shared authority there with the Catholic Father and with the British Mayor (the latter an ignorant man but a straight shooter).

  That dim and dark afternoon full of falling snow, others dropped into the little one-room house. Lumbermen from Ralph’s church. They came wearing huge fat boots, big black caps tied under the chin, enormous fur gloves, and as they entered from the blizzard outside, there was a great noise of stamping, the shaking of coats and the clapping of gloves. As soon as they had warmed themselves by the kitchen range, they took out whistles, flutes, harmonicas, and played ballad music, punctuating the time with stamps of their hobnailed shoes.

  2

  That Christmas vacation, Ralph devoted much of his spare time to reading David Copperfield with me, in order to improve my English. I thought he was taking too much trouble, but he said, no, he liked it. He regarded David Copperfield as the greatest book ever written (outside the Bible). We took turns reading aloud, and when I did so, he would correct me. He explained everything very carefully, as to a child. Sometimes I could not keep from teasing him by asking foolish questions just to get his answers, but he did not know this.

  “Ralph, what does Mrs. Gummidge mean when she says ‘I’m a lone, lorn crittur’?”

  “She means she doesn’t feel well,” answered Ralph patiently, touching his hand to his heart. “Here.”

  Or another time:

  “There is one thing I don’t understand, Ralph. And I would like to know. What is romance?”

  “I will explain. Suppose there is a house—like this,” and as usual, he illustrated concretely, indicating four square walls with his hands. “A house that is a prison. Soldiers guard the house. And around it is a river too. Then there is a girl. A prisoner in this house. Now. If you should swim across the river, break into the house, get to the girl in spite of the soldiers, carry her away, swimming perhaps with her on your back across the river . . . that, you know, would be romance.”

  I showed Ralph a news item in a Canadian paper which had just come out, about an American millionairess who decided to have a baby without getting married. She wanted a baby, not a husband: she was very logical.

  “Ralph, is that romance?”

  George Jum, I knew, would have been much interested. His mind would have played around that like a school of porpoises. But to Ralph, it didn’t even pose a question, raise an image, it didn’t give the slightest incentive to discussion.

  “That’s not romance,” he said decidedly, “that’s moral blindness. You haven’t understood my definition.”r />
  “But isn’t that a romantic thing to do?”

  “She wouldn’t lose anything by getting married first. How would any child feel with that kind of start? Well, let’s not waste time. Let’s get back to David Copperfield.”

  The snow kept coming down. It was hard in such surroundings to visualize New York. Outside, the Canadian countryside was just beginning to be populated, but the spiritual land of Canadians seemed fixed and set. The minds of men like Ralph Glenwood still inhabited the world of David Copperfield, made more rugged, simple, and democratic in a new continent; they lived here with the humbleness of Burns in “A Cotter’s Saturday Night”; duty and the church were a sustaining part of life—you were forcibly impressed with how the colonization of America was a direct result of the Reformation of Europe, of John Calvin and John Knox. Yes, the grim, uncompromising spirit of the Puritan was upon this land, though we do not hear so much of the Scotch Presbyterian of Canada as of the dying Puritanism of New England. And the mood of this Christmas interlude with Ralph was early transcendental, as if, with the strength of three generations ago, it still refused to rest on temporal things. This might have been the practical yet fanatical land of Whittier’s “Snowbound.” And more than to Keats, Ralph Glenwood must have responded to the homely simplicity of such a poem as that of the early-American John Trowbridge:

  I watch the slow flakes as they fall

  On bank and brier and broken wall;

  Over the orchard, waste and brown,

  All noiselessly they settle down,

  Tipping the apple-boughs, and each

  Light quivering twig of plum and peach.

  The hooded beehive, small and low,

  Stands like a maiden in the snow;

  And the old door-slab is half-hid

  Under an alabaster lid.

  All day it snows: the sheeted post

  Gleams in the dimness like a ghost;

  All day the blasted oak has stood

  A muffled wizard of the wood.

  Garland and airy cap adorn

  The sumach and the wayside thorn,

  And clustering spangles lodge and shine

  In the dark tresses of the pine.

  The ragged bramble, dwarfed and old,

  Shrinks like a beggar in the cold;

  In surplice white the cedar stands,

  And blesses him with priestly hands.

  Still cheerily the chickadee

  Singeth to me on fence and tree:

  And in my inmost ear is heard

  The music of a holier bird;

  And heavenly thoughts, as soft and white

  As snowflakes, on my soul alight,

  Clothing with love my lonely heart,

  Healing with peace each bruisèd part,

  Till all my being seems to be

  Transfigured by their purity.

  3

  And so my year in Canada passed by, my sojourn in the nineteenth century, in the Victorian age of the British Empire. At times I thought, “What am I doing here?” And still when I say Green Grove, I see pictures of my loneliness, my essential isolation and misfit. Dark days I see in the dark woodland park, dead snow and ice stretching out grayly on all sides, bright nights under the cold northern moon, as I stand facing the bitter winds, looking down on the ravening, gloomy waves. The glimmer of Green Grovian lights, which I can see from the knoll by the sea—to them I turn reluctantly, away from the wild sea and the free winds. For almost the constellations seem more friendly and warm. Up here by a solitary tower, watching the British battleships go by, somehow I feel more contact with reality than in the snug, warm, theological nooks of Green Grove, listening to the whimsical conversation of Ian with Allan or with Ralph. Away out here the destructive, hard, the brilliant syncopated rhythms of New York come back to me. And curiously enough they stab my heart with longing. . . .

  Already, like the true New Yorker, I felt impatient of the rust and mold that gather gently on the provinces. Nor could I hope to be a real Green Grover, here in Canada. I was never treated as one. For me there was always special favor, special kindliness, special protection . . . the white-man’s-burden attitude toward dark colonies. Ralph’s kindness . . . Leslie’s brutal cruelty . . . I weighed them in my mind, and it seemed to me better to miss the kindness and not to have the cruelty. Yet the beauty of my surroundings could not fail to strike me in more ways than one. As you entered the big University hall, you saw written there in marble, with letters to last out the centuries, “Ora et Labora.” The sons of Maritime had gone away to be soldiers in the Great War. But there was no sign that bombshells had burst here. In course of time, the students had come back. They had put away their warfare for theology; in this world all was ordered, all decided, what was right or wrong, what was noble, what was base. Great figures of the past were here in pristine authority, the vigorous voice of Carlyle still in the air, the Wordsworthian plain living and high thinking, the Miltonic conscience, symbolized by those two portraits hung facing each other in the hall, Milton at the age of twelve just before beginning to write as “the handsome Lady of Christ’s”; Milton during his blindness dictating lines of Paradise Lost to his unloving, unwilling daughters. In the spell of this quiet atmosphere you were almost betrayed to say there is nothing wrong with the world, it is perfect, it is still intact, showing a late firm ripeness, Victorian highmindedness at the very height of Tennysonianism. Into this section, the ills, the discontent, the morbidness of the modern generation happily will not come. Missionaries will continue to go forth from Maritime, for the glory of God. “Ora et Labora.”

  Over the pastoral landscape, the rich late spring had come. On the green meadows by Ritchie’s Pond where we had skated during wintry days, a little brook was flowing, bluets and other wild flowers waving beside its sluicy stream. I walked here under the powerful sunrays of noon, as well as under the crimson beauty of evening; sometimes a gentle mist fell on my hatless head, forming silver beads of the smallest size; sometimes in the deserted park, the new-leaved trees drooped heavily, their thick branches like plumes of mourning for their dead sire the sun. Then a black dragon hovered, a camel-shape burst, and thunder like a tiger was roaring on the wooded hills, to be echoed by the ocean, while fierce lightnings shot from heaven to earth. But after a shower the sun always came back again; then how the earth smiled in tremulous ecstasy through the late afternoon, until billows of color gorgeously rolled down to the dusky horizon, while shadows gathered, thickening at the trees! And as I saw the ever-shifting movements of this natural theatre, I mused on change in the world. I felt that nothing lasts. Where was the ancient habitation of my fathers, where were its ordered ways and everlasting laws? Gutted by time. Maritime seemed to me strangely immobilized. I had no wish to rest in another potential ruin of the age. If today I was dreaming in the warmth of the sun all about Tennyson and Dora, if this seemed a world of great rightness, gentleness and beauty, still I could not accept it as quite real, as any more than a kind of play by Barrie, such as I had seen with Clendenin in Halifax the other day. A closed-off world, far from great ports of Time, oblivious to the tune of cycles and great change, as much a back-wash of life as a village in the South Seas. Remembering Seoul and Tokyo, New York and Peking, I grew amazed:

  “Can it be that only in this one corner of earth the tide of flux has not come, and all remains as if unchanged?”

  And yet there were some changes even in Green Grove. Allan for instance. His engagement was broken. Now he turned to have completely opposite views upon women; and all about love which he had told me before, he must tell me again, vice versa: “Love is silly. Only distracts a man. Girls are a waste of time.” No more he became with Edwin a passionate reader of Tennyson’s Maud, or a tender admirer of The Princess.

  And one of the boys—Horace Thompson, who had been my tutor in Greek—got a sch
olarship to go across to Edinburgh. He was discussed with awe, as the most fortunate of beings, for was he not going to the home of the Scots, to the mother-civilization? Who would not choose those beautiful isles where “the centuries behind repose like a fruitful land”?

  And Leslie Robin no longer triumphed but was sent home in disgrace. During the final exams he did dishonest work in chemistry. In the middle of writing he asked to be excused in order to go to the washroom, where he had planted a convenient friend with a textbook. A proctor suspected. He took up Robin’s question slip with the answers written out from the textbook. Robin was summoned before the pope and the cardinals, as the student-governing body was called, and expelled. Poor Leslie! A hard beginning for a boy. A long road ahead for him!

  I had my moment of swelling pride, too, when Doctor MacMillan stopped me as I walked in Seaway Park. He congratulated me on my marks in Professor Donald’s class—in a tone of pleased surprise. Green Grove, he said, was proud of me. He offered me my scholarship for another year, and said he hoped that I would finish up my course there.

  4

  As Maritime closed for the summer, my spirit sped New York-ward, but that journey was more difficult for my body. I had had no paying work during the whole school year. I must first earn my fare. So it fell out that toward the middle of June, I was trudging on foot toward Stratford, a small neighboring town, with a letter of introduction to Mr. McCann, who owned a boxmaking factory there, and was the brother of the Green Grove “pope.” I had made boxes for a living once before, while going to school in the Orient.

  Stratford was a sleepy little place on the river Avon, a wide, tranquil, gray stream which was always salty and had tides like the sea. The boats traveling up from Boston and Fundy Bay came in with the tide. When the tide was high, water mounted over the quay. When the tide went out, the water retreated, and the town, being left behind, promptly went to sleep again. The apple blossoms along the river were just beginning to scatter. It was a calm, gentle, peaceful land, filled with extensive fruit orchards, fertile pastures with long juicy grass interwoven with wild flowers . . . or else cropped short and green as a golf course by the sheep. The place was considered very historical. A little farther down the Avon, past the town, were the old willows of Evangeline and the meadows of Grand Pré. But though I looked everywhere, I saw no forest primeval with murmuring pines and the hemlocks.