East Goes West

by Younghill Kang

  “Aunt Helen?” asked Kim quickly, with a smile.

  “How did you guess?” she held out her hand impulsively, clasping his warmly, as if asking forgiveness for circumstances outside her power to change, as she said, “Will you let me meet you at the gallery?”

  6

  Kim invited me to come to his place once more, before I returned to Boston that Easter vacation. For tea, he said. When I got there, to my surprise, I found Helen Hancock. There were only we three. I believe Kim asked me out of a sensitive tact that would err always on the side of formality rather than give Miss Hancock, who was rather old-fashioned, the slightest reason for uncomfortableness. Helen was sitting near a bowl of roses and Kim was walking up and down before her, smoking. They seemed very cozy. I interrupted some argument when I came in, and Kim immediately resumed it.

  “No, Helen, what you were saying is wrong. How can there be an absolute—for truth or morals? Nothing I see so relative as morality. To illustrate my meaning, if you had to choose between being burned in hellfire and walking naked down Fifth Avenue, you would probably choose the former, though the latter is no more than a question of social etiquette.”

  “You think I am no Lady Godiva?” Helen laughed.

  “I think you are an extremely conventional Western woman. And you see you are blushing—that is symbolic.” (Helen contradicted him.) “Today in certain parts of Africa or in the South Sea Islands and elsewhere, young girls and women bathe naked in a natural pool with men. And if you were there, you would be accustomed to this daily practice although at first sight you might be shocked. In some countries nakedness has actually been prescribed by laws and clothes are immoral. For instance, in Rohl all women who are not Arabic are forbidden to wear clothes. And the king of Mandingo commits a sin if he allows a woman, even a princess, to approach him otherwise than naked.”

  “There! And you still argue we are no better off than to be in Africa!”

  “Not morally,” Kim was insisting stubbornly. “Morality can never be judged outside its own environment. You speak of the evolution of morality. I do not see it. Education, invention, and progress all help to satisfy our savage natures far more than primitive society. Why, primitive man had to work hard to conquer one enemy—he had to give all his might, and risk life against life. Now a slight touch on a button—like pressing an electric light—this will defeat thousands of men. Savageness of man to man, isn’t that what we mean by immorality? Or should mean. Progress has not removed the motive to kill—but only extends it, complicates it, just as warfare is expanded by new engines. Don’t be deluded by modern civilization, electrified advertisement, press a button and you see a wonder-lighted land!”

  So they went on, while one gathered from the few soft words of Helen that the grand question of life is moral, and the big problem of the universe is truth, and Kim kept repeating like some man who must save face, “In my experience, the pagan is no more savage than the so-called modern; no, he is only much simpler, much closer to natural laws. Man grows more unsure of his part in nature and more artificial, the farther his stage . . .”

  Till Kim said, “The water is boiling.” And Helen, “Let me make the tea.” How warm and nice it was to be in here with them where some subtle excitement reigned in the atmosphere! At least, knowing Kim, I felt that he was moved by something, though he had not had his usual drink, only tea. And Helen—who mostly suggested that she was bred in an old-fashioned Christian home with nineteenth-century New England morality which forgot that Adam was ever naked with his wife and not ashamed in the Garden of Eden—unconsciously looked as relaxed, smiling, shyly receptive as the opening buds among the roses in the Chinese bowl. The tea was rare. It had been sent Kim from home. It was almost colorless, but some little flowers opened themselves frailly there. A delicate bouquet came forth, yet the tea was not sweet; it had nothing of honey-cloy nor jasmine-taste, only a faintly buoyant bitterness stealing through and refining all the senses.

  We sat around Kim’s nest of small tea tables. Though somewhat higher they seemed quite in keeping with Korean style. The smallness of the room and its unusual crowding with the tea things drew us closely together. Helen, it seemed, was going to Europe again next summer. Talk turned on that. Kim said: “You must think of me on some of those Alpine walks. Promise. When you see green grasses and running gushing streams. Then you will glance in imagination at the unhappy savage, Kim . . . a kicking rebel in your march of civilization.”

  Helen looked at Kim as if in a playful perplexity. Quite unlike the girls at the Village party, she never smoked nor drank gin, but sipped tea and ate tiny sandwiches, so small that I could put three in the mouth at one time and speak understandably. But Helen took three bites to each instead of three to one bite. “And you are so truly a civilized person, To Wan. But why are you here? Not in civilization, I mean, but in New York.”

  “It is the human restlessness in life. Oh, this ambition of man’s to conquer everything! How great! How magnificent! I think so. Because of it, Ulysses wandered to unknown lands across the seas. Man must go beyond the deserts of burning sands, through the unexplored forests and over the ice-glued poles—what for? Nobody knows. But what a man! forever homesick, forever lonely, forever unsatisfied! What romance in his insatiable activities! The Columbian navigation, the journeys of Livingstone and Stanley . . . and so on over the snow-capped peaks of Himalaya, across the plain of Mongolia, past the deserts of Araby to the shore of the yellow sea. It has always been so. There was Alexander. He tried to marry Asia and Europe—but at that time he was like a wasp making a fight with a caterpillar. Genghis Khan in his day invaded half the world. And today what is he? Only a shadowy figure in legend. The Roman Empire existed once and is no more. Behind it, many more empires lost in the dim past. Once the highest culture of the world was passing through Korea, unknown to the contemporary West of Charlemagne. Where are all these empires now and what were they for? Only to become splintered into fragments? And still man tries and tries again. Man, man! the strangest animal! He alone feels the romance of conquest, the glamor of commerce and exchange, the divine thrill of the religious search! And he alone so badly wants his face saved, more than all other creatures. Then what other animal so active as he? For him there is no mating season . . . winter as well as spring, far into autumn, deep into summer, all year round a lover and maker forever. . . .”

  Helen said nothing to this, but merely consulted her tea, so Kim continued, “But I mean it. I agree with Lao Tze. Civilization is life’s mistake. Man thinks. . . . The more he thinks, the more thinking kills in him all natural instincts. Even the instinct for death. Here in the West those who logically conceived death, and were willing to wait for it, long ago became disillusioned. They had to build up superstitious conceptions of immortality of the soul . . . or the even more deluded idea of resurrection of the body. As man develops his brain power more, as he enters into the evolution of higher organisms, so he becomes more sensitive and more nervous, his problems are more complicated, his sorrows are increased. I have seen it. My country has many sorrows. But they are more natural ones, such as not having enough to eat, or the premature dying of children, or failure to have any children at all—something like that. And now, the Japanese oppression and the hint of race-death for all. But just see the sorrows Westerners can create. Romeo and Juliet. Do you know, I have heard Orientals laugh at Romeo and Juliet. Too silly, they said; they never heard of love till they saw that. The tragedy of individual love is something foreign still to their viewpoint.”

  Helen looked a little offended about the Orient. “Strange, to think of a whole hemisphere without our complicated Christian views on love . . . a Western woman would not be very happy there.”

  “You value that?”

  “I suppose I do.” Helen paused. “I have always unconsciously believed in it, as the only happiness, power, and security possible to women. Perhaps I am wrong.” Helen said a few more hesit
ating words on that. She was reserved, yet candid and sincere. Not a great talker, but when she got through I felt she was one to make love a profession and romance an occupation, and that when it did not come, she had become a wanderer in homesickness and a traveler in distress. As Kim believed in art for art’s sake, she believed in love for love’s sake. Napoleon is remembered because he was a great general in battle, Michelangelo because he was a great creator in art. Helen, it would seem, if she fulfilled logically her aspirations, would choose to be remembered only as an ardent lover. Helen Hancock, in short, was rather nineteenth-century, with a slight veneer of twentieth-century education, travel, culture . . . and the freedom given the American girl in a prosperous Boston family, cautiously used. At the same time I saw as no Westerner could that she was just the type to appeal to Kim. He would not like a revolting, tortured spirit like himself. Helen’s character and principles had irresistible fascination for the man of lost patterns, the man with a deep Confucian love of ordered life. Nor did they cause him the irritation of one who was brought up on those. (Arthur Brown, for instance.) Her difference of ideas was thrilling stimulation, yet his own innate simplicity of soul—an Eastern quality—found an echo in hers from New England. I suddenly agreed with Hsu Tsimou . . . it was a consummation devoutly to be hoped for. Helen might save Kim if she only would.

  “I like what you say. It is a beautiful sentiment. But I think that for you the ways of other cultures remain heathen ways, cruel, barbaric and unspeakable . . .” Kim said to her with a twinkle in his eyes.

  “Oh, it’s not that. It’s a matter of roots and environment.”

  “But you do have racial prejudice?”

  “I don’t think I have.”

  “Don’t you feel always with me ‘To Wan Kim is a man of another race’? I sense that in you.”

  Helen hesitated. I felt she was weighing her own feelings, determined to give them as honestly as she could. “I don’t know how I feel about you, To Wan,” she said, crossing her legs and putting her hands behind her head, regarding the fire reflectively. “I enjoy you very much. I think I am always happy with you. As with Nature.”

  Kim flushed with pleasure. “And you . . . to me are sunshine on gray mountain slopes. The difference between a frowning cold day and a jolly and sparkling one. I cease to be a lonely exile in your company. I return to the world of men and I leave the realm of ghosts. I feel the joy and grace of humanity again. . . . But you, what did you mean, in what you said just now?”

  “It is hard to express, To Wan . . . there is a restfulness with you I do not feel with other men. Perhaps Oriental art—if I knew it and loved it as Arthur does—might give me the same feeling. Or is it that we must agree somewhere, very fundamentally? . . . Yes, I am much more natural and simple with you than with men of my own race, that is the only difference.”

  But Kim looked dissatisfied with this. “Is it not because you would make an invisible wall between us as man and woman? A wall of all the shortcomings of East as West sees them? . . . Isn’t it unfair to look into another society, seeking only specialized virtues . . . in their absence finding only specialized vices?”

  “I don’t understand you.”

  “Your measuring rod is depth or shallowness in the love relation, for instance.”

  “It is part of my upbringing and philosophy perhaps.”

  “Yes. The Oriental coming West brings his measuring rod too.”

  “What is it? Now we will understand each other,” exclaimed Helen with vivacity. She was always at home in absolutes, it seemed.

  “From the fourth century B.C. comes a story. A man saw a little child crying hard for the loss of its parents. He said to his teacher, a Confucian scholar, ‘I could never understand the rites of mourners. Here in this child we have an honest expression of feeling, and that is all there should ever be.’ The teacher rebuked him. ‘The mourning ceremonial with all its accompaniments is at once a check upon undue emotion and a guarantee against any lack of proper respect. Simply to give vent to the feelings is the way of barbarians. That is not our way.’ Well, this little child crying is the way of Western love.”

  “Yes,” said Helen doubtfully.

  I wondered, would Kim try to show next that he worshipped not Woman even if he did? Of course he was not one for a genuine Romeo-Julietting, and he had too much pride to be as cheap as George. But George would say ‘It is better to worship women than ancestors. It is more sincere, more natural and more beautiful. One is living to inspire you, the other dead to be forgotten.’ Yet I wished Kim would not show this pride with Helen. George might get on with better success there, if he had Kim’s talents in other directions.

  Kim continued, “Choice, and surrender to love . . . this in the West is heroism in the lover. ‘Love is the most beautiful phenomenon in all animated nature, the mightiest magnet of the spiritual world, the source of all veneration and the sublimest virtue’—that is Schiller. But you cannot guess the shock of these words to the poor Confucian pagan, with his measuring rod of discipline, by which love is regarded as the barbaric emotion, for love brings forgetfulness of pride, decorum, dignity, and family duties toward others. This Oriental looks around bewildered on your civilized world of civilized wives and civilized husbands. And out of your most sublime virtue do come the most involved vices. Oh, the beginning seems to be very fine. But then after the thrill of the honeymoon they get bored. They want separation, divorce, surrender to love over again. Sometimes, if I read aright the newspapers, they go back to the savage custom of murdering. Yes. This sublime sentiment gets them united. This heroic rebellion gets them separated. This noble and inspiring passion gets them murdered. . . . But then the murder is logical. How could we have Romeo without Othello? With love the highest virtue, jealousy should be elevated too. Love, it is said, is impossible without some degree of hatred and jealousy and some difficulty. If one says he has none of these on the stage of rival’s competition or these difficulties, certainly he has no love, he is no lover, just a pass-a-day-together, week-end companion. Many people I know here say there are freedom and charm in the week-end marriage . . . and would like to change all marriage to the freedom and charm of that. To me that kind of freedom would be to be a fish still alive in cold water in the frying-pan, and that kind of charm only make-up-face-and-falsetto. But I am neither Confucian nor a Western man. Better to accept Western love wholly or not at all, I should say. Even so, in Western love we do not know the ending. While in Chinese poetry the last line always is written first.”

  “And being narrow, I’m still pretty sure I’m better off in New England than in New York, Asia, or Africa,” said Helen with an innocent laugh.

  “Why not stay there, then?” Kim asked. “Why go to Europe?”

  “Oh, I’m always ready to come back. Maybe Arthur is right. . . . Do you think I am a typical Yankee puritan?”

  Kim thought a bit. “No, not exactly. You are a product of this dominant West—Europe as well as America. Out of Christianity of 2000 years, out of the Renaissance of 500, out of the Victorian expansion of the nineteenth century. You are still very conscious of the transcendental philosophy of Emerson. Goethe helped. And Tennyson and Browning. It took all these centuries to make you what you are. And now you have just the right pattern and are satisfied, the pattern of all that is beautiful, graceful and charming.”

  Helen flushed. “Oh, To Wan . . . sarcasm again . . . Oriental irony?”

  “Irony? My irony? It has no more tail to sting. I am tired of irony—too tired even to laugh with irony. I might yawn with irony, but never laugh. I can only laugh with you. Never, at you. When tonight I could give you my life on a nickel, and buy an ice-cream cone and find the entrance to the graveyard?”

  “Do you mind if I say something?” said Helen.

  “I always like to hear what Helen says.”

  “Always you have seemed to me overexcited, moody and nervous, a
nd it has a good deal to do with drinking, late hours and cigarettes.”

  “What is one more cocktail in New York after all I have sucked? What is one more cigarette after ten thousand? Why should I fear a little thing like this?” He held up a fresh cigarette. “Keep your fright and horror for something bigger than that. Suppose I smoked opium like De Quincey. Still, you can’t buy opium in New York, it is too expensive. Besides, more than the drink, it is illegal. When one can’t get De Quincey’s medicine for the moments of depression, what have you against this cheaper substitute? This dose is not a stimulant but a sedative to me. And with enough drink, all the affairs of the world become no more than duckweeds on a pond, so a Chinese philosopher says. I have to have them, in this risky game, in this rotten air, in this lonely city. No, I will keep my cigarettes and cocktail a while longer. I need civilized vices in order to compete with civilization.”

  Then Kim added, “But do not say I am a pessimist or unbeliever. Though I deny the values of two hemispheres. I am still not civilized enough for a real cynic. And I believe in two things. In Helen and in Death.” And he reached to his book case and showed Helen a poem which read:

  C’est la mort qui console, hélas! et qui fait vivre;

  C’est le but de la vie, et c’est le seul espoir,

  Qui, comme un elixir, nous monte et nous enivre,

  Et nous donne le cœur de marcher jusqu’au soir.

  And after that his whole mood seemed to change. Kim’s face brightened, he was happy now, and gay and sparkling. “All live for the moment in the present hour. When that hour comes to perfect bloom, it is a lot. Who cares then whether time is going to see fruits, or the flower turn to seed, or wither in the desert sun—or be blighted in the winter cold? Yes. This is good. Over a cup of tea in a warm room with you. Just to bloom for an hour—and not to be a Faust in the anxious search through philosophy and history.”