My Several Worlds

by Pearl S. Buck

  “Please explain,” I said, unbelieving.

  “I cannot explain,” he replied. “It is being done.”

  I put on my jacket and went out to see for myself. We lived not far from the main road into the city and a few minutes’ walk brought me to the spot. There I saw the monster machine, something I had never seen before nor heard of, and therefore which I could not name. A man rode upon it, a young Chinese man, not a workingman but a Western-educated man, and he was guiding it slowly along one side of the street and then the other. What was he doing? He was pushing down the houses. Those old one-story houses, made of hand-shaped brick and cemented together with lime plaster, had stood well enough for shelter through hundreds of years, but they had been built long before such a machine had been conceived in the mind of Western man, and they could not withstand the assault. They crumbled into ruins.

  Had this been in my earlier world, I would have stopped the man and asked him what he did and why. But this was another world, and I did not ask. I was a foreigner, I knew it now, and I dared not ask. I stood among the Chinese people, watching, silent, stricken. And the young man said not a word, not even when an old grandmother who had lived in a house since she was born, began to cry wildly and aloud. I asked her son in a whisper if the families were paid for the loss of their homes, and he whispered back they had been promised pay, but none of them trusted promises. I never knew whether they were paid. I think it likely that some were paid and some were not, depending upon the personal honesty of those through whom the government dealt with individual owners. But no money could pay for the homes that were gone, with all their inherited traditions and memories.

  I went back to my own resurrected home with a heavy heart indeed, for I knew that from that day on the new government was doomed in the end to fail. Why? Because it had failed already in understanding the people whom it purposed to govern, and when a government does not rule for the benefit of those ruled, sooner or later it always fails, and history teaches that lesson to every generation, whether or not its rulers can or will understand. And the Communists in China gained their first victory that day, even though they were then in apparent flight. True, the people did not know who the Communists were, true that the name was still only a name, but when the young Nationalists sowed these first wild seeds of the winds of resentment in the hearts of their own people, they prepared for the whirlwinds which would compel the people to turn to their enemy merely because it was the enemy of those whom they resented. It is a natural human impulse, individual as well as general, that when one hates, the hatred becomes a benefit to the enemy of the hated one. Thus before the new government was even well established, it had alienated the people.

  And yet, cursed as I always am with the necessity to see two sides of a question, I felt deeply for the young Nationalists and especially for those who had been educated in the United States. They came back so eagerly to their own country, proud of their honors and their degrees, sincerely patriotic, too, but in the years while they had been away they had forgotten what their country was, enormous, illiterate, mediaeval, or as they loved to call it, “feudal.” To me who had always lived there it was beautiful in spite of its ancient filth, its illiteracy, its age. Nay, it was beautiful because of its age, and the vast accumulation of its wisdom. A people so reasonable, so ready to change when they understood the need, could easily have been persuaded and led, but they were the last people on earth to be forced. Chinese were born, it seemed to me, with an accumulated wisdom, a natural sophistication, an intelligent naïveté, and unless they were transplanted too young, these qualities ripened in them. To talk even with a farmer and his family, none of whom could read or write, was often to hear a philosophy at once sane and humorous. If ever I am homesick for China, now that I am home in my own country, it is when I discover here no philosophy. Our people have opinions and creeds and prejudices and ideas but as yet no philosophy. That, perhaps, can only come to a people with thousands of years. And the sad and frightening fact was that the young and uprooted Chinese, who had been trained in Western universities or in missionary schools and other modern schools in China, had lost the Chinese philosophy. They belonged neither to East nor to West, and they were pitiful, for they were dedicated to the improvement of their own country, and yet they could not understand that it was impossible for them to save their countrymen because they themselves were lost. They still did not know how to speak to their countrymen. I cringed when I heard an earnest young Chinese, the milk of his American doctorate still wet behind his ears, haranguing a Chinese crowd on a street in our city, or in a village where I chanced to be that day. He was so thin, so intense, so filled with missionary zeal as he talked about sanitation, or better farming, or the new government, or foreign imperialism, or the Unequal Treaties, or whatever cause lay upon his soul, and he did not know that with every word he spoke he was destroying his own hopes. Why? Because he spoke to the wise old people as though they were serfs, stupid and ignorant, and he was angry with them in his heart because they stood before him unmoved and they laughed when the sweat ran down his poor young cheeks. He was so angry that he could scarcely keep from weeping, and I am sure that he would have been glad if lightning had struck them dead. But Heaven never helped him, and the rain continued to fall and the sun to shine upon them as well as upon him and by such divine injustice the best of reformers are confounded.

  And I, having learned my lesson of silence, could only go away feeling more sorry for the young man on the machine than for the people, because the people were strong and he was not and in the end I never doubted that the people would win. Later I put the making of the new city into a short story called “The New Road,” and the touching and earnest young man and all the thousands like him went into another entitled “Shanghai Scene.”

  In these days, too, a strange change was taking place upon the flank of our beautiful Purple Mountain. From my distant attic window I could see what looked like a white scar daily growing larger among the pines and the bamboos. It was the tomb of Sun Yat-sen, for the new government had decided that Sun’s embalmed body was to be brought from the North and laid to rest in the southern capital. The cornerstone had been laid on the first anniversary of his death. I went out to look at the mausoleum now and then during the years of its making, and watched it progress from a dislocation of rocks and earth to a monument so hybrid that people did not know whether to repudiate it as something foreign, or be proud of it because it was partly Chinese. A gatehouse, or sort of p’ailou, stood at the foot, and from there a vast flight of white marble steps led up to the mountain. I climbed those steps so many times during the next decade that I thought I could never forget how many there are, yet I have forgotten, for my feet since then have carried me to many other countries and to far places. At the top of the marble flight was the memorial hall and behind it the tomb itself. The blue-tiled roof curved upward in the old temple style and the marble terrace in front of the building was impressive, for from the balustrades one could look over many miles of countryside. To the right was the winding city wall and within it were the roofs of houses, laid closely together.

  The climax of that building was on a hot summer’s day—the day of Sun Yat-sen’s funeral, in 1929, four years after his death. Preparations had been going on for months, and among the more difficult was the necessary, if temporary, reconciliation between Madame Sun Yat-sen, the widow, and the rest of her family, which now included Chiang Kai-shek himself, for Madame Sun was pro-Communist, as she believed her husband had been. Would she come to the funeral or would she not? She did come, and everybody was relieved. To bury The Leader without having his wife present to honor the occasion would have been unthinkable. Yet even so there were many stories among the people and rumors that though she came, she would not speak to any of the family. Nevertheless, the preparations went on.

  And my two guests during those days of the pomp of Sun Yat-sen’s funeral were Dr. Alfred Sze, the Chinese Ambassador in Washington and fath
er of Mai-mai Sze, who has become well known in the United States, and Dr. Taylor, the missionary physician who had embalmed the body of Sun Yat-sen.

  Dr. Sze was a tall handsome man, polished in the cultures of East and West alike, and he could scarcely conceal his dismay at the discomforts of Nanking. I had been asked to entertain him because our house was more comfortable than some, and yet we, too, had no electricity or running water or any of the modern conveniences to which Dr. Sze had become so used in his years abroad. The glimpses he gave me of my own country were extremely enlightening and entertaining, and I in turn tried to modify his discouragement about his own. But what I remember most clearly was a brisk after-dinner conversation between me and the unquenchable Li Sau-tse, still managing our household in spite of her relatively reduced position as kitchen help.

  “It is a pity,” she said in her loud practical voice, “that so pretty a man as this guest of ours was fed too many chicken feet when he was little.”

  “How do you know he was fed chicken feet?” I inquired.

  She was cleaning up in the kitchen as usual, the cook, after the manner of overlords, having departed, leaving the dirty work to her.

  “Don’t you see how his hands tremble all the time?” she inquired.

  “True,” I replied. Dr. Sze’s hands did tremble in a slight nervous palsy.

  “That,” Li Sau-tse declared, “is because he was fed too many chicken feet when he was little.”

  “Indeed,” I observed. I knew better than to contradict her. She would cheerfully spend hours to prove that I was wrong, did I disagree, and the time was late.

  As for Dr. Taylor, I remember only his anxiety lest Sun Yat-sen’s embalmed body might not hold together in the June heat. There was much consternation because the people wanted to see their dead hero, and this meant that the coffin had to be open for a matter of hours. Could the sacred body endure the ravages of the air? Nevertheless, in spite of Dr. Taylor’s agitation, the coffin was opened for a few hours and Sun Yat-sen did hold together except for his hands, but gloves were put on those, and so all went well.

  My own memories of the funeral itself are from the modest viewpoint of a bystander, but that, after all, is perhaps the most interesting. I stood among the crowd which gathered for miles along the road upon which the cortège was to pass, and was pressed on one side by an odoriferous beggar and on the other by a stout and lively country housewife. I peered between clustered heads in front and was pushed by unknown persons from behind while the stately procession passed. Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts in uniform, exhausted with waiting, the sweat running down their faces, students and young people, representatives from all organizations, soldiers and bands, the endless procession went on. Finally I saw the dignitaries from other countries, the handsome and impeccably garbed British, looking cool in spite of their morning clothes and tall silk hats, the Europeans with their brightly striped ribbons and honors across their bosoms, the tall turbaned men from India, the small Japanese men in Western clothes too big for them, the businesslike Americans looking more like clerks than officials. They passed in silence and order and last of all the great casket, draped in flags and silks, passed in slow pomp, followed by the family and the Chinese honoraries.

  We had stood for hours, and now we got what conveyance we could and drove outside the city wall to stand again through the funeral. The rather small mausoleum was crowded with dignitaries, and again I chose my place at the foot of the marble steps among the vast crowd. I do not remember what the program was, except that there were speeches in various languages, presentations of wreaths, singing of songs, all conveyed to us through loud-speakers, the first I had ever seen. What I do remember is that the program broke down somewhere about the middle, and we waited and waited. I wondered what had happened, and in spite of all, I fell into my old habit of identification with the Chinese and worried lest some mistake should spoil the occasion before the foreigners. As though my thoughts were premonition, over the loudspeakers came a Chinese whisper, loud and urgent and perfectly audible.

  “Hurry up—hurry up—the foreigners must not laugh at us!”

  Whoever was delaying matters hurried, and in a few minutes the program went on again. Meanwhile I did not look at any Chinese, pretending that I had not understood the whisper. I suppose most foreigners did not understand, since most of them spoke little or no Chinese.

  When the program was over and nearly all the people had gone away, I climbed the marble steps and went into the reception room of the mausoleum. At that moment Chiang Kai-shek came out of an inner chamber. He wore the Nationalist uniform, upon his breast a row of honors and medals, and, his eyes straight ahead, he strode across the marble floor and stood in the wide doorway, looking out over the valleys. I stood near, watching his face, so strangely like that of a tiger, the high forehead sloping, the ears flaring backward, the wide mouth seeming always ready to smile and yet always cruel. But his eyes were the most arresting feature. They were large, intensely black, and utterly fearless. It was not the fearlessness of composure or of intelligence, but the fearlessness, again, of the tiger, who sees no reason to be afraid of any other beast because of its own power.

  He stood a long time in the blazing afternoon light, and I stood in the shadows, very near, and did not move. What, I still wonder, was he thinking of and what does he remember now, exiled upon that island whose people to this day do not think of themselves as part of China or the Chinese?

  I have no memories of peace under Chiang Kai-shek. He had severe problems to meet and he was not equipped by his education to solve them. He was a soldier and he had the mind of a soldier, and neither by nature nor experience, either, was he fitted to be a civilian ruler of a republic. I read that today the Old Tiger gets up early and says his prayers. They say he likes to walk quietly along the roads of Formosa, his wife at his side. Well, he is getting old. I hear that he reads poetry and he meditates. If so, he is following the tradition of the war lords. Old Wu Pei-fu, as arrant a war lord as ever lived, in his declining years used not only to read poetry but to try to write it, and he yearned in the wistful fashion of so many aging Chinese militarists to be remembered by posterity not as a man of battles and wars, but as a human being, wise and kind. Deep in the hearts of the Chinese people the ancient ways still hold. It cannot be otherwise, for people do not change in a day or a night from what they have been for centuries. And long ago Confucius decreed that the ways of peace are the honorable ways, that the superior man does not fight and kill, but governs himself first and then his household and at last his nation.

  I remember no peace, for those were the years when Chiang Kai-shek’s army was pursuing the Communists across the country and into the far Northwest. The pursuit stretched far but it began in our own city and I saw it even in my classes. More often than I care to remember there were vacant seats in the schoolroom, and when I inquired where my missing pupils were, the others made significant looks and gestures which told me that the unfortunate ones were under arrest as Communists. Sometimes I tried to save them from death, if not from jail, and sometimes I could but usually I could not. I suppose that there were Communists among them, but they were very young and perhaps they could have been brought back again. If so, they were given no chance. It was easier to kill them. But many of them were not Communists, as I very well know. They were arrested for reading liberal magazines, for associating, perhaps accidentally and without knowing it, with a classmate who was a Communist, or for criticizing the new government. Thousands of young men and women who were not Communists were thus killed all over China in the name of Communism, and we were all helpless unless we knew the name of the individual student soon enough to intercede in his behalf. I will not dwell on that sad time, for the bones of those young men and women are already dust. But I learned then that the same cruelties can be committed by any man who has the will to crush those who oppose him, or who even appear to oppose him, if power is his ambition and his satisfaction, and I learned then that th
e noblest end is lost if the means are not worthy of it. With every injustice thus committed, the Nationalist government was further weakened and as early as 1930, behind closed doors and in the villages, the people were singing their secret songs of revolt. They were not Communists, but they were against injustice, knowing that a government built upon injustice to its people cannot stand, whether it be Communist or Nationalist, or any other.

  And so in silence and with bland faces the people in our city and in the countryside watched the brave young officials, the Western-trained specialists and earnest intellectuals, the students and the ardent reformers, go the way of all flesh. Law in China was traditionally for the criminal and not for the good citizen, and certainly not for the government official, and so traditionally the new officials and intellectuals broke the very laws they made. They did not even obey the new speed laws for automobiles, for they were grown haughty and domineering and there were already whispers of widespread graft. The old evils were still with us. I had an example in my own classes, in the handsome son of a high government family. He came every day in an American car, chauffeured by a White Russian. The tall youth wore a uniform and he had a “Lieutenant” before his name, and he arrived every day after the others, his bright spurs clanking as he walked. When the end of the term came he did not appear for his examination and I failed him on the semester’s work, especially as he had not handed in class assignments on time or at all. He was hotly indignant.

  “Do you not know that I am a lieutenant in the Nationalist army of the Chinese Republic?” he demanded.

  “As far as I am concerned, you are merely one of the students in this university who happens to be also in one of my classes,” I replied.

  “My father is—”

  “That makes no difference to me,” I said, and proceeded to give him a briefing on democracy in a modern state, while I tried not to laugh at the proud and incredulous young face.