What do I remember, then? I remember first the beautiful province of Fukien, in South China. It is a seacoast province, its undulating shores infested with pirates, their nests centuries old. The little steamer that carried me had a strong iron fence and a barred gate on the stairway between the upper decks where the white folk travelled and the lower decks where the rest of the world ate and slept. Fence and gate, the English captain told me, were made so that if pirates were hidden among the lower deck passengers, the white people could defend themselves from above. What, I asked, if the pirates set fire below?
The Captain shrugged. “We have the lifeboats.”
I was glad to get ashore from that vessel and settle myself for a few days in a pleasant but certainly not immaculate Chinese inn. And from there, with Chinese friends, I travelled slowly by bus into the back country through the handsomest citrus groves in the world, the trees rich with oranges and pumeloes which the kindly farmers plucked for us as we passed. We went as far as the inner mountains, and there the bus stopped, for the mountains belonged to the Communists hiding there, or if one preferred, the “bandits.” The bus driver was a daring, not to say a wild man, in spite of his calm face and miraculous sense of humor. The bus was an old American castoff, and every hour or two it broke down and we all got out and waited while the driver patched up the engine with bits of wire and string. It always started again, he shouted and we climbed in and went on. Once while he tinkered I observed that there was no hood to the engine.
“Where is the hood?” I asked.
He looked up, his face streaked with oil. “That lid,” he said with contempt, “it was take—it—up, take—it—down, and for what? I took it off altogether.”
The engine burst into loud snorts, he yelled, and we climbed in.
And travelling south through the rich province of Kwangtung, I learned for the first time how the heavy brown sugar was made which I had eaten since childhood as a delicacy. The cane is crushed by a press pulled by slow-moving water buffalo, and a stream of thin whitish-green sweet water pours from a spout into buckets. This water is boiled down very much as maple sugar water is boiled in Vermont, until it is thick and dark. Then it is poured into huge shallow tins and cut into squares like fudge. We ate quantities of it, hot and strong, and then we saw it cooled and crushed again into the coarse sugar we all knew.
And what a scene it was, the beautiful lush green countryside, the thatched roof of the circular mill, open on all sides, the buffalo yoked together or single, pulling the heavy wooden beam across their shoulders, the blue-coated peasants feeding the sugar cane into the press, and then the sugar boiling on the earthen stoves, and the children dancing about, licking their fingers, while wasps and bees droned in the warm air—it all comes back to me still, wrapped in a daze of sleepy content, the fragrance and the heat and the dancing children. They were far from the new capital, those people of the South, and when it was spoken of they were indifferent and cynical about it as about all governments. Only in the cities did I see the new and bitter slogans pasted on the walls of the buildings and the city gates, forever crying out against the “Western imperialists.”
And so southward to Canton, and I am glad that I have seen more than once the old Canton before it was “improved,” for in the old city I could walk the ancient narrow streets where the ivory dealers, the jade lapidaries, the gold and silversmiths, had their one-story shops. Each trade had its own street, in its own area, and one could watch an ivory carver use his delicate instruments to shape a tusk into the graceful flowing figure of a Kuan-yin, or make a huge ivory ball, containing within it eighteen other balls, each separate from the other, and each rolling free from every other, a magic I have never been able to comprehend, in spite of seeing it often with my own eyes. And the jade of every color, yellow, or rust red, blue, or green as spring rice, mottled as marble, or smooth and cold and white as mutton fat, every variety exquisite and put to exquisite use! I had seen triumphs of such art in the palaces of Peking, whole landscapes carved from a single huge lump of jade, but here in a Canton street I saw it actually done, a lifetime spent upon one work. The southern jades came usually from Burma, whereas the jade in Peking was brought by camel from Turkestan. It was a Chinese in the thirteenth century A.D. who discovered the mines in Burma, but not for a long time, in fact not until the latter part of the eighteenth century, did the Chinese jade lovers consider the Burmese gem as valuable as their own variety, and indeed there is a difference, the Burmese jade being a jadeite and the Turkestan a nephrite. But Chinese jade miners and Burmese alike believe that jade has miraculous qualities. The Kachins or Burmese hillmen locate the mines by a bamboo divining rod, set afire, and then, when jade is found, they perform the old rituals and ceremonies for opening the mines.
But why should I divert myself here to speak of jade? It is a subject for many books, from the moment of mining the boulders encrusted with earth and hard rock, their hollow hearts lined with the precious and various stone to the final setting of the stone as jewel or objet d’art. Jade became in China a divine gem in the time of Ch’in Shih Huang, for whom the first great Imperial Seal was made, and that seal was preserved throughout the dynasties, so that whoever was strong enough to gain it and to keep it became by that very sign the Heaven-ordained ruler. It was this seal that the old Empress Dowager carried with her whenever she fled into exile, knowing that so long as she held it, her people would not recognize another on the throne and I wonder where that seal is now. Indeed jade is a possession to be cherished by anyone who can find it or buy it or steal it. Chinese women ask for jade ornaments for their hair, for jade bracelets and rings, and old men keep in their closed palms a piece of cool jade, so smooth that it seems soft to the touch. Rich men buy jades instead of putting their money in banks, for jade grows more beautiful with age. When men die, their families put jade in the tombs with them to keep them from decay and the orifices of their bodies are stopped with jade for purity. The poorest courtesan has her bit of jade to hang in her ears or to use in a hairpin, and the most successful and popular actresses wear jade instead of diamonds, because jade is the more sumptuous jewel against a woman’s flesh. And so enough of jade.
The journey westward into Asia was one of discovery and is now one of remembrance. I went to see what was to be seen, and though every land had its extraordinary and peculiar beauty, it was to see the people that I went.
In Indo-China I found the old familiar signs of colonialism, and the sign which is most unlovable, perhaps, is that colonial people grow too selfish and self-centered. Since they have no responsibility for governing themselves they take little responsibility for anything outside themselves and their families, and when some misfortune comes, they blame anyone except themselves. Otherwise this interesting and beautiful tri-state country of Indo-China was charming, and when it is free and responsible for its own welfare, it may become a tropical Switzerland. For Indo-China is really three small territories, or states, combined to make a nation. Vietnam is mainly Chinese, Cambodia is Indian, and Laos is Siamese. The three languages are quite separately spoken, and French is the common unifying tongue. There are no large cities except Saigon, which is very much French, and where the white community leads an active life in street cafés and night clubs, and where there is less segregation than in other colonial countries. On the streets I saw the mixed, the half-whites, French father and any woman for the mother, and their children as lovely as wild flowers but lost, growing by the wayside, belonging nowhere, intelligent, oversensitive, always wounded. Nevertheless I say still that there is actually less race prejudice among the French than among any Western people, and a beautiful French woman had Indo-Chinese lovers as easily as her own kind.
Colonialism degraded the French rulers, too, as it degrades everywhere, and the French in Indo-China were often unlovely in thought and behavior, inferior nearly always to the ones at home in France. In spite of this, the Chinese have liked them better than other white men, because they do not
act unjustly merely because of race difference. It was, however, an unworthy colonialism that I saw in Indo-China, without pretensions of nobility or goodness. Its purpose was altogether commercial and its goal was money, got anyhow and anywhere, and the only shrewder businessman than the Frenchman was the Chinese.
I went to Cambodia because I wanted to see Angkor Wat and I do not know to this day whether I am glad or sorry, for I hold that place in my memory so deeply that even now sometimes when I wake in the night to instinctive and unreasonable dread, I see the dead palaces, ruined and yet standing in the clutches of vast trees, rooting themselves not in the earth but like serpents entwining the stones. The very approaches are serpents and the balustrades of bridges are the thick bodies of stone cobras with poisonous heads uplifted and hoods flaring. I walked for hours through the desolate and empty palaces that none can explain, for they were lost so long in the jungle. They were built for the Khmer rulers, we are told, but why, and by whom? Tradition says that it was all done by slave labor, that stone upon stone the slaves piled up the palaces for their despotic kings, who treated them with such cruelty and callous inhumanity that at last the slaves rose in insurrection and destroyed their masters, and the deed must have been evilly done, for the reek of evil was everywhere, though slaves and masters alike are long dead. I am not given to superstition, yet there are certain places in old Asian countries where human beings have been born and have lived and died for so many generations that the very earth is saturated with their flesh and the air seems crowded with their continuing presence. Never have I had the same consciousness here in my own country, a new land, scarcely settled in terms of old Asia. But I felt that crowded air in Angkor, even though the jungle pressed about, and I knew that it was evil. The soft sweetish stink of death was everywhere, even the rooms in the hotel smelled of it, the sheets and pillows, the closets where my clothes hung, so that when I got away I put everything into the hot and tropical sunshine to burn out the reek of decay. It conveyed in its own way the old fearful threat, as potent today as a thousand years ago, that when men do evil to other men, when men deal unjustly and without mercy and count others lower than themselves and therefore of no worth, they create for themselves the certainty of downfall.
Yet there were strange and amusing incidents, too, as I continued my journey. In Bangkok, the capital of Siam, I had two experiences entirely new. At a Rotary Club dinner, where the speaker was a prince of the royal house, I sat through a meal as American as meat and potatoes could make it, and after it was over the Prince read a speech of such extraordinary dullness that I could not believe my ears. All through the dinner he had been sparkling in wit and laughter and we had been charmed. But what, I thought, was this speech? When he had finished it he lifted his head, which he had held doggedly to his page, and the sparkle was shining again in his voice and dark eyes.
“Excuse me,” he said. “I have performed a duty. This speech was written in American headquarters and sent here from Chicago.”
Mighty laughter then, and we all roared and applauded, and he sat down with as wicked and sophisticated a twinkle as a handsome face could create. And after this we were led down the corridor into a darkened theater room for the entertainment, also canned and shipped from the United States, and I saw my first Walt Disney film, Three Little Pigs.
But what I really remember about Bangkok, aside from a curious fruit called a durian, so hard that I used it as a permanent doorstop in my hotel room, was the life on the streets, the yellow-robed priests sauntering everywhere, the magnificence of ancient temples, rising in golden steps from a vast and solid base, exactly as modern buildings rise today in steel and glass, but not so high, and the beautiful smooth-faced women and little children, and the gentle-looking men. Small houseboats drifted slowly on the glassy opaque waters of the canals, the families who lived upon them clean and beautiful, and surely the Siamese are among the world’s most handsome creatures, not large, but smooth-skinned, cream-colored flesh covering small smoothly shaped bones, the eyes large and oval and not slanted, dark brown instead of black, and the hair soft and smooth again and dark but not black. These were a free people. And they looked free, their heads lifted, frank and inclined to friendliness instead of hostility, and what lovely hands and feet and slim round bodies they had, men and women and children, all of them!
A few days ago I saw a little half-Siamese boy, born in the United States and therefore an American, a guest in my house, put his arms about his adoptive mother’s neck, she a white American, and loving this child as dearly as though she had created his body within her own. Remembering his other country and all the Siamese ancestors behind him, I knew her blessed. The heritage is good.
India had always been part of the background of my life, but I had never seen it whole and for myself until now. Yet the stories that our Indian family doctor and his wife told me when I was a child had woven themselves into my growing dreams, and I had long read everything that I could find about that country. From my father I had learned of it through Buddhism and the life history of the Lord Buddha. I had seen the opposite face of India, too, in the tall turbaned Sikh policemen in the British Concession in Shanghai, who did not hesitate to beat a luckless Chinese riksha puller if he got in the way of traffic or disobeyed the imperious demands of the turbaned ones. India was not all of a piece! And through young Indians I had learned about the colonial empire of England, some of its evil and some of its good.
China and India are as unlike as two countries can well be. The life philosophies of the two peoples are different and this in spite of the fact that they share a universal attitude toward all mankind. Both peoples are peace-loving, but for different reasons, the Indians because their religions teach them that life is sacred and must never be destroyed, and the Chinese because they know from their superb common sense, inherited and congenital, that war is folly, and that a wise man prevails by his wisdom. Thus the Chinese have accepted even into their blood stream all their invaders, insofar as the invaders themselves have allowed it. The Jews, for example, for centuries took refuge in China, entering first through India and by the ancient trade routes from Asia Minor, and settled in the inner province of Honan, making their headquarters in K’aifeng-fu. Yet of the Jews as a separate people there is no trace left in China. The Chinese never persecuted them and instead by sheer kindliness and active commercial interchange they absorbed them and were the better for it. Often when I found in China an artist of unusual talent, or a mind more vivid than others among my students, the chances were good that he had Jewish blood in him. It is a creative strain. Once, I remember, a portfolio came from Peking to Asia Magazine, in New York, of drawings signed by various names. The editor chose for publication the ones he thought the best, and later he discovered that all but one were actually by the same artist, a young Chinese Jew. But the story of the Jews in China I have already told in my novel Peony, which in England is entitled The Bondmaid.
In India the Jews have not been absorbed. It is not India’s way to absorb. Instead she has allowed peoples to remain separate, although a part of her whole. Thus the Parsis, that affluent and influential people, who came from Persia centuries ago, have remained intact, their religion still fire worship and their burial grounds the splendid Towers of Silence near the city of Bombay. And in the south of India there remain the black Jews, burned dark by the Indian sun shining upon them for so many generations that they have lost their own color.
The very word color reminds me of the variety of hue that is Indian life, as various as our own American human scene. In Kashmir, where the white barbarian invaders from Europe long ago penetrated India, the people are often fair. Auburn-haired, blue-eyed women are beauties there. A young Indian friend of mine has recently married a Kashmiri man who, though his hair is dark, has eyes of a clear green. The skin color of the Kashmiri is a lovely cream and the features are as classic as the Greek. But all the peoples of India must be reckoned as belonging to the Caucasian race, whatever the color
of the skin in the South, though it be as black as any African’s.
And India has an amazing way of appearing unexpectedly in other life, as for example, today in the life of South Africa, the Indians make a third group between the South Africans, and the black and white. For that matter there was our Indian family doctor, and why should there have been an Indian doctor in a Chinese port to tend an American family? And rumors of India persist, for they are a memorable people, dramatic and passionate and finding dramatic lives. Years ago an Irish maid, long with our family during the peripatetic life between New York and Green Hills Farm, happened to mention, when we were expecting an Indian guest, and this only after years of serving us, that she herself had once been in India. Upon my exclamation of surprise she said yes, that her father had been in the British Army, and that his family had gone out there to be with him. She had been only three or four years old and could remember very little.
Whereupon I asked, “How did your father like India?”
And she replied absently, her mind obviously upon sheets and towels. “He liked it well enough, mum, except burnin’ them Hindus.”
“Burning the Hindus?” I repeated, stupefied.
“Yes, mum,” she said, still absently. “They took ’em prisoners by the wagonload and didn’t know what to do with ʼem. But it was narsty, burnin’ ʼem, mum.”
I did not and still do not believe the story, and all my inquiries have since denied the validity of this tale, but it shows how rumor can become stark as reality. The British did commit cruelties, as all colonial masters must if they are to maintain their power over such powerful peoples as the Indian. Thus the famous remark of the English captain, who when he heard of the devastation committed by bombs upon Warsaw in the Second World War cried out in anguish that this European city had been treated as though it were nothing but a Pathan village in India. Pathan villages might, it seemed, be bombed when the inhabitants disobeyed their colonial masters, although, as the Englishman said solemnly in vindication, not until the inhabitants had been duly warned in time to leave their homes.
My Several Worlds Page 41