My Several Worlds

by Pearl S. Buck

  Others are well-known scholars and writers, exiled because they are Confucianists in an age which rejects the order of Confucius. They live in cities in small apartments, their wives doing the housework and finding it hard. “In China I had three servants,” such a Chinese lady said to me the other day. “Here I cannot afford one. I pity the American women, slaves to housework! Life is too difficult here in America.”

  Yes, it is hard for a Chinese exile. In his own country the scholar and the intellectual had honor. Here there is not as much honor for the scholar as for the successful prize fighter or football player or crooner or movie star. And the exile who is a scholar often has his principles. He will accept as his friends only those Americans who believe as he does. Traditionally the Chinese scholar was the administrator of Imperial government and today he reasons, though wrongly, that he who is not for Chiang Kai-shek is certainly for Mao Tse-tung. Tell him that it is possible to reject both equally and he cannot believe you—or he will not. In his narrowed world, for he does not accept the American, either, this exile grows bitter and ill-tempered. “He can be very mean,” the great Chinese novelist, Lau Shaw, once said, and I did not know then what he meant.

  But nowadays Lau Shaw himself is an exile of a sort, I suppose, living in Peking, and speaking what he is told to speak, and writing what he is told to write. I see quotations sometimes from his articles and stories. I hear echoes and I marvel at his obedience. But I know he has compensations. He is in Peking, he is in China, and his heart is free. He was not happy here in the United States as a visitor, for nothing could lift the shadow of exile from him. Once when he came to spend a weekend with us, it happened that we had invited a crowd of wounded veterans from the Valley Forge Hospital to a party in our big barn. They were tragic young men, soldiers who had been half blown to pieces in the war by booby traps and hand grenades. Their faces were all but obliterated, and the plastic surgeon was trying to rebuild them bit by bit. Our party was the first time they had been away from the hospital and the officer in charge had warned us not to be shocked. I had tried to explain to the children, but the explanation had been almost impossible. Luckily our cocker spaniel had a litter of puppies at their best and most lovable age, six weeks, their eyes open and mischief beginning to invade. I was a few minutes late for the party and from the house I could see the Red Cross station wagons arriving with the men. The children were already in the barn. I braced myself, dreading the next hours, and then I went over to be hostess.

  I need not have feared. With infallible instinct the children had taken the basket of puppies to the barn with them and Rusty, the mother, and Silver, the father, then alive, had gone with them. When I entered the barn what I heard was laughter, the loud self-forgetting laughter of young men and children at play, and what they were playing with was the puppies, and the puppies were performing at their best and funniest. The men had forgotten their faces, forgotten for the moment the war. They had gone back to being boys at home, and the children, proud of the puppies, had forgotten that the boys had no faces. They were all laughing, laughing at the puppies. The evening was off to a roaring success.

  What I really wanted to tell about this story, however, was that Lau Shaw was already there, too. I had asked him to speak to the men and I introduced him after the solid refreshments, explaining that he was China’s greatest novelist. I had no idea what he would say. Lau Shaw is really a very old-fashioned Chinese. If he had his way, I am sure that he would like to have lived in China five hundred years ago. He is a sensitive man, over-sophisticated perhaps, instinctively avoiding anything painful, even in conversation. What then would he say to the pitiful young men?

  He got up, diffident as ever, he stood before them a moment, and I could see that his eyes were closed. Then he began to speak in his deep gentle voice. What did he talk about? About shadowboxing in old Peking, if you please, surely as alien a subject as could be imagined! I doubt whether one of those young Americans had ever heard of shadowboxing. Of course Lau Shaw knew that, and so he proceeded to explain the art, its meaning, its story, its historical significance, all in the simplest and most charming fashion, and then without the slightest self-consciousness he illustrated his talk himself by making the movements of shadowboxing into a sort of formal dance, a set of stylized motions. I knew the subject well, I had often watched shadowboxers in Chinese theaters, but I was entranced. And looking about me I saw that the men were entranced, too, comprehending without knowing, perhaps, just what it was they comprehended, but fascinated and carried away into another world they had never seen. When Lau Shaw stopped, there was silence, a great sigh, and then wild applause. And this is what I mean by human understanding.

  Once again I heard Lau Shaw wield the same magic, this time in New York, before a sophisticated city audience. It was at an East and West Association meeting and he had been very reluctant to speak. He was averse to any publicity, hating to be known, wary of politics and political questions and discussion. He made the same hesitation before he spoke and then he delivered a delightful discourse, exactly as he might have done in Peking. The subject? “Crickets, Kites and Pekinese Dogs and Their Significance in Chinese Life,” and the audience was enthralled.

  So gentle a creature as Lau Shaw was of course cheated again and again by the cruel-hearted in the United States, as well as elsewhere. He made friends once in his lonely existence in New York with a man who professed to admire him, and after a month or so of acquaintance, the man, seeming intelligent and well informed, and therefore trusted by Lau Shaw, asked for a twenty-four hour loan of a hundred dollars. It was Lau Shaw’s allowance for the month, but in the Chinese tradition which does not deny a friend he handed the sum to the American who never appeared again. Several such experiences, I am ashamed to say, this Chinese great man suffered. We Americans do not know how often crimes are thus committed against guests in our country. If we knew we would not prate so much of how we are cheated when we go abroad.

  Undoubtedly the revolution in China has had a disastrous effect upon Chinese scholars and intellectuals and not one of them has fulfilled his early promise. Even Hu Shih’s great books, so brilliantly begun, have never been finished. Yet the cause, if not the blame, for this rests partly upon us, too, who belong to the West. Hu Shih and Ch’en Tu-hsiu, the two leaders of the literary revolution in China—and it is necessary to remember that in revolutions scholars and intellectuals were always the leaders—had early committed themselves to the West, as I have said. Ch’en Tu-hsiu, indeed, even attacked Confucianism as a denial of human rights and Hu Shih maintained in those days that the culture of the West was not to be considered materialistic merely because it made life easier. Both declared themselves for an outright adoption of Western ways.

  Yet the literary revolution, so brilliantly begun by these two young men, failed in its purpose of reaching the people, for the First World War revealed deep faults in Western civilization. War was shocking to them as Asians, to whom civilization meant a universal humanism whose inevitable fruit was peace. After the war, the vitality, even the ferocity, of the Russian revolution attracted the fiery nature of Ch’en Tu-hsiu, for, he reasoned, if violence be the secret of power in the world today, then choose the most violent means to the designed end. He became the founder and leader of the Chinese Communist party. Hu Shih, a man of different character, left his work permanently unfinished and retired into the life of a scholar and cosmopolite.

  One is not inclined to blame. The writer suffers in profound ways from the injustices and the griefs of the times. It is inevitable, too, that in the loneliness of exile—for many Chinese will never see their homeland again, I fear, they are too old, and they know it—they feel keenly the indifference of their American neighbors and sometimes even of their American friends, and they cannot love America. We ought therefore to remember them and show them full respect, for we are honored by their presence.

  In these years while my personal life was absorbed in home and growing family, I had at th
e same time been learning about my own people. Life in China and with the Chinese had taught me much about human beings, for in ancient countries humanity and human relationships are the primary concern. To know how a person feels was to my Chinese friends more important than anything else about him, for until one knows how another feels no friendship can be established nor even business carried on with mutual benefit. I applied this education and its skills to those who surrounded me in my new life, to neighbors and to acquaintances and to the casual contacts of everyday. That I might learn more widely, I travelled to various parts of the country, so that I could see the contrasts beneath North and South, East and West, contrasts far more striking than their geographical counterparts in China or indeed in any other country that I had ever seen.

  I began to know my fellow Americans for what they are, a generous, impulsive, emotional people, unstable, not only from nature, but also from environment. This environment is historical as well as present. We have changed so quickly from a pioneer and rural culture to industrialism and its consequent urbanism that we are still divided between the two major types of civilization. Our political system, too, abetted and even partly caused the instability of our life. The complete overturn every four years in our central government, or at least the effort to make the overturn, the intervening upset of local politics, the shortness of the term of office, not only for major officials? but for the lesser ones as well, make impossible the development of enduring policies and principles. A sense of haste and hurry pervades our daily life, bred of the necessity for action before the change again, and this permeates our thinking. The safety valves of English democratic procedures, whereby a government remains until the people overthrow it, are not ours. Good or bad, certain men can count upon remaining in office for a certain number of years, to do good or evil or nothing at all. Yet however beneficial the good, it may be impermanent, for in four years or eight, seldom more, the whole regime is upset or can be upset. To this, more than to any other single cause, I began to ascribe the superficiality of American life and thought. We live from day to day, unable to plan for long years ahead, lest a new government bring about far-reaching changes. I cannot sufficiently stress the disastrous effect upon the life of our people of continual political uncertainty, especially when in addition to it we have the heavy task of amalgamating a population which has come from so many varying parts of the world, and so quickly that there has not been time to create the real union to be found not in political organization so much as in the deep human roots of tradition and custom developing through a long common life together.

  Thus reflecting, I began to be alarmed in the year 1941, for the future of Americans. I knew very well that at the end of the war we would be the ones on the victorious side, and undoubtedly, too, the strongest among the victors, and therefore the peoples of Asia would be expecting a leadership from us which we would be unable to give, mainly because of our own instability but also because of our ignorance of Asian peoples, their history and their importance in the postwar world. When I say importance I mean not only in potentiality but also in the ferment and trouble and struggle in which we would inevitably be involved in the whole world, but centering this time in Asia because of the coincidence of the Second World War with Asian determination for independent modern life. Try as we might we could not again escape as we did after the First World War, by withdrawal. Asia this time must be reckoned with. Yet how could our people meet such a future with these peoples when we knew nothing about their past? I grew wretched with continual pondering upon such matters, aware as I was of the deep hostilities of Asia against the white man. Could Americans escape those whirlwinds of history? The only hope, I came to see, lay in the possibility that we could establish ourselves as a separate people, a new people, not to be allied even in thought with old empires and colonialisms. We must deal with the Asians as Americans not involved with the past, and we were fortunate in the possibility, since we had indeed waged no active wars for colonial purposes nor established any real colonies, and since our regime in the Philippines had been relatively enlightened, and it was clear that we had no wish even to stay there. We were lucky enough, that is, to have already a great fund of good will in Asia, and especially in China, upon which to draw for the future. Only new and reckless action could forfeit it. This was always possible in a war, when many young men are shipped willy-nilly and without real preparation into a foreign country. We had experienced that in Europe in the First World War.

  I have never been an evangelical missionary, and indeed abhor the general notion, and yet I know very well that my missionary beginnings have shaped me to the extent of feeling responsible at least for what I can personally do about a given situation which needs mending. What then could I do, I asked myself, to help my countrymen, even a few of them and even on a small scale, to know something of the lives and thoughts of the peoples with whom they must inevitably deal, either as friends or enemies, in the future and that very near? The one gift I had brought with me to my own country was the knowledge of Asia and especially of China and Japan, gained not only through years of living there but through years of concentrated study, travel and observation. True, I wrote books. But books, even best sellers, reach only a small number of the total population of our country. Do they not reach the leading minds? Yes, but in a democracy such as ours the leading minds seldom achieve a place of permanent influence. And the men who sit in Congress or even in the White House are usually not our leading minds. They are not the thinkers. Still less have they time for reflection, or even for thoughtful travel. In a democracy, I reasoned, it is the people who must be informed.

  But how?

  For a number of years my husband had been editor of Asia Magazine, a monthly started in 1917 by Willard Straight, then American Consul in Peking. Impressed by the fabulously interesting scene in which he worked, Willard Straight put a portion of his wealth into a magazine designed to inform and amuse and interest the American public by describing in authentic prose and pictures the colorful and powerful Asian peoples. I had a sentimental interest in the magazine because some of my own first writing had been published there, and I had continued to write for it occasionally. Yet it had never been able to find the number of readers it deserved. Americans could not be interested in Asia, it seemed. The magazine, maintaining high standards of excellence, had through the years lost much money annually and only a wealthy family could have continued it, as Mrs. Straight did continue it after Mr. Straight’s death, and after her marriage to Leonard Elmhirst. My husband had steadfastly reduced the loss over the years of his editorship, maintaining authenticity above all, but the number of readers did not greatly increase. There were, it seemed, only about fifteen thousand or at most twenty thousand Americans who were interested in Asian peoples, in spite of the inevitable future looming ahead.

  Could this be true? It seemed impossible to me, and in 1941 when Mrs. Elmhirst decided to close the magazine, my husband and I wished to continue it for a while to see whether this small interest could be increased. There was no other magazine in the United States which carried full and authentic information about Asian life. At that moment it seemed folly to end the last means of informing our people and providing the knowledge essential to their own safety and welfare. It was as near a missionary impulse as I ever had, and my husband shared it. We were given the magazine and all its assets in the hope, encouraged by Mrs. Elmhirst, that it could be saved. Suffice it to say that we did keep it going for another five years, until events after the end of the war made it impossible. There was, as a matter of fact, an increase in American interest in Asia during the war years, and had there been enough paper available, the magazine might have become self-supporting.

  In those ten years, too, I founded The East and West Association and from it learned enough for many books. Even a magazine, I could see, did not educate our people. They learned better from hearing than reading, and best of all from seeing. Why not then, I thought, bring to them men and
women of Asia who could speak for themselves, show what they were, explain their own history and civilization? Why not devise a sort of Asian adult education for American communities? In this way our people could get firsthand, from Asian citizens, the story of Asia, without bias and without persuasion. The idea was very simple. In the United States were many pleasant and learned visitors from various countries. I was interested especially in Asians, but if there were such visitors also from Europe why not include them, as well? The world of peoples, I had early learned from Mr. Kung, was indeed one family under heaven. If average Americans could see themselves as part of the human race, they might be stimulated to curiosity and thus to interest and thus to understanding. It was the usual technique of learning.

  We set up a small organization, secured tax exemption and a good list of sponsors, and began our work with an opening dinner in Washington, followed by a large meeting in New York, to explain the purpose of the Association. Wendell Willkie made the main opening speech in New York, and it was there that I first heard him speak of his one world. Hu Shih, then Chinese Ambassador to Washington, spoke, too, and various dignitaries from other Asian embassies. The job was begun. It was not to be carried on by such meetings, of course, but by men and women travelling far and wide over the country, sometimes alone, sometimes in couples, or in groups if they were entertainers, and their task was never to be political but always cultural, and even culturally it was first of all to be simple and friendly and vivid. They were to speak of everyday life in their own countries, of their ways and thoughts and hopes, illustrating what they said with costumes, pictures, instruments of music or drama. We chose good people, not necessarily famous or even highly skilled, and indeed I preferred not to have the very famous. I wanted our average Americans to see men and women of Asia who were like themselves, teachers and students and technical men here to learn American methods. One of the best men we ever had was a quiet little Indian professor, here on his sabbatical year, who visited many communities and spoke to all kinds of groups and stayed in American homes and answered questions over the dinner table and around the evening fire. Expenses for such visitors were paid by the local groups, and I was touched and amazed to find that I had been wrong in thinking that Americans cared nothing about the people of Asia. Asia, it is true, roused no interest as such, but a man or woman from Asia, in the flesh and in their own town, speaking in the high school auditorium, or from the pulpit on a Sunday, staying over the night and cooking an Asian dish for supper, and helping to wash the dishes, making himself human and friendly, Americans were very much interested in him. Nor was the interest one-sided. The visitors themselves came back with shining eyes to our little East and West Association office in New York. Not only had they told the Americans about their countries and their peoples—and how they appreciated the opportunity to do this—but they learned about Americans as they had never had a chance to do before. It was so different, they said, from living in a hotel, from walking the streets of a strange city, even very different from living in a university dormitory and sitting in a classroom. They had stayed in American homes, they had played with the children, they had helped with the chores, they had met real people in the school auditorium and had answered thousands of questions. They had showed American women how to wear a sari, how Korean women put on full skirts and jackets, how to cook Chinese food; they had talked with businessmen and teachers and preachers and workingmen. Now they could go back to their own countries and tell their own people how friendly and good the Americans really are—different indeed from politicians and officials.