Kinfolk

by Pearl S. Buck

  “Go on,” James said, “tell us what you think. None of us know.”

  “I don’t know what to think,” Peter said. “I have been trying to find out. The dirt—the disease—the stupidity!” He stared at them all in a sort of rage. “I shall never forgive Pa as long as I live—letting us believe that everything was wonderful, hiding it all under a Confucian mist! No wonder he doesn’t come back!”

  “I suppose you wish you hadn’t come back,” Mary flung at him.

  But Peter would not accept this. “I don’t wish that. I am glad I came back. If this is the way things are in my country I’d rather know it.”

  “Still you wish they weren’t,” Mary argued.

  “Of course I wish they weren’t!” Peter reared his head like a young stallion and glared at them. “I wish the president of my college weren’t a pussy-footing old fool! I wish he didn’t love tea parties and flattering sycophantic professors—and women! I wish we had a decent government! I wish we needn’t be afraid of secret police sneaking everywhere like rats in sewers! I wish I didn’t have to see my college mates jailed—tortured—killed! I wish we even had the guts to rebel—and stand together—which we haven’t—because we’re all rotten through and through—” His voice broke, tears rushed to his eyes, and he turned away his head.

  James had listened, his eyes steadily on his young brother’s flushed face. Now he spoke. “We all wish that some things were different. It is like coming home from college and discovering that your parents can’t read and write. But they are still your parents. We have to take our people as they are and change them as we can.”

  “They won’t change,” Peter muttered.

  “I suppose we have to prove to them that change would be better,” James said reasonably.

  “How can you prove anything to a lot of village dolts?” Peter demanded.

  “What else can you do?” Mary demanded in return.

  Peter gave her a strange dark look. “There are other ways,” he said.

  They gazed at him with blank looks and he rose to his feet impetuously. “Oh, I don’t belong here and we all know it. The sooner I go back to the city the better it will be for us all. I can board at the college.”

  He went into his own room and shut the door. They were silent for a moment after this. Chen looked very grave. He sat on the high wooden threshold of the door, his hands clasped about his knees, and he gazed out into the barren court surrounded by the low earthen wall. “The innocents!” he murmured. “We must pity them. But they are terrible in their innocence—and dangerous.”

  “What do you mean?” Mary asked.

  “Peter is American,” Chen said. “He has been brought up innocent. He believes that anything can be done and done quickly. You do it by force, either of money or arms. What can the innocent understand of the long slow years, the thousands of years? What can they know of the incorruptible people?”

  “Are the people incorruptible?” Mary asked. Her voice was troubled and wondering and not at all like Mary’s voice, usually brisk and firm.

  “There are corruptible men but no corruptible people,” Chen said.

  “You give me hope,” James said.

  They talked long together that day without Peter. They planned how they would begin, in what small ways, with what few people. They would begin at once, tomorrow, Mary gathering the children together, James setting up his small clinic. They would let the people of the ancestral village lead them, and as they themselves were led, they would lead again.

  “And Peter?” Mary asked.

  “Peter must decide for himself,” James said.

  Young Wang was much troubled. He had been told to go with Peter to the city and see him settled in his room at the college and then come back again. This he would do. But should he first tell his master about the marble bridge? So long as Peter was safe in the village he had felt no need to tell. Yet were Peter to be alone in the city should there not be warning to the elder brother?

  He took his chance to talk with Peter himself as they wound along the country roads northward. “Now, young master,” he argued, “I am older than you, though a serving man only, and I beg you to have nothing to do with such students as do not read their books and who instead spend their time complaining against the government. All governments are devouring beasts, and they feed upon the people. Avoid officials, I pray you. This we are taught even when we are children. And especially now, avoid our present officials, who are beside themselves with greed, since money is worthless. They will destroy all who complain. The nearer a government is to its end, the more cruel and hungry it becomes. Was it not so in the days of the old empire?”

  Peter did not answer this and Young Wang, stealing a look at his sullen face, went on. “I have not told your elder brother anything about the marble bridge, and I will not if you will promise me only to read your books and not mix yourself with those who read no books.”

  “I do not need to promise anything to you,” Peter said rudely. “Let me tell you this—I do not care what you say to my brother.”

  Young Wang did not say any more after this. He became again only the good silent servant and he went with Peter to the college and there they found no room empty. But after some search Peter found a friend, a youth from the province of Hupeh, whose name was Chang Shan, and this friend said, “There is space in my room for another bed, and you are welcome to the space if you can find the bed.”

  So Young Wang ran to the thieves’ market and found a bed and put it up in the narrow room and he spread quilts and he bought some fruits and sweets and did all he could for his young master. When there was nothing more to do, he waited until he could find the Hupeh youth alone for a few minutes and then he said, “This young master of mine is wholly ignorant, coming from America, and he does not understand anything here. I beg you to shield him and watch over him and warn him and do not let him fall into evil hands. He walks with his head high and he does not see where his feet are going.”

  The Hupeh youth smiled at this and said, “Yes, yes,” and Young Wang gave him a parcel of food he had bought as a gift and then having indeed done all he could, he returned to the village. There he made no report to James beyond saying that he had seen Peter safely to the college and had bought him a bed and that he was among friends. Young Wang was a prudent man and he was loath to make trouble in the family he served. It might be that Peter would heed his warning. At least he would wait and see. Meanwhile the affairs of his own marriage began to press him. His father-in-law was a canny man who did not wish to yield up his authority in the inn too easily. The first necessity therefore, Young Wang decided, was to marry the daughter and get her with child and so establish himself secure in this family.

  Young Wang’s wedding day dawned clear and calm, a good day in the midst of days of wind and sandstorm and this he took to be a favorable omen. The wedding was a common one without extra show, but Young Wang in his thriftiness considered it money soundly spent to pay for a meal at the inn for everybody. The gentry ate apart from the others, and the Liang family were put in the inner rooms. Uncle Tao let his hunger loose and he ate and drank mightily, and all admired his capacity.

  Chen, delicately perceiving what was his proper place, did not sit down long with the Liangs and yet he did not sit anywhere else. He wandered about among the guests making jokes and teasing the bride, who ran here and there with the feast dishes as though it were any wedding except her own. James sat near to Uncle Tao but at the outer edge of the tables, and from here he looked at the villagers and country folk. They were hearty people and good, ignorant of letters and yet wise in the ways of human life. They were not innocents. They did not expect much and they were happy with what they had. Yet they would gladly be more happy if it were possible. They liked Uncle Tao and they despised him, too. They bore with such gentry; they did not wish them dead, but they watched their own scales when they measured seed rice and harvested grain. No, they were not innocents. They granted to every man his
own right to the life he liked best, or the life that he had been given by Heaven.

  From this wedding feast James returned to his own room late that night and he sat thinking and alone for a long time. He was not here, he perceived, only to do what good he could. Perhaps he was not here to do good at all. He was here to release some force of life now hidden in his people. To heal their bodies was to release force, to teach them to read and to write was to release yet more of such force. What was this force? It was good sense and strong wisdom, and it was an inheritance. It was also his inheritance. While he gave his people the tools of health and letters, he gave himself the means of learning what their wisdom was, and when he knew them he could enter into his inheritance, from which he had been cut off. Thus would he find his own roots.

  In this humility he began his new life.

  Spring delayed that year, and week after week the cold winter nights covered the city. On one such night the sky clouded soon after sunset and snow began to fall. Many poets of ancient times had written poems about snow falling upon the roofs of the palaces, but Peter could not read these poems and he did not even know of their existence. And the peaceful times in which they had been written were gone. It was one thing to look out from a snug and comfortable house set in a prosperous nation and see the snowflakes drifting upon imperial roofs. Today the palaces were empty and poet and emperor alike were dust. The city was desolate, the people without good rulers and the enemy only newly driven away. The past was no more, and the future could not be seen.

  Peter, pressing his face against the small dirty windowpane of his friend’s room, saw the lamplight reflected only upon large wet snowflakes that tomorrow would make the day’s work harder, the classrooms more chill and damp, the streets slippery. Here inside this heatless room the temperature was already freezing. Like most students, his friend Chang Shan had contrived a small stove upon which to boil hot water to drink, or at best for making a little tea. The stove was only an oil can bought from someone who had followed the American army and had salvaged all tin cans. But Chang Shan, being inventive, had lined the tin with clay and had made a frame of heavy wire to support a small copper kettle. The hot water, poured into cheap pottery bowls, kept their hands from being too chilblained for writing, and the same hot water in their stomachs gave them momentary warmth within.

  Peter looked at Chang Shan. He was a tall very thin young man of twenty-two. Anyone could see that he had tuberculosis, as most of the students had. His head was large and the bones of his skull protruded. A big slightly arched nose, full pale lips and solid white teeth were nothing uncommon in his looks, but these, combined as they were with fiery eyes, gave his head nobility. Everybody secretly admired Chang Shan, but few dared to be his friends. In these times when life depended upon many things besides food, friends could be more dangerous than enemies. Peter and Chang Shan were friends.

  “You will not believe me when I tell you that the place where my father lives is warmed in every corner by pipes carrying hot water,” Peter said.

  “It is a pity you do not return to your father,” Chang Shan said. He was reading a badly printed book and he did not look up.

  “I do not know why I cannot return,” Peter replied. They spoke in Chinese because Chang did not speak English. Peter had learned to speak the Peking Mandarin, partly that he might talk with Chang Shan. Yet he had never taken Chang Shan to the city house. James and Mary, he had felt, would not like this friend. Chang Shan was an absolutist. When anything was not good, he believed in its total destruction. Thus he believed now in the destruction of the old family system, of the president of the university, of all capitalists, of the Chinese written language, of inflation, of the high cost of living, of the gold standard, of Confucianism, the classics, and the government. It was only a matter of time until Chang Shan would be caught by the secret police and killed. He knew it and for this reason he did not allow himself to fall in love with a girl who loved him. He refused even to see her and the only way she could comfort herself was to come to the room when he was away and leave small packages of food. Chang Shan tried not to eat these but sometimes his hunger compelled him to do so. The girl, Fengying, was a plain ugly female student, and she waylaid Peter as often as she could to ask if Chang Shan had eaten the food and to beg Peter to persuade him to do so. She did not hide her adoration. She declared to Peter, “Chang Shan will be a great revolutionary leader. It is our duty to keep him alive.” In her heart she hoped Peter did not consume her gifts, but she did not say so, fearing he might be angry and so refuse to answer her questions about Chang Shan.

  “Yes, yes—” Peter had agreed. She was so ugly, her bulging eyes so pathetic behind her steel-rimmed spectacles, that he escaped from her as soon as he could.

  “I do not know why I do not return to my father,” Peter said now to Chang Shan. He, too, was trying to study but he had found it impossible to read the assignment for the next day. It mattered little enough whether he read it or not. The professor would doubtless not come to his class through the snow. His shoes, like those of his students, were only of cotton cloth, and the snow would soon wet them and he had not another pair. He had long ago sold his leather shoes for money to buy rice and so could buy no more leather shoes.

  “You are weakening again,” Chang Shan said scornfully. “You have been wet-nursed on Confucianism. You are, I suppose, the superior man.”

  “You are very unjust,” Peter said bitterly.

  “I am not unjust, then, to myself,” Chang Shan said gravely. All this time he had not lifted his eyes from the book. Now suddenly he looked at the window. When he saw the reflection of the light upon the falling snowflakes, he got up quickly and went out.

  Peter did not ask where he went. Chang Shan might have gone out for any reason. Since there were no indoor toilets, he might merely have stepped outside in the street to relieve himself. Or he might have decided that this was a good night to go to the marble bridge.

  He came back in a few minutes. “The night is dark and even the police will not be out in the snow,” he announced. “I am going to the bridge.”

  Chang Shan never asked anyone to go with him to the bridge. He merely told a few other students that he was going. Then he went off alone. Usually before he reached the bridge two or three others would follow him. At the bridge they would work in silence, digging into the yellow clay, making a hole big enough for dynamite. Did they have the pure dynamite that Americans used it would not have taken them so long. But they had only the poor stuff left by the Japanese in a warehouse—lucky at that, for the students had found it first. The bridge was huge. Built centuries ago of marble with granite foundations, it was as strong as the day it had been finished. The only signs of time were the hollows worn by the feet of generations upon its surface. Since these were even now only an inch or so deep, the bridge could exist for thousands of years longer. But the students were planning to blow it up for the very reason that it was so old and huge and because its size and permanence made them angry. It signified the glory of an age that was gone, and it was a bridge not only over the water beneath it, but also from the present into the past. The past was what the students wanted to forget because they could not share its glory, and dead glory did them no good now. It was the present which they wanted to build, and they craved hope for the future. Yet the people, those who lived in villages and upon the land, remained on the other side of the bridge, separated from the students in the university. These people still lived in the past, they were content with themselves, they trusted the land, which is eternal. Therefore the students wanted to destroy the bridge in protest.

  In protest against what? They said, against the government. But actually it was in protest against their tuberculosis and their poverty and the miserable teaching they were given when they were hungry for true knowledge; in protest, too, against their wretched childhoods and against their own ambitions, never to be fulfilled, and most of all in protest against their broken pride and the hopelessnes
s of their future. But the students did not know all this. They blamed only their rulers, who they insisted, had sold the country to Western imperialists.

  Alone now in Chang Shan’s room Peter determined that he would not follow his friend. Yet he felt so lonely that he was terrified. He knew that he could never return to his father. If he went home he would quarrel with his father. Sooner or later he would tell his father that he was a liar and had cheated his own children. His mother had become a fool in Peter’s eyes. He did not want to see his parents again as long as he lived. Neither did he want to see his American friends. He could not tell them about China. There were no more dreams to be made, now that he knew the truth. Yet he was more impatient with James and Mary than with any of them. The paltriness of what they planned, the folly of finding satisfaction in it! There was something splendid in Chang Shan’s determination to destroy. Chang Shan was not a Communist. He did not believe that the Communists were any better than others. They, too, Chang Shan said, should be destroyed. A clean country, the old gone, the selfish swept away by the storm—this was the only hope. “Even if I destroy myself in the storm,” Chang Shan argued, “I leave cleanness behind me.”

  For sheer need to have something clear and definite Peter sat down at the table and began to write on a piece of paper. It was only a small piece for even paper was too dear to waste.

  “Our country is foul,” so he began to write in English. “We must make it clean. Our country is rotten. We must ruthlessly cut away what is rotten and burn it up. A prairie wind, a prairie fire, that is what I see. After the fire the ashes, the clean ashes. Who will light this fire? It can be lit by a single match held in a human hand.”

  He sat a long time in thought and he kept seeing the match struck against the substance, and then the flame blazing into a fire as wide as the world. Chang Shan was right. He rose, and catching up his padded coat from the bed as he went, he wrapped it about him and went out. He was better off than Chang Shan who had no padded coat.