Kinfolk

by Pearl S. Buck

  Here was something that Uncle Tao could oppose and he sat up. “Your mother should not come without your father,” he exclaimed. “I suppose that man full of ink has forgotten his ancestors! He has breathed in foreign winds and drunk Western waters. What do I care? But they all depend on me still. What would they do without old Uncle Tao to keep the tenants in their places and to collect a little money for them and hold the house together?” He sank back again and closed his eyes.

  “What indeed!” James agreed. “My mother has often said that.”

  Uncle Tao refused to be placated. “She had a loud voice as a girl. What has there been in these years in a foreign country that could improve her?”

  James smiled and rose to his feet. “You will see,” he said, and thanking Uncle Tao he went away. To Chen and Mary he only said that Uncle Tao did not oppose anything, and Mary and Chen were both cheered.

  “You need not laugh,” James told them. “Uncle Tao could if he liked put us all out of the village.”

  But they did not believe him. In these days nothing could make them afraid or sorrowful, and they laughed at everything.

  “There are many other villages,” Chen said.

  Mrs. Liang looked about her in some anxiety. She had combed her hair but she had not tried to change her wrinkled garments. She was glad therefore when she saw James and Mary and not her new son-in-law. They saw her at the same moment and at once they were a knot of three, their arms about each other.

  “Oh Ma, thank you for coming,” Mary cried.

  James took her bags and bundles and led the way to the cart which he had hired in the city. It was clean and he had folded a new quilt over the bottom. He helped his mother to get in.

  “Ma, it has no springs,” he reminded her.

  “Eh, you need not tell me anything from now on,” she said in a lively voice. She was feeling much better already. This was the air of home and she breathed it in deeply. “Such good smell!” she cried. “I am smelling hot sweet potatoes—”

  So it was. A vendor had come near with his small stove and he was taking out roasted sweet potatoes and laying them on the tray he carried on the other end of his pole. Mrs. Liang fumbled for her purse.

  “Let me, Ma,” James said hastily and putting paper bills on the tray he counted four potatoes. Mrs. Liang shrieked. “James, you have made a mistake—so much money!”

  “No, he hasn’t, Ma,” Mary said. “Money is worth nothing now, unless it is from America.”

  At this Mrs. Liang looked mysteriously cheerful. She fumbled inside her garments somewhere, gave a wrench or two at her waist, and brought out a small oilcloth package. Then she looked up and met the interested eyes of the mule carter and the vendor and she pursed her lips.

  “We better get going,” she said in a loud voice and in English. “I keep something to show you.” She put the thin package into her bosom, made clicking noises to the carter and James jumped in after Mary and they were off. Mrs. Liang sat between them and she put her hand on the arm of each. The country road was cobbled and the cart bounced up and down, but she did not mind this. She continued in English. “What I have in this pack is something your pa also doesn’t know. Why? Because I don’t tell him. Your pa is good but too liking to keep his money for himself. So I take small squeeze for myself!” She laughed gaily and Mary and James smiled, looking at one another over her head.

  “It’s delicious to have Ma,” Mary said.

  “How will we ever let you go again, Ma?” James asked. Now that his mother was here he felt warmed and more confident. Nothing was strange to her. She would be able to help him in the ancestral village, with Uncle Tao, with the hospital, with everybody. He would tell her everything.

  Mrs. Liang looked from one face to the other and continued in triumph. “When I come to you, children, I bring my money with me. Your pa thinking nothing and giving me only a little for myself and for you!”

  The bumping cart was shaking laughter out of her in gasps.

  “Oh Ma!” Mary said fondly. “I am so glad Chen is going to see you.” She gave her mother’s hand a squeeze, and then chanced to look at it. “Why, Ma, how dirty you are,” she exclaimed.

  Mrs. Liang was not embarrassed. “Never mind—it is not here like America,” she said comfortably. “Now tell me, Mary, how is this Chen looking and all that?”

  They were still talking in English because the carter sat on the edge of the vehicle, within a few inches of them. The mule took its own gait while the carter stared at them with bright and curious eyes. He was young and ragged and bold.

  “James, you tell,” Mary said with sudden shyness.

  “Well, Mother,” James said, “he is a little taller than I am, much bigger in the bones, a square head, a big nose—”

  “Not too big!” Mary put in.

  “Always making jokes, doesn’t like the city, doesn’t like to dress up, doesn’t like scholars—”

  “Sounds so nice,” Mrs. Liang said. “Who is go-between?”

  “I was, Ma,” James said.

  “And Uncle Tao?” Mrs. Liang asked shrewdly.

  “Uncle Tao is willing.”

  “When is wedding?”

  Mary looked shy again. “It depends on you, Ma, and when you have to go back to Pa.”

  “Six weeks only,” Mrs. Liang said.

  “Oh Ma!” Their voices rose in chorus. “We thought it would be six months at least,” Mary cried.

  Mrs. Liang looked grave. She glanced at the carter and lowered her voice and still speaking English she explained her anxieties. “Your pa is too valuable,” she ended. “I cannot just to leave him loose. Violet Sung is like some hungry tiger outside door of apartment.”

  “Oh Ma,” Mary murmured while James kept silence.

  “Just like Louise,” Mrs. Liang retorted. “Oh Ma—she says, oh Ma, you are screaming—such talking all the time! But I tell you I am older. Just now, Mary, you are engaging and you think men are too perfect.”

  “Only Chen,” James said, smiling.

  “Maybe just now Chen is too perfect,” Mrs. Liang conceded. “But here is China and men have no such good chance as in America where ladies are waiting everywhere with open bust and leg. I tell you, men cannot continue perfect in such case. You mustn’t think I am blaming your pa too much. No! I blame elsewhere—Violet Sung and whole America!”

  “Tell us about Louise,” James said, seeing his mother was growing agitated.

  To tell all about Louise occupied many miles, and by the time they understood the happy state of their younger sister, it was time to stop for the afternoon meal. Mrs. Liang let her appetite have its way and she consumed several bowls of noodles, steamed vegetable dumplings, steamed meat roll, bean curd with chopped raw onion, and salt fish. Clearly she was happy. Both James and Mary were alarmed for her digestion but she was triumphant. “Many years my stomach is homesick also,” she said. “Now I feel too good.”

  She slept for a while when they got in the cart again and it was twilight when they drew near to the inn where they were to spend the night. There when they were in their rooms, the door closed and barred after they had washed and had eaten a snack of bread in a thin sheet some twenty inches in diameter but rolled about garlic, they made ready for bed. Then Mrs. Liang delayed James as he was going into the next room. Alone with them she spoke Chinese.

  “I had told myself I would not ask about your younger brother,” she said sighing, “but I find him always in my thoughts. Tell me all you know, and then I will think of him in the night and be ready to put my sorrow aside tomorrow.”

  “Ma, you should sleep,” Mary said. But Mrs. Liang shook her head. “I know my old heart.” So James sat down on the edge of the hard board bed and he told his mother everything he knew. It was all too little, and because it was so little she wept bitterly. “At least we know where he is buried,” she said at last. “When the times are good again, we will move him into the place where our ancestors have their graves and where he belongs because liv
ing or dead he is still a Liang.”

  She bade James leave her then, and when he was gone she said to Mary, “If you hear me weeping in the night, let me weep.”

  Mary promised, but she told herself that she would lie awake and listen for her mother’s weeping. With all will to do so, nevertheless with health and youth and happiness and the long day’s riding across the country in the cold clear air, she fell quickly asleep. When they woke in the morning her mother was her usual cheerful self, and when they had washed and eaten they climbed into the cart and set forth again.

  Who could have known that the carter was an evil fellow? James had chosen him for his fresh face and his ready smile and for the agile way in which he leaped upon the cart. But like most men in evil times, he was made up of many parts. He earned a fair living by his mule cart but money was almost worthless, and he took goods too as tender. Thus he managed to feed himself and his young family and his old parents. Had the Liangs been ordinary traveling folk he would have dealt fairly with them, and had they been official folk he would have been fearful. But to him as he listened to the clack of some language he had never heard upon, their tongues they were only foreigners.

  Toward afternoon, having heard this clack for many hours, he leaned toward James and said, “What is this talk that you make?”

  James smiled. “It is English,” he said.

  The carter stared at him. “Yet you have all the same color of hair and eyes that I have and your skin is like mine except that you are not under the sun and wind every day, and I can see you are always washing yourselves. What is your country?”

  James was surprised. “We are Chinese, also, and the only reason we know a foreign language is because we have spent some years on the other side of the sea.”

  “What did you there?” the carter asked.

  When James told him, he went on to ask many more questions, wanting to know how rich Americans were and what they ate and how they looked.

  In the goodness of his heart James told him much, and the carter listened. Now Mrs. Liang did not like the way the carter began to look and so she broke in upon this talk in English.

  “James, don’t talk too much,” she exclaimed. “I think this fellow is maybe bad.”

  “Why, Ma, how suspicious of you!” Mary cried.

  “Maybe,” Mrs. Liang conceded, “but he has something I don’t like.”

  James smiled and ended the talk by saying he was sleepy, as indeed he was. Through the night before he had been wakeful after talking about Peter. But it was not only Peter. His mother had brought other memories with her, too, memories of his childhood and his boyhood in the comfortable American city. He thought of the great bridge by the river, and how he used to dream of what lay beyond it. Now he knew. There was no magic homeland. Here were poverty and oppression, and indifference to both. He began to sink again into the morass of despondence about himself and his life. Was he not throwing himself away, after all? Well, perhaps his mother would help him to answer that question. With some sort of return to childhood, which he fully recognized, he wondered if he should let her tell him, before she went back to his America, what he ought to do with his life.

  Now the steady swing of the cart soothed him. They were traveling over dusty country roads now, and there were no stones. He fell asleep.

  Out of deep sleep he was wakened by the sudden swerve of the cart off the road and by the shouts of men. Then he heard his mother’s loud firm voice. He opened his eyes. The cart came to a standstill and he sat up. At the open end he saw a crowd of heads, rough and dark. An arm reached in and pulled him. He did not see his mother or Mary. He scrambled out of the cart, kicking aside the arm. Mary and his mother stood by the cart. Mary’s face was fixed into angry calm but Mrs. Liang was talking loudly across her arms, folded on her bosom. Half a dozen young men in ragged garments stood pretending not to listen, yet hesitating as they stood. They looked half impudent, half sheepish. Clearly they had not counted on Mrs. Liang.

  “Your mothers!” she said to them severely. “Where have you been taught morals? Have you no reason in your skulls? Can you behave like common robbers? Are we rich folk? No! We are not rich. I have no money on me at all that can be useful to you. Look at me—have I any jewels?”

  She turned one ear and the other, and held out her hands. “That ring is my wedding ring and I have not taken it off in twenty years. Yes, you can cut off my finger but if you do, your head will be cut off.”

  The carter stood half turned away, pretending himself helpless. “You!” she shouted at him, “do not pretend anything!”

  James broke across this torrent. “Ma, why didn’t you wake me? You men! Who are you?”

  “They are robbers and bandits, that is what they are!” Mrs. Liang bawled. “They do not know we are Liangs! Wait until I tell Uncle Tao about them!”

  At the name of Uncle Tao alarm spread over the face of the tallest and darkest young man. He turned to the carter and said in reproach, “How is it you did not tell us they are the Liang family?”

  “How did I know?” the carter replied.

  “You rice bucket!” the other retorted. “Now the old man will not want to pay us his yearly guarantee because we have attacked his relatives.”

  “You had better tell us that you have offended and for once we will let the matter pass,” Mrs. Liang said in a hard voice. “If you get out of our way at once, I will not tell Uncle Tao, but if there is any delay—”

  There was no delay. The tall rough young man spread out his arms as a barrier between his men and the travelers and with much dignity Mrs. Liang commanded Mary to take her seat in the cart and she herself climbed into it with James’s help. Then James stepped in and the carter took up his whip sulkily.

  “Wait,” the young robber cried. “I have something to say.”

  Mrs. Liang looked at him with cold eyes. “Say it then, quickly,” she commanded. “Can I waste all this time?”

  The robber smiled, showing white teeth. “Lady, please know that we are not evil men. The times are very bad for poor folk like us. We belong to the earth and did we have good rulers and a kind Heaven we could work the land and find food for ourselves and our families. But the rulers are evil and Heaven looks the other way. Even so we rob only the rich.”

  Now this was the usual speech which robbers made when they had done their work, and so it had been from ancient times until now and Mrs. Liang was not deceived by it. “Did all do as you do,” she said severely, “there would be nothing but robbers and then whom would you rob?”

  The robber had no answer to this and he scratched his jaw and grinned and Mrs. Liang sat very straight and bade the carter go on. While they traveled the rest of that day she talked very much to the carter, until he became thoroughly frightened, and wanted to give them up as his passengers.

  He stopped the mule and threw down his whip and turned to James as a man.

  “Your honorable ancestor here has said so much good talk that I dare not take you to your village. Please hire another carter.” Only then did James intervene.

  “Ma, let him alone,” he said. “To change carts now would be to invite a fresh band of robbers.”

  So she subsided into muttering and then into silence and toward the end of the day they drove into the ancestral village.

  Uncle Tao had not gone to bed. He had bade his sons help him put on his best clothes and his appetite for his night meal had been poor. Feeling that none of his children, who had lived all their lives in the village, could be of use to him in meeting a lady who had lived years in a foreign country, he had sent for Chen, who came with pleasure.

  Chen knew far better than James the mass of iniquity, humor, and kindness that was Uncle Tao, for there was this difference between the two young men. James expected the best of all human beings and Chen expected nothing at all. Therefore he neither pitied Uncle Tao nor grew angry with him. He enjoyed the old man, good and evil alike, and laughed a great deal over what Uncle Tao said.

&
nbsp; “I do not know how our honest Liang family got into all these foreign ways,” Uncle Tao grumbled. “Until my generation we did not think of leaving our ancestral home and wandering around the four seas. My brother, the father of this bookworm Liang fellow, who now does not come home at all—well, my brother went to the northern capital but no further. In the city his children heard of foreign countries and nothing would do but this bookworm Liang must run over there, taking his wife and two small children, who have grown up as bad as foreigners, and then his wife gives birth to two more who are foreigners because they were born on foreign earth. All this has happened to us Liangs! Now they come back, these foreigners. The woman who is the mother of them—I remember her. She was a big mouth.”

  “On the other hand,” Chen said, “I am grateful for everything, since it will give me a good wife.”

  “Old-fashioned wives are best,” Uncle Tao grumbled. “When I frowned my wife trembled. When I shouted she wept. When I urged her she smiled. I did not praise her more than two or three times a year, for women and children cannot be praised. It makes them impudent. But this granddaughter of my brother whom you want to wed! Eh, I tell you, your life will not be too good. Begin strong, that is my advice to any man. Do not ask women anything. Do not tell them anything that is in your mind. I had a good wife, but I made her good.”

  Chen listened to all this, keeping back laughter. Uncle Tao looked magnificent, as he sat in the most honorable seat in the main room. He wore an ancient yellow brocaded satin gown which was frayed about the edges with age. It hung to his heels and though it was cut full, the sleeves covering his hands, yet it was tight across shoulders and belly. He wore new white cotton stockings which his elder daughter-in-law had made for him and a pair of large black shoes of quilted satin on thick padded soles.

  Thus they were conversing of many things in the universe when a hubbub at the gate where the other members of the family waited in their best clothes told them that the expected ones had arrived. Chen got up quickly and left the room. He should not be the first to greet the newcomer, and he stepped into a side court.