My Several Worlds: A Personal Record

by Pearl S. Buck

  How sorry I feel nowadays for the overcrowded lives of my own children, whose every hour is filled with school and sport and social events of various kinds! They have no chance to know the delight of long days empty except for what one puts into them, where there is nothing to do except what one wants to do. Then the imagination grows like the tree of life, enchanting the air. No wonder I was a happy child, and that my parents were happy, too. We met briefly, we smiled and made communication about necessary matters of food and clothing and the small tasks of my day. My mother bade me hold my shoulders straight, and my father reminded me at table to hold my knife and fork as he did. Upon this subject of the knife and fork my mind was kept divided, for my mother ate her food as Americans do, cutting her meat and then putting down the knife to take up her fork, but my father ate as English people do, holding the fork in his left hand and the knife in his right, and piling the chopped food against his fork. Each gave me directions and sometimes I obeyed one and sometimes the other, wondering at first, and then accepting, as children do, the peculiarities of parents and letting chance decide each meal. Meanwhile my private choice was chopsticks.

  My early memories are not of parents, however, but of places. Thus our big whitewashed brick bungalow, encircled by deep arched verandas for coolness, was honeycombed with places that I loved. Under the verandas the beaten earth was cool and dry, and I had my haunts there. The gardener made a stove for me from a large Standard Oil tin with one side cut away. He lined the three sides with mud mixed with lime and then set into it a coarse iron grating. When I lit a fire beneath this and put in charcoal I could really cook, and of course I cooked the easy Chinese dishes I liked best and that my amah taught me. I had a few dolls but my “children” were the small folk of the servants’ quarters or the neighbors’, and we had wonderful hours of play, unsupervised by adults, all of whom were fortunately too busy to pay us heed. I remember going to bed at night replete with solid satisfaction because the day had been so packed with pleasurable play.

  Under those verandas, too, I kept my pet pheasants and there I watched the tiny thimbles of tawny down pick their way out from the pale brown eggs, and there I smoked my first corn silk cigarette, an unknown sin in my world, but introduced to me by the red-haired small son of a visiting missionary who had lately returned from America.

  “All the kids smoke in America,” the rascal said and so we smoked in the latticed cellars while our elders talked theology upstairs. It was not exciting enough for me, however, for in my other world any child could take a puff from a Chinese grandparent’s water pipe and adults only laughed when children choked on the raw Chinese tobacco smoke. Opium I knew I must never taste, even though sometimes the parents of my best friend might administer it for an ache in a small stomach, for opium was an evil. My parents spent weary hours trying to help some addict break the chain that bound him and I feared the sweet and sickish stuff, imagining, as children do, that if once I tasted it I would grow thin and yellow, like the father of my next door playmate, and never be myself again.

  There was more than that to opium. Our city, which lay beyond the fields and ponds and down by the river’s edge, had once been captured in July, 1842, by the British during the Opium Wars, when China had tried to stop the entrance of opium from India under the English flag and had failed. The Manchu general, Hai Ling, was in charge of the defense of our city in those years, and feeling himself disgraced by defeat he retired into his house and set it on fire and so perished. The English, incensed at the loss of revenue, had insisted on their right to trade, maintaining that it was not they who had introduced the opium habit to the Chinese, that opium was grown on Chinese soil and greedy Chinese traders merely wanted all the income for themselves. Probably this was partly true, for nothing in this life, it seems, is simon-pure, and the hearts of men are always mixed. Yet there were many Chinese who were not traders and who honestly enough were frightened at the tremendous increase of opium-smoking among their people, and it was also true that most of the opium, especially the cheaper kind, did come from India, and not only under the English flag, but also under the Dutch and the American flags. My vigorous parents sided entirely with the Chinese and did their doughty best to help many a man and woman to break the opium habit.

  The use of opium, it may here be remarked, was not native to China. It was first brought in by Arab traders during the Middle Ages, and was then introduced as a drug beneficial in diarrhea and intestinal diseases. The Chinese did not begin smoking opium until the Portuguese traders taught them to do so in the seventeenth century when it became a fashionable pastime for officials and rich people. Most Chinese, even in my childhood, considered it a foreign custom, and indeed their name for opium was yang yien, or “foreign smoke.” The feelings of the average Chinese can therefore be understood the better when a substantial part of the English trade was in opium, grown in India for markets developed in China.

  The Chinese lost the Opium Wars, and after each loss the price was heavy. Treaty ports were yielded, the rights of trade and commerce were demanded and given, and high indemnities had to be paid. The story can be read in any good history of China, and I will not retell it here, except as it influenced my world. Chinkiang, my home city, had been deeply affected by the wars, although it was still an important city, for it stood at the junction of the Yangtse River and the Grand Canal, and so was in a key position for the transmitting of tax money and produce to Peking. An early writer, J. Banow, in his book, Travels in China, says of my Chinese home town in 1797: “The multitude of ships of war, of burden and of pleasure, some gliding down the stream, others sailing against it; some moving by oars, and others lying at anchor; the banks on either side covered with towns and houses as far as the eye could reach; as presenting a prospect more varied and cheerful than any that had hitherto occurred. Nor was the canal on the other side less lively. For two whole days we were continually passing among fleets of vessels of different construction and dimensions.”

  In my time, however, Chinkiang was a treaty port and the stretch of land along the river’s edge was a British Concession. High walls surrounded it, broken by two great iron gates that were always locked at night. Within the boundaries lived the British Consul, his vast house set high on a wooded hill, and all the English and Americans and other foreigners, except for a few missionary families who preferred to live among the Chinese. My parents were among these. They were constitutionally unable to preach what they did not practice, and the discrepancy between a gospel of love and brotherhood and the results of the Opium Wars was too much for them. They could not live happily behind the high walls and the iron gates, although the streets there were clean and shaded by trees and beggars were not allowed. Happy for me that I had such parents, for instead of the narrow and conventional life of the white man in Asia, I lived with the Chinese people and spoke their tongue before I spoke my own, and their children were my first friends.

  Did I not see sights which children should not see and hear talk not fit for children’s ears? If I did, I cannot remember. I saw poor and starving people in a famine year, but my parents bade me help them in relief, and I learned early that trouble and suffering can always be relieved if there is the will to do it, and in that knowledge I have found escape from despair throughout my life. Often I saw lepers, their flesh eaten away from their bones, and I saw dead children lying on the hillsides, and wild dogs gnawing at their flesh, and I saw rascals enough and heard rich cursing when men and women quarreled. I cannot remember anything evil from these sights and sounds. The dead taught me not to fear them, and my heart was only made more tender while I chased the dogs away as best I could. It is better to learn early of the inevitable depths, for then sorrow and death take their proper place in life, and one is not afraid.

  And how much joy I saw and shared in! Our Chinese friends took me into their homes and lives, and that wonderful simplicity which is the result of long living mellowed all their relationships with me. The kindliness of servants w
as warmth at home, and so was the friendliness of our Chinese neighbors. Their laughing curiosity, their unabashed ignorance of our Western ways, their pleasure in seeing our house and what we ate and how we dressed were all part of the day’s amusement. If my kind was different from theirs, I never felt it so, and I did not discern in them the slightest dislike of what we were.

  For much of this I must thank my parents who in their quiet way made no difference between peoples. We were the only missionary family I knew in those days who welcomed Chinese guests to spend the night in our guest room and eat at the table with us. I am sure this was partly because my parents were themselves cultivated persons and drew to them Chinese of like nature and background. They disliked a crude and ignorant Chinese as much as they disliked such a person were he white, or even American, and thus early we learned by their example to judge a man or woman by character and intelligence rather than by race or sect. Such values held, and they were natural to the Chinese, too.

  How shall I conjure again those childhood days? I rose early in the morning because my father demanded it. He got up at five o’clock and when he had bathed and dressed he prayed for an hour in his study. He expected then to find the family waiting for him at the breakfast table. If any one were not there he would not seat himself at the end of our oval teakwood dining table, that piece of furniture imperishable in my memory. There he stood, tall and immovable, his blue eyes gazing across the room at the landscape beyond the high windows. When a small girl hurried through the door and slipped panting into her chair he sat down, and with him all of us. He then asked grace, not carelessly gabbling, but with a moment’s preceding silence. In a solemn voice peculiar to his prayers, he asked divine blessing and always that this food might strengthen us to do God’s will.

  The food itself was simple but it seems to me it was always good. In the morning except in the summer we had oranges, the beautiful sweet oranges that were brought by ship and bearer from Fukien, where such oranges grow as I have never seen elsewhere, although I have seen even the orange groves of California. For we had a great variety of oranges. There were tight-skinned Canton oranges for the winter, and there were a dozen varieties of mandarin oranges or tangerines and there were large loose-skinned oranges, but the best of all were the honey oranges, the mi chü, which came in the season of the Chinese New Year in late January or February, and were often sent to us as New Year’s gifts. The skin peeled from them easily, and inside the sections parted at a touch, each so full of sweet juice and fine fragrant pulp that to eat this fruit was one of my great pleasures. There was always a plate of oranges on the sideboard, I remember, during their long season, and we ate them when we liked, sucking them if the skins were tight.

  When the oranges were gone we had loquats, those bright yellow balls of delicate flesh deep about the brown stones within, and then came apricots, not just one variety but several, and perhaps fresh lichees, imported from the South, and sometimes tree strawberries in their brief season. When the peaches ripened we were well into summer. The earliest peaches were the blood-red ones, enormous and slightly tart, and then came yellow ones and the sweet flat ones, and finally the huge white peaches that were best of all. My mother canned them in the American fashion, buying her jars from Montgomery Ward and Sears Roebuck. Of course we had bananas and pineapples and melons of many kinds, watermelons, red, white and yellow, and little sweet golden muskmelons. Melons were summer fruits and we ate them freely but never if they had been cut in the streets, for we knew that flies were deadly enemies, carrying dysentery and cholera and typhoid in their tiny claws. Years later it took me a while to endure the sight of flies in my own country, for somehow I had not expected to see them here, too. And let me not forget the many varieties of persimmons that were ready to eat in the late autumn. The best of them, the big golden seedless ones, came from the North where they were ripened in the warm ash of charcoal ovens, but I liked very well, too, our small scarlet seeded ones, filled with sweet juice. From Peking came also the dried persimmons, dusty with powdered sugar, and as big and flat as pancakes.

  After the fruit at breakfast we always had a special sort of porridge invented by my father. It was made of whole wheat and the servants ground it at home on a Chinese stone quern. I hear a good deal nowadays from dietitians about the superiority of slowly ground grains, but I learned about it long ago from the Chinese. All the grain there was ground by hand on stone querns, and the breads were delicious. Our porridge was delicious, too. My mother roasted the cleanly washed wheat slightly, before it was ground, and when the porridge was cooked by a long slow process it had a toasted flavor. We ate it with sugar and white buffalo cream, richer than cows’ cream. It made a nourishing dish, and it was followed by eggs, and hot rolls or hot biscuits, for my family came from the American South and seldom ate their bread cold. Coffee for grownups was inevitable, but my mother got her coffee beans whole from Java and ground them in a little square wooden mill with an iron handle. I drank water, boiled and cool.

  Breakfasts were always solid and American, for my parents worked hard and expected their children to do so, but the other two meals were less hearty. To these meals I was indifferent and usually ate first within the servants’ quarters, to the consternation of my mother, who was astonished at my frequent lack of appetite without apparently ever guessing its cause. The servants’ food was plain but delicious. Indeed the diet of the poor in China was remarkable for its flavor, if not for the variety which richer people had. Even their breakfast I liked much better than my own. In our region it was rice gruel served very hot, with a few small dishes of salt fish, salted dried turnips and pickled mustard greens, and an egg, now and then, hard-boiled and cut into eighths. The servants’ midday meal was the best, and that one I ate heartily enough and as often as I dared. It was rice, cooked dry and light, a bowl of soup of some sort, another bowl with Chinese cabbage and fresh white bean curd, and still another with a bit of meat or fowl. We needed no dessert, for fruits and sweets were considered between-meal dainties. At night I supped alone with my amah, and in secret, well before our own family night meal. We ate the leftovers from noon or we drank a soup made from the browned rice at the bottom of the big rice pot.

  Years later when I went to North China to live, but that was in another world, I did not eat rice but wheaten breads with vegetables and infrequent bits of meat. Feather-like twisted crullers, salt and not sweet, and tea made breakfast, with dates and persimmons for fruits, or roasted bread, paper-thin and a foot in diameter, wrapped around chopped garlic. For the second meal of the day, since in North China people eat only two meals a day except in the harvest season, we ate noodles or bread roasted against coal embers and dotted with sesame seeds, or steamed bread-rolls filled with chopped meat and garlic, or boiled dumplings, very small and dainty and filled with bits of meat and fresh ginger, or with chopped spinach and bean vermicelli. I am never in the least homesick for past worlds, for I live in the present, yet I come nearest to nostalgia when I think of the variety of Chinese food. Each province had its own fruits and vegetables and dishes, and every city was famous for some dish or other, and every restaurant had its specialty and every family its private recipes, and no one thought of food and cooking with anything except lyric pleasure.

  The other evening, sitting with Chinese friends here upon my own terrace in Pennsylvania, we remembered together a few of the most famous dishes of our childhood world—the Yellow River fish soup so deliciously cooked in Ching-chow, the steamed shad of West Lake, the cured fish and beef of Chang-sha, the plum flower fragrant salted fish of Chao-chow, the steamed crabs of Soochow, the sweet and sour fish of Peking, and the dried shrimps of Tung-ting Lake.

  And of wines, the best, we agreed, was the Shao-hsing wine of Chekiang, and then the Mao-tai wine of Kweichow and the distilled Fen-chow liquor of Shansi. And of teas the green Lung-ching tea of Chekiang was our favorite, but also the Pu-êrh tea of Yünnan, plucked from the mountain named P’u-êrh, and the Chi-men red tea, a
nd the Lin-an green tea of Anking or the jasmine and the Iron Lo-han tea of Foochow and the Hangchow chrysanthemum tea.

  As for fruits and vegetables, there are so many that only a very few could be mentioned. We spoke of the oranges of Hsin-hui, in Kwangtung, the pumelos of Sha-tien, in Kiangsi, the taro of Li-pu, the red and white dates of Tê-chow in Shangtung, the Chefoo apples and T’angshan pears, the watermelons and grapes of Sinkiang, the Shanghai muskmelons and the Peking persimmons, the kumquat oranges of Foochow, and the olives of Kwangtung province, the bamboo shoots and mushrooms of South Hunan, and the Kalgan mushrooms, Ho-p’u lichee nuts and Nanking lotus root.

  But other foods cannot be altogether forgotten, as for example, Techow smoked chicken, Canton steamed young pigeon, Nanking salted duck, Peking roast duck, Canton’s one-chicken-three-tastes, Fuchow hash, King-hua ham, Szechuan’s pickled salted greens, arrowroot from West Lake, a Peking summer drink made from sour prunes, mushroom oil from South Hunan, rice flour from Kwei-lin, bean curd and sauce from Anking in Anhwei province.

  And we stopped there only because one must not go on forever.

  The gala days were the days when we were invited to wedding and birthday feasts, and then the menu included a score and more of different dishes, each perfected by centuries of gourmets. For Chinese are always gourmets. The appearance of a dish, its texture and its flavor, are subjects for endless talk and comparison. A rich man will pay his cook a prince’s salary, and yet he will humbly heed the criticisms of his friends concerning a dish set before them, for in China cooking is pure art in its most fundamental and satisfying form, and when a dish is criticized by those who know all that it should be, none can take offense, since there is nothing personal in criticizing an art.