“She is only a child,” I remember her very words. “But she is a naughty child, and I will punish her. Please overlook her fault.”
The gentleman did not reply but he did not look mollified, and my mother drew me away and we went down another street.
“Never,” she said more sternly than I had ever heard her speak, “never do such a thing again! It might be very dangerous.”
What frightened me was the look on her face. I had never seen it before. She was afraid, afraid of a Chinese! I had never seen her afraid before in my life. It was indeed the end of an era.
II
Canton, Ohio,
August, 1953
TODAY WE HAVE BEEN travelling over Pennsylvania mountain country and then as afternoon came on, our direction being westward, we reached Ohio and by nightfall came to this quiet small city, which was the home of William McKinley. The American President and his wife lie in an enormous tomb in a park. A long flight of steps leads to the tomb and at the head of the steps there is a statue of the dead statesman.
By a curious coincidence McKinley had something to do with my life in that second world which followed after the troubled Boxer years in China. My father was not killed, nor were any of the white men in our province of Kiangsu killed, and that this could be was the result of the wisdom and courage of one man, our Viceroy, who when he received the edict of the Empress Dowager, refused to obey it. It was more than mercy, it was also foresight, for our Viceroy understood what our old Empress did not or could not, and it was that no one, not even she, could stay the progress of time. The Viceroy knew that it was not white men alone who had bred revolution in China. Their presence and deeds, more evil than good, had only hastened the awakening of the Chinese people. Why, the people asked themselves, had they no weapons to resist the arrogance and robbery of the invaders from the West, who were different from any others of the past? The white men had seized lands and rivers instead of the throne, and they had built railroads to the coast so that they could carry away their loot in ships. Nor did they yield as the others had to the superior civilization of China. On the contrary, the westerners considered their own civilizations superior and they tried to prove them so by guns and cannon. Such weapons were as terrifying to the unarmed Chinese people as a hydrogen bomb might be to an undefended city here in Ohio, to this very city in which we sleep tonight.
Even this city has its direct relation to those years of early revolution in China, since a reason for this journey of ours is something more than pleasure alone. Our family has three sons, the elder two nearing draft age and the third one not far behind. The hideous possibility has become a reality. I who have been reared in one world, a Christian one, and taught that love and brotherhood must be the law of life, and reared too, in another world yet kindlier, with the Chinese belief that life is sacred and that it is evil to kill even a beast, and how much more a human being, I now face the tragic probability that my sons must deny both Christian and Asian teaching. They must join our armed forces and fight perhaps an Asian people, a people whom I love and admire and to whom I am deeply indebted. To prevent this I am helpless, although it could have been prevented long ago in Asia, and prevented many times since, but now perhaps it is too late, since it is not we who have won in Asia, although we might have done so easily had we but understood the nature of the peoples there.
And McKinley, whose bronze statue towers over this small Ohio city? What has he to do with the child I once was? Little enough and yet very much. For when the strange year of 1900 was over, the year in which I saw in my American mother’s eyes the fear of a Chinese, so that from that day on I too had that fear, all mingled with love and friendship at it was, we came to the United States, my own country. My first shock here was the assassination of President McKinley. I scarcely knew the difference then between Emperor and President. In China our young Emperor had died suddenly, murdered, it was rumored, by the command of the Empress Dowager, who was by then herself within hours of her own death from old age and illness. But she would not, could not die until the dangerous heir was first gone. And now suddenly here in my own country the President was murdered, too!
I cannot remember everything, for much had happened and worlds were tumbling about me. But I do remember that I was in my grandfather’s house in West Virginia, where I had been born, a place of peace and beauty, and there on a particular day I was gathering white and purple grapes with my cousins. It was September, hot, still and fragrant, and I was happy and quiet, enjoying to the full my country, my own, where there was no war any more, no hatred, no revolution. Then someone called to us to come quickly and we ran into the house. We went to the parlor, uncles, aunts, my parents, my brother, my cousins and I. There my grandfather stood very straight in his black suit, his stiff white wing collar, his black tie, his snowy hair brushed up from his forehead. His dark eyes were somber and his face was grave, and when we were all assembled he said in a solemn voice:
“Children, the President of the United States has been assassinated. Our President is dead.”
Of all of them only I broke into loud weeping, to their astonishment and dismay, and my mother put her arm about my shoulder.
“Oh,” I cried, “must we have the revolution here, too?”
“What is the child talking about?” my grandfather demanded.
Nobody answered for nobody knew except my mother, and she understood so well that she said nothing at all while she let me sob. And what I was afraid of I did not know until years later.
Indiana
Indiana, I read in books, is of all our states the most valid sample of our whole country. Agriculture and industry, fourth generation immigrants and first generation, plains and hills, rivers and lakes, Indiana has them all. There is even a picturesque corner where rounded tumbling hills have attracted the most American of our artists, and surely some of the best American writers have come from this state, that is, the ones least affected and to a degree the least experimental. I smile at the word experimental! Nothing is new, and everything has been done before. I read this week a reviewer’s comment on a book, a criticism that the author had not used “the modern technique of cutback.” New? Five hundred years ago Chinese novelists were using the cutback with consummate skill, and in Europe, whose history is comparatively recent, French writers were using the cutback when America was new. Joseph Conrad was a master of the cutback, and when I have used it, it has not occurred to me that I was doing anything modern, for I was not. The cutback is an admirable technique for portraiture, but not for edifice.
I feel Indiana is plain American. Sometime or other it went a little mad and people built a few astonishing huge and turreted houses. One such I saw today, painted snow-white and looking like an enormous iced cake. Somebody evidently was proud of it as an antique and quite rightly so, for it was imposing and bizarre.
But the houses of our country are a revelation of our variety. No man knows what an American will construct when he is able to afford his own house. He pays no heed to history or landscape. On the contrary, he behaves as though he were Adam in some Eden of his own. I confess I do not know what to make of our newest building developments, accompaniments of industry, but I assume that they are merely merchandise and that no one will live in them beyond a temporary necessity.
The houses here in Indiana are decently ugly except for the notable few, and they are as various as are the houses in other states. How long did it take, I wonder, for the Chinese people to become so unified, so molded by history and geography combined through centuries, that their architecture became stylized, a distillation of centuries of family living? It was nothing in my Chinese world to find a family that had lived a thousand years in the same place. Homes grew slowly from the landscape. The wide plains of the North created wide gently sloping roofs, and the abrupt upward lines of volcanic southern mountains tilted the roofs sharply. Under the roofs, north and south, however, the rooms were arranged in the same patterned order with the same tolerant a
llowance for independence and privacy in the midst of a complete family life. Each generation lived separately in one-story rooms, but were united by courtyards to the other generations. Thus the Chinese realized the need of the human individual to be alone and yet close to others, especially of his own kind. Thus children grew in free security, surrounded by loving adults of various generations, and thus adults shared the burdens of family responsibility. There was no terror of losing one’s job, for in such a circumstance one simply lived on with the family and without reproach, until a new job was found. There was no need for orphanages for there were no orphans, since the family kept its own. And the old were loved and revered and never put away into institutions as sometimes they are put away here, and must be put away, I am told, because of small flimsy houses where there is only room for two people and their two children.
I am glad I once had the grateful joy of living, even for that year of McKinley’s assassination, with my grandfather and my uncles and aunts and cousins in a big porticoed house. I did not know my own good fortune, for then I took it for granted that everywhere in my country everybody so lived. I was only nine, and I may be forgiven for my ignorance, and yet I still believe that the generations need each other and should live together.
Yung, my Chinese friend, spent last month at our farm and out of long quiet talk I remember two scenes she put before me. The first one had nothing to do with families but with fish. She began in her usual gentle fashion, and very seriously.
“I have something to say to you.”
“What is it?” I asked.
She had spoken in English and now she changed to Chinese, the mid-Chinese Mandarin that was our childhood language. She said:
“Dear Elder Sister, I went to the Museum of Natural History in New York that I might learn something useful and scientific.”
“And did you learn something useful and scientific?” I inquired.
She looked sad. “Scientific, perhaps, but not useful—only troublesome.”
“Tell me,” I suggested.
She hesitated and then went on. “A man there told me such a strange thing. He said that we human beings are come from fish. Must I believe this? It makes me so sad. Only a fish!”
She shook her head and sighed. “So disappointing, isn’t it? A fish! Elder Sister, is it necessary to believe this?”
“No,” I said. “Don’t believe it. The man was guessing. There are many stories of our beginning. Believe what is nearest to your heart as well as your mind.”
She brightened. “You really think so?”
“I do,” I said firmly.
It was also Yung who put into clear and pitiful words the picture of an old lady, an American old lady, or old man for that matter. She said, in the way she has, seeming sudden, but not sudden because she has been thinking long before she speaks, and this time she spoke in English, “I feel sorry for American old lady and old man.”
“Why?” I asked.
For answer she gave me an example out of her life in the New York apartment house in which she lives with her excellent husband. She said, in her ever-gentle voice, still in English, “In our apartment house lives a nice old lady alone. We did not know her. But our neighbor came in one day so happy saying, ‘Do come downstairs with me to see my friend’s granddaughter. My friend is very joyful. Why? Because today for the first time the little girl, five years old, is allowed to come to visit grandmother and to spend the night.’
“I cannot believe such a thing—five years old and never spending the night with grandmother! We went downstairs and it was true. There were the little girl and the grandmother, both happy, and the grandmother told me the story. She said such a long time she had hoped the child could come to visit her but she dared not to ask it. But on this day happily the child herself suggested it, when the old lady went to visit her son’s family. ‘Grandmother,’ the child asked, ‘may I spend the night in your house?’ The old lady dared not to cry out, ‘Oh, come!’ Instead, very quiet, she said, ‘Whatever your mother wishes, my dear.’ So the child asked the mother, who said, ‘Wait until your father comes home.’ So the old lady waited long until her son came home and again she waited for the child to ask, not daring to seem eager for fear it would not be allowed, and she was so happy when the father, her own son, said, ‘Why not?’ And then the child’s mother said, ‘Just this once.’ All this the old lady told and I really did weep, because in China the grandmother could not be so afraid of the younger ones. It is not right.”
I agreed with my Chinese friend and then remembered, contrariwise, what a young American man had said to me only a few weeks before. He said, “I wish my mother would stay with us always the way you say Chinese grandparents do, but she doesn’t want to be bothered by young children, even her grandchildren. She wants to travel, to hear music, to go abroad, to live her own life, as she calls it, and so my children have no opportunity to know their own grandmother.”
Two sides of the same story, and the only sense I can make out of it is that our American pattern is to be patternless, unless individualism is the pattern.
In my own case, my grandfather was remote but comforting. He had his place in the house where I was born, an upright, somewhat rigid figure, but always kind, and though the few months of that year in which McKinley was killed passed quickly and I stayed with my grandfather no more, yet I had seen him, I had lived in the house with him, I had felt him the source of my being, because he was my mother’s father, and his other children were my uncles and aunts and their children were my cousins, and so I was one of a clan and not solitary. When my parents took me back to China with them, I went back knowing where they had come from, and so where I had come from, and we were not a solitary little group lost in a vast and alien China, alien now because the Chinese did not love white people and had killed many of our kind. No, we were Americans, and I had a country of my own, and a big white house where my kinfolk lived, and there were generations of us there, all belonging together. So a child ought to feel, and if he so feels, he can wander to and fro upon the earth and never walk alone.
Sioux Falls, South Dakota
We have been driving over the beautiful uplands of Illinois and Iowa, and cutting deeply into Minnesota. We arrived here in Sioux Falls to spend our first night in South Dakota.
I wonder what dream or experience, or both, led to the naming of American towns and villages? We passed in Iowa a little hamlet named Polo, in honor of Marco Polo. But why Marco Polo in Iowa, U.S.A.? His is a familiar name to me, for Yangchow is across the river from Chinkiang, my Chinese home town, and in Yangchow Marco Polo was governor for some years. It is a city famous for beautiful women, one of whom was my Chinese nurse, although I remember her old and missing some teeth, but still beautiful. What American in Iowa, then, dreaming of those travels on the other side of the world, called his town Polo?
And we passed a town called Woosung, but why Woosung in the heart of Iowa? What musing, wandering mind, compelled to stay at home, named his inland town for that port on the flats of the Yangtse Delta, that gateway to Shanghai and so to China? And while I was pondering on this, our car passed into Minnesota and there was Ceylon on a signpost but the only Ceylon I know is the jewelled island that clings to India’s foot.
Earlier in the journey we passed, too, through a bare little town in Illinois, all open to the sun. It was Galena, ancestor or relative, I suppose, to our little New Galena in Pennsylvania. Galena, Illinois, is the town where Ulysses S. Grant, not yet President, went with his family before the Civil War, to set up his tanning trade. He built a solid square red brick house, graceless, comfortable and commonplace, and from there he was called to lead the Union Army. He took with him some of his cronies to support him, a number unsurpassed before or since, I am told, by any administrator, but I confess I see no wrong in choosing friends for one’s supporters.
What interests me is that Ulysses S. Grant could have reached so high a position. Perhaps the chief weakness of a democracy is
that seldom can a truly great person rise high, for people elect those whom they can understand and therefore admire, and these are usually men like themselves. And even as I write these cynical words the noble ghost of Abraham Lincoln stands before me. He, too, was a man of Illinois, the middle country, and I first heard of him from Mr. Kung, who revered him because he had freed the colored slaves. When I asked my parents, however, they were Southern enough to say proudly that the slaves were being freed anyway, and not by Abraham Lincoln.
Be this as it may, I see myself, a child of ten, returned again to China with my parents. It is the year 1902 and I am in the small old dining room in the mission bungalow on the hills above the Yangtse River, and I am listening to the grave voice of the old Chinese gentleman who is my Chinese tutor. He is a Confucian, which seems not to have troubled at all my Christian parents, although he instilled into me Confucian ethics while he taught me Chinese reading and writing, and I listened and learned and called him Teacher Kung. He prided himself on the surname Kung, which was also the surname of Confucius, this name again being a corruption of the Chinese Kung-futse or Father Kung. But I, as a Christian child, supposed that Confucius was the same as Our Father in Heaven, that is, God the Father, and I accepted all gods, having been accustomed to seeing temples full of many gods. Among them was my special goddess, she of mercy, the Kwanyin, always so beautiful and graceful, such a lady in her looks as well as in her kindness, and tenderhearted toward all female creatures. To be sure, there was her younger sister, The Virgin Mary, but a vague cloud I did not then understand surrounded The Virgin, an immaculate cloud, but producing also The Son. And the patient Joseph, standing always to one side in the Sunday-school pictures, how I pitied him, for somehow it seemed as though he had been cheated. I heard talk of this among the Chinese Christians who had no enthusiasm for Mary and felt sorry for Joseph. And this talk must have reached my own American Christian father, for he ceased trying to explain how Jesus was born of The Virgin. It was one of the mysteries and the less said about it the better. But the Goddess of Mercy was really immaculate and there was never any talk there about a god-father or a god-son. She was pure goodness. Besides, Chinese history or mythology, and often they merge, is rich in stories of beautiful virgins impregnated by gods to conceive divine sons, and this Mr. Kung taught me, too.
My Several Worlds: A Personal Record Page 6