She was right in this as in so much else, and I have never regretted knowing all she taught me, even though I complained enough then when I had to learn fine crocheting and lacework as well as cooking meals and baking delicate hot breads and cakes. I have not been able to impart these feminine arts to my own daughters. My mother had one advantage over me—we had to make American foods if we wanted to eat them. Nowadays, here in the United States, young women can buy such miracles of ready frozen stuff, wanting only to be thrust in an oven to be finished, that it is hard to make them believe that they have lost an art. And this ignorance extends even to the daughters of farmers. I had once a little Pennsylvania maid who could not cook or sew, and did not feel her ignorance unfitted her in the slightest to be a wife and mother. She would buy both food and clothes ready-made, she said, and laughed when I said I felt sorry for her because she had missed so much.
The Chinese slave girls at the Door of Hope, however, were eager to learn. They were wretched children, bought young in some time of famine and reared to serve in a rich household. We had only the ones from evil households, of course, for a bondmaid in a kindly family received good treatment as someone less than a daughter but more than a hired servant, and at the age of eighteen she was freed and given in marriage to some lowly good man. But these who ran away were the ones beaten with whips and burned by cruel and bad-tempered mistresses with live coals from pipes and cigarettes and ravished by growing adolescent sons in the family or by lecherous masters and their menservants. Such slavery was an old system and perhaps no one was entirely to blame for it. In famine times the desperate starving families sold their daughters not only to buy a little food for themselves but often, too, to save the daughter’s life. It seemed better to allow the child to go into a rich and hopefully friendly family rather than certainly to die of starvation. The girl was sold instead of the boy because the family still hoped to survive somehow and the son must be kept, if possible, to carry on the family name. Sooner or later, it was reasoned, the girl would have to leave the family, anyway, when she married. There are many romantic and beautiful love stories in Chinese literature centering about the lovely bondmaid who is the savior and the darling of the family, and these perhaps added to the hopefulness of the starving family when they sold their girl child. Nor was it always a girl who was sold. Sometimes if there were no girls, or if all the girls had been sold and there was more than one boy, a younger boy would be sold to a rich family, also. But a girl was more salable. A boy was less useful as a servant.
It was an old system, I say, and like all systems in human life, everything depended upon the good or evil of the persons concerned. The best government in the world, the best religion, the best traditions of any people, depend upon the good or evil of the men and women who administer them.
At the Door of Hope I saw the dreadful fruit of evil and still another aspect of human and certainly Asian life. Since I spoke Chinese as if it were my native tongue, the slave girls, unless they knew only Shanghai dialect, could talk to me freely and they did. Most of them could speak Mandarin for they had come from northern families who had travelled southward as refugees, although in famine times there were also men or women who deliberately went northward to hunt for children to sell again at profit in the large cities.
Many a night I woke up in my little room at Miss Jewell’s School to ponder over the stories these young girls told me and I wept to think there could be such evil in the world. This grieving either makes a heart grow more hard, in self-protection, or it makes a too tender heart. In my own case, perhaps there was something of both. I had early to accept the fact that there are persons, both men and women, who are incurably and wilfully cruel and wicked. But forced to this recognition, I retaliated spiritually by making the fierce resolution that wherever I saw evil and cruelty at work I would devote all I had to delivering its victims. This resolution has stayed with me throughout my life and has provided a conscience for conduct. It has not always been easy to follow, for I am not an aggressive person by nature. Once in India I was travelling by train from Calcutta to Bombay. In the compartment next to me was an English captain who disliked the Indians, it seemed, with an unusual virulence. When the train stopped, crying beggars and shouting vendors crowded as usual around the windows, and while it was not pleasant to be thus surrounded on a hot day, nevertheless these people were trying to earn a few anna to buy food. The Captain, however, did not use his reason. He carried a rawhide whip and he ran out upon the platform and beat off the half-naked Indians with vicious blows.
It was a horrid sight, yet if I had not made my resolution years before at the Door of Hope, I doubt I would have had the courage to speak to him. Much as I hated it, I did speak.
“How can you be so cruel?” I demanded. “They have not hurt you, and they are only trying to get a little money. There is no law against that.”
He was astonished for a moment, then he shrugged his shoulders. “Filthy beasts!”
Anger came to my aid. “Someday,” I said, “other white men and women and children, quite innocent, will suffer for what you are doing now.”
He shrugged again and walked away. I am not so foolish as to think he changed, for people seldom change once the mold is set, and he was past his youth. But I have never forgotten the dark Indian faces wearing the grave and bitter look I used to see on Chinese faces, too, when some white man was unjust. And the tragedy is that we are now reaping that very fruit. I read this morning in the newspaper of the cruel treatment given to the American prisoners of war in Asian camps. Part of it, I suppose, is not conscious cruelty but merely the difference in standards of living. The average Chinese workingman’s daily fare would seem near starvation to a hearty American boy, used to the best, and walking endless miles over hard roads under a heavy burden is only what many an Asian does every day for his living. If he is ill, it does not occur to him to go to a doctor or a hospital because a thousand chances to one there are none. Part of the cruelty, therefore, is the inevitable difference between poverty and riches. But the worst of it is undoubtedly really cruelty, instinctive and conscious at the same time, and the Asian is punishing the American because he is a white man now in his power and white men have been very cruel to the Asians in the past. The few good deeds done by a handful of missionaries do not change the history of centuries gone—not enough. The nightmare of my life has always been, since I understood anything at all, that someday a son of mine would have to stand in hand-to-hand battle with a Chinese, and that the Chinese, who knew his people’s history, would take revenge upon the innocent American. It has already happened to the sons of other Americans and may yet happen to my own.
Billings, Montana
This up-to-date Western town is built along the railroad, as so many Western towns are, like beads on a string, and I have just been wakened from a sound sleep in a very comfortable roadside inn by the noise of an engine and a few cars racketing past not fifty feet from the head of my bed. When the bed stopped shaking and the dust had settled, I fell to thinking of the difference between night noises here and the ones to which I was accustomed in that other world of mine. At home on our farm in Pennsylvania there are the house noises, the crack of old beams on a cold night, or the first peepers of spring and then the summer croaking of the bullfrogs in the pool, and later the autumn crickets. The dogs bark on a moonlight night and across the road sometimes a cow bawls in heat and must wait until dawn for the farmer to come and lead her to the bull. Or in the deep silence, and this sound I dislike for it always makes me afraid, a plane rushes through the night, too low, it seems to me, always too low, and I fall to wondering what the pilot’s mission is and why it must be done by night and what it is like to be speeding through the black sky, borne upon the beams of his own lights, with nothing between heaven and earth except himself, and what awful loneliness that must be.
Here in the West the train rushes past, making its mournful cry, and I do not know why these western trains have such a sa
d long echoing whistle as they fly past, a cry nearly human, so wild, so lost. It makes me think of human voices I have heard in the night elsewhere, the mournful monotony of voices singing in an Indian village, and I do not know what that song is, either, or why it is sung so often in the night, a few notes repeated over and over, thin and high until at last one’s very heart is caught and twisted into it. But the voice I remember most clearly is the cry of a Chinese woman, a mother, any mother whose child was dying, his soul wandering away from home, she thought, and so she seized the child’s little coat and lit a lantern and ran out into the street, calling the wailing pitiful cry, “Sha-lai, sha-lai!” and this meant, “Child, come back, come back!” How often have I heard that cry, and always with a pang of the heart! Lying in my comfortable bed and safe under our own roof, I could see too vividly the stricken family and the little child lying dead or dying and all the calling in the world could never bring his soul home again.
The Shanghai streets had their own noises, and often wakeful at Miss Jewell’s School, I heard the creak of a late riksha rolling along and the swift patter of people’s feet, and I heard the call of voices, girls’ laughter sometimes, or a hearty English voice, a man saying good-bye to someone. And deep in the night I woke to hear the endless slip-slip of Chinese feet in their cloth shoes, walking along the pavements, and I wondered where they went and why they never seemed to go home but always on and on.
In the spring of that strange year I spent at Miss Jewell’s School, she took me with her to still another of her good works. At a house whose name I cannot remember and where it was I have forgotten, too, there was a shelter for destitute white women, many of them prostitutes too old or ill to work any more, but some of them still young and even with babies. This place struck me with a profound horror, and actual terror. Here, for the first time in my life, I saw people of my own race, and women at that, so low in poverty and disease and loneliness that they were worse off than the Chinese slave girls at the Door of Hope. I could pity the slave girls because they had not chosen to be slaves, but I could not comprehend these white women of every Western nation. “French, English, German, Belgian, American—how had they let themselves come to such a pass and where had the first step been taken and how could they be made innocent again? I suppose my horror must have been plain, for the women fell silent when I came near, and though I did my best, playing games and reading aloud and teaching them to sew, there was never any communion between us. It was impossible, I had no background for it, nor did they understand me.
When I went home for the spring holidays my mother said I was too pale and thin and when I told her of Miss Jewell’s good works and my part in them, she pressed her lips together and her dark eyes sparkled with anger and I knew that I would not be sent to boarding school again. I had learned enough. Into the short year I had crowded human knowledge not only of a Shanghai underworld but of New England women, my headmistress and the teachers, the little Scotch music mistress who was engaged that year to a good young man and whose innocent romance was comforting, the dark and passionate woman who taught us geometry and whom I never understood until years after she was dead, and the other teacher, and I forget even what she taught me but I think it was Latin, who later married and became the mother of a delightful American writer, John Espey. And among those I remember there was also our matron, a tall elderly English woman, whose false teeth slipped back and forth whenever she spoke, but whom we all loved because she had no judgment, and left in charge she could be as silly as any schoolgirl with us, and she was always to be counted on for extra bread and butter at teatime.
Of my schoolmates I remember even less, and those I do remember are for no reasons except foolish ones, such as the missionary boy who would eat the eyes of the baked carp we always had at Friday luncheons. I was and am convinced that he hated fisheyes as much as any of us, but he could not forego the pleasure of seeing us all shudder and hearing us cry out and so he ate them. Yet he grew up into a very good American man, an artist, I believe, who has done well enough at commercial art in his own country.
Perhaps the one I remember best was the half-Chinese daughter of a distinguished American who, when his English love refused him for another man, devoted himself to the education of young Chinese men in a great university, and to help him in his work, he married a Chinese lady, plain-faced but of noble character. Of their children all were boys except one and the boys were handsome like their father but the girl was plain like her Chinese mother and she used to talk to me about herself, and wonder what would become of her because she was plain and because she was afraid no white man would marry her and she did not want to marry a Chinese. I think she never married, but I do not know whether she lived or died.
I was glad to be home, although it was lonely for a while, but not too lonely, for when summer came my parents were to take me to America to college. Would I come back again or not? I did not know, and the few months passed in a sort of sweet melancholy while I wondered if each day were a sort of last farewell to China.
And I have not mentioned the sound I liked best there at night but perhaps the memory belongs here. It is the voice of the great bronze bell that stood on a pedestal in the Buddhist temple halfway down our hill. As long as I could remember I had heard it sound in the night, not often, but at certain hours the round rich note of music reverberated through the darkness. When I was small I used to be afraid, the sound was melancholy and made me feel alone. But in the years of my childhood when I had been so free, more free than any white child before or since, I had often visited the temple in the daytime and had seen for myself how the bell was struck by a small kind old priest who grasped with both hands a piece of wood, the end of which was wrapped into a club with cloth. He swung out his arms and let this club fall against the bell hanging within its frame, and out rolled the great pure sound.
I remember the last night at home and all the bags packed and ready to close. I was sleepless and when I heard the bell strike its last note at dawn as we left the house, I had a strange premonition that I would never hear it again, and I never did.
Sauk Centre, Minnesota
This town was once the home of Sinclair Lewis and it is because of him that we have turned aside from the straight road home. I saw him only once, and it was at a dinner given in New York by the P.E.N. Club upon the occasion of the award of the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1938. I went as the guest of honor, but never was there a guest so faint of heart, and even dispirited, as I was that night. This mood went back to my childhood and perhaps partly to good Mr. Kung, who could not possibly know that even then I had intended to be a teller of tales, a writer of novels, though how that end was to be achieved I did not know. One longs to make what one loves, and above all I loved to hear stories about people. I was a nuisance of a child, I fear, always curious to know about people and why they were as I found them. Moreover, I began to read Charles Dickens at the age of seven and he had his usual influence, and this is always to stir alive the young imagination and create wonder about human beings. My first Dickens book was Oliver Twist, which I read twice through without delay. After that I read any of the dark blue clothbound set that filled a shelf in our parlor. My mother became alarmed at my absorption, especially as she herself resisted an instinctive love of Dickens—resisted, because in her young days he was considered coarse and a novelist of “the lower classes.” No such instincts troubled me. I spent my afternoons reading one volume after another, in summertime in the crook of the huge elm, and in winter sitting in the sunny corner of our back veranda. For ten years, I daresay, I read Dickens complete each year from cover to cover, laughing aloud, though alone, over Pickwick Papers and weeping quietly over the death of Little Nell and the cruelty of Hard Times. Sissy Jukes has remained with me always as a part of myself because she replied sensibly, though faltering with shyness when Thomas Gradgrind asked her if a mortality of seven to a thousand people was high, that it was high because it was just as hard on the seven who d
ied as it would have been if more had died. Thomas Gradgrind shouted that she was a fool, but I have always known that she was right, and the more I see of life and humanity the more sure I am that she was eternally right and that it is the Thomas Gradgrinds of this world who are the fools and not the Sissy Jukeses.
The result of having few childish books and therefore of being compelled at an early age to read adult novels was that I decided well before I was ten to be a novelist, and only Mr. Kung confused my mind. He, as a Confucian scholar, had been trained in the early Chinese classical tradition that no reputable writer condescends to produce novels. Novels, he taught me, cannot be considered literature. They are designed to amuse the idle and the illiterate, that is, those persons who cannot appreciate a true literary style and moral and philosophical content. This discouragement was maintained during my most formative years, and was even increased by the religious feelings of my parents who considered novel-reading a mere pastime. Indeed, my mother and I played a sort of hide-and-seek all through my childhood, although neither of us ever referred to it. She hid the novels I read and I hunted for them until I found them. I cannot remember that I bore her any ill will for this. She was far too lovable and good, nor did she, apparently, feel any anger toward me for almost invariably finding her hiding places. The whole performance was carried on in silence by both of us. When I grew up I forgot about it and have since wished that I had remembered to ask her why she hid the books in such easy places. But she died too young. There were many questions I meant to ask her and did not until it was too late and she was forever gone.
My Several Worlds: A Personal Record Page 10