My Several Worlds: A Personal Record

by Pearl S. Buck

  The result of years of defeat, although she never acknowledged subjection, was that my mother determined to give her daughters every possible advantage over their future husbands, and so she was charmed by the idea of educating me exactly as though I were a boy.

  Arrived at Lynchburg, Virginia, I found my college to be a collection of red brick buildings, still new enough to look raw, at least to my eyes accustomed to years of the finest and most cultivated scenery in the world, which certainly the best Chinese landscapes are. Within those buildings there was no beauty to be found, and the minimum even of comfort. I can measure how long ago that was when I return now occasionally to visit my college and find it mellowed with beauty everywhere and a place already enriched by tradition. In my day, however, it was stark, and it was hard to have no beauty to look at as I came and went along the wide halls down which the only carpeting vas a strip of dull brown linoleum, thick as leather. But other promises were fulfilled. We were soundly taught and the curriculum carried no hint that we were young women and not young men. We were not corrupted by home economics or dressmaking or cookery or any such oft substitute for hard thinking. We were compelled to take sciences whether we liked them or not, and mathematics and Latin were emphasized and excellently administered. Each year the student body petitioned for a course in home economics, for in that day no girl thought it possible that she might not marry, and each year the faculty sternly refused to yield to the request. The theory was, and I think it entirely correct, that any educated woman can read a cookbook or follow a dress pattern. It is the brain that needs education and it can teach the hands. I was proud of my college when I discovered recently that while the students still petition each year for a course in home economics, the faculty still refuses to yield.

  Of my college days I remember shamefully little and this is no one’s fault except my own, for my life was limited by my personal situation. My parents returned to China immediately after depositing me and I had no home for the next four years. My life was confined, therefore, to the college buildings. True, my elder brother was married and was living in the same town, but unhappily there was a shadow over his house, and I did not enter it willingly. The greatest sacrifice of my college life was in my senior year, when he wished to take a new job in a distant city, and not wishing to leave his children he asked me to live in his house instead of in the college buildings. I loved him and we were understanding friends, and I loved his two attractive children, and I did what he asked, but it was a hard year, and for me tragic, because it was my first insight into the danger which besets any marriage when the man and woman are too unlike in their background of birth and education. Yet I did not learn enough to save myself, some years later, from the same mistake.

  But it is too soon to speak here of marriage. When I look back from this distance upon those four college years, I see them as an experience, divided again by my different worlds. I had grown up in Asia, a region of the globe in which my college mates had not the slightest interest and certainly of which they had no knowledge and this fact lent me an aura of strangeness, more unkindly called queerness, which after a short time I perceived well enough in their attitude toward me. With some fortitude I saw that unless I did something about it, I would spend four lonely and unhappy years, for no one is more cruel than the young American female unless it be the young American male, and that it was carelessness rather than conscious cruelty only made the cruelty seem the more severe, especially as I had been reared in a culture where human relationships were the first concern. It took some weeks of thinking to orient myself in this new culture of complete individualism. Meanwhile I could not complain of lack of notice—rather, the opposite, for I had too much attention. Girls came in groups to stare at me, and I soon began to understand the detachment of the only Chinese girl in the student body, a senior, who came and went with friendly indifference to her fellow students. In their way they were even fond of her, but while she accepted their good intentions she never yielded herself. I was not satisfied with her position. I wanted to belong to my own kind and to belong, as I soon saw, meant that I must separate my two worlds again. I must learn to talk about the things that American girls talked about, boys and dances and sororities and so on, and I must look like them, and above all I must conceal the fact that inside me was a difference that I could not escape, even if I would.

  After reflection I decided to live as fully as possible in my college world, to achieve as far as I could its modest awards, and above all to enjoy everything. The first necessity was to buy myself some American-made clothes, and so I put away the fine Chinese linen and silk dresses with which my mother had outfitted me. They had been made with affectionate care by our Chinese tailor and he thought he had copied them faithfully from models my mother showed him in The Delineator. But I soon saw that there was an infinite difference between his dresses and those my college mates wore, and not the quality of the linen and the silk nor the exquisite perfection of his embroidery and drawn work could compensate for the questionable fit of his sleeves and the wrong length of the skirts. I bought a few American dresses and I put up my hair, which I still wore in a thick braid doubled up and tied with a ribbon, and instead of the handmade leather shoes made by our Chinese cobbler I bought American ones. Externally I became an American. I learned the proper slang and exclamations, and by the end of my freshman year, I was indistinguishable from any other girl of my age and class. And so I joined my world.

  I was happy enough at college, although often I was desperately lonely without my family and my home. Vacations were a misery, for I felt obligated to go to my brother’s house, and there was the inescapable shadow, mitigated only by the sweetness of the little children. The long summer vacation was a blank to be filled somehow, and I filled it the first year by going to see my uncles and aunts and cousins. They were kind, but remote indeed from any life I had ever known, and while I loved the countryside and the magnificent Allegheny Mountains rising behind my grandfather’s house like a stage backdrop, yet I did not know how to communicate with my American family. They were immersed in their own life, very naturally, and while I tried to share it, yet it was strange to me, and many of the things we had to do, the visiting, the afternoon calls, the small daily household tasks, seemed trivial and uninteresting, and the talk, lively as it was, incurably local. I had been accustomed to world thinking and world living and it was hard to center in the little town. Yet I learned to enjoy it, as I might enjoy for the moment the reading of a closely knit family novel or watching a play, and I began to see the drama of personalities in close range. My grandfather, so completely the head of the family, was dead by then, and his place was taken by my elder uncle, a gentle and kindly man, black-haired and black-eyed as my mother’s people were. There was a haunting physical resemblance to my mother in all my aunts and uncles proper, and this drew me to them. Yet they were all different from my mother, and sometimes I fancied in them an unexpressed disapproval of her because she had left the family and gone so far away—and to be a missionary! We were not missionary folk by ancestry, and perhaps they did not quite forgive my mother for being different from the rest of them, and I do not know why she was. She was talented enough to have been anything she chose, but some emotional discontent must have made her impetuously willing at a certain moment in her life to give up her pleasantly comfortable home and follow my father across the world, for her soul’s sake, whatever else the reason. With the family I went on Sundays to the white-spired Presbyterian church where my father’s eldest brother was the minister and I did all that I could to seem like everyone else, while I knew I never could be, however I tried. Meanwhile I lost my heart to my country itself. The cleanliness which made it safe to drink water unboiled, the freedom from the possibility of dysentery and cholera which made it pleasant to pluck an apple from a tree and eat it skin and all, the abundance of water to bathe in, the spaces wherein no one lived, the miles of fields and lawns and countryside, the coloring of autumn forests,
all these won my heart.

  One thing I could not understand and do not yet and this was the apparent lack of interest or curiosity in Americans about other countries and peoples. I remember my wonder that my college mates never asked me about China, or what the people there ate and how they lived and whether China was like our country. So far as I can remember, no one ever asked me a question about the vast humanity on the other side of the globe. Certainly no member of my family asked me anything, and years later I remember my father, too, returning after half a century in China for a last visit to his family, coming back again sorely hurt because none of his family had asked him any questions about the people to whom he had given his life. More decades later when I came to America to live, I found the same incuriosity or disinterest, and today after I have made my home for twenty years here in as pleasant a community as can be found anywhere, I have to report that still I have never found an everyday American in the least interested in any of the ways of life of Asia. No farmer has ever asked me about the Chinese farming, or the crops that are harvested there, no doctor has ever inquired of the interesting and indeed invaluable medical knowledge of Chinese physicians, no housewife has ever asked me how Chinese women do their work, and no American boy or girl has ever asked me how the Chinese young people live. True, sometimes when I am asked to talk to school children, their teachers prompt them and they ask proper little questions and forget what I answer. Once in New York, in a lecture in the Town Hall series at eleven o’clock in the morning, an hour when ladies of leisure and cultivation attend, I gave what I hoped was a penetrating analysis of Chinese thought upon modern problems, and at the end of the time allotted me I waited for questions. There was one question. It came from a portly old lady in the front row. She wanted to know whether the chop suey she ate in Chinese restaurants in New York was really a Chinese dish. I told her it was not. I must admit that questions do follow a lecture, but they are more likely to be political than human.

  This lack of interest in other peoples would be of no importance, perhaps, except that it limits the field of mental enjoyment, were it not for the fact that the United States is at a crucial point in her history. It has already been disastrous that we have not known and therefore have not understood other peoples, and especially the peoples of Asia, so that again and again we have lost opportunities for influence. It is almost too late, I fear, to expect other opportunities, but I hope that it is not quite too late. Yet I doubt that the habitual indifference of our people can be changed in a decade or even in a generation. People do not change easily anywhere.

  Long ago when I was in college I pondered upon this aspect of my college mates and it was reflected even in their parents when I went home with them occasionally for visits. But I was young and I shut out of my mind the danger and the possible results, and I went on to enjoy myself as an American girl. By my sophomore year I had my techniques established and was able to feel a genuine interest in the activities of the group, except that I could never be deeply concerned over sports. The competitive instinct was either not born in me or my childhood in China had not developed it. Thus it did not seem to me of the slightest importance who won a game, and in sports therefore I did not shine. I was inclined, too, to waste little time on studies I did not enjoy, such as Latin, mathematics and physics, and stole hours from them to spend in the library reading books I had always wanted to read and had not found before at my hand. I read prodigiously, extravagantly and greedily, in season and out, and certainly lowered my general level of grades thereby. But here, too, my noncompetitive nature prevented me from trying to get higher grades than others. When I did so, it was accidental. Years later I went back to visit my college, and I found a legend among the freshmen that I had once failed an English course. It was not true, but when I observed what a comfort it was to them to believe it, I had not the heart to spoil it. What did it matter whether I had failed it or not?

  By my junior year I was sufficiently American to be elected president of my class, and then I had really to identify myself with my college mates in fairness to them. That was the best year of my college life and I enjoyed it. Other honors came my way, I do not remember them all now, but they had their part in my happiness and I was too innocent or young or unconcerned to realize that many honors do not make one better loved. Such revelation and premonition of the future came in my senior year, when, needing some extra money, I competed for prizes for the best short story and the best poem of the year and won them both. I was glad for the cash and not, I think, unduly impressed by the honor, since I had written stories and poems equally badly, I am sure, as long as I could remember. But what astonished and wounded me was that in the congratulations of my fellows I discerned a slight hostility, a hint of complaint that one person had been given the two best prizes. Upon reflection, I felt the justice of this, and yet what could I say?

  Of my senior year I can remember very little that is pleasant or that added to my growth. I lived off campus at my brother’s house and I was burdened with a secret my brother now shared with me, that he had decided upon a divorce. He asked me to write to my parents and I did so, and they wrote back in such horror and shock that he postponed the whole matter for several more years. Our families on both sides were extremely conservative in every way, and there had never been a divorce in our history. To my parents it seemed unthinkable that their son, particularly, should commit such a sin. My mother wrote to me, weeping, as I could see from the tear splotches on the paper, and blaming herself that she had sent my brother to America at fifteen.

  We met in secret, my brother and I, and talked long hours, and after much thought the decision for postponement was made, for the sake of our parents. True to his decision, he did not seek divorce until after their death, years later, although he lived separately and alone in the intervening years, except for visits from his growing children. This crisis of personal life so near me was an isolating experience, for it meant that the normal life I might have had in my brother’s home during the years I was in America was denied, although I gained in the knowledge of human nature and the difficult and delicate relationships of marriage.

  So I came to the end of college and took my place in the long procession of graduates. I received my diploma, lonely to know that my parents were not in the chapel crowded with other parents, although by then I was used to loneliness of that sort, at least. Summing it up, I am amazed at how little I learned in college. No one except myself was to blame for this, I am sure. College was an incident in my life and out of its main stream, an experience which remains incidental. My attempt, successful enough in its own way, to be like other American girls, was not permanent, I fear, and after my graduation I was faced with my two worlds again. Which should I choose? Should I stay to become permanently American or should I go home again to China?

  All during the days of packing and farewells, I pondered this choice. I wanted to stay, that I knew. Between the two countries my heart chose my own, for I was beginning now to understand that beyond the college walls was a whole country I still did not know, although it was mine and I was born to it. I had my living to earn but that was no problem and I felt secure enough in myself. I could choose among several teaching jobs, including one to remain on in the college as an assistant in psychology with the professor under whom I had majored. Already during my senior year I had been a minor assistant to the extent of helping him correct freshman papers and examinations. Yet my conscience moved me to return to my parents. I did not want to be a missionary, for I knew I could never preach or persuade people to change their religion. I had seen enough of that dangerous business in years gone by. Moreover, I had not the spiritual attitudes which could make it possible for me to proclaim my religion superior to all others. I had seen too many good people who were not Christian, and, as my father used to remark, it took the arrogance out of anybody to have to acknowledge that the best Christian converts were always good people anyway, the best Buddhists or Mohammedans or Taoists or what
not, even before their conversion to Christianity.

  One day a letter came from my father that my dearly loved mother had been taken with sprue, a tropical disease which at that time no physician knew how to cure and scarcely to treat. Yet it was a slowly fatal disease, robbing the blood of its red corpuscles until in the end the victim died of a deadly anemia. My mind was made up on the instant. I wrote to the Presbyterian Board of Foreign Missions under whom my parents worked and asked to be sent to China as a teacher, and I packed my bags and prepared to sail as soon as I could get passage. I did not think of my return as permanent, but only until my mother was well again, or if she did not get well, then until—but that end I could not face.

  No sooner was my passage assured than there came a letter from the Board saying that war threatened in Europe and all passages abroad would be postponed until it was clear to what extent our country would be involved. It is an example of the remoteness of our college life that this news came to us all like a thrust of lightning. We had been studying European history, and yet our study had not prepared us for the uprising of the Germanic peoples in an effort to control the European continent. Our history professor had, it is true, spoken of such a possibility, years hence, but none of us thought of it as part of our lifetime. To me it came with special foreboding, for I saw it as the beginning of the inevitable struggle between East and West, the inflaming incident for a long period of war. Yet I persuaded myself, or tried to, that the murder of an uninteresting archduke in a little European town could not ignite the world. But I did not understand how charged and supercharged were the feelings beneath that small incident, meaningless in itself. It was the touching off of the tinder of human hostilities and fire lit fire around the globe.