My Several Worlds: A Personal Record

by Pearl S. Buck

  As long as the Manchu government stood and especially as long as Imperial Examinations continued, strength remained with the old classical scholars, who would not recognize Western university degrees. When the Examinations ended, however, and the Throne fell, the old scholars were at a loss. Their protection was gone as well as their jobs, and so the young Western-trained scholars became powerful through the political revolution they had created. It was characteristic of these young intellectuals that instead of tackling the practical problems of the country, which were political and economic, they plunged with fervor into a literary revolution. Fully eighty-five percent of the Chinese people could not read and it is doubtful if more than five percent read with ease, and among the five percent were all the scholars, both old and new. Yet here the young intellectuals spent their energies. They attacked first the written language itself, the language of the old scholars, the classical wen-li, which was the only language used for literature. Fiction, or “wild writing” as it was called, was not considered literature. It was pastime reading, and a true scholar of the old school was ashamed to be seen reading novels, although all read them in private. This classical language, however, did prevent the ordinary Chinese from getting information, much as Americans might be prevented if Latin were used instead of English. Years of study were necessary in order to learn proficiency in wen-li, and the young intellectuals, who had spent those years in studying science and other Western subjects and therefore were poor in classical Chinese, declared themselves against wen-li. The language of the people, the spoken language, they said, should also be the written language. It was more than language—the old literary tricks of allusiveness and allegory and parable were also to be sternly rejected. From now on, young intellectuals said, they would write with simple clarity in the vernacular. Ts’ai Yuan-p’ei, the renowned president of the National University in Peking, headed the revolutionary movement, and he enriched his teaching staff with first-rate minds from among the new group. Among them I think before all others of Ch’en Tu-hsiu, brilliant, bold, and radical, who was later lost to Communism. His magazine, Ch’ing Nien, or Youth, was an inspiration to thousands of restless young Chinese, and when in 1916 the magazine took up the cause of the literary reform, the flame of new intellectual life spread everywhere through China.

  Old scholars, of course, and even average conservative minds, literate or not, were horrified at what they considered the destruction of the literary past while discussion went on in scores of new little magazines, in newspapers and in teashops. When Hu Shih, in an article in Youth magazine, startled us all by the brilliance and persuasiveness of his argument for the use of the pai-hua, or vernacular, as against wen-li, we recognized a fresh force in modern China.

  Both Ch’en Tu-hsiu and Hu Shih based their arguments not merely on Western literature, which had obviously influenced them strongly, but also upon the revolutionary spirit of the West. Older Chinese minds were revolted by what seemed to them the foreign and unpatriotic attitudes of the two young men and those who flocked to follow them, but the fact is that Ch’en Tu-hsiu and Hu Shih did search the history of their own people and did find there the periodic appearance of the same revolutionary spirit which had changed their country, too, again and again, as well as the culture of Europe, and this revolutionary spirit, they felt, was simply the renewed determination in progressive generations of human beings, wherever they lived, to do away with old clutter and meaningless phrases and to try instead to approach freshly and directly the problems of life.

  The greatest interest for me in all this was the fact that these modern intellectuals were considering for the first time the Chinese novel as literature instead of the despised possession of the common people, through wandering storytellers and theatrical groups, and which, if it was produced by a scholar, was always done under the cover of anonymity or a pseudonym because it was always written in the vulgar spoken tongue. Now Hu Shih came forward with a stimulating essay on the Chinese novel, a theme never before taken up by a scholar, and I myself, who had never quite dared, under the tutelage of Mr. Kung, to acknowledge how much I enjoyed reading stories and novels, found that Mr. Kung was dead indeed, for not only did all the young people of my age begin to read fiction and feel it quite smart to do so, but they began to write fiction, not in the old classical allusive fashion, but straightforwardly, with unashamed self-revelation and emotion.

  This was an enormous release to educated men and women. To be able to say what one felt and thought without having to think whether it was written in a rigid and antiquated style was to free an energy suppressed for centuries. The new intellectual life began to flow with a strength and an influence far out of proportion to the numbers who were actually engaged in it or were able to understand and profit from it. It was still the five percent of the population who were concerned, and yet they were the leading young minds, and from them even the illiterate and the ignorant caught something of the new China. It was a wonderful hour, young enough to be still pure. The young Chinese lost their animosities and prejudices for the time being and they searched the world in their hunger for new ideas, new forms, new intellectual companionship. So alive were they that I felt myself filled with their enthusiasms, and my faith in China was born again. At this rate, I thought, she would run ahead of all other countries, and compared to the vivid articulate world—questioning minds of my young Chinese friends, both men and women, my American college mates seemed puerile indeed.

  One of my own particular absorptions was a most unusual man named Lin Shu. He knew not a word of English, but he happened one day by chance upon a Western novel, and moved by curiosity, he engaged a friend to read it to him, translating it as he read. Lin Shu was charmed by the story. I wish I knew what novel it was that he first heard. I think, although my memory is not sure, that it was one of the novels of Sir Walter Scott. Whichever it was, he demanded that it be read to him again, and while he listened to the rough translation of the reader, he rewrote it in his own beautiful Chinese style. In this fashion he translated the novels of Scott and Dickens, of Conan Doyle and Victor Hugo and Robert Louis Stevenson, Tolstoi, Cervantes, and others, until he had translated ninety-three English books, nineteen American ones, twenty-five French, and six Russian. Rider Haggard was perhaps his favorite Western writer. He translated for his own pleasure at first but he soon found that Chinese readers enjoyed the foreign novels as much as he did and in the end he became wealthy by this innocent piracy. Of course other Chinese writers, always poor, and particularly the young, were quick to copy his example, and, I must say, not always acknowledging foreign authorship. By this means Western literature was made known even to the average Chinese reader, since it was no longer a disgrace to read fiction, at least foreign fiction.

  Years later when I began to write, I found myself subject to the same honor, or annoyance, depending upon how one wishes to think of it, and my books, too, were cheerfully pirated over and over again. I remember that I saw seven different translations, some in full and some in shortened versions, of The Good Earth, and on two of them my name did not appear at all and the translator’s name was given as that of the author. Young writers lifted certain incidents and characters out of the book and wove amplified stories about them and sold them as original works. The same fate befell others among my books, but nothing could be done about it. There were no copyright laws to which to appeal. I doubt whether the situation has changed under the Communists, since in Russia herself, although I know that my books have been translated there freely, no permissions have been asked and no royalties given me. International altruism may move one to accept a certain amount of the inevitable, but not, I think, the assumption of authorship by a translator.

  From all this fascinating new life I was suddenly removed, or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that I suddenly removed myself, by my marriage to a young American, not strictly speaking a missionary since he was not at all religious, so far as I could see, but who was employed as an agricul
turist by the Presbyterian Mission Board. The time had come for marriage, as it comes in the life of every man and woman, and we chose each other without knowing how limited the choice was, and particularly for me who had grown up far from my own country and my own people. I have no interest now in the personal aspects of that marriage, which continued for seventeen years in its dogged fashion, but I do remember as freshly as though it were yesterday the world into which it transported me, a world as distant from the one I was living in as though it had been centuries ago. It was the world of the Chinese peasant.

  III

  Forest Haunt, Vermont

  THE LANDSCAPE OUTSIDE MY big window this morning is a forest clearing, and beyond the pines and the maples at its edge green mountains rise in rounded peaks. Our simple house is the result of a plan and the plan is the result of a mild revolt on my part. These American children of mine were growing up without knowing how to use their hands. On the farm the boys rode tractors and fastened the milking machine to the cows. They sat on a combine and harvested the grain and called it farming. It is farming, of course, the American way, but I was dissatisfied with it. They had no touch with the earth direct, and I feel that there must be the direct touch, hands upon stones and earth and wood, in order that life may have stability. My own life has been spent in many places, but it has not lacked continuity or stability because everywhere I have made gardens and lived on farms and planted and harvested in the unchangeable turn of the seasons.

  And the houses people build nowadays! The old strong farmhouses in our Pennsylvania community still stand, but I see bulldozers sweep them down as though bombs had fallen, and in their place upon the raw and bleeding earth machines have built little metal boxes a few feet apart, and they are called homes and twenty thousand families crowd into them. When I saw them I knew that I wanted my children to know how to build a real house.

  We went to Vermont one spring to see maple sugaring by helping to make it, and while we were there my revolt took sensible shape in a plan. Land covered with forest was cheap on the mountainside, a little more than two dollars an acre. We bought some high acres far from the road, and the next summer upon an old clearing where a farmhouse had stood a century ago, the boys began housebuilding under the direction of a Vermonter who knew how to do his job well. Thereafter each summer the boys went to the mountain and worked. Foundation, walls of stones mortised in cement, a beamed roof, two big fireplaces, windows and doors, a well-laid stone floor, these slowly came into being. The work was finished by a fine German workman whose passion for perfection was irritant and stimulus to the young Americans but joy to me, for I despise shoddiness of handwork, believing it to be accompanied always by shoddiness of mind and soul.

  Slowly, slowly the learning went on, and at last the house was done, and here we are in our mountain house. Water has to be carried from the brook, lamps have to be cleaned and filled with oil, there will never be a telephone, I cook our meals on the fireplace and think it the best way of cooking in the world. Around us the forest folk come and go, squirrels and deer and sometimes bear, and we always watch for Brother Porcupine who will eat his way through anything, especially enjoying rubber tires. The house has cost us a third of what the new metal boxes in Pennsylvania cost, and the boys now know how to build for themselves and the girls know how to keep house anywhere and still be civilized. As for me, I have this big window, the fir trees and the mountains, and blessed relief from Pennsylvania ragweed.

  Next to people, I remember landscapes, and though at this moment I look at green forests in Vermont, I can remember as clearly as what I see the northern Chinese town to which I went after my marriage. The decision to marry was the result of one of those human coincidences which cannot be explained except to say in the words of the wise man of Ecclesiastes that there is “a time to marry.” When this time comes in the life of any healthy and normal creature, marriage is inevitable, whether it be arranged by parents or by the individual, and to the most likely person who happens to be in the environment. My parents did not approve my marriage and while they maintained an amazing silence on the subject, for they were an articulate pair and silence was not usual, nevertheless I discerned their disapproval because they were united in silence, and this was also unusual. Since I was on more intimate terms with my mother than with my father, I took her aside one day and asked her why they disapproved. She replied that they felt that this young man, while himself a good sort of person doubtless, would not, however, fit into our rather intellectual family. His interests were obviously not intellectual, she said, and when I reminded her that at least he was the graduate of an American college she retorted that it was an agricultural college and this was not what our family considered education.

  “You two are behaving like Chinese parents,” I said. “You think whomever I marry has to suit the family first.”

  “No,” she declared, “it is you we think of. We know you better than you imagine, and how can you be happy unless you live with someone who understands what you are talking about?”

  I was as wilful as any other member of our wilful family, however, and so I persisted in my plans and in a few months was married, with very simple ceremony, in the garden of our mission house and soon thereafter I was settled in my own first home, a little four-room Chinese house of grey brick and black tile within the walled town of Nanhsüchou, in Anhwei province, many miles north of my childhood province of Kiangsu.

  It was a complete change of scene. I had never lived in North China before, and the very landscape was strange to me. Instead of our green valleys and the lovely blue hills beside the wide Yangtse River I now looked from my windows upon a high embankment where stood the city wall, foursquare, with a brick tower at each corner, and surrounded by a moat. Huge wooden gates braced with iron were locked against bandits and wandering soldiers at night and opened in the morning. Outside the walls and beyond the moat, the countryside stretched as flat as any desert, broken only by what appeared to be heaps of mud but which were actually villages whose houses were built of the pale sand-colored earth of the region. In winter there was no green of any kind. Earth and houses were all of one color and even the people were of the same dun hue, for the fine sandy soil was dusted into their hair and skin by the incessant winds. The women seemed never to clean themselves, and this I found was purposeful, for if a woman was tidy, her hair brushed back and coiled smoothly and her garments any color but the universal sand color or faded blue cotton, then she was suspected of being a prostitute. Honest women took pride in being unkempt as a sign of not caring how they appeared to men and therefore virtuous. It was impossible to distinguish between the rich and the poor, for a rich lady wore her satin coat underneath the dull cotton one and was no better to look at than any farm woman. It took me some time to adjust to what seemed to me downright ugliness in my landscape, and I remember being discouraged by the sameness around me and complaining that there was no use in taking a walk, for one could go ten miles beyond the city gates and still everything looked exactly the same.

  But it has always been my weakness or my strength, and to this day I do not know which it is, to be easily diverted by and absorbed in whatever is around me, and I soon found plenty of amusement and occupation. I discovered that I liked housekeeping and gardening, and to arrange the simple furniture about the four rooms, to hang curtains of yellow Chinese silk at the windows, to paint some pictures for the walls, to design bookshelves and grow flowers were all enjoyable activities. I was glad that I lived in a little Chinese house with a black-tiled roof instead of a foreign style mission house. It had no upstairs and the garden seemed part of the house. The climate was too dry for the many flowers in my mother’s southern garden, but chrysanthemums grew well in autumn and the golden Shantung roses in May and June.

  In the spring the whole landscape suddenly grew beautiful. The bare willow trees around the villages put forth soft green leaves and the wheat turned green in the fields and the blossoms of the fruit trees were r
ose-colored and white. Most beautiful of all were the mirages. I had never lived in mirage country before, and when the earth was still cold but the air was warm and dry and bright, wherever I looked I could see mirages of lakes and trees and hills between me and the horizon. A fairy atmosphere surrounded me, and I felt half in a dream. The enchantment of moonlight, too, upon the city wall and the calm waters of the moat outside is still in my memory, half unreal, and it was in this little northern town that I first felt the strange beauty of Chinese streets at night. The dusty streets were wide and unpaved, the usual streets of northern Chinese towns, and they were lined with low one-story buildings of brick or earth, little shops and industries, blacksmiths and tinsmiths, bakeries and hot-water shops, dry goods and sweetmeat shops, all the life of a people confined geographically and therefore mentally and spiritually to an old and remote area. I walked the dim streets, gazing into the open doors where families gathered around their supper tables, lit only by thick candles or a bean oil lamp, and I felt closer to the Chinese people than I had since childhood.