My Several Worlds: A Personal Record

by Pearl S. Buck

  How could I keep from weeping with them? In the midst of our sorrow I heard the story. He had had a touch of dysentery a week before and my friend, his mother, had been taking him to the mission hospital for injections. He had recovered easily and today had been the day for the last injection. After his noon feeding she had taken him to the clinic. A strange doctor, not the usual one, had come out of the office to give the injection.

  “I noticed,” she sobbed, “that the needle bottle was full of medicine. Usually there was only a little in it. I told the doctor that it was too much, and he was angry with me and said he knew what he was doing and that I was only an ignorant woman. I had to let him put the needle in my baby’s thigh. Ai-ya—the child went stiff and was dead in a few minutes!”

  “Was it the American doctor?” I asked.

  “No, a Chinese,” she sobbed.

  We all wept again, but this tells of the deepening division in my worlds—though my heart ached, I was glad that the doctor had been Chinese, and not American. I continued to be glad for that as my friends came to stay with me for a few days so that they could recover themselves enough to face their own lonely house, but I was angry again at the intellectual, the Chinese doctor, who had told the mother rudely that she was only an ignorant woman and then in the pride of his superiority, as he had thought, he had killed her child. It was typical of the contempt of his class for their fellow countrymen, and I write it down here to be remembered, because this attitude was responsible for what Lin Yutang later, in a moment of complete honesty, once called “the failure of a generation.”

  And still another Chinese friend I remember especially, among all the ones I loved and still do love, although I have no means now of communication with them. For I dare not write to them nowadays, since a letter from an American might endanger their lives in the strange Communist China I do not know. And no letter ever comes from them any more, to tell me how the children grow and which is being married and which married ones are having grandchildren. One wintry morning, then, somewhere in those years of uneasy peace after the death of Sun Yat-sen, I heard a knock at my door. I opened it and saw a woman standing there, a ragged dusty figure whom I could not recognize. She came from the North, that I could see, for her half-bound feet and baggy trousers, her old-fashioned knee-length padded jacket and rusty disheveled hair could only belong to a northern peasant.

  “Wise Mother,” she said, “do you not remember me?”

  “No,” I said, “but please come in.”

  She came in then and sat on the edge of a chair and told me who she was. In the North I had had for a while a rascal of a young fellow for a gardener. He knew nothing and worked as little, and we soon parted company. He was her husband, she now told me, but he had run away and left her when the famine came down. It was a famine year; I knew, and we were expecting refugees before many months, but this woman had come early. And she was pregnant, that I could now see.

  “Have you no children?” I asked.

  She patted her belly. “Only this one. The others all died of the ten-day-madness—five of them.”

  This ten-day-madness was simply the convulsions of tetanus, a disease from which many Chinese babies died within the first fortnight of their lives. It was the result of infection at birth, and yet was easily prevented. I had spent a good deal of effort in teaching young Chinese women how to boil the scissors and the bits of cloth or cotton which they used for the children when born. In the North, however, scissors were not used. Instead a child’s cord was cut with a strip of reed or leaf, peeled from the inside. By some sort of experience the women had learned not to use metal and the reed could be clean or not, depending upon its handling.

  “I came to you,” the woman said, adding with touching and I must say annoying naïveté, “I have no one else.”

  I cannot pretend that I was at all happy about this naïveté or that I was in the least flattered by her confidence. Where could I put a pregnant peasant woman in my already too complex household? She could not live outside the compound, for a woman alone and without relatives would only be molested by any idle man in the neighborhood, and we had plenty of such in these times of war lords and unrest and wandering soldiers. The old peaceful security of my own childhood was entirely gone and even my children could not wander about the countryside as I had once done.

  My guest must have seen what was going on in my mind, for she said humbly, “There is a little house behind your garden, Wise Mother. I saw it when I came in the gate. I could live there until the child is born, not troubling you or anyone except for a handful of rice, and then when I am able I will find work.”

  The little house was a hen house and in no way fit for a human being and I told her so. Besides, there was another room, used for storage but quite good, and it could be prepared for her. “But you had better have your child in the hospital,” I concluded. “Then you will have good care.”

  Mrs. Lu—there is no reason why I should not tell her true name, for she is dead now, good soul, and there are as many Lus in China as there are Smiths in America—was a sweetly stubborn woman, as I was to discover. She wanted the chicken house, where she could be alone, and she would not, under any persuasion, go to a foreign hospital. She had had so many children, she insisted, that she knew exactly what to do and she wanted no one with her when the baby was born. I yielded at last, for she would not yield, and the hen house was cleaned and white-washed, the two windows scrubbed free of dust and cobwebs and the floor re-laid with fresh clean brick. I put a bed and a table and a chair or two in the little room and curtained the windows so that men would not look in at night and gave her a strong padlock for the door. With a little money I gave her she bought herself a pottery charcoal brazier, to be used for both heat and cooking, an earthen teapot and two bowls and a pair of chopsticks, and a small store of food. Thereafter Mrs. Lu was part of the compound and she remained almost unseen while she waited for the child. Meanwhile, troubled that she would not go to the hospital or even have our good amah with her, I made up a small sterile kit for her, containing bandages, scissors, and a bottle of iodine.

  One crisp December morning the amah came with good news. Mrs. Lu had come out of her little house long enough to tell her that the baby had arrived during the night. I ordered the usual nourishing food and liquids for the mother, first a bowl of hot water strongly mixed with red sugar, and followed in an hour or so by chicken soup and noodles. This was accepted northern practice, the red sugar supposedly replenishing the blood, and the chicken and noodles insuring a good supply of milk. Then I went to visit mother and baby. It was a pretty sight. The little room was clean and warm, for Mrs. Lu had made everything tidy after the event, and she was lying in bed, her large flat face rapturous, and, wrapped in the clean baby blankets I had given her was a small very fat boy. She had put on him the usual Chinese arrangements for diapers and then he was encased in the blankets. All seemed in order and I gave her a birth gift for congratulations of two silver dollars wrapped in red paper. She was so grateful that she made me uncomfortable and I left as soon as I could.

  The next day while I was at breakfast the amah came in to tell me that the baby was dying. I could not believe it. “Didn’t she use the boiled scissors to cut his cord?” I asked.

  “Oh, yes, Wise Mother,” the amah said. “But his belly is burned.”

  What mystery was this? I went out at once to the little house and found the baby very ill indeed. Mrs. Lu unwrapped the swaddling garments and there upon his tiny belly I saw burns around his navel. They were iodine burns.

  “But I told you not to pour the iodine on the baby,” I exclaimed.

  “Ah, so you said, Wise Mother,” Mrs. Lu moaned. “But I thought, if the medicine is good, why not use it all?”

  I said I would take the baby at once to the hospital but this Mrs. Lu would not hear of, nor would she have the foreign doctor touch the child, not for a moment. But she let me take him to my own house and there I did the best I could for hi
m. After a few days in my bedroom his robust peasant ancestry came to his aid, he decided to live, and I could return him to his mother. Before he was a month old his father, the runaway husband, appeared at the gate and the family was united again. I found a job for him on the university farms and Mrs. Lu rented a small earthen house, two little rooms, just over the compound wall.

  Once again the baby came near death before he was a year old. It was after the summer, and Mrs. Lu walked in with him one day weeping and declaring that the child was doomed to die for some past sin in another incarnation. She turned him over to display his naked bottom and there I saw broken blisters and raw flesh.

  “How is it he is burned again?” I inquired, astounded.

  “He is not burned, Wise Mother,” Mrs. Lu said. “I said to myself that now he is so big I should not use the water cloths you gave me but lay him on a bed of sand as we do in the north country, so that when he wets, there is no washing. But here there is no sand as we have in the North and so I laid him on ashes from the stove.”

  Ashes? Of course the urine had combined with the wood ashes to make lye. Again I took Little Meatball, as his milk name was, and after a few weeks of nursing he was well again.

  All this is of no importance in itself, but it is very important because of the last of the three dates which I remember as monuments of the events in that decade between 1920 and 1930, and which changed my world. This third date was March 27, 1927.

  While thus my life continued within my house, I was continually mindful of what was happening outside. It was difficult sometimes to know exactly what was going on except from the Chinese newspapers which printed brief undigested items which had somehow to be connected by pondering and guessing and then connected again with the grapevine of students’ confidences and complaints. In Peking the huge blustering peasant war lord Feng Yu-hsiang, with whom Sun Yat-sen had hoped to make alliance before his death, had been defeated by the despotic war lord of Manchuria, Chang Tso-lin. Yet we all knew the Chang regime could not last, and it was tolerated only because everybody waited to see what the new Kuomintang revolution, then shaping up in Canton, was going to do. It was rumored and then confirmed not only that the Nationalist party had been reorganized, that Communists were now allowed to be members and that Russian advisors were being employed, but the new party was very different, we heard, from the old one. It was organized under military discipline and carried on with all the spirit of a crusade. When the time was ripe, we heard, this army would march north against the war lords and conquer them and unify China. We were troubled but not frightened, for it was questionable, and certainly the white people thought it so, whether the “Cantonese,” as they liked to call the Kuomintang then, could win against the tough and reckless old war lords in the rest of the country who were doggedly pursuing the historic Chinese techniques of fighting each other until a final victor could and would set up a new dynasty. The students and intellectuals, however, passionately believed in the new revolution and worked for it, while the vast mass of people in both city and country simply waited for what was to happen, not indifferent but passive until the traditional steps were accomplished.

  Though Sun Yat-sen was dead, in a powerful way he was more than ever the leader. He had, after his rapprochement with Soviet Russia in 1921, sent a gifted young soldier to Moscow for further military and revolutionary training. This man was Chiang Kai-shek. He had returned and had set up the new military college of Whampoa. There the officers of the future army were being trained. This Sun Yat-sen had planned, convinced at last that only by military means could China be unified. By his death, then, Sun Yat-sen accomplished far more than by his life. Alive, he had made many mistakes and had often alienated even those among his own people, but dead, he could be made perfect, and this the Kuomintang proceeded to do. His last words, his famous will and his portrait were printed everywhere, and the very sight of his pictured face inspired the students to fresh patriotism and revolutionary fervor. A little more than two months after his death, for example, an incident occurred in Shanghai that was worth a dozen victorious battles to the new leader, Chiang Kai-shek. There had been a strike in a Japanese-owned mill and the police in the International Settlement had arrested some of the strikers. A huge crowd of students from many schools gathered together in a demonstration one day soon after, to protest the arrest, and they refused to heed the warnings of the police. They would not disband when ordered to do so. Finally the police fired and several students were killed. Instantly resentment spread over the whole country. There were demonstrations everywhere, and boycotts were set up against Japanese and British in one city after another from south to north. Hong Kong was entirely boycotted and so many angry Chinese of all classes left that English colonial possession that its life was literally hamstrung until the anti-foreign fever died down again. Few foreigners could read Chinese newspapers but those who could were really terrified, and many white people were recalled by their consuls from the interior where they could not be protected.

  My own sympathies were entirely with the Chinese, for though the police were within their rights as foreign-controlled police, yet it should have been remembered that they were in China and that the traditional Chinese attitude toward law was entirely different from that of the West. In China law was only for criminals, to punish them for their crimes. A person who was not a criminal could not be reached by law. Therefore when the police shot down innocent people even after due warning, and especially young students and intellectuals, who were traditionally recognized as valuable and upper-class persons, it was the police who had committed the crime of murder, the people said, and not the innocent young people who were only trying to be “patriotic.” The incident was sadly typical of the differing points of view of my two worlds. There were many such differences and their number and ferocity were to rise to such volume that they fed directly into the Second World War, with its continuing war in Korea.

  The May 30th Incident, as it came to be called, was a wonderful aid to the Kuomintang revolutionists. The war lord government in Peking was everywhere denounced as “running dogs of imperialism,” and the revolutionaries in the South, building upon the anger of the people, planned their expedition for the next year much earlier than they might otherwise have been able to do. In 1926 began that triumphant northern march, Chiang Kai-shek leading it and flanked by Communist Russian advisors, both political and military. They found no resistance. The war lords of the southern provinces made a pretense of resisting, then fell to bargaining and then to yielding and “joining” the revolution. In the second summer after Sun Yat-sen’s death the revolutionary forces had reached the very heart of China, and had occupied those three vital industrial cities of the middle Yangtse, Hankow, Wuhan and Hanyang. It was far more than military victory. As soon as a region fell the Communist organizers, under Russian direction, spread through the country and organized the peasants against the landlords and the workers in the great factories of the cities against their employers. I say Communist and yet I do not believe that Communism itself was meaningful in those days to the Chinese revolutionists. They had been told by their dead leader that Soviet Russia was their friend and that since the revolution in Russia had been successful in overthrowing an ancient and tyrannical government and organizing a new one—whose tyrannies, alas, were too little known anywhere and to the Chinese unknown—they, the Chinese revolutionists, must be guided by the Russians. The driving force in the Chinese, however, was not political unrest, which was only secondary, and not even class conflict. It was a passionate determination to get rid of the foreigners who had fastened themselves upon China through trade and religion and war, and set up a government for the reform and modernization of their country.

  I pause here to reflect. Over and over again in recent years Americans have said to me with real sadness that they cannot understand why the Chinese hate us “when we have done so much for them.” Actually, of course, we have done nothing for them. They did not ask us to sen
d missionaries nor did they seek our trade. There has been individual kindness on both sides. Americans have sent relief in times of famine and war. I am sure the Chinese would have done the same for us, had our positions been reversed. Individual Americans, usually missionaries, have lived kind and unselfish lives in China, but again they came of their own will and they were appreciated. Individual Chinese have risked their lives and sometimes lost them for missionaries and other white folk in time of revolt or war.

  The Chinese attitude toward the whole business of the missionary may best be exemplified from a little incident I once saw take place in my father’s church in an interior city. He was preaching earnestly and somewhat long, and the congregation was growing restless. One by one they rose and went away. There is nothing in Chinese custom which forbids a person to leave an audience. He saunters away from the temple, the public storyteller or the theater when he feels like it and a sermon is an entirely foreign notion. My father was disturbed, however, and a kindly old lady on the front seat, seeing this, was moved to turn her head and address the people thus: “Do not offend this good foreigner! He is making a pilgrimage in our country so that he may acquire merit in heaven. Let us help him to save his soul!” This reversal so astonished my father, and yet he so perfectly understood its sincerity, that he begged the pardon of the assembly and instantly stopped his sermon.