I was too startled to reply more than feebly. “I never thought of it.”
“Ah, you should think,” Mrs. Webb said reproachfully.
I gathered myself together. “Really, Mrs. Webb, I have no information on the subject, I’m afraid. And if you ask my opinion, I should say that there is less homosexuality among the Chinese than among any other people.”
“Now, now,” Mrs. Webb said, still with the forefinger outstretched, “You’ve just told me you have no information.”
“No, but just thinking aloud, Mrs. Webb,” I went on, “Chinese families marry their sons so early, you know, and besides, there is never much homosexuality in countries where there is no real militarism, where the young men are not segregated young when their sex impulses are most strong, into camps and so on.”
She capitulated suddenly, her forefinger retreating. “Perhaps you are right,” she said abruptly.
I left, and the American with me, and at the end of the lane we paused to look back. The endearing old couple had walked after us and were sitting on the bench again, side by side, Sidney Webb’s hands crossed on his gold-headed cane, and Mrs. Webb upright, the snowy ruffle of her mobcap fluttering in the breeze.
From English countryside I went once more to London, purposely to discover its Dickensian past, which first I had discovered long ago on the wide southern veranda of our bungalow on the Chinese hill. I remember one day, while wandering about the city, that I came upon The Old Curiosity Shop, exactly as I had imagined it, and I stood gazing at it for many minutes in a dream of pleasure, obstructing the sidewalk where I stood and creating a human eddy so that pedestrians were obliged to part on one side of me and come together again on the other side, which they did with dogged English patience. In the same way Charles Lamb came alive again, too, in the dim and narrow streets of the Inner Temple.
From London I went next to Sweden, and found a country so crisply modern that in many ways it made me think of the United States, except that being a smaller country it was better organized and governed. The advantages of a small country are enormous in times of peace, and even in times of war I suppose that Switzerland, and Sweden, too, have proved the positive possibility of a neutral and prosperous existence, provided that the country is not in the way of conquest. On the other hand, the swift rise of Hitler could never have taken place except in a small, relatively homogeneous country. Nowadays, when I view with frequent unease certain events in my own nation which remind me of Germany before the Second World War, I reassure myself merely by reflecting upon our size and variety. It would take more than a mastermind to shape us into totalitarianism, I still believe. But I was uneasy enough at the end of the war, although Hitler had blown himself to bits, to inquire of an intelligent German woman who had seen the rise of the Nazi drama, to explain to me exactly how the whole brutalizing process had taken place in Germany and I put what she said into a book, which I called How It Happens. And the last lines of that book are these:
“A long silence fell between us.
“‘Have we finished our book?’ I asked at last. She lifted her head and I met her grave grey eyes. She said,
“‘I want to tell one story, about an American girl who comes from a small town. I like her very much. She is full of good will, she has become a social worker, and she wants to help. She is so open-minded—that is what I like about Americans, they are so open-minded, even if they don’t understand. This girl’s boy friend was in Germany and on the day when the armistice with Japan was declared, she came to see me and she said, ‘Now it’s all over!’ She was happy and glad, as we all were, that the terrible war was over. But the very next moment she said, ‘Let’s forget about it as quickly as possible!’
“‘Then I said. “No, let’s never forget about it! Let’s remember it forever. Let’s learn how it happened so that it can never happen again!’”
“‘That is what I want to say to all Americans.’”
The Second World War, the rise of Hitler, the continuing evil influence of Fascism were undreamed of in those days, however, at least by me, and Sweden was a holiday. When I left there, I took my first journey by airplane, destination Amsterdam, and discovered that I am irrevocably ill when I am in the air, proving that I am what I have always known myself to be, an earth-bound creature with no heavenly aspirations. I lingered again in Holland, for my mother’s ancestors had come from Utrecht, and then I went to France, through Belgium, and in France I remember again the fields of small white crosses of the American dead, and the mausoleums upon whose walls, as I have said, are engraved the tens of thousands of names of the lost youth of our country, and I reflected even then that if our country could be drawn into a European war at such cost what would be our loss if ever we were drawn into a war with Asia? It was impossible to ignore the portent, for I was now haunted by the similarity of the condition of the Negroes in my own country and that of peoples in colonial Asia. So many of the stories I had heard as I stood that day in New York before the Negro paintings were what I had already known on the other side of the world, and I saw how the minds of the Negroes, revealed in the paintings, were obsessed with the same deep injustices and cruelties that had burned in the minds and hearts even of the Chinese revolutionists. I determined before I returned to my own country to live, if I ever did, that I would travel to India and to Indo-China and Indonesia and see for myself the full measure of the feelings of the peoples there, in order that I might have a world view of the relations between the races of man.
My European journey ended in Italy, for after a stay in Venice I took ship to China again, by way of the Red Sea. Of that journey upon a handsome Italian ship little remains to remember. I spent my time, mostly in solitude, reviewing all that I had learned during the year in my own country, and preparing myself for the year ahead. If, I told myself, I had indeed only one more year in China, how should it be spent? Surely in nothing but learning and writing. And during the long hot days on deck while the ship ploughed its way through a placid sea to the coast of India, I conceived the idea of a series of novels, each of which should reveal some fundamental aspect of Chinese life, even perhaps of Asian life, if I could accumulate that knowledge. But China I knew to the core of heart and the last convolution of my brain, and what was happening in China could and might happen in any country of Asia, unless some unforeseen wisdom in the West could prevent it by understanding in time. Thus I planned my next novel, which I decided to center upon that key figure in Chinese history, the war lord. Surely I knew him, having lived under his rule for decades. This was the beginning of my next novel, Sons.
I went ashore at Bombay and again in Colombo but I made no effort then to see much of India, for I knew that I would come back. I was not returning this time only to China but to all of Asia. It was an Asia as ancient as ever, as mediaeval, and yet in its strange aspects, piercingly new.
Before I reached Shanghai, while I was still aboard the ship, I received an invitation from an American lady to meet the staff of the China Critic at a dinner at her house. This magazine was a weekly, put out by a very modern, Western-educated little group of Chinese literary figures, among whom was Lin Yutang. I had not then met him, but I knew his writings in Chinese as well as in English in the China Critic. He was an essayist, a wit, a humorist, never profound, his rivals said, yet I felt a shrewd accuracy in his pungent jokes and sharp thrusts. In those days he was criticizing Chiang Kai-shek and the Nationalist government with such alarming honesty and fearlessness that his friends besought him not to “twist the tiger’s tail.” He was always lighthearted, however, reckless with a laughing courage that no one seemed to take too seriously, and yet all were grateful because he said much that they only dared to feel.
I accepted the invitation for dinner, mainly to meet him, and passed one of those amazing evenings, where an exotic international intelligentsia poured forth a potpourri, not always fragrant, of wit and scandalous gossip. I listened as usual and said little and accepted a dinner invitation fro
m Lin Yutang to come to his home and meet his wife. The only other guest was to be Hu Shih.
This second evening was even more interesting, for at his house I met Mrs. Lin Yutang, a warmhearted thoroughly Chinese lady, and with her their little daughters. The dinner was delicious, and while I enjoyed it I listened again, this time to interchange between the two notable but curiously contrasting Chinese gentlemen. The lack of understanding between the two men was already plain, Hu Shih being slightly scornful of the irrepressible younger man. He left early, and then Lin Yutang told me that he himself was writing a book about China. It was to be the famous My Country and My People.
I left the house late, excited by the idea of a book in English by a Chinese writer and one so fearless. Its influences, I felt, could be boundless, and I wrote to the John Day Company in New York at once, recommending their immediate attention to this Chinese author, unknown as yet to the West.
The grey house in Nanking stood as I had left it, and I must say that when I walked in the front door it looked empty to me. The servants had done their best and all was neat and clean, but somehow it was no longer home. I had changed more than I knew. Well, to be fair, I must make it home again, I thought—lay down the new rugs I had bought in Shanghai and open doors to a terrace, and even, if I were extravagant, put in central heating. If I had grown too easily used to the luxuries of American life, I would have a few of them here, so that the issue of leaving China would not be confused with the fact that living in America was perhaps physically more pleasant.
I know now that it was a habit of my woman’s nature to plunge deep into housekeeping and gardening whenever I had mental and spiritual problems to face and solve. For the next months, therefore, I did no more than make the house pleasant, bring back my garden to its accustomed flourishing condition in fruit and flowers, renew my friendships with my neighbors and listen to all the news of the city and the nation that was poured into my ears.
The outlook was not good. I found an ever-deepening gulf between the white people and the Chinese. Both groups of the white people, businessmen and missionaries, were alike unhappy. The new government had set up a regime which, however justifiable its rules, antagonized even their white friends while it made the unfriendly furious. Mission schools were forced to comply with the government regulations of obeisance before the portrait of Sun Yat-sen, required to hang on every chapel or assembly hall wall. The famous Will, now a sacred document, had to be read aloud once a week, the audience standing. To the missionaries this smelled of worship before other gods, yet they had to comply or face the possibility of closing their schools. In the Christian churches the Chinese members were pressing for self-government and control of foreign funds, although among many missionaries there was still a hidden distrust of all Chinese—or at least a sense of responsibility toward their home churches, who had collected so painfully the money sent abroad for foreign missions.
In business circles there was the same hostility, for different reasons. Foreign businessmen and their firms knew that the Western nations did not want to take over China, or to conquer her in a political sense. What they wanted was more trade, special concessions perhaps, and guarantees of safety for their personnel. None would have wanted the responsibility of governing China and so assuming the burden of her confused affairs. Indeed, since the end of the First World War no Western power had the strength for such a feat. England was groaning even under the management of India. Colonialism for any nation was nearing its end as a profitable possession. Yet the Nationalist government continued to harp upon the aggressions of the past and to ignore entirely the new and dangerous aggressions of Japan, who, it was obvious, did want to take over China and annex her as she had annexed Korea. Had the Nationalist party, or Kuomintang, understood in those days the true position of the changing West and the real danger from rising Japan, the war with Japan would certainly, I believe, have been impossible, for by siding with the West and moving against Japan, the Nationalists could have prevented the attempts for the Asian empire planned by Japanese militarists and industrial interests in combination. The Nationalist government therefore must take the primary blame, for what happened later. It should have been obvious that the end of Western aggression in China, and indeed in Asia, was already in sight. Britain was yielding her concessions, the special rights were under discussion for change, and it was only a matter of setting up adequate Chinese courts for the extraterritorial rights also to be abolished.
Soviet Russia, however, had earlier confused the Chinese leaders by voluntarily relinquishing her special rights, and at the end of the First World War the fact that the Germans had been forced to yield all special rights further influenced the new Chinese. Chiang Kai-shek would have none of Soviet Russia, of course, but he did display a special friendliness toward Germany, especially as Fascism rose to power there. It was obvious that Fascism appealed to him, and roused in him the old Chinese tradition of the despot, crystallized so long ago at the time of Christ under Ch’in Shih Huang, the First Emperor, a fascist ruler in the fullest sense. It was this Emperor who even at that early time had repudiated the benevolence of Confucius, the great philosopher and intellectual, and had ordered the burning of books, in order that Confucianism could be ended forever. The new and growing Chinese army was put under the advice of German military men, and we saw preference given to German white people over the rest of us. This meant that other Western powers were alienated and so they stood aloof as they watched Japan encroach further and further upon Chinese soil. Let the Japanese solve the massive problem of China, they said to one another. Thus when the war actually broke, China had not a single Western ally and Germany was on the side of Japan! The Nationalists had guessed wrongly.
It was plain by the beginning of the year 1934 that the Nationalist government, still called the “new government,” could not endure. It had never faced the basic problems of the nation, and the peasants were still suffering under the old evils of landlordism and even higher taxes than they had endured before. Thus when I wandered about the countryside beyond the walls of Nanking, as I had used to do, everywhere the farmers and their wives complained that whereas under the old regime they had only one ruler to whom to pay taxes, now there were many little rulers, all demanding taxes, and they were worse off than ever. Democracy? They did not know its meaning, they said, although young men were always spouting the word at them. People’s rights? What were they? There was nowhere they could appeal for their rights. The new roads? Yes, there were new roads but only for motorcars, and who had motorcars except the officials and a few rich men? When those cars roared past, every farmer, carrying his loads to the markets on his shoulders, had to get out of the way. There was no democracy, if by that one meant rights and benefits for the people, and how could a government succeed if it did not practice what it preached? Even the young relatives of the rulers rode through the streets like lords, scattering the people before them. In the old days they would not have been allowed thus to behave.
A thousand such complaints were poured into my ears, and it was impossible not to conclude that the new rulers had indeed failed to understand the necessities of the people. They had tried to stop the revolution without discovering its causes and removing them. They had declared that the Chinese people should believe in and practice a new nationalism and all the while they were allowing the Japanese aggressions to go unchecked. An explosion from the people must be the result, unless Japan attacked China first and I believed, after much listening and observation, that Japan would attack before the people could rebel. The Chinese are long-suffering and patient, and moreover there was no one to lead them in rebellion. The intellectuals were busy in the government, in their own pursuits, and anyone among the people who showed the slightest sign of unrest was instantly disposed of as a Communist. Yes, it was time for me to leave China forever, for sooner or later all white people would have to leave. History had mounted too high, a debacle was inevitable sometime in my life years. If I could have
prevented its arrival in any way, I would have stayed to do it, but no one could prevent the inevitable, and any individual would be simply a straw. And I was a woman, at that.
There were personal reasons, too, why I should return to my own country. It is not necessary to recount them, for in the huge events that were changing my world, the personal was all but negligible. My invalid child, nevertheless, had become ill after I left, and it was obvious that for her sake I should live near enough to be with her from time to time. The grey house, too, had ceased to be a home for family life, in spite of my efforts, for the distances between the man and the woman there had long ago become insuperable. There were no differences—only a difference so vast that communication was impossible, in spite of honest effort over many years. It was the deep difference which my parents had perceived long before I did, and which had made my mother try to persuade me against the marriage. I had not heeded her and although sadly soon I had known her right, I had been too proud to reveal myself wrong. Now the difference had come to include the child who could not grow and what should be done for her, and there was no bridge left to build between. It was time for me to leave China.
Yet I had decided that before I finally went I would travel in the countries of Asia as far as I could go, and gain at least a swift view of the position of the colonial peoples at this critical moment of history. I began therefore to travel, first in parts of China that I had not seen, and then further to Indo-China and Siam, to India and Indonesia. I planned, in fact, a journey of exploration into empire, to see how the peoples did under colonialism and to discover, if I could, how the future lay, in timing, if not in event. When, for example, and how, would India get her freedom?
For me the journey could only be a business of looking and listening. I wanted to see no officials, even if I could have met them, and I wanted as little as possible to do with white people. Their point of view I knew already. I wanted to move about a country in my own half-lazy fashion, stopping where I liked, enjoying everything and learning as much as possible. It would be idle now to detail such a journey for many others have travelled in those countries and it has become quite a matter of course even for American officials to take the Grand Asian Tour.
My Several Worlds: A Personal Record Page 40