My Several Worlds: A Personal Record

by Pearl S. Buck

  My own memories of the film are not so sinister. I did not go to the opening although I was in New York at the time, for I dreaded the fanfare and publicity. I waited for a few days and then my husband and I went quietly to the theater and took seats in the gallery. It is an amazing experience to see the characters one has created come alive on the screen, and I was much moved by the effort that had been made, especially by the incredibly perfect performance of Luise Rainer as O-lan. She not only looked like a Chinese woman but she moved like one and every detail of action, even to the washing of a rice bowl, was correct. When I asked her how she had accomplished this, she told me that she had chosen from among the many Chinese employed on the set for the crowd scenes a young woman whom she thought most like O-lan. She had then followed this woman everywhere, watching her until she felt identified with her. When later the film was shown in China, as well as in other Asian countries, where incidentally it was a great success, Chinese friends wrote to me of their surprise and appreciation of Luise Rainer, marvelling, as I had, at the miracle of her understanding.

  As for the evening at the New York theater, when I got up to leave my seat after the picture was over, I heard a gusty sigh from behind me and a hearty male voice said: “Well, it’s a good show, but I’d ruther see Mae West.” I knew what he meant. I had seen Mae West, but in a small crowded theater in Java, and hearty males had enjoyed her there, too!

  Now and again during these years I have taken the children to see the house where I was born in West Virginia. It stands back from the road in the shelter of the mountains looming behind it, and it belongs to another family, a friendly one, to whom my first cousin went in sad distress, decades ago now, when speculations forced him to sell the homestead he had inherited from my eldest uncle who had it from my grandfather, in old-fashioned primogeniture. I am glad that friends live there but nevertheless the house is sorely changed. It needs paint and carpentering and the great old trees are gone, although the wisteria vine still hangs from the pillared portico. Inside, the house is entirely changed, only the shape of the rooms remaining. The formal old life that I can remember is no more.

  But much is gone that is no more and it would be ungrateful of me to be sorry. And I remember instead that the young son of the family who lives in the house now came back a captain from the Second World War, as his father did from the First World War, and as his grandfather did from the Civil War, but this young captain has lost half his body. We were shocked—nay, our children at first were terrified—when he came rolling out of his car that day of our first visit, a stump of a man with no legs. For some impatience in him had made him to decide to live as he is, without artificial legs if he cannot have the ones he was born with, and thus he goes about his business, making his living and managing with the help of friends even to go fishing, a pastime that he loves. He has a good young wife and he has fathered two children, and he told me on a later visit that the only time he cannot bear his loss is when one of his children asks him to do something which he cannot and then he must explain that he has no legs. He has plenty of courage, nevertheless, and I am glad that my sons know him. It takes courage indeed to live as he does, and to wonder sometimes, as I am sure all young men must, whether there is not common sense enough somewhere in the world so that the folly of such loss can never be again.

  What else do I remember? One winter I was charmed by radio, and I planned a novel written for that fine medium, so new to me then, and I went quietly to a class at Columbia taught by an excellent radio writer, and there, unknown among young men and women green to the craft, too, I learned and wrote my assignments until the professor’s sharp eye picked me out, and then he told me I had learned enough and there was no more he could teach me. I never wrote the novel, but I wrote a few radio plays during the war, one of which was included in the anthology of that year. Now television has come, and sometimes I ponder how a novelist can use that magic medium, too. It remains to be discovered. Meanwhile, I learned not only from the professor but from those young men and women who were my fellow students.

  The young American entices me to ask many questions. I observe him everywhere, in my own house and on the streets of the village and the city, everywhere I go. There is a basic lack in his life, I feel, although I cannot define it. Our young are strangely insecure. I ascribe this, primarily, after much thought and observation, to the general lovelessness of their life as children. In old countries, France, for example, in Europe, and anywhere in Asia, the child is so well loved that he can survive any disaster of his life in childhood, except death itself, because he is always with his family, and in later life because he has had his foundations laid in love. Only in Germany did I see harshness to the young, and I wonder how much that early harshness had to do with their life-unhappiness, the restlessness, the discontent which have forced them into war again and yet again, and compelling them, perhaps, to find a kindly father in any leader who promises them good things.

  Our Americans are not harsh to their children so much as indifferent and withdrawn, or anxious and critical. The parent world is too far separated from the childhood world, there are too many absolutes conflicting one against the other, so that our children grow up uncertain of their own worth as human beings. I am amazed when sometimes an unperceptive foreigner tells me that Americans are proud. Bombastic sometimes, yes, and boastful, but this is because we are not proud, but secretly self-distrustful and doubtful of what we do and say and think. A man who knows his own worth does not boast, is not self-seeking, will not domineer or force his own opinion upon others, respects his fellow man because he respects first himself. When we Americans fail in these virtues it is because somewhere we have lost our faith in ourselves, and this happens, I believe, in early childhood. How I wince when I see a mother, or a father, but more often a mother, because American men do not usually take their proper share of responsibility for their children, jerk a child’s arm upon the street, slap the little creature, shout at him, walk too fast for small legs! I long to have the courage to speak, to tell the mother to be careful what she does, because it is by such cruelty that she will lose her child’s heart. I have never dared to speak because I discover that to the American parent his child is a private possession, to deal with as he likes, and this is not as it was in China, where the child belonged to all the generations, and was always defended from parental injustice.

  Our children, I say, are not treated with sufficient respect as human beings, and yet from the moment they are born they have this right to respect. We keep them children far too long, their world separate from the real world of life. In towns and cities, for example, the young are not allowed to take responsibility. Is this not also a form of disrespect? The opinion of children is a valuable point of view and should be put to use. They are part of the community and they have their thoughts and feelings. The energy, too, of children is an asset which should be expressed for the benefit of the community. I see dirty streets, filthy areas, evidences of careless if not of bad government in most communities, yet the children do not consider it their business. But if I were the mayor of a town, I would want the children to have a voice in putting me in that place, and I would hold the young, at this level, as responsible as the elders at theirs, for the conduct of community life. Americans are citizens from the moment they are born, and not when they become twenty-one years of age. By then, if they have not performed the acts of a citizen in a democracy, it is too late. They remain irresponsible and therefore immature. From the first grade on, the child should be taught his duties as a citizen, and given his voice in municipal matters and then in state and nation. But here I begin to ride a hobby and I dismount.

  In the years during which I have lived in my own country the greatest advance, perhaps, has been made in race relations. I say this in the full knowledge that the advance, measured in terms of the goal, is still very small, but it has begun in the minds of the white people, and in the determination of the Negroes. We do learn, we Americans, though t
he process is slow and we are not always willing to admit that we are changing. Perhaps the outspoken criticism of Asians whose skins are not white, and of South Africans, black and colored, has made us think. I believe that prejudice in the American, as a matter of fact, is very shallow, and could easily be cast away altogether.

  I am the more inclined to this belief when I see the generous praise and respect given to Negroes who prove themselves great artists and great human beings. When Negroes ask me, “What would you do if you were a Negro?” I always reply, “I would devote myself to the discovery of the most gifted and most intelligent children among my race and I would collect money somehow to educate them to their fullest development, and with responsibility for others.”

  The intelligent men and women of India and Pakistan have in recent years, too, had much to do with our realization that people with brown skins can be wise and cultivated, in the ways of the West as well as of the East. I hope that such voices will not allow themselves to be silenced, for Americans are human beings first of all, and we can be won by humanity wherever it is shown. The extraordinary patience and grace with which the leaders of India, in particular, have borne our rash speeches and newspaper articles have increased their influence over us, in spite of loud and raucous cries from certain public figures here. Dignity is a wonderful weapon when it is consistently used, and if never lost, it always wins.

  Many friends have helped me know my country. Dorothy Canfield, for example, means Vermont to me, and knowing her inspired me to build our small house, our sons learning by helping to build it, Forest Haunt in the Green Mountains. There we face the Wilderness. Much as I love people and find my life among them, I like sometimes to sit in our forest-circled cabin and know that for thirty-five miles to the north of us, there is no man or woman living, but only woods and brooks and silence. Each state in this great union lives for me not only in landscape and experience, but in the people who belong there and have taken me with them to their homes, if not in body, then in letters.

  Of my American family, next to husband and children, I remember my dear mother-in-law, now dead. Reared in China, I could not but respect her position in my life. It was essential to me that she like me and approve me, but what if she had not? She did, however, and from the first the relationship was what it should be, honor from me and love, and from her an affection, kind and easy. I do not know why at this moment I see her on a certain morning here at our farmhouse, where she often visited us, but would never live, somewhat to my hurt at first, for I would have liked to have her live with us and give our children the benefit of a grandmother in the house, the grandfather being dead and so beyond the reach of our daily life. But no, she would only come for visits, and on one such morning, as we lingered over the breakfast table after the children had finished and gone away, we talked of England and the royal family in whom, as one born in England, she took much personal interest. She was a handsome white-haired lady, substantially built and always well dressed and cheerful, afraid of nothing except mice. She sat with her back to the big window at the end of the table, my husband on one side of her and I on the other, and behind her the sunlight fell upon the polished red brick floor.

  Suddenly, as she talked, a kangaroo mouse darted out from the logs piled in the fireplace which was not lit, and without an instant’s hesitation, the fragile lively mite rose upon its hind legs, its front paws waving like little hands, and began to dance in the sunshine. The sight was so exquisite, the dance so minutely dainty and graceful, that my husband and I caught each other’s glance, longing to speak. Yet did we speak, the mouse would be revealed to our mother, and then the dance be broken. In silent ecstasy we watched while our elder talked, until the mouse had finished its dance and fluttered back into the fireplace. I see the scene yet, like a painting on a wall, except that no painting could convey the fairy movement of the little wild thing behind our mother’s chair.

  And still another memorable picture in my intermingling worlds is of a cold November day in New Jersey, the twenty-third, to be exact, and at Freewood Acres. The occasion was the consecration of a Lama Buddhist Temple. Actually it was a garage made into a temple, and there is something strange and fascinating about the very idea of such a transformation, the first in the history of our country, I am sure. But it was a true temple, for all that, and made by a devout people now becoming American citizens. They were the anti-Communist Kalmuks, more than a hundred of them, men, women and children, and they had worked on the building themselves, the woodwork, the masonry, the plastering. The asphalt shingles they had painted a bright yellow, the sacred color of Buddhism, but over the door was a huge American flag as well as the red and yellow flag of their religion.

  The Kalmuks are the descendants of the Mongolian warrior-followers of Genghis Khan, who conquered much of Asia and Europe in the thirteenth century. They settled on the steppes between the Don and the Volga rivers, and after the revolution in Russia they were formed into the Kalmuk Socialist Soviet Autonomous Republic. In spite of this fine name they never were friendly with the Kremlin and during the Second World War many of them were taken, or allowed themselves to be taken, by the German armies, and thus they found their way into DP camps, whence they were brought to the United States, mainly through the efforts of Protestant Christians. In New Jersey now they work in carpet factories, on farms and on construction jobs.

  We arrived early that day, the air very frosty and cold, and were met by friendly representatives who led us into a crowded small room in somebody’s house, made festive as a guest room, and there we were offered cakes and tea. Though it was so early, the entire population, even the children, looked clean and rosy, the babies amazingly fat and round-faced and wrapped like little papooses against the cold. After two hours or so the services began. We were invited into the tiny temple and given places of honor behind ropes at the right side of the altar.

  How strange the familiar Buddhist gods looked to me that day! I had never seen them before in an American setting, or even in so simple a building, but here they were, sitting in a row behind the altar, and before them were heaped the offerings of the people, food of every sort including boxes of crackers and breakfast cereals, and I daresay the gods had never been given such gifts before, either. Of course, actually, they were gifts to the lamas. But it was all very solemn and to me inspiring as well as touching. My old friend, the Dilowa Hutukhtu, who is the eighteenth recorded incarnation of the Indian saint Tolopa and is therefore the primate of all the Mongol Buddhists in our country, officiated in the brief half-hour ceremony. To his right and slightly lower sat nine lamas, who had come, I think, with the Kalmuks. The Dilowa himself is a tall man, now growing old, and his wide Mongolian face is as peaceful here as though he were not an exile. On that day in the little garage temple he was quietly radiant, though once he had been the head of nine hundred lamas in three great lamaseries, one in Outer and two in Inner Mongolia. But that was in the days before the Communists drove him out and before Owen Lattimore saved his life.

  Now in the new little temple he put on his yellow silken hat, which signified his rank, comparable, perhaps, to the red hat of a cardinal in the Catholic Church, the Dalai Lama in Tibet being comparable to the Pope. He sat cross-legged on a high seat when we came in, then he rose and walked slowly to the altar, his robes flowing about him. He sounded a delicate small bell, and the other lamas gathered beside him and in chorus they began the sacred chants. When this part of the service was ended the Dilowa made a short sermon, and these, translated, are among the words he spoke:

  “This day, by the saving grace of Buddha, is a day of great rejoicing for the completion of a deed of blessed merit.

  “All ye Kalmuk Mongols of pure faith did succeed in escaping from the dreadful circumstances of Red Russia, where false beliefs prevail, and did come to this great America where peace and happiness are broadly based and you have built a new temple in the pure sincerity of your devotion, to affirm your faith in the Buddha, which you held fr
om of yore, and now invoke its consecration. That you have founded a congregation of the faith, that verily this day you have completed a palace of the Lord Buddha to be his dwelling, to uphold and accomplish that which is in the heart of Buddha, a place of prayer and sacrifice, a place for the sowing of the harvest of blessedness, is your reward because in previous incarnations you were valiant in the faith….

  “Upon all of you, the Kalmuk Mongols, who, in raising this temple, have perpetuated in it the name of Arashi Gimpling, your temple in your ancient homeland, I invoke this blessing: That, having fulfilled all that you sought and all that you hoped for, in the fulness of the Law and to your heart’s desire, your happiness may be overflowing, your words of merit ever increasing, your very rebirth bring you together with the religion of the Buddha, and that speedily and in peace and without toil you may be united with the pure saints on high.”

  When the services were over we all went out into the cold and brilliant sunshine, and there on the tiny porch of the temple I saw a pleasant sight. Five-year-old Sally, the small but extremely beautiful daughter of my friend, the Mongol prince, had paused to give voice to the exuberance of her soul. She was dressed in gorgeous red and green satin robes from her throat to her feet, as were all her family, and thus attired she stood beneath the American and the Buddhist flags, and overcome with religious feeling, she burst into spontaneous song. The hymn? It was “Jesus Loves Me.” I retired behind the building and enjoyed private and soul-shaking laughter, but the Kalmuks seemed to find nothing either amusing or strange in the incident.

  “How nicely Sally sings,” they said, admiring this little Sunday-school princess.

  The next event was a mighty dinner, given by the White Russian colony at Rova Farms to the Kalmuks and their friends. We sat down, three hundred of us, to a feast such as only Russians know how to provide, and while excellent food and drink progressed from course to course, speeches began and went on. Russians rose and spoke with great vitality and vigor, and I listened, unable to understand except as a neighbor translated hastily. What was most moving, however, was the final speech which the leading Kalmuk gave, a sturdy moonfaced man in a grey business suit. He held a paper before him and after he had expressed his thanks for the dinner and also for the great kindness otherwise shown the new colony by the White Russians, he went on to give thanks to the gods that his people had been brought safely to the United States, where, he said, they were doing well. Not only, he told us, had they built the temple consecrated this day, but thirty families owned their own houses, more than twenty had cars, and, he was glad to say, more than fifty had television sets!