My Several Worlds (17 page)

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.

Meanwhile I could only cable my parents, unpack my bags and settle down. I accepted the assistantship at college as the easiest job, making it clear that I could only take it with the understanding that at any moment I must be allowed to resign and go home to my sick mother. Thus I began the task of teaching freshman psychology to the incoming class of girls from all over the country. There was no necessity now to be one of them. I was their teacher, and being so young it was all the better if I carried my head high and kept my distance.

In November my mother was worse, and by dint of anxiety and pressure, although the war loomed darker than ever, I persuaded the Presbyterian Board to let me go home anyway. A classmate and close friend generously came to take over my job, and I set forth alone across the wide spaces of land and ocean to return to the country I had known better than any other, and yet which had changed very much in the four years that I had been away. I began again to think in Chinese. During the four years I had not spoken a single word of Chinese, for our one Chinese student came from Shanghai and did not speak Mandarin, and I did not know her dialect. Chinese was my first language, but for the college years I had spoken only my second language, English, and I had unconsciously absorbed the soft drawl of Virginia speech. I remember that a young American on the ship corrected my pronunciation even of the word China, which he insisted I called “Chahna.”

He was a meticulous young man, on his way to the Philippines to work for the Standard Oil Company, and during the idle weeks on the ship, he was part of my American education. I had known a few American men merely as casual companions, but he was another sort. Somewhere along the way we decided firmly, at first individually and then together, that while we would be friends on the ship we would not continue our friendship after parting at Shanghai, and we did not. I do not remember why we came to this stern decision, for nothing was serious between us, but I imagine that it had to do with his contract and certainly with my own determination not to get myself involved with anybody until the question of my mother’s life was settled. But ship friendships are brittle stuff, and certainly the magic of the wide Pacific ended abruptly when the yellow waters of the Yangtse rushed out to muddy the blue.

At any rate, reality began for me when the tall thin figure of my father and the little figure of my younger sister appeared upon the pier to meet me. The very fact of my mother’s absence struck me to the heart. Neither of them had the slightest ability to tell less than the truth. She had not been well enough to come to Shanghai, but she hoped to meet me at the train in Chinkiang.

I read many warnings nowadays against too deep an attachment between parents and children, and I am sure that such dangers are overrated. There should be a deep attachment, heart should be tied to heart between parent and child, for unless the child learns how to love a parent profoundly, I believe that he will never learn how to love anyone else profoundly, and not knowing how to love means the loss of the meaning of life and its fulfillment. I loved both my parents but at different times and in different ways. During my childhood all my love went to my mother, and I felt very little for my father, even going to the extent of remarking one day at the age of eleven that I hated him. My mother rebuked me but there was no other fuss made about it and my father, although he had overheard me, said nothing. I was not made to feel wicked or ungrateful and so I continued to hate my father mildly until I was old enough to appreciate him, which was not until I was grown. During the years when he was seventy to eighty years old, I adored him and found him delightful and charming, affectionate and amusing, and he knew it and expanded in the friendly atmosphere between us. Yet it was not my fault nor his that we had both to wait until such an age for mutual understanding, He did not know earlier how to accept my world and I did not know how to enter his. We had to grow together in time and maturity, and I am glad he lived long enough for that.

My love for my mother was a thing apart. It was rooted in my blood and my bones. I felt her every pain, I knew when she was wounded, and she was wounded always too easily, so that toward the end of her life she suspected people unfairly of wanting to hurt her, and while I knew this was wrong and I argued against her judgments, yet I could not forgive the ones who wounded her even when they did not know what they did. I wanted her to have the happiest life possible for a human being, and this desire was perhaps made the more passionate because I discerned, although she never acknowledged it, that as she grew older she was desperately homesick for the land she had left too young. It was impossible for her to return, she could not leave my father, and she could not cross the ocean again with her weak heart and enfeebled frame.

How weakened she was I had not been able to imagine until I saw her at the railway station in Chinkiang. There she stood, and instead of the strong upright figure I had remembered, wearing her thick white hair like a crown, her dark eyes bright, her lips firm, I saw a small little lady, very dainty in dress as always she was, but shrunken and tiny, so tiny that I lifted her up in my arms when I ran to her.

“Mother, how little you are!” I cried.

“Daughter, how big you are!” she retorted, laughing.

My heart trembled at her fragility and I tried not to weep and she saw it and made me turn to greet the crowd who had come to welcome me, my old Chinese friends, my English Agnes and her family, a few American missionaries, our servants and neighbors. What a heartwarming home-coming it was, with all of them trying to hug me at once and clinging to my hands and making speeches and giving me flowers and little gifts and packages of Chinese spongecakes and sesame cookies! It was a mild and glorious afternoon although the season was late November and we lingered so that I could speak to everyone and the station gang gathered around to stare and remark upon our goings on. I was home again, even though during the years I had been away the compound in which I had grown up had been given over to a boys’ school and the old bungalow torn down to make place for a new two-story modern dormitory. My parents had moved to another hill and another modest mission house had been built for them. But the hills and the valleys were the same, and as we walked along the familiar roads of beaten earth, the farmers looked up from the fields and saw me and put down their hoes and came to speak to me and their wives and children ran out of the earthen houses to call to me. “And have you come back?” they shouted. “It is good—it is good.” And when we came to the new house, unfamiliar though it was to me, I found that my mother had set aside for me the pleasantest upstairs room, facing the distant river and overlooking the green valley. It was a bare room, I suppose, with the minimum of plain furniture and there were no rugs on the floor, but bowls of late roses stood on the desk and the dressing table, and my mother had made white curtains for the windows and my old bed was there and my childhood books were in a little bookcase built in the wall, and it was home again.