My Several Worlds (20 page)

As a child I took Ruling for granted, and every summer I gave up my birthday party in order that we might go there. My mother disliked leaving my father alone to cope with housekeeping in addition to his work, but her struggle always ended in favor of the children. I knew, each June, when the rice seedlings were transplanted from the dry beds to the flooded fields, that the time had come for Kuling. It was a time I loved at home, too, for the valleys were beautiful, green lakes in the sunshine and mysterious by night under the moon. It was heaven for the frogs and the chorus of their croakings and pipings could be heard clearly even at our house.

The whole process of the growing of rice is a cycle of beauty, from the seedbeds, greener than any green on earth, to the last harvested golden sheaf. I was charmed always by every change, and especially by the transplanting, when the dry fields were filled with water and the farm family rolled up the legs of their blue cotton trousers and waded into the water and planted the seedlings neatly and exactly spaced over the fields. The rice grew swiftly while we were gone during the summer and when we came back in late September the fields were dry again and the grain stood high and yellow. Then came the harvesting when once more the farm family sallied forth and with hand sickles cut the sheaves, and tied them and stacked them and carried them to the threshing floors in front of the farmhouses. There the sheaves were spread and men and women lifted the swinging bamboo flails and beat out the grain. Women swept up the grain and spread it in winnowing baskets and men tossed it up for the wind to clean. When at last the rice was harvested it was piled into vats made of clean rice straw woven into matting and shaped and tied into containers. There was poetry in every movement of the blue-clad peasants, and I see it all clear in my mind today, a series of exquisite and symbolic pictures, memorized through half my lifetime.

Only in Java, years later, did I see the process whole and simultaneous, for there upon the richest soil and with the finest rice climate in the world, planting and harvesting went on in adjacent fields, the earth in continual production so that while some farmers transplanted seedlings into the water others bore home the sheaves. When I think of Java, I see handsome brown men carrying on their shoulders sheaves of rice, heavy-headed and cut as exactly even as strands of yellow silk.

Between planting and harvesting we stayed in our little stone house in the mountains. Other white people, missionaries and tradesmen and their families, joined those of us who had pioneered and gradually, as years went on, a beautiful little town developed there in the top of the mountains. A church was built and at one end of the property shrewd Chinese merchants opened shops. Farmers from the plains below carried up the mountains baskets of eggs and fruits, fowls and vegetables, and we had an abundance of food. Near our house was a clear spring bubbling up from under the top of the mountain and this water we drank without boiling and considered it pure luxury.

As time went on many white people seized the chance to escape from China for a few weeks and mingle with their own kind. Missionaries held meetings and conferences and businessmen and their wives had bridge parties and dances, and everybody went on picnics and walks. Each summer there was a tennis tournament and a sacred concert, where my mother sang in
The Messiah
or in some other oratorio. Each week, too, there was a meeting only for amusements, where amateurs did their best with whatever talent they had. Besides such arranged entertainment there were tea parties, dinners and much visiting, while people who had no chance to see one another during the year could meet here and compare adventures and children and share their news. Kuling did indeed mean many different things to different people, but to my mother it meant first of all a place where her children were safe and the air was clean and where she could renew her own soul. For me, as I look back, I realize that it meant a kind of beauty I knew nowhere else, the beauty of clear brooks and wild ferns and lilies, a place where I could wander safely and explore to my own content. Each morning during the years when I was small it was my task to climb the mountain behind our house and come back with fresh ferns and flowers, and never have I seen so many flowers growing wild as I found there. The little fireplace in our living room my mother filled with bracken, and she wanted the delicate ferns for her pots, and the tall white Madonna lilies, the red, black-spotted tiger lilies or the white ones with red spots were always welcome. Yellow and orange day lilies grew everywhere, and since they lasted but a day, I did not pick them except for our amah who cooked the buds into a delectable dish for her midday meal. Grass-of-Parnassus and club moss were special finds, and my mother loved, too, the long leafy strands of wild clematis, set with hundreds of little white stars of flowers, and this she twined along our mantelpiece. The simple house became a fresh bower, and not for anything would I have missed that morning climb and the return laden with treasures for my mother’s joy. There was only one danger, and it was the short slender grass-green snake that climbed the trees and hung down like a swaying branch. Its bite was fatal, and I kept my eyes sharp as I walked along the trails or climbed the grey rocks.

One fearful aspect of those beautiful mountains of Lu was the flash floods. Springs at the top of the mountains had through the centuries cut deep gorges into the soil, and since the forests had long ago been destroyed, a cloudburst on the top of a mountain could pour water into a gorge so suddenly that within minutes a great wall of water was built up, although below the sun might be shining. Every summer some lives were lost in these flash floods. Picnickers enjoying their meal by the side of a small and peaceful brook looked up to see descending upon them a mass of water twenty feet high. Before they could escape they were swept away, sometimes over high falls. I remember the tragedy of a neighbor, an American woman whose husband was dead and who had only one child. Upon the child’s sixth birthday she had put their supper in a basket and the two of them had gone to a nearby brook to make a little celebration. In the midst of their meal she heard a roar and looking up she saw the flood rushing toward her. In her fright she seized what she thought was the child’s frock and clambered up the side of the gorge only to discover that what she had grasped was her own skirt and that the child was gone. The possibility of death always at hand lent an undertone of terror to the pleasantest summer day in Kuling.

All that was in my childhood, and now when I went to Kuling with my mother, one early June, before even the rice fields were flooded, I went back as a young woman. Kuling was changed, too. I had caught rumors of it in my parents’ talk. Wealthy Chinese wanted to buy land there and it had become a point of hot disagreement between the white people as to whether Chinese could or should be kept out any longer. In the early years no Chinese had thought of coming but now they wanted to buy in the white concession and not in the Chinese section outside the Gap where tradespeople lived. Kuling had developed very much, I discovered when I reached the top of the mountain and I did not like it so well, although the journey up the mountain had been even more beautiful than I remembered. We had left the ship at the river port the day before and had gone by riksha to the resthouse in the city to spend the night on our own bedding rolls spread upon Chinese bed bottoms resting upon two wooden benches. Early the next morning we were waked as usual by the chair bearers, clamoring to get off, and we rose and ate a hearty breakfast of rice and eggs prepared by the resthouse cook, and then we climbed into our chairs, much improved now, and made of wood and rattan instead of bamboo. Thus we set off across the plains and up into the foothills to the second resthouse, where other chairs waited with mountain bearers, for the plainsmen could not climb. Now came, as always, the magical part of the journey. One caught the first hint of it when a clear mountain brook tumbled past the resthouse and the village houses were made of stone instead of the gray brick of the plains. We seated ourselves in our chairs and four bearers carried each chair, suspended by ropes from poles across their shoulders, and thus they mounted the first flight of stone steps with light rhythmic stride. Up the mountain we climbed and soon the frothing bamboos changed to pines and dwarf chestnuts and oaks and we were on our way. The road wound around the rocky folds of the cliffs, and beneath us were gorges and rushing mountain rivers and falls. Higher and higher the road crawled, twisting so abruptly that sometimes our chairs swung clear over the precipices as the front bearers went on beyond the rear ones, still behind the bend. One misstep and the chair would have been dashed a thousand feet into the rocks and swirling waters, but there was never a misstep. In all the years I never heard of an accident, even though the bearers went at an astonishing speed, every step in rhythmic movement.

Somewhere near the top of the mountain we turned a certain corner and were met, as I had remembered, by a strong cold current of mountain air. Until then the air had gradually cooled, but at this spot it changed suddenly and the bearers welcomed it with loud hallooing calls and a spurt of running, the chair swaying between them. It was still exciting. As a child I could never keep from laughing, and this time, although I was grown up, I still felt exhilaration. The air of the plains had been hot and heavy, breathed in and out by millions of human lungs, but here on top of the mountain it was charged with fresh cold purity, and one breathed it in like lifesaving oxygen.

So we reached the same little old house, my mother and I, and very small it looked to my grown-up eyes, but the trees were big and the ferns had grown thick on the terrace walls. The two servants we had brought with us cleaned the house swiftly and we settled in, my mother to rest in bed for a while and I to care for her and read to her. I studied my Chinese books while she slept and every day I went for a long and solitary walk. There were few people to be seen and most of the houses were still closed, for the season had not begun, but it was interesting to walk about the settlement and see the changes. A sanatorium had been built for tuberculosis patients, all white, and Russian traders had developed a separate piece of land beyond the mountain and named it Russian Valley and outside the settlement limits rich Chinese had built immense stone houses for themselves. The streets were named and the trees had grown tall and arched above them and the atmosphere of the place had become worldly and cosmopolitan.

My mother and I talked together about it, and she admitted the change and said, symbolically, that she no longer dared to drink the spring water unboiled because houses were built above it now. Then she said, “We must let the Chinese come in—I can see it. Perhaps we white people ought never to have built a separate place for ourselves but we did it so that we could keep our children. We lost so many little children.”

She could never mention the lost children without thinking, I knew, of our four, buried in little walled cemeteries, three in Shanghai and one in Chinkiang, who died when I was six. The eldest, my sister Edith, my mother considered her most beautiful and brilliant child, and she was the one who had died of cholera when she was four. There was a portrait of her in my mother’s bedroom in the mission house, a handsome sturdy blue-eyed child, her dark hair in bangs across her fine forehead and hanging in thick curls on her shoulders.

“Someday,” my mother was saying, “the Chinese will take everything back again.”

And so they did, though not until she was dead.

During the two years of her convalescence in Kuling she rebuilt the house, tearing down the old one and putting up one larger, though still modest, because she wanted it big enough, she said, for my sister and me when we married and had children. But when she was dead, and my father dead, and China was changing indeed and all that belonged to the white people was being taken from them or they were giving it back for the sake of their own consciences, then my sister and I sold the house to a good Chinese family and so for us Kuling was returned. By that time it had become a stronghold for Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek and Madame Chiang and their many relatives, and the new officials were more rigorous than the white people had been about keeping out the poor Chinese. But it was no more our business.

I felt, that year when I was alone there with my mother, that the end was inescapable, as she had said it was, but I did not fear it. I wanted more than ever to be rid of the burden which had weighed upon me all my life, the burden of knowing that my race had been unjust to another. It is easier to receive injustice than to inflict it, for conscience is a fox gnawing at the vitals. Then, too, I had forgotten by that time the hatreds of the old Empress Dowager and her followers against foreigners, and feeling again the warm friendliness of the Chinese people, the easy courtesy and unfailing consideration, I longed to see every inequality between us removed, and all people living with equal opportunities for self-development. Rich and poor there would always be, of course, and some people would be clean and some dirty, some educated and some ignorant, but these inequalities were fluid and natural, and depended to a large extent upon individuals themselves. What I wanted to be rid of, merely as a burden, was the declared discrimination between the dominant white and the rebellious Chinese. They were right and we were wrong in that particular matter. After all, we were still only guests upon the Chinese soil, not rulers and not even citizens.

But I was removed again from life, for the time being, by our return to Kuling. The First World War was raging, but I knew nothing of it except through the newspaper which reached us weekly from Shanghai, an English paper which gave very little report of American forces. I had no idea, indeed, until years later when I was visiting Europe again, how many Americans had fought in the First World War and had died on foreign soil. I learned it then as I wandered through the vast memorial halls which had been built as monuments to the American soldiers who had died and had never been found. There on walls high and wide were carved in small print the myriad names of the missing. And I wandered through the cemeteries in France and elsewhere and saw little white crosses set as closely as human bodies could lie, and the magnitude of what my country had done overwhelmed me and I wept belated tears for the young men whose flesh was already dust.