My Several Worlds (26 page)

And speaking of cruelty, this is perhaps the place to mention the cruelty to animals which shocks so many foreigners when they visit China. There is indeed a vast difference between the way in which animals are treated in China and the way in which they are treated in the West. Animals are not petted and fondled and made much of by the Chinese. On the contrary, Chinese visitors in the United States are usually shocked and disgusted by the affection with which animals are treated, an emotion which the Chinese feel should be reserved for human beings. I believe in kindness toward animals and human beings and I used to wonder why my Chinese friends, whom I knew to be merciful and considerate toward people, could be quite indifferent to suffering animals. The cause, I discovered as I grew older, lay in the permeation of Chinese thought by Buddhist theory. Though most Chinese were not religious and therefore not Buddhist, yet the doctrine of the reincarnation of the human soul influenced their thinking, and the essence of that theory is that an evil human being after death becomes an animal in his next incarnation. Therefore every animal was once a wicked human being. While the average Chinese might deny direct belief in this theory, yet the pervading belief led him to feel contempt for animals.

Another seeming cruelty among the Chinese, also very shocking to Westerners, was that if a person fell into a danger, as for example if he fell into the water and would be drowned if not pulled out, no other Chinese, or only a very rare one, would stretch out his hand to the drowning one. Cruel? Yes, but again the pervading atmosphere of Buddhism through the centuries had persuaded the people generally to believe that fate pursued the sufferer, that his hour had come for death. If one saved him, thus defying fate, the rescuer must assume the responsibilities of the one saved. A man, however kind, might hesitate if by saving a person who had fallen into the danger of death, he had thereafter to care for this person and even perhaps his whole family because he had made himself responsible for giving new life to one who was supposed to die.

Time went on in our quiet northern town, and at last we, too, became embroiled in the national troubles. War lords had the country firmly in their rude clutches by now and in our own region battles began to break out between them. It was never called war but always “attacking the bandits.” This is, each war lord would claim that he was the real ruler and the other one was the “bandit chief.” At least once or twice a year bullets would fly over our town in brief but alarming scuffles, and the little hospital would be filled with wounded soldiers from both sides. We learned when the bullets whistled over the roof to run for the inner corners of a room and stand there until the battle moved on and certainly never to remain near windows. At sundown the battle usually ended, or if we were lucky enough to have a rainstorm come up, the soldiers on both sides prudently called a truce and returned to their encampments outside the city wall so that they would not get their uniforms wet. The city fathers never let either side camp in the city. When a battle threatened, the main gates were barred and the wounded were brought in through a small wicket gate.

Those old-fashioned wars were often amusing rather than dangerous, provided one stayed out of the range of gunshot, and since war lords themselves did not enjoy a strenuous battle they made various excuses for truce. Actually they preferred treachery and strategy to open warfare, and sometimes over a dinner table when the terms of a truce were to be discussed, there was a surprise assassination of the guests, and so was ended the danger of more war for the time being, at least. I learned to take such skirmishes as part of life, and used precaution without being afraid.

One further change came to my life, and it was the building of a new house. My little four-room Chinese home was needed for expansion of the boys’ school and the mission bought a piece of land outside the city and we were told to design a modest house and build it. I wanted a Chinese house all on one floor but this I was forbidden by the mission authorities. No, it must be a two-story house after the Western fashion, and although I disliked exceedingly the idea of this monstrosity on the flat northern landscape, there was no recourse. I planned a story-and-a-half structure, very simple, but still with stairs, and when it was finished my city friends and country neighbors came to see the foreign house. They were fascinated and terrified by the stairs. They went up fairly easily but looking down that steep decline they could not risk it.

“This is the way I shall do it,” Madame Chang declared, and she sat herself without more ado on the top step and gravely bumped her way down the steps on her seat, her padded winter garments protecting her nicely. And after her came all the other ladies without the slightest self-consciousness, until the last one was safely on the first floor. The most delightful quality the Chinese had, I do believe, was the total lack of self-consciousness in all they did. It did not occur to them to wonder or to care what anybody else thought. It was only in Western-educated Chinese that I began to see self-consciousness, allied with a pitiful false shame of their own people. How sorry I felt for them then, for indeed they ought to have been proud of a nation so civilized by the centuries that its people could behave without self-consciousness! Only royalty in England can equal them in the West, with perhaps the recent addition of Sir Winston Churchill himself.

The years passed tranquilly in our town in spite of the sporadic skirmishes between war lords and my days were absorbed in small human events. There is much humor in Chinese life when it is fully shared, and this comes from the sense of drama which is natural to almost every Chinese. The least quarrel, a festival or a birthday, provided rich entertainment, and a birth, a death or a wedding was enough for days of talk and enjoyment. The raw humor of peasants and the jollity of merchants and their families were never entirely overcome even by occasional and inevitable tragedy. How can I ever forget the trials of old Mr. Hsü, our town’s rich man, whose life was enlivened and beset by his four wives, and the clamor with which they surrounded him! When he travelled on the train to Pengp’u he dared not do what he wished, which was to take only his youngest and therefore his favorite concubine with him. She was a pretty woman in her late twenties, the only one still slender enough to wear the long, tight and very fashionable Shanghai dress. Each journey he began with the determination that he would take only the youngest woman with him, but he was never allowed the luxury. It was impossible to keep anything secret, and so each woman complained until he had unwillingly agreed to take all four. For economy’s sake, however, he distributed them through the train, the third and the youngest concubine with him in second class, the second in third class and his wife and the first concubine in fourth class. Alas, he still had no peace, for the three who were in the lower classes were continually around him, demanding the same food and tidbits that he bought for his favorite. The harassment of Mr. Hsü made town talk, embellished with local witticisms.

Suicides among young women were not uncommon and I shall never forget the one next door. She was my friend, a young woman of my own age, and so I knew that she was not happy with her husband or his family. She was a sensitive intelligent girl who longed to go to school, and much of our time together was spent with books, for she had an insatiable thirst for knowledge. I had been afraid that she might end her own life, for she had no escape, and gradually she had given up hope. I was sent for one bright sunny day at midmorning, and when I reached her room, the family had only just cut the rope by which she had hung herself. I took her hand and it was still soft and warm. She lay there on the tiled floor, limp as a child, her face not marred, and I could not believe she was dead. I begged them to let me try first aid, but her mother-in-law would not allow such foreign ways. The Buddhist funeral priests had already arrived and the death chant had begun. I met hostile looks when I persisted and Madame Chang, who had come soon after I did, hurried me away.

My chief intramural interest, if one may so speak of our compound, was the girls’ school for which I was responsible, and I invited as head teacher one of my old girlhood friends from Chinkiang. She was an able teacher, young and enthusiastic, and I hoped for much accomplishment from her. Alas, as so often happens in China, although she liked the job and the friendly community and especially her eager pupils, she was defeated by the northern food. The Chinese are strangely insular in the matter of food, probably because of the importance that they attach to eating, and she could not make the change in diet from the rice of mid-China to the wheaten bread and millet of the North. She lost weight and vitality, not because she did not digest the new diet, but because it was too strange to eat bread instead of rice, and at last I yielded and acknowledged defeat.

All during these years I lived deeply and narrowly in one community where an age-old peace had never been broken in spite of the World War raging in Europe. True, Mrs. Liu, a tall thin woman with a very yellow face, was in much suffering because her husband, a “good-for-nothing,” as she frankly called him, had gone to France as a laborer during the World War and she had then heard through another friend, whose husband had also gone to France as a laborer, that her “good-for-nothing” was living with a French woman. Mrs. Liu was torn between grief and pride.

“To think,” she cried, the tears streaming down her face, “that my old good-for-nothing should have got himself a foreign woman! But what sort of woman, I ask you? Anyone can see that my old piece-of-baggage is no use. Why, I was even glad when he came home last year from Shanghai and said he was going for a soldier! And now he has got a foreign woman! What if he brings her home? How can we feed her? What do French women eat?”

The term “good-for-nothing,” I discovered, was the usual name for a husband in our region, where women prided themselves on their virtue. “My
yao-yieh
,” or “my good-for-nothing”—the women began most of their sentences with these words. It was true that generally speaking the men were inferior to the women, and this I suppose was because boys were so spoiled in Chinese homes, whereas the girls knew from the first that they had their own way to make and would get very little spoiling indeed. Whatever the reason, the Chinese woman usually emerges the stronger character wherever she is, and out of this fact comes a rich vernacular humor which American men and women could understand without the slightest difficulty. Chinese women are witty and brave and resourceful, and they have learned to live freely behind their restrictions. They are the most realistic and least sentimental of human beings, capable of absolute devotion to those they love and of implacable hatred, not always concealed, toward those whom they hate. The Communists could never have taken China, I believe, if they had not prudently given so much advantage to Chinese women. I remember seeing a few years ago the manuscript account of two young American fliers who had been forced down within Communist territory in China and were later released. During the weeks they spent in a Communist village, they observed with interest and pity how ardently the women supported the new regime and this, they said, was merely because the Communists gave the women help with their children, a meager amount of medicine and food, and yet it was enough to touch the hearts of those who had never been given help before. “How much better we Americans could have done it,” the young fliers commented, “had we only known!”

The quiet and intensely interesting years in my northern town came rather abruptly to an end one day when the man in the house announced that there was a vacancy in the University of Nanking and that he intended to apply for it. He had been floundering, as I well knew, unable to find a way of applying Western farm methods to an old and established agriculture. It would be better, he now said, to join a group somewhere rather than to work alone. He could teach agricultural students in a university and let them make the practical application.

I was sad to leave my northern town where I had been so warmly befriended, and yet in a way I was glad to get back into the midst of modern China. I had almost lost touch even with the literary revolution except to know that it was still going on. True, Nanking was not the center of change, and certainly then I could not foresee that in less than ten years it would be the capital of Chiang Kai-chek’s revolutionary new government. When I went there to live, it was still an ancient and conservative city and, by its own tradition, was even the stronghold of a school of old-fashioned scholars who opposed the “common language” of the young Western-trained intellectuals’ school, the “riksha-coolie-talk school,” as Lin Shu liked to call it. Nevertheless, Nanking was also a center of historical Chinese life, the capital for a long time of the fabulous Ming dynasty, and now it had two Christian colleges, one for men, one for women, and the Chinese National University also.

In my northern home town there were feasts and farewells and exchanges of gifts and considerable weeping and many promises to visit before finally I closed the new brick house, in which I had supposed I would spend the rest of my life, and took the train southward.

Island Beach, New Jersey

Our old Coast Guard house stands bleak and unimproved on the New Jersey shore. I came here today in the early morning, bringing nothing with me except a little food. A few worn dresses hang in the closet from one year’s end to the other, a couple of bathing suits and some sandals, and depending on the season I get into dress or bathing suit and go down to the sea. On the other side of the narrow tongue of sandy soil is the wide bay where my American children played safely through their summer months when they were little, an old rowboat securely tethered to the rough dock for the center of imagination. They fell out of it into the shallow water and climbed back into it a hundred times a day, they crabbed and fished and rowed as far as the rope would go. Then suddenly they outgrew the bay and we moved our quarters to the Coast Guard house on the oceanside, and the bay was useful only for serious crabbing and later for the first outboard motor.