My Several Worlds (46 page)

He was a hearty fellow and he gave a hearty laugh. “You would fall ill if you drank it,” he assured me in a loud cheerful voice. “But it is safe for me. The river-gods know that I trust them for my living and they would not let me die from drinking their waters.”

I said nothing, smiled, and let him think I was impressed, for I had learned long ago how vain is preachment. And who knows what an accumulation of germs had done for him? Germs war one against another within the battlefield of the human body, we are told, and the result is immunity—that is, provided the body is not killed first.

And speaking of Lotus Lake, it was there and in that same flood year that Charles and Anne Lindbergh arrived in their plane all the way from the United States, to help in relief. What an event that was, and how the people crowded our streets and roadsides to see the brave young couple who had come so far! As usual, I stood among the crowds to see what was to be seen, and I watched the faces of the Chinese and listened to their talk as the two Americans came walking by, Lindbergh looking very tall and his wife small and gentle and kind. Yet it is not the Chinese that I remember when I recall that scene, but a little American boy of eight or ten, who stood near me, his face white with excitement and his blue eyes blazing. Lindbergh was his hero, as anyone could see, and in all his world there were for the moment only the two, his hero and himself. At exactly the planned moment, when Lindbergh was within a foot of him the little boy shouted in a mighty voice, “Hello, Lindy!” Lindbergh looked down blankly into the boy’s face and went on without speaking. He was, I suppose, absorbed in his own thoughts and observations, and doubtless the boy’s voice did not reach his conscious mind, but how could a child know that? What I remember is the stricken look on the face of an American child in an alien land, whose American god had not answered him. Ah well, I suppose we are all guilty some time or other of inflicting such wounds upon the innocent!

The Lindberghs did in fact perform a great service to those of us who were devoting ourselves to flood relief. They flew their plane over the entire area and mapped out the isolated villages and thereby many lives were saved. And they all but lost their own lives at that, for when they left it was from the swollen Yangtse River and their plane nearly capsized, or so we heard. Our hearts stopped, for few are the human beings who have ever fallen into that river and survived.

My further memories of the Lindberghs, however, center about a dinner our American Consul gave them upon the evening after their arrival, where I was a guest invited to meet them. Lindbergh was restless and absorbed, his mind single upon the task he had come to perform, and most of the evening he spent poring over a map of the Yangtse river bed. But Mrs. Lindbergh was charming and sensitively aware of every current of thought and trend of talk in the room, and I sat watching her mobile face, so changeful and yet so controlled. Whenever I read one of her rare books even now I see her face as it was that night and I hear her voice, and though it was long before the great tragedy of her lost child fell upon her, yet somehow there was already tragedy in her face and bearing.

During the floodtime that year, I had a message from another American, Will Rogers. He telegraphed from Shanghai that he would like to come and see me, and if I had no idea then of his significance in the American scene, I knew enough about him to await his coming with expectation. The flood, alas, prevented his arrival and so I did not see him then, but two years later when I was in New York he and Mrs. Rogers came to have tea with me at the old Murray Hill Hotel, and they stayed a long time, and how warmly I enjoyed being alone with them, for by then I knew what he was and how much he had done for me in praising
The Good Earth
, and in words he afterwards wrote and said about me, which still make me blush when I think of them because they were all too kind. There was something honest and homespun and yet alert and shrewd in the best sense about Will Rogers so that instinctively one trusted him, not only for honesty, but common sense. And he made me laugh so much that I still thank him most of all for laughter. In those days to be able to laugh was wonderful for me, and I was learning it again, and Will Rogers had the genius of making me laugh because what he said was truly funny, and not contrived or sarcastic. Blessed be his memory!

And I remember, too, the visit of yet another American in that flood year, but it was earlier, before the flood had reached its height, and traffic was still clear between our city and the coast. That American was Lewis Gannett, and I remember thinking that it was the first time I had ever seen a live critic. He looked kind, a pleasant, very American man, and I have always been glad that he met my father, for afterwards when he reviewed
Fighting Angel
in the New York
Herald Tribune
he recalled my father and was able to write of him as “that Lincolnesque figure.” And so he was.

I ought to say that in the spring of this same year of 1931, on March 2, before my father died and the floods came,
The Good Earth
was published. I remember when the first copy of it reached me and I felt shy about it, since nobody knew of its being, or knowing had forgotten it, and I went to my father’s room and showed the book to him, not expecting much, to be sure, since he read no novels. He was very kind about it, he complimented me upon the appearance of the book and inquired when I had had time to write it, and then a few days later he returned it to me saying mildly that he had glanced at it but had not felt equal to reading it.

“I don’t think I can undertake it,” he said. So much for the book in that distant world of mine.

No, there is a little more. I remember, although I have forgotten it these many years, that my first letter from the United States about the book was from a worthy Christian, an official in a mission board, who sent me several pages of blistering rebuke because I had been so frank about human life. He used another and dirtier word, but let it go at that. And, reared as I had been in the naturalism of Chinese life, I did not know for a long time what he meant, but now I know. The worlds in which I have lived and grown have made me what must be called a controversial figure, as I have been told often enough, and this is because inescapably, by experience and nature, I see the other side of every human being. If he be good, then there is that other side, and if he be evil, there is again another side, and if the ability to comprehend the reasonableness of both seems confounding to those who are content with one dimension, to others as to me, it is an endless source of interest and amusement and opportunity for love and life. We have no enemies, we for whom the globe is home, for we hate no one, and where there is no hate, it is not possible to escape love.

The flood did not help the people to like the new government any better. They were too reasonable to blame Chiang Kai-shek for an act of Heaven, and yet, as other peoples do, they felt resentment at the general hard times, and, irritable and impatient, they muttered that something could be done and must be done to make life more bearable. Beyond the local disaster of the flood, there was also the gnawing awareness of the greed of the Japanese militarists, now firmly entrenched in Manchuria, and when next they moved into the vital province of Jehol, these aggressions taking place in the years 1931–1933, the Nationalist government still did nothing. The Chinese Foreign Office merely busied itself with complaining against the Western Powers and the old Unequal Treaties and the Concessions, and such complaints kept the people angry and restless, for they saw themselves friendless in the world. Finally Japan virtually took over North China, basing her attacks from Shanghai, where large sections of the city were burned and ruined. No one knew when or whether they planned to advance up the Yangtse.

The American Consul now advised all American families in Nanking to send their women and children away, and, mindful of the ever-rising anti-foreign feeling, I took my little younger daughter and went to Peking. I had always wanted to stay there for a time and I hoped, too, to do some research into ancient editions of
Shui Hu Chüan,
with the hope of finding old illustrations of which I had heard. Those months seem, at this distance, only an incident, one of the pleasant interludes which somehow always seemed possible for me to find in the vastness of Chinese life, and I was entirely happy for the time being, absorbed in history and sight-seeing and meeting men and women of many nations. Peking has been written about so much and described so often that it is idle to repeat here what may be found elsewhere. For me, however, the experience was recreative, focusing my mind again upon the deep roots of China’s past and giving me perspective upon the rapidly changing present. It was in Peking, too, that I became convinced that sooner or later I must leave China and return permanently to my own country, for such wars and upheavals lay ahead that no white people would be allowed to remain. It was becoming obvious that Chiang Kai-shek’s policy of “internal unification before external attack” was doomed to failure, for while Japan continued her aggressions with all the strength of her army, led by officers trained in Germany, Chiang Kai-shek was still fighting against the Communists, who had simply retreated strategically to the Northwest where he could not reach them. He was right of course in believing that Communism was the basic enemy to the Chinese way of life, but what he did not understand was that by ignoring the terrifying growth of Japanese domination he was alienating his own people, who did not yet gauge the dangers of Communism, especially when the Communists in this case were themselves Chinese, but who did very well perceive the danger of their own weakness and Japan’s increasing strength. Chiang thus was losing even more of his people’s support, and years later when he needed them very much to rally to his side against the Communists, they were already lost.

As for the Communists whom he was pursuing at all costs, they, too, behaved stupidly while under Russian advice. The Russian Communists, before they left China, had advised the Chinese Communists and especially their military leader, Chu Teh, to capture the cities where, they said, the factory workers or “true proletariat” would gather to their aid. But few Chinese cities had factories, there was no proletariat in the orthodox Communist sense, and moreover the Chinese people, still under their doughty old war lords, had no intention of being captured by Chu Teh, whom they did not know. When he attacked Changsha and Canton and then Amoy, the people helped their local armies and destroyed huge numbers of the Communists, who in the end were completely routed so that they were compelled to hide in inaccessible mountains. There in a famous meeting place, Chingkangshan, Chu Teh, the militarist, much depressed at his losses, met Mao Tse-tung, the civilian and son of a well-to-do peasant, and together they reorganized the Chinese Communist party, this time without help and advice from Soviet Russia, who indeed had by now withdrawn from the scene, dismayed by Chu’s defeats after Chiang Kai-shek’s repudiation. The reorganized Chinese Communist party under Mao and Chu proceeded then to entrench itself in the peasantry, for as Chu said, “The people are the sea, we are the fish, and as long as we can swim in that sea, we can survive.”

All this was contradictory to orthodox Communism as defined by Soviet Russians, and it is interesting now to remember that they for a long time repudiated Mao Tse-tung wholeheartedly. The rejection, however, was only gain for the Chinese Communists who were thus thrown upon the knowledge and experience of their own people, and they determined to do all they could to win the favor of the peasants. This they did by announcing as their enemies those whom the peasants traditionally considered their enemies, namely, landlords, tax gatherers, moneylenders and middlemen. The peasants were won by such a policy and they helped the Communists in every way they could, telling them when the Nationalist soldiers were coming and generally defeating the purposes of Chiang Kai-shek, without really knowing what they did. The peasant anywhere is a direct and literal-minded human being and he helps those who help him, an axiom the young intellectuals who guided the affairs of the Nationalist government never did understand. By now I saw what everybody could see, that neither Nationalist nor Communist could win at present, since neither had the necessary support of both peasant and scholar in the ancient and invincible combination, and therefore that a long struggle lay ahead, especially as at the same time Japan was bent upon conquest while China was thus divided.

Whether Communist or Nationalist would finally win, I believed, depended upon which one first recognized the menace of Japan. Unfortunately it was the Communists who were the first to do this and who virtually compelled Chiang to fight Japan, although their own declaration of war upon Japan was ridiculous in its weakness and was obviously only propaganda. Nevertheless in forcing Chiang to realize the danger with Japan they had an immense advantage, which after the Second World War remained with them in the renewed struggle with the Nationalists, still under the leadership of Chiang Kai-shek. Against this advantage no Western influence could prevail, or could have prevailed, unless Chiang Kai-shek could have changed his habits and his policies completely. This of course was too much to ask of him. He had grown old in his ways, and no one could reach his mind any more, not only because it was fixed, but because it was his fatal weakness to surround himself with people who dared not tell him the truth. A Chinese friend told me that he had heard it said in Nanking, after the Second World War, when the inflation was at its absurd and dangerous height, that Chiang Kai-shek even then did not know the reality of the situation and when he was told cautiously by some visitor in secret about the rise of inflation he declared that he would go out and see for himself, whereupon he ordered a meal at a public restaurant. But his coterie were terrified and sent word ahead that the prices were to be the same as before the war and that the restaurant keeper would be reimbursed. The great man therefore dined complacently at prewar prices, convinced that what he had been told was false. Whether this is a true story or not, it was believed by Chinese and the effect was the same upon the people. This is not to accuse Chiang alone of wilful ignorance. It is impossible for any man in so high a place to know the truth about anything. There are always those about him whose interest it is to hide the facts since, when a regime falls, many fall with it.