Pearl Buck - My Several Worlds

And if I have shared my friends from other worlds with family and neighbors, others have drawn me deep into my American world. My first friend was Gertrude Lane, then editor of The Woman’s Home Companion , and she was the first American woman that I knew well. Gertrude Battle Lane — I write her full name because it suited her. She had come as a girl from a little New England town, and with a single ambition, she told me, which was to work for that magazine. Her first job was errand girl, office girl, the lowest possible, she said, and at the beck and call of everyone. And from that place she rose by sheer ability to be the editor and the highest paid woman in the United States. She loved to tell the story of it, not only because it was her story but because it was an American story, for where could it have happened except in our country? She was not young when I first knew her, her hair was grey, her face and figure no longer youthful, but her spirit was dauntless. She loved good talk and good food and she had a shrewd wisdom, not intellectual but practical and sound. We met often for luncheon and it was characteristic that she chose quiet expensive places and pondered over the menu. And I had pleasant visits in her country house and with her friends.

I came to know Dorothy Canfield Fisher, and visited her, too, and through her another American life revealed itself to me, and in as American a home as was ever built, founded nearly two centuries ago, and still maintained in the same Vermont town. In a strange sorrowful way my worlds met again through Dorothy Canfield, for she lost her son in the Philippines during the war, a brave young doctor who gave his life for his fellow Americans when he went to rescue American troops. For a monument to him, his parents brought to this country the young Filipino doctor and his wife, also a doctor, who had been the son’s best friends while he was with them, and the parents gave these two the opportunity for postgraduate study which enabled them to return to their homeland and set up their own hospital.

Thus my worlds meet again and again, until the several are fused in one. Oscar Hammerstein and his wife Dorothy, world citizens, our friends and neighbors, have stood beside me in the work for Welcome House, and not only they, but others as steadfast here in our own community. James Michener, friend and neighbor, too, world citizen again in spirit and in act, and others who have never left this American world and yet have had hearts as wide as the globe, and minds as free, these who have stood with me in the work for Welcome House are my friends. And now, I suppose, it is time to tell of Welcome House, for the children of Welcome House do indeed unite my worlds in one.

It all began one Christmastime and I have already told that story under the title “No Room at the Inn,” and here I shall compress the years into a few pages.

I have never, I believe, willingly undertaken a job outside of my home and my work, which is writing novels. I have inherited no crusading blood and I dislike publicity with a fervor which may as well be called hatred, for that is what it is. When I have undertaken a task which has nothing to do with home or my writing, it has always been with reluctance and only after a period of desperate search for someone else, anyone else, to do it. Certainly I had no thought of opening a child adoption agency in the United States and this after I was fifty years old. Yet that is exactly what I did.

I had long since ceased to think of adoption agencies. My own children were all but grown up, and my interests were in their age group. Then suddenly one cold December day, when our house was all in ferment with approaching Christmas and long-legged boys and girls with their skis and their dances and glorious hodgepodge of Christmas presents and holly wreaths, the postman brought me a special-delivery letter from a distant child adoption agency, asking if I could help them place for adoption a little baby, the son of an American white mother and an East Indian father, but rejected by both families on both sides of the globe. Do not ask why a child is rejected, for I cannot understand it, whatever the reason. The agency workers had exhausted every possibility in the whole of the United States, they told me, and they had even tried to place him in India, but no one wanted him. They enclosed his picture. I looked into the sad little face of a lonely child, and the happy world in which I lived dropped away. What I saw was hundreds of little faces like his in India, hundreds and thousands of young men and women, born of the white man and the Indian woman, not wanted by either and therefore lost, for the unwanted child is always the lost child. But this little boy was American, born here in my own country, and for me it was unendurable that he should be lost here as he would have been lost in India. I hastened to the telephone and called every friend I had who was Indian, or partly Indian, everyone, too, whom I knew who had been to India and might know other Indians, and over and over again I told the baby’s story. Still nobody wanted him. The agency letter said, “If we cannot place him by the first of January, then regretfully we shall have to put him permanently in a Negro orphanage where he does not belong because of course he is Caucasian on both sides. We have no prejudice against the Negro but we are reluctant to put upon any child’s shoulders the burden of prejudice which they bear and which he might be spared.”

Yes, I understood that. Hastily I gathered my family around me and told them the story. What should we do? There was not one dissenting voice, from the father to the youngest daughter. All of them said, “Bring him here. If we can’t find a better place for him, we will keep him.”

Thus authorized, I telephoned the agency. Soon after Christmas in the darkness of a winter’s night, a small dark boy was deposited in my arms, his enormous brown eyes quietly terrified and he utterly silent because his thumb was buried permanently in his mouth. The people who brought him went away again, and I took him upstairs to the crib we had prepared and I put him to bed. He did not sleep much that night and neither did I. He did not cry aloud but now and then he cried in a small voice subdued by fear, and then I held him until he slept.

Astounding as this advent was, yet another came and in the same month. A friend wrote me that a little half-Chinese child was to be born in a certain city hospital. The child had nowhere to go, for the Chinese father, already married, could not acknowledge him and had returned to China, and the American mother had no way to keep him. Could the child be sheltered with me until I could find some family for him? The local adoption agency could not accept him. By now I felt that I was under some guidance I did not understand. My family said, “We may as well have another,” and so, on a cold January day, we brought home from the big city hospital a little baby boy, nine days old, literally naked, for we took clothes with us to put upon him. And he, too, began to live with us.

We all took care of our babies together, except at night when they were my responsibility, and we all shared the joy of seeing them grow strong and happy. The little American-Chinese never knew anything but love and he thrived from the first, but the little American-East Indian had to be won into believing that we loved him. Yet that did not take long. The months passed and our family did a great deal of thinking. If there were these two children there must be many others. I began to inquire among child adoption agencies and found indeed that the American child of Asian or part-Asian ancestry was their greatest problem, greater even than the Negro child. Many agencies would not accept them at all, feeling their adoption was impossible. What became of them then? Nobody knew. A child can be lost here in the United States more easily than in countries where the big family system still prevails.