Pearl Buck - My Several Worlds

But nowadays Lau Shaw himself is an exile of a sort, I suppose, living in Peking, and speaking what he is told to speak, and writing what he is told to write. I see quotations sometimes from his articles and stories. I hear echoes and I marvel at his obedience. But I know he has compensations. He is in Peking, he is in China, and his heart is free. He was not happy here in the United States as a visitor, for nothing could lift the shadow of exile from him. Once when he came to spend a weekend with us, it happened that we had invited a crowd of wounded veterans from the Valley Forge Hospital to a party in our big barn. They were tragic young men, soldiers who had been half blown to pieces in the war by booby traps and hand grenades. Their faces were all but obliterated, and the plastic surgeon was trying to rebuild them bit by bit. Our party was the first time they had been away from the hospital and the officer in charge had warned us not to be shocked. I had tried to explain to the children, but the explanation had been almost impossible. Luckily our cocker spaniel had a litter of puppies at their best and most lovable age, six weeks, their eyes open and mischief beginning to invade. I was a few minutes late for the party and from the house I could see the Red Cross station wagons arriving with the men. The children were already in the barn. I braced myself, dreading the next hours, and then I went over to be hostess.

I need not have feared. With infallible instinct the children had taken the basket of puppies to the barn with them and Rusty, the mother, and Silver, the father, then alive, had gone with them. When I entered the barn what I heard was laughter, the loud self-forgetting laughter of young men and children at play, and what they were playing with was the puppies, and the puppies were performing at their best and funniest. The men had forgotten their faces, forgotten for the moment the war. They had gone back to being boys at home, and the children, proud of the puppies, had forgotten that the boys had no faces. They were all laughing, laughing at the puppies. The evening was off to a roaring success.

What I really wanted to tell about this story, however, was that Lau Shaw was already there, too. I had asked him to speak to the men and I introduced him after the solid refreshments, explaining that he was China’s greatest novelist. I had no idea what he would say. Lau Shaw is really a very old-fashioned Chinese. If he had his way, I am sure that he would like to have lived in China five hundred years ago. He is a sensitive man, over-sophisticated perhaps, instinctively avoiding anything painful, even in conversation. What then would he say to the pitiful young men?

He got up, diffident as ever, he stood before them a moment, and I could see that his eyes were closed. Then he began to speak in his deep gentle voice. What did he talk about? About shadowboxing in old Peking, if you please, surely as alien a subject as could be imagined! I doubt whether one of those young Americans had ever heard of shadowboxing. Of course Lau Shaw knew that, and so he proceeded to explain the art, its meaning, its story, its historical significance, all in the simplest and most charming fashion, and then without the slightest self-consciousness he illustrated his talk himself by making the movements of shadowboxing into a sort of formal dance, a set of stylized motions. I knew the subject well, I had often watched shadowboxers in Chinese theaters, but I was entranced. And looking about me I saw that the men were entranced, too, comprehending without knowing, perhaps, just what it was they comprehended, but fascinated and carried away into another world they had never seen. When Lau Shaw stopped, there was silence, a great sigh, and then wild applause. And this is what I mean by human understanding.

Once again I heard Lau Shaw wield the same magic, this time in New York, before a sophisticated city audience. It was at an East and West Association meeting and he had been very reluctant to speak. He was averse to any publicity, hating to be known, wary of politics and political questions and discussion. He made the same hesitation before he spoke and then he delivered a delightful discourse, exactly as he might have done in Peking. The subject? “Crickets, Kites and Pekinese Dogs and Their Significance in Chinese Life,” and the audience was enthralled.

So gentle a creature as Lau Shaw was of course cheated again and again by the cruel-hearted in the United States, as well as elsewhere. He made friends once in his lonely existence in New York with a man who professed to admire him, and after a month or so of acquaintance, the man, seeming intelligent and well informed, and therefore trusted by Lau Shaw, asked for a twenty-four hour loan of a hundred dollars. It was Lau Shaw’s allowance for the month, but in the Chinese tradition which does not deny a friend he handed the sum to the American who never appeared again. Several such experiences, I am ashamed to say, this Chinese great man suffered. We Americans do not know how often crimes are thus committed against guests in our country. If we knew we would not prate so much of how we are cheated when we go abroad.

Undoubtedly the revolution in China has had a disastrous effect upon Chinese scholars and intellectuals and not one of them has fulfilled his early promise. Even Hu Shih’s great books, so brilliantly begun, have never been finished. Yet the cause, if not the blame, for this rests partly upon us, too, who belong to the West. Hu Shih and Ch’en Tu-hsiu, the two leaders of the literary revolution in China — and it is necessary to remember that in revolutions scholars and intellectuals were always the leaders — had early committed themselves to the West, as I have said. Ch’en Tu-hsiu, indeed, even attacked Confucianism as a denial of human rights and Hu Shih maintained in those days that the culture of the West was not to be considered materialistic merely because it made life easier. Both declared themselves for an outright adoption of Western ways.

Yet the literary revolution, so brilliantly begun by these two young men, failed in its purpose of reaching the people, for the First World War revealed deep faults in Western civilization. War was shocking to them as Asians, to whom civilization meant a universal humanism whose inevitable fruit was peace. After the war, the vitality, even the ferocity, of the Russian revolution attracted the fiery nature of Ch’en Tu-hsiu, for, he reasoned, if violence be the secret of power in the world today, then choose the most violent means to the designed end. He became the founder and leader of the Chinese Communist party. Hu Shih, a man of different character, left his work permanently unfinished and retired into the life of a scholar and cosmopolite.

One is not inclined to blame. The writer suffers in profound ways from the injustices and the griefs of the times. It is inevitable, too, that in the loneliness of exile — for many Chinese will never see their homeland again, I fear, they are too old, and they know it — they feel keenly the indifference of their American neighbors and sometimes even of their American friends, and they cannot love America. We ought therefore to remember them and show them full respect, for we are honored by their presence.

In these years while my personal life was absorbed in home and growing family, I had at the same time been learning about my own people. Life in China and with the Chinese had taught me much about human beings, for in ancient countries humanity and human relationships are the primary concern. To know how a person feels was to my Chinese friends more important than anything else about him, for until one knows how another feels no friendship can be established nor even business carried on with mutual benefit. I applied this education and its skills to those who surrounded me in my new life, to neighbors and to acquaintances and to the casual contacts of everyday. That I might learn more widely, I travelled to various parts of the country, so that I could see the contrasts beneath North and South, East and West, contrasts far more striking than their geographical counterparts in China or indeed in any other country that I had ever seen.