Pearl Buck - My Several Worlds

We reached Shanghai, I know that, but thereafter for the next months I think it was almost a year, my memory falters. I see scenes clear and separate, but no stream carries them on together. Whatever happened seems accidental and disjointed, unrelated to my real life. We were merely refugees. Shanghai was hot, breathlessly hot after our hilltop, but I was used to semitropical heat and the memory was not of suffering but of pleasure. At home our daily baths were in a tin tub, filled by buckets of water which the water-bearer brought in. Here in Shanghai I saw for the first time water coming out of the wall from faucets. It was pure magic, the self-coming water that I heard about from Americans and from Chinese who had been to America. The tub was still of painted tin, but it was a big one, and it was set in a wide shallow wooden platform fenced about with board and lined with tin, at one end of which was a drain. My mother stopped the drain with a big cork and then let cool water run into the walled platform and there on hot afternoons my baby sister and I played. It is a childish memory, slight enough, except that it diverted my mind from larger woe. Our small three-room flat was somewhere off Bubbling Well Road, on a quiet dead end, and there I learned to skip rope from two well-bred little English girls next door. But my favorite neighbor was a Portuguese lady, the soul of kindness, who lived two doors down the street and she invited me often to tea. Thither I went always with joy, dressed in a fresh white dress and my hair curled, and I remember that once I ran so fast to her gate that I fell and scraped my elbow badly and arrived bleeding, though not in tears, and the Portuguese lady bound me up with enormous bandages and plied me with viands. The scar is on my elbow yet as a souvenir of her kindness, although I have long ago forgotten her name.

For a treat our mother or our amah took us to a little park along the Whangpoo River, where an artificial rockery seemed to me a castle of delight, and when the steps were climbed, there at the top in a grotto was a tiny stone boy holding a stone umbrella perpetually over his head, whence dripped eternal rain. For something very special we visited the big park where horse racing went on, and there Chinese and white men mingled together in equal zeal to gamble. We, of course, had nothing to do with that. We walked along the gorgeous flower beds and looked at some monkeys in cages and came home again.

Such are my slight memories of a year when elsewhere in China there was beginning the most dreadful upheaval of our age, whose end is not yet nor can it be foreseen.

A final incident of that refugee period is rooted in my mind. One day we were walking along a crowded street, my mother and I, and I do not know what street. It was crowded and ahead of me, stifling me, I thought, was a wide Chinese gentleman in a blue satin robe and a black sleeveless jacket. Straight in front of my face was the swinging end of his queue, a black silk woven cord ending in a large tassel. The heat became unbearable, the gentleman seemed immovable, and at last in a sort of wilful impatience I did what I had never done before. I pulled the tassel gently, as a hint that he walk a little faster. Instantly he turned around and bent upon me a black look of wrath. He did not frighten me, but my mother did. For I saw her face go quite white, and quickly she begged the Chinese to forgive me.

“She is only a child,” I remember her very words. “But she is a naughty child, and I will punish her. Please overlook her fault.”

The gentleman did not reply but he did not look mollified, and my mother drew me away and we went down another street.

“Never,” she said more sternly than I had ever heard her speak, “never do such a thing again! It might be very dangerous.”

What frightened me was the look on her face. I had never seen it before. She was afraid, afraid of a Chinese! I had never seen her afraid before in my life. It was indeed the end of an era.

Canton, Ohio,

August, 1953

TODAY WE HAVE BEEN travelling over Pennsylvania mountain country and then as afternoon came on, our direction being westward, we reached Ohio and by nightfall came to this quiet small city, which was the home of William McKinley. The American President and his wife lie in an enormous tomb in a park. A long flight of steps leads to the tomb and at the head of the steps there is a statue of the dead statesman.

By a curious coincidence McKinley had something to do with my life in that second world which followed after the troubled Boxer years in China. My father was not killed, nor were any of the white men in our province of Kiangsu killed, and that this could be was the result of the wisdom and courage of one man, our Viceroy, who when he received the edict of the Empress Dowager, refused to obey it. It was more than mercy, it was also foresight, for our Viceroy understood what our old Empress did not or could not, and it was that no one, not even she, could stay the progress of time. The Viceroy knew that it was not white men alone who had bred revolution in China. Their presence and deeds, more evil than good, had only hastened the awakening of the Chinese people. Why, the people asked themselves, had they no weapons to resist the arrogance and robbery of the invaders from the West, who were different from any others of the past? The white men had seized lands and rivers instead of the throne, and they had built railroads to the coast so that they could carry away their loot in ships. Nor did they yield as the others had to the superior civilization of China. On the contrary, the westerners considered their own civilizations superior and they tried to prove them so by guns and cannon. Such weapons were as terrifying to the unarmed Chinese people as a hydrogen bomb might be to an undefended city here in Ohio, to this very city in which we sleep tonight.

Even this city has its direct relation to those years of early revolution in China, since a reason for this journey of ours is something more than pleasure alone. Our family has three sons, the elder two nearing draft age and the third one not far behind. The hideous possibility has become a reality. I who have been reared in one world, a Christian one, and taught that love and brotherhood must be the law of life, and reared too, in another world yet kindlier, with the Chinese belief that life is sacred and that it is evil to kill even a beast, and how much more a human being, I now face the tragic probability that my sons must deny both Christian and Asian teaching. They must join our armed forces and fight perhaps an Asian people, a people whom I love and admire and to whom I am deeply indebted. To prevent this I am helpless, although it could have been prevented long ago in Asia, and prevented many times since, but now perhaps it is too late, since it is not we who have won in Asia, although we might have done so easily had we but understood the nature of the peoples there.

And McKinley, whose bronze statue towers over this small Ohio city? What has he to do with the child I once was? Little enough and yet very much. For when the strange year of 1900 was over, the year in which I saw in my American mother’s eyes the fear of a Chinese, so that from that day on I too had that fear, all mingled with love and friendship at it was, we came to the United States, my own country. My first shock here was the assassination of President McKinley. I scarcely knew the difference then between Emperor and President. In China our young Emperor had died suddenly, murdered, it was rumored, by the command of the Empress Dowager, who was by then herself within hours of her own death from old age and illness. But she would not, could not die until the dangerous heir was first gone. And now suddenly here in my own country the President was murdered, too!