Pearl Buck - My Several Worlds

When the services were over we all went out into the cold and brilliant sunshine, and there on the tiny porch of the temple I saw a pleasant sight. Five-year-old Sally, the small but extremely beautiful daughter of my friend, the Mongol prince, had paused to give voice to the exuberance of her soul. She was dressed in gorgeous red and green satin robes from her throat to her feet, as were all her family, and thus attired she stood beneath the American and the Buddhist flags, and overcome with religious feeling, she burst into spontaneous song. The hymn? It was “Jesus Loves Me.” I retired behind the building and enjoyed private and soul-shaking laughter, but the Kalmuks seemed to find nothing either amusing or strange in the incident.

“How nicely Sally sings,” they said, admiring this little Sunday-school princess.

The next event was a mighty dinner, given by the White Russian colony at Rova Farms to the Kalmuks and their friends. We sat down, three hundred of us, to a feast such as only Russians know how to provide, and while excellent food and drink progressed from course to course, speeches began and went on. Russians rose and spoke with great vitality and vigor, and I listened, unable to understand except as a neighbor translated hastily. What was most moving, however, was the final speech which the leading Kalmuk gave, a sturdy moonfaced man in a grey business suit. He held a paper before him and after he had expressed his thanks for the dinner and also for the great kindness otherwise shown the new colony by the White Russians, he went on to give thanks to the gods that his people had been brought safely to the United States, where, he said, they were doing well. Not only, he told us, had they built the temple consecrated this day, but thirty families owned their own houses, more than twenty had cars, and, he was glad to say, more than fifty had television sets!

Tremendous applause followed these figures of achievement, and after the speeches people really fell upon the food.

It was a wonderful, heart-warming, soul-inspiring day. My many worlds came together for the space of it, at least, and I think something like this happened to us all. The Countess Alexandra Tolstoi was there, and we clasped hands, and looking into her honest and good face, I saw reflected my own feelings.

And I remember, like another painting, an evening when Asia was in my house again, this time in the shape of beautiful young women who had come to contribute their presence in a fashion show that my friend and neighbor Dorothy Hammerstein was giving for the benefit of Welcome House. They had spent the afternoon at her house, had modeled their stunning costumes on the platform by the swimming pool, and having visited the Welcome House children had come to spend the night with us. Japan had given me Haru Matsui and the famous young actress, Shirley Yamaguchi, on her way to Hollywood to make a film. Both were lovely to see, but Shirley Yamaguchi had a French grandmother, and the foreign blood had made her eyes larger and more lustrous than any I have ever seen, her skin pure cream, and her features clear as carved marble, but still all Japanese. A pretty girl from Pakistan, a big handsome Chinese girl, the daughter of a famous war lord, a graceful Indonesian, a tall young beauty from India — they grouped themselves on the couches in the living room after dinner, and no men being present they prepared themselves for female chatter and good talk, eagerly turning to one another to ask how life was in their separate countries. The Chinese girl was the least cultivated, I suppose, not because Chinese girls are so, but being the daughter of a war lord, she had not had the advantages of scholars and artists in her lineage. She came of the plains people of the North and her big body, her handsome heavy features, her broken English, for English was their only common tongue and all the others spoke it with silvery perfection, set her somewhat apart. I noticed that she was restless, and I asked her if she were not feeling well. She replied that she had eaten too much. The night before, in New York, friends in exile had made a feast for her because her father was a high general in Formosa, and tonight she had enjoyed the fried chicken and rice at my dinner table, and now her girdle was too tight.

“Go upstairs and take it off,” I suggested. “We are only women here.”

Upstairs she went, and came back looking much relieved, but only for a few minutes. Then she rubbed her midriff ruefully. “I am still too full,” she said frankly, in Chinese. I translated and the other young women were all mirthful sympathy.

“A little bicarbonate of soda in hot water?” I suggested.

She was willing to try anything, and so I mixed the brew and she drank it, relieving herself thereafter at regular intervals by loud unblushing belches, which startled and shocked the others, but not at all the war lord’s daughter.

“How did you come to America?” I asked at last, to change the situation, for shock had given way to laughter scarcely controlled behind the pretty ringed hands of India and Pakistan, Japan and Indonesia.

The war lord’s daughter answered with hearty honesty. “When the Communists came,” she said, “it was time for my father to go to Formosa. But he has a very large family, several wives and more than thirty children. Which should he take? The sons, he said, could watch over their own wives. His youngest and prettiest concubines and daughters he took with him to Formosa. The ugly ones he left behind because, he said, they would be safe even from the Communists.”

“But how is it you are here?” I inquired.

She was quite literal and quite without rancor toward the old war lord who was her father. “I am not pretty, also not ugly,” she replied, “and so my father sent me to America to school.”

Flooding my living room with irrepressible music came gales of laughter from Asia.

Postscript to this story: The beautiful woman from Indonesia arrived that afternoon in a state of such polished calm that I was sure something had gone wrong. Upon questioning, she confessed that it had. She had decided to model at Dorothy Hammerstein’s garden party a formal costume of her country, to which jewels were an essential decoration, and so she had brought her jewelry bag with her — and had left it in the taxicab in New York! With magnificent fortitude she had come on without the jewels, had told no one, since she did not want to disturb her hostess, had modeled her gown without the jewels, trusting that the American audience would not know the lack.

Now, however, she fervently asked for help. The jewels were priceless — rubies, pearls, diamonds and emeralds in ancient and heavy gold settings. We telephoned at once to the taxicab office in New York and found that the bag had been turned in a few minutes before by the driver. He had opened the bag and had decided the contents were worthless. “Some show girl’s stuff,” he had reported, “Costoom jew’lry—”

The very rugs I walk upon in this American house of mine remind me of Asia. They are good Peking rugs, bought in the year before I left China never to return. I left them where they were when I shut the door in 1934, for the last time, lest I might change my mind, or unchanging, that my last sight would be what I had always known. Six years later, knowing that the Japanese were probably in occupation of all such houses in Nanking, I wrote to a friend asking if it were possible to have the rugs sent me. I doubted it, but the impossible is sometimes possible. So it proved to be again. In an incredibly short time bales of rugs arrived safely. Chinese friends had sent them to me across two hundred miles of Japanese-occupied territory. The Customs officers in New York asked that the goods be checked before release, because there were oil stains on some of the bales. They were checked, and not one rug was stained or missing, and I asked that they be sent on by express to our farmhouse.