Pearl Buck - My Several Worlds

When they arrived here five bales were gone. I reported the matter to the Railway Express Agency office in New York and was told in a courteous letter to write to the Philadelphia office, stating the money value of the rugs, and the sum would be sent me. My temper, usually calm, rose up in a truly American fashion. I wanted the rugs. I wrote a letter saying that the rugs had been sent across miles of enemy-occupied China, across the Pacific and to New York. Why, then, should they be lost in the eighty miles between the New York Customs and our farmhouse in Pennsylvania? The reply to this was another courteous letter saying that if I would state a sum, etc. Whereupon I wrote to the president of the company on the theory that the best man is always at the top. He was, at least in this case. I got back not only a courteous letter but a sensible one, telling me that the rugs would be found and asking me to wait. I waited for months. Now and then a telephone call would come, asking me to wait a little, longer, that the search was going on. At last after half a year or so, the missing bales arrived. Where they had been I shall never know.

When I had laid the Chinese rugs upon my American floors, still the century-old floors of wide old oaken boards, I was astonished to see how new they looked, as though they had scarcely been used. Yet for six years the Nanking house had been lived in, first as a bachelor quarters for American professors at the university, and later by strangers. The mystery was explained some years afterward when I met one of those professors.

“How,” I inquired, “did you keep my rugs so new?”

He laughed. “Don’t think we were allowed to use them! Your too faithful servants rolled them up as soon as you were gone and put them in the attic, packed in camphor. Once a year we saw them, when the servants brought them down and sunned them. Then they were rolled up and put away again, for you.”

I tell this story here in gratitude to a fidelity beyond the call of duty, for those faithful servants I have never seen again, nor can we ever meet, but God go with them always.

Other feet beat a path to my door, too, not because I have made excellent mousetraps or anything else that surpasses the products of others. No, it is because of something that my invalid daughter has done for me. I open the door and there stand two parents, mother and father, and with them a child, a little boy or girl, and I look at the child and I know why they are here. The child is retarded.

“Come in,” I say.

They come in and I open the big old French armoire in the living room that serves as a toy closet for the Welcome House children when they come to spend the day, or for grandchildren and neighbor children, and the little child amuses himself while the parents tell the story I know too well. It is part of my own life, repeated again and again, and when it is told, we consider together what the child’s future shall be, where and how. So much, so tragically much, depends upon money. If the parents are poor and if they cannot keep the child at home, then the only place will be a crowded state institution, and I brace myself for their instinctive cry against it. They have been to see it and they cannot bear to think of their child left in so lonely a place, lonely because who will love him, who indeed will have time to love him there, where there are too many children and too few people to care for them?

Most of the parents are too poor to afford the fees of a private school, and even if they can afford them, can they also afford to arrange for the terrifying future when perhaps they are dead and the child lives on? We talk for hours, the child growing hungry, and I fetch cookies and milk and we talk again. There is no solution and I know it, but still we talk.

For the most neglected children in our entire nation are these little ones whose minds have been injured by some accident before, during, or after birth, the ones who cannot grow. Public schools too seldom carry the classes which would teach them what they could learn, for all of them can learn something and be the better and happier for it, and with what relief to their sorrowing families can scarcely be expressed. But the Boards of Education are oblivious or hard pressed, budgets are strained, and so nothing, or very little, is done for these American citizens. Children with polio, children with heart disease, children with cerebral palsy, children with cancer, children with every possible handicap have their foundations, their hospitals, their shelters, but not yet the little ones who will always be children and innocent. And when their parents leave them they are left to shift with unwilling relatives and hostile communities, and they live and die in a daze of misery.

I have seen with my own eyes what it means in a society like ours, where the family is only father and mother, sisters and brothers, when a child who is physically handicapped in the brain instead of in some other part of his body, is left alone. Lost children these, often used by clever ones to do the evil deeds that we call juvenile delinquency, and so it will be until the parents together rise up to defend their own. I appeal again to the family, for family must be the individual’s stronghold, his safety and his shelter, and there is no welfare agency or state institution or public organization which will do so well for the needy child, or adult for that matter, as the concerned family. Somehow the American family must be taught responsibility for its own again.

Yes, when I survey the memories of the twenty years that I have lived in my country I see very much and yet I realize that still I see no finished story, nor even consecutive pages of the years. I see my America in scenes and episodes, experiences so varied that I scarcely know how to put them together. The daily life goes on, rich and deep and good, and I am rooted in it, but I know that it is only as much of America as one family can live upon one farm in one community, from which it is true, paths lead around the world. When a visitor from Asia presses me to tell him what Americans really are, that he may have the key to our hearts, the clue to our minds, I shake my head.

“I have to take my compatriots one by one,” I tell him. “I have no key, I do not know the clue — not yet.”

I say that I see no unifying thread which ties together these rich and varied American scenes of my present life, and yet I feel a unifying spirit abroad in our land. In spite of our incredible differences in thinking, our seemingly irreconcilable conflicts in action, we have a unity of spirit, the American spirit. It is difficult to define, and yet I feel it steadfast, the deepening and strengthening expression of a people still in growth, still in the process of welding a new nation out of human material, from everywhere in the world. Whatever were the motives of our ancestors in leaving old countries to come, to this continent, and the reasons were as various as themselves, good and bad, we who are their descendants are creating something unique in our own selves, a nature native to our soil, a character peculiarly American.

Our contribution to the solutions of the world’s problems will come only from the working of the American spirit. Our approach will be practical, though sometimes impatient; optimistic, though humorously rueful; energetic, though occasionally reluctant. In short, if I am sometimes critical of my own people, it is in excess of love, for I perceive so clearly the needs of humanity and our own amazing ability to aid in fulfilling them, that I grow restless with the delays preventing the realization of ourselves and of what we can do, at home and abroad, to create a sensible and pleasant world.

Yet the advance in our national thinking since the end of the Second World War should pacify and encourage even the most exacting and loving of critics. In spite of embarrassing mistakes and alarming missteps in the process of learning our world lessons, I see the American spirit reaching new levels of common sense and enlightenment. We are already beginning to give up our destructive prejudices in color, creed and nationality, and we are no longer so boastfully sure that we can lead the world. Indeed the idea of world leadership is becoming distasteful to us, and we are considering cooperation instead of leadership. Americans learn quickly and well from experience, if not from preaching or even from books. Our own men, coming home from abroad as soldiers and diplomats, are proving to us that we can like other peoples — not all of them, but enough of every people so that we do not dislike all of any one kind. Given half a human chance, we like rather than dislike, but we are not sentimental about it.