Pearl Buck - My Several Worlds

I agreed with my Chinese friend and then remembered, contrariwise, what a young American man had said to me only a few weeks before. He said, “I wish my mother would stay with us always the way you say Chinese grandparents do, but she doesn’t want to be bothered by young children, even her grandchildren. She wants to travel, to hear music, to go abroad, to live her own life, as she calls it, and so my children have no opportunity to know their own grandmother.”

Two sides of the same story, and the only sense I can make out of it is that our American pattern is to be patternless, unless individualism is the pattern.

In my own case, my grandfather was remote but comforting. He had his place in the house where I was born, an upright, somewhat rigid figure, but always kind, and though the few months of that year in which McKinley was killed passed quickly and I stayed with my grandfather no more, yet I had seen him, I had lived in the house with him, I had felt him the source of my being, because he was my mother’s father, and his other children were my uncles and aunts and their children were my cousins, and so I was one of a clan and not solitary. When my parents took me back to China with them, I went back knowing where they had come from, and so where I had come from, and we were not a solitary little group lost in a vast and alien China, alien now because the Chinese did not love white people and had killed many of our kind. No, we were Americans, and I had a country of my own, and a big white house where my kinfolk lived, and there were generations of us there, all belonging together. So a child ought to feel, and if he so feels, he can wander to and fro upon the earth and never walk alone.

Sioux Falls, South Dakota

We have been driving over the beautiful uplands of Illinois and Iowa, and cutting deeply into Minnesota. We arrived here in Sioux Falls to spend our first night in South Dakota.

I wonder what dream or experience, or both, led to the naming of American towns and villages? We passed in Iowa a little hamlet named Polo, in honor of Marco Polo. But why Marco Polo in Iowa, U.S.A.? His is a familiar name to me, for Yangchow is across the river from Chinkiang, my Chinese home town, and in Yangchow Marco Polo was governor for some years. It is a city famous for beautiful women, one of whom was my Chinese nurse, although I remember her old and missing some teeth, but still beautiful. What American in Iowa, then, dreaming of those travels on the other side of the world, called his town Polo?

And we passed a town called Woosung, but why Woosung in the heart of Iowa? What musing, wandering mind, compelled to stay at home, named his inland town for that port on the flats of the Yangtse Delta, that gateway to Shanghai and so to China? And while I was pondering on this, our car passed into Minnesota and there was Ceylon on a signpost but the only Ceylon I know is the jewelled island that clings to India’s foot.

Earlier in the journey we passed, too, through a bare little town in Illinois, all open to the sun. It was Galena, ancestor or relative, I suppose, to our little New Galena in Pennsylvania. Galena, Illinois, is the town where Ulysses S. Grant, not yet President, went with his family before the Civil War, to set up his tanning trade. He built a solid square red brick house, graceless, comfortable and commonplace, and from there he was called to lead the Union Army. He took with him some of his cronies to support him, a number unsurpassed before or since, I am told, by any administrator, but I confess I see no wrong in choosing friends for one’s supporters.

What interests me is that Ulysses S. Grant could have reached so high a position. Perhaps the chief weakness of a democracy is that seldom can a truly great person rise high, for people elect those whom they can understand and therefore admire, and these are usually men like themselves. And even as I write these cynical words the noble ghost of Abraham Lincoln stands before me. He, too, was a man of Illinois, the middle country, and I first heard of him from Mr. Kung, who revered him because he had freed the colored slaves. When I asked my parents, however, they were Southern enough to say proudly that the slaves were being freed anyway, and not by Abraham Lincoln.

Be this as it may, I see myself, a child of ten, returned again to China with my parents. It is the year 1902 and I am in the small old dining room in the mission bungalow on the hills above the Yangtse River, and I am listening to the grave voice of the old Chinese gentleman who is my Chinese tutor. He is a Confucian, which seems not to have troubled at all my Christian parents, although he instilled into me Confucian ethics while he taught me Chinese reading and writing, and I listened and learned and called him Teacher Kung. He prided himself on the surname Kung, which was also the surname of Confucius, this name again being a corruption of the Chinese Kung-futse or Father Kung. But I, as a Christian child, supposed that Confucius was the same as Our Father in Heaven, that is, God the Father, and I accepted all gods, having been accustomed to seeing temples full of many gods. Among them was my special goddess, she of mercy, the Kwanyin, always so beautiful and graceful, such a lady in her looks as well as in her kindness, and tenderhearted toward all female creatures. To be sure, there was her younger sister, The Virgin Mary, but a vague cloud I did not then understand surrounded The Virgin, an immaculate cloud, but producing also The Son. And the patient Joseph, standing always to one side in the Sunday-school pictures, how I pitied him, for somehow it seemed as though he had been cheated. I heard talk of this among the Chinese Christians who had no enthusiasm for Mary and felt sorry for Joseph. And this talk must have reached my own American Christian father, for he ceased trying to explain how Jesus was born of The Virgin. It was one of the mysteries and the less said about it the better. But the Goddess of Mercy was really immaculate and there was never any talk there about a god-father or a god-son. She was pure goodness. Besides, Chinese history or mythology, and often they merge, is rich in stories of beautiful virgins impregnated by gods to conceive divine sons, and this Mr. Kung taught me, too.

But the important lesson which he taught me was that if one would be happy he must not raise his head above his neighbor’s.

“He who raises his head above the heads of others,” Mr. Kung said, “will sooner or later be decapitated.”

It was true in China as in other democratic nations that when a man became too famous, too successful, too powerful, mysterious forces went to work and the earth began to crumble under his pinnacle. The Chinese are a proud and envious people, as a nation and as individuals, and they do not love their superiors and never did, and the truth is they have never believed that their superiors could exist. This fact partly explains the present anti-Americanism, this and the attitudes of missionaries and traders and diplomats, all white men indeed, who considered themselves whether consciously or unconsciously superior to the Chinese, so that a smouldering fury has lived on in Chinese hearts for more than a century and this fury, which white men could not or would not recognize, is the chief reason why Chiang Kai-shek lost his country and why the Communists won it. Had he been wise enough he would have expressed boldly his own anti-Western feelings and had he done so he might have held the leadership. But he thought he could win by American force and this his people could not forgive him, and, sadly for us, Mao Tse-tung seized the opportunity that Chiang threw away, and the power of history today is turned against us. It is hard for Americans to believe that American charm, so warmly expressed in the ready smile and the outstretched hand, does not win the Chinese. What then can the American do? He must read history afresh. He must prove to the Asian that he is not to be confused with the past, of which he is relatively innocent, and therefore he must not be compelled to bear its burdens. American boys must not die because England once ruled India and in China won the Three Opium Wars and fastened a ruinous tax upon the people, or because an Englishman allowed Japan to stay in Manchuria, and so established a foothold for an imperial war. Nor should American people be asked to share the intolerable and ancient burdens of France in Indo-China. We shall have enough to do to prove to Asia that we are not as other white men have been.