Pearl Buck - My Several Worlds

All this learning went on quite pleasantly and painlessly and I was aware of no particular insecurity and certainly of no frustrations and boredoms. Indeed I had a happy life, though my days would perhaps have seemed intolerably slow and boring to my children now, who do not love books as I have ever done, perhaps because their imaginations were not caught young, as mine was, by the visions of minds between covers. Perhaps Mr. Kung had something to do with that. I see him still as he arrived upon all fine afternoons, except on Sundays, and he could not come upon rainy days because his mother forbade it, lest he wet his feet and fall ill, and being a filial son he did not wish to cause her anxiety, and there was nothing strange to me in that, although Mr. Kung was nearly fifty and his mother seventy-two. She was his mother, was she not, and would be until she died, and the web that held the Chinese together as a people, solid and eternal, was the love and respect between the generations. “Honor thy father and thy mother that thy days may be long upon the land” is an Asian precept as well as a commandment.

And so Mr. Kung arrived punctually on fine afternoons at two o’clock, carrying his treasure of books wrapped in a soft old piece of black silk. This he unfolded but only when he had given greeting to me and received from me a suitable bow and salutation, after which I, too, could seat myself. Then only, I say, did he open the silk with tender care and bring forth the book which we might then be studying. For two hours we read and he expounded, not alone the past contained within the book, but also the relation of that past, however dim and distant, to the present and even to the future yet to come.

Thus it was from him in those days of my early youth that I learned the first axiom of human life, and it is that every event has had its cause, and nothing, not the least wind that blows, is accident or causeless. To understand what happens now one must find the cause, which may be very long ago in its beginning, but is surely there, and therefore a knowledge of history as detailed as possible is essential if we are to comprehend the present and be prepared for the future. Fate, Mr. Kung taught me, is not the blind superstition or helplessness that waits stupidly for what may happen. Fate is unalterable only in the sense that given a cause, a certain result must follow, but no cause is inevitable in itself, and man can shape his world if he does not resign himself to ignorance. Mr. Kung liked to quote also from the Christian Bible, partly, I imagine, to prove to me his liberal Confucian mind, and his favorite text was the one about reaping the whirlwind if one sowed the wind, and he reminded me often, in his gently lofty manner, that one could not expect figs from thistles.

When four o’clock came the lesson was over. He covered his tea bowl and wrapped the book again in the square of soft black silk and we rose and I bowed and he inclined his head, reminding me of tomorrow’s preparation and of a few mistakes I might have made. So we parted, I following him to the gate as a pupil should follow a teacher, and there standing until his swaying robes and black silk queue had disappeared.

It would still be years before the demands of revolution, smouldering under the surface of our everyday life, would cut the queue away as the last sign of servitude to the dying Manchu Empire. But Mr. Kung was dead by then, taking his queue with him to the grave, and what I made of those later days I had to make without him.

Meanwhile our life went on in strange and silent peace. I was too old by now to play in the pampas grass outside the gate, and my free time in the afternoons after Mr. Kung was gone was divided between our home and my friends in the small white community or among the Chinese we knew. I did not run down the hill any more to visit the women and girls in the valley farms. I was getting to be what was called “a big girl” and if my mother was not with me then my Chinese nurse accompanied me when I went outside the gate. She was far more strict than any mother and she pursed her wrinkled lips if I stopped to buy a sweet from a vendor or some bit of jewelry that took my fancy at a silversmith’s. The Chinese silver was beautiful, soft and pure, and the smiths carved it in delicate patterns in a bracelet or a heavy chain, or they twisted hair-fine wires into exquisite filigree as delicate as cobweb, and studded it with plum blossoms and butterflies inlaid with blue kingfisher’s feathers.

For the first time, during these post-Boxer years, I tried to find a few friends among people of my own race. I remember a sweet-faced, brown-eyed English girl whose father worked for the English Bible Society, a gentle creature with whom I could find no profound companionship, for she had lived the secluded, almost empty life of most white families, entirely unaware of the rich culture of the Chinese people. Her home was built upon a high and narrow hill which had once been an island in the restless Yangtse until the river receded from the city to gnaw away the opposite bank. I remember less of this English Agnes than I do of her English home and the entirely English garden which surrounded it. That bit of England created above the turmoil of a particularly poor and crowded Chinese slum taught me love for England, nevertheless. The father, dark-eyed and brown-bearded, always in rough tweeds, was as English as if he had never left his native land, and the mother, an impetuous Scotch woman, was untouched by any idea that she was surrounded by other human beings who were Chinese. In spite of my knowing that this was entirely wrong of them, I enjoyed the family, the two older sons, home only for the holidays from the English school in Chefoo, and the two girls, my friends, and a Wee Willie, as they called him, who died somewhere in those years and who always, in his fragile gentleness, reminded me of Tiny Tim and then, very late, a loud and robust English baby, a postscript of a child embarrassing the whole family by his birth. Each of them enchanted me in his own way and nothing was more delightful than to sit down at tea with them and to enjoy real English cheer on a chill winter’s afternoon, when the houses of my Chinese friends were damp and cold. For however reprehensible they were, I loved my English friends and never more than when we gathered in a little dining room stuffed with ugly English furniture, secondhand from Shanghai shops, and had an English tea. There was no dainty nonsense about that meal. It might have taken place in any honest middle-class family in London or in Glasgow. There were no silly sandwiches, no hint of lettuce or olives. The big rectangular table was covered with a solid white linen cloth, and upon this were set the silver-covered plates of hot scones and dishes of Australian butter and Crosse and Blackwell English strawberry jam. There was no puttering with pale Chinese tea. We had strong black Indian tea, stout Empire stuff, enriched with white sugar and proper English condensed milk. And when we had helped ourselves to scones, the plate was set on the hearth beside the black polished grate, wherein coals burned cheerfully, beneath a mantelpiece and an overmantel, a hideous structure of carved shelves reaching to the ceiling, whereon every shelf was crowded with bits of porcelain or painted glassware, not from China, but from various spots within the blessed British Isles—“Greetings from Brighton” (in gold upon pink), or “Hearty Good Wishes from Dundee.” Never mind, it was hideous but it was warm and cozy and friendly and in its hideous funny way I loved it. And after the scones, but not until the last bit of scone and jam was eaten, and one did not take butter and jam for the same scone, we had fresh poundcake or English raisincake and more and more cups of tea, poured for us by the comfortable Scotch mother who sat at the foot of the table and talked unendingly while she poured, cheerful chatter as guiltless of wit and wisdom as any charwoman’s, but amusing and kind, for all of that. And this good English tea was prepared in a dark little English kitchen by a thin Chinese man of years, who survived the harrying scolding of his foreign mistress and consoled himself by cheating her richly when he shopped, and learning meanwhile to cook so well that when the white folk departed, forever so far as he was concerned, he found a job as head cook for a famous war lord who had a fancy for foreign food. And we were served at table by a table boy who afterwards burned down the house in which we sat. But how were we to know such effects, when we did not know the causes that we made?