Pearl Buck - My Several Worlds

Two worlds, two worlds, and one cannot be the other, and each has its ways and blessings, I suppose.

At any rate, here in South Dakota the night has fallen, and I prepare for sleep in a comfortable roadside motel. The South Dakota sky is brilliant with bright stars, the wilful car has been hauled into a garage and tomorrow will have its inner organs cleansed and healed, we hope, and so its soul restored. And I am glad enough to turn the chromium faucet in the porcelain bathroom and fill the tub with water, hot and comforting, although without a human hand to bring it to me.

Dayton, Wyoming

A pretty sight passes the window at this moment near high noon on a summer’s day. I hear the clatter of hoofs, and looking out I see a string of horses cantering up the dusty road from the canyon. These are the riders who set out this morning after breakfast, with a wrangler in command, to spend the morning in the Big Horn Mountains. The horses are eager to get home and the riders sit them well. The riders are young, boys and girls still in their early teens, but late enough so that some are beginning to be sober folk, thoughtful because the armed services lie just ahead. The girls, I think, have it harder than the boys for they will stay at home, most of them. I notice that in spite of enticing posters, seducing propaganda and noble appeals, most women stay at home. There is something in their natures that cannot accept the necessity of warfare, even after centuries.

The horses pass and the dust settles again, the riders dismount and go their way. The scene is mountains, rock and sage and pine, and sands golden under the hot Wyoming sun, and I sit here writing in my book.

I have, as I well know, been avoiding those years between 1901 and 1911 after the Boxer Rebellion when I was growing up in China. As I look back upon them they seem now to be strangely hesitant years, their transience concealed beneath a sort of everyday happiness so brittle that I think we all felt that it could at any moment be shattered. Peace covered China like a sheet of thin ice beneath which a river boiled. Outwardly our life was better than ever. My mother dug up the buried family silver, our faithful servants gathered around us again, and my father came and went in such freedom, with so little cursing on the streets against foreigners, that I think even he was troubled, knowing what a price had been paid for such peace.

For after the Boxers had been dispelled and disgraced, after it was plain to the simplest villager that his country had been defeated, the new treaties guaranteed the safety of the white man wherever he might choose to travel, to live, to preach, to trade. In addition, China was compelled to pay vast indemnities for the desperate folly of the old dead Empress, and though my own country later chose to spend its share in scholarships for young Chinese in American universities, that time was not yet.

The Chinese are a practical people and very wise. They knew their own defeat and could not then risk another. The time for the next struggle lay far ahead. For ten years at least they must recuperate, reflect and plan. In those ten years I passed from childhood into adolescence. I am grateful for one aspect of that decade — the years contained a freedom which perhaps no white child had ever known in China and certainly could not know after the revolution broke again in 1911. Had it not been for that freedom, that perfect safety, insured by treaties, indemnities and punishments with which I had nothing to do and yet in whose benefits I unwittingly shared because I was a white man’s daughter, I could not have come and gone so easily upon the city streets and country roads. Only the dogs dared bark at me, for those savage, starving village dogs alone still dared to show the hatred they had been taught to feel against the foreigners. No, there were the children. Sometimes a child having heard his family talk at night behind closed doors, would still shout “Yang kwei-tse” —foreign devil! — as I passed, but if did his mother clapped her hand across his mouth, frightened because she had heard how cruel was the revenge that white folk took.

This fear always broke my heart, I think, and wherever I found it, I stopped and spoke gently to the mothers and asked them not to be afraid, and if I could I lingered long enough to talk and play with the child and I left only when I saw fear gone and friendly looks taking its place. This gave me comfort and it pleased me when they wondered that I spoke their language so easily, for then I had the chance to tell them about my country and how my people were not hateful and did not hate them and how much I wished that we could be friends, because indeed our hearts were all the same.

Here I must confess a secret, for which I hope my dear parents in their graves will forgive me, for I never let them know. Often I would have liked to have invited these friends I made to come to our house and visit us and see how harmless our family was, how kindly were my parents, how tenderhearted my little sister, but I could not invite them because I did not want them preached at. I understood the deep burden of my father’s soul, the duty that he felt to preach the love of God and his own yearning to save, as he said, their precious souls. I did not blame him, but I could not cast my friends into that white fire of his own spirit. And would they not distrust me if I put them in his power? They were naturally courteous, they would not have refused to hear him, but would they not say that I had used friendship to win them to a foreign god? I could not risk it, and so for years I had many Chinese friends whom I took care to keep away from my good parents, and this not only because I thought it right, but also because, quite selfishly, I could not risk their doubt.

I was richly repaid for their trust, for to this day I value what they shared with me, their homes, their work, their laughter and good talk. Once the trust was established, we talked, questioning each other in close human ways. There was plenty of time in those years. We still lived in the country, and my mother taught me in the mornings but there were the long lonely afternoons and I had few companions of my own race. It was natural therefore that my paths led me to the red gate between the stone lions of the Lu family a half mile or so away and that I spent hours in the courtyards there, playing with the babies, listening to the young wives gossip, and sharing the thoughts of a schoolmate, a pretty girl of my own age. And how she happened to be a schoolmate was that Mr. Kung died in 1905, and since I was so tall my parents felt I had better not be taught by a strange man but go instead two or three times a week to a mission school for girls. But I never again learned as much as I had learned from Mr. Kung. I wept at his funeral and wore a white band of mourning on my sleeve and I bowed before his coffin with the lesser members of his family. He died of cholera, in September. He rose as usual in the morning but he was dead by night and my mother did not want me to go to his funeral because of the danger of contagion and when I insisted she let me go with my father only on the promise that we would not touch our lips even to so much as a bowl of tea and certainly not to any funeral meats. She had good reason to demand such promises for she had nearly died of cholera once, before I was born, and had on the same day lost my sister whom I never saw, a child of four. And my father, having found a doctor, for that dreadful day took place in Shanghai where there were white doctors, was forced to decide which life was to be saved, his daughter’s or his wife’s.

“I cannot save them both,” the doctor had said.

He chose his wife, but sometimes I wonder if my mother forgave him for it. It would have been like her to have insisted on saving both and somehow getting it done, but she was unconscious and had no say. She always felt, I think, that my father accepted too easily the will of God.