Pearl Buck - My Several Worlds

These were shocking ideas to my two roommates, and though I presented them in innocence and in the course of bedtime talk, they reported me to Miss Jewell as being a heretic. I, on the other hand, was shocked that they could call the Chinese people heathen, a term my parents never allowed to be spoken in our house, so that even certain hymns were forbidden to us because they contained this ugly word. Miss Jewell, informed of my monstrous views, removed me from the attic room lest I contaminate the others, and put me in a little room alone. This pleased me for I could read after lights went out elsewhere, and from the veranda outside my room I could look across the street and observe a large and friendly Portuguese family. I never knew their surname, for I never met them, but I knew all their personal names, since they had loud lively voices and they called to one another from floor to floor and lived on their upstairs veranda with careless intimacy. Mama and Papa, Rosa, Marie and Sophie and little Dee-Dee were the ones still at home. On Sundays after Mass a married son and daughter and their children came home to spend the day, and on that day I too had leisure after compulsory church, and so I could watch them and share in their merry life. I grew fond of them in my way, for perhaps it is my weakness to be fond of people easily, although intimacy is difficult for me, and they gave cheer to what might otherwise have been a shadowed existence in those great dark buildings.

For once in my life I took no interest in my lesson books. I did not, I found, enjoy studying in classes, for I was accustomed to my mother’s quick mind and imaginative teaching and other teachers bored me, with the exception of my English teacher, a frail blue-eyed little woman whose oversenstitive spirit I discerned and dreaded somewhat, I think, because I felt in it depths for which I was not ready.

We had good teachers, Miss Jewell saw to that, but I was a restless pupil, informed in some subjects far beyond my age, thanks to my parents, but impatient when confronted with the more technical aspects of Latin grammar and mathematics. What I really learned had nothing to do with formal subjects. Miss Jewell, feeling that I needed a stricter Christian theology, endeavored to instill it in me by taking me to prayer meetings and then to places of good works. Both terrified me. The prayer meetings were unlike any I had ever seen. I do not know to what sect Miss Jewell belonged, but for her prayers she went to one private house or another where her fellow Christians met to pray. She was a busy woman and we usually arrived late, after the meeting had begun. We entered a dark hall, admitted by the usual blasé Chinese houseboy who led us to the room of prayer. It was always dark and we stumbled over legs and reclining figures until we found a space wherein to kneel. There we stayed as long as Miss Jewell could spare the time, and stiff with repulsion, I listened to voices in the darkness pleading for the presence of the Holy Spirit, or fervent beseeching for forgiveness of unmentioned sins, accompanied by moans and groans and sighs. The experience became so frightening, so intolerable to me, that I asked my mother to let me come home. Religion I was used to, but not this dark form of it, this grovelling emotion, the physical confusion, a loathsome self-indulgence of some sort that I could not understand but at which my healthy instincts revolted. In my father’s house religion was a normal exercise, a combination of creed and practice, accompanied by music. My mother had a fine strong clear soprano voice, well trained, and at any hour of the day she sang, not only the better hymns but solos from great oratorios and noble church music. My father’s sermons, inclined, it is true, to scholarly dryness, did not, however, contain any talk of hell. Infant damnation, a horrid idea from which I am happy to say all Christians have now recovered, was nevertheless in those days still part of the normal creed, but my father, heretic that he was, would have none of it, and my mother, having lost four beautiful little children, was raised to fury at the very mention of any child descending into hell. I had heard her comfort more than one young missionary mother beside the body of a dead child. “Your baby is in heaven,” she declared. “There are no babies in hell — no, not one. They are all gathered round the Throne of God the Father, and Jesus takes them in his bosom when they first come in, when they still feel strange to heaven.” Upon the common tombstone of three of her children, who died before I was born, she had their names inscribed and then the text, “He gathered them like lambs in His bosom.” And as long as she lived there hung on the wall of her bedroom opposite her bed, where she could see it night and morning, the picture of a shepherd with his sheep, and in his arms were baby lambs.

My parents were alarmed, then, when I told them of the dark rooms and the strange prayers, and they wrote my headmistress and requested that I be taken to no church services except on Sunday mornings in the Community Church, where Mr. Darwent, a short stout little Englishman with a bald rolling head and no neck, could be trusted to preach harmless sermons, sincere and brief. Thus one burden was removed from me.

Miss Jewell, however, did not give me up. She felt that I was old enough to have some share in her good works, and so I took her turn, when she was busy, at the Door of Hope, a rescue home for Chinese slave girls who had cruel mistresses. It was really an excellent work, and the municipal authorities gave it every support, even to the extent of legal help in freeing slaves from their owners. I was supposed to teach the girls to sew and knit and embroider, all of which tasks I disliked, but which my own beautifully educated mother had taught me to do well. She believed that it was still part of a woman’s education to know the household arts. “Even if you always have servants,” she was fond of telling me, “you ought to know how to teach them to do their work properly. And home is the place to learn home-making.”

She was right in this as in so much else, and I have never regretted knowing all she taught me, even though I complained enough then when I had to learn fine crocheting and lacework as well as cooking meals and baking delicate hot breads and cakes. I have not been able to impart these feminine arts to my own daughters. My mother had one advantage over me — we had to make American foods if we wanted to eat them. Nowadays, here in the United States, young women can buy such miracles of ready frozen stuff, wanting only to be thrust in an oven to be finished, that it is hard to make them believe that they have lost an art. And this ignorance extends even to the daughters of farmers. I had once a little Pennsylvania maid who could not cook or sew, and did not feel her ignorance unfitted her in the slightest to be a wife and mother. She would buy both food and clothes ready-made, she said, and laughed when I said I felt sorry for her because she had missed so much.

The Chinese slave girls at the Door of Hope, however, were eager to learn. They were wretched children, bought young in some time of famine and reared to serve in a rich household. We had only the ones from evil households, of course, for a bondmaid in a kindly family received good treatment as someone less than a daughter but more than a hired servant, and at the age of eighteen she was freed and given in marriage to some lowly good man. But these who ran away were the ones beaten with whips and burned by cruel and bad-tempered mistresses with live coals from pipes and cigarettes and ravished by growing adolescent sons in the family or by lecherous masters and their menservants. Such slavery was an old system and perhaps no one was entirely to blame for it. In famine times the desperate starving families sold their daughters not only to buy a little food for themselves but often, too, to save the daughter’s life. It seemed better to allow the child to go into a rich and hopefully friendly family rather than certainly to die of starvation. The girl was sold instead of the boy because the family still hoped to survive somehow and the son must be kept, if possible, to carry on the family name. Sooner or later, it was reasoned, the girl would have to leave the family, anyway, when she married. There are many romantic and beautiful love stories in Chinese literature centering about the lovely bondmaid who is the savior and the darling of the family, and these perhaps added to the hopefulness of the starving family when they sold their girl child. Nor was it always a girl who was sold. Sometimes if there were no girls, or if all the girls had been sold and there was more than one boy, a younger boy would be sold to a rich family, also. But a girl was more salable. A boy was less useful as a servant.