Pearl Buck - My Several Worlds

It was an old system, I say, and like all systems in human life, everything depended upon the good or evil of the persons concerned. The best government in the world, the best religion, the best traditions of any people, depend upon the good or evil of the men and women who administer them.

At the Door of Hope I saw the dreadful fruit of evil and still another aspect of human and certainly Asian life. Since I spoke Chinese as if it were my native tongue, the slave girls, unless they knew only Shanghai dialect, could talk to me freely and they did. Most of them could speak Mandarin for they had come from northern families who had travelled southward as refugees, although in famine times there were also men or women who deliberately went northward to hunt for children to sell again at profit in the large cities.

Many a night I woke up in my little room at Miss Jewell’s School to ponder over the stories these young girls told me and I wept to think there could be such evil in the world. This grieving either makes a heart grow more hard, in self-protection, or it makes a too tender heart. In my own case, perhaps there was something of both. I had early to accept the fact that there are persons, both men and women, who are incurably and wilfully cruel and wicked. But forced to this recognition, I retaliated spiritually by making the fierce resolution that wherever I saw evil and cruelty at work I would devote all I had to delivering its victims. This resolution has stayed with me throughout my life and has provided a conscience for conduct. It has not always been easy to follow, for I am not an aggressive person by nature. Once in India I was travelling by train from Calcutta to Bombay. In the compartment next to me was an English captain who disliked the Indians, it seemed, with an unusual virulence. When the train stopped, crying beggars and shouting vendors crowded as usual around the windows, and while it was not pleasant to be thus surrounded on a hot day, nevertheless these people were trying to earn a few anna to buy food. The Captain, however, did not use his reason. He carried a rawhide whip and he ran out upon the platform and beat off the half-naked Indians with vicious blows.

It was a horrid sight, yet if I had not made my resolution years before at the Door of Hope, I doubt I would have had the courage to speak to him. Much as I hated it, I did speak.

“How can you be so cruel?” I demanded. “They have not hurt you, and they are only trying to get a little money. There is no law against that.”

He was astonished for a moment, then he shrugged his shoulders. “Filthy beasts!”

Anger came to my aid. “Someday,” I said, “other white men and women and children, quite innocent, will suffer for what you are doing now.”

He shrugged again and walked away. I am not so foolish as to think he changed, for people seldom change once the mold is set, and he was past his youth. But I have never forgotten the dark Indian faces wearing the grave and bitter look I used to see on Chinese faces, too, when some white man was unjust. And the tragedy is that we are now reaping that very fruit. I read this morning in the newspaper of the cruel treatment given to the American prisoners of war in Asian camps. Part of it, I suppose, is not conscious cruelty but merely the difference in standards of living. The average Chinese workingman’s daily fare would seem near starvation to a hearty American boy, used to the best, and walking endless miles over hard roads under a heavy burden is only what many an Asian does every day for his living. If he is ill, it does not occur to him to go to a doctor or a hospital because a thousand chances to one there are none. Part of the cruelty, therefore, is the inevitable difference between poverty and riches. But the worst of it is undoubtedly really cruelty, instinctive and conscious at the same time, and the Asian is punishing the American because he is a white man now in his power and white men have been very cruel to the Asians in the past. The few good deeds done by a handful of missionaries do not change the history of centuries gone — not enough. The nightmare of my life has always been, since I understood anything at all, that someday a son of mine would have to stand in hand-to-hand battle with a Chinese, and that the Chinese, who knew his people’s history, would take revenge upon the innocent American. It has already happened to the sons of other Americans and may yet happen to my own.

Billings, Montana

This up-to-date Western town is built along the railroad, as so many Western towns are, like beads on a string, and I have just been wakened from a sound sleep in a very comfortable roadside inn by the noise of an engine and a few cars racketing past not fifty feet from the head of my bed. When the bed stopped shaking and the dust had settled, I fell to thinking of the difference between night noises here and the ones to which I was accustomed in that other world of mine. At home on our farm in Pennsylvania there are the house noises, the crack of old beams on a cold night, or the first peepers of spring and then the summer croaking of the bullfrogs in the pool, and later the autumn crickets. The dogs bark on a moonlight night and across the road sometimes a cow bawls in heat and must wait until dawn for the farmer to come and lead her to the bull. Or in the deep silence, and this sound I dislike for it always makes me afraid, a plane rushes through the night, too low, it seems to me, always too low, and I fall to wondering what the pilot’s mission is and why it must be done by night and what it is like to be speeding through the black sky, borne upon the beams of his own lights, with nothing between heaven and earth except himself, and what awful loneliness that must be.

Here in the West the train rushes past, making its mournful cry, and I do not know why these western trains have such a sad long echoing whistle as they fly past, a cry nearly human, so wild, so lost. It makes me think of human voices I have heard in the night elsewhere, the mournful monotony of voices singing in an Indian village, and I do not know what that song is, either, or why it is sung so often in the night, a few notes repeated over and over, thin and high until at last one’s very heart is caught and twisted into it. But the voice I remember most clearly is the cry of a Chinese woman, a mother, any mother whose child was dying, his soul wandering away from home, she thought, and so she seized the child’s little coat and lit a lantern and ran out into the street, calling the wailing pitiful cry, “Sha-lai, sha-lai!” and this meant, “Child, come back, come back!” How often have I heard that cry, and always with a pang of the heart! Lying in my comfortable bed and safe under our own roof, I could see too vividly the stricken family and the little child lying dead or dying and all the calling in the world could never bring his soul home again.

The Shanghai streets had their own noises, and often wakeful at Miss Jewell’s School, I heard the creak of a late riksha rolling along and the swift patter of people’s feet, and I heard the call of voices, girls’ laughter sometimes, or a hearty English voice, a man saying good-bye to someone. And deep in the night I woke to hear the endless slip-slip of Chinese feet in their cloth shoes, walking along the pavements, and I wondered where they went and why they never seemed to go home but always on and on.

In the spring of that strange year I spent at Miss Jewell’s School, she took me with her to still another of her good works. At a house whose name I cannot remember and where it was I have forgotten, too, there was a shelter for destitute white women, many of them prostitutes too old or ill to work any more, but some of them still young and even with babies. This place struck me with a profound horror, and actual terror. Here, for the first time in my life, I saw people of my own race, and women at that, so low in poverty and disease and loneliness that they were worse off than the Chinese slave girls at the Door of Hope. I could pity the slave girls because they had not chosen to be slaves, but I could not comprehend these white women of every Western nation. “French, English, German, Belgian, American — how had they let themselves come to such a pass and where had the first step been taken and how could they be made innocent again? I suppose my horror must have been plain, for the women fell silent when I came near, and though I did my best, playing games and reading aloud and teaching them to sew, there was never any communion between us. It was impossible, I had no background for it, nor did they understand me.