Pearl Buck - Kinfolk

Lili continued in the same plaintive tone. “Every day I wish to write a letter to Jim.”

“It would make him very happy,” Mary murmured. She sat down in a pink satin chair and felt hot and plain. She brushed back her hair with her hands and wiped her temples with her handkerchief.

“Oh, what can I tell him?” Lili asked. “Everything is not sure. Maybe many years before he is ready for me!”

“He is ready for you now,” Mary said. She unfolded the letter and began to read it slowly and clearly. Lili listened, her head leaned on her hand, her great eyes earnest and a tender smile about her mouth. She did not speak. When Mary had finished she lay back and closed her eyes. Then she felt under the satin pillow and found a lace handkerchief with which she slowly wiped her eyes. “I long to go to Peking,” she said in a heartbroken voice.

“Then why don’t you?” Mary asked. She wondered if she had misjudged the beautiful girl. It was so hard to understand the girls who came from China. One knew the blood was the same, but to have grown up in America and in China made two different beings. Lili was so soft, she yielded everywhere — until one knew she had really yielded nowhere.

“I cannot just go to Peking,” Lili said without opening her eyes. Her beautiful lips trembled. “I have to think about many things.”

“If you loved James you would think only of him,” Mary said.

Lili shook her head. She touched the wisp of lace to her lips. “You talk just like American,” she complained. “I am Chinese. I cannot just think about one man.”

At this Mary lost her temper. “I can see that,” she said bitterly. “I guess anybody can see that. You think of a lot of men.”

Tears rolled down Lili’s cheeks. She opened her eyes and gazed at Mary through wet lashes. “You don’t understand,” she whispered. “You are so American!”

“I’ll tell James you can’t just think of him,” Mary said.

Lili gave a soft scream. “Please don’t tell him this! He is American, too, and he can’t understand.”

“What shall I tell him, then?” Mary asked. “I’ve got to tell him something, Lili. He loves you — and you’re being too cruel.”

Lili was silent for a moment. Then she looked sidewise at Mary. “Tell him — tell him — I write very soon!” She clapped her hands and laughed. Then she got up from the couch. “I have to go with Baba and Ma to tea at the Consulate, but I don’t want to go a bit. I much rather sit here with you and listen to the letter all over again. But I must go — they tell me to.”

She smiled lovingly at Mary, and as firmly as though Lili had laid her hands upon her, Mary felt herself pushed from the room.

IN HIS ROOM AT the end of a hot day James read Mary’s letter. She confessed that she was writing too quickly after she had seen Lili. She ought to have waited for a few days until her anger was cooled. “But you know how hard it is for me to wait,” she said, “especially when it has to do with you, Jim. Lili did not say she would not marry you or that she was going to marry anyone else. She just said she had many things to consider. I don’t know whether she is hard or soft. Somehow she does manage to get her way.”

James folded the letter. It was a long letter covering many pages, and Mary had put into it family news and scraps of gossip about their friends and she had mailed it before the family went to the mountains. By now they would be in the cool green hills of Vermont. He thought with homesickness of the clear streams of cold water running over round brown stones, and the winds fragrant with pines. Yet when he was there he had not thought of it as home. Home, then, had been China. By what contrary whims of the soul was he always to feel homesickness wherever he was? Were Lili here, he thought restlessly, then his heart would be settled.

He no longer thought of going back to America. Lili must come to him. He knew now that here was where he must stay. He was a doctor first, and he was already entangled in the needs of the people who came to the hospital in terror and desperation. No one came for foreign medicine, as it was called, unless death were the alternative, and each day’s work was the saving of creatures already committed to death. He handled bodies bruised with the pinching fingers of old wives and punctured with the needles of old-fashioned doctors. Many of his gangrene cases began as poison from unsterilized needles thrust into shoulders and limbs and breasts to exorcise devils. He tried to teach health while he healed, but the dark eyes of the sick were dull and unheeding. He began to dream of health education in schools, among the young. Yet how could he do more than he was doing? A dozen operations in a day were routine. The hospital was understaffed. American doctors had not yet returned and the Chinese doctors trained abroad were constantly being tempted to easier jobs. It took courage to operate when the death of an already dying person might mean a lawsuit, if he were a rich general or a millionaire. Only the poor were grateful and only the poor did not want revenge.

In his growing anger against his rich patients he found himself turning to the poor who came to the clinics and crowded the charity wards. His first quarrel with the hospital came over the question of the charity wards which were daily squeezed smaller to provide more private rooms. When he saw beds touching one another and pallets on the floors he went to the office of his superiors and opened the door abruptly.

“Dr. Peng!” he began and stopped.

The handsome delicate-featured Dr. Peng Chenyu was seated at his carved desk, and leaning over him was the pretty head nurse. They were talking in earnest tones, the man smiling, the girl coquettish. Then they saw James standing square and frank as an American in the open doorway.

The girl stepped back and slipped from the room by a side door. Dr. Peng spoke in his high smooth voice. “Dr. Liang,” he said in English, “please be so kind as to knock before you enter.”

James spoke in Chinese. He rarely used English. It disgusted him that every little student nurse and interne tried to chatter in English. “That this was a private office I did not know, Dr. Peng,” he said. “I come to complain. The wards are being reduced until now my patients are lying on the floor.”

Dr. Peng smiled and lifted a small object from his desk. It was the nude figure of a woman and it was made of white jade. “Do you know what this is?” he asked, still in English. He came from Shanghai and he did not speak Mandarin well.

“A naked woman,” James said bluntly.

“Much more interesting than that,” Dr. Peng said delicately. His voice had the cadences of poetry. “It is the figure that native doctors use to diagnose the ills of an old-fashioned woman patient. She will not show herself to a man — as you have doubtless discovered — but she puts her pretty fingertip somewhere on this jade figure, to show where her pain is.” Dr. Peng laughed silently. “What amuses me is how lovingly the Chinese doctors carve these little figures, or have them carved, and how precious is the material! Do sit down, Dr. Liang.”

“I have no time,” James said. “I have come to complain about the wards.”

Dr. Peng held the little figure in his palm. “As to our wards,” he said gently, “we regret very much that they are too few.”

“This pandering to the rich disgusts me,” James said. “Every few days I find workmen putting up walls about a section of the ward to make a new private room for a general or an official.”

“It is not pandering,” Dr. Peng said. Virtue shone in his narrow brilliantly black eyes. “It is necessity. Charity patients do not pay. Generals and officials and millionaires pay very well. I daresay you would complain, Dr. Liang, if your salary were curtailed — an excellent salary it is, too. You are worth it, of course. But the rich people pay for it. Do not forget that our grants from America ceased last year. We have to find our own salaries as well as support the hospital.”