Pearl Buck - Kinfolk

Meanwhile Mrs. Li had become anxious, as she grew familiar with American life on the streets of New York, lest Lili be attacked by American ruffians and robbed of her virtue, or, almost worse, lest some American fall in love with her and want to marry her. She was afraid that she and Mr. Li, who were both mild people, might not have the courage to refuse their daughter to an ardent and desperate American. Therefore they had made known their growing approval of the Liang family to Lili, and Lili had accepted James.

Nevertheless she did not wish to let her parents think her the usual old-fashioned obedient Chinese daughter, and so she had told Jim very shyly, after his proposal and her acceptance, that she did not want anybody to know at least for a whole week. To this he had agreed because it gave him time to persuade his father to let him go to China. With that permission he would tell Lili that they would make their home in Peking itself. The Liang ancestral lands and village were only about a hundred li south of the city. He was lucky, he told himself, that he would have as his wife a real Chinese girl instead of an American-born Chinese who might be very unhappy even in her own country.

He moved restlessly on the bench beside his sister and then he got up. “When did you tell Lili?” he asked.

“Yesterday. She telephoned to ask me to go to Radio City with her. You know she doesn’t dare go alone anywhere.”

“That’s her mother,” James said.

“She’s afraid, too,” Mary said.

They had discussed Lili’s tearfulness before, Mary critically and James with defense. “Inevitably Lili was affected by the war, even in Shanghai,” he now said. Mary did not answer. She continued to gaze dreamily across the river at the flashing sign of the amusement park. She had seen that sign all her life but she had never been to the park. Peter and Louise went every summer and came back weary with laughter and half sick with spun sugar and popcorn, both of which she hated. But most of all she hated loud voices and catcalling, whistling young white men. She loathed the touch of their flesh. Her heart was full of dreams about the country she had never seen, yet to which she belonged, where her own people lived. She could believe nothing but good about China, nothing but what was brave about her people. When Madame Chiang had visited America she had been in her first year of high school, and without hope of meeting her. But she had seen her, flashing in and out of hospitals, in and out of great cars, in and out of hotels, and always proud and beautiful. She had made a scrap book of the newspaper photographs.

“I’m going to see Lili now,” James said suddenly.

Mary looked at her watch. It was still early. “Hadn’t you better telephone first?” she asked. “She may not be up. You know how Mrs. Li is — she plays mah-jongg all night, and Lili stays up—”

“I’ll go on the chance,” he replied.

“What will you tell her, Jim?” Mary asked. “You can’t very well say that you are going—”

“Why not?” he asked.

“But if even Mother wants you to wait?”

“If Lili is willing, we’ll be married right away — and we’ll go together.”

“What if—” Mary broke off and shook her head.

“What if she isn’t willing?” Jim asked. “I’ll face that — if I must. So long—”

He nodded and walked away, and Mary looked after him thoughtfully. Inside her small neat head her life was planned as carefully as one of the outlines she prepared in her class in child hygiene. She was going to China, too. Jim did not know it yet, but she did. Whether he was married or not, she was going. If he married — well, Lili was helpless and she could help her. Lili knew nothing at all about housekeeping and children. Mrs. Li had always said there were plenty of servants in China and so what was the use of teaching Lili to do things she would never have to do?

Mary watched her brother out of sight, then she rose, shook her skirts, and tripped back to the big apartment house. She had promised Peter to make shrimp flakes, for no one else would take the trouble, and he loved to eat them while he studied at night. To have the radio turned on full blast, to reach out for handfuls of shrimp flakes while he memorized with such ease the laws of physics — this combination of activities satisfied Peter’s whole nature.

Mr. and Mrs. Li had found an apartment on the next street in from the river. It was a sublease from a European motion-picture actress who was at present having one of her wrestling matches with Hollywood. It had been impossible to find an apartment on long lease and next to impossible to get a sublease. Almost any American, at the sight of Mr. Li’s fat, kind, yellow face, declared that he had decided not to sublet, after all. Mrs. Liang, who was the interpreter and manager on these occasions, had been filled with fury, but she did not wish to let her new friends know that they were unwelcome in this country of refuge. Besides, she knew that they were not really unwelcome. Shopkeepers would rejoice in Mrs. Li’s easy purchases and Mr. Li’s ready checkbook. The unwillingness lay in some undefined region which Mrs. Liang preferred not to probe.

Secretly she hated and despised all Americans, but this she kept to herself. Someday when the dreadful discomforts of present China had changed to the solid, pleasantly lazy life of the old normal days, when they had all gone home, and when she had filled her house with servants and once more had nothing to do, she would tell her best friends all that she knew and felt about Americans. It would take a long time and she would not do it until she knew she need never come back to America again. Meanwhile she dared not release herself. She had plodded from agency to agency, had studied the newspapers with her shortsighted eyes, spelling out to herself the advertisements of apartments, and had been rewarded one day by finding this handsome place where the owner had no feeling against Chinese, since she herself was only French.

Julie de Rougemont had laughed a great deal at Mr. Li, who had been only too charmed with her, and within twenty-four hours the Li family was comfortably settled in a highly modern apartment, whose three baths vied with each other in magnificence. Mrs. Li had disliked the mirrored ceiling in the one she used because she did not enjoy looking at herself as she lay in the tub or, did she chance to look up, the sight of herself moving squatly about on the floor, and so she had ordered the mirrors painted, in spite of the lease which insisted that no alterations were to be made. Of the family only Lili seemed to suit the apartment. Lili, slim in her gorgeous and extreme Chinese gowns, matched the modern settees and tables, the blond rugs, the sleek draperies. The French woman had screamed with pleasure at the sight of Lili.

“Ah, what beauty!” she had sighed. “What skin — what hands — and the eyes, mon Dieu!”

Mr. and Mrs. Li had looked at their daughter with new respect, but Lili had given no sign of pleasure. Her red mouth, her dark eyes, had remained sweetly unmoved.

At the door of this apartment James now pressed a small button, jeweled with luminous glass. He could hear the soft murmur of voices speaking Chinese. At the sound of the bell they stopped. There was silence, and then after a moment Lili herself opened the door.

“Lili,” he cried. “I was hoping you were at home.”

Her manner, perfectly decorous, softened. She turned her head and called, “Ma, it is only James.”

The rooms came to sudden life. Somewhere Mr. Li coughed and spat heartily and groaned. Mrs. Li shouted in Chinese, “Come in, come in — we are drinking tea. Ha, you — Lili, what’s the servant woman’s name?”

“Mollie,” said Lili.