Pearl Buck - Kinfolk

Was Peter a Communist? That was what Young Wang continually wished to find out. He himself was not, since the government cut off all Communist heads or else shot them dead. But he listened sometimes in the corners of the teashops and winehouses. At his village when he had gone to rescue his family from the island to which they clung he had heard a young man and woman who came together and helped them move and stayed while they put up fresh earthen houses on their fields, and they had kept saying, “Where are your landlords? Where are your wonderful students? Where is your government? Does no one come to help you? Only we help you, we the Communists.”

The villagers had been much troubled by their help, well knowing that in this world no one does anything for nothing, and they had been casting about in their minds as to why this young pair with such bold faces had come to their aid. When they found they were Communists they fell into awful terror, for no one in these regions could be Communist and live, seeing that the government sent armies every day against Communists. Worse even than their own government, for they were used to their own, were the Americans, who now demanded, the villagers were told, that every Communist be killed. So Young Wang and his family had joined with the villagers in driving these two young Communists away with hoes and rakes and bamboo poles. The two had gone off singing one of their songs and they shouted back at the villagers.

“We offered you peace, but now you reject us and we will come back with swords and guns!”

Young Wang had been as frightened as the rest. Nevertheless, this stuck in his mind as truth — no one did anything for men like him and their families. They struggled along as best they could, starving in famine, dying with sickness, their children were dirty and unlearned, and all this was in spite of their continual labor. Who indeed had helped them build anew their houses after the flood?

That Peter was angry at something Young Wang well knew. He had heard the young man argue with his calm older brother and with Chen. “You with your tolerance and your patience,” Peter had said bitterly to those two. “The only way to wake our people up is to use violence on them.”

“You mean kill them?” Chen had inquired politely. “Alas, people do not wake from the dead!”

“I mean kill everyone who will not change,” Peter had declared.

“Oh, Peter, don’t be silly,” Mary had exclaimed.

James had listened in his usual thoughtful manner. Then he said, “When men start killing other men, a craving for death enters their heart, and to kill becomes the solution for every difficulty, however small.”

“There is something of Pa’s Confucius in you,” Mary exclaimed.

“Perhaps there is,” he had replied.

Now Young Wang walked softly to Peter’s room and looked into the window. The young man sat by his desk writing furiously. Even as Young Wang looked at him he put down his pen and sat frowning and troubled. Young Wang went to the door and coughed.

“Go away,” Peter said, recognizing the cough. “I am busy.”

Young Wang opened the door enough to put in his head. “Will you not even go to the train to see them off?” he asked in a mild voice.

“Get out,” Peter replied.

Young Wang weighed the tone of his voice. The words were harsh like an American’s, but the voice was not too much so. He came in looking meek and stood with his back to the door. “I said get out, didn’t I?” Peter cried, looking up with high impatience.

“I will get out,” Young Wang promised. “But first I tell you what I heard today. Something is being planned at the marble bridge.”

Peter shot him a sharp look. “Where did you hear that?”

“A chestnut vendor told me.”

Peter had taken up his pen but now he threw it down again. “Go on,” he commanded, “tell me what you heard.”

“He passed by at midnight a few nights ago,” Young Wang said in a low voice. “He had been to a theater to sell his chestnuts. That is why he was so late. He passed by and he saw some people under the bridge. Of course he thought they were beggars sheltering there. Then one of them cried out with pain. One of the others had let a spade or a hoe fall on his foot. And this cry was no beggar’s cry, the vendor said. It was the voice and the curse of a student.”

Young Wang paused.

“Well, what of that?” Peter asked.

“The vendor went back the next night and the next,” Young Wang went on, “and he goes every night. He is being paid now by the secret police.” Young Wang looked down at Peter’s shoes. “I brush your shoes every day,” he said suddenly. “Yesterday they were clean. But tonight there was yellow clay on them. I know there is yellow clay under the bridge. Our soil elsewhere is sandy and dusty. But under the bridge there is clay. Doubtless when our ancestors sank the great stones into the bowels of the river, they brought yellow clay here from the south to hold hard the foundation.”

Peter leaped from his chair and rushed at Young Wang. But Young Wang slipped through the door like a tomcat.

Nevertheless Peter locked the door after him and went to the desk and taking the sheets of paper upon which he had been writing, he tore them across again and again and he emptied the bottle of ink upon them and threw them into the wastebasket. Then he began most restlessly to pace the floor.

DR. LIANG WAS VERY ANGRY. James’s letter had come by airmail and had thus reached him some two weeks before Louise could be expected. He who had proclaimed so often before audiences in classroom and lecture hall the wisdom of the doctrine of fate could scarcely persuade himself of the inevitability of what had already happened to his family and therefore to him. It now seemed to him that it would have been better to have had Louise marry Philip Morgan, whose father was in Wall Street and therefore rich. Who knew what this new fellow was, this Alec Wetherston? James had put the address of the family in his letter. It was an address of a somewhat middle-class sort. Dr. Liang had a flair for a good address, and he knew that this one was only partly good. It was not distinguished and very wealthy people would not be in that part of the city. He decided to ignore the Wetherston parents, refusing to recognize publicly his own secret fear that they might not be pleased with a Chinese daughter-in-law.

To his wife, however, he spoke with complete frankness, and in the height of his irritation at fate, he bullied her a good deal in small ways. “It would be very pleasant now, wouldn’t it, if this soldier’s family did not like to be connected with us?” he demanded of Mrs. Liang.

“On the other hand they might like us,” she suggested reasonably. “For example, can we not ask why this Alec does not object to a Chinese wife? He has received no teaching against our people. Doubtless his parents also have no strong objection.”

The reasonableness of this incensed Dr. Liang. He tasted his coffee and set the cup down again. “How strange that after twenty years you still cannot tell good coffee from bad,” he remarked.

“Neh-lee!” she called, but he put up his hand.

“She drinks anything herself,” he said. “Therefore she has no taste. It is you, my wife, who should be able to know the difference, even by the aroma, between good and bad coffee.”

“But I don’t like coffee, Liang,” she objected.

“That has nothing to do with it,” he retorted.

She sighed. She must prepare to bear upon her own shoulders the brunt of her husband’s displeasure. She brooded in silence, her eyes downcast, while he finished his scrambled eggs, broiled kidneys, and the bad coffee, munching as she did so on a piece of toast.