Pearl Buck - Kinfolk

“But Lili, you didn’t love them!” He pressed her hand to his breast.

“No, not at all,” she replied.

“Then why, dear?”

“They asked me, and I said why, and they said for good feeling between Americans and Chinese, and so courteously I did.”

He laughed loudly at this, and then silently cursed the men who had taken advantage of her ignorance. “Please promise me you will never kiss any other man but me, Lili. It is not right, you know. Only engaged people and husband and wife should kiss.”

She looked at him now with some alarm. “You mean, the officers were bad men?”

“I’m afraid so, dear.” He did not want to hurt her, or disillusion her too quickly.

She pondered this for a moment, her face moved with distaste. “They did smell very bad,” she said. “And I do promise you, James. For I do not like to kiss very much.”

“Only me,” he insisted.

She smiled at this and lifted her hand. “Kiss my hand, please, so I don’t have so much trouble to take off and on lipstick.”

He laughed, detecting in the corners of her long eyes the hint of a sparkle, and he put the delicate scented hand to his lips and then held it while he talked.

“Lili, now that we are alone, I must tell you what I want more than anything in the world after we are married. I want to go back to China, dear, and do my work there in our own country.”

There was not a quiver in the narrow hand he held.

“Are you willing for that, Lili?” he asked gently.

“Oh, yes,” she said readily. “If my parents agree.”

“Do you think they will agree?” he asked anxiously.

“Oh, no,” she said in the same ready voice. “I think they will not. We had too much trouble in Shanghai.”

“Then, darling,” he exclaimed, “what shall we do?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “Please, James, you think of something else.”

“You mean — not go?”

“Yes, please!”

She took his hand and suddenly pressed it to her cheek. “Please stay here,” she begged. “Radio City is so nice!”

“But darling, I have work to do,” he urged.

“You will have a good job,” she reminded him.

She was so lovely in her childlike sweetness that he had not the heart to reproach her. “But China needs us, dear. Think how few hospitals there are! I want someday to make a big hospital where sick people can come and be healed.”

“Chinese people are too poor to pay hospitals,” she said.

“But in my hospital the rich will help pay for the poor,” he urged.

She laughed at this. “Rich people don’t want to pay for them,” she said shrewdly.

He felt himself caught in some sort of a net, so soft as to be intangible, and yet he was floundering in it. “Lili, answer me straight. Will you come to China with me?”

“If my father says so,” she told him.

“Is that a promise, darling?”

“I promise,” she said in her sweet ready way.

“We’ll live in Peking,” he murmured.

“I like Peking,” she agreed. “Such nice shops there! Oh, that remembers me — I haven’t spent my money.” She rose and smiled down at him with the witchery of a child. “Come, please — I want to buy something. A taxi, please!”

He rose and called a cab and she sat down luxuriously.

“Fifth Avenue near the park,” she called.

They were put down below Central Park and with the ease of many such trips she went into one expensive shop and then another. At the end of an hour and a half she returned to the first shop she had entered and bought a set of costume jewelry that cost exactly one hundred dollars including the tax. She laughed while she waited for the package. “I was so stupid when I came to New York, James,” she confided to him. “I thought I must offer half the price as asked. Now I know with Americans it is not so. You always give them what they want.”

He saw the saleswoman gazing at her with admiration and even astonishment at her beauty, and he was proud that she was Chinese — and that she was his. He bent to whisper in her ear, “Only — not kisses!”

She shook her head. “No — only not that.”

It was long past noon when he returned her to her parents. Mr. Li was restless with hunger, and he exclaimed at the sight of his daughter. “How long you have been! My belly is thundering.”

“What did you buy?” Mrs. Li asked.

It was, James saw, no hour to talk with Mr. Li, and he bade them farewell. Lili followed him to the door. “I will come tonight and ask your father,” he said.

“Please do,” she said sweetly and shut the door.

At the door of his own home Mary met him, as silent as a little cat. “Will she go?” she demanded in a whisper.

“Yes,” James said, “if her father will let her.”

“And if he will not?”

“He must,” James replied.

“Ha!” Mary cried under her breath.

“Come!” their mother’s voice sang at them from the dining room. “Come, eat — the food is hot — don’t let the food get cold. Father doesn’t like cold food.”

“Coming,” Mary cried.

“Coming, Mother,” James echoed.

There could be no talk or argument at the table. Dr. Liang insisted on perfect calm at his meals. He stood behind his chair in abstracted silence waiting for his family to gather. Mrs. Liang bustled through the rooms calling and compelling.

When James and Mary entered the dining room she was hurrying upstairs, her somewhat thick figure toiling its way on half-bound feet. In her childhood her feet had been bound, but when her family discovered that the little boy to whom they had betrothed her years before had grown up into a fastidious and modern young man who swore with ferocity that he would not marry a woman with bound feet, they had hastened to unbind them as far as it was possible. Dr. Liang had never acknowledged that his wife once had bound feet. He had declared to Americans until he believed himself that the custom of binding the feet of young females had died out of China sometime in the last century. “Somewhat earlier than you Westerners stopped binding the waists of your women,” he was fond of saying with his charming smile. “I flatter myself,” he said next, “that our race was less injured than yours, since important organs were not, luckily for us, located in the feet of our women!” Nothing enraged him more profoundly than to have a luckless missionary, newly home from China, maintain that there was still foot-binding going on in remote villages.

“It is not true,” he would say with high dignity. “As a Chinese I know.”

He looked up now as his two elder children came in. “Let us sit down,” he told them. “I hear your mother screaming on the upper floor, and doubtless Peter and Louise will join us soon.”

He began to sup the chicken broth and bean vermicelli with audible satisfaction. Among Americans he would have drunk silently but with his own family it was a pleasure to relax, he declared, and act as a real Chinese.

No one spoke while he ate. Peter came in and sat down. He was a pleasant-looking boy of seventeen, so thin that his long neck was ludicrous. His features were large and unusually strongly marked, and his forehead was high. Dr. Liang found it difficult not to make fun of this son of his, but today because he was displeased with James he felt kindly toward Peter.

“You were working on some physics but a few days ago,” he said courteously. “I have not heard the outcome.”

“I received a mark of ninety-seven, Father,” Peter said. By concentration he could keep his voice down, and he achieved this sentence without a squawk.

“Good son,” Dr. Liang exclaimed. “Drink your soup while it is hot.”

Mrs. Liang bustled in at this moment, sweating apologies. Louise followed, looking sulky. She was sixteen, taller than Mary, and very pretty. Her short hair was extravagantly curled and she wore a tight red dress and high-heeled black pumps. She had been crying, and Mrs. Liang looked at her crossly as she sat down heavily at her place.