Pearl Buck - Kinfolk

“Think what this girl of ours has been doing!” she said.

Dr. Liang stared at his youngest child. “She has been crying. Why have you scolded her?” Louise was his favorite child and the whole family knew it.

“After all you have said about waist-binding,” Mrs. Liang complained. She gulped her soup between sentences, to Dr. Liang’s intense disgust. “She was binding her waist — that’s what she was doing! Before the mirror! Her face was all red.”

“But why?” Dr. Liang asked, staring at Louise.

“Because why?” Mrs. Liang answered in a loud voice. “Now it is fashionable again, it seems. The Americans are wanting very small waists.”

“We are Chinese,” Dr. Liang said mildly. He continued to gaze at Louise. “Never forget, my child — we are aliens here. This is not our civilization. We must not forget our sources. Our women are beautiful because they are natural.”

The four young people lowered their heads and drank assiduously of the soup in the bowls. Mrs. Liang tipped her bowl, and shouted toward the kitchen, “Neh-lee, Neh-lee!”

The maid Nellie came in quickly, gathered the dishes and brought in bowls of food on a tray. Mrs. Liang watched her sharply while Dr. Liang talked to Louise.

“We should set the example, my child. I often ask Heaven why it is that I am sent here, an exile from my beloved country. Heaven does not answer but my heart makes reply. I have a mission here. My children have a mission, too. We must show this vast new country what it is to be Chinese. Now if you bind your waist, even as the Americans — and can it be true that this vile and harmful practice is again to be adopted?”

“Oh, Father, don’t worry,” Mary cried out. “Louise won’t be uncomfortable for long, you may be sure of that. She loves to eat.”

“Shut up,” Louise whispered under her breath.

Dr. Liang put down his chopsticks. Mrs. Liang had served a large bowl of rice with vegetables and had set it in front of him. This was his family bowl. When guests were present he used a small bowl, a gentleman’s bowl, he laughingly explained. Only peasants used large bowls.

“But I thought most of the people of China were peasants,” the guest would reply. Dr. Liang deprecated this with a graceful left hand. He used his left hand for gesturing.

“An unfortunate impression,” he always said gently. “Due, I am afraid, to best sellers about China — written by Americans. A very limited point of view, naturally. It is quality that is meaningful in any nation, the articulate few, the scholars. Surely men like myself represent more perfectly than peasants can the spirit of Chinese civilization. Our nation has always been ruled by our intellectuals. Our emperors depended upon wise men.”

“Mary!” he now cried sharply, “do not be cruel to your younger sister. Louise, do not be rude to your older sister. The family relationships must be preserved.”

“Eh, eh, eat your food, all of you,” Mrs. Liang cried impetuously. “When your stomachs are full you will feel better. I made this beef and cabbage myself. Here, father of my sons—”

She reached across the table with her chopsticks in her right hand and picked a tender bit of beef from the dish and put it on Dr. Liang’s heap of rice. “Now come — the children will all be good. It will rouse your ulcers to be angry at mealtime.”

Like many Chinese intellectuals, as well as rich men, Dr. Liang suffered from the threat of stomach ulcers. Mrs. Liang declared that it was the excessive restraint of his temper which went to his stomach. “You should let your temper out,” she sometimes urged her husband in private. “Be angry with the children when you feel like it, but between meals. Slap Mary or twist Peter’s ears — it will make you feel better. It is hard on you to have no servants who will bear with a little anger now and then. You felt better when we were in China for that reason. There the ricksha coolie was especially patient — remember? Here you have no way of venting your anger. It stays in your belly and makes boils.”

“I hope I am a truly superior man in the Confucian sense, whether I am in China or America,” Dr. Liang had replied.

“Confucius died of stomach trouble, too,” she had retorted.

This he had not answered, remembering that Confucius himself had said that the superior man must be patient with women, children, and fools.

Now he fell to eating heartily. For so slender a man his appetite was large, and to his wife entirely satisfactory. Nothing gave Mrs. Liang a greater sense of success as a wife than the sight of her husband eating his food with enjoyment. She was irked that her own pleasure was checked by a frame that ran easily to fat, and she was sometimes made melancholy by the sight of her husband’s spare and graceful body when he bathed himself. Did he compare her solid shape to the naked outlines of American women? She had long ago refused to go to seashore resorts after one visit to Atlantic City. How could even Dr. Liang keep his virtue in that place? Yet such was American life that he had only to open the page of a magazine, left about carelessly by one of the children, to see even in his own house the pictures of evil females. American women she considered whores without exception when they were young and some although they were middle-aged. Even white-haired dowagers made over Dr. Liang in a manner that could only be called whorish.

She did not believe that her husband, left to himself, could ever be unfaithful to her or to the children. Had she not borne him two handsome sons? Yet the memory of their arranged marriage rankled in her. True, her father had yielded to the extent of allowing them to meet for fifteen minutes, one day, under his own supervision. She had been a tongue-tied girl of eighteen. She could still feel her cheeks burn at that memory. But the tall extremely handsome young man who stood gazing at her then seemed now to have nothing to do with her husband, Dr. Liang. Whether he ever remembered that meeting under the eyes of the watchful old man, she did not know. He had never spoken of it. Even on their wedding night, six months later, he had made no reference to it. Nevertheless he had gone on with the marriage. She had not, she supposed, been too ugly, and in those days she was not fat, although certainly not thin, even then. Her cheeks had been round and red with a high color that tended to grow purple in cold weather. Her plump girlish hands were always chilblained in winter until she came to America.

She had been thoroughly afraid of her husband on her wedding night. He was methodical and almost completely silent. Not until she was sure that there was no more to marriage did she recover her natural and somewhat loud gaiety. By that time she knew she was indispensable to him. She still was, and this kept her fairly careless in mind, except when Dr. Liang began to write poetry, which he sometimes did. These poems were woven about women entirely different from herself and they alarmed her. She searched with jealous eyes their entire acquaintance in New York to discover, if possible, someone who resembled even remotely these ladies of his imagination. Such resemblances were difficult to fasten upon, since his poems were all about ladies who had lived centuries ago in Chinese history. The Fragrant Concubine, for example, was one of his favorites, a delicate lady who when she perspired exuded scent instead of sweat.

“I doubt there was ever this woman,” she had exclaimed when Dr. Liang read aloud to some American friends a poem he had written in honor of the Fragrant Concubine.

“She lives in history,” Dr. Liang had answered firmly. He looked about the group of earnest American faces. “And in my heart, perhaps,” he had added smiling.

Mrs. Liang had quarreled with him that night in her good hearty fashion. “You!” she had cried, scolding and shaking her forefinger at him while he undressed for his bath. “Starting scandal with these Americans!”