Pearl Buck: Bridge for Passing

I REMEMBER THE DAY when I decided to make the picture in Japan, an April day a year ago, a day like this one upon which I begin the story of my return to Asia. I have always known that the return was inevitable, not a permanent return, for I am too happy in my country to live elsewhere, but a return, nevertheless. One does not live half a life in Asia without return. When it would be I did not know, nor even where it would be, or for what cause. In our changing world nothing changes more than geography. The friendly country of China, the home of my childhood and youth, is for the time being forbidden country. I refuse to call it enemy country. The people in my memory are too kind and the land too beautiful.

China is not the whole of Asia, however, in spite of being most of it. There are other countries to which I could return — Japan, India, Korea and all the rest. Japan, I suppose, is the one I know best after China. Logically, the return would be there, but when? I am not a tourist. I do not enjoy visiting a country merely to see the sights. Nor do I enjoy visiting as a special person. When I return to Japan, I told myself, it will be for a project, a piece of work, something interesting to do, something that will explain why I cannot accept all the dinner invitations, weekends, entertainments which hospitable people offer to friends. But what project? A new question was added to my where and when.

Quite unexpectedly one day it was proposed to me that I go to Japan to work with others on the filming of my book, The Big Wave . The work would be something new and therefore exciting. I am long past the conservatism and caution of youth. I have arrived at the adventuresome age and The Big Wave is an adventurous book. It involves a remote fishing village, a tidal wave, a volcano, none of which I had seen for decades, and which I hankered to see again. The questions were answered. As to where, it was Japan; as to when, it was now.

No, not quite answered, for there was my family to consider. Some of them were old and some very young, a large family spreading over generations and into ramifications. Could I, should I, leave them all at such a time? We went into family consultation. Apparently I could and should. The family doctor assured me that there was no reason to delay going. The children, grown and half grown, were hearty and healthy. And he? He was as he ever would be always now. If I waited for the final possibility, it might be years. Six months ago I could not have left him. But in the brief interval there was for me all the difference between day and night. He had slipped into a world of his own. I had not yet learned to bear what was and must ever be.

“Go,” the doctor said. “You must have a change. You have a long road ahead.”

“Go,” my responsible daughter said. “I will look after everything.”

Thus encouraged, contracts were signed and tickets bought.

The book, of course, had to be put into new form. The Big Wave is a simple story but its subject is huge. It deals with life and death and life again through a handful of human beings in a remote fishing village on the southern tip of the lovely island of Kyushu in the south of Japan. The book has always had a vigorous life of its own. It has won some awards in its field, it has been translated into many languages, but never into the strange and wonderful language of the motion picture. To use that language was in itself adventure, not words now, but human beings, moving, talking, dying with courage, living and loving with even greater courage. I am accustomed to the usual arts. I have made myself familiar with canvas and brush, with clay and stone, with instruments of music, but the motion picture is different from all these. Yet it, too, is a great art. Even when it is desecrated by cheap people and cheap material, the medium is inspiring in its potential. When artists are great enough, we shall have many great pictures. I was not under the illusion of greatness but I hoped that we could make a picture true to the people of whom I had written.

We set forth on a morning in May. Japan had been a near neighbor all during my years in China. When I was a child, if we sailed from Vancouver or San Francisco, then Japan was the last stop before Shanghai, the gateway to my Chinese home. If we sailed from Shanghai, then Japan was the first stop toward my American home. It had been, too, a country of refuge when revolutionary wars drove us out of China. I once spent many months in a small Japanese house in the mountains near Unzen, and Unzen is near the southern part of the island of Kyushu, near Obama. I had taken a motor trip in that same year around Kyushu, and had stopped briefly in Obama to bathe in the hot springs there. In mind I now saw my fishing village somewhere in that region of glorious seacoast, green mountains and smoking volcano.

“I shall recognize it the moment I see it,” I told my family. “It will be a little village hugging a rocky shore, a sandy cove between mountains, a few houses of stone behind a high sea wall. I see it as though I remembered it, although I do not know its name.”

If Japan had been near and familiar in the past, this time it seemed just outside the gates of my home in Pennsylvania. We entered a jet in New York, two hours or so away from my stone farmhouse, and were airborne in a matter of minutes. I reflected upon the incredible span of my life. Though, God willing, I have decades more to live upon this beautiful globe, yet in experience of life and peoples, I began in the middle ages. As a child I traveled by wheelbarrow, sedan chair, mule cart or in a boat pulled along a lazy canal by men walking the towpath. I was twelve years old before I saw a railway train in China and fifteen before I rode in it. Ships I knew, for there were ships on the Yangtze River to take us to Shanghai and thence across the Pacific or up the river to Kiukiang and the mountains of Lu, where we escaped the torrid summer heat of the plains. I did not see or ride in an automobile until I was in college and after that not again for years until I returned to live in my own country. Then I became a modern woman and traveled by air as a matter of course. No, wait — I once took a disheveled little airplane to shorten a journey to Rangoon. Otherwise it would have been a matter of eight days on a slow boat. And once I flew from Sweden to Copenhagen on another journey. Yes, and still again, I flew from Ceylon to Java, descending once into the wet jungle heat of Sumatra. Years later, my first trip by jet was in Europe in the incredibly swift and silent jet aircraft that flies between Copenhagen and Rome. My interest in science has kept my curiosity keen in the development of jet and rocket, and anything slower than a jet makes me impatient now — I who began my life at a speed no greater than four miles an hour by sedan chair!

When the jet lifted me from the earth to the sky that May morning in New York I confess, however, to an elation all but unique. The huge metallic bird girded itself for flight, its engines roared, the creature trembled with its own inner power. Part of the elation was perhaps a reckless awareness of my own complete helplessness as we soared into the upper air. I had committed myself to the machine. I could not escape, I could not descend. No decisions faced me, for there was no way to go but up. An old Chinese proverb says that of the thirty-six ways of escape, the best is to run away. I do not know what the other thirty-five ways are — curiously enough, I never thought to inquire in all those years in China, I suppose because the obvious answer would have been that they were unnecessary, since one can always run away. This is no longer true, however, in our modern age. When one commits one’s self to an airborne craft and the door is fastened against earth and home, there is no escape even by running away. The result is a strange sense of peace — desperate, perhaps, but peace.