Pearl Buck - Letters From Peking

Rennie came home at midnight and found me still on the terrace. “You haven’t been waiting for me, I hope, Mom?” he said.

Yes, suddenly he is getting to be an American. The stately name of Mother, upon which his father always insisted, has become Mom. I say nothing. What is the use of keeping alive the shadow of his father when the substance is far from here?

“No,” I said, “I was just thinking about your father and wondering what he is doing tonight — working, probably.”

So much of the substance I mentioned.

Rennie did not answer. Instead, rather ostentatiously, he lit a cigarette. I know that he smokes, and he knows that I know, but it is the first time he has done so before me.

“Give me one, will you?” I said.

He looked surprised enough to amuse me and held out the pack. “I didn’t know you smoked,” he said and lit my cigarette.

“I don’t.” I retorted. “But you seem to enjoy it, and why not I?”

He was embarrassed and I fear the pleasure went out of his cigarette. Perhaps it is necessary for the young to have something to defy. I suspect they hate this modern permissiveness. There is nothing in it to set their teeth against. At any rate, Rennie soon put out his cigarette, but I smoked mine to the end.

“Not much to it,” I said. “I’d thought there was more.”

“You have to inhale.”

“When I have time I will.”

The moon was sailing high overhead, a sphere of white gold in a pale starless sky. Rennie stretched himself in the other long chair and locked his hands behind his head. I heard him sigh.

“How old were you when you were married, Mom?”

This was his question.

“I was twenty-three. I had just graduated from college the year before.”

“Gee, that was old.”

“It didn’t seem so,” I said. “Your father and I were engaged for a year.”

“Why didn’t you get married before?”

How much does one reveal to a child? Rennie’s profile in the moonlight was not a child’s. He has grown three-and-a-half inches this year. He is already as tall as Gerald. The bones of his face are hardening and the lines are strengthening. If these are the outward signs of manhood, there must be inward changes, too.

“Your father was afraid I might not like China. More than that, he wanted to be sure that I could love what was Chinese in him. Until he was sure, he would not marry me. It took time. He doesn’t give himself all at once.”

This our son pondered.

“What is Chinese in him?” he asked at last.

“Don’t you know?” It was a parry. I did not know how to answer.

“No. I can’t even remember him clearly.”

“Why, Rennie, you were twelve when we left.”

“I know — I should remember. I don’t know why I can’t.”

He does not want to remember his father — that is why. But I cannot tell him so. It would be accusation and I must not accuse him. Let me seize this opportunity to help him remember.

“You know how he looks.”

“He really looks Chinese,” Rennie said unwillingly.

“Then you do remember,” I said. “Yes, he looks Chinese until he is with Chinese and then he looks American.”

“If he were here he’d look Chinese all right.”

“What of it? The Chinese are very handsome, especially northern Chinese, where your grandparents lived. Do you remember your granduncle Han Yu-ren?”

“No.”

Well, perhaps not. We did not see Han Yu-ren again. He was a collaborator with the Japanese and when Peking was returned he had disappeared. Rennie knows that much.

“I hope you will never think of your granduncle as a traitor,” I said. “I am sure that he believed he was doing what was best. Perhaps Peking would have been destroyed had it not been for him. I can imagine that in times of war, when the enemy is within the gates, many a true patriot yields for the moment that he may preserve the eternal possession of his country. China has been saved many times by such patriots. Think of the Mongol conquerors, think of the Manchus! Men like Han Yu-ren seemed to yield to them, too. But the conquerors came and went and China remained. Remember always that Peking is not to be destroyed.”

Rennie said nothing to this. He listened, as the young do listen, in silence, and it is not known how much they comprehend until one sees how they live in after years. I thought of his grandmother, Gerald’s mother. Should I tell him? No, not yet. But I shall keep her picture and the commemorative magazine and the time will come.

“Is my father more Chinese inside or more American?” This Rennie asked, while he stared at the moon.

I answered as truthfully as I could. “I should be hard put to it to say. I’ve asked myself that question. I think that when he is Chinese he is very Chinese. There are other times when he is very American.”

“For example?”

Rennie has the precise mind of a scientist. How can I answer him? How can I speak of the hours when Gerald and I were man and woman? For it was when we were alone, husband and wife, that Gerald was American. That surely was his true self. Then he put aside the curtains of tradition and habit and no strangeness came between us.

“He is really very Chinese when it comes to family,” I said. “He treats you as a Chinese father does his son, gently but with an inexorable loving firmness. He never lets you forget that you are not only his son but you are the grandson, the great-grandson, a thousand times over, of many men before you. The generations are always with you — aren’t they?”

“Yes,” Rennie said unwillingly. Then he added, after a moment, “But I have other ancestors — yours, Mom — and maybe I’m more like them.”

“It may be that you are.”

I knew that he had not reached the real meaning of all this talk. What can one do with the young except wait? Soon he began again.

“Mom, do you think my being part Chinese will keep a girl from liking me?”

“An American girl?”

“Of course.”

So it is of course!

“Certainly not.” I said. “It would be much more likely that a Chinese girl wouldn’t like the American in you.”

“I couldn’t fall for a Chinese girl.”

“You might. They’re very beautiful, many of them.”

“I shan’t go back to China,” he told me.

“You might go back some day to see your father, if he doesn’t come here to us.”

“Will he come here, do you think?”

This, this was the moment to tell him about the letter locked in my box upstairs. Sooner or later he will have to be told. I am afraid to tell him. He is too young to understand, too ignorant to have mercy.

“I hope he will come. Let’s both hope. And who’s the girl, Rennie?”

For of course there is a girl. All the talk has simply been leading up to it. I was suddenly tired.

He sat up surprised. “Mom, how did you know?”

“Oh, I know,” I said, trying to laugh. “I really know more than you think I do.”

He lay back to stare again at the moon.

“It’s nothing to talk about — not yet, I guess. She’s the girl in that red and white house down the road. Summer people.”

I knew people had moved into the house, but I have been too busy to call on them. Sometimes I call on our summer neighbors and sometimes I do not. Now of course I must go.

“What’s her name?”

“Allegra.”

“A fanciful name!”

“It’s pretty, though, don’t you think?”

“Perhaps.”

“The last name is Woods,” he went on.

“What does the father do?”

“Business of some sort in New York. He isn’t here much. Allegra’s here with her mother.”

“How did you happen to meet?”

“She was walking down the road one day, toward Moore’s Falls, and I happened along and she asked where she was.”