Pearl Buck - Letters From Peking

“There is much in marriage that is distasteful to a nice woman.” This she said when I asked her why she did not want me to marry. “Although MacLeod is a good name,” she added.

I considered for one moment whether I would tell her next that Gerald was half Chinese. He can pass for a dark Caucasian, for while his eyes are slightly almond-shaped, they are large and his brows are handsome. He is far more beautiful as a man than I am as a woman. I am small and fair and my eyes are grey rather than blue. I have never been sure I was pretty. Gerald has not told me I was pretty.

“Your skin is exquisite.”

“Your mouth is very sweet.”

Such words he has said, defining attributes but never declaring beauty. With all my heart I declared his beauty. For indeed there is some magic in the mingling of blood. Yet from which side the magic comes, who knows? It is the formula that provides the freshness….

But if I considered concealing Gerald’s Chinese blood, it was only for a moment. My mother was exceedingly acute. She could surmise what she did not know. I said, carefully casual,

“Gerald’s father lives in Peking. He is American but he married a Chinese lady and so Gerald is half Chinese.”

My mother’s little mouth opened. She looked at me with horror.

“Oh, Elizabeth — no!”

Only my mother called me Elizabeth. I am named for my grandmother, Elizabeth Duane. Gerald calls me Eve. It is his love name for me. By others I am called by every possible variation.

“Eve,” he said, that day when we were newly betrothed, “you are my first love.”

“Shall I call you Adam?” I asked half playfully.

He looked half amused, half cynical. “I doubt that Christians would concede the name to a Chinese,” he remarked.

“You insist upon being Chinese, but you aren’t — not by half,” I retorted. “And please, Gerald, when you meet my mother, be the American half.”

He became very Chinese at this, and made a show of being inscrutable and polite and evasive, all with humor, and I did not know how he would behave to my mother. I sorrowed that my father was dead, for he would have enjoyed Gerald, and might even have reveled in his being half Chinese. The windows of my father’s mind were open to the world. When he died, I kept the windows open.

Nevertheless, I should have trusted Gerald, for when he met my mother, he appeared before her as an extremely handsome young American, his Chinese ancestry escaping only in his suave and natural grace, and in the straightness of his sleekly brushed and very black hair. Even his eyes were alert and frank. Sometimes they were Chinese in their look, revealing the self-contained and sometimes distant person who lives within the soul of my beloved.

My mother could be distant too, in her small way, and on that day she was frigid. She sat in the parlor to receive him, dressed in her grey silk. Beside her was the mahogany tea table and the silver tea set her mother had left her, and the best porcelain cups and saucers which a seafaring ancestor brought home from Canton, China, a hundred years ago.

“Mother,” I said, “this is Gerald.”

My mother put out her small pale hand. “How do you do,” she murmured. She was a little woman but she could put on immense dignity and did so.

“I am well, thank you,” Gerald said in his warm pleasant voice, “and very happy, Mrs. Kirke, to meet you.”

“Sit down, Gerald,” I said, trying to be at ease while I was instantly furious with my mother. For she could be amiable if she wished, never quite losing her dignity, but gentling it. She had a rare but pretty smile. There was no hint of it now on her severe narrow face.

“Such a beautiful house,” Gerald said looking about him. “I like these old houses that belong to their landscapes.”

My mother was unwillingly pleased. “It’s too big,” she said, and began to pour tea.

“There is no need for houses to be small,” Gerald said. “A house should be like a gem, always in proportion to its setting.”

“I suppose you would like China tea,” my mother said, “but we always use Indian.”

“I would like it then with cream,” Gerald said. He was composed and at ease, while, as I could see, he was quite aware of my mother’s mood. And when he had his tea and was eating scones, for my mother could be very English when she chose, and she always chose to be so when she put on all her dignity, Gerald said,

“Ah, scones! I haven’t had these since my Scotch grandmother died.”

“Oh, and was your grandmother Scotch?” my mother inquired.

“She was, although her family emigrated early to Virginia,” Gerald said. “When I was small, however, she came to visit us and she liked our city so well that she stayed until she died, and we buried her in the cemetery with the other white people.”

“What was your city?” my mother asked, nibbling her scone.

“Peking, the ancient capital of China,” Gerald said, exactly as though he might have said London or Paris or Rome. “This is good tea,” he said. “Indian tea can be quite bad, as Chinese tea can be, too. You are a connoisseur, Mrs. Kirke.”

“I was taught as a girl to know my teas,” my mother said. She was trying not to unbend and she made a pretense of lifting the cake plate and then put it down again.

Gerald laughed. “In a minute, please! Grandmother taught me not to take cake while I was still eating scone.”

Mother had to smile then, a very small, cool smile, but I laughed, partly at her and partly because I was happy.

“You were too well brought up, Gerald,” I said.

My mother instantly turned on me. “Elizabeth, I do not understand that remark. You yourself have been well brought up, I think, and Mr. MacLeod is entirely right, and you shouldn’t be facetious at the wrong time.”

“I’m sorry, Mother,” I said. It was the slogan of my childhood, taught me in secret by my father. “Liz,” he said, and Liz was his version of my stately name, “Liz, it’s so easy to say ‘I’m sorry.’ It costs nothing and it saves a mint of pain. Those two words are the common coin of daily life, but especially between people who love each other.”

My mother turned her profile to me and she chose to speak to Gerald.

“Did your grandmother MacLeod live in Richmond?” she asked.

“She did,” he said. “There are old Scotch families in Virginia, and my grandmother always insisted that her great-great-grandfather Daniel was among the first founders. Perhaps he was.”

“Very interesting,” my mother said. Family trees were her hobby and I saw that I need not exert myself. Gerald had won her cool little heart, so far as it could be won.

This is not to say that she had no misgivings. More than once after that, when Gerald came to visit before we were married, she summoned me to her room late at night, after Gerald and I had parted, and there she sat upright in her Windsor chair, wrapped in her grey flannelette dressing gown and her hair in black kid curlers.

“Elizabeth, I have a dreadful fear that when you have a child it will look Chinese. Children do take after the grandparents. You are the image of your Grandmother Duane.”

“He might look like the MacLeods,” I suggested.

“There’s no guarantee,” she retorted, “and how I could bear to have a Chinese grandchild I do not know. I could not explain it in Boston.”

For my mother was never a true Vermonter but always a citizen of Boston, spiritually and mentally.

“Don’t worry, Mother,” I said. “Gerald and I will live in Peking.”

This startled her indeed. “You’ll never go and live in China,” she said, remonstrating.

“Didn’t you come and live in Vermont?” I parried.

“But China,” she persisted.