My Several Worlds (44 page)

And so in silence and with bland faces the people in our city and in the countryside watched the brave young officials, the Western-trained specialists and earnest intellectuals, the students and the ardent reformers, go the way of all flesh. Law in China was traditionally for the criminal and not for the good citizen, and certainly not for the government official, and so traditionally the new officials and intellectuals broke the very laws they made. They did not even obey the new speed laws for automobiles, for they were grown haughty and domineering and there were already whispers of widespread graft. The old evils were still with us. I had an example in my own classes, in the handsome son of a high government family. He came every day in an American car, chauffeured by a White Russian. The tall youth wore a uniform and he had a “Lieutenant” before his name, and he arrived every day after the others, his bright spurs clanking as he walked. When the end of the term came he did not appear for his examination and I failed him on the semester’s work, especially as he had not handed in class assignments on time or at all. He was hotly indignant.

“Do you not know that I am a lieutenant in the Nationalist army of the Chinese Republic?” he demanded.

“As far as I am concerned, you are merely one of the students in this university who happens to be also in one of my classes,” I replied.

“My father is—”

“That makes no difference to me,” I said, and proceeded to give him a briefing on democracy in a modern state, while I tried not to laugh at the proud and incredulous young face.

He was one of many. And somehow the Chinese people could not forgive the new officials because they were so much like the old. They had hoped for more than a new government. They had hoped for a new world.

In the midst of these years I made a swift journey to the United States to put my invalid child into a permanent school. The decision had been hastened because I foresaw a future in China so uncertain in terms of wars and revolutions that the only safety for a helpless child was in a life shelter. It was during those few months in the United States, in 1929, that I heard my first novel,
East Wind: West Wind
, had been accepted for publication. I had sent that slender manuscript off to David Lloyd in New York a year before, and then so much had happened that I had all but forgotten it. I was visiting in a friend’s house in Buffalo when a cablegram from David Lloyd reached me, forwarded from China, and telling me that the book had been taken by the John Day Company, and that I was asked to come to the company office to discuss some revisions. This news came one morning when I was feeling very desolate at the prospect of a future of separation from my child, and while it did not compensate, nevertheless it brightened life in its own way. I am told that both agency and publisher were astounded at the calmness with which I replied, and at the fact that I waited weeks before going to New York. I suppose my habitual casualness about time is the result of having lived so long in a timeless country.

In time, however, I did go to New York and there I met David Lloyd whom I had never seen, and went with him to the offices of the John Day Company, where I waited patiently upon a long Pennsylvania Dutch bench which stood in the vestibule and which, incidentally, now stands in our dining room as a keepsake. The president of the John Day Company was late in coming back to work after lunch that day. When he did come I was interested to hear that it was he who had decided to publish my little book, since his editorial staff was equally divided for and against it and he had cast the deciding vote, not, he told me quite frankly, because he thought it a very good book, since he did not, but because he believed that he saw evidences there of a writer who might continue to grow. I had already been told by David Lloyd that my manuscript had been sent to every publisher in New York and that had the John Day Company not accepted it, he would have withdrawn it. I was therefore in a properly humble frame of mind, but long ago Mr. Kung had already seen to that, and I was neither downcast nor uplifted. Almost immediately I returned to China.

The house in Nanking was empty without my little elder daughter and not all the friends and family could fill it. This, I decided, was the time to begin really to write. So one morning I put my attic room in order and faced my big Chinese desk to the mountain, and there each morning when the household was in running order for the day I sat myself down to my typewriter and began to write
The Good Earth.
My story had long been clear in my mind. Indeed, it had shaped itself firmly and swiftly from the events of my life, and its energy was the anger I felt for the sake of the peasants and the common folk of China, whom I loved and admired, and still do. For the scene of my book I chose the north country, and for the rich southern City, Nanking. My material was therefore close at hand, and the people I knew as I knew myself.

In all my books I have made such mixture. Years later, for example, I put into
Kinfolk
bits of the same northern country. Uncle Tao’s tumor, which he kept so proudly in a glass bottle for everyone to see, grew first and actually in the stout body of Madame Chang. She too mustered the courage to have it cut out, and she too put it into a bottle of alcohol and kept it on the table in her main hall for everybody to see. “Are your characters real people?” A hundred times and again I am asked that question and of course they are real people, created from the dust of memory and breathed upon by love. Yet not one of them lived outside my books exactly as they do within them.

How long the days were, in the separation from my child, although I crammed them full! In the afternoon I taught my classes in the new government university, and when I came home at four o’clock there were always guests for tea, young Chinese intellectuals, old Chinese friends, young Americans and English from the Language School which had been opened in Nanking by cooperating mission boards. Still the days were too long, for there were the evenings and the weekends and the long hot summers when schools were closed, and I did not care to go to Kuling any more. In the summers I had even more time, for my father always spent the two hottest months of summer with my sister’s family in the mountains, and the house was emptier than ever. It was then that I decided to begin my translation of the great Chinese novel
Shui Hu Chüan,
which later I called
All Men Are Brothers.
The Chinese title is meaningless in English, although allusive enough in Chinese, where robbers and pirates have always gathered about the watery margins of river and lakes, and the Chinese words refer to them. Four years I worked on the translation of that mighty book, spending upon it the hours when I could not write my own books and when I did not teach. It was a profound experience, for though the book was written five centuries ago, the pageant of Chinese life was still the same, and in the Communists, fleeing now into the Northwest, I saw the wild rebels and malcontents who had risen against government in the old days of Empire.

The same? No, there was now something much more dangerous. Those early bandits were not organized under a sinister new banner. They had been only Chinese rebels, angry against other Chinese who ruled them unjustly, and they had a rough sense of justice which made them help a good man and destroy a tyrant, whether he were an official or a village bully. But I knew by now that the Communists were part of a world movement, and when the Chinese malcontents and rebels allied themselves with Russian Communism it was something that we had never seen before.

Yet I was still only a bystander. No foreigner had any influence in those days among the young intellectuals except the advisors who were hired from abroad, for example, Bertrand Russell from England who came with Dora Black and put our young men and women into a furor of upset, and soon they were all talking free love, by which they mean the right to choose their own husbands and wives, until my elderly Chinese friends, their parents, were appalled.

“Is this what it means to be a republic?” Thus my old neighbor Madame Wu, inquired of me at least twice every time we met, and I could not reply, for I did not myself know then what it meant to live in a republic.

Paul Monroe and John Dewey came to help in the organizing of the new public schools, and they did sound work in planning for a university in every province, a high school, or middle school as we called it, in every county, and a grade school in every city. It was still impossible to speak of compulsory education, for there were few teachers ready to teach in modern schools. For another generation, at least, seventy-five percent of China’s children must go without schools. Now, after having seen years of public schools in my own country I sometimes question, however heretical that is, whether a compulsory school system is all that our fathers planned it to be. The task of the teacher in the United States is very hard. I see classrooms of lounging unwilling adolescents, and schoolrooms where noisy and troublesome children must be taught whether they wish or not, the elements of learning. And most difficult of all, I see bricklayers and truck drivers and mechanics, good men but certainly ignorant, get more pay than the teachers themselves or than most brainworkers can command, and then I do not blame the American children for their confusion. Perhaps indeed it is true, as a certain young adolescent remarked to me the other day, that there is no use in going to college when one can make much more money than a college professor by stopping his education after high school and undertaking a career as a truck driver. In China the brainworker, the intellectual, always commanded the highest salaries, for there knowledge was valued, not only for its own sake, but because it is the source of wisdom in the conduct of life, and for this technical knowledge was not considered enough.

As a bystander, therefore, I watched my Chinese world change before my eyes. Government bureaus by the dozen were established, manned by clever young Chinese who could speak English or French or German better than they spoke Chinese. I remember sitting beside one such young man at a great dinner one night. He asked me what I had been doing that day by way of diversion, and I told him that I had ridden horseback out into the country to a distant village to see the ancient stone lions of the Liang dynasty. It had been a beautiful autumn day: the air golden and still. The Chinese countryside is never lovelier than in autumn, after the rice has been cut and the gleaners, in their blue cotton garments and carrying their bamboo baskets, go out over the stubbled fields to pick up the grain that has been left. Behind them in turn come the inevitable flocks of white geese to find the single grains that the gleaners leave. I had ridden happily and alone along the earthen paths that followed the ancient stone paved roads and so I had come to the Liang Lion Village, and there had dismounted. It was a gay place after the harvest; young women were playing with the children on the threshing floors, now swept clean, and old women were spinning in the doorways. I had not been there before, but I had long known of the stone lions from Western books on Chinese sculpture, and so I recognized them at the end of the village street, although they were at the moment covered with the village wash. From under ragged blue coats and trousers the noble beasts looked out with the patient gentle air of life endured for centuries. The villagers knew very well that they were Liang sculptures, and they gave me a lively and fairly accurate account of their history.

This I relayed that evening to my dinner companion. He was a spruce young man in a well-cut Western business suit. I could see that his mind was on other matters while I talked, for he drank tea, drummed his fingers on the table, coughed and moved restlessly in his chair. When I had finished he said decisively, “There are no Liang stone lions near Nanking.”

I was startled at his rejection of history, and I protested mildly. “Western scholars have long admired the stone animals, and you will find photographs and data—”

“There are no Liang stone lions near Nanking,” he said again more loudly than before.

Already I had learned that we had minds among us which could not be informed, and so I held my peace. Now when I think of the young men who manned the bureaus of our new government I think always of that incident, and I offer it here as example, if not proof, of the dangers of ignorance. As for the Liang lions, I am sure they still stand there as they have for hundreds of years and I am sure, too, that the village women still hang their faded garments upon their stone shoulders and haunches, and this though Mao Tse-tung reigns today in Peking, even as Chiang Kai-shek reigned in those days in Nanking.

Reigned? Well, something like it, for he was having a hard time to preside as a president of a republic. He knew nothing about modern democratic government, or perhaps any government except a military one. He was used to men who came when he said come and who went when he said go. The education of a military man is the same the world over, and our President was a military man. He had, however, a number of wilful civilians in his cabinet and they often opposed him manfully. When he could not thunder them down he began to kill them. Such a protest was aroused by this highhandedness that he paused, in some astonishment, to discover that evidently a president is not an emperor. He earnestly wanted to be modern, I do believe, in spite of not having the education for it, for certainly his year in Moscow and his other years in a military school in Japan did not educate him for democracy. It is to his credit that he modified his ruthlessness then to imprisonment, and at last even to a fairly pleasant imprisonment. There was a hot springs resort not far from Nanking, where he had made a house for himself and his wife. This house he turned over to be a place of confinement for the members of his cabinet who disagreed with him. There they went and there they stayed until they saw reason, and I remember passing sometimes when I was riding outside the city wall and asking the villagers who was now in prison. They always knew. As for younger offenders, there were either none who dared to oppose our President or he disposed of them in ways less polite.