My Several Worlds (45 page)

I do not propose to blame him now for these doings. He had risen to a place of great power suddenly and without previous preparation, and it was inevitable that he behaved in the only ways that he knew, which were the traditional ways of the military conqueror who kills his enemies if they will not bargain with him, and tradition had not really been changed very much even by the Communist advisors whom Chiang Kai-shek had once obeyed and then rejected. Modern communism itself is not new, perhaps, shaped as it is by the tyrannies and cruelties of ancient Russian rulers. Chiang Kai-shek sincerely did the best he knew, but he did not know enough. I do not know whether ignorance can be called a crime. If so, then many in this world are guilty, and I see them here in my own country, too, in high places.

Meanwhile I was writing
The Good Earth.
This I did in three months, typing the manuscript twice myself in that time. When it was finished I felt very doubtful indeed of its value, but to whom could I turn for judgment? My brother was in China that year on a mission from the Milbank Memorial Fund in New York, to look into the Mass Education Movement headed by James Yen, with a view to giving a large grant to that admirable work. He had only a few days to spend with me, and during that time I mentioned shyly indeed that I had written a novel. He was kind as always, he expressed interest, but not enough for me to feel I could ask him to take his valuable time to read my manuscript and tell me if it were any good. My old father certainly could not tell me, and there was no one else. So I tied up the pages and mailed them off to New York myself, and prepared to wait while I busied myself with other work.

At this period of my life and of China’s history I was keenly aware of the Chinese peasant, his wonderful strength and goodness, his amusing and often alarming shrewdness and wisdom, his cynicism and his simplicity, his direct approach to life which is the habit of a deep and natural sophistication. It seemed to me that the Chinese peasant, who comprised eighty-five percent of China’s population, was so superior a human group, that it was a loss to humanity that he was also voiceless because he was illiterate. And it was this group, so charming, so virile, so genuinely civilized in spite of illiteracy and certain primitive conditions of life that might very well be merely the result of enforced mental isolation from the currents of modern thinking and discovery, whom the young moderns, rootless and ruthless, proposed to “educate.” Nothing in Communist theory enrages me more than Trotsky’s callous remark that the peasants are the “packhorses” of a nation. Who made them packhorses? And to what heights may not these “packhorses” rise if they are considered human beings instead of beasts of burden? For in all my years in China I never ceased to feel intolerable pain and anger when I looked into the thin intelligent face of some Chinese peasant twisted into sheer physical agony because on his back he bore a burden too much even for a beast. I have seen his slender legs quiver under the weight of a two-hundred-pound bag of rice, or under the huge wardrobe trunk of some travelling foreign tourist. Edwin Markham’s poem “The Man with the Hoe,” discovered late by me, gave me a wonderful catharsis of the spirit. Here was an American who could have understood the whole problem of Asia. And my continuing regret concerning Asian leaders is that so few of them have understood the quality of their own peasants, and therefore few have valued this mighty and common man of the earth. And among them the Communists are the most guilty, for with all their talk, I do not see that they have valued this man, either, and their condescension to him makes my soul sick. Yesterday in New York a young Chinese woman sat in my small living room and told me breathlessly of the great and marvellous changes that the Communists are making in China. And in her words, too, I caught the old stink of condescension.

My mind could not rest after I had finished
The Good Earth
and almost immediately I began to write another novel,
The Mother
, in which I portrayed the life of a Chinese peasant woman, but more than that, I hoped, it was the life of such a woman anywhere, who has been given no fulfillment except her own experience and understanding. Everywhere in the world there are such women and by the million. I had supposed in those days that certainly they were not in my own country, but when I came here to live I found her here, too, in many a farmhouse not far from where I write these pages, and certainly in the Deep South where she is often Negro, or on the deserts of the Western states, where she must travel miles to meet another human creature, or shut away in the mountains of New England. That woman in China, however, was too remote from the book readers in my own country, and certainly from the minds of the critics and reviewers for them to understand her—a strange thing, I thought, until I remembered how alien to me are the warped and twisted people in the novels of William Faulkner, I never saw such people in China, but I take it for granted that he lives among them here since they make the stuff of his famous books. But abroad, in France, and in Italy and in other countries where the peasant woman is strong and alive, my readers knew her and my book was understood. It is one of the compensations of the writer that somewhere there is always the reader who understands. I remember an honest critic in New York said once of my book
Pavilion of Women
that he did not “get” what it was about. Why should he, how could he? But from all over the world women have written to me and comforted me for their understanding of that book. Yet it would not be fair of me if I did not record here that, when I had finished
The Mother
, I was far from pleased with it and I threw it in the wastebasket beside my desk. There it lay and it was only chance that it was not thrown away permanently. The houseboy happened to be away for a few days and the baskets were not emptied, since one servant did not presume to do the work of another lest it appear he envied him the job, and before the houseboy returned, I had retrieved my manuscript to examine it again and see whether I was wrong. Eventually it was a book, although I put it away for several years before I offered it doubtfully to my publishers. That houseboy, by the way, had a curious habit of triumphing over fate and gods. He was a tall pallid melancholy silent fellow, a dogged pessimist at all times. One day he appeared so phenomenally pallid that his yellow countenance was actually a pale moss green and I inquired if he were ill. He was not, he said, but his wife had typhoid fever and he had to care for her and the baby and got no sleep. I was properly terrified since he handled dishes and silver and waited on the table and helped the cook. I begged him to take his wife to the hospital, but he refused, saying that nobody went to a foreign hospital unless he expected to die. I knew better than to press the matter since if the woman did die, I would be held responsible for having insisted, and so I merely said that he had better stay at home and care for his wife until she was better. He reflected upon this for a while, standing stock-still before me, his disconsolate head drooping, and at last he said that he would take her to the hospital, since there was no one to look after the child anyway in the daytime, and he could not care for both wife and child even though he stayed at home, since he had not slept for six nights. So to the hospital she went, and after apparent recovery one day she took a turn for the worse. The houseboy came to tell me that she was dying, as he had feared she would if he put her in the foreign hospital, and that he wanted to take her home now. Since the message was that she was near death, I begged him to leave her in peace, but no, his mind was made up, we were all helpless and he took her home in a riksha, unconscious, saying that he would let me know when he could come back to work. I half expected never to see him again, since it was quite probable that in his habitually debilitated condition he would have the disease himself.

In two weeks or so, to my astonishment, he returned, looking rested and fatter than I had ever seen him and certainly less melancholy. His wife, he said in triumph over me and all my kind, had recovered. As soon as he got her home he laid her on the bed and stayed in the room with her and the child for five days, feeding her broth and rice gruel and keeping her warm. “They washed her too much in the hospital,” he explained. “They were washing her life away. I did not wash her at all, and she got well and now she is doing everything as usual.”

I expressed my pleasure and said no more. Far too often I have seen doctors confounded and science defied by just such love and determination.

The year of 1931 was a monumental one in many ways for me. In that year my dear old father died in the eightieth year of his life. In that year the Yangtse River swelled with unusual rains and flooded our whole countryside, a sight no one living had ever seen before, and in that year the Japanese empire builders seized Manchuria, and all thinking Chinese and a few white people comprehended the full portent of this act of aggression. Mr. Lung, the old Chinese scholar who was working with me on my translation of
Shui Hu Chüan,
said to me often and anxiously, “Can it be possible that the Americans and the English do not understand what it means that Japan has taken Manchuria? There will be a Second World War.”

I said that neither English or Americans could understand this.

For me, of course, the most moving event was my father’s death. His story I have told elsewhere, and, therefore, I will not repeat it here. During the last two years his tall ascetic frame had grown more and more frail, his nature more completely the saint, and I feared, observing these changes, that he had not many more years to live. That summer, however, he went to my sister in Kuling as usual, and spent a happy two months with his old friends and with her little family. It was when he was preparing to come back to me again that he was suddenly seized by his old enemy, the dysentery. He weakened rapidly and in a few days was gone. I could not even get to his funeral, for the river was flooding at a frightening speed and all ships were delayed. With my father’s death the last of my childhood life was gone, and I was from then on living in the new world of struggle and confusion. His steady faith that all things work together for good was removed from my house.

Once upon a platform in Sweden, I was comforted by hearing Per Hällstrom, in his citation, mention the biographies of my father and mother. Actually I did not tell my father’s story until years after he died, when I wrote
Fighting Angel; Portrait of a Soul.
I wrote that book because some of my American readers were so bemused by my mother’s story in
The Exile
—for by then the manuscript I had written for my children was published—that they thought I did not love my father. On the contrary, I had learned to love him with warmth and reverence when I grew old enough to understand and value him. His soul can perhaps be best expressed in two quotations I placed at the beginning of my book about him:

ANGEL
—One of an order of spiritual beings, attendants and messengers of God, usually spoken of as employed by him in ordering the affairs of the universe, and particularly of mankind. They are commonly regarded as bodiless intelligences.

Century Dictionary

Who maketh his angels spirits

And his ministers a flame of fire.

The Epistle to the Hebrews

And that monstrous flood of 1931—how strange it was to see the yellow waters climbing over the walls of the Bund seven miles from the city, and then come creeping and crawling through the streets and spreading into the fertile fields outside the city wall! The road to the mountain was built high enough above the fields so that the water did not cover it, and I rode out to Purple Mountain often to gaze upon a landscape which had become a muddy sea. Our own people now were refugees, a strange experience, and we had to set ourselves to the task of local relief, a heavy one until the waters receded again. Land people became boat people, and farmers who had always got their living from the soil now housed their families on boats and lived on fish and crabs, and all this with the utmost calm and good nature, blaming no one for the disaster. True, I heard some mutterings that had Chiang Kai-shek not been a river-god in his previous life, we could scarcely have so great a flood, but by this time our President had established such a reputation that few dared to complain in public any more, and such discontent as there was took the form of street ballads and impromptu songs, which blind musicians sang to the accompaniment of their two-stringed violins, or jokes which were whispered behind hands from mouth to ear. Incidentally, everybody feared a blind man, for it was thought that the blind had divining powers to compensate for their darkened eyes, and no one dared to rebuke one blind. It must be said that a blind man sometimes made the most of such a reputation and was often indeed a very mischievous creature.

In spite of the wickedness of that flood and the enormous damage it did, I could not but enjoy its wild beauty. The colors of the sky were reflected upon it, and to sit as sometimes I did upon the crest of Purple Mountain and survey the scene was to be lifted up to strange heights indeed. To the right the huge and noble city wall was mirrored in the water. Lotus Lake where we often spent our summer evenings in a pleasure boat was merely an arm of the new sea, and when the sun set behind the distant hills, the whole sea was illumined, its muddiness forgot, transfigured into rose and gold. When I came down from the mountain I had to take a boat to where my horse waited, tied against a tree at a solitary farmhouse built high enough to live in, and the boatman was a waterman who lived even in dry times upon the canal which ran outside the city. That boat was in normal years a coal barge, and though profitable now as a ferry, it was as black and dirty as ever, and so was the boatman. He grew thirsty on the way and he dipped his pottery bowl into the water and drank the floodwater just as it was, filthy with dead animals and every vile effluvium of the countryside.

“Are you not afraid you will fall ill?” I inquired.