He bowed again, smiled, and walked down the steps. Billy Pan followed, and pushing aside the people, he led Dr. Liang out to the street and bawled to a passing taxicab, which swerved and stopped. He opened the door and bowed deeply.
“Thank you, a hundred thanks,” he said with fervor. “Come again! Please let me know next time and have dinner with me. There is a good restaurant in next street. I tell him plenty of time to make some good Chinese food, eh? Please! Thank you — thank you—”
He was still bowing when Dr. Liang shut the door firmly and turned to the cab driver.
“Riverside Drive,” he said distinctly.
From the darkness of the cab he looked out at Chinatown. The people were going home from the theater, shuffling along the streets. They were waking, he supposed, from the dream world of the past into the dreariness of the present. Yet they did not look dreary. Stopped by a traffic light, he heard their voices laughing and gay, and he saw fathers tenderly carrying little children while mothers led the toddlers. When did they sleep? Shops that were also homes were still lighted and viciously bright neon lamps shone down on windows of chinaware and groceries and lit up long signboards which declared the names of small firms that sold bamboo shoots and dried shrimps and curios. Young men lounged upon the counters and young girls in two’s and three’s chattered along the sidewalk. It was a lively place, and because it was crude and cheap it was almost worse, Dr. Liang thought, than Americans liked to believe it was, a place of mystery and evil. There was no mystery here, and very little evil. Families lived together closely, and parents struggled with their children to keep to the standards of a country the young had never seen. It was an ordinary place and the people were simple and common. He did not often come here because he found it depressing.
He wished with some annoyance that he had not come tonight, or at least that he had not been recognized. It was gratifying to be known, and yet it made him remember what he habitually tried to forget, that the common people of his country were not in the least like himself.
“Surely you are not a typical Chinese—” how often Americans had cried the words at him!
He always answered them with mild amusement. “I assure you I am a very ordinary Chinese. There are millions like me and better.”
He suddenly thought of his eldest son, James, and he sighed. He was profoundly proud of that brilliant boy, the child who had so easily stood at the head of his classes in school and was now at the head of the list of graduates in the medical college.
“A great mind, Dr. Liang,” the Chancellor had said only a few days ago. “A great mind and skillful hands — what a surgeon he will make!”
And now James wanted to waste all his education and go back to China! Who in a war-ruined country could pay the fees of a surgeon?
The cab slowed. “Whereabouts Riverside Drive?” the driver asked.
“Two blocks, and then one to the right, please,” Dr. Liang replied.
The streets were quiet with midnight. There was a moon and it shone down on the river. Just ahead was the George Washington Bridge, silvered with light. It was a scene familiar through twenty years of living, but Dr. Liang always felt its beauty. There was nothing more beautiful in the world, perhaps, unless it was the great marble bridge near Peking. But he did not want to be in Peking.
“Here you are,” the cabby said.
Dr. Liang stood on the sidewalk and counted his change. The man would expect an exorbitant fee — all American working people expected to earn more than any workingman was worth. He counted out the exact amount and added five per cent to it. His daughter Mary had once been angry with him for that five per cent. “Why don’t you ride on the subway?” she had demanded. He had not answered her.
He turned abruptly and entered the apartment house where he lived and stepped into an elevator without speaking. He was very tired and he felt confused and old. His son James was very confusing. The elevator mounted rapidly to the tenth floor and he stepped out. The door to his apartment opened and his wife stood there.
“I have been expecting you for an hour,” she said.
He followed her in and she shut the door and yawned loudly. He could see by the slightly dazed look on her plump face that she had been asleep on the couch and her Chinese robe of dark blue silk was wrinkled. He was often ashamed of her, but Americans liked her heartiness and good nature and Chinese feared her temper and her domineering ways. She was an excellent housekeeper, she made him entirely comfortable, and she did not interfere with certain pleasant dreams he had of quite different women whom he met in the pages of Chinese poetry. He was too good a man to allow them to come to life otherwise. He had made Confucian ethics his own and he respected his wife as the mother of his children and the heart of his household. Moreover, she worshiped him, in spite of often scolding him and occasionally flouting him. The problem of her life centered in how to indulge her children and at the same time seem to obey her husband.
“Are the children asleep?” he asked.
“An hour ago,” she said, trying to be brisk. “Sit down and rest yourself. I have kept some soup hot.”
“My sons might have waited for me,” he said in a hurt voice.
“Well, they did not,” she said in her practical way. “Now drink your soup and let us get to bed ourselves.”
She went into the kitchen and brought out a bowl of soup and a spoon on a tray and a plate of crackers. He crumbled the crackers into the soup and began to eat. “I would have been back earlier except that I was recognized and the crowd would have me address them,” he said slowly without looking at her.
“Yes, well—” she said without interest and yawned again.
A crude woman, he thought with distaste, and he did not speak for a while as he ate.
Mrs. Liang sat on a stool and watched him, her eyes bleary with sleep. She perceived simply that he was not pleased with her and she tried to make amends. “It was good of you to speak to those small people,” she said. “And I am glad you were not at home. That James of ours did nothing but talk about going back to China.” She sighed and scratched her head with her little fingernail. “You must get a good night’s sleep — he is going to talk with you in the morning.”
“I shall put him off,” Dr. Liang declared. But his appetite failed him and he set the bowl on the table only half empty. He knew that James was not a son to be put off even by his own father. Then he caught sight of Mrs. Liang’s mouth wide open in another yawn and he was suddenly angry.
“Come — come,” he cried, “get yourself to bed — spare me the sight of you!”
He stalked out of the room and turned out the light at the door. In the darkness she pattered after him humbly, and forgave him. He was a great man, and he was her husband.
Dr. Liang prided himself on his calm. Reared upon Confucian ethics in his early home in China, he had for many years comforted himself for his somewhat arid life in New York by teaching Chinese philosophy in colleges. There, he hoped, crude young Americans might imbibe from him the spiritual nourishment which he liked to think had kept China intact for four thousand years and would, he said confidently in his classroom, weather her through her present difficulties.
He summoned all his calm the next morning, as he faced his son James. The young man, twenty-six years old and last month graduated from a medical college, also faced his father. For months, all during his last year of internship in the medical center, he had been approaching inevitably this hour. He loved and feared his father, and it had taken all his strength to decide that the day had come to tell him finally that he wanted to go back to China. Why it should be this June morning rather than any other, he did not know. He had got up early, full of energy and impatience, to find that the day was clear, that the heat of the past week had broken, and that he felt hungry and well. The duplex apartment in which his family had lived almost as long as he could remember was very pleasant indeed this morning. His father had almost decided last week to put in air conditioning, in order that he could work more comfortably, which always meant more profitably. This morning being cool, he knew he would find his father in the library at his desk, and there he had gone after a hearty breakfast of fruit, bacon and eggs, coffee, and toast. The family always ate American breakfasts, and unless his mother felt inclined to cook, they ate American food altogether. His two sisters could not cook, and his younger brother Peter did not like Chinese food. All the children except himself and Mary had been born in America and were therefore American citizens.