Such news and much more reached me here in my pleasant Pennsylvania home, and in the letters of my Chinese friends I read of so many changes — many, it seemed, for the good — that I began to wonder if indeed it had been necessary to leave my childhood land. Not that I regretted the choice — I was entirely happy in my own country, and was already absorbed in the daily discovery of its life, its people, and its manners. But I remembered what my Chinese friends had said when I left. “Go back to your country and discover your ancestors, for this is good,” they had told me. “But when you are old, you will come back to us.” I had denied this in my heart, for I felt if I left China for the reasons that I had, then I would never return. Yet could I resist? Sometimes I wondered. China was the ideal country for the old, a pleasant place where one achieved honor merely by growing old. How often had I come upon a village, anywhere in China, to find sitting outside the door on a bench at the edge of the threshing floor, a comfortably dressed old man or woman, dozing in the sun, pipe in hand, idle without reproach, loved and cared for and made much of, merely because he or she was old! Old people were treasures and no one was afraid to grow old. When an aged one spoke the others listened, eager for the wisdom of his accumulated years.
It had been a shock to discover how differently the old are treated in my own country, and how pathetically they try to hide the number of their years and pretend themselves still strong and able to do a full day’s work. Worse almost than the injustice to homeless children was it to find white-haired parents and grandparents in old people’s homes and even in mental institutions, often without mental illness beyond the gentle and harmless decay of age. I suppose that the uncertainty of economic life and the insecurity of the individual alone in his struggle to maintain himself, his wife and children, make thoughtful tenderness too rare between young and old in our country. The aging feel their children’s dread and they try to care for themselves and are guilty if they cannot, and so the generations pull apart in a mutual fear which stifles natural love.
I listened not long ago to the conversation of a good elderly man who had for many years been the head of a local bank. He took an interest in an old men’s home in a nearby city, and he told me how the superintendent of this old men’s home would find upon a doorstep in the early morning an old man left there by son or daughter, abandoned and under injunction not to reveal his family’s name. Yes, this happens.
Yet somehow our society must make it right and possible for old people not to fear the young or be deserted by them, for the test of a civilization is in the way that it cares for its helpless members. Thus when Hitler began to destroy the old, I knew that his regime could not last in a civilized world. It was an anachronism, and the laws of human evolution would provide its end — and how quickly did that end come!
To return, however — what might have happened in China had Japan not chosen this hour to enlarge her dream of empire no one can tell. Chiang Kai-shek had not counted upon the speed of Japan’s advance and he had continued his policy of internal pacification, encouraged by its seeming success. One by one the provinces had aligned themselves with his government as he drove the Communists to the northwest corner of the country. True, the Communists had set up a rival government there, independent from the rest of China, small but enough to irritate Chiang Kai-shek, determined as he was to unify the country politically. He decided in December, 1936, to make one last march against them, using as his base the city of Sian in Shensi, and as his army local soldiers and the men under Chang Hsüeh-liang, the son of the old Manchurian war lord, Chang Tso-lin. Chang Hsüeh-liang and his men had been exiled ever since Japan seized Manchuria, and now they were discontented exiles, longing to fight Japan but with no heart to fight against the Communists, who were, after all, Chinese. Chiang Kai-shek had heard of their disaffection, and thither he flew by air with his staff on the seventh day of December, 1936, to unite his forces and lead the attack against the entrenched Communists.