Then followed the retraction of all the young Emperor’s edicts during the past hundred days, and we knew that The Venerable Ancestor was back on the throne again and in full power.
It was in the year of 1900, when I was eight years old, that the two worlds of my childhood finally split apart. I had held them tied together by my very existence, I could see them clearly and combined from our vantage point on the hill above the Yangtse River. Sometimes in the morning when I looked abroad from our veranda, my mind flowed on beyond the green hillsides and the greener valleys, their ponds like diamonds in the sunshine, beyond the dark-roofed city and the bright breadths of the river, beyond to the sea. Across the sea was America, my own land, about which I knew nothing, and so upon which my imagination played with fantastic freedom. It all belonged to me, the near hills and the valleys, the city and the river, the sea and the land of my fathers.
In an academic fashion I knew, of course, even in those early years, that I was not Chinese, and I felt a rough justice in street urchins calling me “little foreign devil,” or in their pretending when they saw me that it would soon rain, since devils, they said, come out only when it is going to rain. I knew that I was no devil, and to be called one did not trouble me because I was still secure in my Chinese world. Did these naughty children know me, they would not call me a devil, and I merely made reply that they were the children of turtles — that is to say, they were bastards, a remark which sent them into shocked silence. My parents did not know for years the significance of the retort, and by that time I was old enough to be ashamed of it myself.
In the year of 1900, however, throughout the spring, the beautiful springtime of the Yangtse River Valley, I felt my world splitting unexpectedly into its parts. The stream of visitors thinned and sometimes days passed without a single Chinese friend appearing before our gates. My playmates were often silent, they did not play with the usual joy, and at last they too ceased to climb the hill from the valley. Even my schoolmates did not clamor to share my desk seat. I was a child spoiled by love and gifts and at first I was bewildered and then sorely wounded, and when my mother saw this, she explained to me as best she could what was happening. It had nothing to do with Americans, she said, for surely we had never been cruel to the Chinese nor had we taken their land or their river ports. Other white people had done the evil, and our friends, she promised me, understood this and did not hate us. Indeed, they felt as warmly to us as before, only they did not dare to show their feelings, since they would be blamed. At last I comprehended that all of us who were foreigners were being lumped together in the cruel fashion that people can adopt sometimes, for particular and temporary reasons, which are no real reasons but merely vents for old hatreds. But I had never known what hatred was. I had neither been hated nor had I ever hated anyone. I could not understand why we, who were still ourselves and unchanged, should be lumped with unknown white men from unknown countries who had been what we were not, robbers and plunderers. It was now that I felt the first and primary injustice of life. I was innocent, but because I had the fair skin, the blue eyes, the blond hair of my race I was hated, and because of fear of me and my kind I walked in danger.
Danger! It had been an unknown word to me. Noxious insects and reptiles were dangerous, but now we were in danger from people, I and my family and all white men, women and children like us. For there came creeping down from Peking in the North to our mid-country province the most sickening rumors about the Empress Dowager, she whom I, too, had learned to think of as The Venerable Ancestor, not only of the Chinese but of all of us who lived under her rule. She had turned against us. Because greedy Europeans and Englishmen were gnawing at the shores along the Chinese seas and the rivers, she, we heard, wanted to rid herself of all white people and lock the gates of China forever against us. She was scarcely to be blamed, my grave father said, for being angry or for wanting to free China of invaders and the plunderers, and how would we like it if our own country, the United States, were fastened upon by strangers and stolen away from us bit by bit, by nagging petty wars and huge indemnities in money and land and railroad rights? He sympathized with the Empress Dowager, but his sympathy could not save us. We had to take our place with our own kind, guiltless though we were, and we had to suffer for their guilt.
I remember the faultless summer day when we heard of the first massacre of missionaries in Shantung, and that the little children had been murdered with their parents. It was the death of the children that made my mother’s face turn pale and made my father decide that we must all be sent away. He had not believed until then that the Empress Dowager could be so foolish as to trust herself to the Boxers, that clan of monstrous imposters who pretended to her that they could by their secret magic withstand the foreign guns. For it was the foreign guns she feared. She knew that she had no armies or weapons which could match the armies and weapons of the Western peoples, and wanting desperately to find a means of protection and retaliation, she let herself believe in the magic pretensions of the Boxers. But by this time hysteria was raging over the whole nation. The foreign powers had demanded one concession after another from the weak young Emperor, and the people had, it was true, been only the more terrified by his Hundred Days of Reform, when he had sent the edicts which, if obeyed, would have destroyed the very structure of their ancient society. Meanwhile France had taken Annam, England insisted upon Weihaiwei, France upon Kwangchow, Germany upon Tsingtao and Russia upon Dairen. These were called “leased territories,” but actually they were colonies. And where were the armies and the navies for which the Chinese people had been paying so heavily through taxes? It was clear that the money had been absorbed, spent, squandered, not only by the old Empress Dowager herself upon such follies as the marble boat on the lake by the Summer Palace, but through the private hoardings of her officials. When her full guilt began to be suspected she was glad to turn the attention of the angry people to the plundering foreigners, and so she listened to the Boxers, against the advice of her best ministers. By now the young Emperor had no power at all, for he was locked up and his helpers were decapitated or gone.
Into this storm and fury our quiet bungalow was swept one day like a leaf upon a whirlpool. The air that summer’s day was hot and still and from the verandas the landscape was beautiful, the valleys green as jade with their earthen farmhouses shaded beneath the willow trees. White geese walked the paths between the fields and children played on the threshing floors while their parents in blue cotton peasant garb tilled the fields. Beyond the dark city the shining river flowed toward the sea. There was not a sign to show that the world was changed. I remember, though I was only eight years old, that long moment I stood on the veranda, gazing upon the scene that was home to me because I knew no other. It was the same and yet I knew, child though I was, that it could never be the same again.
Half a century and more has passed over my head since then, two world wars and the cruel snarl in Korea, and yet I see myself upon the veranda of the bungalow that was long ago torn down, a child, facing the changing world. The feelings then in my childish heart, the forebodings and the sadness, were right enough, for all has come to pass as I felt it might.
We left our home on that perfect summer’s day and took ship on one of the sturdy steamboats that plied the Yangtse down to Shanghai. There had been plenty of argument in the mission bungalow before we left. My mother and father did not leave their post easily, and it was only the murdered children that gave the better argument now for escape, and even at that there was no thought of my father accompanying us. He was to take us to Shanghai and stay only long enough to see us established in some modest flat, and then return alone. We left the house as it was, for him, but my mother took some of the family silver she had brought from her West Virginia home and buried it in a corner of the yard to save it. Long ago she had learned such lessons in her childhood, when in the War between the States her family had hidden their treasures, too, but against the Yankees. I realize now that the calm with which my parents faced our danger was the result of their childhoods in a wartime.