And so we went home again, our memories filled with glorious scenes and good people. We spent another year quietly at home and busy with our usual work, yet always uneasy in the world. In December of 1941 we were enjoying a quiet Sunday afternoon in my stepdaughter’s house across the road from our farmhouse. Mutual friends were guests, and we were talking about anything and nothing, while their adolescent son sat outdoors in their car to hear a football game over the radio.
Suddenly he rushed into the room, panting with terror and excitement.
“The Japanese,” he gasped, “they’ve attacked Pearl Harbor!”
My stepdaughter reached for the radio. She turned it on and the news came flooding into the quiet cozy room. It was true. War was certain. We had become part of the whole world. Instantly I thought of China and of Chiang Kai-shek. How happy must he be, far off there in Chungking! Who could blame him? He loved his country, too.
The war years we all know too well for them to be retold again. My task was to keep the children as free from fear as possible, to continue my work, to maintain what is called an even keel. It was a familiar atmosphere, but one I had never expected in my own country. As in China, however, I determined not to allow the war to shadow my existence, nor to prevent me from getting the most possible out of my daily life.
Much of my life in those days centered about the school to which the children were going, a staid Quaker day school conducted in a beautiful old stone schoolhouse, where it had continued for nearly two centuries. Next to it was an equally historic meetinghouse. We had always planned to educate the children in Quaker schools, for the philosophy of the Friends was the nearest I had found to the Asian one in which I had grown up. Never shall I forget the first morning I took our little sons to school. They went trustingly and with enthusiasm, believing, alas, that they were about to comprehend immediately the wonders. Thus one, the fair-haired, said joyfully, “I am going to learn how to make an airplane.” My heart ached, I confess, when he began to understand how long the road, how weary the hours would be until that day could arrive. But my heart has often ached for such little scholars, their sweet enthusiasm dying in the daily grind. I will not criticize our schools, for I do not know how to make compulsory education pleasant, yet to me learning, learning anything, but especially something I want to know, is the most joyful occupation in life. I do not know when it is that the joy fades out of school for most children, so that they end not only by hating school but even worse, by hating books, and this is grave indeed, for in books alone is the accumulated wisdom of the whole human race, and to read no books is to deprive the self of ready access to wisdom. Even in China such wisdom was relayed generation to generation through centuries until the people were permeated with the sayings of poets and philosophers. But in our mixed ancestry there are no such clear streams, and it is only in books that we can discover what we are, and why we are that, and thus self-knowledge, as well as knowledge of others, is achieved.
It was not only my children who were educated by going to school. Through them as school children, I, too, have been educated, by force if not always by conviction. By background, of course, I am not fitted to have American children. I have nothing to prepare me for the problems they face. My childhood world was spent in an old and sophisticated society, and therefore in one completely natural and simplified as only an ancient society does simplify itself. Take, for example, the matter of tattling. Before the children went to school and we were all at home together every day, I had established as a matter of course the Chinese principle that when something wrong was going on, it was the duty of any child to report to the adult in charge, usually parent or teacher. It was not right to run about telling other people of a person’s wrongdoings, but for the sake of order it must be reported to the one who could correct it. This went very well.
Picture my surprise, however, when upon the children’s reaching school age and moving out into their larger American environment, they came home to tell me that I was wrong! One of them had duly reported to the teacher misbehavior on the part of a fellow pupil, and she had scolded the little reporter for something called “tattling.” I investigated and found that this was true.
“But how,” I remonstrated with the teacher, “can you maintain law and order in your school if the law-abiding ones may not report the lawbreakers?”
She evaded this. “It is hateful to tattle,” she said.
“Then the children will grow up believing that it is hateful to report a murder to policemen. This would also be tattling,” I said.
“I cannot answer that,” she replied in a positive voice.
I was to learn that this refusal to face the practical is sometimes characteristic of our people. We act upon emotion — she hated tattling — and upon prejudice — she disliked tattlers — without reference to the very practical question of how a child is to help keep order if he cannot report disorder, and what the confusion is in his own mind if he must remain silent about something he knows is wrong. To what principle is he to be loyal? I am convinced that much of our so-called American lawlessness goes back to this stifling of the child’s perfectly right impulse to tell if someone is violating a common rule, accepted by all, and his confusion if he is reproved for obeying the impulse.
Yet when I expressed my conviction the other day to an American friend, he was quite violent in his disagreement with me. I was, he said, “off my base.”
“Your argument,” he said, “if carried to its logical conclusion, would mean that Soviet children are justified in reporting their parents to the government. Any possible good that might come out of ‘tattling’ would be more than offset by injury to the child and the community. The informer, at least in Western society, is universally abhorred and even those who use him despise him. There is no way to draw the line and it is better to accept the apparent, immediate evil than to face a much greater one later.”
I have reflected much upon his words, and I realize the validity of his point of view in the United States, at least. Yet my own argument holds, too, or so I believe. Perhaps the difference in the two societies, Chinese and American, on this point, lies merely in their organization. Our society is not ordered as the Chinese was. A child reported only to the adult in charge of his little world and when he was grown his primary loyalty was by tradition still to his family and not to the state. Perhaps it is basically a question of primary loyalty, and on this matter of loyalty we Americans are indeed confused. It does seem contradictory to me that we elect representatives to make laws and enforce them and yet absolve ourselves of responsibility when we see those laws broken. There is something wrong in the logic, and in the result, too, since we are the most lawless of all nations, and our rate of individual crime incredibly high. It is, as the King of Siam said, “a puzzlement.”
Green Hills Farm
“Please,” my youngest daughter said to me this morning, “come with me.”
Should I or should I not? In trying to be a good American mother how often I have asked myself the question. Where exactly is the point for a parent to stand back so that the child may be independent? In China the parent was always welcome, the parent always went. She is sixteen, this child, and she is near the end of high school. She wants to be a kindergarten teacher and she had decided, quite by herself, that she would go into our public school system, and therefore the State Teachers’ College is the place for her next year, after high school. The formalities had been finished, many papers signed and questions answered, and today was the day for the interview.
“Please,” she said again.
“Sure you want me?” I asked.