Even this city has its direct relation to those years of early revolution in China, since a reason for this journey of ours is something more than pleasure alone. Our family has three sons, the elder two nearing draft age and the third one not far behind. The hideous possibility has become a reality. I who have been reared in one world, a Christian one, and taught that love and brotherhood must be the law of life, and reared too, in another world yet kindlier, with the Chinese belief that life is sacred and that it is evil to kill even a beast, and how much more a human being, I now face the tragic probability that my sons must deny both Christian and Asian teaching. They must join our armed forces and fight perhaps an Asian people, a people whom I love and admire and to whom I am deeply indebted. To prevent this I am helpless, although it could have been prevented long ago in Asia, and prevented many times since, but now perhaps it is too late, since it is not we who have won in Asia, although we might have done so easily had we but understood the nature of the peoples there.
And McKinley, whose bronze statue towers over this small Ohio city? What has he to do with the child I once was? Little enough and yet very much. For when the strange year of 1900 was over, the year in which I saw in my American mother’s eyes the fear of a Chinese, so that from that day on I too had that fear, all mingled with love and friendship at it was, we came to the United States, my own country. My first shock here was the assassination of President McKinley. I scarcely knew the difference then between Emperor and President. In China our young Emperor had died suddenly, murdered, it was rumored, by the command of the Empress Dowager, who was by then herself within hours of her own death from old age and illness. But she would not, could not die until the dangerous heir was first gone. And now suddenly here in my own country the President was murdered, too!
I cannot remember everything, for much had happened and worlds were tumbling about me. But I do remember that I was in my grandfather’s house in West Virginia, where I had been born, a place of peace and beauty, and there on a particular day I was gathering white and purple grapes with my cousins. It was September, hot, still and fragrant, and I was happy and quiet, enjoying to the full my country, my own, where there was no war any more, no hatred, no revolution. Then someone called to us to come quickly and we ran into the house. We went to the parlor, uncles, aunts, my parents, my brother, my cousins and I. There my grandfather stood very straight in his black suit, his stiff white wing collar, his black tie, his snowy hair brushed up from his forehead. His dark eyes were somber and his face was grave, and when we were all assembled he said in a solemn voice:
“Children, the President of the United States has been assassinated. Our President is dead.”
Of all of them only I broke into loud weeping, to their astonishment and dismay, and my mother put her arm about my shoulder.
“Oh,” I cried, “must we have the revolution here, too?”
“What is the child talking about?” my grandfather demanded.
Nobody answered for nobody knew except my mother, and she understood so well that she said nothing at all while she let me sob. And what I was afraid of I did not know until years later.
Indiana
Indiana, I read in books, is of all our states the most valid sample of our whole country. Agriculture and industry, fourth generation immigrants and first generation, plains and hills, rivers and lakes, Indiana has them all. There is even a picturesque corner where rounded tumbling hills have attracted the most American of our artists, and surely some of the best American writers have come from this state, that is, the ones least affected and to a degree the least experimental. I smile at the word experimental! Nothing is new, and everything has been done before. I read this week a reviewer’s comment on a book, a criticism that the author had not used “the modern technique of cutback.” New? Five hundred years ago Chinese novelists were using the cutback with consummate skill, and in Europe, whose history is comparatively recent, French writers were using the cutback when America was new. Joseph Conrad was a master of the cutback, and when I have used it, it has not occurred to me that I was doing anything modern, for I was not. The cutback is an admirable technique for portraiture, but not for edifice.
I feel Indiana is plain American. Sometime or other it went a little mad and people built a few astonishing huge and turreted houses. One such I saw today, painted snow-white and looking like an enormous iced cake. Somebody evidently was proud of it as an antique and quite rightly so, for it was imposing and bizarre.
But the houses of our country are a revelation of our variety. No man knows what an American will construct when he is able to afford his own house. He pays no heed to history or landscape. On the contrary, he behaves as though he were Adam in some Eden of his own. I confess I do not know what to make of our newest building developments, accompaniments of industry, but I assume that they are merely merchandise and that no one will live in them beyond a temporary necessity.
The houses here in Indiana are decently ugly except for the notable few, and they are as various as are the houses in other states. How long did it take, I wonder, for the Chinese people to become so unified, so molded by history and geography combined through centuries, that their architecture became stylized, a distillation of centuries of family living? It was nothing in my Chinese world to find a family that had lived a thousand years in the same place. Homes grew slowly from the landscape. The wide plains of the North created wide gently sloping roofs, and the abrupt upward lines of volcanic southern mountains tilted the roofs sharply. Under the roofs, north and south, however, the rooms were arranged in the same patterned order with the same tolerant allowance for independence and privacy in the midst of a complete family life. Each generation lived separately in one-story rooms, but were united by courtyards to the other generations. Thus the Chinese realized the need of the human individual to be alone and yet close to others, especially of his own kind. Thus children grew in free security, surrounded by loving adults of various generations, and thus adults shared the burdens of family responsibility. There was no terror of losing one’s job, for in such a circumstance one simply lived on with the family and without reproach, until a new job was found. There was no need for orphanages for there were no orphans, since the family kept its own. And the old were loved and revered and never put away into institutions as sometimes they are put away here, and must be put away, I am told, because of small flimsy houses where there is only room for two people and their two children.