Our children, I say, are not treated with sufficient respect as human beings, and yet from the moment they are born they have this right to respect. We keep them children far too long, their world separate from the real world of life. In towns and cities, for example, the young are not allowed to take responsibility. Is this not also a form of disrespect? The opinion of children is a valuable point of view and should be put to use. They are part of the community and they have their thoughts and feelings. The energy, too, of children is an asset which should be expressed for the benefit of the community. I see dirty streets, filthy areas, evidences of careless if not of bad government in most communities, yet the children do not consider it their business. But if I were the mayor of a town, I would want the children to have a voice in putting me in that place, and I would hold the young, at this level, as responsible as the elders at theirs, for the conduct of community life. Americans are citizens from the moment they are born, and not when they become twenty-one years of age. By then, if they have not performed the acts of a citizen in a democracy, it is too late. They remain irresponsible and therefore immature. From the first grade on, the child should be taught his duties as a citizen, and given his voice in municipal matters and then in state and nation. But here I begin to ride a hobby and I dismount.
In the years during which I have lived in my own country the greatest advance, perhaps, has been made in race relations. I say this in the full knowledge that the advance, measured in terms of the goal, is still very small, but it has begun in the minds of the white people, and in the determination of the Negroes. We do learn, we Americans, though the process is slow and we are not always willing to admit that we are changing. Perhaps the outspoken criticism of Asians whose skins are not white, and of South Africans, black and colored, has made us think. I believe that prejudice in the American, as a matter of fact, is very shallow, and could easily be cast away altogether.
I am the more inclined to this belief when I see the generous praise and respect given to Negroes who prove themselves great artists and great human beings. When Negroes ask me, “What would you do if you were a Negro?” I always reply, “I would devote myself to the discovery of the most gifted and most intelligent children among my race and I would collect money somehow to educate them to their fullest development, and with responsibility for others.”
The intelligent men and women of India and Pakistan have in recent years, too, had much to do with our realization that people with brown skins can be wise and cultivated, in the ways of the West as well as of the East. I hope that such voices will not allow themselves to be silenced, for Americans are human beings first of all, and we can be won by humanity wherever it is shown. The extraordinary patience and grace with which the leaders of India, in particular, have borne our rash speeches and newspaper articles have increased their influence over us, in spite of loud and raucous cries from certain public figures here. Dignity is a wonderful weapon when it is consistently used, and if never lost, it always wins.
Many friends have helped me know my country. Dorothy Canfield, for example, means Vermont to me, and knowing her inspired me to build our small house, our sons learning by helping to build it, Forest Haunt in the Green Mountains. There we face the Wilderness. Much as I love people and find my life among them, I like sometimes to sit in our forest-circled cabin and know that for thirty-five miles to the north of us, there is no man or woman living, but only woods and brooks and silence. Each state in this great union lives for me not only in landscape and experience, but in the people who belong there and have taken me with them to their homes, if not in body, then in letters.
Of my American family, next to husband and children, I remember my dear mother-in-law, now dead. Reared in China, I could not but respect her position in my life. It was essential to me that she like me and approve me, but what if she had not? She did, however, and from the first the relationship was what it should be, honor from me and love, and from her an affection, kind and easy. I do not know why at this moment I see her on a certain morning here at our farmhouse, where she often visited us, but would never live, somewhat to my hurt at first, for I would have liked to have her live with us and give our children the benefit of a grandmother in the house, the grandfather being dead and so beyond the reach of our daily life. But no, she would only come for visits, and on one such morning, as we lingered over the breakfast table after the children had finished and gone away, we talked of England and the royal family in whom, as one born in England, she took much personal interest. She was a handsome white-haired lady, substantially built and always well dressed and cheerful, afraid of nothing except mice. She sat with her back to the big window at the end of the table, my husband on one side of her and I on the other, and behind her the sunlight fell upon the polished red brick floor.
Suddenly, as she talked, a kangaroo mouse darted out from the logs piled in the fireplace which was not lit, and without an instant’s hesitation, the fragile lively mite rose upon its hind legs, its front paws waving like little hands, and began to dance in the sunshine. The sight was so exquisite, the dance so minutely dainty and graceful, that my husband and I caught each other’s glance, longing to speak. Yet did we speak, the mouse would be revealed to our mother, and then the dance be broken. In silent ecstasy we watched while our elder talked, until the mouse had finished its dance and fluttered back into the fireplace. I see the scene yet, like a painting on a wall, except that no painting could convey the fairy movement of the little wild thing behind our mother’s chair.
And still another memorable picture in my intermingling worlds is of a cold November day in New Jersey, the twenty-third, to be exact, and at Freewood Acres. The occasion was the consecration of a Lama Buddhist Temple. Actually it was a garage made into a temple, and there is something strange and fascinating about the very idea of such a transformation, the first in the history of our country, I am sure. But it was a true temple, for all that, and made by a devout people now becoming American citizens. They were the anti-Communist Kalmuks, more than a hundred of them, men, women and children, and they had worked on the building themselves, the woodwork, the masonry, the plastering. The asphalt shingles they had painted a bright yellow, the sacred color of Buddhism, but over the door was a huge American flag as well as the red and yellow flag of their religion.
The Kalmuks are the descendants of the Mongolian warrior-followers of Genghis Khan, who conquered much of Asia and Europe in the thirteenth century. They settled on the steppes between the Don and the Volga rivers, and after the revolution in Russia they were formed into the Kalmuk Socialist Soviet Autonomous Republic. In spite of this fine name they never were friendly with the Kremlin and during the Second World War many of them were taken, or allowed themselves to be taken, by the German armies, and thus they found their way into DP camps, whence they were brought to the United States, mainly through the efforts of Protestant Christians. In New Jersey now they work in carpet factories, on farms and on construction jobs.