This fear always broke my heart, I think, and wherever I found it, I stopped and spoke gently to the mothers and asked them not to be afraid, and if I could I lingered long enough to talk and play with the child and I left only when I saw fear gone and friendly looks taking its place. This gave me comfort and it pleased me when they wondered that I spoke their language so easily, for then I had the chance to tell them about my country and how my people were not hateful and did not hate them and how much I wished that we could be friends, because indeed our hearts were all the same.
Here I must confess a secret, for which I hope my dear parents in their graves will forgive me, for I never let them know. Often I would have liked to have invited these friends I made to come to our house and visit us and see how harmless our family was, how kindly were my parents, how tenderhearted my little sister, but I could not invite them because I did not want them preached at. I understood the deep burden of my father’s soul, the duty that he felt to preach the love of God and his own yearning to save, as he said, their precious souls. I did not blame him, but I could not cast my friends into that white fire of his own spirit. And would they not distrust me if I put them in his power? They were naturally courteous, they would not have refused to hear him, but would they not say that I had used friendship to win them to a foreign god? I could not risk it, and so for years I had many Chinese friends whom I took care to keep away from my good parents, and this not only because I thought it right, but also because, quite selfishly, I could not risk their doubt.
I was richly repaid for their trust, for to this day I value what they shared with me, their homes, their work, their laughter and good talk. Once the trust was established, we talked, questioning each other in close human ways. There was plenty of time in those years. We still lived in the country, and my mother taught me in the mornings but there were the long lonely afternoons and I had few companions of my own race. It was natural therefore that my paths led me to the red gate between the stone lions of the Lu family a half mile or so away and that I spent hours in the courtyards there, playing with the babies, listening to the young wives gossip, and sharing the thoughts of a schoolmate, a pretty girl of my own age. And how she happened to be a schoolmate was that Mr. Kung died in 1905, and since I was so tall my parents felt I had better not be taught by a strange man but go instead two or three times a week to a mission school for girls. But I never again learned as much as I had learned from Mr. Kung. I wept at his funeral and wore a white band of mourning on my sleeve and I bowed before his coffin with the lesser members of his family. He died of cholera, in September. He rose as usual in the morning but he was dead by night and my mother did not want me to go to his funeral because of the danger of contagion and when I insisted she let me go with my father only on the promise that we would not touch our lips even to so much as a bowl of tea and certainly not to any funeral meats. She had good reason to demand such promises for she had nearly died of cholera once, before I was born, and had on the same day lost my sister whom I never saw, a child of four. And my father, having found a doctor, for that dreadful day took place in Shanghai where there were white doctors, was forced to decide which life was to be saved, his daughter’s or his wife’s.
“I cannot save them both,” the doctor had said.
He chose his wife, but sometimes I wonder if my mother forgave him for it. It would have been like her to have insisted on saving both and somehow getting it done, but she was unconscious and had no say. She always felt, I think, that my father accepted too easily the will of God.
Well, there were six or seven families not too far away where I was welcome and where I learned the other side of the victory the white men had won and I knew then what my life has taught me since, that in any war a victory means another war, and yet another, until some day inevitably the tides turn, and the victor is the vanquished, and the circle reverses itself, but remains nevertheless a circle.
From those long and happy hours of visiting I came home more torn in heart than any child should be, for I saw that each side was right as well as wrong, and I yearned over both in a helpless fashion, unable to see how, history being what it was, anything now could be done. I used to look at my parents, wondering how to tell them what I felt and feared, not wanting to betray my Chinese friends, either, for who knew what use my parents might make of what I told, reporting it in duty to the Consul, perhaps, or forbidding me to go again to my friends’ courtyards.
And yet I knew my parents were so wholly good, so utterly innocent, that surely I ought to tell them that Mr. Lu said there were wars ahead and more wars.
I never told them, and I comforted myself that if I had they would have said merely that what would be was in the hands of God. This I did not wholly believe, knowing very well that much can be done by men’s hands if they have the wit and will.
Looking back, I see my life in parts, each part fitting into the age in which I lived. If my childhood was different from that of other children of my time, and it was very different, then the deepest difference was that I always knew that I was a mere leaf in the gathering storm to come. Yet day by day I had plenty of love and kindness and I knew no personal unhappiness. There were no pressures on me, I had hours for myself and blessed freedom, for my parents were lenient and undemanding. And I had the fortune to be born with a nature easily diverted and amused, with a gift, if I had any gift, for enjoying what was around me, both landscape and people. I was healthy and full of good spirits and never idle or bored, a curious child plaguing everyone with questions sometimes too intimate and personal, and yet I will forgive myself to this extent: I had no interest in gossip, but only in story. I was entangled in every human story going on about me, and could and did spend hours listening to anyone who would talk to me, and there were always those ready or needing to talk. Of course I absorbed much useless information, and yet I wonder if any of it was really useless. I took deep interest, for example, in the farming problems of our neighbors, the difficulties of raising crops on five acres or so of land, and yet learned the miracle of how it was done, by hand actually, so that every rice plant was thrust into the paddy field by hand, and not by hired hand at that, but by farmers and their wives and daughters and sons and sons’ wives and their children. I watched the turn of seasons and was anxious with the farmers when there was no rain and yearned with them in their prayer processions and was grateful when sometimes the rain did fall. All knowledge was useful to me later when I began to write.