I remember the fear that fell upon me and then the passionate pity for those pleasant and endearing people in England and Europe, and I said to my father,
“Can’t we tell them? Can’t we warn them?”
He shook his head. “They have their prophets,” he said.
I knew he was thinking of the Biblical story, a sort of parable, of the man who, in hell for his sins, wanted to send a warning to those he loved, who were still upon the earth, that they might escape his fate, and God’s stern reply was that they had their prophets and would not heed them.
My father and I did not often talk together. He was in some ways an unbending man. One had to enter his world of intellect and religion, for he never left it. But that evening we understood each other. And then because I was on my way to my own country, so unknown and yet so eagerly longed for, now that I knew the old days in China were gone forever, I could not keep from asking him the old question I dreaded to hear him answer.
“But Americans won’t have to suffer, will they? We have no colonies — no real ones, like India — and we have no concessions in China, and we are using the indemnity money from the Boxer Rebellion for Chinese students in American colleges, and we have done so much good for the Chinese people — hospitals, schools, food in famines—”
He listened to this with a quiet patience and then he said, “We must never forget that missionaries went to China without invitation and solely from our own sense of duty. The Chinese therefore owe us nothing. We have done the best we could, but that, too, was our duty and so they still owe us nothing. And if our country has taken no concessions, we have kept silent when others did, and we too have profited from the unequal treaties. I don’t think we shall escape when the day of reckoning comes.”
A chill came over me when he said this and I feared that he was right. Today, worlds later, though we are innocent, we Americans, of the guilt of the weight of history of the white man in Asia, we are not innocent of the guilt of silence. The burden of Asia has fallen upon us, and for what other white men have done, we too must suffer.
Green Hills Farm,
Pennsylvania
I entered America in September, 1910, with a sober heart and a mind too old for my years. We had used up all our days in England and there was none to spare and so we travelled directly to the town where my college was. I had originally hoped to go to Wellesley and had taken the examinations for entrance there, but my Southern relatives, still haunted by the War between the States, had objected sufficiently by letter to my parents so that a compromise had to be made between a Yankee college and the Southern finishing schools against which I rebelled. A Southern college for women, Randolph-Macon, was chosen for me. My mother approved it because the education there was planned to be exactly what a man would get. After being married to my father for thirty years she had developed into an ardent feminist, and I must say with cause. My father, who based all his acts upon Biblical precedent, followed strictly some careless remarks made centuries before by Saint Paul, in which that saint stated flatly that as Christ was head of the Church, so man was head of the woman. My mother had an intrepid and passionate nature, but my father was a monument of calm, and as usual the monument won. In our home my father was the head, and although my mother battered at him, he held his position. To her eloquent and sometimes angry assaults on the subject of being a woman, as for example when she felt that the family bank account, always slim, should be a joint account so that she could draw checks as well as he, he never answered anything more violent than a quiet protest, “Oh, now, Carie, don’t talk that way!”
The result of years of defeat, although she never acknowledged subjection, was that my mother determined to give her daughters every possible advantage over their future husbands, and so she was charmed by the idea of educating me exactly as though I were a boy.
Arrived at Lynchburg, Virginia, I found my college to be a collection of red brick buildings, still new enough to look raw, at least to my eyes accustomed to years of the finest and most cultivated scenery in the world, which certainly the best Chinese landscapes are. Within those buildings there was no beauty to be found, and the minimum even of comfort. I can measure how long ago that was when I return now occasionally to visit my college and find it mellowed with beauty everywhere and a place already enriched by tradition. In my day, however, it was stark, and it was hard to have no beauty to look at as I came and went along the wide halls down which the only carpeting vas a strip of dull brown linoleum, thick as leather. But other promises were fulfilled. We were soundly taught and the curriculum carried no hint that we were young women and not young men. We were not corrupted by home economics or dressmaking or cookery or any such oft substitute for hard thinking. We were compelled to take sciences whether we liked them or not, and mathematics and Latin were emphasized and excellently administered. Each year the student body petitioned for a course in home economics, for in that day no girl thought it possible that she might not marry, and each year the faculty sternly refused to yield to the request. The theory was, and I think it entirely correct, that any educated woman can read a cookbook or follow a dress pattern. It is the brain that needs education and it can teach the hands. I was proud of my college when I discovered recently that while the students still petition each year for a course in home economics, the faculty still refuses to yield.
Of my college days I remember shamefully little and this is no one’s fault except my own, for my life was limited by my personal situation. My parents returned to China immediately after depositing me and I had no home for the next four years. My life was confined, therefore, to the college buildings. True, my elder brother was married and was living in the same town, but unhappily there was a shadow over his house, and I did not enter it willingly. The greatest sacrifice of my college life was in my senior year, when he wished to take a new job in a distant city, and not wishing to leave his children he asked me to live in his house instead of in the college buildings. I loved him and we were understanding friends, and I loved his two attractive children, and I did what he asked, but it was a hard year, and for me tragic, because it was my first insight into the danger which besets any marriage when the man and woman are too unlike in their background of birth and education. Yet I did not learn enough to save myself, some years later, from the same mistake.
But it is too soon to speak here of marriage. When I look back from this distance upon those four college years, I see them as an experience, divided again by my different worlds. I had grown up in Asia, a region of the globe in which my college mates had not the slightest interest and certainly of which they had no knowledge and this fact lent me an aura of strangeness, more unkindly called queerness, which after a short time I perceived well enough in their attitude toward me. With some fortitude I saw that unless I did something about it, I would spend four lonely and unhappy years, for no one is more cruel than the young American female unless it be the young American male, and that it was carelessness rather than conscious cruelty only made the cruelty seem the more severe, especially as I had been reared in a culture where human relationships were the first concern. It took some weeks of thinking to orient myself in this new culture of complete individualism. Meanwhile I could not complain of lack of notice — rather, the opposite, for I had too much attention. Girls came in groups to stare at me, and I soon began to understand the detachment of the only Chinese girl in the student body, a senior, who came and went with friendly indifference to her fellow students. In their way they were even fond of her, but while she accepted their good intentions she never yielded herself. I was not satisfied with her position. I wanted to belong to my own kind and to belong, as I soon saw, meant that I must separate my two worlds again. I must learn to talk about the things that American girls talked about, boys and dances and sororities and so on, and I must look like them, and above all I must conceal the fact that inside me was a difference that I could not escape, even if I would.