After reflection I decided to live as fully as possible in my college world, to achieve as far as I could its modest awards, and above all to enjoy everything. The first necessity was to buy myself some American-made clothes, and so I put away the fine Chinese linen and silk dresses with which my mother had outfitted me. They had been made with affectionate care by our Chinese tailor and he thought he had copied them faithfully from models my mother showed him in The Delineator. But I soon saw that there was an infinite difference between his dresses and those my college mates wore, and not the quality of the linen and the silk nor the exquisite perfection of his embroidery and drawn work could compensate for the questionable fit of his sleeves and the wrong length of the skirts. I bought a few American dresses and I put up my hair, which I still wore in a thick braid doubled up and tied with a ribbon, and instead of the handmade leather shoes made by our Chinese cobbler I bought American ones. Externally I became an American. I learned the proper slang and exclamations, and by the end of my freshman year, I was indistinguishable from any other girl of my age and class. And so I joined my world.
I was happy enough at college, although often I was desperately lonely without my family and my home. Vacations were a misery, for I felt obligated to go to my brother’s house, and there was the inescapable shadow, mitigated only by the sweetness of the little children. The long summer vacation was a blank to be filled somehow, and I filled it the first year by going to see my uncles and aunts and cousins. They were kind, but remote indeed from any life I had ever known, and while I loved the countryside and the magnificent Allegheny Mountains rising behind my grandfather’s house like a stage backdrop, yet I did not know how to communicate with my American family. They were immersed in their own life, very naturally, and while I tried to share it, yet it was strange to me, and many of the things we had to do, the visiting, the afternoon calls, the small daily household tasks, seemed trivial and uninteresting, and the talk, lively as it was, incurably local. I had been accustomed to world thinking and world living and it was hard to center in the little town. Yet I learned to enjoy it, as I might enjoy for the moment the reading of a closely knit family novel or watching a play, and I began to see the drama of personalities in close range. My grandfather, so completely the head of the family, was dead by then, and his place was taken by my elder uncle, a gentle and kindly man, black-haired and black-eyed as my mother’s people were. There was a haunting physical resemblance to my mother in all my aunts and uncles proper, and this drew me to them. Yet they were all different from my mother, and sometimes I fancied in them an unexpressed disapproval of her because she had left the family and gone so far away — and to be a missionary! We were not missionary folk by ancestry, and perhaps they did not quite forgive my mother for being different from the rest of them, and I do not know why she was. She was talented enough to have been anything she chose, but some emotional discontent must have made her impetuously willing at a certain moment in her life to give up her pleasantly comfortable home and follow my father across the world, for her soul’s sake, whatever else the reason. With the family I went on Sundays to the white-spired Presbyterian church where my father’s eldest brother was the minister and I did all that I could to seem like everyone else, while I knew I never could be, however I tried. Meanwhile I lost my heart to my country itself. The cleanliness which made it safe to drink water unboiled, the freedom from the possibility of dysentery and cholera which made it pleasant to pluck an apple from a tree and eat it skin and all, the abundance of water to bathe in, the spaces wherein no one lived, the miles of fields and lawns and countryside, the coloring of autumn forests, all these won my heart.
One thing I could not understand and do not yet and this was the apparent lack of interest or curiosity in Americans about other countries and peoples. I remember my wonder that my college mates never asked me about China, or what the people there ate and how they lived and whether China was like our country. So far as I can remember, no one ever asked me a question about the vast humanity on the other side of the globe. Certainly no member of my family asked me anything, and years later I remember my father, too, returning after half a century in China for a last visit to his family, coming back again sorely hurt because none of his family had asked him any questions about the people to whom he had given his life. More decades later when I came to America to live, I found the same incuriosity or disinterest, and today after I have made my home for twenty years here in as pleasant a community as can be found anywhere, I have to report that still I have never found an everyday American in the least interested in any of the ways of life of Asia. No farmer has ever asked me about the Chinese farming, or the crops that are harvested there, no doctor has ever inquired of the interesting and indeed invaluable medical knowledge of Chinese physicians, no housewife has ever asked me how Chinese women do their work, and no American boy or girl has ever asked me how the Chinese young people live. True, sometimes when I am asked to talk to school children, their teachers prompt them and they ask proper little questions and forget what I answer. Once in New York, in a lecture in the Town Hall series at eleven o’clock in the morning, an hour when ladies of leisure and cultivation attend, I gave what I hoped was a penetrating analysis of Chinese thought upon modern problems, and at the end of the time allotted me I waited for questions. There was one question. It came from a portly old lady in the front row. She wanted to know whether the chop suey she ate in Chinese restaurants in New York was really a Chinese dish. I told her it was not. I must admit that questions do follow a lecture, but they are more likely to be political than human.
This lack of interest in other peoples would be of no importance, perhaps, except that it limits the field of mental enjoyment, were it not for the fact that the United States is at a crucial point in her history. It has already been disastrous that we have not known and therefore have not understood other peoples, and especially the peoples of Asia, so that again and again we have lost opportunities for influence. It is almost too late, I fear, to expect other opportunities, but I hope that it is not quite too late. Yet I doubt that the habitual indifference of our people can be changed in a decade or even in a generation. People do not change easily anywhere.
Long ago when I was in college I pondered upon this aspect of my college mates and it was reflected even in their parents when I went home with them occasionally for visits. But I was young and I shut out of my mind the danger and the possible results, and I went on to enjoy myself as an American girl. By my sophomore year I had my techniques established and was able to feel a genuine interest in the activities of the group, except that I could never be deeply concerned over sports. The competitive instinct was either not born in me or my childhood in China had not developed it. Thus it did not seem to me of the slightest importance who won a game, and in sports therefore I did not shine. I was inclined, too, to waste little time on studies I did not enjoy, such as Latin, mathematics and physics, and stole hours from them to spend in the library reading books I had always wanted to read and had not found before at my hand. I read prodigiously, extravagantly and greedily, in season and out, and certainly lowered my general level of grades thereby. But here, too, my noncompetitive nature prevented me from trying to get higher grades than others. When I did so, it was accidental. Years later I went back to visit my college, and I found a legend among the freshmen that I had once failed an English course. It was not true, but when I observed what a comfort it was to them to believe it, I had not the heart to spoil it. What did it matter whether I had failed it or not?