He was a meticulous young man, on his way to the Philippines to work for the Standard Oil Company, and during the idle weeks on the ship, he was part of my American education. I had known a few American men merely as casual companions, but he was another sort. Somewhere along the way we decided firmly, at first individually and then together, that while we would be friends on the ship we would not continue our friendship after parting at Shanghai, and we did not. I do not remember why we came to this stern decision, for nothing was serious between us, but I imagine that it had to do with his contract and certainly with my own determination not to get myself involved with anybody until the question of my mother’s life was settled. But ship friendships are brittle stuff, and certainly the magic of the wide Pacific ended abruptly when the yellow waters of the Yangtse rushed out to muddy the blue.
At any rate, reality began for me when the tall thin figure of my father and the little figure of my younger sister appeared upon the pier to meet me. The very fact of my mother’s absence struck me to the heart. Neither of them had the slightest ability to tell less than the truth. She had not been well enough to come to Shanghai, but she hoped to meet me at the train in Chinkiang.
I read many warnings nowadays against too deep an attachment between parents and children, and I am sure that such dangers are overrated. There should be a deep attachment, heart should be tied to heart between parent and child, for unless the child learns how to love a parent profoundly, I believe that he will never learn how to love anyone else profoundly, and not knowing how to love means the loss of the meaning of life and its fulfillment. I loved both my parents but at different times and in different ways. During my childhood all my love went to my mother, and I felt very little for my father, even going to the extent of remarking one day at the age of eleven that I hated him. My mother rebuked me but there was no other fuss made about it and my father, although he had overheard me, said nothing. I was not made to feel wicked or ungrateful and so I continued to hate my father mildly until I was old enough to appreciate him, which was not until I was grown. During the years when he was seventy to eighty years old, I adored him and found him delightful and charming, affectionate and amusing, and he knew it and expanded in the friendly atmosphere between us. Yet it was not my fault nor his that we had both to wait until such an age for mutual understanding, He did not know earlier how to accept my world and I did not know how to enter his. We had to grow together in time and maturity, and I am glad he lived long enough for that.
My love for my mother was a thing apart. It was rooted in my blood and my bones. I felt her every pain, I knew when she was wounded, and she was wounded always too easily, so that toward the end of her life she suspected people unfairly of wanting to hurt her, and while I knew this was wrong and I argued against her judgments, yet I could not forgive the ones who wounded her even when they did not know what they did. I wanted her to have the happiest life possible for a human being, and this desire was perhaps made the more passionate because I discerned, although she never acknowledged it, that as she grew older she was desperately homesick for the land she had left too young. It was impossible for her to return, she could not leave my father, and she could not cross the ocean again with her weak heart and enfeebled frame.
How weakened she was I had not been able to imagine until I saw her at the railway station in Chinkiang. There she stood, and instead of the strong upright figure I had remembered, wearing her thick white hair like a crown, her dark eyes bright, her lips firm, I saw a small little lady, very dainty in dress as always she was, but shrunken and tiny, so tiny that I lifted her up in my arms when I ran to her.
“Mother, how little you are!” I cried.
“Daughter, how big you are!” she retorted, laughing.
My heart trembled at her fragility and I tried not to weep and she saw it and made me turn to greet the crowd who had come to welcome me, my old Chinese friends, my English Agnes and her family, a few American missionaries, our servants and neighbors. What a heartwarming home-coming it was, with all of them trying to hug me at once and clinging to my hands and making speeches and giving me flowers and little gifts and packages of Chinese spongecakes and sesame cookies! It was a mild and glorious afternoon although the season was late November and we lingered so that I could speak to everyone and the station gang gathered around to stare and remark upon our goings on. I was home again, even though during the years I had been away the compound in which I had grown up had been given over to a boys’ school and the old bungalow torn down to make place for a new two-story modern dormitory. My parents had moved to another hill and another modest mission house had been built for them. But the hills and the valleys were the same, and as we walked along the familiar roads of beaten earth, the farmers looked up from the fields and saw me and put down their hoes and came to speak to me and their wives and children ran out of the earthen houses to call to me. “And have you come back?” they shouted. “It is good — it is good.” And when we came to the new house, unfamiliar though it was to me, I found that my mother had set aside for me the pleasantest upstairs room, facing the distant river and overlooking the green valley. It was a bare room, I suppose, with the minimum of plain furniture and there were no rugs on the floor, but bowls of late roses stood on the desk and the dressing table, and my mother had made white curtains for the windows and my old bed was there and my childhood books were in a little bookcase built in the wall, and it was home again.
That night my mother and I sat long in talk and I made her tell me about herself and how it was that sprue had begun and then fastened itself on her, and unwillingly she showed me her poor mouth, sore and red, and told me that the vicious disease, a sort of fungus growth it was thought to be, was destroying the mucous membranes of her mouth and throat and intestines, so that it was painful for her to speak very much or to eat anything but the mildest of bland foods, and this she had hidden from me! I put my arms about her and wept, and she comforted me, saying that she intended to fight the disease with all her strength and get well again now that I was home, and I dried my eyes and swore myself to the task with her. I was glad I had chosen to come home and I was sure that I had decided rightly to leave America. It was not so much China that I chose. It was my mother’s life.
My own life now was divided again. My daily duty, besides teaching in the new boys’ school, and supervising seventeen to twenty young Chinese women who were being trained for various types of work in other schools, was to care for my mother. I took over the management of the house in order to relieve her, and in her place I carried on the work among women for which she was responsible. I could not and would not lead religious meetings, but my mother did not do much of this sort of thing herself. She was too sensitive to impress upon others directly the advantages even of the religion in which she still fervently believed. Her meetings were usually friendly gatherings where the women told of their difficulties and problems and opportunities and needs, and my mother endeavored as best she could to fulfill each demand. I was too young to take her place, but I could listen and promise to get her advice for the next meeting. It was an invaluable experience thus to hear Chinese women open their hearts because of their faith in my mother and I was always touched and moved at their acceptance of me in her place. Beyond this I made a fierce and determined attack upon the disease which threatened my mother, working with the doctors to learn all I could about it. Nothing but diet was then tried as a cure, and we experimented with all the known foods to find the one most suitable to her. Some victims professed to recover upon bananas and my long-suffering mother fed for months upon bananas, never a favorite food at any time with her. Then we heard that fresh strawberries were helpful and we set about the cultivation of strawberries. Milk, however, fresh raw milk, seemed to be the most approved food and how to get fresh raw cow’s milk became my problem. I do not know whether it is only Chinese milkmen who are the most wily of their kind or whether milkmen everywhere are below the average of human beings in integrity. But certainly in those days it seemed impossible to find an honest milkman. The Chinese had never been used to drinking cow’s milk, indeed the very idea of it was repulsive to them, partly because Buddhists considered that to drink milk was to rob the calf of its life, and partly because of the cow smell of those who drank milk, or so they declared. Yet cow’s milk was beginning to be thought of as a Western source of health, and the more modern among the Chinese eagerly bought canned milk from American stores in Shanghai for their children. Human milk the Chinese had always considered beneficial for young children and old people but it was expensive and not suitable for the average person. A few enterprising Chinese therefore bought a cow or two and sold raw milk to foreigners. Sometimes the cows were only water buffaloes, and although their milk was good, it was scanty and very high in butter fat, too high for my mother’s delicate digestion. All milk, of course, had to be boiled, and this destroyed much of its value. Also, boiled milk is very binding to the bowels and to exist upon a boiled milk diet is to complicate the system. How to get clean unwatered raw milk was my task, and knowing nothing about cows at that time, I conceived the idea of having the milkman lead his cow up the hill to our back yard and there milk her product into a pan before my eyes, after I had seen his hands scrubbed with hot water and soap and dipped into disinfectant. We did this for a few days, and still the milk seemed disconcertingly blue and thin. It was our faithful cook who asked me to observe closely one day that the milkman’s dirty cotton sleeves hung down over his wrists. I did so, and discovered a thin rubber tube under his right wrist, and from that wrist ran a small stream of water into the milk pail. I stooped and twitched back the wide sleeve and disclosed a rubber hotwater bag which he had bought from some servant of a foreigner. It was filled with water. I was speechless and for a moment I could only look my reproach.