He was ashamed enough, though only for the moment, too, I fear, and then he said, “But I boiled the water, Little Sister — truly I boiled it, knowing that foreigners always drink only boiled water. Besides, the milk is so rich I feared it would make your honored mother ill.”
We gave up on raw milk after that, and experimenting further we worked out a diet of rice gruel and fresh fruit juice and soft-boiled eggs and liver which served at least to prolong my mother’s life, though she was never really well again during her few remaining years. Now, of course, doctors of tropical diseases know that sprue is a deficiency disease, and while the bananas and fresh strawberries and raw milk and liver were useful in providing some vitamins, far more were needed. But the knowledge came too late for my mother.
Outside this home battle I lived another life. I was intensely interested in my teaching, for my students were not children. They were senior high school students, and far more mature than Western boys of the same age. Many of them were already married men and some had children. I could treat them as adults, although I was not much older than they were. My task was to teach them English and in this tongue we attempted to carry on conversations upon the profound subjects which interested them. They taught me far more than I taught them. For, as I said before, while I had been away at college great things were happening in China. I had left in a period of confusion. The weak little Emperor Pu Yi sat upon the throne but with the passing of the doughty old Empress Dowager there had been no real ruler and the Manchu dynasty was near its end. As usual in such times, the Chinese people were waiting philosophically for a new head to appear and various local leaders were developing into war lords. It was a process thoroughly Chinese and essentially democratic, and tradition compelled the new ruler to do the best he could to comfort the people in order that his seat might be secure. The throne was seldom secure in the first generation, however, for the Chinese were accustomed to criticizing their rulers and they did not revere easily, any more than Americans do. By the second generation national affairs settled down, and the dynasty began to rise towards its full power.
This historical process I now found was disturbed. The war lords were swarming as usual when the dynasty came to an end, but there was no throne for a prize. While I had been peacefully at college a real revolution had been going on, fed by a dozen fires, but chiefly by the intrepid Sun Yat-sen. His name, of course, I had long known, but it was always surrounded by doubt, for no one knew what to think of him. He was the son of a village farmer in South China, but he had been sent to a mission school and when he was only a boy he had been taken to Honolulu by his elder brother, who was a merchant there. There, too, he had attended a Christian school and had seen American government at work. He was no mean missionary himself, for he soon conceived the vast notion of modernizing his country, not by education or by writing essays and translating books as the two famous scholars, Liang Ch’ih-ch’ao and K’ang Yu-wei, were doing in exile, but by inciting other Chinese to help him overthrow the throne and set up a republic based on the constitutional form of the Government of the United States. With this idea as big as a melon in his head, he had given up his profession as a doctor of medicine and set out as a sort of patriotic pilgrim to find Chinese in every part of the world and collect funds from them for his revolution. Meanwhile he hoped to persuade foreign governments to help him with the new China.
It was one of those mad dreams which can succeed only when the mood of many people is at the point of readiness to accept any hope of improving their state. The foreign governments, as was to be expected, only shrugged Sun Yat-sen off, but the Chinese overseas gave him all they had and put their faith in him. Exiled as they were by the demands of business, they were patriotic Chinese still and they longed to see their country strong and great and safe from colonization. They agreed with Sun Yat-sen that only modernization could save them.
The story of this remarkable man has been told so often that I am not inclined to repeat it here. In my sophomore year in college he did actually succeed in his dream. While he was travelling in the United States collecting his funds, the revolutionaries he had left behind him in his own country became impatient and rose up and overthrew the dynasty representatives in the province of Kiangsi and declared Sun Yat-sen the first President of the Republic of China. He saw the news in an American newspaper while he was on a train in one of the Western states. No one recognized him, of course, and it is fascinating to imagine his thoughts as he read that paper and saw his own name in great headlines while he sat in the dingy day coach, lonely and unknown. The anger of the Chinese people, meanwhile, had risen to its height and everywhere they killed the Manchus whom hitherto they had protected in contempt. In a letter my mother had written to me in 1911 she had said, “I look from the window this morning and see poor Manchu women and children hiding for their lives behind the graves on the hillside. I shall have to go out and see what I can do.”