It was characteristic of my parents that while the American Consul had warned all Americans to leave for Shanghai until the trouble was over, lest the revolution take its usual anti-foreign turn, my parents did not go, and it is characteristic, too, that the Chinese said nothing when my parents helped the Manchus to escape death. It was a good deed, according to Chinese ethics as well as Christian, and they did not reproach my parents for saving the very people whom they themselves were killing. The paradox is part of Chinese human nature, but the explanation is that they believed that religion and religious acts were entirely individual responsibilities and privileges.
All these doings had seemed vague enough to me while I was at college, and I had not mentioned them to my college mates because it would have taken too much explaining. I should have had to go far back in world history and begin with the Portuguese sailing vessels pushing their way across the oceans in search of treasure in the East, and laying lasting hold on Goa in India and Macao in China and I should have had to tell of Spanish ships snatching the Philippines, and how, long after Americans drove the Spanish out, the Filipinos supposing meanwhile that we intended to give them independence, we had stayed for half a century bringing both good and evil to those islands. And I should have had to remind them that Columbus himself did not want to discover America, that it was only an accident in his search for the jewelled treasures of India, and I should have had to tell them that we Americans would not so easily have freed ourselves from the English in 1776 had not the East India Company at that very hour been discovering the extravagant wealth of India, so that England concentrated her effort there instead of upon thirteen little stretches of wilderness in an uncivilized continent. “You Americans owe us a great deal,” my Indian friends are fond of saying to me today. “If the English had not discovered how much richer we were than you were in 1776, you would still be part of the British Empire.” It may be true for all I know, for certain facts of history point in that direction. And I would have had to explain to my college mates the whole disgraceful story of the Western Powers and how they were still robbing the great peaceful countries of Asia, which on principle had never developed the use of gunpowder and modern weapons, and I should have had to explain about the Opium Wars and the Boxer Rebellion and the Unequal Treaties, the extraterritoriality whereby any white man walked the earth of China free from arrest by a Chinese authority. He could commit murder and rape and sometimes did and yet he could not be arrested because all white people had what amounted to diplomatic immunity. I should have had to explain the arrogance of the white man in Asia, unmatched, I believe, since the days of the cruel Roman Empire.
And how could I have explained the evolution of this history, clear though it was from the very first days of rapacious tradesmen and bigoted priests? My college mates had nothing in their experience wherewith to understand. All that they knew about China was that they had heard a missionary beg for money in a church so that he could teach the Chinese or feed them or buy Bibles for them and they thought of the great and beautiful country as a land of beggars and savages instead of the most ancient existing civilization in the world, with a culture older than any in Europe. So I did not explain. I read my mother’s letters alone and pondered the changes which she described so vividly and then I put them aside to face when I returned.
Now, however, the struggle of Sun Yat-sen was a matter of daily study in the newspaper and daily talk with my Chinese friends. Could he organize a republic or not? If not, what would then happen? Would we have a throne again and a new Emperor and if so, who would he be?
Meanwhile as usual in the midst of political confusion the life of the Chinese people went on in its accustomed ways, with no ferment and no uproar. The greatest change that I could see outwardly was that the men and boys had their queues cut off, and their hair cut in Western fashion, since the queue had been a sign of subjection to the Manchu dynasty and that dynasty was ended. Even so, many a Chinese peasant clung to his queue and did not want to cut it off. He did not know why he had it, but his father and forefathers for generations had worn the queue and therefore it must be good. But peasants were overcome by the strong forces of revolution and young men, some of them my own students, stationed themselves at the city gates through which the farmers had to pass to carry their vegetable baskets and bundles of fuel to the markets, and when one wore a queue they sat him down on a stool and lectured him and cut off his appendage, even though he wept while they did so. In a matter of some years all the queues seemed to be gone, although when I was living in North China after my marriage a few years later, I still occasionally saw dusty-haired farmers from the back country with modest little queues curled under their felt caps, and now and then I found an old woman who did not know that the Empress Dowager was dead although she had been in her jewelled tomb for twenty years. I considered this ignorance remarkable at the time but have discovered since that it was not. The New York Times recently published the results of an American history test given to thousands of college freshmen throughout the United States. Among other amazing discoveries were these: that thirty percent of them did not know Woodrow Wilson was President during the First World War; that only six percent were able to name the first thirteen colonies — many even listed such states as Texas and Oregon; and a third of them did not know who was President during the Civil War. People everywhere do not concern themselves much beyond the common round of everyday, and this is the chief problem for a democratic government, whose success depends upon an informed and responsible citizenry.
There were many conservative and well-educated old Chinese, however, who heartily disapproved of Sun Yat-sen and the revolution and all the doings of the young people, and who wished the Throne back again. Some of them were friends of my parents, and while I heard the arguments of the young during the day in my classes, I had the other side from these older Chinese. I was hard put to it sometimes to answer the questions which the students asked in class. One of their favorites was to demand of me in halting English, which nevertheless improved daily, “Why does not your country give freedom to the Filipinos?”
I did not know why, but later the rising ambitions of Japan helped me and I could then reply, “If Americans leave the Philippines, the Japanese will come in. Would you rather have the Japanese?”
They had to acknowledge that they would not. At that time the United States was the most popular of the Western nations. In spite of resentment against our demand that we share the benefits of extraterritoriality and trade agreements, the Chinese did not fear us as an imperial power, for that was before the days of Communism, but they did very much fear the new strong Japan.
Yet even that Japan had, I knew, its roots in the old evil of empire and colonization. I had Japanese friends who insisted, to me that the only way to insure Japan’s continuing freedom was to make her too strong for any Western power to colonize.
“You must remember, my dear young lady,” Mr. Yamamoto said to me one day. He was a rich merchant who had a home in our town as well as in Japan and he was responsible, as were others like him, for filling the Chinese shops gradually over the years with a plethora of cheap but remarkably good merchandise and driving out to the same extent the more expensive products of Britain and the United States. “You must remember,” he repeated, wagging a long pale forefinger at me, “every Asian country has either been seized by a Western power, as India has been, or it has been despoiled and weakened by excessive demands and the Unequal Treaties and frightful indemnities as China has been. Only Japan remains free, and we are in great danger. We could never tolerate colonization. It is necessary, therefore, for us to make ourselves an empire as Britain has done, and China is the logical place for us to begin. We will develop China, we will not despoil her — it would not be to our interest.”