What could I say? It seems to me now, looking back, that I spent those first years of my return in almost complete silence. I listened and could not reply. Sometimes even my father, impatient because of the lack of central government and the confusion of rising war lords and revolutionists in China, would exclaim that “it might be a good thing if Japan came in and cleaned China up.”
To this I could and did make retort that I was sure it would not be a good thing. The Japanese and the Chinese are as nearly opposite in their national characteristics as it is possible for human beings to be. There is more difference between them than there is between any two peoples in the white race. Their geography has shaped their history, and their history could not be less alike. The Chinese are actually much more like the Americans, also a continental people, than they are like the Japanese who are an island people, and I knew that the Japanese, much as I liked and admired them and do still, would be tyrants if they were able to rule in China. They could never understand the Chinese, and not understanding, they would, out of fear and insecurity, try to rule by force and that, of course, the Chinese could not tolerate.
Many years later, on a bright Sunday afternoon in December in Pennsylvania I heard that Japanese bombs had fallen upon Pearl Harbor. I remembered instantly the words of Mr. Yamamoto, spoken so long ago, and again I saw the path of history clear from the very first Portuguese vessel that sailed the seas to maraud on the coasts of Asia to the Japanese ships of the air flying to destroy as much as they could of the strongest Western power in the world. Step by step, cause always preceding result, history marches on.
Young as I was in those early years, and filled with conflicting and youthful interests and impulses, I tried very hard to understand what was taking place in my worlds. I was lonely in many ways. My years in college had separated me from the Chinese girls with whom I had once been such close friends. They were all married and busy with household affairs, and they felt strange with me, perhaps because I had been away to college. They asked me a thousand questions for, unlike the Americans, the Chinese are full of curiosity about other peoples and will stop at nothing in the way of intimate detail, and I answered as best I could. Invariably our sessions together ended with the one important question they put to me anxiously, a very personal question—“When are you going to be married?”
“I don’t know,” I always replied.
The next question was also invariable and concerned. “Are your parents doing nothing about finding a husband for you?”
Without exception their parents had found husbands for them in the approved old Chinese fashion. It was still too soon for the later wave of impetuous rebellion of youth against traditional marriages, and a Chinese girl or young man would have been astonished and embarrassed to be told that she or he must find a mate. Marriage was a family affair, and the parents pondered with much care upon the nature of their child and the sort of person that should be found to complete his or her life. It was also essential that this person fit into the family group, for where the generations lived together in the old Chinese custom, it could only bring unhappiness if the new person did not fit into the circle, both in birth and breeding. The results of these arranged marriages were usually good. Most of them were happy, an even higher percentage, I think, than in the individualized and romantic marriages of the West. This is only to be expected, for marriage, after all, is basically a practical matter and romantic aspects pass into solid love and companionship. Usually love did develop after marriage, sometimes romantic and passionate love, but it was not an essential. Such marriages had perhaps the greater chance for survival because the expectations of romantic love were not as high as they are in the West.
At any rate, my Chinese friends were happily married and busy with babies, and although I was young enough they were troubled about my solitary state. As far as my own race went, I had no possible friends except my English Agnes, and she, alas, I had outgrown. The nearest American woman to me in age was thirty-five years old, a missionary’s wife and the mother of three children. It was another generation. Nor was I allowed to accept the attentions of any of the few young white men in the British Concession in our city. Among them were even two or three Americans with the Standard Oil Company or one of the tobacco companies. I did accept their invitations at first without thinking, until one of the older missionary women in the narrow circle lectured me one day severely. “You cannot continue in both ways of life,” she said solemnly. “If you go with the business people you must leave the missionary circle.”
“I am not a missionary,” I insisted. “I am a teacher.”
“You are a teacher in a missionary school,” she reminded me, “and your parents are missionaries.”
“My parents don’t mind,” I persisted.
“The rest of us do,” she retorted.
For the sake of my parents I refused all invitations from then on and scheduled my days severely between work and home. I began to study Chinese books and as my mother’s health grew a little better I travelled about the country within walking and riding distance. My Chinese friends, however, were still concerned, and I know they talked with my parents about arranging a marriage for me. This resulted in a curious argument between my father, who had become far more Chinese in his mentality and feelings than he was American, and my mother, who remained American to the core. My father, it seemed, would have been pleased to have me marry a young Chinese gentleman of his own choice but my mother was wholeheartedly against it. I listened and reflected and did not take sides, for I saw no danger from the handsome and brilliant Chinese whom my father had in mind, since his family would not have tolerated his marriage to an American, even though she were my father’s daughter. I decided, instead, since my mother’s health was better, that I would like to go to some other part of China, and carve out my career alone.
I knew in my heart as I had always known, that someday I would be a writer, but I was not yet ready. I still felt empty. I know now, of course, that emptiness is the normal state of youth. No writer, I believe, should attempt a novel before he is thirty, and not then unless he has been hopelessly and helplessly involved in life. For the writer who goes out to find material for a novel, as a fisherman goes out to sea to fish, will certainly not write a good novel. Life has to be lived thoughtlessly, unconsciously, at full tilt and for no purpose except its own sake before it becomes, eventually, good material for a novel.
I did not want to travel to other parts of China to find material for writing but I did want to find more life. I was caught in too small a circle and I wanted to break away, as all young people do and should, from the childhood environment. I wanted to move out from being the child of my parents and make my own place among strangers. Yet it did not occur to me to go back to America, partly because I did not want to leave my mother at such a distance, for her malady was only better and not cured and it would never, I feared, be cured. Therefore I must be within distance of possible return. Beyond this, however, I was genuinely part of my Chinese world again, a new world changing from day to day, and China was destined, as even then I could see, to be a pivotal country in the future. She had always been a source country in culture, and India alone, although completely different, could be her rival. Now I wanted only to be free to live in China as I liked, in some place where I could escape the confines of dogmatic religion. Casting about I thought of a woman who had stirred my imagination ever since I had first heard of her. She lived alone in a distant and ancient city of the province of Yunnan, itself, I had always heard, a supremely beautiful part of a beautiful country. I sat down one day at the little Chinese desk in my room and wrote to Cornelia Morgan and asked her if she would let me come and work with her. Somehow or other, weeks later, her friendly reply fell into my mother’s hands and then I saw a new aspect of my mother. She broke down and wept and said that if I went away she did not want to live and why was I dissatisfied here, where everyone loved me so much? And what would the Chinese say if I deserted my parents when they believed in filial piety?