As time went on many white people seized the chance to escape from China for a few weeks and mingle with their own kind. Missionaries held meetings and conferences and businessmen and their wives had bridge parties and dances, and everybody went on picnics and walks. Each summer there was a tennis tournament and a sacred concert, where my mother sang in The Messiah or in some other oratorio. Each week, too, there was a meeting only for amusements, where amateurs did their best with whatever talent they had. Besides such arranged entertainment there were tea parties, dinners and much visiting, while people who had no chance to see one another during the year could meet here and compare adventures and children and share their news. Kuling did indeed mean many different things to different people, but to my mother it meant first of all a place where her children were safe and the air was clean and where she could renew her own soul. For me, as I look back, I realize that it meant a kind of beauty I knew nowhere else, the beauty of clear brooks and wild ferns and lilies, a place where I could wander safely and explore to my own content. Each morning during the years when I was small it was my task to climb the mountain behind our house and come back with fresh ferns and flowers, and never have I seen so many flowers growing wild as I found there. The little fireplace in our living room my mother filled with bracken, and she wanted the delicate ferns for her pots, and the tall white Madonna lilies, the red, black-spotted tiger lilies or the white ones with red spots were always welcome. Yellow and orange day lilies grew everywhere, and since they lasted but a day, I did not pick them except for our amah who cooked the buds into a delectable dish for her midday meal. Grass-of-Parnassus and club moss were special finds, and my mother loved, too, the long leafy strands of wild clematis, set with hundreds of little white stars of flowers, and this she twined along our mantelpiece. The simple house became a fresh bower, and not for anything would I have missed that morning climb and the return laden with treasures for my mother’s joy. There was only one danger, and it was the short slender grass-green snake that climbed the trees and hung down like a swaying branch. Its bite was fatal, and I kept my eyes sharp as I walked along the trails or climbed the grey rocks.
One fearful aspect of those beautiful mountains of Lu was the flash floods. Springs at the top of the mountains had through the centuries cut deep gorges into the soil, and since the forests had long ago been destroyed, a cloudburst on the top of a mountain could pour water into a gorge so suddenly that within minutes a great wall of water was built up, although below the sun might be shining. Every summer some lives were lost in these flash floods. Picnickers enjoying their meal by the side of a small and peaceful brook looked up to see descending upon them a mass of water twenty feet high. Before they could escape they were swept away, sometimes over high falls. I remember the tragedy of a neighbor, an American woman whose husband was dead and who had only one child. Upon the child’s sixth birthday she had put their supper in a basket and the two of them had gone to a nearby brook to make a little celebration. In the midst of their meal she heard a roar and looking up she saw the flood rushing toward her. In her fright she seized what she thought was the child’s frock and clambered up the side of the gorge only to discover that what she had grasped was her own skirt and that the child was gone. The possibility of death always at hand lent an undertone of terror to the pleasantest summer day in Kuling.
All that was in my childhood, and now when I went to Kuling with my mother, one early June, before even the rice fields were flooded, I went back as a young woman. Kuling was changed, too. I had caught rumors of it in my parents’ talk. Wealthy Chinese wanted to buy land there and it had become a point of hot disagreement between the white people as to whether Chinese could or should be kept out any longer. In the early years no Chinese had thought of coming but now they wanted to buy in the white concession and not in the Chinese section outside the Gap where tradespeople lived. Kuling had developed very much, I discovered when I reached the top of the mountain and I did not like it so well, although the journey up the mountain had been even more beautiful than I remembered. We had left the ship at the river port the day before and had gone by riksha to the resthouse in the city to spend the night on our own bedding rolls spread upon Chinese bed bottoms resting upon two wooden benches. Early the next morning we were waked as usual by the chair bearers, clamoring to get off, and we rose and ate a hearty breakfast of rice and eggs prepared by the resthouse cook, and then we climbed into our chairs, much improved now, and made of wood and rattan instead of bamboo. Thus we set off across the plains and up into the foothills to the second resthouse, where other chairs waited with mountain bearers, for the plainsmen could not climb. Now came, as always, the magical part of the journey. One caught the first hint of it when a clear mountain brook tumbled past the resthouse and the village houses were made of stone instead of the gray brick of the plains. We seated ourselves in our chairs and four bearers carried each chair, suspended by ropes from poles across their shoulders, and thus they mounted the first flight of stone steps with light rhythmic stride. Up the mountain we climbed and soon the frothing bamboos changed to pines and dwarf chestnuts and oaks and we were on our way. The road wound around the rocky folds of the cliffs, and beneath us were gorges and rushing mountain rivers and falls. Higher and higher the road crawled, twisting so abruptly that sometimes our chairs swung clear over the precipices as the front bearers went on beyond the rear ones, still behind the bend. One misstep and the chair would have been dashed a thousand feet into the rocks and swirling waters, but there was never a misstep. In all the years I never heard of an accident, even though the bearers went at an astonishing speed, every step in rhythmic movement.
Somewhere near the top of the mountain we turned a certain corner and were met, as I had remembered, by a strong cold current of mountain air. Until then the air had gradually cooled, but at this spot it changed suddenly and the bearers welcomed it with loud hallooing calls and a spurt of running, the chair swaying between them. It was still exciting. As a child I could never keep from laughing, and this time, although I was grown up, I still felt exhilaration. The air of the plains had been hot and heavy, breathed in and out by millions of human lungs, but here on top of the mountain it was charged with fresh cold purity, and one breathed it in like lifesaving oxygen.
So we reached the same little old house, my mother and I, and very small it looked to my grown-up eyes, but the trees were big and the ferns had grown thick on the terrace walls. The two servants we had brought with us cleaned the house swiftly and we settled in, my mother to rest in bed for a while and I to care for her and read to her. I studied my Chinese books while she slept and every day I went for a long and solitary walk. There were few people to be seen and most of the houses were still closed, for the season had not begun, but it was interesting to walk about the settlement and see the changes. A sanatorium had been built for tuberculosis patients, all white, and Russian traders had developed a separate piece of land beyond the mountain and named it Russian Valley and outside the settlement limits rich Chinese had built immense stone houses for themselves. The streets were named and the trees had grown tall and arched above them and the atmosphere of the place had become worldly and cosmopolitan.