My mother and I talked together about it, and she admitted the change and said, symbolically, that she no longer dared to drink the spring water unboiled because houses were built above it now. Then she said, “We must let the Chinese come in — I can see it. Perhaps we white people ought never to have built a separate place for ourselves but we did it so that we could keep our children. We lost so many little children.”
She could never mention the lost children without thinking, I knew, of our four, buried in little walled cemeteries, three in Shanghai and one in Chinkiang, who died when I was six. The eldest, my sister Edith, my mother considered her most beautiful and brilliant child, and she was the one who had died of cholera when she was four. There was a portrait of her in my mother’s bedroom in the mission house, a handsome sturdy blue-eyed child, her dark hair in bangs across her fine forehead and hanging in thick curls on her shoulders.
“Someday,” my mother was saying, “the Chinese will take everything back again.”
And so they did, though not until she was dead.
During the two years of her convalescence in Kuling she rebuilt the house, tearing down the old one and putting up one larger, though still modest, because she wanted it big enough, she said, for my sister and me when we married and had children. But when she was dead, and my father dead, and China was changing indeed and all that belonged to the white people was being taken from them or they were giving it back for the sake of their own consciences, then my sister and I sold the house to a good Chinese family and so for us Kuling was returned. By that time it had become a stronghold for Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek and Madame Chiang and their many relatives, and the new officials were more rigorous than the white people had been about keeping out the poor Chinese. But it was no more our business.
I felt, that year when I was alone there with my mother, that the end was inescapable, as she had said it was, but I did not fear it. I wanted more than ever to be rid of the burden which had weighed upon me all my life, the burden of knowing that my race had been unjust to another. It is easier to receive injustice than to inflict it, for conscience is a fox gnawing at the vitals. Then, too, I had forgotten by that time the hatreds of the old Empress Dowager and her followers against foreigners, and feeling again the warm friendliness of the Chinese people, the easy courtesy and unfailing consideration, I longed to see every inequality between us removed, and all people living with equal opportunities for self-development. Rich and poor there would always be, of course, and some people would be clean and some dirty, some educated and some ignorant, but these inequalities were fluid and natural, and depended to a large extent upon individuals themselves. What I wanted to be rid of, merely as a burden, was the declared discrimination between the dominant white and the rebellious Chinese. They were right and we were wrong in that particular matter. After all, we were still only guests upon the Chinese soil, not rulers and not even citizens.
But I was removed again from life, for the time being, by our return to Kuling. The First World War was raging, but I knew nothing of it except through the newspaper which reached us weekly from Shanghai, an English paper which gave very little report of American forces. I had no idea, indeed, until years later when I was visiting Europe again, how many Americans had fought in the First World War and had died on foreign soil. I learned it then as I wandered through the vast memorial halls which had been built as monuments to the American soldiers who had died and had never been found. There on walls high and wide were carved in small print the myriad names of the missing. And I wandered through the cemeteries in France and elsewhere and saw little white crosses set as closely as human bodies could lie, and the magnitude of what my country had done overwhelmed me and I wept belated tears for the young men whose flesh was already dust.
We stayed the summer through in Kuling, our old friends and many new ones returned to their summer homes, and my sister came from boarding school in Shanghai and we took up much of the old childhood life, except that I was no longer a child. An English doctor had my mother in charge, and he changed her diet again, so that she fed now upon an obnoxious mixture of boiled liver and spinach, consuming it with a fortitude that was amazing. She was slow to get well, and after my father had come for his brief vacation and gone, and my sister had returned to school, my mother and I stayed on while the frost turned the leaves scarlet and the chinquapin burrs burst and dropped their small sweet nuts. Then, because so few white people remained, we were asked to move lower into the valley where it would be easier for the doctor to visit my mother and easier to reach supplies of food and coal. We moved into the house of a Swedish friend, a pink and white cottage, and I began what was to be the loneliest winter of my life, so far as human beings were concerned. The nearest person to my age was a young man in the sanatorium recovering from tuberculosis, but he was only a boy to my newly adult eyes, and our friendship was brief, ended indeed by the alarm of his missionary parents at his growing interest in a young woman. My own mind was concerned with far different matters. I was struggling with the decision of what I was to do with myself. My problem was the variety of my interests, all leading someday of course to writing, but not yet. I enjoyed too many employments.
Meanwhile, as winter passed my mother was better. My school was clamoring for my return, and so with the doctor’s permission and on her own insistence, I left her surrounded by a few good friends and cared for by our servants, and one cold February day I walked down the mountain.
It was strange to get back to the mission house and take charge of it alone, my father its only other occupant, strange and a little exciting to be my own mistress, to go to classes and teach and to come home and study Chinese literature with my own teacher, order the household affairs and plan our simple meals, and even invite a few guests now and then. I enjoyed my independence, in spite of my great love for my mother, and yet I knew all the time that this was not permanent, neither this place nor this time. Something else lay ahead but I did not know what. While I waited I busied myself.
There was plenty with which to be concerned. The year 1914, in which I was graduated from college, had been a year of importance in much larger matters. Many young Chinese were being graduated from other American colleges and universities at about the same time, young men who were destined to clarify the new age by their writings. Sun Yat-sen and his followers were still struggling with political problems, for Yuan Shih-kai, the military leader, had finally assumed the Presidency of the new Republic of China as a compromise between the old guard who rejected Sun Yat-sen, and the impetuous radicals who would not acknowledge Pu Yi as Emperor. Sun Yat-sen had been set back, but he had accepted the situation with Chinese grace. Now, however, it became apparent that the ambitions of Yuan Shih-kai were leading him to try to establish the Throne again with himself as the First Emperor. It was still doubtful whether the people would allow this, for if I could judge from my own students and young Chinese friends, the revolutionary stimulus constantly applied, not only by Sun Yat-sen, but also by Liang Ch’ih-ch’ao and K’ang Yu-wei and others, had permeated the people more than one might guess was possible when eighty percent of the people could not read and write. The Chinese are a very articulate people, however, always curious and mentally awake, and hearsay and rumors ran fast over the nation, and it was evident that they would not tolerate the setting up of a monarchy, especially under old Yuan, who carried with him quite a stink from the dead regime, for it was he who had betrayed the Young Emperor to the Old Empress and was therefore morally responsible in the end for his death. The people did not forget.