The quiet and intensely interesting years in my northern town came rather abruptly to an end one day when the man in the house announced that there was a vacancy in the University of Nanking and that he intended to apply for it. He had been floundering, as I well knew, unable to find a way of applying Western farm methods to an old and established agriculture. It would be better, he now said, to join a group somewhere rather than to work alone. He could teach agricultural students in a university and let them make the practical application.
I was sad to leave my northern town where I had been so warmly befriended, and yet in a way I was glad to get back into the midst of modern China. I had almost lost touch even with the literary revolution except to know that it was still going on. True, Nanking was not the center of change, and certainly then I could not foresee that in less than ten years it would be the capital of Chiang Kai-chek’s revolutionary new government. When I went there to live, it was still an ancient and conservative city and, by its own tradition, was even the stronghold of a school of old-fashioned scholars who opposed the “common language” of the young Western-trained intellectuals’ school, the “riksha-coolie-talk school,” as Lin Shu liked to call it. Nevertheless, Nanking was also a center of historical Chinese life, the capital for a long time of the fabulous Ming dynasty, and now it had two Christian colleges, one for men, one for women, and the Chinese National University also.
In my northern home town there were feasts and farewells and exchanges of gifts and considerable weeping and many promises to visit before finally I closed the new brick house, in which I had supposed I would spend the rest of my life, and took the train southward.
Island Beach, New Jersey
Our old Coast Guard house stands bleak and unimproved on the New Jersey shore. I came here today in the early morning, bringing nothing with me except a little food. A few worn dresses hang in the closet from one year’s end to the other, a couple of bathing suits and some sandals, and depending on the season I get into dress or bathing suit and go down to the sea. On the other side of the narrow tongue of sandy soil is the wide bay where my American children played safely through their summer months when they were little, an old rowboat securely tethered to the rough dock for the center of imagination. They fell out of it into the shallow water and climbed back into it a hundred times a day, they crabbed and fished and rowed as far as the rope would go. Then suddenly they outgrew the bay and we moved our quarters to the Coast Guard house on the oceanside, and the bay was useful only for serious crabbing and later for the first outboard motor.
To the sea I go with love and terror, for actually I am afraid of water and I know why. I crossed the Pacific too often and too young, and I am never deceived by calm under sunshine or even under the moon. The madness is there, hidden in the depths of unknown caverns. And yet I go back to the sea again and again, although I do not want to stay long and there are certain times of the year when I would not be near it for any reason.
The beach is wide and deserted today except for a few fishermen who do not turn their heads to see who passes. It is as private here as any lonely coral isle could be, white sand, blue sky and a sea more blue. The children have gone out to sail, the house is empty and quiet, and memory flows unchecked as I sit alone by the seaward window.
…I had been in Nanking only once before I went to live there and that had been as a girl when I visited a school friend. My memories of it were vague and overlaid with later experiences, and now I saw the city with fresh eyes. It lies seven miles from the Yangtse River, a vast walled area, and its city wall is one of the handsomest in China, made of large brick as strong as stone, and so wide at the top that several automobiles can travel abreast. This wall is twenty-five miles in circumference, and I was to know it later for various reasons, one of which was that during the famines which befell North China periodically the refugees flooded into Nanking and lacking other space built their matting huts on top of the city wall where the winter winds were the most bitter. One of the few angry discussions I ever had with a Chinese friend was with a young woman of Nanking who had been graduated from the University of Chicago, where she specialized in social service. We had a famine that first winter in Nanking, a very bad one, and I tried to do my share in getting food and clothing for the thousands of wretched people huddled on the city wall. Thus I went to Mrs. Yang, only that was not her name. She was a young and very pretty woman — pretty, that is, in a sort of hard smart modern fashion. Her satin dresses were Chinese, but cut tight to her slender figure, and her hair was short. Her house was a two-story, Western brick building, furnished in semi-foreign fashion. In the neat little living room with flowered carpet, curtained windows, formal modern landscapes in gilt frames on the wall, I told her of the plight of the refugees on the city wall. She would not believe that conditions were as I portrayed them for her, nor could I persuade her to climb the city wall and see for herself. The street in which she lived was the most modern in the old city and she never went far from it.
“I saw such things in Chicago slums,” she said complacently, “but I am sure that they are not here.”
Nor would she stir herself to find out the truth. In my memory she is embalmed as the typical Western-educated Chinese who is no longer Chinese. She had created a little tight nice world of her own, whose citizens were all like herself. They lived in neat little brick houses, their husbands had university jobs and their children went to an exclusive kindergarten. Beyond this they did not want to know. Perhaps they were afraid to know. China had its vast and frightening aspects.
The city wall was more than a place for refugees, however. In the spring when they had gone back to their land, it became a pleasant place to walk and I could gaze out over the countryside and the mountains. One mountain stood high and clear against the sky, Tze-ch’ing Shan or Purple Mountain, and it became a resort of delight as I came to know my city better. Temples were hidden in the mountain, beautiful shaded spots of repose, and near there, too, were the tombs of the Ming Emperors, approached by avenues of huge stone beasts and men on guard. There were many stories still told about the Mings. No one, it was said, knew where the emperors were actually buried, for at the time of an Imperial funeral, nine processions, all exactly alike, proceeded at the same time from the nine gates of the city. Stories were told also of fabulous treasures buried in the tombs but I doubted that. Too many tombs had been looted during the centuries, and probably all that was left was the human dust, and that much disturbed.