During the long hot summers there was always a new and ailing baby to keep alive somehow, and the mother’s milk never was enough and each morning I made up bottles of formula and the mother came for them. Each year I remonstrated with the gardener and urged self-control, and he agreed with all that I said, but the new baby arrived as promptly as ever. At last I could only look my reproach, for words were useless, and one day he came in and said he had a favor to ask of me.
“Please, Learned Mother,” he said plaintively, “find me a job on the opposite side of the city so that I cannot come home.”
I knew too well what this meant.
“Which is it this time?” I inquired. “Boy or girl?”
“Both,” he said in a whisper.
“Twins!” I gasped.
He nodded his miserable head, speechless.
It was another world, familiar and yet new. My parents were not too far away, only two hours by rail, and I went home as often as I could to see them. My mother was plainly fading, though she came of a long-lived family and was not yet old, and I was increasingly anxious about her.
My child was born that first year in Nanking, too, and after that I was not so free to come and go as I had been. I did not mind, for to have a child was a miracle to me and I did not dream of the dark future in store for us both. Mercifully I was to have nearly four years of happy ignorance about her. During that same year my mother died, not suddenly, but slowly and unwillingly, and I am glad that she never knew what lay ahead for me. But let me tell of the year of birth and death.
It was 1921 and I was in full touch again with what was going on in China. Japanese militarists had made great profit from the World War, for in 1915 Japan began the conquest of China in earnest. While the Western Powers were busy with the war, she made the infamous demands which would have reduced China almost to a colony, until the nine-power Washington conference, in 1922, was to return the province of Shantung to China and restored a measure of her independence. It soon became evident, however, that unless China could organize herself somehow and establish a unified government, she would eventually be swallowed up by Japan. Responsible Chinese were anxious, as one irresponsible war lord after another continued to borrow money from Japan and to give national resources as surety.
I began almost immediately to teach English literature in the National University but my students were distracted from their studies because of their rage, equally given to the Japanese aggressors and to their own indifferent and ignorant war lords. In Nanking itself we lived under a war lord who was only slightly better than those in the North, and his lack of energy in betraying his country was due to opium rather than to patriotism. It was a strange double sort of life which reminds me of the way we live now at this moment in the United States. While the President and his cabinet tell us that we may at any moment be annihilated, and while we realize the validity of the warning yet we all go on living and planning the details of our days exactly as though no threat hung over our heads. We know, we realize, we are not apathetic, but the monstrous potentiality of our times is too much for us. We cannot act as though the bomb might fall, or else we could not live at all.
So it was in those days in Nanking, when it was clear to everyone and especially I think to the young Chinese intellectuals what horrors lay ahead, and yet we went our daily way. The seasons changed, my garden bloomed, the markets were filled with fine foods and flowers and crowded with buyers, we did our work carefully and well, we went to the hills for picnics and weekends, the city seemed happy, the people were content and prosperous, our war lord was not oppressive, and yet we all knew that at any moment it might and perhaps it must end, because no one knew what to do to prevent the future before it became inevitable.
My friends now were entirely different from the ones in my northern town. They were my neighbors, young couples, both Chinese and American, who were ultramodern in their education and outlook, and my students who came from all over China. Some came, too, from Korea and it was in them that I discovered the source of the deepest hatred against Japan. These young Koreans were the sons and daughters of Korean families who had not been able to endure Japanese rule in their own land, and had therefore left the country, some to come to China, others to go to Manchuria and still others to Russia to rear their children. From their parents the young Koreans had learned rebellion, and so I first began to understand the causes whose results have led straight and inevitably to the Korea of today.
Three dates are monuments in my memory of the next decade. In October of that year of 1921 my mother died, after a last long illness. She had apparently recovered from sprue, but actually she had never recovered. The mucous membranes of her intestines were scarred, I suppose, and she could not absorb sufficient nourishment to maintain her health, whatever her diet. I wanted to take her to the United States but she was convinced that she could not survive the incurable seasickness which no remedy could allay and she would not cross the ocean. More than the conviction, I think she felt it was too late to lead another life than the one she had so long lived. She could not begin again, even in her own country, and so she quietly began to die and, although the dying took months, its end was soon clear and inevitable. She did not want to die, that was plain, too, but there was no help for it. I was with her almost constantly. But I could not hide from myself that she was doomed, and I tried to face a world in which I could never see her face again. I had learned to live my own life and yet it was rooted in my deep relationship with her. The relationship was sometimes irksome because of the very fact that I loved her so well and understood her and recognized in myself certain qualities which were hers. There were even moments, the parting being inescapable, when I longed for it to be over and in the past. This is the cruelty of youth, and there is no one who is not guilty of it sometimes. I look now at my own children and reflect that I must neither love nor be loved too much if I want them to enjoy their freedom while I am alive and not anticipate it before my death. Yet there must be enough love, too, for growth.
When on a grey October afternoon the nurse told us, my father and my sister and me, that my mother was dying it was I alone who could not go to her bedside. Had she been conscious, I would have compelled myself and indeed might have wanted to go and see her last conscious looks and hear her last words. But she was in coma, and whether I went or not she would never know, and so I let them enter her bedroom without me and I stood in the hall outside and gazed out of the window at a landscape dimmed by tears. When I think of her dying I still see that landscape, the bamboos swaying below the window, the valley beyond, the small farmhouses and the tawny fields, the late gleaners moving slowly across them, women and children in their peasant blue, and beyond them again the distant mountains. Those were long minutes in which I felt my very flesh being torn from hers. I longed to go to her and I could not. My father opened the door at last and said in a strange calm voice that she was gone and then he walked wearily down the hall and the stairs to his own study, and a few minutes later my sister came, but I cannot remember beyond that.
The next day a neighbor missionary coaxed me to go in and see her before the coffin lid was closed.
“She looks beautiful,” the neighbor said in a tender voice. “You’ll be sorry if you don’t take a last look at your mother.”
I went in unwillingly, nevertheless, and glanced at the waxen figure which I could scarcely recognize and then rushed away. And I wish, even at the length of these years, that I had not to remember that waxen doll, who was only someone strange.