Meanwhile I was also enjoying quite a different sort of life. First of all were my house and garden. Though I can live anywhere, be either rich or poor with equal acceptance, I have to have a setting, and if there is not one, I make it. I subdued, therefore, the too large and somewhat graceless grey brick house where I lived, and within the limits of a small amount of money, I did as my mother had taught me to do and created as much beauty as I could. The garden furnished plenty of flowers, and well-designed furniture of cheap materials could be cushioned with the inexpensive but beautiful Chinese stuffs. Wicker and rattan I had wearied of, but the Chinese about that time were weaving cash string, a thin robe made of grass, upon strong bamboo frames, and such chairs were comfortable and substantial. Old Chinese blackwood tables could be bought cheaply, and there were always delicate and beautiful bowls and vases in the chinashops. One day in a silkshop I found yards of faded silk going at a bargain price and I bought it for curtains and dyed it in different colors. Matting rugs upon the floor gave good effect and sunshine and flowers did the rest. I enjoyed the whole process and have often thought to myself that if I had not wanted to write books I would have liked to build houses and decorate them. But then I like to cook, too, and my children know that if I did not want to write books above all else, I would be a cook in a big family, perhaps in an orphanage, and make delicious dishes for everybody. But there are many persons I would like to have been — for example, again, a sculptor — had I not wanted to write books. I am fortunate that I had not to make the decision. At that I once wrote a novel about a woman sculptor, entitled This Proud Heart, and there, I suppose, in the curious way writers have, I fulfilled a dream.
My life in my northern town had been simple indeed compared to the one I now led. I taught classes not only in the Christian university but also in the provincial one, and had therefore two entirely different groups of students. The young men in the Christian university were the sons of Christians and had scholarships or they were the sons of the rich who could afford to pay substantial tuition fees. All of them understood English at least fairly well and usually they came from port cities and were somewhat cosmopolitan and certainly conservative in their family backgrounds. The students in the National University, on the other hand, were nearly all poor and they knew little English and they paid no tuition. Most of them had not much to eat and they wore a sort of blue cotton garb later known as the Sun Yat-sen uniform. In winter they were bitterly cold, and so was I, for we had no heat in the buildings and when window panes were broken they were not replaced, whereas in the Christian university everything was in good order and we had central heat and much comfort. Yet I enjoyed my work in the provincial university far more, because there my students were desperate for learning and they waited eagerly for my arrival and tried to keep me from leaving at the end of our classes. Their English was almost unintelligible and had I not spoken Chinese I could not have taught them. Yet they yearned to speak English, and so we struggled along. They were young men and women, thinking and questioning and alive, and I learned far more from them than from the suave and acquiescent men students in the Christian university. I came away frozen with cold in my body but warm in my heart and stimulated in mind because between me and those eager young students, so thinly clad and badly fed, there were no barriers. They wanted to talk about everything in the world, and we talked. Even now I get letters from some who have escaped Communism, though most of them are dead in the wars and revolutions that have swept over us all.
In those days Sun Yat-sen was still alive and still working to bring unity to the country, but he was in retreat in the South. In Nanking we lived under the war lord, Sun Chuan-fang, a temperamental man younger than most of the war lords who divided the country into fragments, and in some ways less oppressive, but still he was a war lord. We were not disturbed, however, unless our war lord undertook a battle with some neighboring war lord, and the period of what is called, historically, fragmentation, seemed natural enough to the Chinese and to me. China, as I have said, always went into fragmentation under war lords in the periods between dynasties, and the people were patient as usual and waited for things to work themselves out. Without being religious, the ordinary Chinese had a vague faith in Heaven and believed that nothing could succeed without its will. This meant that whoever finally assumed the leadership of the nation would be the best one under Heaven’s design. Meanwhile family life went on, the center and the core of the nation as it had always been, and our war lord did not interfere with our affairs.
My own interest has never been in politics but in the thoughts of men and women and so I continued to be deeply concerned with the literary revolution. By 1920 the spoken language had become the accepted written language of the new times. The question was, could real works of literature be written in the vernacular? Older scholars still insisted that it could never express allusive meanings as did the wen-li, or classical style of writing. The young scholars, Western-trained, had to prove that it could. Hitherto it had been used only for magazine and newspaper writing. Here again Hu Shih was the leader of the new school, for he now began to write his monumental work, Outline of the History of Chinese Philosophy. It was never finished, alas, but the first volume proved again that the Chinese spoken language could also be a beautifully clear and graceful written language, flexible and alive, expressing the most profound meaning and thought.
Once Hu Shih had shown the value of the new written language, young Chinese writers rushed to follow his example, and a mass of experimental material got into print. Most of it was bad, I must confess, and there were reasons enough for this dismal fact. The young Chinese who called themselves modern were burning with unclarified emotions, rebellious and ambitious, but actually they still had nothing to say. They had cut themselves off too abruptly from their traditional roots and had been trained too quickly and superficially in Western cultures. It was inevitable that when they began to write they wrote imitatively, and since they refused to imitate their own literary figures of the great Chinese past, they imitated the Western writers, who were foreign to them in spite of their determination to be modern, or Western. There were no modern Chinese in fact, there were only Westernized Chinese. How wearisome it was in those days to open one much-praised Chinese novel after another only to discover that it was all but plagiarized from a Western one! What a disappointment to go to the new modern theater to see an eagerly anticipated play by a famous young Chinese playwright and discover that it was a Eugene O’Neill play, scarcely disguised by Chinese names!
Since there was little original work, it was inevitable that much of the outpouring of the new writers soon became literary criticism of each other and of Western books, and shallow stuff that was, too. Goethe’s Sorrows of Werther was the novel which seemed to suit the mood of most of the young Chinese and in my effort to understand them I read hundreds of Chinese “Sorrows.” It became ridiculous, and yet so serious were these young men and women that one dared not laugh. It even became the fashion to ape the Western poets in person and one handsome and rather distinguished and certainly much beloved young poet was proud to be called “The Chinese Shelley.” He used to sit in my living room and talk by the hour and wave his beautiful hands in exquisite and descriptive gestures until now when I think of him, I see first his hands. He was a northern Chinese, tall and classically beautiful in looks, and his hands were big and perfectly shaped and smooth as a woman’s hands, and guiltless, I am sure, of any real manual labor. For our young Chinese scholars maintained the old traditions in one respect at least. They did no physical work whatever. Our Chinese Shelley died young, I am sad to say, for he had a sort of power of his own, and could he have outgrown the Shelley phase he might have become himself. But in his desire to have wings he was among the first to take to airplanes and he died in an accident.