We went back, the first American family to return, although my unconquerable old father had returned alone some months before and had been living quietly with a Chinese family in the city. How strange it was to ride again into the city gates which had been shut so finally behind us when we left, homeless and possessing nothing! I saw no visible change, the carriage was as dirty and decrepit as ever, the horse as disconsolate after the revolution as before, and the streets were as crowded and filthy. Nothing else was changed, either, not the great city wall, nor the monumental gates, the pagodas and the temples and above all the soaring crest of Purple Mountain.
I say nothing was changed and yet the carriage had not passed through the city gate before I felt a change. It was in the people. The city was crowded with new people who looked at us with curious and unfriendly stares. I saw familiar faces, too, the peanut vendor who had always stood at the corner of The Drum, Tower was still there, the gatekeeper at the Li Family Gardens, an occasional riksha puller, passers on the street. But they did not smile nor did I. It was too early yet to know if old friends could be recognized.
And so we went jogging along with our few bags to the Chao house, a modest place in a valley below the university buildings, and there we found Mr. and Mrs. Chao and their recently born baby girl and their old parents waiting for us. They were in the tiny living room, and I felt that they were still uneasy and had not dared to come outside to greet us. But they were kind and as warm as ever otherwise, and Mrs. Chao led us to two small rooms set aside for us.
We stayed there a month, and I shall never forget the unfailing daily courtesy of this Chinese family. If they were inconvenienced or in danger from our presence they never let me know. If my two children were troublesome, I heard nothing of it, except that one day my amah told me that the elder child had thrown mud into the jar of soy sauce, that prized possession of every family. Mrs. Chao, being an old-fashioned housewife, made her own soy sauce and it always stood for a whole year fermenting in the yard under the eaves of the house, the jar covered with a wooden lid.
“Do not speak of it,” the amah said. “She made me promise not to tell you. But I do tell you because it will be necessary to show her some special kindness in return when the opportunity comes.”
The opportunity came a few days later when I happened to see in the glass-covered foreign china closet of Mrs. Chao’s living room a fine large platter which had belonged to my set of Haviland china. There it was, quite obvious, and when I first noticed it, I almost cried out, “Oh, where did you find my platter?”
Remembering my amah’s warning, however, I kept silent, and as the days passed, I found other possessions which had once been in my house, a set of teapots, a sewing machine, a victrola and records, and so on.
“Where did she get them?” I asked my amah in the privacy of our own rooms.
“She got them honestly by buying them at the thieves’ market,” the amah said. “That is where the looters sold the foreigners’ goods when the Communists came in.”
“Isn’t it strange she doesn’t ask me if I want them back?” I inquired. I had thought that I understood my Chinese friends, but this was a new experience.
The amah looked surprised. “But you lost them,” she reminded me. “They do not belong to you any more. And she is your friend — why should they not belong to her?”
I could not explain why this seemed wrong reasoning, and yet it did. I was more American than I thought. “I don’t mind anything except my Haviland platter,” I said stubbornly. “I do want that back.”
“Remember the soy sauce, please,” my amah advised. “If you are patient,” she added, “someday you may be able to have the plate again without losing friendship.”
I knew the amah was right. To lose friendship is a human disaster, and so I held my peace and pretended not to see the platter. Meanwhile every day I spent in my own house, superintending repairs, and when I was not satisfied with the work, getting down on the floor myself to scrub and sand and disinfect every crack between the boards. All the walls had to be whitewashed and every bit of woodwork and stone scrubbed with lysol. The house smelled hideously but at last it was clean and safe to live in again, and I began to gather some furniture and to hang new curtains.
Some of the household objects which our good servants had saved for us were returned from their hiding places in friends’ houses, enough so that here and there were remembrances of what had been before. And speaking of this, I must speak, too, of the manuscript of The Exile, which I had put into a wall closet. There it had been overlooked by the mobs but discovered later by students of mine who had gone to my house to salvage my books. They saved many books and these now stand upon the shelves of the library here in my American home, their pages torn and their backs soiled, but they are precious to me. I even have ten of the old Dickens volumes which I read so often as a child. Among these books when they were returned to me I found my manuscript quite safe and indeed still in the box in which I had left it, and not a page was missing.
And it was next to the last day, I think, before we left the Chad house, when absent-mindedly I let my eyes rest on the Haviland platter. I was not thinking of it any more, but unguardedly my eyes had fallen upon it and Mrs. Chao noticed. She said in her sweet calm voice, “I bought that big platter of yours so that I might have a dish upon which to place a whole fish. But it is too flat — the sauce runs off.”
“You have been so kind to us,” I said, trying to seem indifferent. “Let me buy you a big fish plate in the china shops in South City.”
“Do not trouble yourself,” she said. “Are we not friends?”
It was true that our friendship was deeper than ever. We had enjoyed the month together, and not by the slightest sign had the Chinese family showed the least weariness, although there must have been times when our presence was a burden indeed. I doubt that any but a Chinese family could have been so unfailing in courtesy, for no other people, perhaps, are so trained in the art of human relationships.
We moved at last to our own house, leaving gifts behind us, and among the gifts was a fine big fish dish which my amah had gone to South City to buy for me. The day after we moved, Mrs. Chao’s amah came up the hill with my Haviland platter.
“My mistress asks me to thank you especially for the fish dish,” she said as she stood before me. “She asks me to say that since she now has the fish dish, she would like to present you with this plate.”
With both hands she presented to me my plate, wrapped in red paper, and I received it with both hands as a valuable gift, and certainly as one which I had never seen before.
“You see,” my amah said, later, “if relationships are conducted with honor, the reward is sure.”
“Thank you for teaching me,” I said.
My friendship with Mrs. Chao continued throughout the years, we discussed the most intimate details in one family crisis or another, yet never did we violate the courtesy of the platter that had been mine, then was hers, and now was mine again. It was an incident, slight in itself, and yet for me it has been unforgettable. Through my Chinese youth I had learned that the proper conduct of human relationships is the most important lesson of life. Now the learning was crystallized. I perceived a technique as well as a text. The technique is mutual consideration and deference, applied with patience and in the certain conviction that there is reason in every man and woman, a cause for all that is said and done. Such cause must be known and understood before judgment can be made and action proceed. Great lessons are learned usually in simple and everyday ways. So it was in the case of the Haviland platter and the fish dish, exchanged between my Chinese friend and me. At this distance of years I have forgotten the hardships of that return to the despoiled house in Nanking. What I remember is the lesson of friendship. That is a permanent possession.