I heard rumors, but then one could always hear rumors in a Chinese city lacking daily newspapers and regular reporters. I could not imagine how a modern city could be made from our old capital. Then one day I understood. Our tailor, he who first had come to tell us of the Communists’ entry into the city, and he who, by the way, and I may as well say it here, was later the tragic hero of my short story “The Frill,” came to tell me that “they” were pushing down the homes of the people with a monstrous machine. “They” by this time meant the new government.
“Please explain,” I said, unbelieving.
“I cannot explain,” he replied. “It is being done.”
I put on my jacket and went out to see for myself. We lived not far from the main road into the city and a few minutes’ walk brought me to the spot. There I saw the monster machine, something I had never seen before nor heard of, and therefore which I could not name. A man rode upon it, a young Chinese man, not a workingman but a Western-educated man, and he was guiding it slowly along one side of the street and then the other. What was he doing? He was pushing down the houses. Those old one-story houses, made of hand-shaped brick and cemented together with lime plaster, had stood well enough for shelter through hundreds of years, but they had been built long before such a machine had been conceived in the mind of Western man, and they could not withstand the assault. They crumbled into ruins.
Had this been in my earlier world, I would have stopped the man and asked him what he did and why. But this was another world, and I did not ask. I was a foreigner, I knew it now, and I dared not ask. I stood among the Chinese people, watching, silent, stricken. And the young man said not a word, not even when an old grandmother who had lived in a house since she was born, began to cry wildly and aloud. I asked her son in a whisper if the families were paid for the loss of their homes, and he whispered back they had been promised pay, but none of them trusted promises. I never knew whether they were paid. I think it likely that some were paid and some were not, depending upon the personal honesty of those through whom the government dealt with individual owners. But no money could pay for the homes that were gone, with all their inherited traditions and memories.
I went back to my own resurrected home with a heavy heart indeed, for I knew that from that day on the new government was doomed in the end to fail. Why? Because it had failed already in understanding the people whom it purposed to govern, and when a government does not rule for the benefit of those ruled, sooner or later it always fails, and history teaches that lesson to every generation, whether or not its rulers can or will understand. And the Communists in China gained their first victory that day, even though they were then in apparent flight. True, the people did not know who the Communists were, true that the name was still only a name, but when the young Nationalists sowed these first wild seeds of the winds of resentment in the hearts of their own people, they prepared for the whirlwinds which would compel the people to turn to their enemy merely because it was the enemy of those whom they resented. It is a natural human impulse, individual as well as general, that when one hates, the hatred becomes a benefit to the enemy of the hated one. Thus before the new government was even well established, it had alienated the people.
And yet, cursed as I always am with the necessity to see two sides of a question, I felt deeply for the young Nationalists and especially for those who had been educated in the United States. They came back so eagerly to their own country, proud of their honors and their degrees, sincerely patriotic, too, but in the years while they had been away they had forgotten what their country was, enormous, illiterate, mediaeval, or as they loved to call it, “feudal.” To me who had always lived there it was beautiful in spite of its ancient filth, its illiteracy, its age. Nay, it was beautiful because of its age, and the vast accumulation of its wisdom. A people so reasonable, so ready to change when they understood the need, could easily have been persuaded and led, but they were the last people on earth to be forced. Chinese were born, it seemed to me, with an accumulated wisdom, a natural sophistication, an intelligent naïveté, and unless they were transplanted too young, these qualities ripened in them. To talk even with a farmer and his family, none of whom could read or write, was often to hear a philosophy at once sane and humorous. If ever I am homesick for China, now that I am home in my own country, it is when I discover here no philosophy. Our people have opinions and creeds and prejudices and ideas but as yet no philosophy. That, perhaps, can only come to a people with thousands of years. And the sad and frightening fact was that the young and uprooted Chinese, who had been trained in Western universities or in missionary schools and other modern schools in China, had lost the Chinese philosophy. They belonged neither to East nor to West, and they were pitiful, for they were dedicated to the improvement of their own country, and yet they could not understand that it was impossible for them to save their countrymen because they themselves were lost. They still did not know how to speak to their countrymen. I cringed when I heard an earnest young Chinese, the milk of his American doctorate still wet behind his ears, haranguing a Chinese crowd on a street in our city, or in a village where I chanced to be that day. He was so thin, so intense, so filled with missionary zeal as he talked about sanitation, or better farming, or the new government, or foreign imperialism, or the Unequal Treaties, or whatever cause lay upon his soul, and he did not know that with every word he spoke he was destroying his own hopes. Why? Because he spoke to the wise old people as though they were serfs, stupid and ignorant, and he was angry with them in his heart because they stood before him unmoved and they laughed when the sweat ran down his poor young cheeks. He was so angry that he could scarcely keep from weeping, and I am sure that he would have been glad if lightning had struck them dead. But Heaven never helped him, and the rain continued to fall and the sun to shine upon them as well as upon him and by such divine injustice the best of reformers are confounded.