In all my books I have made such mixture. Years later, for example, I put into Kinfolk bits of the same northern country. Uncle Tao’s tumor, which he kept so proudly in a glass bottle for everyone to see, grew first and actually in the stout body of Madame Chang. She too mustered the courage to have it cut out, and she too put it into a bottle of alcohol and kept it on the table in her main hall for everybody to see. “Are your characters real people?” A hundred times and again I am asked that question and of course they are real people, created from the dust of memory and breathed upon by love. Yet not one of them lived outside my books exactly as they do within them.
How long the days were, in the separation from my child, although I crammed them full! In the afternoon I taught my classes in the new government university, and when I came home at four o’clock there were always guests for tea, young Chinese intellectuals, old Chinese friends, young Americans and English from the Language School which had been opened in Nanking by cooperating mission boards. Still the days were too long, for there were the evenings and the weekends and the long hot summers when schools were closed, and I did not care to go to Kuling any more. In the summers I had even more time, for my father always spent the two hottest months of summer with my sister’s family in the mountains, and the house was emptier than ever. It was then that I decided to begin my translation of the great Chinese novel Shui Hu Chüan, which later I called All Men Are Brothers. The Chinese title is meaningless in English, although allusive enough in Chinese, where robbers and pirates have always gathered about the watery margins of river and lakes, and the Chinese words refer to them. Four years I worked on the translation of that mighty book, spending upon it the hours when I could not write my own books and when I did not teach. It was a profound experience, for though the book was written five centuries ago, the pageant of Chinese life was still the same, and in the Communists, fleeing now into the Northwest, I saw the wild rebels and malcontents who had risen against government in the old days of Empire.
The same? No, there was now something much more dangerous. Those early bandits were not organized under a sinister new banner. They had been only Chinese rebels, angry against other Chinese who ruled them unjustly, and they had a rough sense of justice which made them help a good man and destroy a tyrant, whether he were an official or a village bully. But I knew by now that the Communists were part of a world movement, and when the Chinese malcontents and rebels allied themselves with Russian Communism it was something that we had never seen before.
Yet I was still only a bystander. No foreigner had any influence in those days among the young intellectuals except the advisors who were hired from abroad, for example, Bertrand Russell from England who came with Dora Black and put our young men and women into a furor of upset, and soon they were all talking free love, by which they mean the right to choose their own husbands and wives, until my elderly Chinese friends, their parents, were appalled.
“Is this what it means to be a republic?” Thus my old neighbor Madame Wu, inquired of me at least twice every time we met, and I could not reply, for I did not myself know then what it meant to live in a republic.
Paul Monroe and John Dewey came to help in the organizing of the new public schools, and they did sound work in planning for a university in every province, a high school, or middle school as we called it, in every county, and a grade school in every city. It was still impossible to speak of compulsory education, for there were few teachers ready to teach in modern schools. For another generation, at least, seventy-five percent of China’s children must go without schools. Now, after having seen years of public schools in my own country I sometimes question, however heretical that is, whether a compulsory school system is all that our fathers planned it to be. The task of the teacher in the United States is very hard. I see classrooms of lounging unwilling adolescents, and schoolrooms where noisy and troublesome children must be taught whether they wish or not, the elements of learning. And most difficult of all, I see bricklayers and truck drivers and mechanics, good men but certainly ignorant, get more pay than the teachers themselves or than most brainworkers can command, and then I do not blame the American children for their confusion. Perhaps indeed it is true, as a certain young adolescent remarked to me the other day, that there is no use in going to college when one can make much more money than a college professor by stopping his education after high school and undertaking a career as a truck driver. In China the brainworker, the intellectual, always commanded the highest salaries, for there knowledge was valued, not only for its own sake, but because it is the source of wisdom in the conduct of life, and for this technical knowledge was not considered enough.
As a bystander, therefore, I watched my Chinese world change before my eyes. Government bureaus by the dozen were established, manned by clever young Chinese who could speak English or French or German better than they spoke Chinese. I remember sitting beside one such young man at a great dinner one night. He asked me what I had been doing that day by way of diversion, and I told him that I had ridden horseback out into the country to a distant village to see the ancient stone lions of the Liang dynasty. It had been a beautiful autumn day: the air golden and still. The Chinese countryside is never lovelier than in autumn, after the rice has been cut and the gleaners, in their blue cotton garments and carrying their bamboo baskets, go out over the stubbled fields to pick up the grain that has been left. Behind them in turn come the inevitable flocks of white geese to find the single grains that the gleaners leave. I had ridden happily and alone along the earthen paths that followed the ancient stone paved roads and so I had come to the Liang Lion Village, and there had dismounted. It was a gay place after the harvest; young women were playing with the children on the threshing floors, now swept clean, and old women were spinning in the doorways. I had not been there before, but I had long known of the stone lions from Western books on Chinese sculpture, and so I recognized them at the end of the village street, although they were at the moment covered with the village wash. From under ragged blue coats and trousers the noble beasts looked out with the patient gentle air of life endured for centuries. The villagers knew very well that they were Liang sculptures, and they gave me a lively and fairly accurate account of their history.
This I relayed that evening to my dinner companion. He was a spruce young man in a well-cut Western business suit. I could see that his mind was on other matters while I talked, for he drank tea, drummed his fingers on the table, coughed and moved restlessly in his chair. When I had finished he said decisively, “There are no Liang stone lions near Nanking.”
I was startled at his rejection of history, and I protested mildly. “Western scholars have long admired the stone animals, and you will find photographs and data—”
“There are no Liang stone lions near Nanking,” he said again more loudly than before.