Already I had learned that we had minds among us which could not be informed, and so I held my peace. Now when I think of the young men who manned the bureaus of our new government I think always of that incident, and I offer it here as example, if not proof, of the dangers of ignorance. As for the Liang lions, I am sure they still stand there as they have for hundreds of years and I am sure, too, that the village women still hang their faded garments upon their stone shoulders and haunches, and this though Mao Tse-tung reigns today in Peking, even as Chiang Kai-shek reigned in those days in Nanking.
Reigned? Well, something like it, for he was having a hard time to preside as a president of a republic. He knew nothing about modern democratic government, or perhaps any government except a military one. He was used to men who came when he said come and who went when he said go. The education of a military man is the same the world over, and our President was a military man. He had, however, a number of wilful civilians in his cabinet and they often opposed him manfully. When he could not thunder them down he began to kill them. Such a protest was aroused by this highhandedness that he paused, in some astonishment, to discover that evidently a president is not an emperor. He earnestly wanted to be modern, I do believe, in spite of not having the education for it, for certainly his year in Moscow and his other years in a military school in Japan did not educate him for democracy. It is to his credit that he modified his ruthlessness then to imprisonment, and at last even to a fairly pleasant imprisonment. There was a hot springs resort not far from Nanking, where he had made a house for himself and his wife. This house he turned over to be a place of confinement for the members of his cabinet who disagreed with him. There they went and there they stayed until they saw reason, and I remember passing sometimes when I was riding outside the city wall and asking the villagers who was now in prison. They always knew. As for younger offenders, there were either none who dared to oppose our President or he disposed of them in ways less polite.
I do not propose to blame him now for these doings. He had risen to a place of great power suddenly and without previous preparation, and it was inevitable that he behaved in the only ways that he knew, which were the traditional ways of the military conqueror who kills his enemies if they will not bargain with him, and tradition had not really been changed very much even by the Communist advisors whom Chiang Kai-shek had once obeyed and then rejected. Modern communism itself is not new, perhaps, shaped as it is by the tyrannies and cruelties of ancient Russian rulers. Chiang Kai-shek sincerely did the best he knew, but he did not know enough. I do not know whether ignorance can be called a crime. If so, then many in this world are guilty, and I see them here in my own country, too, in high places.
Meanwhile I was writing The Good Earth. This I did in three months, typing the manuscript twice myself in that time. When it was finished I felt very doubtful indeed of its value, but to whom could I turn for judgment? My brother was in China that year on a mission from the Milbank Memorial Fund in New York, to look into the Mass Education Movement headed by James Yen, with a view to giving a large grant to that admirable work. He had only a few days to spend with me, and during that time I mentioned shyly indeed that I had written a novel. He was kind as always, he expressed interest, but not enough for me to feel I could ask him to take his valuable time to read my manuscript and tell me if it were any good. My old father certainly could not tell me, and there was no one else. So I tied up the pages and mailed them off to New York myself, and prepared to wait while I busied myself with other work.
At this period of my life and of China’s history I was keenly aware of the Chinese peasant, his wonderful strength and goodness, his amusing and often alarming shrewdness and wisdom, his cynicism and his simplicity, his direct approach to life which is the habit of a deep and natural sophistication. It seemed to me that the Chinese peasant, who comprised eighty-five percent of China’s population, was so superior a human group, that it was a loss to humanity that he was also voiceless because he was illiterate. And it was this group, so charming, so virile, so genuinely civilized in spite of illiteracy and certain primitive conditions of life that might very well be merely the result of enforced mental isolation from the currents of modern thinking and discovery, whom the young moderns, rootless and ruthless, proposed to “educate.” Nothing in Communist theory enrages me more than Trotsky’s callous remark that the peasants are the “packhorses” of a nation. Who made them packhorses? And to what heights may not these “packhorses” rise if they are considered human beings instead of beasts of burden? For in all my years in China I never ceased to feel intolerable pain and anger when I looked into the thin intelligent face of some Chinese peasant twisted into sheer physical agony because on his back he bore a burden too much even for a beast. I have seen his slender legs quiver under the weight of a two-hundred-pound bag of rice, or under the huge wardrobe trunk of some travelling foreign tourist. Edwin Markham’s poem “The Man with the Hoe,” discovered late by me, gave me a wonderful catharsis of the spirit. Here was an American who could have understood the whole problem of Asia. And my continuing regret concerning Asian leaders is that so few of them have understood the quality of their own peasants, and therefore few have valued this mighty and common man of the earth. And among them the Communists are the most guilty, for with all their talk, I do not see that they have valued this man, either, and their condescension to him makes my soul sick. Yesterday in New York a young Chinese woman sat in my small living room and told me breathlessly of the great and marvellous changes that the Communists are making in China. And in her words, too, I caught the old stink of condescension.
My mind could not rest after I had finished The Good Earth and almost immediately I began to write another novel, The Mother, in which I portrayed the life of a Chinese peasant woman, but more than that, I hoped, it was the life of such a woman anywhere, who has been given no fulfillment except her own experience and understanding. Everywhere in the world there are such women and by the million. I had supposed in those days that certainly they were not in my own country, but when I came here to live I found her here, too, in many a farmhouse not far from where I write these pages, and certainly in the Deep South where she is often Negro, or on the deserts of the Western states, where she must travel miles to meet another human creature, or shut away in the mountains of New England. That woman in China, however, was too remote from the book readers in my own country, and certainly from the minds of the critics and reviewers for them to understand her — a strange thing, I thought, until I remembered how alien to me are the warped and twisted people in the novels of William Faulkner, I never saw such people in China, but I take it for granted that he lives among them here since they make the stuff of his famous books. But abroad, in France, and in Italy and in other countries where the peasant woman is strong and alive, my readers knew her and my book was understood. It is one of the compensations of the writer that somewhere there is always the reader who understands. I remember an honest critic in New York said once of my book Pavilion of Women that he did not “get” what it was about. Why should he, how could he? But from all over the world women have written to me and comforted me for their understanding of that book. Yet it would not be fair of me if I did not record here that, when I had finished The Mother, I was far from pleased with it and I threw it in the wastebasket beside my desk. There it lay and it was only chance that it was not thrown away permanently. The houseboy happened to be away for a few days and the baskets were not emptied, since one servant did not presume to do the work of another lest it appear he envied him the job, and before the houseboy returned, I had retrieved my manuscript to examine it again and see whether I was wrong. Eventually it was a book, although I put it away for several years before I offered it doubtfully to my publishers. That houseboy, by the way, had a curious habit of triumphing over fate and gods. He was a tall pallid melancholy silent fellow, a dogged pessimist at all times. One day he appeared so phenomenally pallid that his yellow countenance was actually a pale moss green and I inquired if he were ill. He was not, he said, but his wife had typhoid fever and he had to care for her and the baby and got no sleep. I was properly terrified since he handled dishes and silver and waited on the table and helped the cook. I begged him to take his wife to the hospital, but he refused, saying that nobody went to a foreign hospital unless he expected to die. I knew better than to press the matter since if the woman did die, I would be held responsible for having insisted, and so I merely said that he had better stay at home and care for his wife until she was better. He reflected upon this for a while, standing stock-still before me, his disconsolate head drooping, and at last he said that he would take her to the hospital, since there was no one to look after the child anyway in the daytime, and he could not care for both wife and child even though he stayed at home, since he had not slept for six nights. So to the hospital she went, and after apparent recovery one day she took a turn for the worse. The houseboy came to tell me that she was dying, as he had feared she would if he put her in the foreign hospital, and that he wanted to take her home now. Since the message was that she was near death, I begged him to leave her in peace, but no, his mind was made up, we were all helpless and he took her home in a riksha, unconscious, saying that he would let me know when he could come back to work. I half expected never to see him again, since it was quite probable that in his habitually debilitated condition he would have the disease himself.