“Are you not afraid you will fall ill?” I inquired.
He was a hearty fellow and he gave a hearty laugh. “You would fall ill if you drank it,” he assured me in a loud cheerful voice. “But it is safe for me. The river-gods know that I trust them for my living and they would not let me die from drinking their waters.”
I said nothing, smiled, and let him think I was impressed, for I had learned long ago how vain is preachment. And who knows what an accumulation of germs had done for him? Germs war one against another within the battlefield of the human body, we are told, and the result is immunity — that is, provided the body is not killed first.
And speaking of Lotus Lake, it was there and in that same flood year that Charles and Anne Lindbergh arrived in their plane all the way from the United States, to help in relief. What an event that was, and how the people crowded our streets and roadsides to see the brave young couple who had come so far! As usual, I stood among the crowds to see what was to be seen, and I watched the faces of the Chinese and listened to their talk as the two Americans came walking by, Lindbergh looking very tall and his wife small and gentle and kind. Yet it is not the Chinese that I remember when I recall that scene, but a little American boy of eight or ten, who stood near me, his face white with excitement and his blue eyes blazing. Lindbergh was his hero, as anyone could see, and in all his world there were for the moment only the two, his hero and himself. At exactly the planned moment, when Lindbergh was within a foot of him the little boy shouted in a mighty voice, “Hello, Lindy!” Lindbergh looked down blankly into the boy’s face and went on without speaking. He was, I suppose, absorbed in his own thoughts and observations, and doubtless the boy’s voice did not reach his conscious mind, but how could a child know that? What I remember is the stricken look on the face of an American child in an alien land, whose American god had not answered him. Ah well, I suppose we are all guilty some time or other of inflicting such wounds upon the innocent!
The Lindberghs did in fact perform a great service to those of us who were devoting ourselves to flood relief. They flew their plane over the entire area and mapped out the isolated villages and thereby many lives were saved. And they all but lost their own lives at that, for when they left it was from the swollen Yangtse River and their plane nearly capsized, or so we heard. Our hearts stopped, for few are the human beings who have ever fallen into that river and survived.
My further memories of the Lindberghs, however, center about a dinner our American Consul gave them upon the evening after their arrival, where I was a guest invited to meet them. Lindbergh was restless and absorbed, his mind single upon the task he had come to perform, and most of the evening he spent poring over a map of the Yangtse river bed. But Mrs. Lindbergh was charming and sensitively aware of every current of thought and trend of talk in the room, and I sat watching her mobile face, so changeful and yet so controlled. Whenever I read one of her rare books even now I see her face as it was that night and I hear her voice, and though it was long before the great tragedy of her lost child fell upon her, yet somehow there was already tragedy in her face and bearing.
During the floodtime that year, I had a message from another American, Will Rogers. He telegraphed from Shanghai that he would like to come and see me, and if I had no idea then of his significance in the American scene, I knew enough about him to await his coming with expectation. The flood, alas, prevented his arrival and so I did not see him then, but two years later when I was in New York he and Mrs. Rogers came to have tea with me at the old Murray Hill Hotel, and they stayed a long time, and how warmly I enjoyed being alone with them, for by then I knew what he was and how much he had done for me in praising The Good Earth, and in words he afterwards wrote and said about me, which still make me blush when I think of them because they were all too kind. There was something honest and homespun and yet alert and shrewd in the best sense about Will Rogers so that instinctively one trusted him, not only for honesty, but common sense. And he made me laugh so much that I still thank him most of all for laughter. In those days to be able to laugh was wonderful for me, and I was learning it again, and Will Rogers had the genius of making me laugh because what he said was truly funny, and not contrived or sarcastic. Blessed be his memory!
And I remember, too, the visit of yet another American in that flood year, but it was earlier, before the flood had reached its height, and traffic was still clear between our city and the coast. That American was Lewis Gannett, and I remember thinking that it was the first time I had ever seen a live critic. He looked kind, a pleasant, very American man, and I have always been glad that he met my father, for afterwards when he reviewed Fighting Angel in the New York Herald Tribune he recalled my father and was able to write of him as “that Lincolnesque figure.” And so he was.
I ought to say that in the spring of this same year of 1931, on March 2, before my father died and the floods came, The Good Earth was published. I remember when the first copy of it reached me and I felt shy about it, since nobody knew of its being, or knowing had forgotten it, and I went to my father’s room and showed the book to him, not expecting much, to be sure, since he read no novels. He was very kind about it, he complimented me upon the appearance of the book and inquired when I had had time to write it, and then a few days later he returned it to me saying mildly that he had glanced at it but had not felt equal to reading it.
“I don’t think I can undertake it,” he said. So much for the book in that distant world of mine.
No, there is a little more. I remember, although I have forgotten it these many years, that my first letter from the United States about the book was from a worthy Christian, an official in a mission board, who sent me several pages of blistering rebuke because I had been so frank about human life. He used another and dirtier word, but let it go at that. And, reared as I had been in the naturalism of Chinese life, I did not know for a long time what he meant, but now I know. The worlds in which I have lived and grown have made me what must be called a controversial figure, as I have been told often enough, and this is because inescapably, by experience and nature, I see the other side of every human being. If he be good, then there is that other side, and if he be evil, there is again another side, and if the ability to comprehend the reasonableness of both seems confounding to those who are content with one dimension, to others as to me, it is an endless source of interest and amusement and opportunity for love and life. We have no enemies, we for whom the globe is home, for we hate no one, and where there is no hate, it is not possible to escape love.
The flood did not help the people to like the new government any better. They were too reasonable to blame Chiang Kai-shek for an act of Heaven, and yet, as other peoples do, they felt resentment at the general hard times, and, irritable and impatient, they muttered that something could be done and must be done to make life more bearable. Beyond the local disaster of the flood, there was also the gnawing awareness of the greed of the Japanese militarists, now firmly entrenched in Manchuria, and when next they moved into the vital province of Jehol, these aggressions taking place in the years 1931–1933, the Nationalist government still did nothing. The Chinese Foreign Office merely busied itself with complaining against the Western Powers and the old Unequal Treaties and the Concessions, and such complaints kept the people angry and restless, for they saw themselves friendless in the world. Finally Japan virtually took over North China, basing her attacks from Shanghai, where large sections of the city were burned and ruined. No one knew when or whether they planned to advance up the Yangtse.