And one of my happiest days in Peking was spent with the great Chinese actor and female impersonator, Mei Lan-fang, in his beautiful house. He talked of many matters, and he sang and played upon his lute for me, and showed me his priceless collection of musical instruments. And his cook, one of the most famous in Peking, prepared delicious Mongol sweets for us, and dainty Chinese pastries, and Mei Lan-fang ate them with conscience-smitten enjoyment, for he was already getting plump, and the willowy heroines he impersonated were essential to the ancient Chinese opera. During the war with Japan he went to Shanghai, I heard, and there he refused to act or sing and even grew a beard and moustache, in order to make it impossible for him to play the part of a beautiful woman, and so be compelled to perform for the conquerors. When the war was over he returned to Peking and his great house and he shaved off his whiskers and once more began to delight audiences in his ageless fashion. Now he heads the actors’ organization under the Communists, I am told, and I wonder if he, too, like other great dramatic and literary figures, is compelled to play the Communist party line. We have no more communication now, and I dare to write this about him only because he is great enough, I believe, to hold his own under any government. And by now he must be really old, but still beautiful upon the stage, I am sure, for his beauty was of inner grace.
Ah, when I think of Peking, my heart still dissolves, for the very soul of the Chinese people was there and it is no wonder that many a foreigner went to visit and stayed to live, and, now driven forth, is forever exiled. My joy was not in the cosmopolitan life of foreigners, however, although they were kind enough to me. My joy was to wander the streets alone, to linger in the palaces and the gardens, and sometimes to ride outside the city among the bare mountains and gaze at the Summer Palace, deserted and empty. My joy was to listen to the people talk, in that purest of Chinese Mandarin, the aristocrat of languages, and to watch them as they came and went, the proudest race upon the earth.
And as I write I do remember one thing more. That spring a little dramatic group among the foreigners gave a play for the English-speaking community. It was The Barretts of Wimpole Street. I do not remember the other actors but only the little frail creature, whose name I have forgotten, but who played the part of Elizabeth Barrett. She was a missionary, I was told, a shy virginal woman, not young, not old, whom nobody knew. But she had great dark sad eyes and a small olive-skinned face and heavy dark hair, and a soft stealing footstep. Upon the stage she became Elizabeth herself, the beloved of a poet, and before our amazed eyes she gave a performance so passionate, so true, so utterly astounding in the perfection of its sensitive comprehension of a poetic love, that I have never forgotten it. And indeed when later I saw our own great Katharine Cornell play the same part in a revival, I felt the little missionary had surpassed even her performance. Yet when the play was over that small creature shrank away again, and when she was tried in another play was quite mediocre, I was told. Something in that play and in that one character fitted, I suppose, the emotional need of her own life at the moment. Years later I wove the incident into a short story.
I did not decide quickly or easily to leave China, and in fact the decision was not final for two years. We had a sabbatical year in 1932 and were spending it in the United States, and those months, I felt, would give me time to know what the future should be. I seem not to remember much about the departure, but I did return from Peking to the house in Nanking and it was put in order for my absence, and farewells were said to all the Chinese friends and the faithful servants. I was detached enough not to grieve as I might have done in earlier years, and besides I had the joyful expectation of seeing my elder child, from whom I had been absent for nearly three years. She, too, would have her part in my decision to stay in the United States. I do not even remember the journey across the Pacific Ocean, except that my chief concern was a brief case containing my completed translation of Shui Hu Chüan together with the photographed copies of hundreds of illustrations from a very ancient text in Peking. I did not then know the difficulties and the cost of illustrations in books, and I hoped to use all the pictures, making the English translation as nearly as possible like the best Chinese version. Two or three times the precious brief case was mislaid in the various changes of the journey, and every time all else was stopped until it was found again.
I had been told that upon this visit to the United States I would find another world awaiting me and different from the one I had known so casually before, but such remarks had made no special impression upon me, since I could not imagine that future. My American publisher met my train in Montreal with a car and a list of questions to be decided, and it was not long before I saw that the year I had thought of as somewhat idle and certainly very free was to be neither. But it is of no interest even to myself to recall the events which are almost standardized for the author of a best seller, as The Good Earth had proved to be. The dinners, the cocktail parties, the invitations to see and be seen, to lecture, to give opinions on everything, were mildly interesting in themselves, but what deeply I searched for was not to be found in such activities. I wanted first of all to know my own people, for until I did, I knew that I could not put down roots in my country, and second, I hoped to find a circle of congenial friends in my own field of the arts.
To change countries is an overwhelming and it may be a crushing experience. I have accomplished it during the years that have passed since I left China, and my respect for all immigrants and my understanding of them have grown steadily. To move from an old established society, and the Chinese were that and have remained so in spite of the upheavals of revolution and temporary governments, into an effervescent and a fluid new society, such as the American still is and must remain for many future decades or perhaps centuries, is to do more than change countries — it is to change worlds and epochs. Moreover, I did not then understand what later I found to be true, that the naturally changing quality of our American culture, compelled by scientific discovery and invention to move so rapidly from a pioneer stage to high industrialism, was violently shaken by the First World War. The effect of that war is not yet fully comprehended or assessed, either materially or psychologically, but we are not only a changing people in the normal course of our national life, we are a changed people as a result of the World Wars.
I was ill-prepared for all this. My parents had left their own country in 1880, many years before I was born, and they had never lived long enough again in the United States to understand its development. My mother used to ponder the American papers and magazines that reached us, concerned over the waves of immigrants that came into America and how they were affecting the national life. But she could tell me no more than we read. I had had no home during college and thus I had never become a part of the American scene. True, the isolation had made me understand very well how it was that Chinese students could spend four years and sometimes seven in American universities without comprehending in the least the structure of our nation or the character of our people, and I had seen the disaster of not knowing the life of a country in which one lived or was educated. Many white people, indeed most, I suppose, lived in China, too, in a remote fashion without understanding either the culture or the customs, or even the language of the Chinese. I did not want to be such a person in my own country. Yet I soon saw that it would be very easy to live as an expatriate in the United States. In so large a land it would be easy merely to choose a pleasant spot to call my home and there to spend my life in various gentle interests. I did not want to do that, I wanted to be an American in the fullest sense of the word.