While I spent my first year, then, in a round of literary and social affairs, mainly in New York, my real interest was in the many kinds of people I saw, met or came to know. I soon perceived that there was no circle of literary people, in the European or even in the Chinese sense. The brilliant young group of literary revolutionists headed by Hu Shih and others certainly had no counterpart in my own country. One of my first acquaintances was Alexander Woollcott, a man who occupied men a peculiar place in American letters, eclectic rather than creative, and critical rather than original. He invited me to come to dine with him alone, and I was advised that I had better go, since in his way he was a little king. He lived in a charming apartment and I could scarcely resist his library, where I should have liked to spend the evening alone, had I dared to risk such discourtesy. As it was, I sat listening for two or three hours to his running comments on the American literary scene, in which I gathered that he had the place of leading critic. It was amusing and therefore delightful, and when I left I felt I knew him much better than he knew me, but that was perhaps the more important knowledge for us both. One after the other I met writers and critics, and I soon discovered that far from mingling in comradeship and interchange American writers tended to draw away from each other, and to work alone at places far from any center. When they came together they seemed cautious and prudent, reserved toward the very ones with whom I had imagined they would be free. There was little frankness of talk between them, and I often pondered this and wondered why it was so. It could not be jealousy, for many of them were far too great for so small a vice. It may have been their insecurity in our fluid society where the economics of a writer’s life are dependent upon a changing public taste, which nevertheless at all times holds the intellectual in mild contempt mingled with fear. It may be, too, that the writers wisely know that their sources are not in each other but in the common life of the country, and this is so varied and so rich that there is enough for all. Yet I feel something is lost when creative minds cannot meet and discuss freely and easily the thoughts and questions upon which we brood. Brains need to sharpen brains, not with wit and wisecrack so much as in serious interchange.
Among second-rate and third-rate writers there was plenty of coming and going, but since that was the age of the speak-easy it was considerably muddied with liquor ill digested. I went once, that winter, to a speak-easy as an invited guest and saw my first dead-drunk man. The Chinese drink quantities of hot wine but with their food and so I had never seen drunk men in China. In Japan I had seen wildly drunken men coming home from the city after a weekend, but they were excited and not dead, and I had seen plenty of sailors from foreign war vessels on the Yangtse River drunken in my childhood city, but they too were far from dead. I thought at first, therefore, when I saw a man suddenly stiffen and then collapse in the cellar of a speak-easy in New York, that he had died, and I exclaimed because no one seemed to care. My host, Christopher Morley, laughed vastly at this, and explained the circumstance, ordinary enough, whereupon I ceased to be amused and went no more to such places. I have never learned to view with unconcern the loss of control over one’s faculties. It is to me terrifying and repulsive, and I suppose this, too, goes back to the days of Mr. Kung, who instilled in me the old Confucian ethic that a superior person does not lose self-control, either in temper or drunkenness.
And yet I knew, too, that Li P’o, the beloved Chinese poet of the eighth century and the T’ang dynasty, was a drunkard. I had often visited the temple outside Nanking that is dedicated to him, and there had heard the priests tell of his life. From the cliffs beyond the temple one could see the famous spot upon the flowing yellow waters of the Yangtse where, it was said, one night when he was boating with his friends he was drowned because he leaned too far to grasp the image of the moon, reflected upon the current.
Of this poet a courtier spoke thus to the Emperor Hsuan Tsung, then regnant, “I have in my house the greatest poet that ever existed. I have not dared to speak to Your Majesty of him, because of his one defect, impossible to correct. He drinks and sometimes to excess. But his poems are beautiful. Judge them for yourself, Sire!”
And he thrust the manuscript into the Emperor’s hand.
“Fetch me this poet and at once!” was the Emperor’s reply, and from then on Li P’o was under royal patronage, drunk or sober. He lived surrounded by friends for the rest of his life. Ah me, those were pleasant times!
This year of my return, 1932, was the year of the Great Depression in the United States, and yet it is significant that I did not notice it. My fireside critic, when I said this, exclaimed, “Do you not remember the men on the streets selling apples? Do you not recall the beggars?” The fact is I had always lived where beggars were an accepted group in society, providing by their very existence a means for merit for other folk who wished to perform good deeds as a requisite for a career in heaven, and so I did not notice the beggars on the streets of New York, except to marvel how few they were. Had the great rich city been in China or India, the beggars would have been many times more. And I was used all my life to seeing vendors selling small stores of fruit on the streets of any city and so I did not notice the few apple peddlers in New York that year. The first real understanding I had of the Depression was the day that Franklin Roosevelt, the new President, closed the banks in order to reorganize the nation’s finances, and then indeed I saw crowds of anxious frightened people. But even banks had not been of importance in my experience, and I did not comprehend the basic nature of their existence in our economic structure.
That day, I remember, was a morning bright and clear, the air clean from the sea as sometimes it can be in New York, and I had risen in good spirits to spend the hours ahead filled with interesting engagements and pleasurable excitements. After breakfast I walked on the streets, as I love to do, and soon I came upon a great throng of people pressing about a closed building. Why, I thought, should they be gathered there, and why were they all silent and anxious? I made myself part of the crowd as I had used to do in China, and soon I learned that they were afraid because they thought their savings might be gone, the bits of money they had accumulated from hard work, for these were working people, as I could see from their clothes and their hands. Their security, I thus discovered, was not in family and in human relations but in something as cold as a bank, and a bank could shut its doors upon them and upon what belonged to them. It was deep relief when later our financial system was revised so that, hopefully, such disaster can never happen again.
And I remember, when I think of crowds, my first motion picture and the palatial theater in which I saw it, or it seemed a palace to me, for I had seen a few motion pictures in Nanking since the revolution, mainly comedies by Charlie Chaplin and Harold Lloyd and I had enjoyed them vastly, but I saw them sitting on a hard backless wooden bench in a big mat shed. Around me were crowded Chinese audiences and part of my enjoyment lay in their running comments upon what they saw, their roars of laughter at the jokes, their lively horror at the kisses, the old ladies decently holding their sleeves before their eyes, and peeping from behind while they exclaimed with delighted repulsion at the disgusting sight of mouth upon mouth. So that was the way foreigners behaved! How pleasant then, the audience implied, to be a Chinese and a superior person!
My discomfort at first in American theaters, however, was not because of what I saw but of what I smelled. I had lived so long among Chinese and had eaten their food so consistently, since I preferred it to Western food, that my flesh had become like theirs. Like them I abhorred milk and butter and I ate little meat. Therefore among my own people I smelled a rank wild odor, not quite a stink, but certainly distressing and even alien to me at the time, compound as it was of milk and butter and beef. I remembered how my Chinese friends had used to complain of the way white folk smelled, and so they did. Sometimes before the picture was ended I was quite overpowered, especially if the air were heated, and then I had to leave the theater in spite of my earnest desire to see the finish of the story. It was only after a year or so of consuming American food, though still without milk to this day, that I was able to endure an evening among my own kind, and this is because now I smell like them. There is no validity whatever to the absurd theory that races smell differently from some inherent cause. Unwashed people of all races smell unwashed, and beyond that their odor depends upon their food. I remember that Mrs. Li, my neighbor in Nanking, complained very much to me when her son came back from his four years at Harvard because he smelled like a foreigner. It took a year or so to make him smell Chinese again.