“‘I want to tell one story, about an American girl who comes from a small town. I like her very much. She is full of good will, she has become a social worker, and she wants to help. She is so open-minded — that is what I like about Americans, they are so open-minded, even if they don’t understand. This girl’s boy friend was in Germany and on the day when the armistice with Japan was declared, she came to see me and she said, ‘Now it’s all over!’ She was happy and glad, as we all were, that the terrible war was over. But the very next moment she said, ‘Let’s forget about it as quickly as possible!’
“‘Then I said. “No, let’s never forget about it! Let’s remember it forever. Let’s learn how it happened so that it can never happen again!’”
“‘That is what I want to say to all Americans.’”
The Second World War, the rise of Hitler, the continuing evil influence of Fascism were undreamed of in those days, however, at least by me, and Sweden was a holiday. When I left there, I took my first journey by airplane, destination Amsterdam, and discovered that I am irrevocably ill when I am in the air, proving that I am what I have always known myself to be, an earth-bound creature with no heavenly aspirations. I lingered again in Holland, for my mother’s ancestors had come from Utrecht, and then I went to France, through Belgium, and in France I remember again the fields of small white crosses of the American dead, and the mausoleums upon whose walls, as I have said, are engraved the tens of thousands of names of the lost youth of our country, and I reflected even then that if our country could be drawn into a European war at such cost what would be our loss if ever we were drawn into a war with Asia? It was impossible to ignore the portent, for I was now haunted by the similarity of the condition of the Negroes in my own country and that of peoples in colonial Asia. So many of the stories I had heard as I stood that day in New York before the Negro paintings were what I had already known on the other side of the world, and I saw how the minds of the Negroes, revealed in the paintings, were obsessed with the same deep injustices and cruelties that had burned in the minds and hearts even of the Chinese revolutionists. I determined before I returned to my own country to live, if I ever did, that I would travel to India and to Indo-China and Indonesia and see for myself the full measure of the feelings of the peoples there, in order that I might have a world view of the relations between the races of man.
My European journey ended in Italy, for after a stay in Venice I took ship to China again, by way of the Red Sea. Of that journey upon a handsome Italian ship little remains to remember. I spent my time, mostly in solitude, reviewing all that I had learned during the year in my own country, and preparing myself for the year ahead. If, I told myself, I had indeed only one more year in China, how should it be spent? Surely in nothing but learning and writing. And during the long hot days on deck while the ship ploughed its way through a placid sea to the coast of India, I conceived the idea of a series of novels, each of which should reveal some fundamental aspect of Chinese life, even perhaps of Asian life, if I could accumulate that knowledge. But China I knew to the core of heart and the last convolution of my brain, and what was happening in China could and might happen in any country of Asia, unless some unforeseen wisdom in the West could prevent it by understanding in time. Thus I planned my next novel, which I decided to center upon that key figure in Chinese history, the war lord. Surely I knew him, having lived under his rule for decades. This was the beginning of my next novel, Sons.
I went ashore at Bombay and again in Colombo but I made no effort then to see much of India, for I knew that I would come back. I was not returning this time only to China but to all of Asia. It was an Asia as ancient as ever, as mediaeval, and yet in its strange aspects, piercingly new.
Before I reached Shanghai, while I was still aboard the ship, I received an invitation from an American lady to meet the staff of the China Critic at a dinner at her house. This magazine was a weekly, put out by a very modern, Western-educated little group of Chinese literary figures, among whom was Lin Yutang. I had not then met him, but I knew his writings in Chinese as well as in English in the China Critic. He was an essayist, a wit, a humorist, never profound, his rivals said, yet I felt a shrewd accuracy in his pungent jokes and sharp thrusts. In those days he was criticizing Chiang Kai-shek and the Nationalist government with such alarming honesty and fearlessness that his friends besought him not to “twist the tiger’s tail.” He was always lighthearted, however, reckless with a laughing courage that no one seemed to take too seriously, and yet all were grateful because he said much that they only dared to feel.
I accepted the invitation for dinner, mainly to meet him, and passed one of those amazing evenings, where an exotic international intelligentsia poured forth a potpourri, not always fragrant, of wit and scandalous gossip. I listened as usual and said little and accepted a dinner invitation from Lin Yutang to come to his home and meet his wife. The only other guest was to be Hu Shih.
This second evening was even more interesting, for at his house I met Mrs. Lin Yutang, a warmhearted thoroughly Chinese lady, and with her their little daughters. The dinner was delicious, and while I enjoyed it I listened again, this time to interchange between the two notable but curiously contrasting Chinese gentlemen. The lack of understanding between the two men was already plain, Hu Shih being slightly scornful of the irrepressible younger man. He left early, and then Lin Yutang told me that he himself was writing a book about China. It was to be the famous My Country and My People.
I left the house late, excited by the idea of a book in English by a Chinese writer and one so fearless. Its influences, I felt, could be boundless, and I wrote to the John Day Company in New York at once, recommending their immediate attention to this Chinese author, unknown as yet to the West.
The grey house in Nanking stood as I had left it, and I must say that when I walked in the front door it looked empty to me. The servants had done their best and all was neat and clean, but somehow it was no longer home. I had changed more than I knew. Well, to be fair, I must make it home again, I thought — lay down the new rugs I had bought in Shanghai and open doors to a terrace, and even, if I were extravagant, put in central heating. If I had grown too easily used to the luxuries of American life, I would have a few of them here, so that the issue of leaving China would not be confused with the fact that living in America was perhaps physically more pleasant.
I know now that it was a habit of my woman’s nature to plunge deep into housekeeping and gardening whenever I had mental and spiritual problems to face and solve. For the next months, therefore, I did no more than make the house pleasant, bring back my garden to its accustomed flourishing condition in fruit and flowers, renew my friendships with my neighbors and listen to all the news of the city and the nation that was poured into my ears.
The outlook was not good. I found an ever-deepening gulf between the white people and the Chinese. Both groups of the white people, businessmen and missionaries, were alike unhappy. The new government had set up a regime which, however justifiable its rules, antagonized even their white friends while it made the unfriendly furious. Mission schools were forced to comply with the government regulations of obeisance before the portrait of Sun Yat-sen, required to hang on every chapel or assembly hall wall. The famous Will, now a sacred document, had to be read aloud once a week, the audience standing. To the missionaries this smelled of worship before other gods, yet they had to comply or face the possibility of closing their schools. In the Christian churches the Chinese members were pressing for self-government and control of foreign funds, although among many missionaries there was still a hidden distrust of all Chinese — or at least a sense of responsibility toward their home churches, who had collected so painfully the money sent abroad for foreign missions.