What do I remember, then? I remember first the beautiful province of Fukien, in South China. It is a seacoast province, its undulating shores infested with pirates, their nests centuries old. The little steamer that carried me had a strong iron fence and a barred gate on the stairway between the upper decks where the white folk travelled and the lower decks where the rest of the world ate and slept. Fence and gate, the English captain told me, were made so that if pirates were hidden among the lower deck passengers, the white people could defend themselves from above. What, I asked, if the pirates set fire below?
The Captain shrugged. “We have the lifeboats.”
I was glad to get ashore from that vessel and settle myself for a few days in a pleasant but certainly not immaculate Chinese inn. And from there, with Chinese friends, I travelled slowly by bus into the back country through the handsomest citrus groves in the world, the trees rich with oranges and pumeloes which the kindly farmers plucked for us as we passed. We went as far as the inner mountains, and there the bus stopped, for the mountains belonged to the Communists hiding there, or if one preferred, the “bandits.” The bus driver was a daring, not to say a wild man, in spite of his calm face and miraculous sense of humor. The bus was an old American castoff, and every hour or two it broke down and we all got out and waited while the driver patched up the engine with bits of wire and string. It always started again, he shouted and we climbed in and went on. Once while he tinkered I observed that there was no hood to the engine.
“Where is the hood?” I asked.
He looked up, his face streaked with oil. “That lid,” he said with contempt, “it was take — it — up, take — it — down, and for what? I took it off altogether.”
The engine burst into loud snorts, he yelled, and we climbed in.
And travelling south through the rich province of Kwangtung, I learned for the first time how the heavy brown sugar was made which I had eaten since childhood as a delicacy. The cane is crushed by a press pulled by slow-moving water buffalo, and a stream of thin whitish-green sweet water pours from a spout into buckets. This water is boiled down very much as maple sugar water is boiled in Vermont, until it is thick and dark. Then it is poured into huge shallow tins and cut into squares like fudge. We ate quantities of it, hot and strong, and then we saw it cooled and crushed again into the coarse sugar we all knew.
And what a scene it was, the beautiful lush green countryside, the thatched roof of the circular mill, open on all sides, the buffalo yoked together or single, pulling the heavy wooden beam across their shoulders, the blue-coated peasants feeding the sugar cane into the press, and then the sugar boiling on the earthen stoves, and the children dancing about, licking their fingers, while wasps and bees droned in the warm air — it all comes back to me still, wrapped in a daze of sleepy content, the fragrance and the heat and the dancing children. They were far from the new capital, those people of the South, and when it was spoken of they were indifferent and cynical about it as about all governments. Only in the cities did I see the new and bitter slogans pasted on the walls of the buildings and the city gates, forever crying out against the “Western imperialists.”
And so southward to Canton, and I am glad that I have seen more than once the old Canton before it was “improved,” for in the old city I could walk the ancient narrow streets where the ivory dealers, the jade lapidaries, the gold and silversmiths, had their one-story shops. Each trade had its own street, in its own area, and one could watch an ivory carver use his delicate instruments to shape a tusk into the graceful flowing figure of a Kuan-yin, or make a huge ivory ball, containing within it eighteen other balls, each separate from the other, and each rolling free from every other, a magic I have never been able to comprehend, in spite of seeing it often with my own eyes. And the jade of every color, yellow, or rust red, blue, or green as spring rice, mottled as marble, or smooth and cold and white as mutton fat, every variety exquisite and put to exquisite use! I had seen triumphs of such art in the palaces of Peking, whole landscapes carved from a single huge lump of jade, but here in a Canton street I saw it actually done, a lifetime spent upon one work. The southern jades came usually from Burma, whereas the jade in Peking was brought by camel from Turkestan. It was a Chinese in the thirteenth century A.D. who discovered the mines in Burma, but not for a long time, in fact not until the latter part of the eighteenth century, did the Chinese jade lovers consider the Burmese gem as valuable as their own variety, and indeed there is a difference, the Burmese jade being a jadeite and the Turkestan a nephrite. But Chinese jade miners and Burmese alike believe that jade has miraculous qualities. The Kachins or Burmese hillmen locate the mines by a bamboo divining rod, set afire, and then, when jade is found, they perform the old rituals and ceremonies for opening the mines.
But why should I divert myself here to speak of jade? It is a subject for many books, from the moment of mining the boulders encrusted with earth and hard rock, their hollow hearts lined with the precious and various stone to the final setting of the stone as jewel or objet d’art. Jade became in China a divine gem in the time of Ch’in Shih Huang, for whom the first great Imperial Seal was made, and that seal was preserved throughout the dynasties, so that whoever was strong enough to gain it and to keep it became by that very sign the Heaven-ordained ruler. It was this seal that the old Empress Dowager carried with her whenever she fled into exile, knowing that so long as she held it, her people would not recognize another on the throne and I wonder where that seal is now. Indeed jade is a possession to be cherished by anyone who can find it or buy it or steal it. Chinese women ask for jade ornaments for their hair, for jade bracelets and rings, and old men keep in their closed palms a piece of cool jade, so smooth that it seems soft to the touch. Rich men buy jades instead of putting their money in banks, for jade grows more beautiful with age. When men die, their families put jade in the tombs with them to keep them from decay and the orifices of their bodies are stopped with jade for purity. The poorest courtesan has her bit of jade to hang in her ears or to use in a hairpin, and the most successful and popular actresses wear jade instead of diamonds, because jade is the more sumptuous jewel against a woman’s flesh. And so enough of jade.
The journey westward into Asia was one of discovery and is now one of remembrance. I went to see what was to be seen, and though every land had its extraordinary and peculiar beauty, it was to see the people that I went.
In Indo-China I found the old familiar signs of colonialism, and the sign which is most unlovable, perhaps, is that colonial people grow too selfish and self-centered. Since they have no responsibility for governing themselves they take little responsibility for anything outside themselves and their families, and when some misfortune comes, they blame anyone except themselves. Otherwise this interesting and beautiful tri-state country of Indo-China was charming, and when it is free and responsible for its own welfare, it may become a tropical Switzerland. For Indo-China is really three small territories, or states, combined to make a nation. Vietnam is mainly Chinese, Cambodia is Indian, and Laos is Siamese. The three languages are quite separately spoken, and French is the common unifying tongue. There are no large cities except Saigon, which is very much French, and where the white community leads an active life in street cafés and night clubs, and where there is less segregation than in other colonial countries. On the streets I saw the mixed, the half-whites, French father and any woman for the mother, and their children as lovely as wild flowers but lost, growing by the wayside, belonging nowhere, intelligent, oversensitive, always wounded. Nevertheless I say still that there is actually less race prejudice among the French than among any Western people, and a beautiful French woman had Indo-Chinese lovers as easily as her own kind.