Colonialism degraded the French rulers, too, as it degrades everywhere, and the French in Indo-China were often unlovely in thought and behavior, inferior nearly always to the ones at home in France. In spite of this, the Chinese have liked them better than other white men, because they do not act unjustly merely because of race difference. It was, however, an unworthy colonialism that I saw in Indo-China, without pretensions of nobility or goodness. Its purpose was altogether commercial and its goal was money, got anyhow and anywhere, and the only shrewder businessman than the Frenchman was the Chinese.
I went to Cambodia because I wanted to see Angkor Wat and I do not know to this day whether I am glad or sorry, for I hold that place in my memory so deeply that even now sometimes when I wake in the night to instinctive and unreasonable dread, I see the dead palaces, ruined and yet standing in the clutches of vast trees, rooting themselves not in the earth but like serpents entwining the stones. The very approaches are serpents and the balustrades of bridges are the thick bodies of stone cobras with poisonous heads uplifted and hoods flaring. I walked for hours through the desolate and empty palaces that none can explain, for they were lost so long in the jungle. They were built for the Khmer rulers, we are told, but why, and by whom? Tradition says that it was all done by slave labor, that stone upon stone the slaves piled up the palaces for their despotic kings, who treated them with such cruelty and callous inhumanity that at last the slaves rose in insurrection and destroyed their masters, and the deed must have been evilly done, for the reek of evil was everywhere, though slaves and masters alike are long dead. I am not given to superstition, yet there are certain places in old Asian countries where human beings have been born and have lived and died for so many generations that the very earth is saturated with their flesh and the air seems crowded with their continuing presence. Never have I had the same consciousness here in my own country, a new land, scarcely settled in terms of old Asia. But I felt that crowded air in Angkor, even though the jungle pressed about, and I knew that it was evil. The soft sweetish stink of death was everywhere, even the rooms in the hotel smelled of it, the sheets and pillows, the closets where my clothes hung, so that when I got away I put everything into the hot and tropical sunshine to burn out the reek of decay. It conveyed in its own way the old fearful threat, as potent today as a thousand years ago, that when men do evil to other men, when men deal unjustly and without mercy and count others lower than themselves and therefore of no worth, they create for themselves the certainty of downfall.
Yet there were strange and amusing incidents, too, as I continued my journey. In Bangkok, the capital of Siam, I had two experiences entirely new. At a Rotary Club dinner, where the speaker was a prince of the royal house, I sat through a meal as American as meat and potatoes could make it, and after it was over the Prince read a speech of such extraordinary dullness that I could not believe my ears. All through the dinner he had been sparkling in wit and laughter and we had been charmed. But what, I thought, was this speech? When he had finished it he lifted his head, which he had held doggedly to his page, and the sparkle was shining again in his voice and dark eyes.
“Excuse me,” he said. “I have performed a duty. This speech was written in American headquarters and sent here from Chicago.”
Mighty laughter then, and we all roared and applauded, and he sat down with as wicked and sophisticated a twinkle as a handsome face could create. And after this we were led down the corridor into a darkened theater room for the entertainment, also canned and shipped from the United States, and I saw my first Walt Disney film, Three Little Pigs.
But what I really remember about Bangkok, aside from a curious fruit called a durian, so hard that I used it as a permanent doorstop in my hotel room, was the life on the streets, the yellow-robed priests sauntering everywhere, the magnificence of ancient temples, rising in golden steps from a vast and solid base, exactly as modern buildings rise today in steel and glass, but not so high, and the beautiful smooth-faced women and little children, and the gentle-looking men. Small houseboats drifted slowly on the glassy opaque waters of the canals, the families who lived upon them clean and beautiful, and surely the Siamese are among the world’s most handsome creatures, not large, but smooth-skinned, cream-colored flesh covering small smoothly shaped bones, the eyes large and oval and not slanted, dark brown instead of black, and the hair soft and smooth again and dark but not black. These were a free people. And they looked free, their heads lifted, frank and inclined to friendliness instead of hostility, and what lovely hands and feet and slim round bodies they had, men and women and children, all of them!
A few days ago I saw a little half-Siamese boy, born in the United States and therefore an American, a guest in my house, put his arms about his adoptive mother’s neck, she a white American, and loving this child as dearly as though she had created his body within her own. Remembering his other country and all the Siamese ancestors behind him, I knew her blessed. The heritage is good.
India had always been part of the background of my life, but I had never seen it whole and for myself until now. Yet the stories that our Indian family doctor and his wife told me when I was a child had woven themselves into my growing dreams, and I had long read everything that I could find about that country. From my father I had learned of it through Buddhism and the life history of the Lord Buddha. I had seen the opposite face of India, too, in the tall turbaned Sikh policemen in the British Concession in Shanghai, who did not hesitate to beat a luckless Chinese riksha puller if he got in the way of traffic or disobeyed the imperious demands of the turbaned ones. India was not all of a piece! And through young Indians I had learned about the colonial empire of England, some of its evil and some of its good.
China and India are as unlike as two countries can well be. The life philosophies of the two peoples are different and this in spite of the fact that they share a universal attitude toward all mankind. Both peoples are peace-loving, but for different reasons, the Indians because their religions teach them that life is sacred and must never be destroyed, and the Chinese because they know from their superb common sense, inherited and congenital, that war is folly, and that a wise man prevails by his wisdom. Thus the Chinese have accepted even into their blood stream all their invaders, insofar as the invaders themselves have allowed it. The Jews, for example, for centuries took refuge in China, entering first through India and by the ancient trade routes from Asia Minor, and settled in the inner province of Honan, making their headquarters in K’aifeng-fu. Yet of the Jews as a separate people there is no trace left in China. The Chinese never persecuted them and instead by sheer kindliness and active commercial interchange they absorbed them and were the better for it. Often when I found in China an artist of unusual talent, or a mind more vivid than others among my students, the chances were good that he had Jewish blood in him. It is a creative strain. Once, I remember, a portfolio came from Peking to Asia Magazine, in New York, of drawings signed by various names. The editor chose for publication the ones he thought the best, and later he discovered that all but one were actually by the same artist, a young Chinese Jew. But the story of the Jews in China I have already told in my novel Peony, which in England is entitled The Bondmaid.