She pointed out to me the danger signs I had not seen, or would not see. The child’s span of attention was very short indeed, far shorter than it should have been at her age. Much of her fleet light running had no purpose — it was merely motion. Her eyes, so pure in their blue, were blank when one gazed into their depths. They did not hold or respond. They were changeless. Something was very wrong.
I thanked her and she went away. Thinking it over, I saw there was no reason why a stranger should stay to tell me more. Perhaps she knew no more. There is no task more difficult than to tell a parent that the beloved child will never grow to be an adult. I have done it sometimes since, and I have not allowed myself to shrink from it, but it has been hard. The heart can break more than once.
The doctors met the next day. I can still see the scene as though it took place before my eyes now. The house had a wide veranda, facing the sea. It was a glorious morning, and the sea was violet blue and calm except for the gentle white surf at the coast. The child had been with her Chinese nurse playing on the sand and wading in the water. I called and they came up the path between the bamboos. In spite of my terror, I was proud of my child as she stood before the doctors. She had on a little white swimming suit and her firm sun-browned body was strong and beautiful. In one hand she held her pail and shovel and in the other a white shell.
“She looks well enough,” one of the doctors murmured.
Then they began to ask questions. I answered them with all the honesty I had. Nothing but honesty would do now. As they listened they watched and they began to see. The shell dropped from her hand and she did not pick it up. Her head drooped. The oldest doctor, who had known my parents, lifted her to his knee and began to test her reflexes. They were weak — almost nonexistent.
The doctors were kind men and I begged them to tell me what they thought and then tell me what to do. I think they were honest in their wish to do this. But they did not know what was wrong or, whatever was wrong, how to cure it. I sat in silence and watched the child. I began to feel that they were agreed that development had stopped in the child, but did not know why. There were so few physical symptoms — only the ones I have mentioned. They plied me with questions about the child’s past, about her illnesses: had she ever had a high temperature, had she ever had a fall? There had been nothing. She had been sound from her birth and so cared for that she had never been hurt.
“You must take her to America,” they told me at last. “There the doctors may know what is wrong. We can only say there is something wrong.”
Then began that long journey which parents of such children know so well. I have talked with many of them since and it is always the same. Driven by the conviction that there must be someone who can cure, we take our children over the surface of the whole earth, seeking the one who can heal. We spend all the money we have and we borrow until there is no one else to lend. We go to doctors good and bad, to anyone, for only a wisp of hope. We are gouged by unscrupulous men who make money from our terror, but now and again we meet those saints who, seeing the terror and guessing the empty purse, will take nothing for their advice, since they cannot heal.
So I came and went, too, over the surface of the earth, gradually losing hope and yet never quite losing it, for no doctor said firmly that the child could never be healed. There were always the last hesitant words, “I don’t want to say it is hopeless”; and so I kept hoping, in the way parents have.
It was getting harder all the time for another reason. The child was older and bigger and her broken speech and babyish ways were conspicuous. I had no sense of shame for myself. I had grown up among the Chinese, who take any human infirmity for what it is. Blind people, the lame, the halt, the tongue-tied, the deformed — during my life in China I had seen that all came and went among others and were accepted for themselves. Their infirmities were not ignored. Sometimes they were even made the cause of nicknames.
For example, Little Cripple was a playmate of my own early childhood, a boy with a twisted leg. According to our western notions, it would have been cruel to call him by his deformity. But the Chinese did not mean it so. That was the way he was, literally, and his twisted leg was part of himself. There was some sort of catharsis even for the boy in this taking for granted an affliction. Somehow it was easier than the careful ignoring of my American friends. The sufferer did not feel any need to hide himself. There he was, as he was, and everybody knew him. It was better than any sweet pretending that he was like everybody else.
More than this, the Chinese believed that since Heaven ordains, it was a person’s fate to be whatever he was and it was neither his fault nor his family’s. They believed, too, with a sort of human tenderness, that if a person were handicapped in one way, there were compensations, also provided by Heaven. Thus a blind person was always treated with respect and even sometimes with fear, for it was thought he had a perception far beyond mere seeing.
All the years my child and I had lived among the Chinese we had breathed this frank atmosphere. My Chinese friends discussed my child with me easily as they discussed their own. But they were not experienced enough to know what was wrong or even that it was wrong. “The eyes of her wisdom are not yet opened,” was the way they put it. “For some persons wisdom comes early and for others late — be patient.” This was what they told me. When we walked on the narrow winding streets of our old city no one noticed when she stopped reasonlessly to clap her hands or if, without reason, she began to dance. Yes, the Chinese were kind to my child and to me. If they did notice her, it was only to smile at what they took to be her pleasure, and they laughed with her.
It was on the streets of Shanghai that I first learned that people were not all so kind. Two young American women walked along the street, newcomers from my own country, I suppose, by their smart garments. They stared at my child and when we had passed one of them said to the other, “The kid is nuts.” It was the first time I had ever heard the slang phrase and I did not know what it meant. I had to ask someone before I knew. Truth can be put into brutal words. From that day I began to shield my child.
There is no use in giving the details of the long, sorrowful journey. We crossed the sea and we went everywhere, to child clinics, to gland specialists, to psychologists. I know now that it was all no use. There was no hope from the first — there never had been any. I do not blame those men and women for not telling me so — not altogether. I suppose some of them knew, but perhaps they didn’t. At any rate, the end of each conference was to send us on to someone else, perhaps a thousand miles away.
One famous gland specialist gave me considerable hope, and we undertook a year-long treatment with dosages of gland medicine. It did my child no good, and yet I do not regret it, for from what I learned that year I was able to save another child who really needed the treatment a few years later. I saw a little boy who at four was still crawling on his hands and knees and I recognized in his symptoms — the dry skin and hair, the pallid flesh, the big ungainly weak body, the retarded mind — the need for thyroid treatment. I did not know his mother very well, but remembering the silence of my friends, I went to her and told her what I thought. There was a long moment when her flushed face showed me her inner struggle. She did not want to know — and yet she knew she must know. I went away, but afterward she did take the child to the gland specialist and he was able to help the boy become normal. That boy was not really mentally retarded. He was suffering from a thyroid deficiency. Years later the mother and I met on different soil and she thanked me for that past day. But it took courage to speak. It always does.