They could not believe that I had no such home even in my native land. My relatives were strange to me, since I had grown up far from them, and certainly they could not be expected to look after my helpless child were I to die. Moreover, they lived in separate homes of their own. They would consider it an imposition to have my child left in their care. Ours is an individualistic society, indeed, and the state must do for the individual what family does in the older civilizations. It was hard to explain this to my Chinese friends, and hard not be moved by their appeals to me to keep the child with me.
The decision made, the next question was how it was to be done, and then when. I had found out enough to know that the sort of place I wanted my child to live in would cost money that I did not have. There was no one to pay for this except myself. I must myself devise means to do what I wanted to do for my child.
I am speaking now entirely about myself, and I realize that what I did cannot always be done. The fact is I had never considered money from the days when I first began to earn my own living, at least in part, when I was seventeen years old and in college. Independence had taught me that the important thing was to know what I wanted. Then I could always find means to get it. This habit of mine held. I decided that when the time came I would return to my country and search for the place which could become my child’s home.
There is infinite relief in a decision. It provides a goal. A guiding rope was flung into the morass and I clung to it and dragged myself out of despair day by day, as the goal became more clear to me. Knowing what I was going to do and thinking how to do it did not heal the inescapable sorrow, but it helped me to live with it. I ceased to use all my spiritual energies in rebellion. I did not ask why so continually. The real secret of it was that I began to stop thinking of myself and my sorrow and began to think only of my child. This meant that I was not struggling against life, but slowly and sometimes blindly coming into accord with it. So long as I centered in myself, life was unbearable. When I shifted that center even a little, I began to understand that sorrow could be borne, not easily but possibly.
I felt, however, that before I let my child leave me I ought to try her abilities for myself and learn to know her thoroughly, so that I could make the best possible choice of her future home. For this I decided to take a year, during which all my time, aside from family essentials, would be spent with her. I would try to teach her to read, to write, to distinguish colors and, since she loved music, to learn notes and to sing little songs. Whether she could do this I did not know. It was as important for me to know if she could not as to know if she could.
In a curious way I was helped here by what was taking place in China. The rowdy capture of Nanking by the new revolutionary forces had compelled all white people to leave the city for a period. It was in early spring that the capture took place, and we went to Japan for a peaceful summer in the beautiful green mountains above the seaport of Nagasaki. It was a happy summer in its way. We lived in a small Japanese house in the woods, and bereft of possessions and responsibilities, it was a return to nature. For me, after the hard years, it was a time of healing. I knew no one except the friendly Japanese fisherfolk who came to sell crabs and fish at early morning. My child could run about as she liked, while I did my primitive housekeeping. I cooked on a charcoal brazier as the Japanese women did, and we lived upon rice and fish and fruit.
I shall pause here for a little gift of thanks to the Japanese people I met in those pleasant months of enforced holiday. Later in the summer I decided to take advantage of idleness and to make a journey through Japan. With my child I made that journey, traveling third class by day on the trains, both to save money and to meet the average Japanese people. We ate the little lunches we bought from vendors at the station, small clean wooden boxes packed with compartments of rice, pickles and fish, and my child for the first time in her life had fresh pasteurized milk, hot and in sealed bottles.
At night we left the train and slept in clean little village inns where we saw only Japanese faces. We left our shoes at the doorway, and deft Japanese maids put slippers on our feet and led us to a hot bath and then to our room. Then the evening meal was served in lacquered wooden bowls, a chicken or beef broth, eggs, fish, rice and tea. Afterward the spotless soft quilts were brought from the wall closets, and spread on the clean matting floor for us. I woke often in the night to gaze into a dim moonlit garden, perhaps only a few feet square, which somehow suggested, nevertheless, space and infinity. It is the Japanese genius. Everywhere we met with kindness and courtesy. There was no sign that anyone saw my child as strange. She was accepted for what she was and most tenderly treated. That brought healing too.
In the late autumn, before Christmas, we went back to China to live for a year in Shanghai. It was still not safe, we were told, to return to Nanking. That year alone with my child was a profound education for me. As I look back on it, I see that it was the beginning of whatever real knowledge I have of the human mind. We had three rooms at the top of a house shared with two other families, refugees like ourselves. There I planned my child’s days and my own, so much time each day devoted to finding out what she could learn. I willed myself to patience and submission to her capacities. Impatience was a sin. So the long year began, work interspersed with exercise and play.
The detail of those months is unimportant now, but I will simply say that I found that the child could learn to read simple sentences, that she was able, with much effort, to write her name, and that she loved songs and was able to sing simple ones. What she was able to achieve was of no significance in itself. I think she might have been able to proceed further, but one day, when, pressing her always very gently but still steadily and perhaps in my anxiety rather relentlessly, I happened to take her little right hand to guide it in writing a word. It was wet with perspiration. I took both her hands and opened them and saw they were wet. I realized then that the child was under intense strain, that she was trying her very best for my sake, submitting to something she did not in the least understand, with an angelic wish to please me. She was not really learning anything.
It seemed my heart broke all over again. When I could control myself I got up and put away the books forever. Of what use was it to push this mind beyond where it could function? She might after much effort be able to read a little, but she could never enjoy books. She might learn to write her name, but she would never find in writing a means of communication. Music she could hear with joy, but she could not make it. Yet the child was human. She had a right to happiness, and her happiness was to be able to live where she could function.
“Let’s go outside and play with the kittens,” I said.
Her little face took on a look of incredulous joy, and that was my reward.
Happiness, I now determined, was to be her atmosphere. I gave up all ambition for her, all pride, and accepted her exactly as she was, expecting nothing, grateful if some flash came through the dimness of her mind. Wherever she could be most happy would be her home. I kept her with me until she was nine years old, and then I set out in search of her final home.