Authors: Pearl S. Buck
But some other small story was sold, somewhere, I don’t remember where. That Shanghai Christmas was the most dismal and wretched I had ever had, and added to the general sadness of my situation, I received not one gift which had any meaning. I am not one to care for gifts, nor to be ungrateful, I hope, for thoughtfulness, but that year I needed just one real gift.
The day after that dark Christmas I decided upon what, for me, amounted to a crime. I decided to spend my little store of money, and thus entirely selfish, I sallied forth on a grey December day and bought Christmas gifts for myself.
I wish that I could say that I felt afterwards a sense of shame but even now I feel nothing but satisfaction. For those few objects of beauty which my dollars could purchase had such a restorative influence upon my soul that from then on my courage was renewed. And of that winter in Shanghai I can remember nothing else, wilfully of course, for there was plenty in our crowded house.
No, wait—I do remember Li Sau-tse and her romance, which in its small way was contemporaneously connected with the romance of Chiang Kai-shek and Soong May-ling, then a young Shanghai debutante.
The redoubtable Li Sau-tse had of course accompanied us from Japan and she had established herself in the basement kitchen of our three-family house and proceeded to cook our meals. With the three amahs, she declared, she could manage, although she might in the future want a table boy, but it would be one of her own choosing. We were willing to be managed and gave no more thought to the table boy. One morning, however, we heard a violent noise in the basement where Li Sau-tse lived, a man’s voice protesting loudly. A man? Our servants were all women. I sent an amah for Li Sau-tse and after a few minutes she came up breathless and red-faced while the man’s voice continued to bellow from below.
“Li Sau-tse,” I exclaimed, “what is going on?”
She explained. Since these were modern times, she had fallen in love with the table boy of a neighbor the winter before and there had been some amorous passages and promises. Then the man had disappeared.
“It was those Communists,” she declared. “When they came and you all left, my man went crazy. Everything was upset, you understand. There were no law and custom any more. In this time another woman seized him from me, and he could not be found. So I went to Japan to serve you. But yesterday when I was at the market to buy your vegetables, I saw the woman, older than I am and uglier. He was with her and I seized him before her eyes and brought him here and locked him in my room. We are going to be married.”
“Bring him here,” I said. “I will talk with him and see whether he wishes to marry you. We cannot have this noise in the house.”
She looked unwilling but she went away and returned soon with a tall good-looking young man.
“How is this?” I asked him as severely as I could.
He was quite willing to tell me how it had happened. “It is difficult for me now that we are having a revolution,” he said. “Two women want me for a husband. They are both widows, it is true, but such women are shameless nowadays.”
“Do you want either of them for a wife?” I asked.
“Either would do,” he said quite honestly. “And I would like a wife, although to get a virgin still costs money. A widow can be had for nothing. I am willing.”
“But which?” I urged.
“Li Sau-tse is as good as the other,” he replied. “Yet I do not wish to be locked up.”
Li Sau-tse, who was supposed to be in the kitchen, now thrust her head in the door to bawl at him, “If I do not lock you up, you good-for-nothing, you will go back to the other woman!”
The man grinned rather nicely. “Let’s get married,” he suggested.
This was all entirely unorthodox, but it was symbolic of the upset times, at least in coastal China. Marriages were being made independently, divorces were easy, a mere newspaper notice was enough, and the incident in my own house made me realize suddenly that the old China was really gone.
So they were married, we gave the wedding feast, and for a few days all went well. Li Sau-tse managed the table boy who was now her husband as she managed everyone, and since she had the best heart in the world, I let it go. Alas, the other woman’s charms became brighter in the bridegroom’s memory as he continued to live under Li Sau-tse’s oppressive love, and one night he told her he wanted to leave. She locked him up immediately, and we were wakened at dawn with his shouting and thumping on the door.
Once more I summoned the strong-minded bride. “You cannot keep a grown man locked up,” I protested.
She looked grim and folded her arms across her full bosom. “Do you know what he wants?” she demanded. “He wants the other woman, too—both of us!”
“Many Chinese men have more than one wife,” I reminded her.
“No,” she said impressively, “not since the revolution. And he is only a common man. He is not Chiang Kai-shek.”
While this kitchen romance had been going on, the much more important one had been taking place in the new national government. Chiang Kai-shek had been pursuing his courtship of Soong May-ling, and although it was supposed to be private, everybody knew everything. They knew that old Mother Soong objected, as a stout Methodist Christian, to his already, reportedly, having three wives. The young lady herself, reared in America, also objected, one heard, to this old-fashioned competition. She insisted that she must be the only wife. Her elder sister had made the same demand of Sun Yat-sen. The three earlier Madame Chiangs were not only to be put away but divorced, gossip said, although Chiang Kai-shek it seemed, was reluctant to be so severe, and public opinion was with the older ladies who were blameless and loyal. Compromise was being talked of, however, not by the Soong family, but by the interested nation. It was this compromise which disgusted Li Sau-tse. A Chiang Kai-shek could have what he wanted, the old and the new, but not her common fellow. The upshot of it nevertheless, was that she released her bridegroom upon my insistence, and he fled instantly and she went about weeping for several days. Suddenly, when she had given up hope of ever seeing him again, he returned one day without explanation, and from then on was an exemplary husband.
It was a happy ending, and quite unexpected. When last I saw Li Sau-tse she was the proud mother of a child, not her own, for the terrible abortion had made motherhood impossible for her, to her great grief. In necessity she returned to the ways of old China. She chose a nice ugly concubine for her husband, and the obliging girl promptly produced a fine baby boy whom Li Sau-tse instantly appropriated for her own. She adored him and kept him beautifully dressed, exhibited him with maternal conceit and boasted of his intelligence. At the age of six months, she declared, if she whistled in a certain insinuating way he would immediately make water, and she was prepared to prove it to anybody at any time and anywhere.
As for Chiang Kai-shek, whose high romance coincided with this simple one, he was obliged to sacrifice his wives, or so we were told, and there was a great wedding, very fashionable and Christian, and Soong May-ling became the First Lady of the land. They made a handsome pair, he so straight and soldierly in his bearing, and she proud and beautiful. I said to a Chinese gentleman after the wedding, “What do the people think of this marriage?”
He looked at me astonished, “Does it matter? A man’s marriages are his own business.”
Ah well, it was a man’s point of view!
Meanwhile, far more important than romance was what was happening now in the nation. Chiang Kai-shek was in Nanking consolidating his government. It was a time of weighing and testing to see which elements in the revolution would follow the right wing which he led. The Three Cities upriver were uncertain, then they decided for him and we were all hopeful. The Communist party was firmly expelled from the Kuomintang and was forbidden even to exist in China. All Soviet advisors were sent back to Russia. Moreover, the Nationalist army forced its way triumphantly to Peking and drove out Chang Tso-lin, the last war lord in that seat of empire, and victory was announced.
This was all very satisfactory for the white people, at least, who felt Chiang Kai-shek was the best leader on the horizon, and certainly one who would not demand too much from them. They wished to do their part, and so they gave up some of the smaller of their advantages. The Concessions at Hankow and the lesser ports were returned to the Chinese, although the really important ones were kept, as were the extraterritorial rights. This was compromise and both sides so understood it.
The Communists, however, were not so easily vanquished. Part of the Fourth Army, under the leadership of Chu Teh, mutinied against Chiang in Kiangsi, and was immediately organized into the Red army, dangerous because it provided a nucleus around which all discontented persons could gather. Still more dangerous was the fact that while most of the intellectuals, the Western-trained scholars, left the Reds and flocked about Chiang Kai-shek who promised them government jobs, the peasants had nowhere to turn. Those who had been organized for the first time by the Communists, remained for the most part with the Communists, for to peasants Chiang Kai-shek had made no promises. This division between peasant and intellectual was the first threat to the new government. Never in Chinese history has any government succeeded if there is division between peasant and intellectual.
But this I did not comprehend immediately. The American Consul had granted us permission to return to Nanking and I had to think of making a home again. Our house, I heard, had been vacated at last after having various occupants and fortunately it had not been burned. But it had been used recently as a government cholera base and it would have to be thoroughly cleaned and disinfected. My kind Chinese friends helped me again, they whose little son had been killed by the overdose through hypodermic. I have not used their surname because it might be dangerous in these strange days under the Communists if I write it down, even though now I am thousands of miles away and an ocean lies between us, and all the years besides. Let me call them Chao, because it is not their name. At any rate, they invited me and my little family to stay in their house as long as we needed to do so, while I made the other house home again.
We went back, the first American family to return, although my unconquerable old father had returned alone some months before and had been living quietly with a Chinese family in the city. How strange it was to ride again into the city gates which had been shut so finally behind us when we left, homeless and possessing nothing! I saw no visible change, the carriage was as dirty and decrepit as ever, the horse as disconsolate after the revolution as before, and the streets were as crowded and filthy. Nothing else was changed, either, not the great city wall, nor the monumental gates, the pagodas and the temples and above all the soaring crest of Purple Mountain.
I say nothing was changed and yet the carriage had not passed through the city gate before I felt a change. It was in the people. The city was crowded with new people who looked at us with curious and unfriendly stares. I saw familiar faces, too, the peanut vendor who had always stood at the corner of The Drum, Tower was still there, the gatekeeper at the Li Family Gardens, an occasional riksha puller, passers on the street. But they did not smile nor did I. It was too early yet to know if old friends could be recognized.
And so we went jogging along with our few bags to the Chao house, a modest place in a valley below the university buildings, and there we found Mr. and Mrs. Chao and their recently born baby girl and their old parents waiting for us. They were in the tiny living room, and I felt that they were still uneasy and had not dared to come outside to greet us. But they were kind and as warm as ever otherwise, and Mrs. Chao led us to two small rooms set aside for us.
We stayed there a month, and I shall never forget the unfailing daily courtesy of this Chinese family. If they were inconvenienced or in danger from our presence they never let me know. If my two children were troublesome, I heard nothing of it, except that one day my amah told me that the elder child had thrown mud into the jar of soy sauce, that prized possession of every family. Mrs. Chao, being an old-fashioned housewife, made her own soy sauce and it always stood for a whole year fermenting in the yard under the eaves of the house, the jar covered with a wooden lid.
“Do not speak of it,” the amah said. “She made me promise not to tell you. But I do tell you because it will be necessary to show her some special kindness in return when the opportunity comes.”
The opportunity came a few days later when I happened to see in the glass-covered foreign china closet of Mrs. Chao’s living room a fine large platter which had belonged to my set of Haviland china. There it was, quite obvious, and when I first noticed it, I almost cried out, “Oh, where did you find my platter?”
Remembering my amah’s warning, however, I kept silent, and as the days passed, I found other possessions which had once been in my house, a set of teapots, a sewing machine, a victrola and records, and so on.
“Where did she get them?” I asked my amah in the privacy of our own rooms.
“She got them honestly by buying them at the thieves’ market,” the amah said. “That is where the looters sold the foreigners’ goods when the Communists came in.”
“Isn’t it strange she doesn’t ask me if I want them back?” I inquired. I had thought that I understood my Chinese friends, but this was a new experience.
The amah looked surprised. “But you lost them,” she reminded me. “They do not belong to you any more. And she is your friend—why should they not belong to her?”
I could not explain why this seemed wrong reasoning, and yet it did. I was more American than I thought. “I don’t mind anything except my Haviland platter,” I said stubbornly. “I do want that back.”
“Remember the soy sauce, please,” my amah advised. “If you are patient,” she added, “someday you may be able to have the plate again without losing friendship.”
I knew the amah was right. To lose friendship is a human disaster, and so I held my peace and pretended not to see the platter. Meanwhile every day I spent in my own house, superintending repairs, and when I was not satisfied with the work, getting down on the floor myself to scrub and sand and disinfect every crack between the boards. All the walls had to be whitewashed and every bit of woodwork and stone scrubbed with lysol. The house smelled hideously but at last it was clean and safe to live in again, and I began to gather some furniture and to hang new curtains.