Authors: Pearl S. Buck
The social worker has, indeed, a power over human lives which demands a largeness seldom found. She—or he—sits in judgment upon two people, weighing them, examining them, peering into their private lives, and it is this social worker who decides whether or not they shall have a baby. Even God has not such power. Any man and woman who come together, whether they are fit parents or not, may bring a child to life. The child comes according to the law of nature, and if detachment is wanted, here it is. No questions asked, but if healthy people copulate, they have children. But the couple, denied children and wanting a baby more than all else, who submit to the perfectionist’s process, are frightened to offend the almighty lest they be refused the joy they long for and to which they are usually entitled.
It will be seen by now that I am angry. I acknowledge it. I have seen too much. I have gone too deep. And I find that it is harder to adopt a child nowadays, thanks to the development of the profession of social work, than it was twenty-eight years ago, when I found my little daughter, or eighteen years ago when our blessed Big Four came home. And I doubt that my husband and I would have passed at all nowadays, as adoptive parents, and certainly we would not have been given more than one child. Yes, the professional gods actually parcel out the children, saying that it is not “fair” for one family to have two children when others have none. What validity the argument might have is destroyed when one visits the orphanages. One such orphanage I know has exactly three hundred children.
“Why exactly three hundred?” I inquired of my guide.
“We are required to have a minimum of three hundred in order to receive our full quota of funds,” she replied honestly but without understanding the frightful import of her words.
And I remember the day when a little timid woman, herself a social worker, stole into my office in New York City. She had come from another state to tell me that something had to be done for the children there, because twenty-seven children in an institution or in boarding homes constituted a job and salary for a social worker, and therefore too many of these workers did not want to free the children for adoption, since it meant finding other children to replace the ones adopted.
“I keep seeing their little faces,” she said. “Please, can’t you do something?”
I could not. The mountain I could not move, for in that state it was imbedded in the corruptions of political life. And so I am glad we began our family before the latter-day social workers had a chance at us, for we have had a glorious life with our children, making plenty of mistakes with them, I am sure, and losing patience on a grand scale occasionally, and they with us, but we have had a glorious time nevertheless, and thank God for every minute of it.
We need social workers, if by that we mean persons devoted to the happiness of children. In a society like ours, where children can be easily lost and ill-treated, there must be organized care for them. But the organization must be watched and criticized continually and rebelled against individually and collectively by those concerned and by the lay public, or else the organization becomes a vested interest. And when children are property, then we have slavery as real as anywhere in the world. The lay mind must always remain in control of the professional, exactly as the civilian mind must remain in control of the military, for once the organization takes over, danger looms. The professional is the specialist, employed to advise and to perform but always under the supervision of the lay mind, for the specialist is too narrow, and made so by his education, to be also the administrator. This is the basic principle upon which alone the citizens of a democracy are safe. For the curse of the professional in any walk of life is his perfectionism. It is all very well to want to be perfect but such heights are achieved only after due process, and the purpose fails if there is such delay that people grow impatient. I read much of the black market in babies, and certainly I do not approve it, but I know the black market in any commodity exists and flourishes only when the proper sources of supply are inadequate for the demand. It is ideal to complete a perfect adoption, taking time to prepare both child and parents, so that one child has a good home and every chance for happiness. But what of all the other children growing too old in the boarding home or orphanage while the one is being perfectly placed, so that many lost children never find adoption?
This is an old war of mine, this war against perfectionism in an imperfect world. I used to fight it in China against the American doctors and the Western-trained Chinese doctors. While millions of people died of preventable disease and millions more went blind from trachoma, the doctors went on with their high professional standards. That is, anyone who practiced medicine must be a graduate physician. But there were few who could be graduates, it was too expensive and there were too few medical schools. To go abroad was prohibitive indeed. I used to argue—why do we need such high training for everybody? Why not train field workers who could give quinine for malaria, treat ulcers and wounds, swab eyelids for trachoma, yet who could realize when a malady was beyond their knowledge? These serious cases could be sent to a medical center and if there too the illness was too grave sent still further to a central hospital. It would mean that the time of highly paid expensive professionals would not be spent upon familiar diseases, easily recognizable, and best of all it would mean people were being cured.
But no, I was told, this was the absurd idea of a layman. I am now enduring considerable secret agony when I hear that the Communists in China are doing exactly what I had hoped could be done by our earlier professionals, and are getting full credit for it. The manner in which a job is done is certainly very important, and the methods should be the best possible. I put only one aim above it—to get the job done, for if one group fails to accomplish it, another group will take over. In the United States the black market in babies flourishes and will flourish, in spite of efforts to control it, until the supply meets the demand. Human nature always prevails.
One personal note I insert here. When I bought the house which became a home for me and mine, my dear elder brother bought the small stone house across the brook. If we stepped out of our front doors together we could wave across the hills. It was our comfortable dream that after being separated all our lives, for he had left our Chinese home for college at fifteen, when I was only four, we could live the rest of our lives side by side. We were still peculiarly congenial, friends as well as relatives. And I think of him here, because I remember how he laughed when we showed him our first two baby boys, then six weeks old! He loved babies and he had a magic with them. I have seen him on a train lift from a mother’s arms a fretful crying baby whom he had never seen before and talking gently and half humorously persuade the little thing to quiet contemplation of his kind face, and then to sleep. I could see the adoring uncle in him when he looked at his tiny new nephews and then he decided immediately that since we were spending the winter in New York, only weekending in the country, the babies must have his sun lamp. He was then at the height of his distinguished career in vital statistics and health work, sought in various countries for his wise advice, yet he found time from his busy offices in Wall Street to get the lamp to us that very day.
The next morning he was stricken with a coronary thrombosis as he was about to go to a meeting of his board of directors, and without recovering consciousness he died that day, and with him went our dream.
I have kept his little ancient house all these years, completing its restoration as he had planned and using it to house friends from far countries who needed a home for a while, before moving on.
And while I think of those early years when we still lived in New York and only weekended here at Green Hills, let me remember, too, the kindly men who helped us convey four little children up and down eighteen floors to our apartment. I had been told that children are not welcome in New York apartments but I have not found it true. There was never a complaint when twice a week the doormen and elevator men helped two little boys and two babies into cars and out of them. Once when I spoke my thanks a cheerful elevator man replied, “Shure, ma’am, we’d rather have kiddies than dogs in the house.”
And once, I remember, when my husband had left us at his downtown office and had turned over the car full of children and nurse to me, I was stopped at the crossing by the immense policeman at our corner. And oh, dear, I thought, what have I done now? For I was never the best of drivers, being congenitally absent-minded, but the policeman held us there with the flat of his hand against us, while traffic came and went, and the babies began to show signs of hunger. On the second red light, while the cars waited like crouching tigers, he sauntered over to us and leaned amiably into the open window behind me.
“I just wanted to see how the kids are doin’,” he explained.
Then he waved us on.
And why do I speak gratefully of elevator men and policemen, and not of the one above all men? For three years of babies my husband, halfway on our way to New York or halfway home, stopped at a wayside diner to heat bottles of milk for those hungry babies of ours. The diner man got to know us well and he took vast interest in the twice-a-week event. But what I remember is my husband’s affectionate half-humorous patience as he brought back two bottles of warm milk to insert them gently into the waiting mouths.
When at times I tend to grow impatient with my fellow Americans, and I am only impatient when it comes to large world affairs, at which it seems to me we are still rather stupid, I remember the infinite goodness of my fellow citizens, taken one by one, and the personal kindnesses of daily living, over the years.
During the forty years I lived in China I had kept myself aware of what was going on in the rest of the world, and especially in my own country. I had learned from childhood to recognize the peoples of the earth as members of one family, known or unknown, and had realized the practical meaning of this Chinese view of the globe, first instilled into me by Mr. Kung, as history unrolled before me, enfolding me as it went. So now, living the second half of my life in the United States, I keep close touch with what is going on in China, the country that I have left, and yet which will always be a part of me, in spite of the fact that I am
persona non grata
to the Communists at present in control.
In 1938, therefore, although I was living deeply in my peaceful American farmhouse, I was still close to my other country. Ten years had passed since Chiang Kai-shek set up his government in the old Ming capital of Nanking. They had been difficult years for him and his government, and four severe floods with the inevitable famines following, and one severe drought, had made them no easier. The depression that wrought such havoc with the American people had been, far more than we realized, a world depression, and China in 1933 had all but succumbed to her share of it. Yet the government had pulled through disasters, and in some ways had made progress. The Communists were steadily beaten back into the Northwest, and one province and leader after another gave allegiance to the new Central Government, as it was now called. Anti-Western slogans were dying down, and the influence of the Western-trained officials was growing stronger. Chinese businessmen were eager to increase trade with Western countries, and experts in industry, road making, and scientific research were invited to China to give their advice. An air service was begun and one could fly from the North to the South, from East to West. Many westerners were surprised to see how readily China took to modern modes of travel, but that was because they did not understand the literal and practical nature of the Chinese, who are always ready to improve themselves. It was amusing, even in the days when I was still living in China, to see a stout businessman, his clean extra garments in a small pigskin trunk, mount as confidently into an airplane as he had once climbed into a riksha. Railways, greatly increased, made it possible to travel by train from the coast to as far west as Sian-fu in Shensi. Motor roads were built and buses in various stages of collapse and disrepair bumped along their way into the interior and back again to the ports, although private cars still belonged only to the very rich and to government officials. Perhaps the most notable contributions of the Western-trained Chinese were in the area of roads and railways. The weakness of the young government, however, was still in its remoteness from the peasants who, it must always be remembered, were eighty-five percent of the population. Motor roads and even railroads did not benefit them, and taxes steadily increased. Central control still did not reach far beyond the large cities, and local bullies, in the posts of officialdom, too often exacted levies as they liked. For the peasant there were no courts of appeal. To maintain an enormously increased officialdom he groaned under fresh burdens. Behind Chiang Kai-shek and his government, however, were the Chinese bankers of the port cities, mainly Shanghai. In spite of the slogans of anti-foreignism upon which the Nationalist government rose to power, the fact is that this government owes more to westerners than it has ever been willing to acknowledge and some of it was because of the treaty ports, where in concessions guarded by Western police and soldiers, the banks and treasuries could be maintained in safety. There, too, the bankers and their families were safe, their children educated in Western schools. The sons of Chinese bankers and other rich men did indeed become the vanguard of a national movement toward Westernism, and through them much of the old Chinese tradition was dying. Young men, growing up in the cosmopolitan cities of Shanghai and Tientsin, wore Western clothes and went to Western dance halls where the hostesses were not only lovely Chinese girls in their slim gowns fashioned on Western lines, but French girls and beautiful White Russians, and even a few English and Americans were available to all alike. A modern theater movement flourished in those cities, and such stars as the Chinese Butterfly Wu, vying with pretty Janet Gaynor of Hollywood, the favorite American star, made motion picture theaters everyday pleasures. Young couples began to want “small family” homes instead of living in the traditional manner with the clan, and much of the literature one read in Chinese magazines and books of the period had to do with the sorrows of young lovers parted from each other by family betrothals. It became acceptable for a man, married by his family, to leave his wife in the ancestral home in the country and to take another wife of his own choosing for his business life in the city. The Chinese is always able to accommodate his principles to the needs of the hour, and for this reason, more than any other, there was never a clean-cut, thoroughgoing revolution in China, let it be said, as there was in Russia. New
mores
developed, but never abruptly. Even the houses changed, and instead of the graceful old dwellings of the past, conforming to landscape, hideous square two-story structures sprang up to mar the ancient Chinese scene. It became fashionable among the modern-minded to be Western in all possible ways, and the effect was often distressing indeed.