My Several Worlds (40 page)

And I am forever grateful for the beauty of Japan, for the wooded mountains, rising so sharply above the most beautiful coastline in the world. I remember warmly the twisted pines and the rocks and the incoming curling tides. The people built their houses as a part of the landscape, the roof lines conforming to the planes of rock and coast and mountain, and within the houses I found the same treasurable discipline of beauty and restraint. I know no other country where beauty is so restrained that poured into one clear mold it emerges in the form of an ecstasy. And I admire above all the fortitude of the Japanese upon their dangerous islands. For they never know when fierce earthquakes will destroy their homes or typhoons attack them or tidal waves sweep over their coastal villages. They live literally in the presence of death and this they know and yet they are calm.

Never did I conceive it possible that the Japanese people could be an enemy to me nor I to them. War was an agony to be endured while one remembered that the ones who made war, who committed crimes and atrocities, were not the Japanese people, but those who deceived them. I remember the day after Pearl Harbor was bombed that I sat in my office in New York, and Yasuo Kuniyoshi, the great Japanese artist, was announced. He came in and I rose at once to receive him.

“Sit down, please,” I said.

He sat down in a chair opposite me, speechless, the tears running down his cheeks. He did not wipe them away, he did not move, he simply sat there gazing at me, the tears running down his cheeks and splashing on his coat. “Our two countries—” he whispered at last, and could not go on.

“I know,” I said. “But let us remember that our two peoples are not enemies, no matter what happens.”

There was nothing more said. He wiped his eyes after a few minutes, we clasped hands and he went away. We were continuing friends, understanding each other, whatever the day’s news was.

One other such person I knew, months later, perhaps even years later, for I have never been able to measure time, and this person was an American woman, quite average at that. It was in Los Angeles, where I had gone to make some speeches for war relief. The Japanese-Americans had already been sent to the detention camps, and some sort of argument was going on about the confiscation of their property. Suddenly one day I received a hurry call from the American Civil Liberties Union to go and testify on behalf of the Japanese-Americans before a State senatorial committee then meeting in Los Angeles. Without delay I put on my hat and went to the hall. There I was called almost immediately, and I argued that it would be gross injustice to confiscate the property of persons whose guilt had not even been proved. And when, I asked, had it become legal in the United States to confiscate property? I came from Pennsylvania where there were many German-Americans. Indeed, the center of the secret Nazi Bund had only recently been discovered in a town less than five miles away from our home, and a neighbor’s barn was burnt because she had said something publicly against Hitler. While it was burning she received a telephone call, and an unknown voice had said, “This’ll learn you to talk about the
Führer
!” Yet there had been no talk about confiscating the property of German-Americans, and no thought of doing so. To discriminate thus even between enemies was not just, I said.

When my testimony was finished a middle-aged plain-looking woman asked to testify also on behalf of the Japanese-Americans. She was allowed to do so, and she said very simply that she did not think it was fitting for Americans to take peoples’ houses and land just because they were Japanese in ancestry. She said that some of her neighbors had told her she ought not to speak for the Japanese because her son was at that moment fighting them in the Pacific.

“But,” she said, her face honest and good, and her eyes clear, “I tell them that my Sam ain’t fightin’ the same Japanese. I know Mr. and Mrs. Omura and they’ve always been kind good people and nice neighbors, and I don’t think we ought to take their property. They’ll need it when they come back. Anyway, it’s theirs.”

A scattered hand clapping followed her testimony, and two or three others got up and dared to endorse what she had said. I don’t know that any of us had influence enough to impress the row of hard old faces behind the table, but at any rate the Japanese-Americans were not robbed, and later their sons proved their loyalty by fighting and dying for America in alien Italy, while in the concentration camps their families lived with dignity and grace, creating gardens in the desert and works of art out of sagebrush, roots and stones.

I did once make another little monument of a sort, too, to the Japanese people. It was carved from a day spent in Kobe, a day which threatened to be lonely and sad because I was then lonely and sad, and which instead was an experience which I have placed among the most treasured of my life. I put it into a small book for children, entitled
One Bright Day
, which was exactly what it was.

Ah well, I needed a memory crammed with tenderness and beauty when I went back to China that next winter. We were still not allowed to return to Nanking, after all, and so we had to find quarters somehow in Shanghai, a city more repulsive than ever that year, filled as it was with refugees of every sort, and it was the more repulsive because of the war lords and the rich people and their families living in magnificence in the French and British concessions. They rolled along the streets in huge cars chauffeured by sad-faced White Russians, and when they came out of cars to enter expensive English and French shops they were guarded by tall young White Russians, in uniforms. These were, as I have said, the sons of nobility and intellectuals driven from Soviet Russia, and their sisters were trying to earn their living as hostesses in the new night clubs. Sometimes in despair, for there was no future for them, Russian girls even became the concubines of the war lords, and joined the heterogeneous households of women and children. It became fashionable for a war lord who had made his peace with the revolutionaries at a price and had retired to Shanghai to take a beautiful White Russian girl as a concubine, and soon the wealthy merchants and bankers began to do the same thing.

One of the most repulsive aspects of Shanghai life grew out of the promiscuity among the decadent Chinese intellectuals. The city had many rootless young Chinese, educated abroad, who did not want to involve themselves in anything more trying than art and literature, the artists from the Latin Quarter in Paris, the postgraduates from Cambridge and Oxford in England, the Johns Hopkins-trained surgeons who did not practice, the Columbia Ph.D.s who could not bear life in “the interior,” the graduates of Harvard and Yale who kept their hands soft and spent their time in literary clubs and poetry-making, who published little decadent magazines in English and pretended that the common Chinese did not exist. In such groups there were also a few American women who had come to China for adventure, women who took Chinese lovers and about whom the Chinese lovers boasted, so that what an American might fondly think was secret was in reality everywhere known. There were always, too, American hostesses in well-to-do homes of American business tycoons, who thought they were seeing “new China” when they invited such mixed groups to their homes, but were in reality only seeing the expatriates, who knew little indeed of their own country.

There was nothing healthy or good about Shanghai life. Its Chinese city was filthy and crowded, and the foreign concessions were hiding places for criminals of all countries, behind their façades of wealth and magnificence. Upon the streets the beggars and the struggling people pushed and hurried. If I had to draw a cartoon of Shanghai at that period, I would draw a wretched riksha puller, his vehicle piled with five or six factory workers on their way home after work, being threatened by a tall English policeman, or a turbaned Sikh in the British Concession, while he made way for a car full of satin-clothed people of any nationality that one might mention, but usually Chinese. I am not one of those who think the poor are always right, for I know they are often stupid and wrong, and the rich are not wrong merely because they are rich. Yet that is what I see when I think of Shanghai.

A friend recently sent me a copy of a letter which I wrote from Shanghai to her in White Plains, New York, on December 26 of that year 1927. I include it here because of the prophecy it contains, a prophecy I wrote twenty-six years ago. I do not claim to be a prophet, at that. If I had any advantage over other white people in those days, it came from a life centered in China and the Chinese instead of in the constricted foreign circle of my own race. The few foreigners who had lived as I had certainly knew at least as much as I could know. Here is the letter:

1056 Ave. Joffre

Shanghai

Dec. 26, 1927

Dear——

Your letters to others I happened to see last night and today being the day after Christmas and the children still absorbed in their toys, I am moved by an unaccustomed sense of leisure to write you solely in the selfish hope that you will write to me.

Your letters mirror a delightfully placid existence in your American home. I feel in some ways like a poor little girl looking into a shop window full of unattainable pleasures. Like the same little poor girl, however, I have my compensations. Living in China these days is like being the spectator at a tremendous melodrama, with the Communists as villain and the Nanking government as the fair damsel in distress. The crisis is fast approaching and the spectators, as well as the heroine, are beginning to look frantically about for the hero, who, as yet, has not appeared, and may not even yet be born! Meanwhile the villain is waxing bold and furious and no one can foretell the end….

As for China itself, it is very difficult to speak of the future here. We stand by from day to day. If this were any other country one would say such a condition of chaos could not possibly continue, but in China anything can continue indefinitely so long as people gather together enough food to keep from starvation. Tremendous crops and poor transportation have combined this year to make rice in central China unusually cheap and therefore chaos is the more philosophically endured.

You will have read of the Nationalists’ endeavor to get rid of the Soviet. They have returned the Russian Consul and all the Red Russians they could get hold of. Many Russians have been treated most brutally in Hankow and Canton. I hate Bolshevism, but I hate brutality, too. Everyone has been shocked by the brutality of the Chinese in this affair.

The hardest thing about living in China these days, however, is the spirit of disillusionment and despair which is everywhere growing. The best Chinese are so sad over the failure of the Nationalists, already apparent, that it is heart-breaking. The Nationalists are using the old militarist methods—heavy, illegal taxes, corruptly spent. Same old thing! Chiang Kai-shek could retire a rich man, we hear, and whether true or not, the gossip implies disillusionment.

All this is hard to bear. The leaders in the Nationalist party are returned students, for the most part. It is a shock to those who have believed that in modern education lay the salvation of China. The hopefulness in the whole thing is, however, that this despair and disillusionment may be the beginning of sober self-realization and facing the fact that the roots of China’s troubles are in the moral weakness of her upper classes, and in the helplessness of the peasants. Full humility and facing of truth is the only hope I see for this country. Many are realizing it. But here in Shanghai I am appalled by the wanton extravagance and carelessness of Chinese rich people. I feel as though I were living at the capital of Louis of France before the French revolution broke. The streets are crowded with hungry, sullen, half-starved people and among them roll the sedans and limousines of the wealthy Chinese, spending fabulous sums on pleasure, food, and clothes, wholly oblivious to others. This cannot go on forever. Personally I feel that unless something happens to change it, we are in for a
real
revolution here, in comparison to which all this so far will be a mere game of ball on a summer’s afternoon. Then it will be a real uprising of the ignorant and poor, against those who own anything. When it will come, no one can tell. Good crops put it off awhile. But the people are very restive and angry now….

Shanghai is swarming, too, with destitute White Russians. They keep pouring down from the north, anxious for money or work or anything. They do the most menial labor, and are oftentimes the most pathetic of creatures. The night watchman at a Chinese house near us was once a professor of literature at a Russian university—a cultured gentleman. One’s heart gets so surcharged with the sorrows of the world here sometimes that one breaks….

As ever,

Pearl

As for my own bit of the city, it was a small third-floor apartment in a fairly comfortable house which I shared with two other American families. Of those months I spent in Shanghai there is not one incident worth telling except a pleasant day after Christmas. Somewhere during that time I wrote a story and it was sold by my agent in the United States. Yes, I had an agent by then, because it took so many months to wait for rejections. A month perhaps, to write a story and type it, a month to send it to New York where all magazine editors and publishers seemed to live, two or three months for a lagging decision to reject, another month for the rejection to reach me, made me foresee an eternity of waiting. One day when I was walking past Kelly and Walsh’s bookstore, I went in and among some secondhand books I found a dingy little book called
The Writer’s Guide.
It was published in London, but I searched the index and found the names of two literary agents who had offices also in New York.

I wrote to them both. One of them replied after two months that he could not consider material from me because “no one was interested in Chinese subjects.” The other, David Lloyd, replied that he would like to see my material. I sent him my two stories once printed in
Asia Magazine
, with the suggestion that they might make a novel. As a matter of fact, Brentano’s had already written me about the first one, asking me to enlarge it into a novel, but upon reflection I had decided that the story was too slight to enlarge and they had declined the second story as a possibility for combination. For a long time no further word came from Mr. Lloyd, and I all but forgot the stories.