My Several Worlds (6 page)

All this was only story to me, for it had happened before I was born. What I knew actually was the trouble that Kwang-hsü made now when he had become the Emperor. I suppose the Empress Dowager was already dreaming of something like retirement and enjoying herself, for she had many interests and amusements. She liked to paint, and had she been free to devote herself to art she could have become notable. She was a fine calligrapher, she loved flowers, she had a magnetic and enchanting way with birds and animals, so that she could coax wild birds to come to her at call, and cicadas to sit upon her wrist while she stroked them with her forefinger. She had a profound love of nature and was fond of certain vistas about the palaces, especially about the rebuilt Summer Palace, and she would have been glad, I think, to leave the affairs of state to her adopted son. But she did not deceive herself. He, too, was impetuous and weak, and though she had provided the finest of teachers for him, he was unable to think and plan as a statesman. Moreover, and this really terrified her, he seemed bewitched by the ways of the West. It had begun in his early childhood, in a manner which had seemed innocent enough. The eunuchs who were his servants had been hard put to it to amuse the lonely little boy, torn from his home and family, and they had searched the city for toys. But he grew tired of kites and clay dolls and paper lanterns and whistles, and at last one of the eunuchs remembered that there was a foreign toyshop in the capital, kept by a Dane, who stocked a few Western toys for the children of the foreign legation families. Thither the Imperial eunuchs went and they bought a toy train for the little Emperor, a magical toy which could be wound up to run. He was delighted with it, and they, poor souls, pleased and relieved to find something that could amuse their tiny sovereign, hurried to the shop again and again until the astonished Dane found himself on the way to riches. Every imaginable trinket and toy was bought and at last he searched the European countries to find something new for the baby Emperor.

Thus from early years Kwang-hsü believed that from the West came strange and wonderful objects which his own country did not know how to make. As he grew older he read of machines and railroads and he wanted to study science and he began to dream of reforming his nation and making China as modern as were the Western nations. Nor was he the only one. There were men who had the same dreams, and two of them were the Emperor’s own tutors. Unknown to the Empress, they encouraged their young ruler to imagine himself as the head of a vast modern people, a new China, and they tried to persuade him to the first dreadful step toward his complete power. It was to murder the Empress Dowager, his adoptive mother.

Here was the stuff of Shakespearean drama. The young Emperor was torn between loyalty to the great woman who had brought him in her own arms to the Imperial Palace and his sincere belief that China must be changed. He loved and admired the Empress with the force of all the tradition which had trained him to obedience to her not only as his sovereign but also as his adopted mother, and filial piety made his conscience tender. Yet he saw clearly enough what she would not, that China was in peril if she did not modernize to defend herself. Hungry Western powers were nibbling at her coasts and inland rivers, and she had no ships of war, no armies with which to beat them off. It was the age of empire, and any country not strong enough to defend itself was considered fair prey for Western empire builders. But China had never built an army or a navy, for she had not needed such defenses. The strength of her superior civilization until now had conquered every invader.

“We are being carved into pieces like a melon,” the old Empress groaned, and indeed they were, and yet she could not trust the impetuous young Emperor. She was partly justified for in a burst of reforming energy as soon as he became Emperor, within a hundred days, he had sent tens of edicts flying over the country, announcing new schools to be set up in temples, new railways, new laws and customs. Everything was to be changed and at once.

The people were confused and inside the palace immediately there was deep division. The old princes told the Empress Dowager that order must be restored. The modern advisors of the Emperor and his reformers must be routed and killed. The Emperor, they said, must be restrained.

When the Empress Dowager had to act, she acted quickly. Though I was a child and far away in another province, I can remember the consternation of my parents and our liberal Chinese friends and the satisfaction of our conservative Chinese friends, including my tutor, Mr. Kung, when we heard the news one early morning that by a
coup d’etat
the young Emperor had been taken prisoner and locked up on an island, that Yuan Shih-k’ai, the Commander of the new Western-trained Chinese army, had deserted the Emperor to take his side with the Empress Dowager, that six of the reformers had been killed and only two of the leaders, K’ang Yu-wei and Liang Ch’i-ch’ao, had escaped. A strange silence pervaded our region that day and doubtless it spread over the whole country. What now was to happen? The foreign governments, it became evident during the next few weeks, would do nothing. Opinion was divided but on the whole it sided with the Empress Dowager and with the conservative party. The foreign governments did not welcome reforms which might rouse the people of China to knowledge of what had been going on.

The first edict we next received was signed by the Emperor, but every one knew that the Empress had written it and sent it out over his name and the imperial seal. It was moderate enough, mildly saying that the reforms were going too fast and the people were becoming confused.

“Our real desire,” the edict announced reasonably, “was to make away with superfluous posts for the sake of economy; whereas, on the contrary, we find rumors flying abroad that we intend to change wholesale the customs of the Empire, and, in consequence, innumerable suggestions of reform have come to be presented to us. If we allowed this to go on, none of us would know to what pass matters would come. Hence, unless we hasten to express our present wishes clearly before all, we greatly fear that petty officials and their underlings will place their own construction on what commands have gone before, and create a ferment in the midst of the usual calm of the people. This will indeed be contrary to our desire, and put our reforms for strengthening and enriching our empire to naught.”

Then followed the retraction of all the young Emperor’s edicts during the past hundred days, and we knew that The Venerable Ancestor was back on the throne again and in full power.

It was in the year of 1900, when I was eight years old, that the two worlds of my childhood finally split apart. I had held them tied together by my very existence, I could see them clearly and combined from our vantage point on the hill above the Yangtse River. Sometimes in the morning when I looked abroad from our veranda, my mind flowed on beyond the green hillsides and the greener valleys, their ponds like diamonds in the sunshine, beyond the dark-roofed city and the bright breadths of the river, beyond to the sea. Across the sea was America, my own land, about which I knew nothing, and so upon which my imagination played with fantastic freedom. It all belonged to me, the near hills and the valleys, the city and the river, the sea and the land of my fathers.

In an academic fashion I knew, of course, even in those early years, that I was not Chinese, and I felt a rough justice in street urchins calling me “little foreign devil,” or in their pretending when they saw me that it would soon rain, since devils, they said, come out only when it is going to rain. I knew that I was no devil, and to be called one did not trouble me because I was still secure in my Chinese world. Did these naughty children know me, they would not call me a devil, and I merely made reply that they were the children of turtles—that is to say, they were bastards, a remark which sent them into shocked silence. My parents did not know for years the significance of the retort, and by that time I was old enough to be ashamed of it myself.

In the year of 1900, however, throughout the spring, the beautiful springtime of the Yangtse River Valley, I felt my world splitting unexpectedly into its parts. The stream of visitors thinned and sometimes days passed without a single Chinese friend appearing before our gates. My playmates were often silent, they did not play with the usual joy, and at last they too ceased to climb the hill from the valley. Even my schoolmates did not clamor to share my desk seat. I was a child spoiled by love and gifts and at first I was bewildered and then sorely wounded, and when my mother saw this, she explained to me as best she could what was happening. It had nothing to do with Americans, she said, for surely we had never been cruel to the Chinese nor had we taken their land or their river ports. Other white people had done the evil, and our friends, she promised me, understood this and did not hate us. Indeed, they felt as warmly to us as before, only they did not dare to show their feelings, since they would be blamed. At last I comprehended that all of us who were foreigners were being lumped together in the cruel fashion that people can adopt sometimes, for particular and temporary reasons, which are no real reasons but merely vents for old hatreds. But I had never known what hatred was. I had neither been hated nor had I ever hated anyone. I could not understand why we, who were still ourselves and unchanged, should be lumped with unknown white men from unknown countries who had been what we were not, robbers and plunderers. It was now that I felt the first and primary injustice of life. I was innocent, but because I had the fair skin, the blue eyes, the blond hair of my race I was hated, and because of fear of me and my kind I walked in danger.

Danger! It had been an unknown word to me. Noxious insects and reptiles were dangerous, but now we were in danger from people, I and my family and all white men, women and children like us. For there came creeping down from Peking in the North to our mid-country province the most sickening rumors about the Empress Dowager, she whom I, too, had learned to think of as The Venerable Ancestor, not only of the Chinese but of all of us who lived under her rule. She had turned against us. Because greedy Europeans and Englishmen were gnawing at the shores along the Chinese seas and the rivers, she, we heard, wanted to rid herself of all white people and lock the gates of China forever against us. She was scarcely to be blamed, my grave father said, for being angry or for wanting to free China of invaders and the plunderers, and how would we like it if our own country, the United States, were fastened upon by strangers and stolen away from us bit by bit, by nagging petty wars and huge indemnities in money and land and railroad rights? He sympathized with the Empress Dowager, but his sympathy could not save us. We had to take our place with our own kind, guiltless though we were, and we had to suffer for their guilt.

I remember the faultless summer day when we heard of the first massacre of missionaries in Shantung, and that the little children had been murdered with their parents. It was the death of the children that made my mother’s face turn pale and made my father decide that we must all be sent away. He had not believed until then that the Empress Dowager could be so foolish as to trust herself to the Boxers, that clan of monstrous imposters who pretended to her that they could by their secret magic withstand the foreign guns. For it was the foreign guns she feared. She knew that she had no armies or weapons which could match the armies and weapons of the Western peoples, and wanting desperately to find a means of protection and retaliation, she let herself believe in the magic pretensions of the Boxers. But by this time hysteria was raging over the whole nation. The foreign powers had demanded one concession after another from the weak young Emperor, and the people had, it was true, been only the more terrified by his Hundred Days of Reform, when he had sent the edicts which, if obeyed, would have destroyed the very structure of their ancient society. Meanwhile France had taken Annam, England insisted upon Weihaiwei, France upon Kwangchow, Germany upon Tsingtao and Russia upon Dairen. These were called “leased territories,” but actually they were colonies. And where were the armies and the navies for which the Chinese people had been paying so heavily through taxes? It was clear that the money had been absorbed, spent, squandered, not only by the old Empress Dowager herself upon such follies as the marble boat on the lake by the Summer Palace, but through the private hoardings of her officials. When her full guilt began to be suspected she was glad to turn the attention of the angry people to the plundering foreigners, and so she listened to the Boxers, against the advice of her best ministers. By now the young Emperor had no power at all, for he was locked up and his helpers were decapitated or gone.

Into this storm and fury our quiet bungalow was swept one day like a leaf upon a whirlpool. The air that summer’s day was hot and still and from the verandas the landscape was beautiful, the valleys green as jade with their earthen farmhouses shaded beneath the willow trees. White geese walked the paths between the fields and children played on the threshing floors while their parents in blue cotton peasant garb tilled the fields. Beyond the dark city the shining river flowed toward the sea. There was not a sign to show that the world was changed. I remember, though I was only eight years old, that long moment I stood on the veranda, gazing upon the scene that was home to me because I knew no other. It was the same and yet I knew, child though I was, that it could never be the same again.

Half a century and more has passed over my head since then, two world wars and the cruel snarl in Korea, and yet I see myself upon the veranda of the bungalow that was long ago torn down, a child, facing the changing world. The feelings then in my childish heart, the forebodings and the sadness, were right enough, for all has come to pass as I felt it might.

We left our home on that perfect summer’s day and took ship on one of the sturdy steamboats that plied the Yangtse down to Shanghai. There had been plenty of argument in the mission bungalow before we left. My mother and father did not leave their post easily, and it was only the murdered children that gave the better argument now for escape, and even at that there was no thought of my father accompanying us. He was to take us to Shanghai and stay only long enough to see us established in some modest flat, and then return alone. We left the house as it was, for him, but my mother took some of the family silver she had brought from her West Virginia home and buried it in a corner of the yard to save it. Long ago she had learned such lessons in her childhood, when in the War between the States her family had hidden their treasures, too, but against the Yankees. I realize now that the calm with which my parents faced our danger was the result of their childhoods in a wartime.