My Several Worlds (64 page)

We all took care of our babies together, except at night when they were my responsibility, and we all shared the joy of seeing them grow strong and happy. The little American-Chinese never knew anything but love and he thrived from the first, but the little American-East Indian had to be won into believing that we loved him. Yet that did not take long. The months passed and our family did a great deal of thinking. If there were these two children there must be many others. I began to inquire among child adoption agencies and found indeed that the American child of Asian or part-Asian ancestry was their greatest problem, greater even than the Negro child. Many agencies would not accept them at all, feeling their adoption was impossible. What became of them then? Nobody knew. A child can be lost here in the United States more easily than in countries where the big family system still prevails.

I reported back to my family. Behind our two babies were perhaps hundreds of others. Were we to do nothing about them? I had now a special concern. No one perhaps can love his country so logically and deeply as the person who has lived away from it for many years and returns with ardent patriotism. I could not bear to see in my country the same evils that I had seen in others. That is, I could not bear to believe that these beautiful children could find no adoptive homes because of their mixed origins. I would not believe it. The job was simply to find parents for them.

Yet suppose I could not? Hundreds of agencies had tried and failed. I could not take all the children, that was obvious. Also, as I reminded our grown children, their father and I were too old to start another family of babies. These little American-Asians needed special love and care right through the years and we were no longer young. We must plan for a sound future. Then I asked myself—why not then find younger parents in our own community for our two American-Asian babies, and let theirs be the home center while we helped as grandparents? And why not plan for all such children until other agencies were convinced that they are “adoptable”? Our community has many generous and kind people in it, and perhaps they would help. I invited our leading men and women one evening to talk over the plan. “If you will stand behind it with us,” I said, “I believe we can do something really useful not only for this, after all, rather small group of American children, but for our nation. Communist propaganda in Asia says that we Americans despise people with Asian blood. But we will show them that we care for these exactly as we care for all.”

The man who keeps our general store spoke for everybody. He was a big Pennsylvania Dutchman, our oldest citizen and our most respected and influential. He said, “We won’dt only be willin’, we will be proudt to have the childtern.”

Thus began Welcome House, Incorporated. It has grown through the years to gather many children. A few live permanently in our community, established in two families before the adoptions began, but the others, the babies, now go to adoptive parents. For there are many parents who want the American children of Asian blood. Some of these parents are white Americans, some Asian, some part-Asian. All of them are people who have unusual background, advantages in understanding and education and experience. We are particular about our parents. They must want our babies for what they are, they must value the Asian heritage and be able to teach the child to value it. Once a prospective mother, looking at a lovely little girl whose Japanese mother had given her Asian eyes, asked me, “Will her eyes slant more as she grows older?” My heart hardened. That woman would not be given one of our children. She had to think the tilted eyes were beautiful, and if she did not, then she was not the right one. Plenty of people do think such eyes beautiful. We have at last a list of waiting parents who want our babies. And when they are approved, our babies go with them into their communities and make their way, without fail. For the blood of Asia adds a gentle charm to the American child and there is no gainsaying this fact.

The job has not been easy. Has it been worth doing? Yes, and for many reasons. For me it has been deeply satisfying to find Americans who are generous and wide-hearted, who help to find the children, help to support them, and help to place them with good adoptive parents and thus insure good lives. It has been worth while, too, to discover the Americans of different caliber, the small-minded narrow-hearted prejudiced ones, the men and women unworthy of the great name they carry, the un-American Americans. I find it as useful to know these as the others. Not all the people even in our community are the right kind of Americans—the kind that I can be proud of before the whole world.

And I hope I am not too selfish in finding comfort in the children for myself. At night in the solitary hours before dawn, when, wakeful, I find my wilful mind dwelling upon the problems of the world and particularly upon our American problems, which seem increasingly severe, I find myself thinking of all our Welcome House children, each one of them belonging now to an American family, loving and loved, and I remind myself that thousands of people, maybe millions of people, in Asia know about them, too. As I write these very words, I was stopped by the ringing of the telephone and when I answered it, I heard the voice of a man from Indo-China, a Vietnamese, who broadcasts regularly to his own country against Communism and for democracy, and he put a familiar question to me. “May I come and visit Welcome House? I want to know all about the children, how they get adopted into American families, so that I can tell my countrymen about it. This is what they ought to know about the United States.”

“Come,” I said as I always say. “We are glad to tell you everything.”

Yes, and Welcome House is worth while, too, not only for what it does now, but for what it proves to other adoption agencies—that no child is “unadoptable” if they find the parents who want that particular child. There are parents for every child born in the United States of America.

Green Hills Farm

We have many exiles with us nowadays, here in our country. I used to see exiles in my Chinese world often enough but they were the white men who could never go home. Sometimes it was their own fault. They had married Chinese women, or had children by them, and the little creatures they had made, inadvertently perhaps, had laid such hold upon them that they stayed until it was too late to leave them. More often they were exiles merely because they could not enjoy living in the small American towns and on the farms where they had been born. The magic of Asia had caught them, the inexplicable richness of ancient life, the ease and freedom of belonging nowhere, and they could not return to the tight circle of family and friends who could never understand the magic.

Today I see other exiles, the Chinese here in the United States, who dare not return to their own land because they have committed themselves against the Communists and now fear for their lives if they go home. It interests me to see how the state of exile affects these people I have known for so many years, the famous as well as the unknown, the rich as well as the poor. Some of the Chinese exiles are very rich. They have prepared against this day by storing away in American banks wealth enough to last their lifetime through. They live here much as they did in China, in comfortable houses or apartments, but waited upon by American servants and deferred to by Americans who sympathize with them. The ladies play mahjong in New York as they did in Shanghai, all afternoon and most of the night, sleeping in the early hours to wake up and play again. They invite each other as guests, travelling in sleek automobiles with Negro chauffeurs. They are not seen often in public and their circle is themselves and the Americans who defer to them.

Others are well-known scholars and writers, exiled because they are Confucianists in an age which rejects the order of Confucius. They live in cities in small apartments, their wives doing the housework and finding it hard. “In China I had three servants,” such a Chinese lady said to me the other day. “Here I cannot afford one. I pity the American women, slaves to housework! Life is too difficult here in America.”

Yes, it is hard for a Chinese exile. In his own country the scholar and the intellectual had honor. Here there is not as much honor for the scholar as for the successful prize fighter or football player or crooner or movie star. And the exile who is a scholar often has his principles. He will accept as his friends only those Americans who believe as he does. Traditionally the Chinese scholar was the administrator of Imperial government and today he reasons, though wrongly, that he who is not for Chiang Kai-shek is certainly for Mao Tse-tung. Tell him that it is possible to reject both equally and he cannot believe you—or he will not. In his narrowed world, for he does not accept the American, either, this exile grows bitter and ill-tempered. “He can be very mean,” the great Chinese novelist, Lau Shaw, once said, and I did not know then what he meant.

But nowadays Lau Shaw himself is an exile of a sort, I suppose, living in Peking, and speaking what he is told to speak, and writing what he is told to write. I see quotations sometimes from his articles and stories. I hear echoes and I marvel at his obedience. But I know he has compensations. He is in Peking, he is in China, and his heart is free. He was not happy here in the United States as a visitor, for nothing could lift the shadow of exile from him. Once when he came to spend a weekend with us, it happened that we had invited a crowd of wounded veterans from the Valley Forge Hospital to a party in our big barn. They were tragic young men, soldiers who had been half blown to pieces in the war by booby traps and hand grenades. Their faces were all but obliterated, and the plastic surgeon was trying to rebuild them bit by bit. Our party was the first time they had been away from the hospital and the officer in charge had warned us not to be shocked. I had tried to explain to the children, but the explanation had been almost impossible. Luckily our cocker spaniel had a litter of puppies at their best and most lovable age, six weeks, their eyes open and mischief beginning to invade. I was a few minutes late for the party and from the house I could see the Red Cross station wagons arriving with the men. The children were already in the barn. I braced myself, dreading the next hours, and then I went over to be hostess.

I need not have feared. With infallible instinct the children had taken the basket of puppies to the barn with them and Rusty, the mother, and Silver, the father, then alive, had gone with them. When I entered the barn what I heard was laughter, the loud self-forgetting laughter of young men and children at play, and what they were playing with was the puppies, and the puppies were performing at their best and funniest. The men had forgotten their faces, forgotten for the moment the war. They had gone back to being boys at home, and the children, proud of the puppies, had forgotten that the boys had no faces. They were all laughing, laughing at the puppies. The evening was off to a roaring success.

What I really wanted to tell about this story, however, was that Lau Shaw was already there, too. I had asked him to speak to the men and I introduced him after the solid refreshments, explaining that he was China’s greatest novelist. I had no idea what he would say. Lau Shaw is really a very old-fashioned Chinese. If he had his way, I am sure that he would like to have lived in China five hundred years ago. He is a sensitive man, over-sophisticated perhaps, instinctively avoiding anything painful, even in conversation. What then would he say to the pitiful young men?

He got up, diffident as ever, he stood before them a moment, and I could see that his eyes were closed. Then he began to speak in his deep gentle voice. What did he talk about? About shadowboxing in old Peking, if you please, surely as alien a subject as could be imagined! I doubt whether one of those young Americans had ever heard of shadowboxing. Of course Lau Shaw knew that, and so he proceeded to explain the art, its meaning, its story, its historical significance, all in the simplest and most charming fashion, and then without the slightest self-consciousness he illustrated his talk himself by making the movements of shadowboxing into a sort of formal dance, a set of stylized motions. I knew the subject well, I had often watched shadowboxers in Chinese theaters, but I was entranced. And looking about me I saw that the men were entranced, too, comprehending without knowing, perhaps, just what it was they comprehended, but fascinated and carried away into another world they had never seen. When Lau Shaw stopped, there was silence, a great sigh, and then wild applause. And this is what I mean by human understanding.

Once again I heard Lau Shaw wield the same magic, this time in New York, before a sophisticated city audience. It was at an East and West Association meeting and he had been very reluctant to speak. He was averse to any publicity, hating to be known, wary of politics and political questions and discussion. He made the same hesitation before he spoke and then he delivered a delightful discourse, exactly as he might have done in Peking. The subject? “Crickets, Kites and Pekinese Dogs and Their Significance in Chinese Life,” and the audience was enthralled.

So gentle a creature as Lau Shaw was of course cheated again and again by the cruel-hearted in the United States, as well as elsewhere. He made friends once in his lonely existence in New York with a man who professed to admire him, and after a month or so of acquaintance, the man, seeming intelligent and well informed, and therefore trusted by Lau Shaw, asked for a twenty-four hour loan of a hundred dollars. It was Lau Shaw’s allowance for the month, but in the Chinese tradition which does not deny a friend he handed the sum to the American who never appeared again. Several such experiences, I am ashamed to say, this Chinese great man suffered. We Americans do not know how often crimes are thus committed against guests in our country. If we knew we would not prate so much of how we are cheated when we go abroad.

Undoubtedly the revolution in China has had a disastrous effect upon Chinese scholars and intellectuals and not one of them has fulfilled his early promise. Even Hu Shih’s great books, so brilliantly begun, have never been finished. Yet the cause, if not the blame, for this rests partly upon us, too, who belong to the West. Hu Shih and Ch’en Tu-hsiu, the two leaders of the literary revolution in China—and it is necessary to remember that in revolutions scholars and intellectuals were always the leaders—had early committed themselves to the West, as I have said. Ch’en Tu-hsiu, indeed, even attacked Confucianism as a denial of human rights and Hu Shih maintained in those days that the culture of the West was not to be considered materialistic merely because it made life easier. Both declared themselves for an outright adoption of Western ways.