I used to wonder why my Chinese friends, whom I knew to be merciful and considerate towards people, could be quite indifferent to suffering animals. The cause, I discovered as I grew older, lay in the permeation of Chinese thought by Buddhist theory. Part of the doctrine of the reincarnation of the human soul is that an evil human being after death becomes an animal in his next incarnation. Therefore, every animal was once a wicked human being. While the average Chinese might deny direct belief in this theory, yet the pervading belief led him to feel contempt for animals.
Still, living today with electric household appliances, I find myself nostalgic for a house where the servants are human, the while I know and hate poverty that makes human labour cheap. And yet the servants in our own Chinese home enjoyed their life, and they respected themselves and their work for us. How lonely might I have been in the evening had I not been free to sit in the servants’ court, to play with their babies and listen to the music of a country flute or a two-stringed violin!
Certainly machines are not so companionable. I went not long ago to call upon a young farmer’s wife, a neighbour of mine in Pennsylvania. I entered the kitchen and encircling it I saw monumental machines: washing machine, drier, mangle, two freezers, refrigerator, electric stove, sink. With such help her daily work was soon done, and we went into the neat living-room where there was no book, but where a television set was carrying on. She paid no heed to it and, inviting me to sit down, she took her fat baby, immaculate and well fed, on her knee and we talked until I had to leave. She said, real disappointment in her voice, “Oh, can’t you stay? I though you’d spend the afternoon. I get so bored after dinner – I haven’t a thing to do.”
I thought of Chinese farm wives who take their laundry to the pond and chatter and laugh together while they beat their garments with a wooden paddle upon a flat rock, a long tedious process, except what would they have done of an afternoon without it? And by their talk and merriment they were more amused, I do believe, than was that young neighbour of mine by the television rattling on all day long, with its unknown voices and its pictured faces.
Two worlds, and one cannot be the other, and each has its own ways and blessings, I suppose.
Years later, in American theatres, I was uncomfortable not because of what I saw but what I smelled. I had lived so long among the Chinese that like them I abhorred milk and butter and ate little meat. Therefore when I came among my own people I smelled a rank and wild odour, compound of milk and butter and beef. I remembered then how my Chinese friends had complained of the way white folk smelled, and so they did. It was only after a year or so of consuming American food, though still without milk to this day, that I was able to endure an evening among my own kind, and this is because I now smell like them.
I had a curious sense of recklessness when I stepped off the ship at Shanghai. There is something to be said for losing one’s possessions, when nothing can be done about it. I had loved my Nanking home and the little treasures it had contained. Well, that was over. Nothing was ever valuable to me again, nothing, that is, in the way of beloved objects, for I knew now that anything material can be destroyed. On the other hand, people were more than ever important and human relationships more valuable.
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