My Several Worlds by Pearl S. Buck Page B

again to China without a lesson learned. They went back in complacency, thinking that by force they had taught the Chinese a lesson, so that never again would they rebel against the white man’s rule. We were to be allowed to come and go as we liked over the Chinese earth, our ships of merchandise and our men of war were to be permitted to sail the waters and dock at any port. Our missionaries were given the freedom to live where they wished, to open schools foreign in all they taught, to establish hospitals which practiced foreign medicine and surgery, and strangest of all, these missionaries were free to preach a religion entirely alien to the Chinese, nay, to insist upon this religion as the only true one and to declare that those who refused to believe would and must descend into hell. The affrontery of all this still makes my soul shrink.
    It made me unhappy enough even in the days when Mr. Kung was my teacher. He explained it to me gently and being an intuitive and feeling child I remember one afternoon that I wept. We had only just come back from America and the year in my kindly grandfather’s house, and I wept because I knew that if Mr. Kung and my grandfather could meet and talk things over they would understand each other and agree together. But how could they meet when one lived in China and the other in America, and even if they could have met, what common language could they have spoken? And yet I knew and know to this day that could such men as they have met and could they have found a common language, and it did not matter whether this was English or Chinese, all that has happened need not have happened. Pearl Harbor would never have been, and the atomic bomb would not have fallen and American prisoners of war would not have come back wounded and dying from a Communist China, for Chinese would not have yielded to Communism had they known there was hope in the white men of the West. It was when the last hope died that the Chinese turned away from us in final despair. And we cut the last golden cord ourselves, in innocent ignorance, if ignorance can be innocent any more in this day and age.
    All this in some dim foreseeing way I think I vaguely understood that day when I leaned-my forehead down upon the oval dining table in the mission house and sobbed because of what Mr. Kung had just told me. For what he said in his beautiful polished Peking Mandarin was something like this:
    “It will be peaceful for you here again, Little Sister, but not for long. The storm is still rising and when it breaks, you must be far away from here. You must go to America and stay there and not come back, lest next time you be killed with all your kind.”
    “There must be a next time?” I asked, terrified.
    “Until justice is done,” he said gravely and with infinite pity.
    And I could say nothing, for I knew that his ancestral home in Peking had been destroyed by German soldiers, men to whom the German Kaiser had given the imperial command in some such words as these: “Germans, so behave that forever when a Chinese hears the name of Germany he will quake with fear and run to save himself.” And the Germans had obeyed their Kaiser.
    Yet as the days passed, I forgot my fears as a child forgets, and I still took comfort because we were Americans. Surely, I argued, my Chinese friends would see how different we were from other white people. For a long time it seemed they did perceive our difference. I can see now, looking back, how changed I myself was after the Boxer defeat. My worlds no longer interwove. They were sharply clear, one from the other. I was American, not Chinese, and although China was as dear to me as my native land, I knew it was not my land. Mine was the country across the sea, the land of my forefathers, alien to China and indifferent to the Chinese people.
    I used often to ponder that indifference, child that I was, and I was not deceived in the eleven years I was to live between the outburst of the Boxer