“It is not true,” he would say with high dignity. “As a Chinese I know.”
He looked up now as his two elder children came in. “Let us sit down,” he told them. “I hear your mother screaming on the upper floor, and doubtless Peter and Louise will join us soon.”
He began to sup the chicken broth and bean vermicelli with audible satisfaction. Among Americans he would have drunk silently but with his own family it was a pleasure to relax, he declared, and act as a real Chinese.
No one spoke while he ate. Peter came in and sat down. He was a pleasant-looking boy of seventeen, so thin that his long neck was ludicrous. His features were large and unusually strongly marked, and his forehead was high. Dr. Liang found it difficult not to make fun of this son of his, but today because he was displeased with James he felt kindly toward Peter.
“You were working on some physics but a few days ago,” he said courteously. “I have not heard the outcome.”
“I received a mark of ninety-seven, Father,” Peter said. By concentration he could keep his voice down, and he achieved this sentence without a squawk.
“Good son,” Dr. Liang exclaimed. “Drink your soup while it is hot.”
Mrs. Liang bustled in at this moment, sweating apologies. Louise followed, looking sulky. She was sixteen, taller than Mary, and very pretty. Her short hair was extravagantly curled and she wore a tight red dress and high-heeled black pumps. She had been crying, and Mrs. Liang looked at her crossly as she sat down heavily at her place.
“Think what this girl of ours has been doing!” she said.
Dr. Liang stared at his youngest child. “She has been crying. Why have you scolded her?” Louise was his favorite child and the whole family knew it.
“After all you have said about waist-binding,” Mrs. Liang complained. She gulped her soup between sentences, to Dr. Liang’s intense disgust. “She was binding her waist—that’s what she was doing! Before the mirror! Her face was all red.”
“But why?” Dr. Liang asked, staring at Louise.
“Because why?” Mrs. Liang answered in a loud voice. “Now it is fashionable again, it seems. The Americans are wanting very small waists.”
“We are Chinese,” Dr. Liang said mildly. He continued to gaze at Louise. “Never forget, my child—we are aliens here. This is not our civilization. We must not forget our sources. Our women are beautiful because they are natural.”
The four young people lowered their heads and drank assiduously of the soup in the bowls. Mrs. Liang tipped her bowl, and shouted toward the kitchen, “Neh-lee, Neh-lee!”
The maid Nellie came in quickly, gathered the dishes and brought in bowls of food on a tray. Mrs. Liang watched her sharply while Dr. Liang talked to Louise.
“We should set the example, my child. I often ask Heaven why it is that I am sent here, an exile from my beloved country. Heaven does not answer but my heart makes reply. I have a mission here. My children have a mission, too. We must show this vast new country what it is to be Chinese. Now if you bind your waist, even as the Americans—and can it be true that this vile and harmful practice is again to be adopted?”
“Oh, Father, don’t worry,” Mary cried out. “Louise won’t be uncomfortable for long, you may be sure of that. She loves to eat.”
“Shut up,” Louise whispered under her breath.
Dr. Liang put down his chopsticks. Mrs. Liang had served a large bowl of rice with vegetables and had set it in front of him. This was his family bowl. When guests were present he used a small bowl, a gentleman’s bowl, he laughingly explained. Only peasants used large bowls.
“But I thought most of the people of China were peasants,” the guest would reply. Dr. Liang deprecated this with a graceful left hand. He used his left hand for gesturing.
“An unfortunate impression,” he always said gently. “Due, I am afraid, to best sellers about China—written by Americans. A very limited point of view, naturally. It is quality that is meaningful in any nation, the articulate few, the scholars. Surely men like myself represent more perfectly than peasants can the spirit of Chinese civilization. Our nation has always been ruled by our intellectuals. Our emperors depended upon wise men.”
“Mary!” he now cried sharply, “do not be cruel to your younger sister. Louise, do not be rude to your older sister. The family relationships must be preserved.”
“Eh, eh, eat your food, all of you,” Mrs. Liang cried impetuously. “When your stomachs are full you will feel better. I made this beef and cabbage myself. Here, father of my sons—”
She reached across the table with her chopsticks in her right hand and picked a tender bit of beef from the dish and put it on Dr. Liang’s heap of rice. “Now come—the children will all be good. It will rouse your ulcers to be angry at mealtime.”
Like many Chinese intellectuals, as well as rich men, Dr. Liang suffered from the threat of stomach ulcers. Mrs. Liang declared that it was the excessive restraint of his temper which went to his stomach. “You should let your temper out,” she sometimes urged her husband in private. “Be angry with the children when you feel like it, but between meals. Slap Mary or twist Peter’s ears—it will make you feel better. It is hard on you to have no servants who will bear with a little anger now and then. You felt better when we were in China for that reason. There the ricksha coolie was especially patient—remember? Here you have no way of venting your anger. It stays in your belly and makes boils.”
“I hope I am a truly superior man in the Confucian sense, whether I am in China or America,” Dr. Liang had replied.
“Confucius died of stomach trouble, too,” she had retorted.
This he had not answered, remembering that Confucius himself had said that the superior man must be patient with women, children, and fools.
Now he fell to eating heartily. For so slender a man his appetite was large, and to his wife entirely satisfactory. Nothing gave Mrs. Liang a greater sense of success as a wife than the sight of her husband eating his food with enjoyment. She was irked that her own pleasure was checked by a frame that ran easily to fat, and she was sometimes made melancholy by the sight of her husband’s spare and graceful body when he bathed himself. Did he compare her solid shape to the naked outlines of American women? She had long ago refused to go to seashore resorts after one visit to Atlantic City. How could even Dr. Liang keep his virtue in that place? Yet such was American life that he had only to open the page of a magazine, left about carelessly by one of the children, to see even in his own house the pictures of evil females. American women she considered whores without exception when they were young and some although they were middle-aged. Even white-haired dowagers made over Dr. Liang in a manner that could only be called whorish.
She did not believe that her husband, left to himself, could ever be unfaithful to her or to the children. Had she not borne him two handsome sons? Yet the memory of their arranged marriage rankled in her. True, her father had yielded to the extent of allowing them to meet for fifteen minutes, one day, under his own supervision. She had been a tongue-tied girl of eighteen. She could still feel her cheeks burn at that memory. But the tall extremely handsome young man who stood gazing at her then seemed now to have nothing to do with her husband, Dr. Liang. Whether he ever remembered that meeting under the eyes of the watchful old man, she did not know. He had never spoken of it. Even on their wedding night, six months later, he had made no reference to it. Nevertheless he had gone on with the marriage. She had not, she supposed, been too ugly, and in those days she was not fat, although certainly not thin, even then. Her cheeks had been round and red with a high color that tended to grow purple in cold weather. Her plump girlish hands were always chilblained in winter until she came to America.
She had been thoroughly afraid of her husband on her wedding night. He was methodical and almost completely silent. Not until she was sure that there was no more to marriage did she recover her natural and somewhat loud gaiety. By that time she knew she was indispensable to him. She still
was, and this kept her fairly careless in mind, except when Dr. Liang began to write poetry, which he sometimes did. These poems were woven about women entirely different from herself and they alarmed her. She searched with jealous eyes their entire acquaintance in New York to discover, if possible, someone who resembled even remotely these ladies of his imagination. Such resemblances were difficult to fasten upon, since his poems were all about ladies who had lived centuries ago in Chinese history. The Fragrant Concubine, for example, was one of his favorites, a delicate lady who when she perspired exuded scent instead of sweat.
“I doubt there was ever this woman,” she had exclaimed when Dr. Liang read aloud to some American friends a poem he had written in honor of the Fragrant Concubine.
“She lives in history,” Dr. Liang had answered firmly. He looked about the group of earnest American faces. “And in my heart, perhaps,” he had added smiling.
Mrs. Liang had quarreled with him that night in her good hearty fashion. “You!” she had cried, scolding and shaking her forefinger at him while he undressed for his bath. “Starting scandal with these Americans!”
He had forgotten the episode and when she saw this she would have been glad to stop there. But some time or other it would happen again and so she went on. “Talking about fragrant concubines!” she stormed.
He had laughed at her. “There was only one,” he said, folding his trousers carefully and putting them over the foot of the double brass bed.
“The Americans are so sexy!” she had complained. She spoke in Chinese but the word “sexy” she always used in English. “You should speak to them otherwise.”
“You are jealous,” he said with pleasure.
“Of a dead woman?” she shrieked.
“Of any woman.”
“If you take a woman, I will take a man,” she said boldly.
At this he had laughed immoderately. “Come,” he said, leaning on the foot of the bed. “You and I will have a race—you for a man, I for a woman! I will buy you a jade ring and bracelet if you win yours first.”
She had been properly scandalized at this. “Come to bed, you old man! Stop talking like Americans.”
“A little more beef,” she said now to her husband as they sat at their family meal. He held out his bowl obediently.
“I shall have to have a nap,” he complained.
“It will be good for you,” she replied. “You are not too young to sleep a little in the middle of the day.”
Around them their four children ate in silence, dipping into the dishes in the middle of the table. Mrs. Liang did not tolerate the presence of the maid Nellie while they ate. All of them enjoyed their food better when they dipped for themselves from the middle dishes, but only the children did so in front of the maid, and not then in the mother’s presence. Mrs. Liang had scolded them one day when, coming back from a luncheon in Dr. Liang’s honor, she had discovered her four children hunched over the table eating with bowls in their hands, dipping with their chopsticks from the main dishes and chattering with the maid.
“Why shouldn’t we act like Chinese since we are Chinese?” James had demanded.
“You in medical school learning about American germs!” Mrs. Liang had cried for the benefit of Nellie.
She had hustled the children from their meal, and waiting until the maid was gone she had presented their iniquity to their father. Dr. Liang had been judicial. “The germ theory is true, of course,” he had told his children, “but the immunity of our people to certain germs is very high. Then, too, in one family, there is not much danger. I myself would not care to dip my chopsticks into a bowl with unknown persons even of our own race. But your mother is right. Americans tend to think too little of us, and we should not therefore lend ourselves to their low opinion.”
The meal was over; Mrs. Liang produced a box of chocolates which she loved, and Nellie came in and poured hot tea and went away again. Mrs. Liang belched comfortably and Dr. Liang looked at her sadly but in silence. He had eaten too well to reprove her and he rose, yawned, and went to his room to sleep. Mrs. Liang went into the living room and sat down in a deep chair, and, reclining her head she closed her eyes.
In the dining room the four young people were left alone together. Mary folded her arms on the table and leaned on them.
“Are you going to tell Peter and Louise?” she asked.
“What has Jim done now?” Peter asked. He was gobbling chocolates, hunting with his long forefinger for the cream-filled ones.
“He has asked Lili to go back to China with him as soon as they are married, and Lili says she will—if her papa lets her,” Mary’s mischievous voice echoed Lili’s soft Chinese pronunciation, “Baba.”
“No kidding!” Peter exclaimed.
“I am going, too,” Mary announced.
The three of them turned on her. “Who said?” Louise demanded.
“I say,” Mary declared. “I’ve made up my mind. All this child hygiene—why do you think I have been taking that?”
“So you can be a good mother,” Louise said wickedly.
“Oh, shut up!”
Without their parents the four of them were wholly American. Not seeing them, hearing only their voices, none could have heard a difference.
“I think Jim ought to go first and blaze the trail for the rest of us,” Peter cried. With excitement his long neck seemed to grow longer.
“How’s Jim going?” Louise asked. “It costs oodles of money.”
“I’ve been offered a job,” Jim said slowly.
“Oh, where, Jim?”
“In Peking, in the big hospital there.”
“Lucky stiff,” Peter muttered.
All of them were sick to get to China, all except Louise, and she dared not say she was not. Alone sometimes she was frightened at the thought of China. She loved America. Her days were pure fun, mingled with brief hours of work at high school, and away from her family she lived a life which she concealed from them altogether. She was gay and popular, and she danced well and sang as clearly as a Chinese lark. An American boy had fallen in love with her. No one knew except her best friend Estelle, who was his sister. Romantic Estelle begged them to marry, and Louise spent long hours in exciting conversation. The only trouble was that Philip had not asked Louise to marry him.
“There’s a hitch, though,” Jim said soberly. “Lili wants her father to agree to her going.”
There was a chorus of snorts at this. “Marry her first,” Peter advised in a manly voice. “When you’re married you can do what you like. Be a Chinese for once—make your wife obey you.”
Jim smiled at him and shook his head. “I don’t know,” he said. “I’m afraid I shan’t make a very good Chinese husband, Pete.”
“Aw, get tough,” Peter urged. “Don’t let ’em lick you, Jim. Remember you’re our pilot.”
James looked around the table at their faces. Peter was eager; Mary was determined, and Louise looked remote and dreaming. They were all depending on him, their elder brother, the head of the family after their father. The head of the family! When he was that he’d have them all in China where they belonged.
“You can trust me,” he said. “I won’t give up.”
He was somewhat daunted, however, by Lili’s air of resolute calm when she arose with undulant grace to meet him that evening, as he entered the elaborate living room of the Li apartment. She put out her hand and took his and led him to the sofa where she had been sitting. On the sofa opposite, Mr. and Mrs. Li sat with some formality and their faces were solemn. When he greeted them they inclined their heads and did not speak and he knew at once that Lili had told them what he had asked. He knew, too, that they had discussed the matter and had decided what their answer would be. Their reserve frightened him. Were they favorable surely they would not have looked so grave. He concealed his fears and sat down beside Lili, accepted the tea she offered him, and declined the suggestion of what she called “viskee-sodah” from the small tray on the table in front of t
he empty ornate fireplace. They were being very Chinese, he realized, and a mingling of stubbornness and humor with his dismay made him determine to be also as Chinese as he could.
“The night is mild,” he announced. “The sky is the color of rain.” Because he did not want to speak English tonight he spoke in Mandarin Chinese, native to him but foreign to Mrs. Li’s Shanghai-bred tongue.
Nevertheless she answered him in an attempt at the same language. “The river will grow more damp, and it will be bad for our cough.”
James drank a little tea and set down the bowl. “There are many varieties of climate in this large country,” he remarked. “Would it not be well for you to travel to the West where the air is dry and there is constant sunshine?”
Mrs. Li shook her head. “We cannot leave New York,” she sighed. “It is like Shanghai. And where else can we buy fresh ginger and bamboo shoots? In Chinatown the markets are at least as good as in small towns in our own land.”
Mr. Li rumbled forth his cough. “The soy sauce is quite good here,” he remarked.
Lili said nothing. She sat in repose, her exquisite hands crossed on the lap of her apple-green satin robe. She wore a white gardenia in her hair and green jade earrings. The scent of the gardenia wrapped her in fragrant air, and stole into the young man’s heart. He grew impatient with the slow preambles of Chinese courtesy and he suddenly cast them aside. Leaning forward he addressed himself to Mr. Li in English.