The story of this woman is too complex to tell here, and perhaps no one could understand it in detail who had not heard her tell it and explain all that had happened. Years later she became the material, in the very rough, for my novel The Mother. In those days, however, even I did not know her whole. The first time I saw her was when she was employed as an amah in a missionary’s family. We had shared a summer cottage with that family once at Peitaiho, a seaside resort in North China, which somehow I have not mentioned, perhaps because I forget it unconsciously since it was the place where I first knew that my child could never grow. At any rate this woman, Li Sau-tse, and I shall have to write her name because of after events, decided that she wanted to work for me, because I could speak Chinese as well, she declared, as she could. I had refused to hire her, however, out of fairness to her mistress, and so the summer had ended. Besides, I needed no amah, having my own faithful one.
A few months later Li Sau-tse appeared in Nanking, determined to work for me. She had given up her job, she told me, and would not go back, and when I said that I needed only a table boy, my own having had to go home to care for his old parents, she said she would be a table boy. As table boy, then, she stayed. It became evident, in spite of her padded winter garments, as the days passed, that she was going to have a baby. Since she had long been a widow, this was astonishing and upsetting in our Chinese society. I felt compelled to mention the matter to her before much longer, whereupon she wept loudly and declared that she had been waylaid by a soldier in the kaoliang fields of the north country, and she had been forced, etc. It sounded doubtful, it looked doubtful, for she was a tall strong creature, able, I thought, to defend herself against anyone, but soldiers did sometimes do such things, as I knew, and so I accepted her story, whereupon she became immediately cheerful, and assured me that I need not trouble myself about anything, that she would attend to the child when it was born and bring it up outside the compound. I said she could keep it in the compound, and we let matters rest. A few weeks later when the house was full of important guests, some sort of an investigating group from America, she did not appear in the morning to serve breakfast. The other servants went around with pursed lips, and the amah suggested that I go myself to their quarters. I did, and upon opening the door of Li Sau-tse’s little room, I stepped literally into a pool of blood. She had made an abortion for herself, but far too late, and the violent Chinese drug she had swallowed had produced a frightful hemorrhage. We got her to the hospital at once and there she stayed for weeks with blood poisoning. When she recovered, nothing could separate her from me. She declared that her life was mine, and although there were times when I wished it belonged to anyone else but me, for she was an opinionated, devoted, loud-voiced person, yet I knew her loyalty. When we had hidden in the little hut on the day of revolution, it was she who tried to save as many of our possessions as she could, risking her life, the lovable and ridiculous woman, upon such follies as kitchen cooking pots and umbrellas and pillows, and leaving to the rabble my fine old French china and the silver my ancestors had brought from Holland.
At any rate, there she was in Japan with us, as madly devoted as ever, and insisting upon doing everything, so that I was compelled to idleness, and, since she had no one to talk to except me, I had to listen to her long monologues on the Japanese, who, she declared, were much better than the Chinese.
“In China I heard nothing except how bad the Japanese are,” she would say, “but here I see they are good, and much better than we Chinese are. Look, Wise Mother, when two Chinese riksha men bump together, what do they do? They curse and howl and one calls the other’s mother dirty names, but when two riksha men bump together here in Japan, what happens? They stop, they bow to each other, they are not angry, each says he is wrong, and then they go their way. Is this not better than the Chinese?”
I always agreed with her as the easiest way to silence.
Yet somehow the atmosphere of the little house changed after this good soul came. She was one of those women—and there are such men too—who battle whatever they do. Thus when Li Sau-tse cleaned a room, she not only made it clean but in the process she opposed every article of furniture, she attacked it and compelled it to be clean, and the floor was nothing short of an enemy. A spider web in the beams of the ceiling demanded ferocity to exterminate it and mutterings and threats, and before she had been with me a week the local police had visited us three times. She had done nothing wrong but in her zeal to civilize my habitation she had burned the dead pine needles at the door and thus smoke had ascended and the police came to investigate a possible forest fire. Again they came because they discovered that she had no passport, and it was true that in her innocence she had not thought of it and had somehow managed to bustle her way through the authorities. The third time they came because she had sullied the stream with bits of garbage, and the farmers below us complained.
By this time my sister’s baby was born and she and her family needed a place to stay, and so after a little time together in the small house, I decided upon a sight-seeing journey. It was not to be a tourist journey. In the first place I was too poor to go in luxury, and in the second place I wanted to see the Japanese as they travelled, and that was not in first-class coaches. One fine morning my children and I set out, therefore, on a pleasure trip, and such it proved to be. We took a train, any train, and all through the lovely autumn days we sat with travelling companions who were Japanese, kind and courteous and interested and interesting. When we were hungry we bought little lunch boxes at a station, cold rice and pickle and a bit of fish daintily packed in a clean wooden box with a pair of new bamboo chopsticks, and bottles of hot pasteurized milk for the children and persimmons and pears and small red apples for dessert. Sometime before darkness we got off the train, just anywhere, and found a Japanese inn, clean and welcoming, and there we stayed the night, sleeping after a hot bath as I had not slept since I was a child.
It was like a dream to wake in the night and lie there under the soft quilts upon the tatami mats, and gaze into the dim moonlight of the garden. There was always a garden and we always drew back the paper-paned sliding doors, so that the soft damp air of outside filled the little room where we slept. To gaze awhile at the misty branches of the trees and the vague outlines of the rocks, to hear the tinkle of a small waterfall and then fall asleep again was pure peace. And in the morning we waked at the minute sounds of the maid, bringing in the breakfast trays of rice congee and fish and pickled radishes. In all the weeks of our journey we had not a single misadventure or one unkindness. I remember the wonderful controlled beauty of Japan, not only in such places as the island of Miyajima, where the beauty was sophisticated and planned, but I remember especially the everyday beauty of the little inns and villages, and above all, I remember the kindness of the people. Their self-discipline was exquisite and it broke only when a man was drunk. Then to my surprise, instead of growing mellow and humorous as the Chinese do when drunk, the Japanese turned wild and ferocious. I learned not to go abroad on Saturday nights, even on the country roads, when the farmers, usually so well-mannered, were coming home from market singing and roistering after they had spent part of their profits on hard Japanese liquor.
Green Hills Farm
In these days while I have been writing of the months I once spent in the mountains above Nagasaki, there has been a little figure wearing kimonos of dove grey or soft plum color with wide embroidered obis of dull blue or gold stealing about the rooms of our old Pennsylvania farmhouse. She is from Japan, a gentle friend, visiting our country again after twenty-seven years away. Long ago she came here as an honor student from a Tokyo university, who had won an award to a scholarship to Wellesley, but after her American college years were over she went home again to Japan, married and lived the life of a Japanese wife and mother, struggling against poverty all the while, and trying to keep alive the life of mind and heart stimulated and broadened by her years in America. She went through the war years, lost her h
ome in the bombings of Tokyo, survived with her family nevertheless, and was one of the keenest observers of the Occupation. Its faults she saw, but she feels, she has told us, her voice so mild, her English precise and beautiful, that the Americans brought to her country something glorious and unforgettable, a warmth and an outgoing which the repressed Japanese needed.
We have listened to her in long evenings by the fire, trying to see the postwar Japan she portrays, and seeing it at least in her own slender and exquisite person and in her sad and lovely face, whereupon are carved the lines of a terrifying and tragic patience, which is also of Japan.
It is quite by chance that my Japanese friend’s visit has coincided with the moment when I had reached Japan in this book, a fortunate chance, for in this woman I see both the old and the new of Japan, the narrow isle, the broader way. She sees no great hope now for her country, situated midway between East and West and coveted by both. How, she asks without expecting an answer, can Japan survive? She belongs with Asia, with the peoples of India and China and Indonesia and the Philippines, and from them she was cut off by her own militarists, and now again by the new alliance to the United States, which the Japanese fear and yet dare not reject.
I ventured the remark one evening, “How tragic that your militarists insisted upon a war of conquest in Asia! Actually, your country had a position in China, at least, which was far above that of any country. Wherever I went in those days, into whatever little interior city and town of China, I saw Japanese goods, exports from less than a penny in value to more than a thousand dollars. The Chinese had vast quantities of raw material they wanted to sell to Japan and Japan needed raw material desperately. Indeed, the whole of Asia wanted to sell Japan raw material, and the Japanese had a strategic opportunity, because they could manufacture so cheaply and so well.”
“We know now,” the little figure from Japan sighed. “But at the time we were completely deceived by our militarists. And we are so frightened lest we are being deceived again. The people have no way to know the truth and we have no one we can trust.”
It is the predicament of all peoples that we have no way to know the truth and no one whom we can wholly trust. Even in those years so long ago I could feel the doubt of the Japanese people as I travelled through their country. The shape of the future was already clearly drawn. The army was being increased, families were having to give up their sons, Japanese were encouraged to move to China and above all to Manchuria. Industrialists were making plans with the militarists in the old dangerous combination, and everywhere I felt the reluctance of the people, who had no way of finding the truth because they had no way of reaching the other peoples.
Yet I could not stay in Japan to follow that fate. We began to hope that white people could safely return again to China, for the Nationalists, under the new leadership of General Chiang Kai-shek, were setting up a government in Nanking, my home city, and it was only a matter of months, we were told, until order would be restored enough for our return. For, as all now know, Chiang Kai-shek separated himself from the Communists in 1927. While we were hiding in Mrs. Lu’s hut, he was already in Shanghai negotiating with Chinese and Western bankers and other influential men. He had disliked the increasing arrogance of the Russian Communists, and was determined to drive them out of China, and put an end to Chinese Communism. To this end he declared himself friendly to the West, and invited foreigners to return to Nanking, which was to be the capital.
It was good news, and yet I felt sad to leave Japan, where I had found shelter and peace and friendliness. I should like to set up a monument here to the people of Japan, a modest monument, for I have not the means of making anything more. I should like to say that living among them as I did, without pretensions and in real poverty, I found them finer than any people I have ever known, in their own particular way. Other peoples have been more articulate, more demonstrative, more aggressively kind, but the Japanese were so delicate in their understanding of sorrow, so restrained and yet so profound in their sympathy, so exactly right in the measure of their comfort, which never demanded and never expressed itself, but simply was there. They did not fear long silences when one could not speak. Silences were not hastily filled with needless talk. Mere presence was enough. This same quality of silence has been a part of our evenings here at the farm with our Japanese friend. She can sit quite at ease without speaking, not because she has nothing to say, but because she waits to discover what one of us might wish to say. She responds upon our own level, her remarks gentle and penetrating. Often she presents some new and even original idea but in the same quiet voice. This can be a very soothing atmosphere.
And I am forever grateful for the beauty of Japan, for the wooded mountains, rising so sharply above the most beautiful coastline in the world. I remember warmly the twisted pines and the rocks and the incoming curling tides. The people built their houses as a part of the landscape, the roof lines conforming to the planes of rock and coast and mountain, and within the houses I found the same treasurable discipline of beauty and restraint. I know no other country where beauty is so restrained that poured into one clear mold it emerges in the form of an ecstasy. And I admire above all the fortitude of the Japanese upon their dangerous islands. For they never know when fierce earthquakes will destroy their homes or typhoons attack them or tidal waves sweep over their coastal villages. They live literally in the presence of death and this they know and yet they are calm.
Never did I conceive it possible that the Japanese people could be an enemy to me nor I to them. War was an agony to be endured while one remembered that the ones who made war, who committed crimes and atrocities, were not the Japanese people, but those who deceived them. I remember the day after Pearl Harbor was bombed that I sat in my office in New York, and Yasuo Kuniyoshi, the great Japanese artist, was announced. He came in and I rose at once to receive him.
“Sit down, please,” I said.
He sat down in a chair opposite me, speechless, the tears running down his cheeks. He did not wipe them away, he did not move, he simply sat there gazing at me, the tears running down his cheeks and splashing on his coat. “Our two countries—” he whispered at last, and could not go on.
“I know,” I said. “But let us remember that our two peoples are not enemies, no matter what happens.”
There was nothing more said. He wiped his eyes after a few minutes, we clasped hands and he went away. We were continuing friends, understanding each other, whatever the day’s news was.
One other such person I knew, months later, perhaps even years later, for I have never been able to measure time, and this person was an American woman, quite average at that. It was in Los Angeles, where I had gone to make some speeches for war relief. The Japanese-Americans had already been sent to the detention camps, and some sort of argument was going on about the confiscation of their property. Suddenly one day I received a hurry call from the American Civil Liberties Union to go and testify on behalf of the Japanese-Americans before a State senatorial committee then meeting in Los Angeles. Without delay I put on my hat and went to the hall. There I was called almost immediately, and I argued that it would be gross injustice to confiscate the property of persons whose guilt had not even been proved. And when, I asked, had it become legal in the United States to confiscate property? I came from Pennsylvania where there were many German-Americans. Indeed, the center of the secret Nazi Bund had only recently been discovered in a town less than five miles away from our home, and a neighbor’s barn was burnt because she had said something publicly against Hitler. While it was burning she received a telephone call, and an unknown voice had said, “This’ll learn you to talk about the Führer!” Yet there had been no talk about confiscating the property of German-Americans, and no thought of doing so. To discriminate thus even between enemies was not just, I said.
When my testimony was finished a middle-aged plain-looking woman asked to testify also on behalf of the Japanese-Americans. She was allowed to do so, and she said ve
ry simply that she did not think it was fitting for Americans to take peoples’ houses and land just because they were Japanese in ancestry. She said that some of her neighbors had told her she ought not to speak for the Japanese because her son was at that moment fighting them in the Pacific.
“But,” she said, her face honest and good, and her eyes clear, “I tell them that my Sam ain’t fightin’ the same Japanese. I know Mr. and Mrs. Omura and they’ve always been kind good people and nice neighbors, and I don’t think we ought to take their property. They’ll need it when they come back. Anyway, it’s theirs.”
A scattered hand clapping followed her testimony, and two or three others got up and dared to endorse what she had said. I don’t know that any of us had influence enough to impress the row of hard old faces behind the table, but at any rate the Japanese-Americans were not robbed, and later their sons proved their loyalty by fighting and dying for America in alien Italy, while in the concentration camps their families lived with dignity and grace, creating gardens in the desert and works of art out of sagebrush, roots and stones.
I did once make another little monument of a sort, too, to the Japanese people. It was carved from a day spent in Kobe, a day which threatened to be lonely and sad because I was then lonely and sad, and which instead was an experience which I have placed among the most treasured of my life. I put it into a small book for children, entitled One Bright Day, which was exactly what it was.