My Several Worlds by Pearl S. Buck

Author:Pearl S. Buck [Buck, Pearl S.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-4804-2123-3
Publisher: Open Road Media
Published: 2013-04-17T16:36:00+00:00

Dear——

Your letters to others I happened to see last night and today being the day after Christmas and the children still absorbed in their toys, I am moved by an unaccustomed sense of leisure to write you solely in the selfish hope that you will write to me.

Your letters mirror a delightfully placid existence in your American home. I feel in some ways like a poor little girl looking into a shop window full of unattainable pleasures. Like the same little poor girl, however, I have my compensations. Living in China these days is like being the spectator at a tremendous melodrama, with the Communists as villain and the Nanking government as the fair damsel in distress. The crisis is fast approaching and the spectators, as well as the heroine, are beginning to look frantically about for the hero, who, as yet, has not appeared, and may not even yet be born! Meanwhile the villain is waxing bold and furious and no one can foretell the end….

As for China itself, it is very difficult to speak of the future here. We stand by from day to day. If this were any other country one would say such a condition of chaos could not possibly continue, but in China anything can continue indefinitely so long as people gather together enough food to keep from starvation. Tremendous crops and poor transportation have combined this year to make rice in central China unusually cheap and therefore chaos is the more philosophically endured.

You will have read of the Nationalists’ endeavor to get rid of the Soviet. They have returned the Russian Consul and all the Red Russians they could get hold of. Many Russians have been treated most brutally in Hankow and Canton. I hate Bolshevism, but I hate brutality, too. Everyone has been shocked by the brutality of the Chinese in this affair.

The hardest thing about living in China these days, however, is the spirit of disillusionment and despair which is everywhere growing. The best Chinese are so sad over the failure of the Nationalists, already apparent, that it is heart-breaking. The Nationalists are using the old militarist methods—heavy, illegal taxes, corruptly spent. Same old thing! Chiang Kai-shek could retire a rich man, we hear, and whether true or not, the gossip implies disillusionment.

All this is hard to bear. The leaders in the Nationalist party are returned students, for the most part. It is a shock to those who have believed that in modern education lay the salvation of China. The hopefulness in the whole thing is, however, that this despair and disillusionment may be the beginning of sober self-realization and facing the fact that the roots of China’s troubles are in the moral weakness of her upper classes, and in the helplessness of the peasants. Full humility and facing of truth is the only hope I see for this country. Many are realizing it. But here in Shanghai I am appalled by the wanton extravagance and carelessness of Chinese rich people. I feel as though I were living at the capital of Louis of France before the French revolution broke.

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