Homesick: Chapter 6–Background

IT TOOK TWENTY-EIGHT DAYS TO GO FROM Shanghai to San Francisco, and on that first morning I thought I’d be content to lie on my deck chair and stare at the ocean and drink beef tea the whole time.

There were the Counters, for instance: fast-walking men, red-cheeked women, keeping score of how many times they walked around the deck, reveling in how fit they were.

Then there were the Stylish Strollers, the Huffers and Puffers, the Lovebirds, leaning on each other, the Queasy Stomachs who clutched the railing and hoped for the best.

She said everyone at the Shanghai American School had a crush on someone else and when your love was requited—well, that was the cat’s.

In the afternoons we made pigs of ourselves at tea where we had our pick of all kinds of dainty sand¬wiches, scones, macaroons, chocolate bonbons, and gooey tarts.

I’d still be on the go, moving closer to America every minute.

She had slipped off her shoes and stockings and she was dancing what was obviously an “in-between” dance, leaping up toward the stars, sinking down toward the water, bending back toward China, reaching forward toward America, bending back again and again as if she could not tear herself away, yet each time dancing farther forward, swaying to and fro.

Of course it wasn’t the same as one of the forty-eight states; still, when we stepped off the President Taft in Honolulu (where we were to stay a couple of days before going on to San Francisco), we wondered if we could truthfully say we were stepping on American soil.

Of course it wasn’t the same as one of the forty-eight states; still, when we stepped off the President Taft in Honolulu (where we were to stay a couple of days before going on to San Francisco), we wondered if we could truthfully say we were stepping on American soil.

Since the Hawaiian Islands didn’t have a star in the flag, they couldn’t be one-hundred-percent American, and I wasn’t going to consider myself on American soil until I had put my feet flat down on the state of California.

That morning I would be the “eyes” of the President Taft, searching the horizon for the first speck of land.

My private ceremony of greeting, however, would not come until we were closer, until we were sailing through the Golden Gate.

And for years I had planned my entrance.

“‘Breathes there the man, with soul so dead,'” I cried,
“ ‘Who never to himself hath said,
This is my own, my native land!’”

We had to open our baggage and let inspectors see that we weren’t smuggling in opium or anything else illegal.

We even had to prove that we were germ-free, that we didn’t have smallpox or any dire disease that would infect the country.

The big story was about America’s new hero, an aviator named Charles Lindbergh who had just made the first solo flight across the Atlantic Ocean.

My father had told my mother and me that since he wasn’t used to our new car or to American highways, we should be quiet and let him concentrate.

Sitting in the front seat, she flinched every time she saw another car, a crossroad, a stray dog, but she never said a word.

I had never seen cows in China but it was not the cows themselves that impressed me.

He not only talked, he sang, and if he felt like hitching up his trousers, he just took his hands off the wheel and hitched.

“Well, we’re headed for the sta¬ble, Myrtle. You never heard of a horse that dawdled on its way home, did you?”

Just as I’d suspected, my father was out to break records.

Driving along a back road that my father had figured out was a shortcut, we came to a bridge with a barrier across it and a sign in front: THIS BRIDGE CONDEMNED.

Shirls Ave¬nue, my grandparents’ street, apparently turned into a dirt road just before plunging down a steep hill to their house and farm.

“If it looks bad,” my mother suggested, “we can park at the top of the hill and walk down in our galoshes.”

My father put the car into low, my mother closed her eyes, and down we went, sloshing up to our hubcaps, careening from one rut to another, while my father kept one hand down hard on the horn to announce our arrival.

As we went to the other side of the house, a brown-and-white-speckled rooster came strutting to meet us.

And I added that they were worthless daughters of baboons and they should never have been born.

I told myself that only little kids like Ruth and Marie could be so ignorant.

Sometimes I spent the whole day working beside her: shelling peas, kneading bread dough, turning the handle of the wringer after she’d washed clothes, feeding the chickens, sweeping the porch.

But I did have a lot of new accomplishments.

“What’s a silo?”

I kept pestering Aunt Margaret to tell me if there was anything about eighth grade that I should know and didn’t.

So she explained that every morning we’d start off by pledging allegiance to the flag and she taught me how to say it, my hand over my heart.

I’d clap my hand over my heart and tell them about “one nation indivisible.”

The next day Aunt Margaret took me to Caldwell’s store on Main Street and bought me a red-and-black-plaid gingham dress with a white collar and narrow black patent leather belt that went around my hips.

When I’d spotted some—separate groups of girls and boys laughing and talking—I decided that I didn’t look any different, so I went into the building, asked in the office where the eighth grade was, and went upstairs to the first room on the right.

I guess he must have hunched across his desk, because all at once I heard him whisper over my shoulder:
“Chink, Chink Chinaman Sitting on a fence,
Trying to make a dollar Out of fifteen cents.”

After the commotion I had already made in the class, I decided to be as meek as I possibly could the rest of the morning.

Since both my mother’s and father’s families had helped to settle Washington County, I was interested to know how they and other pioneers had fared.

Opening the book to the first chap¬ter, “From Forest to Farmland,” I skimmed through the pages but I couldn’t find any mention of people at all.

There was talk about dates and square miles and cultivation and population growth and immigration and the Western movement, but it was as if the forests had lain down and given way to farmland without anyone being brave or scared or tired or sad, without babies being born, without people dying.

“Jean,” Miss Crofts said after the workbooks had been distributed, “I expect you have not been exposed to the Palmer method of penmanship. The rest of the class will work on Exercise One, but I want you to come up to my desk while I explain the principle of Palmer penmanship.”

“The Palmer method has been proved to be the most efficient system.”

I had a sudden picture of schools in every one of the forty-eight states grinding out millions and millions of sheets of paper covered with leaning letters exactly alike.

“But what about liberty for all?”

Her imitation was so perfect, I burst out laughing.

Early in the nineteenth century, however, Western nations had gradually been exerting their power and forcing their way into the country.

Eventually the Chinese rebelled not only against this Western imposition but against their own internal sys¬tem which served a ruling class at the expense of mil¬lions of farmers and laborers.

“China is being transformed everywhere,” he wrote, “into a colony of for¬eign powers.”

While warlords fought back and forth, Sun Yat-sen made another attempt at national unity.

Although he was head of the Nationalist party, he still did not have the military support he needed to get rid of the war¬lords and do away with the special privileges of the foreigners.

Meanwhile Hankow, an industrial city, had become a central point for strikes, agitation, and anti-foreign demonstrations.

Behind the scenes Mao Tse-tung was organizing peasants for a Communist uprising, but Chiang was against the idea of peasants taking violent action against their landlords.

In order to ensure a united China, Chiang believed he had to make deals with Chinese capitalists, with members of China’s underworld, and with foreigners who believed that with Chiang in charge, they could continue business as usual.

He eliminated Communists from his party and in April 1927 (after the Nanking Incident), he set up his own government in Nanking.

It was during this turbulent period of transition that I was in China.