Free My Several Worlds by Pearl S. Buck

is something more than pleasure alone. Our family has three sons, the elder two nearing draft age and the third one not far behind. The hideous possibility has become a reality. I who have been reared in one world, a Christian one, and taught that love and brotherhood must be the law of life, and reared too, in another world yet kindlier, with the Chinese belief that life is sacred and that it is evil to kill even a beast, and how much more a human being, I now face the tragic probability that my sons must deny both Christian and Asian teaching. They must join our armed forces and fight perhaps an Asian people, a people whom I love and admire and to whom I am deeply indebted. To prevent this I am helpless, although it could have been prevented long ago in Asia, and prevented many times since, but now perhaps it is too late, since it is not we who have won in Asia, although we might have done so easily had we but understood the nature of the peoples there.
    And McKinley, whose bronze statue towers over this small Ohio city? What has he to do with the child I once was? Little enough and yet very much. For when the strange year of 1900 was over, the year in which I saw in my American mother’s eyes the fear of a Chinese, so that from that day on I too had that fear, all mingled with love and friendship at it was, we came to the United States, my own country. My first shock here was the assassination of President McKinley. I scarcely knew the difference then between Emperor and President. In China our young Emperor had died suddenly, murdered, it was rumored, by the command of the Empress Dowager, who was by then herself within hours of her own death from old age and illness. But she would not, could not die until the dangerous heir was first gone. And now suddenly here in my own country the President was murdered, too!
    I cannot remember everything, for much had happened and worlds were tumbling about me. But I do remember that I was in my grandfather’s house in West Virginia, where I had been born, a place of peace and beauty, and there on a particular day I was gathering white and purple grapes with my cousins. It was September, hot, still and fragrant, and I was happy and quiet, enjoying to the full my country, my own, where there was no war any more, no hatred, no revolution. Then someone called to us to come quickly and we ran into the house. We went to the parlor, uncles, aunts, my parents, my brother, my cousins and I. There my grandfather stood very straight in his black suit, his stiff white wing collar, his black tie, his snowy hair brushed up from his forehead. His dark eyes were somber and his face was grave, and when we were all assembled he said in a solemn voice:
    “Children, the President of the United States has been assassinated. Our President is dead.”
    Of all of them only I broke into loud weeping, to their astonishment and dismay, and my mother put her arm about my shoulder.
    “Oh,” I cried, “must we have the revolution here, too?”
    “What is the child talking about?” my grandfather demanded.
    Nobody answered for nobody knew except my mother, and she understood so well that she said nothing at all while she let me sob. And what I was afraid of I did not know until years later.
    Indiana
    Indiana, I read in books, is of all our states the most valid sample of our whole country. Agriculture and industry, fourth generation immigrants and first generation, plains and hills, rivers and lakes, Indiana has them all. There is even a picturesque corner where rounded tumbling hills have attracted the most American of our artists, and surely some of the best American writers have come from this state, that is, the ones least affected and to a degree the least experimental. I smile at the word experimental! Nothing is new, and everything has been done before. I read this week a reviewer’s comment on a book, a criticism that the author had not used “the modern technique of cutback.” New? Five hundred