Free My Several Worlds by Pearl S. Buck Page B

inquired.
    She looked sad. “Scientific, perhaps, but not useful—only troublesome.”
    “Tell me,” I suggested.
    She hesitated and then went on. “A man there told me such a strange thing. He said that we human beings are come from fish. Must I believe this? It makes me so sad. Only a fish!”
    She shook her head and sighed. “So disappointing, isn’t it? A fish! Elder Sister, is it necessary to believe this?”
    “No,” I said. “Don’t believe it. The man was guessing. There are many stories of our beginning. Believe what is nearest to your heart as well as your mind.”
    She brightened. “You really think so?”
    “I do,” I said firmly.
    It was also Yung who put into clear and pitiful words the picture of an old lady, an American old lady, or old man for that matter. She said, in the way she has, seeming sudden, but not sudden because she has been thinking long before she speaks, and this time she spoke in English, “I feel sorry for American old lady and old man.”
    “Why?” I asked.
    For answer she gave me an example out of her life in the New York apartment house in which she lives with her excellent husband. She said, in her ever-gentle voice, still in English, “In our apartment house lives a nice old lady alone. We did not know her. But our neighbor came in one day so happy saying, ‘Do come downstairs with me to see my friend’s granddaughter. My friend is very joyful. Why? Because today for the first time the little girl, five years old, is allowed to come to visit grandmother and to spend the night.’
    “I cannot believe such a thing—five years old and never spending the night with grandmother! We went downstairs and it was true. There were the little girl and the grandmother, both happy, and the grandmother told me the story. She said such a long time she had hoped the child could come to visit her but she dared not to ask it. But on this day happily the child herself suggested it, when the old lady went to visit her son’s family. ‘Grandmother,’ the child asked, ‘may I spend the night in your house?’ The old lady dared not to cry out, ‘Oh, come!’ Instead, very quiet, she said, ‘Whatever your mother wishes, my dear.’ So the child asked the mother, who said, ‘Wait until your father comes home.’ So the old lady waited long until her son came home and again she waited for the child to ask, not daring to seem eager for fear it would not be allowed, and she was so happy when the father, her own son, said, ‘Why not?’ And then the child’s mother said, ‘Just this once.’ All this the old lady told and I really did weep, because in China the grandmother could not be so afraid of the younger ones. It is not right.”
    I agreed with my Chinese friend and then remembered, contrariwise, what a young American man had said to me only a few weeks before. He said, “I wish my mother would stay with us always the way you say Chinese grandparents do, but she doesn’t want to be bothered by young children, even her grandchildren. She wants to travel, to hear music, to go abroad, to live her own life, as she calls it, and so my children have no opportunity to know their own grandmother.”
    Two sides of the same story, and the only sense I can make out of it is that our American pattern is to be patternless, unless individualism is the pattern.
    In my own case, my grandfather was remote but comforting. He had his place in the house where I was born, an upright, somewhat rigid figure, but always kind, and though the few months of that year in which McKinley was killed passed quickly and I stayed with my grandfather no more, yet I had seen him, I had lived in the house with him, I had felt him the source of my being, because he was my mother’s father, and his other children were my uncles and aunts and their children were my cousins, and so I was one of a clan and not solitary. When my parents took me back to China with them, I went back knowing where they had come from, and