1971.08 一个文化帝国主义者的回忆

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Recollections of a Cultural Imperialist
"All of us have been the tools of American cultural aggression, perhaps without being wholly conscious of it."

—Y. T. Wu, Chinese Christian leader, July, 1951

By James C. Thomson
AUGUST 1971 ISSUE
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So at last it begins to happen: the reopening of China to Americans. Bizarrely, belatedly, but inevitably, a “new page” is turned in Sino-American relations.

For the real China Lobby within American society, this past spring has been a season of exhilaration. I speak of those scattered thousands throughout our country who once lived in China and are determined someday to return: the pre-1949 expatriates of the missionary, business, diplomatic, journalistic, and even military community, but especially their legions of sons and daughters. For twenty years now, inside and outside our government, nostalgia for a “land of lost content” has afflicted a small but persistent cluster of Americans. “Back-to-the-Mainland” is no monopoly of Chiang Kai-shek.


As one who belongs to this lobby, who spent his childhood in China and has yearned to go back, I share in the exhilaration. Yet the feeling is curiously mingled with twinges of anxiety. What will it be like? How will it feel? Will anything be the same? And will the memories be destroyed?

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What memories?

What follows are some random recollections of a “cultural imperialist”—Peking’s term for foreign missionaries—but a cultural imperialist junior-grade, an infant member of the species, in pre-Communist China. I offer them as a glimpse of a fast-receding era, now that we seem on the verge of a very new one.

Among the children of American missionaries in China, there persisted before the war two social divisions-the BIC’s and the BOF’s. The BIC’s were the elite, those fortunate enough to have been born in China. The BOF’s were the rest, born on furlough when their parents returned to America for their one-year-in-seven breathers. That I was a BOF pained me except that it meant I might one day be elected President of the United States, while my BIC brother and sisters very probably could not. That provided me with one major source of security.


Otherwise, I was quite insecure. I was years younger than the rest of the family. And besides, I had missed 1927, the year in which everything had happened. Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist troops, in alliance with the Communists, had marched up from the South to overthrow the Northern warlords. My father and mother, militant pacifists at the time, had refused to budge from their Nanking home when the American Consul warned all citizens to take refuge down the Yangtze River in Shanghai. So there they sat, with three children and a grandmother; and in poured Chiang’s underfed, underclothed troops, eager to relieve foreigners of their belongings and, in a few cases, their lives. The visitors went wild for three days, and by the end of that time the Nanking Incident had taken place and I had missed it. The high point was reached when the family, looted of their last possessions, were lined up for final disposal by some trigger-happy farm boys from the South. At the last minute my father’s students saved the day by buying them off for four hundred silver dollars. The soldiers initially wanted four thousand but decided, on closer inspection, that the price was too inflated for the particular goods in question. Eventually, the U.S. Navy came to the rescue.

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But all this, as I say, was well before my time. It was not until 1933, at the age of one and a half, that I emigrated to China. And for the next seven years, China was home.

It was a splendid home, too. Not that what I came to know was really “the old China.” It was rather an interim phase that had begun with the Generalissimo’s accession to power in 1927. Pre-1927 Nanking was something I knew only from stories at the dinner table. These were countless, and in the course of their retelling, I came to cherish favorites among the pageant of heroes and villains that passed before my mind’s eye.

One special hero was the King of the Thieves. In the old days he had reigned supreme over the city’s ancient and respected guild of robbers. Each winter, on the eve of Chinese New Year, the cook would announce the arrival of the King of the Thieves, a tall, dark Northerner who then entered, bowed, and awaited his annual gift with the utmost grace and courtesy. The ten silver dollars constituted a small protection fee which kept us immune from robbery for the next twelve months. And it worked. Every once in a while a slipup might occur, and a protected household would awaken to find that the family silver had vanished in the night. But a pained protest to the King of the Thieves would always bring most of the missing loot speedily back to the doorstep, together with an explanation that some novice had pilfered the wrong house and would be sternly reprimanded. All this came to an end with the creation of the Nanking police force in the nineteen thirties. So did our immunity from thieves.


Mother of my heroes was the old warlord of Nanking. He had died some years before, and his funeral had been one of the city’s memorable events. Chinese funerals are always festive. This time the entire city came out in parade. First marched the zesty mourners and two brass bands playing the irrelevant pseudo-Western music of which the warlord was so fond. Then came an eight-horse hearse. The climax was five carriageloads of bereaved concubines, followed by a third brass band blaring forth ‘The Girl I Left Behind Me.”

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This was, incidentally, the same warlord who would periodically institute, during the years of chronic disorder, a rather ineffectual system of martial law. Our next-door neighbor, Pearl Buck (who later scandalized the missionary community by publishing a novel, divorcing her husband, marrying her publisher, and winning the Nobel Prize), was out visiting friends beyond the city walls one evening. She returned by carriage somewhat after eleven to discover the city gates closed and barred because of a new curfew. “Halt, who goes there?” shouted the sentry. “Give the password!” Mrs. Buck groped for an inspiration and called out, “Hopei!” “You fool!” said the sentry, “that was yesterday’s password. Today’s is Shensi!” “Shensi,” shouted Mrs. Buck. “Pass!” said the sentry. Such incidents kept me from developing too serious a concern over the dangers of Chinese militarism.


Among the villains, on the other hand, of these dinner-table legends were wild boars and wolves. Boars were there to be hunted, outside the city walls. But wolves had the habit, it seemed, of straying through the city gates unnoticed and causing a considerable commotion. Nanking, the “Southern Capital,” had been the seat of the first Ming emperor and was once a great city. But the Taipings had wrought terrible havoc there during their curious midnineteenth-century rebellion, and afterwards it was reduced to a sleepy provincial town. It retained certain marks of imperial grandeur-among them its impressive walls, seventy feet high, twenty-six miles long, and wide enough on top for two small cars to pass. Much of the area within the walls was now rural, and wolf hunts could be good sport even inside the city limits. It was in the twenties, too, that my father used to go hunting for wild boars in the eroded and beautifully treeless countryside beyond the walls. But the boars seem to have emigrated with the coming of Chiang’s armies, so my father was left to hunt deer until the day he shot a doe who looked like my sister Nancy, at which point he put away his gun and turned to photography.

But this is not to say that the impact of China was communicated to me over the dining room table. Far from it. China was all around me-its sounds, its smells, its colors-beyond the protection of the walls which enclosed our Western-style brick house, our servants’ quarters, and our garden with its camphor, pomegranate, fig, and persimmon trees. Sometimes China even sneaked inside the walls.

My father was a professor of chemistry at the mission-sponsored University of Nanking. My mother taught school for the older missionary children. They had originally journeyed to China in 1917 as embodiments of confused ecumenism. My father was Dutch Reformed, my mother Episcopalian; they had been dispatched to China by the Presbyterian Board of Foreign Missions to take the place of a Methodist at an interdenominational university and had occupied a house owned by the Disciples of Christ. For a while, in their first year, no one would pay their salary. But all this was past history by the time I came along. From the beginning I was certain that the true road to salvation lay through Presbyterianism, especially since the Presbyterian Board was now footing the bill. As for my father’s employment, I knew he could do wondrous things in an exciting place called his “laboratory”—like grinding wheat for our porridge, peanuts for our peanut butter, and brewing buttermilk by the vat. Other than this, I was reasonably impervious to the missionary enterprise and was left to my own devices.

These devices brought me into contact with the second most important woman in my life, namely Ch’u Sao-tzu the amah. Ch’u Sao-tzu had previously belonged to famous Pearl Buck and considered her present employment, I think, a distinct step downward on the social ladder; She was the most strongwilled female I have ever known, swore with eloquence rare even among the Chinese, chased the male servants with hot irons when her ire was aroused, and kept her poor husband, Li-hua the cook, in a state of lamblike docility. It had taken a steely hand to catch Li-hua, and Ch’u Sao-tzu had not been averse to using it. Shortly before his announcement of his desire to marry her, Li-hua had been locked in the cellar for three days by his lady, unbeknownst to the household. Many years later a childless Ch’u Sao-tzu decided it was high time she should have some heirs. So she found Li-hua a second wife, got them married, and expropriated the eventual offspring of this union.

Extraordinarily, independent of mind, Ch’u Saotzu was highly adaptable of spirit. Some years before, a’ good missionary had brought her into the arms of Christianity, and she was a confirmed and reasonably faithful member of the Chung Hua Shen Kung Hui, or Chinese Episcopal Church. At least twice a year, too, she would burn incense to her ancestors to assure good luck. Now and then she would visit the local Buddhist temple and purchase a prayer stick or two. She always stopped to pay her respects to the little images in Taoist shrines along the roads in the countryside. And to the extent that her unbridled spirit would permit, she honored the precepts of the Sage Confucius in her human relationships. Ch’u Sao-tzu was. a formidable example of the obstacles facing Christian evangelism in China. She was imbued with a wholesome disregard for metaphysics, a zestful concern for the here and now, and a boundless capacity for absorbing such trivia as credos and forms of worship.

It was through Ch’u Sao-tzu that I first knew the China beyond our brick-wall frontier. It was she who used to lift me over to the amah next door, an amiable soul well stocked with such delights as spiced dumplings and, on special occasions, almondpaste “moon cakes.” It was Ch’u Sao-tzu who would let me sample, on the sly, the forbidden wares of the street vendors-fried breads and spun sweets. It was Ch’u Sao-tzu who taught me songs and poems of an earthier nature than those I learned in school. And it was she who would tend me when I was ill, taking special care, in accordance with my mother’s instructions, to sterilize the thermometer in alcohol-after which she would lick it off just to make sure it was clean.

In fact, it was from Ch’u Sao-tzu that I derived my early skepticism about sanitation, and about germs in general. My father was to germs very much what Joseph McCarthy was to American Communists; he saw them everywhere and pursued them ferociously. But from Ch’u Sao-tzu I learned that all this was an example of Western superstition; the Chinese were above such things, but tolerated the foreigners’ eccentricity in this regard, as they did in most others. Sometimes her attitude used to worry my mother. And on one memorable occasion the missionary community decided to have a showing of a documentary film on the menace of flies for the enlightenment of all the local servants. It was. one of those awesome things in which the fly is magnified several hundred times to show its full filth and really looks appalling. Afterwards it was Ch’u Sao-tzu who voiced the audience’s sense of revelation. “Oh, T’ang Sze-mu!” she exclaimed to my mother, in Chinese, “I see why you have always made such a fuss about flies, since flies are so very large in your country. But you must not worry. You see, our Chinese flies are really tiny little harmless things.”

Teaching Ch’u Sao-tzu Western sanitation was just about as difficult as teaching the local carpenter to accustom himself to Western designs for furniture. My father once wanted a special desk built for his laboratory, so he called in this craftsman, chatted with him, and made a perspective drawing of the completed piece. The carpenter reluctantly agreed that it might be possible to produce such a desk, and came back in a week with the finished product. It was a. very curious desk; the top was in the shape of a tired parallelogram, while the rear legs were shorter than the front legs. He had followed the drawing exactly—and had constructed the desk itself in perspective.


When I was old enough to embark upon education, it was Ch’u Sao-tzu who escorted me to Chinese kindergarten. And Chinese kindergarten was a joy. Getting there involved one obstacle. Each day my route led me past the same genial policeman, and each day he would ask me my name and roar with mirth when I replied. It seems that the Chinese phonetic equivalent of my name, Jimmy, or “Chimi,” a name bestowed upon me inadvertently by my mother, had the literal meaning “Chicken Feed,” a term which unfortunately connotes no greater virility in Chinese than in English. But Chi-mi I remained, and to kindergarten I toddled daily. There I learned to salute the Chinese flag, to sing the Chinese national anthem, and to bow three times before the portrait of Dr. Sun Yat-sen. I learned, in short, to be a useful Chinese citizen. But I was not as great a success as my brother had been before me, for he had come home from the all-Chinese school one day, to my mother’s rather mixed pleasure, with a prize for being the second-cleanest boy in the class. Anyway, after several months of this, my parents decided that it was time to train me in my cultural heritage. And so I was dispatched to an nglo-American Quaker kindergarten. It was here that I got religion, so to speak; and that was useful, too.

In the first place, it gave me and a small female friend a stimulus to play endless sessions of a game. which must be the missionary equivalent of “House”—except that instead of taking turns being Mama and Papa, we played, as I remember, a totally asexual and Presbyterian variety in which we took turns being God and Jesus. This tended to produce fierce altercations as to who had played which role longer, though I do not recall who took precedence in our hierarchy. It was also at Quaker kindergarten that I leaned to pray. This skill found special use in my continued and inconclusive battle against the carrot, a vegetable I abhorred. My greatest triumph came the day I went into the kitchen with a large black book under my arm and asked the cook and amah to join with me in a prayer meeting. This they reverently did, bowing their heads while I called upon the deity generally to preserve us from carrots and, in particular, to keep the cook from buying or preparing them ever again. The ceremony had its effect, I discovered, as Li-hua felt it would shake my youthful belief in God were he to disobey my wishes on the subject. So carrots disappeared from the menu for several months until my mother complained and learned the story. It seems she had less regard for the tenderness of my faith.

Kndergartens aside, Nanking was a lively place in the thirties. The years from 1928 to 1937 were an interval of promise as well as upheaval. The Kuomintang government, whatever its shortcomings, was infused with a good deal of youth, vigor, and idealism. It mapped out some of the most ambitious programs of modernization the country had ever known. Nanking was the hub of the new order, and there one could feel the quickening pulse of the land.

Most of this, of course, passed me by. But I do clearly recall the Generalissimo’s curious plan for national regeneration along neo-Confucian principles, something called the “New Life Movement”which, I must confess, darkly fascinated me for some time, as I was convinced that it had something to do with the excretory process. Had I been less of a prude, I should have raised the point with my parents. But prude I was, which fact indicates a staggering victory for Presbyterianism in the wilds of Asia, as there is nothing to which life in China is less conducive than prudery. A country in which the fields are periodically draped in night soil is not a country where one learns to be finicky about the more private bodily functions as in our overcivilized West. Men and women tended to relieve themselves without self-consciousness or concealment. The only problem was that Chinese children and even some less circumspect adults seemed to place a premium on the valu of observing a foreigner so performing. In later years I was to become quite blasé about the large and genuinely curious crowds which would gather around the open outhouses of country inns where I happened to be spending a night. Among Chinese children. I am convinced, that there exists a game whose title, roughly translated, reads: “Catch-the-foreign-devil-going-pee-pee.”

It should be mentioned that one thing to which Westerners in China did have to accustom themselves speedily was the fact of living in a zoo-but. not on the spectator side of the bars. As big-nosed, pinkfaced people, we were excruciatingly funny to observe, and in the course of the years, our entertainment value was immense, if at all else we failed. As foreigners we gathered swarms of spectators wherever we went outside such cosmopolitan and sophisticated centers as Shanghai and Hong Kong. We were funny when walking, we were comical when eating, and we were downright ludicrous when taking pictures, reading books, or writing letters. In later years I was often to collect crowds of as many as thirty people in the course of changing a single camera film. Once, long afterwards, in postwar West China, a friend and I overnighted in a town which had not seen a foreigner in six years and inadvertently led a parade of five hundred screaming children through the streets in desperate search of anonymity and the small, elusive inn where we had left our baggage.

Not that this particularly bothered me in the thirties. I was universally addressed by street urchins as “hsiao yang kuei-tzu,” or “little foreign devil,” but came to regard it as almost a term of endearment. Even “ta-pi,” or “big-nose,” seemed rather mild, especially in the face of such spicier epithets as “big turnip” and “turtle’s egg.” Chinese swearing was colorful, if less than overwhelming in translation. And the zoolike aspects of life in China were often diverting for a child.


And so the thirties passed, filled with the songs of street vendors and mountain carriers, with misty landscapes and soft red temples, with pagoda roofs and the smells of the Chinese alley. It was in the summer of 1937, while we played in the Lushan mountains at Kuling, that a second Nanking Incident occurred with the Japanese occupation of that city; and once again I missed the excitement. For a few months we remained refugees in our mountain fastness as the Sino-Japanese war snapped and crackled to the north of us. And then, on New Year’s Day, we walked down Kuling’s 3000 steps to the international train which whisked us south to Hong Kong, a city memorable chiefly for our refugee camp cots in the cavernous dining salon of the Peninsular Hotel. Next came Shanghai, an international enclave where we could park ourselves peacefully for two more years on the campus of the Shanghai American School. Shanghai I remember for the world’s most comfortable rickshaws, for double-decker buses, chocolate shops, White Russian cafés, and the Jessfield Zoo’s most cheerful inmate, one “Jimmy the Giant Kangaroo.” The implications of this sizable advance over the days of Chicken Feed were not lost on me. Shanghai was cosmopolitan in the extreme and a very gay place; but it was not really China. Only once did we return to Nanking, a curiously dead, gray city now in the spring of 1938.

But then came furlough time at last. By late 1939 I was on my way to the country I had never known, a paradise so clean, I was assured, that you could pick pennies off the street and pop them quite safely into your mouth.

It was nine years before I returned to China, and the China to which I returned was a rather different one. Many of the differences lay in me, for I was seeing the country through seventeen-yearold eyes. The hazy, happy memories still lingered, and they snapped into clear focus as I revisited old scenes and relived old experiences. But scenes and experiences assumed new significance, for my arrival coincided with the collapse of the regime and the way of life we had known so well in Nanking.

I traveled to China in July, 1948, with a classmate (Winthrop Knowlton, now president of Harper & Row, publishers) who was joining me for a year abroad between school and college. In the summer months we wandered in the North around Peking, the Great Wall, and Inner Mongolia, then to central China up the Yangtze River in the mountains of the Lushan range once again. In September we enrolled in Nanking University and settled down for nine months of prewar domesticity. It turned out to be a bare two and a half months. By December the Communist armies were poised a few miles above Nanking, and my parents were moving to South China. The two of us bade farewell to things academic. This was our last chance, we said; so we armed ourselves with DDT, bedding rolls, and a sense of urgency. And we took off for four months of travel through the West and Southwest. They were months which brought us to the heart of the China that lies far behind the Eastern seaboard. Meanwhile, the walls were crumbling about us.


China was a curious place in this period of turnover. During our last weeks in Nanking enormous armies were convulsed in the greatest battle of Chinese history at Hsuchow, forty miles to the north of us. But all was deceptively serene in the city itself. Elsewhere in West China, later in the year, we had stepped back a thousand years to a land in which the war a few hundred miles away had no effect on the ancient rhythm of sowing and harvesting, of giving birth and dying. The tranquil past one found in West China was as nothing I have ever known. This was the China that had vexed a score of conquerors; the glacial China that lumbered on relentlessly in its peaceful and massive way, engulfing, quelling, absorbing.

It was in the West, too, that I came to know the reality of the unchanging Chinese spirit. We traveled a great deal as “yellow fish”—illegal paying hitchhikers—on the tops of antique postal buses and trucks, clinging to the sides of mailbags, market baskets, and freshly butchered hogs. We stopped for meals and lodgings in towns, remote villages, and sometimes Buddhist monasteries. Our fellow “fish” were provincial businessmen and farmers moving from town to town. They gaped at us, they guffawed at us. (China was still a zoo.) But almost never were we able to pay for a night’s lodging, almost never for a meal. Whenever we asked for the bill in the small mud-floor lamplit restaurant, the proprietor would reply that a gentleman at another table had already paid for us. Invariably this would be one of our fellow wayfarers, a countryman whose Confucian ethic had long ago taught him to show kindness to the stranger traveling through his land. We tried to repay by distributing peanuts and tangerines to the others during the ride. In the midst of misery they could be the most gracious and generous people on earth.


West China was an eye-opener in other ways. It instructed me further in the nature of Chinese governance. Here, after nearly forty years of nominal republican rule, the central government maintained control only through a careful network of alliances with powerful local warlords who still retained private armies.

And here it was that we encountered age-old symptoms of disorder best illustrated in the dilemma we confronted in February, 1949, when we reached Kweiyang in the Southwest on our trek back to the Coast. We had to choose, then, between a motor route southward, which was officially closed because bandits had seized a large portion of the road, and a river route southeastward, which was officially closed because pirates had seized a large portion of the river. As it was, we elected to try our luck with a narrow-gauge railway leading eastward which had been built in strips but never connected. The procedure was to journey in trucks by day, meet the railroad by nightfall, and meander through the darkness in plush prewar wagons-lits. Why had the rail sections never been linked? Because the local general had deduced from history that The Enemy always marched up completed railroads, so it would be best to construct only incomplete railroads.

And why, we asked one night, as we chugged along at two miles per hour, did the trains run so slowly? Oh, said the conductor, because if the train went any faster, the locomotive usually jumped the track. But, he added, there was one other problem: when the train ran slowly, bandits would walk aboard, rob all the passengers, and walk off again. It was a hard life, he sighed.

Were we imperialists? I suppose so—though judging by the outcome we were less than a success. And if anyone changed anyone, they changed us.

All I know is that I cried when I heard those first sounds from Peking on the television last spring.






一个文化帝国主义者的回忆
"我们所有人都是美国文化侵略的工具，也许没有完全意识到这一点"。

-Y. 1951年7月，中国基督教领袖吴大猷

作者：James C. Thomson
1971年8月号
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终于开始发生了：中国向美国人重新开放。奇怪的是，迟到了，但不可避免地，中美关系翻开了 "新的一页"。

对于美国社会中真正的中国游说者来说，过去的这个春天是一个令人振奋的季节。我指的是那些分散在我国各地的成千上万的曾经在中国生活过并决心有朝一日重返中国的人：1949年以前的传教士、商人、外交官、记者、甚至军事界的侨民，但特别是他们的儿子和女儿。二十年来，在我国政府内外，对 "失去内容的土地 "的怀旧情绪一直困扰着一小撮但持续存在的美国人。"回到祖国 "并不是蒋介石的专利。


作为属于这个游说团体的一员，在中国度过童年并渴望回去的人，我也有这种兴奋感。然而，这种感觉奇怪地混杂着一丝丝的焦虑。它将会是什么样子？它的感觉如何？有什么会是一样的吗？记忆会被摧毁吗？

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请看这个故事出现在《大西洋》杂志的页面上。

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什么记忆？

以下是一个 "文化帝国主义者"--北京对外国传教士的称呼--但却是一个文化帝国主义者的初级阶段，是这个物种的幼年成员，在共产主义之前的中国的一些随机回忆。我把它们作为一个快速消逝的时代的一瞥，现在我们似乎处于一个非常新的时代的边缘。

在美国传教士在中国的子女中，战前一直存在着两种社会分化--BIC和BOF。BIC是精英，是那些幸运地在中国出生的人。北京人是其他人，当他们的父母回到美国休息一年的时候，他们在休假中出生。我是北京人，这让我很痛苦，因为这意味着我有一天可能会被选为美国总统，而我的北京人兄弟姐妹们很可能不会。这为我提供了一个主要的安全来源。


否则，我是相当没有安全感的。我比家里的其他人年轻好几岁。此外，我错过了1927年，那一年发生了一切。蒋介石的国民党军队与共产党结盟，从南方进军，推翻了北方军阀的统治。我的父亲和母亲当时是激进的和平主义者，当美国领事警告所有公民到长江下游的上海避难时，他们拒绝离开南京的家。于是，他们带着三个孩子和一位祖母坐在那里；蒋介石的部队吃不饱、穿不暖，急于将外国人的财物和（在少数情况下）他们的生命解救出来。游客们疯狂了三天，在这三天结束时，南京事件已经发生了，而我却错过了它。当被洗劫一空的一家人被来自南方的一些扣动扳机的农场男孩排队进行最后处理时，达到了高潮。在最后一刻，我父亲的学生以四百银元买下了他们，从而挽救了这一天。士兵们最初想要四千银元，但在仔细检查后决定，这个价格对有关的特定货物来说太夸张了。最终，美国海军出手相救。

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但是，正如我所说，这一切都比我的时代早。直到1933年，在我一岁半的时候，我才移民到了中国。在接下来的七年里，中国就是我的家。

这也是一个美好的家。并不是说我所了解的真的是 "旧中国"。它是一个过渡阶段，从1927年总书记上台开始。1927年以前的南京，我只是从饭桌上的故事中了解到。这些故事数不胜数，在复述的过程中，我开始珍视那些在我脑海中闪现的英雄和恶棍的盛会中的最爱。

一个特别的英雄是盗贼之王。在过去的日子里，他是这个城市古老而受人尊敬的强盗公会的最高统治者。每年冬天，在中国新年的前夕，厨师会宣布贼王的到来，一个高大黝黑的北方人，然后走进来，鞠躬，并以最优雅和礼貌的方式等待他的年度礼物。这十块银元构成了一笔小小的保护费，使我们在接下来的十二个月里免于被抢劫。而且它还起了作用。偶尔也会有失手的时候，受保护的家庭醒来后会发现家里的银子在夜里消失了。但是，向贼王提出痛苦的抗议，总会使大部分丢失的战利品迅速回到门口，同时解释说一些新手偷错了房子，将受到严厉的训斥。所有这些都随着1930年代南京警察部队的成立而结束了。我们对小偷的豁免权也随之消失。


我的英雄之母是南京的老军阀。他在几年前去世了，他的葬礼是该市值得纪念的事件之一。中国人的葬礼总是很喜庆。这一次，整个城市的人都出来游行了。首先是兴致勃勃的送葬者和两个铜管乐队，他们演奏的是军阀非常喜欢的无关痛痒的伪西方音乐。然后是一辆八匹马的灵车。高潮是五辆满载丧偶之人的车，接着是第三支铜管乐队演奏《我留下的女孩》。

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顺便说一下，就是这个军阀，在长期混乱的年代里，会定期制定一个相当无效的戒严制度。我们的隔壁邻居珀尔-巴克（Pearl Buck）（她后来出版了一本小说，与丈夫离婚，与出版商结婚，并获得了诺贝尔奖，令传教士界感到震惊），一天晚上外出拜访城墙外的朋友。11点过后，她乘马车返回，发现城门因新的宵禁令而关闭，禁止通行。"站住，谁去那里？"哨兵喊道。"请说出密码！" 巴克夫人摸索着灵感，喊道："霍贝！" "你这个傻瓜！"哨兵说，"那是昨天的密码。今天的是 "神思"！" "神思"，巴克夫人喊道。"通过！"哨兵说。这样的事件使我没有对中国军国主义的危险产生太严重的担忧。


另一方面，在这些餐桌上的传说中，野猪和狼是坏蛋。野猪是在城墙外被猎杀的。但狼似乎有一个习惯，就是在不知不觉中穿过城门，引起相当大的骚动。南京，"南都"，曾是明朝第一个皇帝的所在地，曾经是一座伟大的城市。但太平天国在19世纪中期的奇特叛乱中给这里带来了可怕的破坏，之后它就沦为一个沉睡的省城。它保留了某些帝国的宏伟标志--其中包括令人印象深刻的城墙，高七十英尺，长二十六英里，上面的宽度足以让两辆小车通过。城墙内的大部分地区现在是农村，即使在城市范围内，猎狼也是很好的运动。也是在20年代，我的父亲曾经在城墙外被侵蚀的、美丽的无树乡村中去猎杀野猪。但野猪似乎随着蒋介石军队的到来而移民了，所以我父亲只能去猎鹿，直到有一天他射中了一只长得像我妹妹南希的母鹿，这时他才收起枪，转而去摄影。

但这并不是说，中国的影响是通过餐桌传达给我的。远非如此。中国就在我身边--它的声音，它的气味，它的颜色--在围着我们的西式砖房，我们的仆人的住所，以及我们有樟树、石榴、无花果和柿子树的花园的墙壁保护之外。有时，中国甚至会偷偷溜进墙里。

我的父亲是传教士赞助的南京大学的化学教授。我的母亲为年长的传教士子女教书。他们最初是在1917年作为混乱的大公主义的体现来到中国的。我的父亲是荷兰归正会的，我的母亲是圣公会的；他们被长老会国外传教士委员会派遣到中国，在一所跨教派的大学里取代卫理公会的位置，并占据了基督门徒会的房子。有一段时间，在他们的第一年，没有人愿意支付他们的工资。但在我来的时候，这一切都已经成为过去。从一开始我就确信，真正的救赎之路在于长老会，尤其是长老会现在正在为我买单。至于我父亲的工作，我知道他能在一个被称为 "实验室 "的令人兴奋的地方做一些奇妙的事情--比如为我们的粥研磨小麦，为我们的花生酱研磨花生，以及用大桶酿造酪乳。除此以外，我对传教士的工作不闻不问，任由自己摆布。

这些设备使我接触到了我生命中第二位最重要的女人，即阿玛的朱圣子。她是我见过的意志最坚强的女性，她的口才甚至在中国人中也是罕见的，当她的怒火被激起时，她会用热铁追赶男仆，并使她可怜的丈夫，厨师李华，处于羔羊般的驯服状态。捉拿李华需要一双坚定的手，而丘处机并不排斥使用它。在他宣布要娶她之前不久，丽华被他的夫人关在地窖里三天，家里人都不知道。许多年后，没有孩子的丘处机决定，现在是她应该有一些继承人的时候了。于是她给丽华找了个第二任妻子，让他们结婚，并征用了这次结合的最终后代。

超乎寻常的是，朱绍祖有独立的思想，精神上有很强的适应性。几年前，一位优秀的传教士将她带入基督教的怀抱，她是中华神功会，或中国圣公会的忠实成员。每年至少有两次，她会给她的祖先烧香，以确保好运。现在，她会去当地的佛教寺庙，购买一两根祈祷棒。她总是停下脚步，向乡间道路两旁的道教圣地的小佛像致意。在她不羁的精神允许的范围内，她在人际关系中尊重圣人孔子的戒律。丘处机是基督教在中国传福音所面临的障碍的一个可怕的例子。她充满了对形而上学的健康漠视，对此时此地的热切关注，以及对信条和崇拜形式等琐事的无限吸收能力。

正是通过《楚辞》，我第一次知道了我们砖墙外的中国。她经常把我带到隔壁的阿妈那里，阿妈是个和蔼可亲的人，有很多好吃的东西，比如香喷喷的饺子，在特殊情况下还有杏仁酱 "月饼"。是楚啸天让我偷偷地品尝街头小贩的禁忌商品--油炸面包和纺纱糖果。是楚啸天教我唱的歌和诗，比我在学校里学的更朴实。也是她在我生病时照顾我，按照我母亲的指示，特别注意用酒精对温度计进行消毒--之后她会舔掉它，以确保它是干净的。

事实上，正是从《楚辞》中我得到了我早期对卫生设施和一般细菌的怀疑态度。我父亲对细菌的态度就像约瑟夫-麦卡锡对美国共产党人的态度一样；他看到细菌无处不在，并对它们穷追猛打。但我从《楚辞》中了解到，所有这些都是西方迷信的一个例子；中国人对这些东西不屑一顾，但在这方面容忍外国人的古怪行为，就像他们对其他大多数人一样。有时，她的态度曾经让我母亲担心。有一次，传教士团体决定放映一部关于苍蝇威胁的纪录片，以启迪所有当地仆人。那是一种令人敬畏的东西，其中苍蝇被放大了几百倍，显示出它的全部污秽，看起来真的很可怕。事后，是丘处机说出了观众的启示感。"哦，唐司马！"她用中文对我母亲说，"我明白你为什么总是对苍蝇大惊小怪了，因为苍蝇在你们国家非常多。但是你不要担心。你看，我们中国的苍蝇真的是很小的无害的小东西。"

教导丘处机学习西方的环境卫生，就像教导当地木匠习惯于西方的家具设计一样困难。我父亲曾经想为他的实验室制作一张特殊的桌子，所以他叫来了这个工匠，和他聊天，并为完成的作品画了一张透视图。木匠不情愿地同意有可能制作这样一张桌子，并在一周后带着成品回来。这是一张非常奇怪的书桌；桌面是一个疲惫的平行四边形，而后腿比前腿短。他完全按照图纸的要求，用透视法建造了书桌本身。


当我到了可以开始接受教育的年龄时，是丘处机护送我去了中国的幼儿园。中国的幼儿园是一种快乐。去那里有一个障碍。每天我的路线都会经过同一个和蔼可亲的警察，每天他都会问我的名字，当我回答的时候，他都会笑着吼叫。似乎我的名字的中文音译是 "吉米 "或 "奇米"，这个名字是我母亲无意中给我起的，字面意思是 "鸡饲料"，不幸的是，这个词在中文中的含义并不比英文中的阳刚。但我仍然是 "智美"，我每天都在蹒跚地走向幼儿园。在那里我学会了向中国国旗敬礼，唱中国国歌，并在孙中山先生的画像前鞠躬三次。简而言之，我学会了做一个有用的中国公民。但我没有像我哥哥那样取得巨大的成功，因为有一天他从全中文学校回家，我母亲相当高兴，因为他是全班第二干净的男孩，获得了奖品。总之，这样过了几个月后，我的父母决定是时候对我进行文化传统的培训了。于是我被派往一个美国贵格会的幼儿园。在这里，我得到了宗教信仰，可以说，这也很有用。

首先，它给了我和一个小的女性朋友一个刺激，让我们无休止地玩一种游戏。这一定是相当于传教士的 "房子"--只是我们不是轮流做妈妈和爸爸，而是玩一种完全无性和长老会的游戏，我们轮流做上帝和耶稣。这往往会产生激烈的争吵，争论谁扮演的时间长，尽管我不记得谁在我们的等级制度中占优先地位。也是在贵格会幼儿园，我开始倾向于祈祷。这一技能在我与胡萝卜这一我厌恶的蔬菜的持续而无结果的斗争中得到了特别的使用。我最大的胜利是有一天，我腋下夹着一本大黑书走进厨房，请厨师和大妈和我一起参加祈祷会。他们虔诚地照做了，在我呼吁神灵保佑我们远离胡萝卜，特别是不让厨师再买或准备胡萝卜时，他们低下了头。我发现这个仪式是有效果的，因为李华觉得如果他违背我在这个问题上的意愿，会动摇我对上帝的年轻信仰。所以胡萝卜从菜单上消失了几个月，直到我母亲抱怨并了解了这个故事。看来她对我的信仰的温柔不太在意。

撇开Kndergartens不谈，南京在三十年代是一个热闹的地方。从1928年到1937年是一个充满希望和动荡的时期。国民党政府，不管它有什么缺点，都注入了大量的青春、活力和理想主义。它制定了这个国家有史以来最雄心勃勃的现代化计划。南京是新秩序的中心，在那里，人们可以感受到这片土地的脉搏在加快。

当然，这一切大部分都被我忽略了。但我确实清楚地记得，总参谋长按照新儒家的原则制定了奇怪的国家复兴计划，即所谓的 "新生活运动"，我必须承认，这让我暗暗着迷了一段时间，因为我确信它与排泄过程有关。如果我不是那么假正经，我应该向我的父母提出这个问题。但我确实是个假正经的人，这一事实表明长老会在亚洲的荒野中取得了惊人的胜利，因为在中国的生活没有什么比假正经更有利的了。在一个田野上定期铺设夜色土壤的国家，人们不会像在我们过度文明的西方那样，学会对更多私人的身体功能进行挑剔。男人和女人都倾向于在没有自我意识或隐瞒的情况下解脱自己。唯一的问题是，中国的孩子，甚至是一些不太谨慎的成年人，似乎对观察一个外国人如此表演的价值很重视。在后来的日子里，我对那些聚集在我碰巧过夜的乡间旅馆的开放式外屋周围的大批真正好奇的人群变得相当淡定。在中国儿童中。我相信，有一种游戏，其名称粗略地翻译一下，就是 "抓外国鬼子去撒尿"。

应该提到的是，西方人在中国不得不迅速适应的一件事是生活在动物园里的事实，但不是在铁栅栏的观众席上。作为大鼻子、粉脸的人，我们的观察是非常有趣的，而且在这些年里，我们的娱乐价值是巨大的，如果说我们失败的话。作为外国人，我们在上海和香港这样的国际大都市和成熟的中心之外，无论走到哪里都会有成群的观众。我们走路时很滑稽，吃饭时也很滑稽，拍照、看书、写信时则完全是可笑的。在后来的日子里，我经常在更换一部相机胶片的过程中收集多达30人的人群。很久以后，在战后的中国西部，我和一个朋友在一个六年没有见过外国人的小镇上过夜，无意中带领五百个尖叫的孩子在街上游行，拼命寻找匿名和我们留下行李的小旅馆，难以捉摸。

在三十年代，这对我来说并不特别困扰。街头顽童普遍称呼我为 "小洋鬼子"，或 "小洋鬼子"，但我几乎把它当作一种爱称。即使是 "ta-pi"，或 "大鼻子"，也显得相当温和，尤其是面对 "大萝卜 "和 "乌龟蛋 "等更辛辣的外号。中国的脏话是丰富多彩的，尽管在翻译中并不那么让人难以接受。而中国生活的动物性方面，对一个孩子来说往往是很有吸引力的。


就这样，三十年代过去了，充满了街头小贩和登山者的歌声，充满了缥缈的风景和柔和的红色寺庙，充满了宝塔的屋顶和中国胡同的气味。就在1937年夏天，当我们在牯岭的庐山上玩耍时，发生了第二次南京事件，日本人占领了那个城市；而我又一次错过了激动人心的时刻。在几个月的时间里，当中日战争在我们的北面打响时，我们仍然是山中的难民。然后，在元旦，我们走下九岭的3000级台阶，坐上国际列车，向南驶向香港，这个城市主要是由于我们在半岛酒店空旷的餐厅里的难民营的小床而令人难忘。接下来是上海，一个国际飞地，在那里我们可以在上海美国学校的校园里安安静静地多呆两年。我记得上海有世界上最舒适的人力车，有双层巴士，有巧克力店，有白俄咖啡馆，还有杰斯菲尔德动物园里最欢快的囚犯，一只 "大袋鼠吉米"。与 "喂鸡 "的日子相比，这种巨大的进步对我来说并不陌生。上海是一个极端的国际大都市，是一个非常快乐的地方；但它并不是真正的中国。我们只回过一次南京，在1938年的春天，南京是一个奇怪的、死气沉沉的城市。

但后来终于到了休假的时候。到1939年末，我已经在前往我从未了解过的国家的路上了，这个天堂是如此干净，我得到保证，你可以在街上捡到一分钱，然后很安全地把它们塞进你的嘴。

九年后我才回到中国，而我回到的中国是一个相当不同的国家。许多不同之处在于我，因为我是通过17岁的眼睛看到这个国家。朦胧的、快乐的记忆仍然挥之不去，当我重温旧时的场景和重温旧时的经历时，它们被清晰地聚焦了。但是，这些场景和经历具有新的意义，因为我的到来恰逢政权和我们在南京熟知的生活方式的崩溃。

1948年7月，我和一位同学（温斯洛普-诺尔顿，现在是哈珀-罗出版社的总裁）一起来到中国，他要和我一起在学校和大学之间进行为期一年的留学。在夏季，我们在北方的北京、长城和内蒙古一带游荡，然后再次到中国中部的长江上游的庐山山脉游荡。9月，我们进入南京大学学习，并在战前的九个月里安家落户。结果这只是两个半月。到了12月，共产党的军队在南京上空几英里处蓄势待发，而我的父母则迁往华南。我们两个人告别了学术性的东西。我们说，这是我们最后的机会；所以我们用滴滴涕、被褥卷和紧迫感来武装自己。我们在西部和西南部进行了四个月的旅行。这几个月把我们带到了远在东部沿海地区的中国的中心。与此同时，我们身边的墙壁正在坍塌。


在这个更替时期，中国是一个奇怪的地方。在我们在南京的最后几周，庞大的军队在离我们北面40英里的徐州发生了中国历史上最伟大的战斗。但在城市本身，一切都显得十分平静。在这一年晚些时候，在中国西部的其他地方，我们已经回到了一千年前，在这片土地上，几百英里外的战争对古代的播种和收获、生育和死亡的节奏没有影响。在中国西部发现的宁静的过去是我所不知道的。这是一个令无数征服者烦恼的中国；这个冰川般的中国以其和平而庞大的方式无情地向前推进，吞噬、镇压、吸收。

也是在西方，我开始了解到不变的中国精神的现实。我们作为 "黄鱼"--非法付费的搭便车者，在古色古香的邮政巴士和卡车顶上，紧紧抓住邮包、市场上的篮子和刚宰杀的猪的两侧，进行了大量的旅行。我们在城镇、偏远的村庄，有时在佛教寺院里停下来吃饭和住宿。我们的 "鱼 "伙伴是省内的商人和农民，他们从一个城市到另一个城市。他们凝视着我们，嘲笑着我们。(中国仍然是一个动物园。)但我们几乎从未支付过一晚的住宿费用，几乎从未支付过一餐。每当我们在小的泥巴地板上的小餐馆里要求买单时，老板就会回答说另一桌的一位先生已经为我们付过钱了。这个人往往是我们的一个同路人，一个乡下人，他的儒家伦理早就教导他要对在他的土地上旅行的陌生人表示善意。我们试图通过在旅途中向其他人分发花生和橘子来报答他们。在苦难中，他们可能是世界上最亲切和慷慨的人。


中国西部在其他方面也让我大开眼界。它让我进一步了解了中国治理的性质。在这里，经过近四十年的名义上的共和制统治，中央政府只是通过与仍然保留私人军队的强大的地方军阀建立一个谨慎的联盟网络来维持控制。

在这里，我们遇到了由来已久的混乱症状，1949年2月，当我们在返回海岸的旅途中到达西南地区的贵阳时，我们所面临的困境就是最好的说明。当时，我们必须在向南的汽车路线和向东南的河道路线之间做出选择，前者因为土匪占领了大部分道路而被正式关闭，后者因为海盗占领了大部分河道而被正式关闭。因此，我们选择在一条向东的窄轨铁路上碰碰运气，这条铁路是分条修建的，但从未接通。我们的程序是白天乘坐卡车，在夜幕降临时与铁路会合，然后在黑暗中乘坐战前的毛绒马车--灯火阑珊处漫步。为什么这些铁路段从未被连接起来？因为当地的将军从历史中推断出，敌人总是沿着已建成的铁路行进，所以最好只建造不完整的铁路。

一天晚上，当我们以每小时两英里的速度前进时，我们问道，为什么火车跑得这么慢？哦，列车长说，因为如果火车再快一点，火车头通常就会跳出轨道。但是，他补充说，还有一个问题：当火车运行缓慢时，强盗会登上火车，抢劫所有的乘客，然后又走了。他叹了口气，这真是一种艰难的生活。

我们是帝国主义者吗？我想是的--尽管从结果来看，我们并不那么成功。如果说有人改变了谁，那就是他们改变了我们。

我所知道的是，当我去年春天在电视上听到来自北京的第一个声音时，我哭了。