Mrs. Liang was pleased indeed. “How is it I have not thought of this myself?” she exclaimed.
“Mary says he will not do it,” Chen suggested.
Mrs. Liang considered this. “Had he not fallen once in love with that Lili Li, I know he would not. But he is a very single heart. When he was small he once had a dog and when it died he never took another. So when he had one friend it was enough — he never had many friends. This is his temper. We will plot together.”
That evening Mrs. Liang went to Mary and Chen and together they planned what James should have for a wife. She must of course be schooled and she must not be too old-fashioned or perhaps too modern. Something between was well enough. For more important than schooling or fashion was the girl’s own nature. She must be honest, she must be one who could love a man more than herself, a thing which not all women can do. She must be good at sewing and cooking, for James did not notice when his own garments needed mending, and when he worked he often forgot to eat. She need not be pretty, but since there was not love to begin with, neither should she be ugly. Certainly she must be clean, since James would have everything clean, and she must have a sweet breath and a soft voice.
With these matters decided, they laid their plot and let days pass perfecting it and inquiring where such a girl could be found. Chen offered to go to the city and Mary thought of writing to Dr. and Mrs. Su as the best among their new friends. Mrs. Liang even tried to bring to memory the young Chinese women she had seen in New York. She could remember no one except Sonia Pan, and she would be worse than any American, because while her body was Chinese, nothing else was. Besides, Sonia would certainly not live where she could not buy chewing gum, turn on the radio, or have a permanent wave in her hair. Uncle Tao, moreover, would not tolerate her, and she would be of no use to James.
At last Chen said sensibly that they had better lay the whole plan before James himself and with much timidity and laughter and arranging of who should speak first and how it should all be broached, they invited him to take a meal with them in a room at the inn, where Young Wang now being innkeeper and his father-in-law retired, they were sure of a good meal and of being alone in an inner room. They made the excuse of this being the first month day of Mary’s marriage, and Mrs. Liang talked of having to go home in a few more weeks. She longed to stay on, to stay even another month. If James would get himself married—
Outside the little room the inn was full. Young Wang gave meals for barter of flour or wheat and for vegetables, fowl and eggs and for fish or a pig or cow’s meat. Money was useless and the people did business without it.
Young Wang served them himself. He looked like an innkeeper now, his face was fatter than it had been and he ran with sweat as he hurried in and out of the inner room.
“Eh, do not be so busy,” Mrs. Liang told him kindly, but his zeal urged him on. Only when all the food was on the table and his young wife had poured out wine and tea, did he go away and leave the four alone.
Mrs. Liang had been chosen to begin and when they had eaten she said to James, “My son, as your mother, I beg you to let me see you married to a good wife before I leave you again. Then I will not worry. You are the eldest of all my children, and why should you live alone and my youngest be dead?” The tears came to her eyes.
Mary spoke next and she said, “We have been thinking of all our friends to find one whom you might like. Don’t try to fall in love again, Jim. Just choose a nice girl and see what happens of its own accord.”
“After all,” Chen said in turn and before James could speak, “it is only this generation of our own which has so much as thought of choosing wives and husbands for themselves. Remember that it is the custom here still for parents to find husbands and wives for their children.”
To their surprise James answered at once with a sensible gravity. “I have been thinking of such a thing myself, and I have told myself the very words which Chen has just used. Am I different from my ancestors? It may be that they understood better than we do the proper relationship between man and woman.”
“Then who—” Mrs. Liang began joyfully.
James cut her off. “I will not choose for myself, Mother. You may choose for me. You gave me birth and you know me. Mary and Chen can give their advice.”
All three were set back by their easy victory. “But have you no thought about the kind of girl you — you—” Chen ventured.
“Yes, I have thought,” James said calmly. “I should like to have a good-tempered woman, one strong and healthy, and the daughter of a peasant — one of our own peasants.”
The three listening were struck speechless. The daughter of a Liang peasant! This was something too strange even for them. This was going too far back!
James looked at the three solemn faces. “Why not? Goodness and health are all I want.”
“But an ignorant woman, Jim?” Mary asked.
“You shall teach her,” James replied smiling. He put down his chopsticks. “Come, why are you all staring? I have only agreed to do what you have proposed.”
“We did not ask you to go so far,” Chen remonstrated.
“Find my bride,” James said, half teasing them. “When you have found her, I will marry her. Now let us enjoy our feast.”
Why not, he asked his own heart? There was no woman in the world whom he wanted for himself. To this his heart made no answer. It had become a machine to pump the blood through his body and keep him alive that he might do his work.
21
MRS. LIANG CLIMBED INTO the great plane that was to carry her back to America. She walked to her seat, arranged her belongings, leaned her head back and closed her eyes. Only the fact that she had overstayed her six weeks by more than a month had compelled her again to fly across the sea. She had stayed until the very last moment with her three children. She now thought of Chen as entirely her own. Since Chen’s parents were immured in Communist territory she thought of him as an orphan. She knew nothing about Communists or communism, but she had heard so much from Dr. Liang that she considered it only a matter of time until everybody in Communist territory would be dead. Since no letters came to Chen, nor did he write any letters, there was nothing to contradict this theory. Unless they were dead people wrote to their relatives. Since Chen had no letters, his parents must be dead. It was just as well, she thought privately, since the children could continue in the ancestral village under Uncle Tao’s protection.
She reflected upon Uncle Tao. He was as intolerable as ever but circumstances had changed. That is, he was now old and he had a knot in his belly. Moreover, she also was older than she had been when she had rebelled against him as a girl. Aunt Tao had been alive then, and she had thought Aunt Tao weak and yielding too much to the quarrelsome and domineering man that Uncle Tao had been in those days. Now she realized that it was a rubbery yielding, and that actually Aunt Tao had been tough. But she only understood this from the years of her own marriage.
The most important thing about Uncle Tao nowadays, however, was none of these things. It was the simple fact that Uncle Tao had power. What this power was she did not know. But he had some sort of power over the magistrate, over the country police, even over tax gatherers. His hold over the tenants was of course absolute. She had warned James against defending these tenants too much.
“The men of earth are not what they were when I was young,” she told James. “In those days what could they do? Sometimes they rose up, it is true, and killed the ones they hated. But when that man was dead another came down from the Emperor and when they saw it was no use to kill a man if another came at once to take his place, they endured again for a few generations. Now everything is different. They have heard too much. They even know that in America people can stop work and farmers can refuse to sell their food. It gives them ideas of what they can do also. And now too there are the accursed Communists to whom they can always go. We are pinched between these people and the Communists.”