My father, Hu Chuan, was a scholar and a man of strong will and administrative ability. After a period of classical training in literature and history, he took great interest in the study of geography, especially in the geography of the frontier provinces. He went to Peking and, with a letter of introduction in his pocket, traveled 42 days to Kirin in Northern Manchuria to see the Imperial Commissioner, Wu Ta-chen, who is now known to European Sinologues as one of the greatest archaeologists in China.
Wu received him and asked what he could do for him. “Nothing,” said my father, “except let me follow your mission to settle the boundary dispute with Russia, so that I may study the geography of the northeastern provinces.” Wu was interested in this scholar who had taken only his first degree in the literary examinations and was almost penniless after the long journey outside the Great Wall. He took the young man with him on his historic mission and found him a most valuable and hard-working assistant.
One time my father’s party lost its way in an immense forest and could not get out for 3 days. Provisions were exhausted and all reconnoitering had failed when he suggested that a search be made for running streams, which would in all probability flow out of the forest. A stream was found and the party followed its course to safety. My father composed a long poem to celebrate this occasion. When 40 years later I used this incident as an illustration in a paper on Professor John Dewey’s theory of systematic thinking, several surviving acquaintances of my father still recognized this story, though I had not mentioned his name, and wrote to inquire if I was a younger son of their long-departed friend.
Although Wu Ta-chen had once recommended him to the government as “a man capable of governing provinces,” my father never achieved political prominence and, after becoming an officiain Kiangsu and Formosa, died at the age of 55 when Formosa was ceded to Japan as a result of the Sino-Japanese War.
* * * *
I was the youngest son of my father and the only child of my mother. He married three times. The first wife was killed in the Taiping Rebellion, which swept over my home district in southern Anhui and reduced it to ashes. By a second marriage he had three sons and four daughters. The eldest son proved to be an incorrigible degenerate at an early age. When my father lost his second wife, he wrote home that he had decided to marry a girl of the good, sturdy stock of the farmer class.
My mother’s father was a farmer who also practiced tailoring during the off months of the year. He came from a respectable family which was massacred during the Taiping Rebellion. Being only a small boy, he was made a captive and carried away to serve in the army of the Taipings. To prevent him from running away, four characters—“Tai-ping Tien-kuo” （Heavenly Kingdom of Everlasting Peace）—were branded on his face and remained throughout his life. But he managed to escape and, after terrible hardship, returned to his home only to find it in complete ruins without a single member of his family left alive. He worked hard, cultivating his land and practicing tailoring, which he had learned in the bandit camp. He grew up, married, and had four children of whom my mother was the eldest.
My grandfather’s life ambition was to rebuild the family dwelling destroyed by the Taipings. Every morning before sunrise he would go to the riverside, select three heavy loads of stone, and in three trips carry them on his shoulder pole to the site of his ruined house. Then he would start out for his regular work in the field or in tailoring. When he returned home late in the afternoon,he would make three more trips and carry three more loads of stone for his future house before he sat down to supper. All this hard and persevering work was silently witnessed by my mother, who secretly regretted that, being a girl, she was unable in any way to lighten her father’s hardship and accelerate the realization of his dream.
Then came the matchmaker who met my grandfather in the field and pleaded eloquently on behalf of my father for the “birth date” paper of his eldest daughter. My grandfather consented to talk it over with his family. But when he told the proposal to his wife in the evening, she was very furious. “Never!” she said, “How can you think of giving our daughter to a man 30 years older than she? And some of his children are older than our daughter! Moreover, people will naturally think that we, in giving our girl to an elderly official are sacrificing her for the sake of money and respectability.” So the old couple quarreled. In the end the father said, “Let us consult the girl herself. After all, it’s her own affair.”
When the question was placed before my mother she remained silent, as was usual with Chinese girls in a similar situation. But she was thinking grave thoughts. To marry a middle-aged widower with grown-up children meant that the contract money to be paid to the bride’s family would be much more than in an ordinary marriage. That would be a great help to her father’s building projects. And she had seen my father before and knew that he was revered by everybody in the district. She adored him, and was willing to marry him, partly because of a sense of hero worship, but chiefly because of her filial anxiety to help her toiling father. So when she was pressed by her parents for an answer, she said resolutely: “If you think he is a good man, I’ll obey. After all, a man of forty-seven is not very old.” My grandfather sighed with relief when he heard it, and my grandmother burst out in great fury: “So you want to be ataitai（lady）of a mandarin! So let it be!”
* * * *
My mother was married in 1889 at the age of 17， and I was born in December, 1891. My father died in 1895， leaving my mother a widow at 23. By his death, she became head of a large family with many grown-up stepchildren. The position of a Chinese stepmother is proverbially difficult, and her life from this time o was a long period of patient suffering and painstaking compromise.
My mother’s greatest gift was forbearance. Chinese history records that when an Emperor of the Tang dynasty asked the patriarch Chang Kung-i by what principle his family had managed to live together for nine generations without separation or division, the grand old man, too feeble to speak, requested leave to write out his answer, and he wrote a hundred times the word “Forbearance.” The Chinese moralists constantly cite this story of the “Hundred Forbearances” as the best example of family life, but none of them seems ever to realize the terrible amount of suffering, friction, suppression, and injustice which have made forbearance an absolute necessity.
Ill-feeling, dagger-like words, hostile looks on the part of the stepdaughters-in-law—my mother bore all this patiently. Sometimes she found herself reaching her limit of forbearance. Then she would stay in bed in the morning and gently weep aloud, mourning the early loss of her husband. She never mentioned the offending daughter-in-law nor the offense. But each time these tears had an almost miraculous effect. I would invariably hear a door open in the room of one of the sisters-in-law, and the footsteps of a woman walking in the direction of the kitchen. Presently she would return and knock at the door of our room. She would enter with a cup of tea and offer it to my mother, imploring her to cease weeping. My mother would take the cup and accept her silent apologies. Then there would be peace in the family for about a month.
Although she could neither read nor write, my mother staked all her hope on my education. I was a precocious child and before I was three had learned over 800 characters, which my father taught me every day on square slips of pink paper. A little after three, I was already in school. I was then a sickly child and could hardly climb a doorstep of 6 in. without assistance. But I could read and memorize better than all the other boys in the school. I never played with the children of the village and, because of my complete lack of child play, I was given the nickname ofShien-seng（the Master） when I was five. Fifteen years later, at Cornell University, I was nicknamed“Doc” when I was a sophomore, and for this same weakness.
My mother would wake me up every day before daybreak and make me sit up in bed. She would then tell me all she knew about my father. She would say that she expected me to follow the footsteps of him who was to her the best and greatest man that ever lived, a man who, she said, was so much respected that all opium dens and gambling houses in the vicinity suspended business during his occasional sojourns at home. She told me that I could glorify him and her only by my good conduct and by achievements in scholarship and in the government examinations—that whatever she was suffering would be rewarded by my diligent application to my studies. I would often listen with half-open eyes, but she rarely gave up this morning sermon except when some lady guest was staying with us in the same room.
When daylight came, she would dress me and send me to school. When I grew a little older, I was always the first to arrive at school and almost every morning knocked at my teacher’s door for the key to open the school gate. The key was handed out through the small crevice between the two doors and I was soon in my seat reading aloud my assignments. The school was not dismissed till dusk, when each boy bowed to the big picture of Confucius in crimson rubbing and to the teacher and went home. The average length of the school day was 12 h.
While allowing me no child play of any kind, my mother gave me every encouragement in my childish attempt to build a temple of worship to the great sage, Confucius. I learned this from the son of my eldest half-sister, a boy 5 years my senior. He had built a paper temple of Confucius with all kinds of gorgeous colorpapers, and it attracted me. I used a big paper box as the main hall of worship and cut a big square hole on its back to which I pasted a smaller paper box as the inner shrine for the tablet of Confucius. The outer hall where I placed the great Confucian disciples was decorated with miniature scrolls on which were written eulogies of the great sage which I partly copied from my nephew’s temple and partly from books. Incense sticks were frequently burned before this toy temple and my mother rejoiced in my childish piety, secretly believing that the spirit of Confucius would surely reward me by making me a renowned scholar and successful candidate in the literary examinations.
My father was a classical scholar and a stern follower of the Neo-Confucianist Rational Philosophy of Chu Hsi （1130–1200 A.D.）. He was strongly opposed to Buddhism and Taoism. I remember seeing on the door of my uncle’s house （which was my first school） a sun-bleached sign bearing the words “No Alms for Buddhist Monks or Taoist Priests,” which, I learned afterward, was part of the Rationalist tradition left by my father. But my father was dead, my scholarly uncle soon left home to become a petty officia in northern Anhui, and my elder brothers were in Shanghai.
The women left at home were under no obligation to respect this Rationalistic tradition of my father. They observed the usual rites of ancestor worship and were free to worship wherever custom and occasion led them. Kwan-yin, the Goddess of Mercy, was their favorite deity, and my mother, chiefly out of her anxiety for my health and well-being, was a devout believer of Kwan-yin. I remember going with her on a pilgrimage to a temple of this goddess on a mountain, and she, in spite of the bound feet which pained her throughout her life, walked the whole distance of hilly trail to and from the shrine.
I was in the village school, of which there were seven in our village, for 9 years （1895–1904）， during which time I read and memorized the following books:
1.The Book of Filial Piety， a post-Confucian classic of unknown authorship.
2.The Elementary Lessons（or “The Small Learning”）， a book of Neo-Confucianist moral teaching commonly attributed to the Sung philosopher, Chu Hsi.
3. The Four Books:The Analects of Confucius，The Book of Mencius，The Great Learning， andThe Doctrine of the Mean.
4. Four of the Five Classics:The Book of Poetry，The Book of History，The Book of Change， andThe Li Ki.
My mother, who was always economical in her household expenses, insisted on paying my teacher at least thrice better than the usual tuition fee, which was two silver dollars a year. She paid six dollars from the beginning and increased it gradually to 12. From this insignificant increase in the fee, I derived benefits a thousand times greater than the numerical ratio stated above can possibly indicate. For the two-dollar pupil merely read aloud and recited by heart, and the teacher never took the trouble to explain to him the meaning of the words memorized. I alone, because of the additional pay, enjoyed the rare privilege of having every word and sentence in the readings explained to me, that is, translated from the dead language into the colloquial dialect.
Before I was 8 years old, I could read with very little assistance. At the suggestion of my second brother, my teacher made me readThe General Mirror for Government， which was in reality a general history of China in chronological form compiled by the great historian Ssu-ma Kuang in the year 1084 A.D. This historical reading interested me greatly and I soon began, as an aid to memory, to compile a rhymed summary of the dynasties, emperors, and chronological eras.
Then one day in a waste-paper box in my uncle’s house I chanced upon a torn volume of a part of the great novelShui Hu （The Hundred and Eight Heroes of Liang-shanand read it through while standing by the box. I ran about the village and soon found a complete set of the novel. From that time on I devoured every novel known in our community and in the near-by villages. They were written in thepei hua， or spoken language, and were easily intelligible and absorbingly entertaining. They taught me life, for good and for evil, and gave me a literary medium which years later enabled me to start what has been called “the Literary Renaissance” in China.
In the meantime, my religious life underwent a curious crisis. I was brought up in an idolatrous environment and accustomed to the ugly and fierce faces of the gods and to the folk versions of Heaven and Hell. When I was 11 I was one day rereading aloudThe Elementary Lessonof Chu Hsi, which I had memorized without much understanding. I came upon a passage where the Rationalist philosopher quoted the historian Ssu-ma Kuang in an attack on the popular belief in Heaven and Hell. The quotation reads: “When the body has decayed, the spirit fades away. Even if there be such cruel tortures in Hell as Chiseling, Burning, Pounding, and Grinding, whereon are these to be inflicted?” This sounded like good reasoning and I began to doubt the idea of judgment after death.
Shortly afterward, I was reading Ssu-ma Kuang’sGeneral History and came upon a passage in its 136th chapter which made me an atheist. The passage in question tells of a philosopher of the fifth century A.D. named Fan Chen who championed the theory of the destructibility of the spirit or soul against the whole Imperial Court, which was then patronizing Mahāyāna Buddhism. Fan Chen’s view was summed up by Ssu-ma Kuang in these words: “The body is the material basis of the spirit, and the spirit is only the functioning of the body. The spirit is to the body what sharpness is to a sharp knife. We have never known the existence of sharpness after the destruction of the knife. How can we admit the survival of the spirit when the body is gone?”
This was more thorough reasoning than Ssu-ma Kuang’s viewthat the spirit fades away when the body has decayed, a theory which still admits the spirit as something. Fan Chen fundamentally denies the spirit as an entity: it is only a functioning of the body. This simplification pleased my boyish mind and it gladdened my heart to read that “Although the whole Court and country were against him, no one succeeded in refuting him.”
In the same passage, Fan Chen was quoted as being opposed to the Buddhist doctrine of Karma, or the causal chain throughout the various existences. He was talking to the Prince of Ching-ling, who said to him: “If you do not believe in Karma, how can you explain the different states of wealth and poverty, of honor and lowliness?” Fan Chen replied: “Human life may be likened to the flowers on yonder tree. The wind blows down the flowers, of whi some are caught by the screens and scattered on the beautifully decorated mats and cushions, while others are blown over the fence and dropped on the dung-heap. Your Lordship is one of those flowers on the cushions, and I， your humble servant, chance to be on the dung-hill. There is the difference in position, but where i the causal chain?”
The doctrine of Karma is one of the few most influential idea from India that have become an integral part of Chinese thought and life. The ancient Chinese moralists had taught that goodness was always rewarded and evil punished. But in real life, this is not always true. The Buddhist doctrine of Karma has the advantage over the Chinese idea of retribution in that it can always evade the issue by referring to the absolute continuity of the causal chain throughout past and future existences.
But Fan Chen’s figure of speech appealed to my youthful fancy and shook me out of the nightmare absolutism of Karma. It was Chance versus Determinism. And, as a boy of 11， I took the chances and revolted against Fate. There was no sophisticated reasoning on my part in those days of my boyhood. It was mere temperamental attraction and repulsion. I was my father’s son, and Ssu-ma Kuang and Fan Chen attracted me. That was all.
* * * *
But this mental crisis was not without its comic consequences in my early life. During the New Year Festival of 1903， I paid a visit to my eldest sister, who lived 20 li away. After spending a few days at her home I returned with her son, who was coming to pay his New Year visit to my mother. A servant of his was carrying the New Year presents for him. On our way home we passed a shrine with ugly and fierce-looking gods. I stopped and said to my nephew: “Nobody is watching. Let’s throw these images into the mud pool.” My childish iconoclasm greatly horrified my companions, who persuaded me to move on without troubling the already tottering deities.
It was the day of the Lantern Festival （the fifteenth of the firs month）. When we arrived, there were many visitors at my house. I was hungry and, when supper was served, my nephew made me drink a cup of strong rice wine which played havoc with my empty stomach. I was soon running about the courtyard and shouting to the moon to come down to see the Lantern Festival. My mother was displeased and sent men to fetch me. I ran before them and the effect of wine worked more rapidly with my running. I was finall caught, but I struggled to get away. My mother held me tight on her lap and many people soon gathered around us.
In my fright, I began to talk nonsense. Then my nephew’s servant stepped forward and whispered to my mother: “Madame, I believe that the little uncle is beside himself. Very likely some god or spirit is troubling him. This afternoon when we passed the Shrine of Three Gates, he proposed to throw the gods into the muddy pool. That must have caused the trouble.” I overheard the whisper and a bright idea came to me. I shouted all the more wildly, as if I were actually one of the gods of the Shrine of Three Gates.My mother then ordered incense to be burned in the open and, pleading my youthful ignorance and irresponsibility, made a vow to offer sacrifices at the shrine should my innocent offense be forgiv by the gods.
At that moment report came that the Lantern Procession was approaching, and the people in our house rushed out to see it. My mother and I were left alone. I soon fell asleep. The vow had apparently worked. One month later, when my mother and I visited my grandparents, she made me offer, in all solemnity, our promised sacrifices at the Shrine of Three Gates
* * * *
Early in my 13th year （1904）， I left home on a 7-day journey to seek a “new education” in Shanghai. After that separation I visited my mother only three times and stayed with her altogether about 7 months in 14 years. Out of her great love for me she sent me away without apparently shedding a tear, and allowed me to seek my own education and development in the great world all alone armed only with a mother’s love, a habit of study, and a little tendency to doubt.
I spent 6 years in Shanghai （1904–1910） and 7 years in America （1910–1917）. During my stay in Shanghai I went through three schools （none of which was a missionary school） without graduating from any. I studied the rudiments of what was then known as “the new education,” consisting chiefly of history,geography, English, mathematics, and some gleanings of natural science. Through the free translations by the late Mr. Lin Shu and others, I made my first acquaintance with a number of English and European novels, including those of Scott, Dickens, Dumaspèreandfil， Hugo, and Tolstoy. I read the works of a few of the non-Confucian and Neo- Confucian philosophers of ancient and medieval China and was delighted in the altruism of Mo Ti and the naturalistic philosophy of Lao-tze and Chuang-tze.
Through the popular writings of the late Mr. Liang Chi-chao,the most powerful writer of the age, I came to know a little of such Western thinkers as Hobbes, Descartes, Rousseau, Bentham, Kant, and Darwin. Mr. Liang was a great admirer of modern Western civilization and published a series of essays in which he frankly admitted that the Chinese as a race had suffered from the deplorable lack of many fine traits possessed by the European people, notably emphasis on public morality, nationalism, love of adventure, the conception of personal rights and the eagerness to defend them against encroachment, love of freedom, ability for self-control, belief in the infinite possibility of progress, capacity for corporate and organized effort, and attention to bodily culture and health. It was these essays which first violently shocked me out of the comfortable dream that our ancient civilization was self-sufficien and had nothing to learn from the militant and materialistic West except in the weapons of war and vehicles of commerce. They opened to me, as to hundreds of others, an entirely new vision of the world.
I also read Mr. Yen Fu’s translation of John Stuart Mill’sOn Liberty and Huxley’sEvolution and Ethics. Mr. Yen’s translation of Huxley’s essay had been published in 1898 and had been immediately accepted by the Chinese intelligentsia with acclamation. Rich men gave money to have new editions made for wider distribution （there being no copyright law then）， because it was thought that the Darwinian hypothesis, especially in its social and political application, was a welcome stimulus to a nation suffering from age-long inertia and stagnation.
In the course of a few years many of the evolutionary terms and phrases became proverbial expressions in the journalistic writings of the time. Numerous persons adopted them in naming themselves and their children, thereby reminding themselves of the perils of elimination in the struggle for existence, national as well as individual. The once famous General Chen Chiung-ming called himself “Ching-tsun” or “Struggling for Existence.” Two of my schoolmates bore the names “Natural Selection Yang” and “Struggle for Existence Sun.”
Even my own name bears witness to the great vogue of evolutionism in China. I remember distinctly the morning when I asked my second brother to suggest a literary name for me. After only a moment’s reflection, he said, “How about the wordshih [fitness] in the phrase ‘Survival of the Fittest’” ? I agreed and, firs using it as anom de plume， finally adopted it in 1910 as my name.
* * * *
My slight knowledge of the evolutionary hypothesis of Darwin and Spencer was easily linked up with the naturalism of some of the ancient Chinese thinkers. For example, it delighted my boyish heart to find an equally youthful cobeliever of over 2，000 years ago in the following story told in theLieh-tze， a spurious work of the Taoist school:
“The House of Tien held a great post-sacrificial feast at which ove a thousand guests were present. When fish and wild duck were offered the host said with a sigh: ‘Great is Nature’s kindness to man! She has produced grain and fish and birds for the use of man.’ The speech wa applauded by all the guests present. Thereupon, the son of the House of Pao, who was only twelve years old, stepped forward and said: ‘It is not so, my lord. All the beings in the universe coexist with men on a basis of equality. There is no natural order of superiority and inferiority.They conquer and prey on one another only by virtue of their superior strength and intelligence. No species is purposely produced for the sake of another. Men, too, prey on those things which they are able to conquer. How can we say that Nature has produced them for our benefit? Do not mosquitoes suck our blood and tigers and wolves eat our flesh? Shall we say that Nature has produced men for the benefit of mosquitoes and tigers and wolves?’ ”
In 1906 a few of my schoolmates in the China National Institute founded a periodical calledThe Struggl—another instance of the popularity of the Darwinian theory—which, being primarily interested in instilling new ideas into the uneducated masses, was to be published in thepei hua or spoken language. I was invited to contribute to its first issue, and a year later I became its sole editor.My editorial work on this magazine helped me not only to develop an ability in the use of the living tongue as a literary medium, but also to think out, in clear language and logical order, the ideas and thoughts which had been taking shape since my childhood days. In many of my articles written for this magazine I strongly attacked the superstitions of the people and was frankly iconoclastic and atheistic.
In 1908 my family was in great financial difficulty because of business failures. At the age of 17 I found myself facing the necessity of supporting myself at school and my mother at home. I gave up my studies and taught elementary English for over a year, teaching 5 h a day and receiving a monthly pay of 80 silver dollars. In 1910 I taught Chinese for a few months.
Those years （1909–1910） were dark years in the history of China as well as in my personal history. Revolutions broke out in several provinces and failed each time. Quite a number of my former schoolmates at the China National Institute, which was a center of revolutionary activities, were involved in these plots and not a few lost their lives. Several of these political fugitives came to Shanghai and stayed with me. We were all despondent and pessimistic. We drank, wrote pessimistic poetry, talked day and night, and often gambled for no stakes. We even engaged an old actor to teach us singing. One cold morning I wrote a poem which contained this line: “How proudly does the wintry frost scorn the powerless rays of the sun!”
Despondency and drudgery drove us to all kinds of dissipation. One rainy night I got deadly drunk, fought with a policeman in the street, and landed myself in prison for the night. When I went home the next morning and saw in the mirror the bruises on my face, this line in Li Po’sDrinking Song came to my mind: “Some use might yet be made of this material born in me.” I decided to quit teaching and my friends. After a month of hard work, I went to Peking to take the examination for the scholarship founded on the returned American portion of the Boxer Indemnity. I passed the examination and in July sailed for America.