China and the West

Letter from Alice Chipman Dewey to Albert C. Barnes
Pietaho Beach, China, | August 19th, 1920.
Dear Mr Barnes…
We are in a wonderful place here, out of that burning furnace of Peking where all life is just a struggle to breathe during these hot weeks. Mrs Crane gave us this house, wiring to me a few nights after I succeeded in running the gauntlet of Chang Tso Lin's soldiery who were almost blocking the line from Tiensin to Peking. It is was like a cup of water in the desert to get the hope of escaping, for Peitaho is crowded and expensive during these two months, and we came as soon as Evelyn could get her trunks packed. We live on the beach right in the sand and we look night and day, and listen to the white surf rolling from this blue water. The stars and the new moon are the objects of our adoration and our backs are turned to a corn field which is between us and the moving world of foreigners. Among all the strange experiences of China , this American life of luxury and ease and laziness emphasizes all the others.
I am sorry you are so sure you cant come to China. It is thrilling and reconstructive and revolutionary and reorganizing to know of a place where one can get nothing except the confirmation of the vague suppositions we call originality and realize that after all every thing is experience, experience we are feeling for in the newer world. Having that new world become remote, and this the real one, knowing the 'dead past' is not past at all, but simply the base on which we are resting our air castles, moving not so much in space as in time, having a ricsha man pull you two thousand years into that past in half an hour, realizing that one province here has as many people as the whole U.S. and that province no schools except a few elementary ones such as the missionaries have been able to start, and at the same time the province most representative of the most enduring of nations, understanding how wealth depends on poverty and so well knows that dependence, one can go on indefinitely. Perhaps you will be interested to know what we have just found out privately, that the soldiers in the recent struggle left about 800,000 people, farmers destitute in this year of famine, and the govt does not even find a way to give them food to keep off starvation, nor seed to plant for next years wheat and the foreigners here are getting money together to feed them immediately. Many of them are under the shelter of rocks in the mountains and most of them have the walls of theirs mud huts left to them, all their animals are gone to the war, they neither ask for food nor expect it, and the head of the agricultural experiment station who is also head of the Govt relief is at present trying without success to borrow money on their land to buy seed for them.,. All their trees, the most precious things in China are lyng on the ground, cut for the trenches of the Wu Pei fu soldiers, After the battle the looting left them not a pot nor a pan nor a bit of bedding, only the clothes on their backs, and this new govt can not even give them food; and the generals reply the animals have already been distributed and could not be returned without too great difficulty. All this is in a region round one city and sixty miles from Peking. Rates of interest at the banks that will take risks on the land, the land being as you know the surest security in China, are sometimes as low as 16% a month, but more often as high as 30% per month. The good farmer has about three mo of land under his control. In good years each mo yields 3½ bushels of wheat and the second crop I dont know about, but it is less than the first in value. For the propagation of poverty the genius of this country can hardly be outdone in India, Meantime, here, in this resort, the great houses of the officials are being built and the officials discuss eugenics and other modern doctrines, while the latest concubine exhibits the newest baby, as happened a few days ago during the call of a foreigner.
The undue length of this letter is result of its being the first one of the morning, but I am sorry you wont come to China with your psychology, for this China is a question for that science.
I didnt show your letter to the professor.
With regards, A. C. Dewey