A Bridge for Passing: A Meditation on Love, Loss, and Faith

  He beat his barrel chest to illustrate how the American director must behave. The American, however, was unmoved. He said with frightful calm, “I know how to behave like this in my own country. I will not behave like this in Japan. I must ask that the Japanese director be removed.”

  The two men stared, not to say glared, at each other. I opened my handbag and took out the Chinese fan I keep for such emergencies. Although the room was well cooled, I found it necessary to fan myself. I tried to think about something remote and pleasant, the mountains of Vermont, for example, as seen from my living room window there.

  I heard a loud gust of a sigh. It was the production manager. He got up and stalked about the room, rubbing his head with his hands. He was muttering, still in English. “I am fearing something like this to happen—oh yes, goddam!”

  He sat down and pondered. I know my Japan and I understood that he was very unhappy. Somebody had to lose face, and it could not be the aged and famous Japanese director. Nor could it be ourselves, since as foreigners, we do not know enough to lose face. He lifted his head and sent me a reproachful look. You, he conveyed to me, you know better. You should have spared me this.

  “I am sorry,” I murmured from behind my fan. “I am so very sorry. But what can I do? If I had not told you, if we had gone on location, trouble would have been worse.”

  “Ah, sodeska,” he sighed. “True—better get it over.”

  He relapsed into Japanese. He could not speak English any more. “Tell them,” he said to the interpreter, “tell them that I will attend to it. Tomorrow I will see them. I am busy but I will see them.” He turned his back as soon as possible, and we returned to the hotel.

  “At least it’s done,” I told the American.

  He refused to be cheerful. “We have not seen the end of it,” he said grimly.

  Next day it appeared that he was right. We returned to the studios and resumed casting. Everything was as it was the day before except we did not see the production manager, upon whom we depended for everything. Pretty actresses came in, reported that they had studied English for six years, declared that they could not speak English and left us again. Handsome young men came in with ditto. We were enormously cheered by an older actor who could take the part of Toru’s father and spoke perfect English. And all this time there was no production manager. When we inquired of a pretty girl, she went away and returned to say that he could meet us in the city offices at two o’clock. He was very busy, et cetera. We were served delicious meat sandwiches—yesterday beef and today spiced pork. I pause here to say that the beef in Japan is made of beer-drinking Kobe cows, hand-massaged every day by devoted cowboys, and is tender beyond any beef I have ever tasted.

  At two o’clock promptly we were in the city offices. No production manager appeared on the horizon of today or any day. The American became indignant and I became resigned. The pretty girls trotted off and returned to say that the production manager would see us at five o’clock the next day, or the next or the next. This meant a delay in deciding upon our cast which we simply could not afford. We went back to the hotel and complained to my special friend by telephone. It was useless to think of food or sleep if the production manager had abandoned us. There was a long wait. She called us. This time the American took the brunt. He explained his position, unaltered and unalterable. He listened to her reply and his face cleared for the first time in two days. I gathered that the matter of the Japanese director had been settled. He had been invited to resign. Everything would be all right, my friend said.

  But late at my solitary dinner I found myself suddenly without appetite, although a delicious crabmeat salad was put before me. A horrid knowledge stirred in me, an echo of the past, my past in Asia. Everything was not all right—not quite, not quite. There is always a price for victory. What it would be I did not know. I still do not know. A debt remains unpaid. I can only hope the production manager will not—what? It is quite possible I shall never know. At any rate, the episode was over for the day.

  And always at the end of the day, every day, there came the return to no one! After the problems, solved and unsolved, after the coming and going of many people, the doubt and concern, the excitement of discovery, the shared laughter, the growing confidence in the work, each day had the same end. I went back to my hotel rooms, unlocked the door, went in and locked the door again. Flowers were fresh, the rooms cool, letters heaped on the table—letters from no one. The one letter I longed for could never be written because he was gone. I did not open the others. Let them wait until my Japanese secretary came and I was forced to work in order that she could work. Invitations were many, but I had no enjoyment in accepting them. A few I must accept, those which had to do with the sad and anxious parents of retarded children, a few others from old friends for the sake of past kindness. I fell then into the habit of having dinner sent to my rooms and of eating alone, so that I need not be compelled to smile at strangers who might approach me with questions and praise. When night came, life was suddenly meaningless.

  Yet I was not impatient with myself. I knew from experience that time is needed for the absorption of sorrow into one’s being. Once that adjustment is made, growth begins again and new life. It was too soon. I found it was impossible to sit alone in the hotel rooms. Had he been with me, it would have been the best part of the day. It always was the best part. Much of our life had to be spent in separation during the hours of day, for each of us had a profession, a work. But how eagerly we looked forward to the evening, and to what lengths we went in order to spend it together! We went together wherever we had to go, I yielding to his necessity, he to mine, depending upon the importance we attached to the specific. occasion. And in the twenty-five years of our married life we did not spend a night apart, until it became necessary for him to live and work entirely at home. Even then I refused all invitations that kept me away for a night, until he ceased to know whether I was there or not. And when he ceased to know, everything was different, except memory.

  I have discarded that time of not knowing. When I think of him, I think of him as I knew him, vivid, alive, with infinite variety in thought and word, dominant, invincibly prejudiced in some matters, as I used to say impetuously when we disagreed, and he smiled and accepted the accusation with amusement and no intention of changing himself. But he knew I did not want him changed. Whatever he was, he was himself, and I liked that. For example, he could not drive a nail without pounding his thumb and therefore wisely he refused to drive nails. He took no part in household matters, however busy I was. He would not eat what he did not like, no matter how good the dish might be for him. At the same time he disciplined himself in amount and quality of what he did eat. When he spoke, none of us interrupted. He was the father as well as the husband, and yet he refused to have any part in disciplining our big family. I am no disciplinarian myself, being given to laughter over naughtiness unless I am angry, and neither mirth nor anger is the right atmosphere for discipline. Teachers of our nine children were unanimous in one comment, always made sooner or later to us, but particularly to me, for he would not attend parent-teacher meetings and I had to go alone. The comment was simple. “Your children are spoiled.”

  I agreed helplessly. How could it be otherwise when they had a mother who laughed too easily, and if she did not get angry easily, nevertheless when she did, she was in such vast temper that the child looked on astonished and thought she did not mean it? As for him, the extent of his discipline was to stare at the refractory child with cool disapproval and then turn to me with a remark made so casually that it stunned me unfailingly into feeble retort.

  “Do you allow this sort of thing to go on?” he would ask.

  “Do you?” I would ask.

  Silence after that, and the child, isolated by our silence, usually subsided after a few minutes of trying to maintain independence. Looking at these same children now, I can only say that so far as I know, they have turned out well. That is, none of them is delinquent or
has been in jail. Of course there is still time for jail but I doubt they will ever come to it.

  Am I being quite fair to him as a disciplinarian? Perhaps not, for there was one offense which he would not tolerate from any child, and this was act or word which he considered a sign of lack of respect for me. If a child so behaved, his response was instant, invariable and thunderous.

  “Don’t you know your mother is the greatest person in the world?”

  The absurdity of this remark wilted me at once into a state of embarrassment, which the children understood and suffered with me, especially as they never intended disrespect. I enjoyed free argument and spirited disagreement and his outburst killed communication. If we were at the table, our appetites failed and we sat in silence. What he thought of this silence I do not know, for he allowed no protest or discussion on the subject of respect for me, even from me, myself!

  As for me, I obeyed him far too literally and this for two reasons. I had spent my life in China until we met, and I had been taught that woman should obey man, if possible. Second, I was disgracefully ignorant about my own country. I was born a late child and my parents had lived decades in China before I appeared in their life. They were young when they left home, my father twenty-eight and my mother only twenty-three, and both of them were idealists and intellectuals. They grew to maturity in Chinese culture and society and not in their own. When I came to live finally in my own country and we were married, he and I, he said that among other enjoyments it was fun to be married to me because I was so ignorant that he could tell me all the old American jokes and they were new to me. This was true, and he should have lived to tell them all, for he never got to the end. At any moment he would tell something that sent me into healthy laughter.

  In only one family decision was he wrong, and I know now that I should have disobeyed him for practical reasons. Even at that he was right in principle. Here it is: he did not believe in homework for children. He contended, and rightly, that the school had the child all the best hours of the day. If the curriculum was carefully planned and all nonsense and waste of time eliminated, everything could be completed within school hours. He believed that family life in the evenings should not be destroyed by the child having to work on daytime school tasks. As usual, what he disapproved, he ignored. I had not been educated in the American school system, and knew no better than to agree with him. Consequently we all enjoyed our evenings together in music and games and reading aloud. The result showed, alas, in the children’s report cards, and in a general attitude, I must confess, of considering school a pastime rather than work. I repeat, I should not have obeyed him. I should have gathered the children around the big table at night, and seen to it that they did their homework, until they were old enough to assume responsibility for themselves. … Yet what would have been his fate, in that case? Lonely evenings and no happy evening memories, and I am glad that we lived as we did.

  In such half-smiling, half-tearful reminiscence I relapsed too easily and it was necessary to take myself in hand. So, when dinner was over, and the little Japanese waitress, always solicitous when I left my plate only half-empty, had removed the table, I sauntered again into the streets of Tokyo. I went often to the Ginza, market, bazaar and amusement place, always diverted by the variety of people who came to enjoy the gaudy scene. Flags, balloons, paper flowers of every color tied to the eaves of the roofs floated above the streets and shops; open to the street were exhibitors who demonstrated their many wares. American cars, a proof of wealth, stood waiting by the curbs, the chauffeurs zealously polishing the chromium while their employers explored toys or silks or jewelry. Bicycles dashed madly through the swarming crowds and women clattered along on wooden geta, their babies strapped to their backs.

  Most significant of all were the young men and women who wandered hand in hand in a state of dazed happiness, window shopping, or just wandering. It takes getting used to, this hand-in-hand business in modern Japan. It is something entirely new. In old Japan lovers met in secret and climbed volcanoes and threw themselves into the fiery craters to signify the depth of their hopeless love. Nowadays they walk hand-in-hand in the Ginza or go on picnics to the famous spots where once they committed suicide together. Have the parents changed or is it the young who have learned to demand their rights? Certainly there is some change in the parents. The four chief catastrophes of old Japan, if we are to trust an ancient Japanese saying, were “earthquakes, fires, floods and fathers.” Earthquakes, fires and flood are still to be feared, but fathers?

  There is a change in fathers certainly, but the greatest change is in the mothers. No mother in old Japan would have dreamed of allowing her daughter to walk hand-in-hand with a young man in the Ginza or anywhere else, nor would the daughter have dreamed of disobedience. But I must take this change in the Japanese woman gradually and bit by bit. It is profound and overwhelming.

  As for the Ginza, though the merchandise was astounding, garish, clamorous and sometimes beautiful, the people were my diversion—are my diversion wherever I wander. Thanks to them, I escape from myself. When midnight came and the crowd dispersed—for the Japanese go early to bed, except the gentlemen of the bars—I returned to my hotel rooms, let myself in again, locked the door, and went to bed.

  In the strange floating existence of those days and nights, I went one evening to the Kabuki Theater by invitation of the star actor. The troupe had returned from a successful engagement in New York, but I had not gone to see them there. Somehow Kabuki seemed incongruous to me in that most modern of cities, and one time or another, perhaps, I would be in Tokyo again. The play that evening was the same one they had presented in New York, The White Snake. I knew the story well, for it is an ancient Chinese tale. The White Snake is a woman who assumes the form of a serpent for purposes of her own.

  The night was clear and the streets of Tokyo were unusually crowded. I took a cab, and we arrived at the theater entrance, a vast place hung with paintings and filled with exhibits and crowded with people. Someone was waiting to meet me. The star had declared that he would not begin the show until he had met me and we had been photographed. I was led backstage and there he stood, made-up as a woman, the White Snake. It was a perfect make-up, sinister and graceful. He wore a close-fitting white kimono, without a trace of color. The headdress was white and his face, neck and hands were painted snow white. Even his lips were white, though lined at the inner edge with scarlet. The eyes were a snake’s eyes, black and glittering, their glance darting here and there. When he saw me he put out his hand, and I took it and it felt cold and smooth in my hand. I wanted to put it down because it was cold and smooth as a snake’s skin but it clung to mine, and thus, hand in hand, we were photographed. He talked for a few minutes, his stiff white lips scarcely moving, and then the gong struck and it was time for him to go on stage.

  I went to my seat in the theater and there spent a few hours of pure pleasure. The stage was enormous, larger than any stage I had ever seen, and the spectacle superb. Amid masses of color and splendor, the White Snake moved with a sinuous composure, at once terrifying and symbolic, and I had never seen the play performed more powerfully and beautifully. There is no art in the world, in my opinion, which surpasses Kabuki in imaginative power. But perhaps this is partly because the stories of these plays have been a part of my childhood and I live through them again. At any rate the Japanese audience was absorbed as they can be only in this theater. When the play was over we walked out in a dream of silence.

  The immense stage, the enormous cast, the splendor of the costumes and the extraordinary lighting made me realize again in contrast the cramped and narrow stage of Broadway. Year by year theater there has been compressed and diminished simply because of the cost of putting on a play. A great art is being strangled by craftsmen and mechanics in unions. Playwrights, directors and actors have offered a cut in their earnings but there is no such willingness on the part of the union workmen. I lingered after the play in the Kabuki Theater that eveni
ng and talked about it with Japanese friends over a bowl of tea. They had visited New York and they maintained that Japanese theater could never suffer such disaster. “We love art too well,” they said. “We realize the spiritual and emotional benefits of art. Even our workmen realize this, and they would never destroy such an important part of our life merely for the sake of personal greed.”

  I hope they are right.

  It was long past midnight when I reached my hotel rooms. When I was ready for bed, I went to the window as is my habit wherever I am in the world before I sleep, and looked out over the quiet city. An old moon hung crookedly in the sky, and its pale light shone down upon the roofs. At this moment, I felt again the deep inner quiver of an earthquake. It began as a tremor and then rose into a rolling motion. A picture fell, books slipped from the desk, a bowl of flowers crashed to the floor. I clung to the window sill and felt my heart pound against my ribs. Was this to be dangerous …? No. … The earth grew still again. Only the moon hung there, unchanged and fixed. I waited a few minutes more, then put the books into place and filled the bowl with water for the flowers.

  It was long before I could sleep. The earth tremor had somehow shaken the roots of my temporary world. I recognize the need in myself for roots. I suppose it is the result of my childhood in China. Well as I loved that country and must always so love it, nevertheless I was at the same time always aware of the turmoil over which we lived, the possibility that at any moment the angers and discontents existing for centuries against the western peoples might flame into crises in which we, innocent as we were individually, might lose our lives, as indeed we very nearly did and more than once. Perhaps this childhood remembrance of ever present uncertainty, over which I had no more control than a leaf in a storm, has always haunted me—or did until he came. Now that he was gone, the old subterranean awareness of danger returned again.