Asian Current

Asiatic Motif

In my early twenties I left the Southwest for New York City. Here I spent nearly four years, working during the day and attending lectures at night at New York University. Among the friends I made was an old exiled professor from India, Lala Laipat Rai, who began tutoring me in Indian history, preparatory to sending me to India as a teacher. Some of his younger countrymen convinced me that India could not advance until it was freed from British rule - as America had been freed - by revolution. All my experiences predisposed me to believe this, and I became a kind of communication center for these men. I kept their correspondence, their codes, and foreign addresses. It was as a result of this work that I was arrested in 1918, held in solitary confinement in the Tombs in New York City, and charged with a violation of our Neutrality Law. Although I had never met a German and believed that I was only helping a subjugated people, I found myself accused of aiding in German espionage.

Years later I learned that Indian exiles in Europe had indeed formed a government-in-exile and taken a loan from the German Government to finance their work. They had shipped arms and ammunition from America to India, but had no more use for the Germans than-the Germans had for them.

Soon after the Armistice I was released from jail and the charges against me were dismissed. I had spent the months of imprisonment studying and writing. Friends had sent me books, paper, and pencils, and for the first time in my life I had been able to study without being burdened with the necessity of earning my own living. My first short stories, Cell Mates, were written during that time.

Coming out of prison, I learned that, months before, my younger brother had passed through New York City en route to France as a soldier. He had tried to see me repeatedly but the prosecuting attorney had turned him away, telling him that I was a traitor. This, combined with news that my other brother had been killed while working as a day laborer, sickened me. The employer in whose service my older brother had been killed paid my father fifty dollars for his life. My younger brother, unable to earn a living, had offered himself to death before he was seventeen. Both had lived like animals without protection or education.

The problems of my own life had developed neurotic tendencies within me, and the fate of my brothers, combined with my imprisonment, deepened them. I came out of prison morose and miserable. I was in my early twenties, at an age when serious-minded middle-class men and women were completing their schooling and embarking on careers. They had homes, protection, and guidance. It was not that I begrudged them these good things; it was merely that I thought the advantages they had should be made universally available.

I was a woman, and women were expected to marry and, if possible, “marry money.” If you were not interested in marriage or money, you were doomed. As I saw it, I could hope to continue only as I was - slaving by day and striving desperately at night for some kind of meager education. And what after that? A shabby hall bedroom for the rest of my days?

I rejected such a life, yet I could envision no other. A World War had just ended and there was a sort of peace. The German Republic had come to life, but was held in pawn by the victors. The Russian Revolution had taken place, but the Russian people were still fighting on more than a dozen fronts against invading armies of World War victors, including one from my own country. The Russian people were learning the most brutal lesson in human history - that only by their own armed might could they have a civilization of their own choosing.

A Communist Party was being formed in New York, but I did not join it. I knew many of its leaders and had read books or articles written by some of them. For years I listened to Communists with sympathy and in later years in China I gave them my active support, but I could never place my mind and life unquestioningly at the disposal of their leaders. I never believed that I myself was especially wise, but I could not become a mere instrument in the hands of men who believed that they held the one and only key to truth.

Because of this I was often attacked from two sides: believers in capitalism called me a Communist, a Red, or an Anarchist; Communists called me an individualist, an idealist, or a bourgeois democrat… One American woman Communist long delighted in dubbing me a “Smedleyite.’

One day as the year 1919 drew to a close, I took my place in a line at the office of a shipping company on the New York waterfront and made application for a job as a stewardess on an old Polish-American freighter bound for Europe. It carried deck and third-class passengers, and another girl and I were hired to care for them. I had no definite destination, no clear aims, no connections with any organization save a weak link with Indian exiles who lived in Europe and published a small newspaper from Berlin. I merely entertained the hope that I could find them, live a short time in Europe, visit the Soviet Union, and, if possible, find work on some ship sailing for India. Whatever might result from this venture, I would at least see something of the earth on which I had been born. But live the life of a cabbage I would not.