Blaze in Asia

WHAT AMERICA MEANS TO ME--Pearl S. Buck--John Day ($2).

In these 16 essays Pearl Sydenstricker Buck tries to answer the question which she says is at the heart of this war: "Can the white man and the colored man ever come together in any sort of cooperation?"

If not, "we must prepare for a future of nothing but struggle and war on a stupendous scale." For, says Mrs. Buck, the day of little dark brothers and the white man's burden is over. When the Axis falls we shall find ourselves faced by the blaze in Asia. It will be fanned by the irresistible wind of Asia's determination to be free, and kept alive by men who outnumber us by millions and who possess raw materials which reduce the natural resources of even America to small proportions.

> "We [have] had no man great enough to declare at the necessary moment the true meaning of this war." Our leaders are "men of local minds." Thus, our war is "not even a war to save civilization. It is only a war to save European civilization"--and it is to India, China, the Far East that America must look for its rebirth.

> Because racial prejudice is attributed to Americans, "in the East our prestige has already suffered so greatly [no] military victory will restore it. ... We consent to the heaviest of taxes for military warfare but we are not willing to treat the Chinese as we treat the British."

> "While we really are a sincere, good, kind people, we hate to have our brains stirred. . . . We fear cooperation with people we don't know. . . . We lull our brains with our own money." The result: "We have made up our minds that though we love China we are not going to let love interfere with business, and so instead of a proposal of real alliance with China, we are going to send flowers in the form of relief . . . give [them] a piece of bread, when what they want is a good hard stone to heave at the enemy." And in peacetime "we give millions for Chinese relief with . . . joy, when we will not even allow a hundred-odd Chinese a year to enter our country on an immigration quota."

Our strength, says Mrs. Buck, is in our youth and naturalness, forthrightness, human understanding and democratic nature. We are at our best when we are ourselves-- "When we are as natural as our landscape" and do not try to take on that "smoothness of finish" that characterizes Europe's peoples. We like issues to be simple--"Whenever our leaders have, in the course of our history, cut across the tangle of complexities put out by lesser men to obscure the issues . . . our whole nation has risen to new strength."

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