Bridge for Passing by Pearl S. Buck Page A

discovered a tiny baby. Some desperate young mother had left it there. She drew the child out and took him to the house and cared for him. From then on she has devoted herself to the half-American children born in Japan. What began with a small dead body has grown into a great living work for thousands of children, born of Japanese mothers and fathered by American men, black and white. She has organized an adoption agency of her own and has placed more than a thousand half-American orphans with American parents in the United States. The children are still being born and she is still placing them. But many of them live with her and will continue in her home until they are grown and able to take care of themselves.
    On that day as I climbed the hill I heard their voices from above, shouting, laughing, screaming in play. The path, winding among great trees, was paved with stone, and stone steps led up the steepest slopes. The day was beautifully mild and the sunshine fell between the tree trunks upon the moss-covered earth. Far below us the village houses clustered together, their roofs of thatch and tile. I walked slowly, I remember, my usually strong energies sapped from within. I asked questions and heard her answers and all the time I was far away from everyone and near to none. It was as though I were suspended, weightless, in space. Mind and heart were numb, I realized suddenly that she was talking and I did not know what she had said.
    “How many children have you here, Miki?” I asked, merely to have something to say.
    “One hundred and forty-eight,” she told me. She was walking at her habitual brisk speed and she stopped, waiting for me to catch up.
    One hundred and forty-eight! They were scattered everywhere in the fine old Japanese buildings and gardens of Miki’s ancestral home. She has built some modern houses, too, utilitarian for school and dormitories. In one of the dormitories I saw two little girls absorbed in the care of a rabbit and some field mice. The children were allowed to have their pets near them and each child had a special place for his own private possessions. Most orphanages are sad places but somehow Miki had made her huge establishment a home instead of an orphanage. About half of the children, I noticed, were the children of Negro fathers. The proportion born is, of course, much lower, but most of the half-white children have been adopted, and only a few of the half-Negro ones, for the simple reason that few Negro couples can afford the cost of adoption.
    We wandered about the grounds, stopping here and there to look at some special point of interest. Miki’s great delight is the school, and she was working hard now for her senior high school building. She had been engaged in a neck-and-neck race for the last ten years on this business of school, keeping just ahead of her children. We looked at all the schoolrooms, I remember, and I noticed on each door a small map in bronze. Upon examination, each map proved to be that of a State in the United States, and Miki answered my question.
    “Each year I go to your country and concentrate my appeal on one State. When the people there give me enough money for one more schoolroom I come back and add it to my school building. Then in thanks I put on the door a map of the State and on the map is engraved my appreciation to the people of the State.”
    “But your maps are so different in relative size from the reality,” I said. “Rhode Island, for example, is quite big here, though actually it is our smallest state.”
    She opened another door while I spoke and I looked into a tiny room, not much larger than a closet and much too small for a schoolroom. A storage space, possibly? On the door was a map no bigger than the palm of my hand. It expressed appreciation to the people of Texas!
    Miki laughed at my astonishment. “Texas people like to keep their money for Texas,” she said frankly. “I thank them just the same for what they gave me for