Yuan leaves the foreign country with a mixture of love and hate for it. Much like the feeling he struggled with in his youth against his father. He gets on the big ship home with a box of books, notebooks, and wheat seeds he has experimented with and hopes to grow to bring an improved harvest to China.
He ponders his time in America, realizing he gained vast knowledge from books. Also, "He knew that when he wed, the woman must be of his own flesh and kind," (p. 216). So, "As though he cast aside a garment no longer to be used, he cast aside these whole six years of his life except the knowledge in his brain and the box of books . . . Yet now upon the ship when.....
