The Living Reed: A Novel of Korea

by Pearl S. Buck

  “Do not be distressed, please. We understand how the families of the brave Americans might feel. It is only natural that they wished to have their sons safely home again. Our country must seem a very remote place in which to die.”

  “Thank you,” I replied. “All the same, I believe that if my fellow countrymen had known, had understood, they would have been honored to leave their sons here, among their comrades.”

  “Ah yes,” a soft voice put in. “I have been in your country—I know how friendly your people are.”

  “My wife,” the tall Korean said.

  I turned and met face to face an exquisite woman in Korean dress.

  It was the beginning of a friendship and from these two I created the characters of Liang and Mariko. From them also I learned what happened after the ending of my book. I had read, of course, of the events, how the American government had done its best to correct the first misunderstandings. But through my new Korean friends I came to my own comprehension of all that had happened.

  “We misunderstood, too,” Liang said one night, a week later, as we lingered over dinner in his house in Seoul. “Koreans were angry and disappointed when the first Americans came. I am sure that your soldiers during the days of the occupation, in those years between 1945 and 1948, must have had many bad experiences. We were not at our best after half a century of ruthless Japanese control.”

  “Even the Japanese did some good things,” Mariko reminded him. “Don’t forget your hospital.”

  We were sitting on the warm ondul floor around the low table. It was a pleasant room in a delightful house, Korean but modern. Next door was the excellent hospital where Liang worked. He had done graduate work at Johns Hopkins and was a skilled surgeon.

  “I remember the good as well as the evil,” he now replied, and went on: “But we Koreans are determined to be a free and independent nation. We will never give up that struggle. It is in the beat of our hearts, in the flow of our blood. And we look back and wonder how different our lives might have been if that treaty between our two countries, yours and mine, had been honored—that treaty of amity and commerce, ratified by your country in 1883, that gave us the promise of your assistance if we were invaded. In return we were to give you our trade. But your Theodore Roosevelt was prudent—he did not wish to become embroiled in the rivalry of Japan and Russia for possession of Korea. William Howard Taft, who was then your Secretary of War, went to Tokyo and on July 29, 1905, signed a secret agreement giving Korea to Japan, if Japan would promise not to keep your country out of Manchuria and not to attack the Philippines—”

  Mariko rose from the table. “Liang, why do you speak of old things? Let us speak of how Americans sent their sons here to die for our freedom.”

  Liang responded instantly. “Yes! You are right.”

  We all rose then and went into the living room and Mariko played the piano and she and Liang sang together, most beautifully, old Korean songs and new American songs. I remember they sang a duet version of “Getting to Know You” from the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical.

  Looking back, I know that both Liang and Mariko were right. Yes, the mistakes of history bring relentless reprisals. There is a direct connection between that secret agreement signed in Tokyo by Taft and Katsura and the young men of many nations who died on Korean soil. Korea is divided today not only by the 38th parallel, but also by the Korean men and women born in Russian territory when their parents fled their country at the time it was occupied by Japan. These children grew up in Communism, as Sasha did, and believed they were “liberating” their country when they went to Korea. American lads died at their hands.

  But, as Mariko says, why speak of old things? Let us remember, rather, that a tie binds our peoples together. Brave young American men climbed the rugged slopes of Korean mountains and fought in homesickness and desperate weariness for the sake of a people strange to them and for reasons they scarcely understood, even when they yielded up their lives. With such noble impulse and final sacrifice, let the past be forgot, except for what it teaches for the future.

  PEARL S. BUCK

  A Biography of Pearl S. Buck

  Pearl S. Buck (1892–1973) was a bestselling and Nobel Prize-winning author of fiction and nonfiction, celebrated by critics and readers alike for her groundbreaking depictions of rural life in China. Her renowned novel The Good Earth (1931) received the Pulitzer Prize and the William Dean Howells Medal. For her body of work, Buck was awarded the 1938 Nobel Prize in Literature—the first American woman to have won this honor.

  Born in 1892 in Hillsboro, West Virginia, Buck spent much of the first forty years of her life in China. The daughter of Presbyterian missionaries based in Zhenjiang, she grew up speaking both English and the local Chinese dialect, and was sometimes referred to by her Chinese name, Sai Zhenzhju. Though she moved to the United States to attend Randolph-Macon Woman’s College, she returned to China afterwards to care for her ill mother. In 1917 she married her first husband, John Lossing Buck. The couple moved to a small town in Anhui Province, later relocating to Nanking, where they lived for thirteen years.

  Buck began writing in the 1920s, and published her first novel, East Wind: West Wind in 1930. The next year she published her second book, The Good Earth, a multimillion-copy bestseller later made into a feature film. The book was the first of the Good Earth trilogy, followed by Sons (1933) and A House Divided (1935). These landmark works have been credited with arousing Western sympathies for China—and antagonism toward Japan—on the eve of World War II.

  Buck published several other novels in the following years, including many that dealt with the Chinese Cultural Revolution and other aspects of the rapidly changing country. As an American who had been raised in China, and who had been affected by both the Boxer Rebellion and the 1927 Nanking Incident, she was welcomed as a sympathetic and knowledgeable voice of a culture that was much misunderstood in the West at the time. Her works did not treat China alone, however; she also set her stories in Korea (Living Reed), Burma (The Promise), and Japan (The Big Wave). Buck’s fiction explored the many differences between East and West, tradition and modernity, and frequently centered on the hardships of impoverished people during times of social upheaval.

  In 1934 Buck left China for the United States in order to escape political instability and also to be near her daughter, Carol, who had been institutionalized in New Jersey with a rare and severe type of mental retardation. Buck divorced in 1935, and then married her publisher at the John Day Company, Richard Walsh. Their relationship is thought to have helped foster Buck’s volume of work, which was prodigious by any standard.

  Buck also supported various humanitarian causes throughout her life. These included women’s and civil rights, as well as the treatment of the disabled. In 1950, she published a memoir, The Child Who Never Grew, about her life with Carol; this candid account helped break the social taboo on discussing learning disabilities. In response to the practices that rendered mixed-raced children unadoptable—in particular, orphans who had already been victimized by war—she founded Welcome House in 1949, the first international, interracial adoption agency in the United States. Pearl S. Buck International, the overseeing nonprofit organization, addresses children’s issues in Asia.

  Buck died of lung cancer in Vermont in 1973. Though The Good Earth was a massive success in America, the Chinese government objected to Buck’s stark portrayal of the country’s rural poverty and, in 1972, banned Buck from returning to the country. Despite this, she is still greatly considered to have been “a friend of the Chinese people,” in the words of China’s first premier, Zhou Enlai. Her former house in Zhenjiang is now a museum in honor of her legacy.

  Buck’s parents, Caroline Stulting and Absalom Sydenstricker, were Southern Presbyterian missionaries.

  Buck was born Pearl Comfort Sydenstricker in Hillsboro, West Virginia, on June 26, 1892. This was the family’s home when she was born, though her parents returned to China with the infant Pearl thr
ee months after her birth.

  Buck lived in Zhenjiang, China, until 1911. This photograph was found in her archives with the following caption typed on the reverse: “One of the favorite locations for the street barber of China is a temple court or the open space just outside the gate. Here the swinging shop strung on a shoulder pole may be set up, and business briskly carried on. A shave costs five cents, and if you wish to have your queue combed and braided you will be out at least a dime. The implements, needless to say, are primitive. No safety razor has yet become popular in China. Old horseshoes and scrap iron form one of China’s significant importations, and these are melted up and made over into scissors and razors, and similar articles. Neither is sanitation a feature of a shave in China. But then, cleanliness is not a feature of anything in the ex-Celestial Empire.”

  Buck’s writing was notable for its sensitivity to the rural farming class, which she came to know during her childhood in China. The following caption was found typed on the reverse of this photograph in Buck’s archive: “Chinese beggars are all ages of both sexes. They run after your rickshaw, clog your progress in front of every public place such as a temple or deserted palace or fair, and pester you for coppers with a beggar song—‘Do good, be merciful.’ It is the Chinese rather than the foreigners who support this vast horde of indigent people. The beggars have a guild and make it very unpleasant for the merchants. If a stipulated tax is not paid them by the merchant they infest his place and make business impossible. The only work beggars ever perform is marching in funeral and wedding processions. It is said that every family expects 1 or 2 of its children to contribute to support of family by begging.”

  Buck worked continually on behalf of underprivileged children, especially in the country where she grew up. The following caption was found typed on the reverse of this photograph in Buck’s archive: “The children of China seem to thrive in spite of dirt and poverty, and represent nature’s careful selection in the hard race for the right to existence. They are peculiarly sturdy and alert, taken as a whole, and indicate something of the virility of a nation that has continued great for four thousand years.”

  Johann Waldemar de Rehling Quistgaard painted Buck in 1933, when the writer was forty-one years old—a year after she won the Pulitzer Prize for The Good Earth. The portrait currently hangs at Green Hills Farm in Pennsylvania, where Buck lived from 1934 and which is today the headquarters for Pearl S. Buck International. (Image courtesy of Pearl S. Buck International, www.pearlsbuck.org.)

  Richard J. Walsh—Buck’s publisher and second husband—pictured in China with an unidentified rickshaw man. Walsh’s tweed suit and pipe are typical of his signature daily attire.

  Buck receiving her Nobel Prize from the King of Sweden, Gustav V, in 1938. (Image courtesy of Pearl S. Buck International, www.pearlsbuck.org.)

  Buck and Walsh with their daughter, Elizabeth.

  Buck in the 1930s.

  Walsh—with his ever-present pipe—pictured with an unidentified child.

  Buck addresses an audience in Korea in 1964, discussing the issues of poverty and discrimination faced by children in Asia. She established the Orphanage and Opportunity Center in Buchon City, Korea, in 1965.

  Buck in her fifties.

  This family photograph was taken on Buck’s seventieth birthday, June 26, 1962. The gathering included Buck’s children, grandchildren, and some of the children supported by Pearl S. Buck International.

  Buck on her seventieth birthday.

  Pearl Buck’s legacy lives on through Pearl S. Buck International, a non-profit organization dedicated to humanitarian causes around the world.

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this ebook onscreen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  copyright © 1948 by Janice C. Walsh, Richard S. Walsh, John S. Walsh, Mrs. Henrietta C. Walsh, Mrs. Chico C. Singer, Edgar S. Walsh, Mrs. Jean C. Lippincott, and Carol Buck

  cover design by Kathleen Lynch

  978-1-4532-6746-2

  Published in 2012 by Open Road Integrated Media

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