The Big Wave

by Pearl S. Buck

  Jiya shook his head. “Your castle is not safe either,” he told Old Gentleman. “If the earth shakes hard enough, your castle will crumble, too. There is no refuge for us who live on these islands. We are brave because we must be.”

  “Ha,” the builders said, “you are right,” and they went back to pounding the foundation posts.

  Old Gentleman rolled his eyes a few times. “Don’t ask me to save you next time the big wave comes,” he told everybody.

  “But you will save us,” Jiya said gently, “because you are so good.”

  Old Gentleman shook his head at this and then smiled. “What a pity you would not be my son,” he said and then he went back to the castle and shut the gates.

  As for Kino and Jiya, they returned to the farmhouse, but the whole family could see that Jiya was restless from that day on. They had supposed that he would be a farmer, for he had learned everything about the land, and Kino’s father trusted him with much. But Jiya fell into a mood of forgetfulness, and one day Kino’s father spoke to him when they were working in the fields.

  “I know that you are too good a son to be forgetful on purpose,” he said. “Tell us what is on your mind.”

  “I want a boat,” Jiya said. “I want to go back to fishing.”

  Kino’s father was shaping a furrow. “Life is stronger than death,” he said quietly.

  From that day on the family knew that someday Jiya would go back to the sea, and that he would build himself a house on the beach. One after another now seven houses had risen, the frail wooden houses of fisherfolk that the big wave could lift like toys and crush and throw away. But they sheltered families, men and women and children. And again they were built with no windows toward the sea. Each family had built on the bit of land that had belonged to it before the big wave came, and at the end was left a bare piece. It belonged to Jiya now, for it had belonged once to his father.

  “When I have a boat, then I shall build my own house there,” Jiya said one night to the farm family.

  “I shall pay you wages from this day,” Kino’s father said. “You have become a man.”

  From that day Jiya saved his wages until he had enough to buy a boat. It was a fine boat, slender and strong, of seasoned wood, and the sails were new. The day he got it he and Kino sailed it far into the channel, and Jiya had not been so happy since before the big wave. Kino could not forget the deep still cold of the bottomless waters upon which they floated. But Jiya thought only of the joy of having a boat of his own, and Kino did not want to spoil his joy by any hint of fear.

  “I knew all the time that I had to come back to the sea,” he told Kino.

  Then to Kino’s surprise Jiya grew very red. “Do you think Setsu would be afraid to live on the beach?” he asked Kino.

  Kino was surprised. “Why should Setsu live on the beach?” he asked.

  Jiya grew redder still, but he held his head high. “Because that is where I shall build my home,” he said firmly. “And I want Setsu to be my wife.”

  It was such astonishing news that Kino did not know what to say. Setsu was his little sister, and he could not believe that she was old enough to be anybody’s wife. Nor, to tell the truth, could he imagine anybody wanting her for his wife. She was careless and teasing and mischievous and she still delighted to hide his things so that he could not find them.

  “You would be very foolish to marry Setsu,” he now told Jiya.

  “I don’t agree with you,” Jiya said, smiling.

  “But why do you want her?” Kino urged.

  “Because she makes me laugh,” Jiya said. “It is she who made me forget the big wave. For me—she is life.”

  “But she is not a good cook,” Kino said. “Think how she burns the rice because she runs outside to look at something!”

  “I don’t mind burned rice,” Jiya said, “and I will run out with her to see what she sees.”

  Kino said no more, but he kept looking at his friend. Jiya, wanting to build a house, to marry Setsu! He could not believe it.

  When they got home he went to his father. “Do you know that Jiya wants to marry Setsu?” he asked.

  His father was looking over his seeds, for it was springtime again. “I have seen some looks pass between them,” he said, smiling.

  “But Jiya is too good for Setsu,” Kino said.

  “Setsu is very pretty,” his father said.

  Kino was surprised. “With that silly nose she has?”

  “I believe that Jiya admires her nose,” his father said calmly.

  “I don’t understand that,” Kino replied. “Besides, she will hide his things and tease him and make him miserable.”

  “What makes you miserable will make him happy,” his father said.

  “I don’t understand that, either,” Kino said soberly.

  “Someday you will understand,” his father said, laughing. “Do you remember that I told you life is stronger than death? Jiya is ready to live.”

  On the day in the early summer that Jiya and Setsu were married, Kino still did not understand, for up to the very last day Setsu was naughty and mischievous, and indeed on the day of her own wedding she hid his hairbrush under his bed. “You are too silly to be married,” he told her when he found it. “I feel sorry for Jiya.”

  Her big brown eyes laughed at him and she stuck out her small red tongue at him. “I will always be nice to Jiya,” she said.

  But when the wedding was over and the family took the newly married pair down the hill to the new house on the beach, Kino began to feel sad. The farmhouse would be very quiet without Setsu and he would miss her. Every day he would come to see Jiya and many times he would go fishing with him. But Setsu would not be in the farmhouse kitchen, in the rooms, or in the garden. He would miss even her teasing. He grew very grave indeed. What if the big wave came again?

  There in the pretty little new house he turned to Jiya. “Jiya, what if the big wave comes again?” he asked.

  “I have prepared for that,” Jiya said. He led them through the little house to the room that faced the sea, the one big room in the house, where at night they would rest and where in the day they would eat and work.

  All the family stood there, and as they watched, Jiya pushed back a panel in the wall. Before their eyes was the ocean, swelling and stirring under the evening wind. The sun was sinking into the water, in clouds of red and gold. They gazed out across the deep waters in silence.

  “I have opened my house to the ocean,” Jiya said. “If ever the big wave comes back, I shall be ready. I face it. I am not afraid.”

  “You are strong and brave,” Kino’s father said.

  And they went back to the farm, and left Jiya and Setsu to make a new life in the new home on the old beach.

  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 three 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 Pearl S. Buck

  cover design by Kathleen Lynch

  978-1-4532-6747-9

  Published in 2012 by Open Road Integrated Media

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