Pearl Buck in China

by Hilary Spurling

  Soldiers from the hill fort with earthen ramparts above the town were generally indistinguishable from bandits, who lived by rape and plunder. The local warlords who ruled China largely unchecked by a weak central government were always eager to extend or consolidate territory. Severed heads were still stuck up on the gates of walled towns like Zhenjiang, where the Sydenstrickers lived. Life in the countryside was not essentially different from the history plays Pearl saw performed in temple courtyards by bands of traveling actors, or the stories she heard from professional storytellers and anyone else she could persuade to tell them. The Sydenstrickers’ cook, who had the mobile features and expressive body language of a Chinese Fred Astaire, entertained the gateman, the amah, and Pearl herself with episodes from a small private library of books only he knew how to read. This was her first introduction to the old Chinese novels—The White Snake, The Dream of the Red Chamber, All Men Are Brothers—that she would draw on long afterward for the narrative grip, strong plot lines, and stylized characterizations of her own fiction.

  Wang Amah, Pearl’s nurse, had an inexhaustible fund of tales of demons and spirits that lived in clouds, rocks, and trees, sea dragons, storm dragons, and the captive local dragon pinned underneath the pagoda on the far hill, who lay in wait for a chance to squirm free, swamp the river, and drown the whole valley. They inhabited an ancient fairyland of spells, charms, incantations, sensational flights, and fights with “wonderful daggers that a man could make small enough to hide in his ear or in the corner of his eye but which, when he fetched them out again, were long and keen and swift to kill.” But even as a small child Pearl liked her fairy stories more closely rooted in reality, and she pestered Wang Amah to tell her about when she was little and how she grew up into a flawless young beauty with pale porcelain skin, plucked forehead, black braided hair that hung to her knees, and three-inch-long bound feet, so lovely that she had to be married off early for fear of predatory soldiers. By the time Pearl knew her thirty or forty years later, Wang Amah was wrinkled and practically toothless (the heartless little Sydenstrickers laughed when she knocked out all but two of her remaining teeth in a fall on the cellar steps), with scanty hair, heavy flaps of skin over her eyes, and a protruding lower lip. She was strict but kind and dependable, a source of warmth and reassurance, the only person in Pearl’s household who ever gave her a hug or took the child onto her lap and into her bed for comfort.

  She had been the daughter of a small tradesman in Yangzhou with a prosperous business destroyed in the seismic upheavals all over China that left at least twenty million people dead after the Taiping Rebellion. Wang Amah lost her family—parents, parents-in-law, husband—and with them her means of subsistence. She scraped out a living in the sex trade until hired by Pearl’s mother to look after her children (an appointment badly received by the rest of the mission community). The traumas of her youth resurfaced in her new life as a sequence of thrilling set pieces, starting with her miraculous escape, when she was lowered on a rope down a dry well to save her from Taiping marauders, and going on to the firing of the great pagoda in her hometown, which was burned to the ground with all its priests inside it. Interrogated by Pearl about the smell of roasting men and whether the Chinese variety smelled different from white flesh, Wang Amah replied confidently that white meat was coarser, more tasteless and watery, “because you wash yourselves so much.”

  Even the dire process of having her feet bound became heroic in retrospect. Wang Amah explained that her father made her sleep alone in the kitchen outhouse from the age of three so as not to disturb the rest of the family by her crying at night. Rarely able to resist Pearl’s coaxing, she took off the cloth shoes, white stockings, and bandages that had to be worn, even in bed, by women with the infinitely desirable “golden-lily” feet that enforced subjugation as effectively as a ball and chain. Pearl inspected the lump of mashed bone and livid discolored flesh made from forcing together the heel and toes under the instep, leaving only the big toe intact. She had witnessed the mothers of her contemporaries crippling their own daughters’ feet and even suspected she might have ruined her chances of getting a husband by failing to go through the procedure herself. She watched her nurse put the bindings back on without comment. It was one of her first lessons in the power of the imagination to cover up or contain and make bearable things too ugly to confront directly. It was the same lesson she learned from the body parts she found on the hillside. The potent spell Pearl cast later, as a phenomenally successful writer of romantic best sellers, came in large part from this sense of a harsh hidden reality, protruding occasionally but more often invisible, present only beneath the surface of her writing as an unexamined residue of pain and fear.

  The second major storyteller of Pearl’s early years was her mother, whose repertoire transported her children to “a place called Home where apples lay on clean grass under the trees, and berries grew on bushes ready to eat, and yards were un-walled and water clean enough to drink without boiling and filtering.” In the enchanted idyll of her mother’s West Virginia childhood, America lay open and free, untouched by the taint of disease, corruption, injustice, or want. (“I grew up misinformed,” Pearl wrote dryly, “and ripe for some disillusionment later.”) The family were Dutch immigrants who had ended up a decade before the Civil War in a small settlement sixty miles west of the Shenandoah Valley, a corridor that allowed Confederate forces to launch raids on Washington from one end and move supplies into Richmond through the other, fought over with relentless ferocity for four years until victorious Federal troops finally laid waste the valley, destroying buildings, slaughtering livestock, and burning crops. Five years old when the war began, Pearl’s mother grew up in a borderland repeatedly occupied by the scavenging, sometimes starving armies of both sides. Like Wang Amah, she reorganized her memories in later life into broad-brush narrative paintings depicting sudden dramatic reversals and hair’s-breadth escapes, with streams of galloping gray and blue cavalry superimposed on the pagoda and the groves of bamboo her listeners could see beyond the veranda.

  She applied the same bold graphic technique to her early experiences in China. Caroline Sydenstricker had set sail for the Orient as an idealistic young bride with only the haziest notion about what a missionary career might entail. For her it turned out in practice to mean housekeeping and child rearing in cramped, inconvenient lodgings in the poorer quarters of the more or less hostile cities where her husband parked his growing family, while he himself pushed forward into unknown territory in search of fresh converts. He drove himself on by totting up the staggering totals of heathen sinners to be saved and the pitifully thin line of men like himself standing between them and damnation, an insoluble equation that appalled and maddened him to the end of his life. When the Sydenstrickers first landed in Shanghai to join the Southern Presbyterian Mission in the autumn of 1880, they brought its numbers in the field up to twelve. Apart from a handful of foreign compounds in or near the main trading ports, the interior of China seemed to be theirs for the taking. Seven years later Absalom Sydenstricker persuaded the Mission Board to let him launch a personal assault on the vast, densely populated area of North Kiangsu, setting up his campaign headquarters in the walled city of Tsingkiangpu, nearly three hundred miles north of Shanghai on the Grand Canal, where no missionary had ever settled before. “He had to himself an area as large as the state of Texas, full of souls who had never heard the Gospel,” his daughter wrote later. “He was intoxicated with the magnificence of his opportunity.” The local people received him with passive and often active resistance. A younger colleague eventually dispatched to join him boasted that for three years he made not a single convert, coming home from country trips with spit on his clothes and bruises all over his body from sticks and stones hurled as he passed. Almost overwhelmed by the numerical odds stacked against him, Absalom spent more and more time on the road.

  His wife had long ago learned to manage without him. One of the thrilling stories she told her chil
dren later was about the night she faced down a mob of farmers with knives and cudgels, who blamed an unprecedented drought on malevolent local gods provoked beyond bearing by the presence of foreign intruders. This was the sweltering hot August of 1889, when rice seedlings withered in the parched fields around Tsingkiangpu. Alerted by men beneath her window plotting in whispers to kill her, Carie found herself alone with Wang Amah and the children (by this stage there were three: eight-year-old Edgar, four-year-old Edith, and the baby Arthur, age seven months), surrounded by an angry populace, a hundred miles from the nearest white outpost, with no one to turn to and no time to send a runner for her absent husband. Her response was to stage a tea party, sweeping the floor, baking cakes, and laying out her best cups and plates. When her uninvited guests arrived at dead of night they found the door flung wide on a lamplit American dream of home-sweet-home, with the three small children waked from sleep and playing peacefully at their mother’s knee. This preposterous story passed into family legend, along with its triumphant outcome: the hard heart of the ringleader was so touched by the spectacle laid on for him that he repented of his murderous mission, accepted a cup of tea instead, and left with his men shortly afterward, only to find rain falling as if by magic later that very same night.

  This and similar incidents became part of a folkloric family epic, whose episodes were conflated, transposed, and repeated so often that Pearl, and in due course her younger sister, Grace, knew them and their punch lines by heart. The same stories figure in accounts published later by both sisters, where their mother’s courage, resourcefulness, and determination stand out, burnished to a high gloss against a dull undertow of futility and waste, unfulfilled ambition, stifled hope and desire. There were other stories Carie knew but didn’t tell. At Tsingkiangpu she set up one of a succession of informal clinics for women, where she taught young girls to read and offered sympathy and practical advice to their mothers. Even before they were old enough to understand what was said, her children could hear the urgent, uneven monotone of Chinese women explaining their problems to Carie. Pearl said it was a first-rate novelist’s training.

  As a public figure in the second half of her life, Pearl campaigned tirelessly for what were then unfashionable causes: women’s rights, civil rights, black rights, the rights of disabled children and the abandoned children of mixed-race parents. As a writer she would return again and again to her mother’s story, telling and retelling it from different angles in her various memoirs and in the biographies she wrote of each of her parents. Her analysis of Carie’s predicament in The Exile and elsewhere is searching, frank, and perceptive. But it is in the daughter’s fiction that the mother’s voice echoes most insistently between the lines, at times muted, plaintive, and resigned, at others angry and vengeful. In her sixties Pearl published a lurid little novel called Voices in the House about a prime fantasist, a brilliantly precocious and imaginative child who might have grown up to be a novelist herself but descends instead into gruesome madness and murder. All the other characters in the novel are lifeless and bland compared to this energetic self-projection at its core. Voices is the book in which the author said her “two selves” finally merged, meaning not just her American side and her Chinese side, but also her outer and inner selves, reason and instinct, the two aspects of her own personality embodied in the cool, clever observer through whose eyes the story is told, and the implacable heroine who ends up possessed, “people would once have said by a devil, and yet there was no devil… except the reverse energy of dreams denied.”

  Pearl Buck knew perfectly well that most of her later novels had few literary pretensions, just as she understood why critical opinion dismissed popular fiction as trash. “But I cannot, I keep going back to it. It is what most people read.” She wrote initially for herself and was genuinely astonished when her work spoke directly to the mass market, which she promptly adopted as her own, vigorously defending the magazine stories that kept her in close touch with her public. “One cannot dismiss lightly a magazine bought and read by three million people…. It is a serious thing for literature if three million read—not literature, but something that gives them greater satisfaction.” The Good Earth, published in 1931 and still in print, sold tens of millions of copies worldwide in its author’s lifetime and since.

  Buck is virtually forgotten today. She has no place in feminist mythology, and her novels have been effectively eliminated from the American literary map. In the People’s Republic of China her fiction remains unique because it accurately depicts the hard lives of an illiterate rural population ignored by the Chinese writers who were Buck’s contemporaries and subsequently obliterated from the record by Communist Party doctrine. “In China she is admired but not read,” ran a recent article in the New York Times, “and in America she is read but not admired.” Both views could do with reappraisal. The Good Earth transformed the West’s understanding of China, partly because of the picture it painted, and partly because it reached a readership most other books never could. Buck won a Pulitzer Prize for it and went on to become the first of only two American women ever to receive the Nobel Prize for literature. Everyone read her in her day, from statesmen to office cleaners. Eleanor Roosevelt was her friend. Henri Matisse said she explained him to himself as no one else ever had. Jawaharlal Nehru read her Chinese Children Next Door aloud to Mahatma Gandhi. My book aims to look again at the early years that shaped Buck as a writer and gave her the magic power—possessed by all truly phenomenal bestselling authors—to tap directly into currents of memory and dream secreted deep within the popular imagination.

  SHE WAS BORN Pearl Comfort Sydenstricker on June 26, 1892, in her mother’s family home in America, where her parents had returned to recover from a catastrophe that very nearly wrecked their marriage. A year after Carie’s night with the farmers her youngest child, Arthur, who had never been strong, fell ill with a raging fever and died the day before his father could get back from the north. The family set out with the body in a sealed coffin on the long journey by canal and riverboat to bury him beside his sister Maude in Shanghai. There Carie and her surviving daughter immediately succumbed to a cholera epidemic. Edith died a fortnight after her brother, on September 5, 1890. Absalom, who had looked after the child while the doctor struggled to save Carie, retreated behind what had long since become an impenetrable barrier against emotions that threatened to swamp him. “We had a full cup of sorrow” was the most he would say then or later. The only flicker of personal feeling that surfaced in spite of himself in the many articles he published over a quarter of a century in the Chinese Recorder was an aside, in a piece written that autumn, on “the heart-rending bereavements that come to so many houses in spite of all medicine can do.” Carie lay in stony silence, barely alive herself, unable to absorb or accept what had happened. “The deaths of these two children, coming so close together, almost deranged our mother,” her daughter Grace wrote half a century later.

  Husband and wife emerged from their ordeal each holding the other in some sense to blame. Every year Carie dreaded the tropical summer months, when disease flared in the towns, mosquitoes swarmed on ponds and streams, flies gathered in clouds over the great jars of human excrement used for fertilizer, and Absalom overruled her pleas to take the children to the comparative cool of the coast or the hills. “I shouldn’t have listened to him,” she said of an earlier defeat, “but I always did.” Now that her worst fears had materialized, all she wanted was to go home. Warned by the doctor that Carie was on the verge of losing her mind, her husband reluctantly agreed to take her. “He went about Europe like a chained and quarrelsome lion,” Pearl wrote of her father on their long slow journey, punctuated by sightseeing stops on the westward route to America. Absalom remained as always incredulous at his wife’s inability to put the crying need of a whole nation of infidels before her own private setbacks. “I never saw so hard a heart, so unreasoning a mind as hers in those days,” he said, looking back gloomily twenty years later. “Nothing
I could say would move her.”

  It was an ignominious homecoming for both of them. Lively, pretty, and pleasure-loving, Carie had married the saintly younger brother of the minister in her hometown of Hillsboro, West Virginia, because he was preparing to go as a missionary to China, and she wanted to give herself to God. She said she had sworn a vow at her mother’s deathbed, and she stuck to it in spite of stiff opposition from her father. Now she was returning damaged in body and mind, with only the oldest of her four children to show for a decade away. Pearl’s birth eighteen months after they landed brought the consolation signaled by her middle name, Comfort, but it also marked yet another defeat for her mother, who was finally forced to accept that her marriage was a life sentence, “irrevocable as death,” and that she must go back to serve it in a country she already feared and was beginning to hate. This new child tied her to both. “Had it taken the death of the other three to break her to God’s will…?” Pearl wrote somberly in The Exile. “She was broken, then, and she would do that will.”

  Absalom had extended his twelve months’ furlough when his wife became pregnant, and now he could not wait to get back. In the ten years he had spent in China he had made, by his own reckoning, ten converts. Millions more awaited his call. “We are by no means overtaking these millions with the Gospel,” he wrote grimly after another twenty years. “They are increasing on us.” He was haunted by the specter of populations growing uncontrollably so that, as fast as young men migrated to the towns, “their place was taken by grinning boys.” He listed with relish the components of a nightmarish vision: “a great and increasing host against us… Heathenism with all its vices still living and active… The darkness, widespread and deep, sin in all its hideous forms, intense worldliness as well as hydra-headed idolatry.”