Pearl Buck in China

by Hilary Spurling

  This was the most dangerous period of Absalom’s professional career. “In the year 1900 the famous ‘Boxer’ uprising broke over the land like a tremendous tornado,” he wrote with an uncharacteristic flourish in his memoirs, “and all work was more or less suspended while it raged.” The Boxers were a militant sect recruited initially from young northern farmers who blamed foreigners—which meant missionaries in rural China—for their country’s misfortunes: social and political inanition, the inability to repel Western or Asiatic predators, and a cycle of flood and famine that devastated Shandong and Honan as the Yellow River burst its embankments and the Grand Canal silted up in the late 1890s. The movement spread rapidly with tacit and eventually open backing from the imperial throne, itself helpless to contain or control the opportunistic incursions of Japan, Russia, and the great European powers. Xenophobia simmered and flared in the countryside. Absalom never went out without a stick big enough to beat back the dogs loosed on him wherever he went in these years. People started cursing him in the street again. Once an innkeeper almost killed him with a cleaver. He was forced to close down chapels rented from landlords no longer prepared to do business with Christians. He spent much time cooped up at home, visiting local converts only in secret with a lantern after dark. All through the spring and early summer of her eighth birthday Pearl slept with her clothes folded ready for flight on a chair beside the bed. Her mother kept a bag beside the door packed with spare shoes and a set of underwear for each of them, together with a basket of tinned milk for the baby.

  After fierce arguments about whether to go or stay, Pearl’s parents compromised by hiring a junk to wait on the river at the far end of a concealed escape route, down through the bamboo at the back of the house, so that Carie could get away fast if she had to with the children and Wang Amah. For the first time the Sydenstrickers were shunned. Chinese visitors stopped calling on Pearl’s parents, and her friends no longer came to play or shared her desk at school. On one of his clandestine visits to the city to administer communion to the aged mother of a parishioner, Absalom was caught by soldiers who raided the house, roped him to a post, and forced him to watch them torture to death his Christian convert, Lin Meng, before carrying off Lin’s ten-year-old son. Lin’s mother died the same night. When he was eventually released the next day, Absalom came home exultant and bloody. “Then he looked at us all strangely, his ice-colored eyes shining, his voice solemn and triumphant: ‘Lin Meng has entered into the presence of our Lord, a martyr, to stand among that glorified host!’” Buoyed by the prospect of martyrdom himself, Absalom refused even to consider evacuation long after most of the white population had left Zhenjiang.

  White refugees began trickling down from the north, small groups of ragged, hungry, frightened adults whose children had died from starvation or fever on the way. Carie told brave stories of Civil War battles in the United States and buried her few valuable possessions in the yard as her own mother had done forty years before. An imperial edict dated June 20, a week before Pearl’s eighth birthday, declared war and death to all foreigners. Chinese troops opened fire the same day on the foreign quarter in Beijing, laying siege to Western diplomats in their own legations. On July 9 forty-five Christians were killed in the governor’s compound at Shanxi. More atrocities followed. The American consul in Zhenjiang ordered the few remaining white people to evacuate by gunboat at a prearranged signal, which came at noon on a day so hot that the whole family of Sydenstrickers was resting in a darkened room (“even Father with his collar off,” said Grace). Looking back half a century later Pearl described their departure as if it were a scene on a Chinese willow pattern plate: “The air that summer’s day was hot and still and from the verandas the landscape was beautiful, the valleys green as jade with their earthen farmhouses shaded beneath the willow trees. White geese walked the paths between the fields and children played on the threshing floors…. Beyond the dark city the shining river flowed toward the sea…. The actual leave-taking was entirely unreal.”

  Absalom escorted his family to Shanghai, taking only what they could carry, and returned alone to Zhenjiang, the only white man in the region, dressed once again in formal Western clothes, looking weirdly conspicuous in the Chinese crowds on account of his crumpled white suit and pith helmet as much as his great height. When his two chapels were burned to the ground he preached on the streets to people who responded by stoning him. The single Chinese disciple who stayed with him told Pearl years later that he had expected her father over and over again to be killed. Absalom lived through the summer, by his own account in an ecstatic trance: “I seemed without the body. For I was conscious of the presence of God with me like a strong light shining, day and night. All human beings were far away from me.” He came as close as he could to claiming a martyr’s crown, regarding this near miss ever afterward as one of the high peaks of his life.

  Pearl retained almost no memory of her own time in Shanghai, where the foreign community buzzed with rumors about Western troops preparing to move on Beijing and every steamer brought yet more refugees from the farthest parts of the empire. “The white people in Shanghai seemed to be clinging to the edge of China, waiting to be shoved off.” Pearl saw great gray foreign warships in the harbor, and listened to her mother’s stories of sanctuary in America. She remembered reaching up to pull the pigtail of a portly Chinaman ambling ahead of her and being terrified, not by his anger but by Carie’s abject attempt to placate him: “I had never seen her afraid before in all my life.” In the semi-tropical heat of that ominous summer Pearl played with her little sister in a tub of cold water in their boardinghouse on Bubbling Well Road, where for the first time she saw water come out of a tap. Afterward she thought they were away for almost a year, but in fact it was a few months before their father arrived to fetch them home that autumn, looking so strange Grace didn’t recognize him. The Boxers had been defeated, their leaders executed, the countryside pacified, and humiliating public capitulation forced on the dowager empress, who surrendered to virtually all the demands of the victorious Western powers.

  In October Absalom convened the annual meeting of the newly formed North Kiangsu Presbyterian Mission, which assembled in Shanghai, and tabled a formal resolution urging him to go home at once on furlough to the United States. On July 8, 1901, he finally sailed with his family for San Francisco, taking the train on to West Virginia, the home his children had heard so much about and now saw with alien eyes as they traveled “down through the states, through wooded hills that looked strange and furred after the shorn Chinese hills, over rivers that looked like creeks after the flooding Yangtse and the Yellow River, through towns that looked unreal, they were so orderly and clean after the heaped mud and the confusion of Chinese villages.”

  CHAPTER 2

  Mental Bifocals

  WHEN PEARL LANDED at nine years old in America, she came in effect from a war zone. Pitched battles had been fought against Christians in northern China, foreign railroads ripped up, churches looted and destroyed, their adherents murdered or driven out. According to figures established later, no more than two hundred foreigners were in fact killed, none of them (thanks to a prescient political pact negotiated by two local governors) in the Yangtse Valley. But at the time white people lived in an atmosphere of terror heightened by stories, real and imaginary, of whole communities imprisoned and slaughtered by Boxers. Three thousand Chinese Christians lost their lives, many tortured to death like Lin Meng by the often ingenious and always excruciating standard procedures of Chinese punishment. Pearl had heard adults telling individual horror stories in whispers in Shanghai all through the previous summer. Children had been included in the massacres, and she herself had got used to people shouting routine death threats on the street. In the eight months between the suppression of the Boxers and the Sydenstrickers’ departure, she heard many more dreadful accounts of missionaries who survived persecution or failed to, and whose followers were caged, hanged, sliced to pieces, or left out to shrivel
in the sun. Christian newspapers published rolls of the glorious dead. Her father, who had hoped to join their ranks himself, totted up the numbers with satisfaction: “thousands of Christians suffered martyrdoms, which gave us great encouragement, as showing that the work which had been accomplished was not merely on the surface, but a genuine fruit that would stand the severest test.”

  Pearl, already expert in strategies for dealing with fears she could not face, suppressed many of these memories. “Did I not see sights which children should not see, and hear talk not fit for children’s ears?” she asked rhetorically half a century later. “If I did, I cannot remember.” The mood in her American world was upbeat. Missionaries returning to their posts all over China found themselves indemnified, amply compensated, privileged and protected more effectively than ever before by new government treaties that provided opportunities even Absalom conceded were “immensely better than they had been.” The defeated Chinese were acquiescent, even obsequious, and almost suspiciously eager to enlist in the ranks of a religion that had so decisively demonstrated superior supernatural strength. Pearl moved uneasily between the two worlds of her childhood now that she had seen for herself the sudden ferocity that could erupt from beneath a surface as sunny and calm as the Yangtse. She said that in all this unaccustomed civility only the dogs still snarled at her, “for those savage, starving village dogs alone still dared to show the hatred they had been taught to feel against the foreigners.”

  It was high time to exchange the ambivalent actuality of China for the dreamworld of the West. When Pearl finally saw her mother’s home at Hillsboro, tucked under the Allegheny Mountains in Pocahontas County, West Virginia, she knew as in a dream exactly how it would be: a handsome, unpretentious, white-painted house with a pillared portico set in a wide level valley beneath gently sloping green hills, surrounded by a broad meadow and shaded by sugar maples, with flower beds under the windows and wild honeysuckle growing along the picket fence. She recognized everything from the layout of the rooms and the grapevine shading the porch to the family spilling out onto the front steps: her tall brother Edgar dressed as a student in a high collar, straw boater, and glasses; her aunts and cousins and the two gray-haired old gentlemen she knew to be her grandfather, Hermanus Stulting, and his oldest son, her mother’s favorite brother, Uncle Cornelius. She made friends at once with Cornelius’s youngest daughter, Cousin Grace Stulting, who was two years older. For the first time Pearl had an American contemporary to play dolls and swap confidences with in the bedroom they shared at night. The two girls fed the turkeys together, built tree houses, picked grapes trained along the side of the big wooden barn and ate the fallen apples lying on the grass in the orchard. (“I knew every tree,” said Cousin Grace, “the Early Harvest and the Early Ripe, the hard apples and the Maiden’s Blush.”) Pearl’s mother slipped back into the routines of her girlhood, sitting gossiping and sewing with her sister-in-law on the front porch, baking bread, bottling preserves, churning butter, washing clothes in the shade of an elm tree and ironing them in the cool stone buttery under the house.

  Everything was exactly as Carie had said it would be, and yet Pearl could see that her mother never felt entirely at home in the house she had inhabited for so long in her imagination. For one thing, her memories of living there were more fantasy than fact. Throughout her childhood her family had lived in rented accommodation in Hillsboro, scraping together the funds to buy enough land for a house of their own only a few years before Carie married and left the country, at which point her family began to break up. Within four years the two Stulting brothers and four of the five sisters had married and moved away, all except Cornelius, who for as long as anyone could remember had been their mother’s mainstay and a father in all but name to his younger brother and sisters. Their actual father, Hermanus, eighty-five years old when Pearl met him, was a small, fastidious, immaculately turned-out figure, aloof and choleric, a lover of music and painting, who had apparently played no more part in family life than her own father in China. Born and bred in Utrecht, nostalgic all his life for the thriving Dutch metropolis he had left as a married man with a wife and two children, he described himself in official documents variously as carpenter, silversmith, and clockmaker, but his attempts to start a business in the United States had failed, and he seems to have resigned the practical running of his domestic economy to his wife and son. “He was a city man, never anything else,” Grace Stulting said pityingly long afterwards. “He would chop kindling and do it like a woman.”

  Pearl’s mother inherited her hot temper from Hermanus and also her gift for telling tales. He warmed to his strange little semi-Chinese granddaughter, leading her away to the room full of clocks and watches where he lived separately from the rest of the family, and enthralling her—as Carie had done before him—with highly romanticized accounts of “the Old Country,” which in his case meant Holland. He filled Pearl’s receptive ears with stories of her great-grandfather, Mynheer Cornelis Johannis Stulting, a pious and prosperous merchant who had uprooted his five sons to set out at the head of a party of three hundred persecuted pilgrims seeking religious liberty in the promised land of America, where, after many disastrous setbacks along the way, the family finally settled in Virginia, clearing primeval forest, hauling tree stumps and facing down parties of Indians, “frightening and savage to see.” Very little of this was strictly true. The history of the Stultings’ arrival in New York in 1847 and their subsequent establishment in Hillsboro, carefully documented from local archives by Grace Stulting more than a century later, was decidedly more prosaic than the alternative version published by her cousin Pearl. But his children and grandchildren all agreed that Hermanus (who had first learned English in his thirties) was a first-rate storyteller: “all that he said was like a fairy-tale,” said Grace.

  The heroine of the stories Carie told was always her mother, Johanna Stulting, who, like her daughter, had also abandoned her own familiar world to follow her husband to an unknown continent, where she made a life for her family from scratch, with scant support from Hermanus. Survival meant physical labor almost beyond the strength of a woman contending with regular pregnancies, whose only helper was a young son (Cornelius was not yet into his teens when the family reached West Virginia, and his only brother, Calvin, still unborn). Daily life consisted of digging, planting, hoeing, chopping, keeping a cow and chickens, making bread, butter, and cheese, spinning and weaving wool, cotton, and flax, producing enough to feed and clothe seven children. The family boasted that they eventually emerged from the Civil War self-sufficient in everything except tea, coffee, and chocolate. Carie, who idolized her mother, was eighteen when she nursed her through the final stages of the tuberculosis that killed her, worn out and used up at the age of sixty. Nearly all of her children became teachers. Having had to make do without education during the war, Carie herself was sent away by Cornelius to catch up in two years at boarding school after their mother’s death. She had seen enough of life at home to know that she needed more. If social and religious convention required her to sacrifice herself for others, she planned to do it in a completely different way from her mother. Foreign missions offered the nearest means of self-immolation, and at the same time the only available escape route from unending domestic drudgery together with the narrow horizons that closed down round it.

  The Stultings were admirably suited to their time and place. They were stubborn, resilient, puritanical people shaped by the Calvinist teachings of their Presbyterian church, which still saw China and its inhabitants in much the same terms as Carie had done when she sailed away with her young husband for God’s sake in search of a cloudy vision, “a harvest of dark, white-clad heathen being baptized, following them with adoring eyes… two brave young missionaries… two white and cloud like shapes, blessing the dark, bowed multitudes bending in devotion before them.” The gap between reality and imagination, which would be Pearl’s chosen territory as a writer, opened up for her wider than ever before in
the Stulting household. Her new family were the first Americans she had ever known at close quarters, and they made her feel foreign in the country she had been taught to call home. None of them had any inkling of the suppressed anxieties she lived with, or how exposed she felt in a house and garden without the protection of high compound walls. The assembled household was baffled and faintly embarrassed by her hysterical tears when her grandfather gravely announced the assassination of President McKinley in September 1901. Only Carie understood the shock and terror—“must we have the revolution here, too?”—released in her daughter by news of regime change.

  The Stultings had never owned black slaves and they could not afford to pay servants, but their allegiance lay with the southern states. They had bitterly resented finding themselves just inside the border of Federal West Virginia when war split the state in two (Carie said that as a small child she believed the grown-ups who told her that Yankees had horns like devils). Although in theory they opposed slavery, they belonged by instinct and choice to a white society that treated black people as subhuman. For all their idealism, the same prejudice accompanied Pearl’s altruistic parents when they left for China. After more than twenty years in the field neither Carie nor Absalom could ever quite see the Chinese in the way their daughter did, as people like any others.