Layers of mistrust and mutual incomprehension blocked any traffic between Pearl’s two worlds. Dearly as she had loved her cousin as a child, Grace Stulting in later life disapproved strongly of Pearl’s upbringing in a household of Chinese servants who expertly subverted all Carie’s efforts to discipline her children, and ensure that they grew up in the hardworking, egalitarian, self-reliant American way. The Stultings were dismayed to find that Pearl had no idea how to sew, cook, clean, or wash up. “That amah, she raised her,” Grace said sniff-ily. At the end of the summer holidays the Sydenstrickers moved to Lexington, Virginia, where Edgar was due to start as a freshman at his father’s old college of Washington and Lee, and Pearl entered school in third grade. This was one of the periods she preferred to forget, for she could no more blend in with her southern classmates than she had gotten on in Zhenjiang with the sheltered and segregated daughters of foreign businessmen and diplomats, growing up behind the barred gates of the British concession. The ladylike white girls she met at Zhenjiang’s British Club seemed condescending and dull to Pearl, and for their part they could make nothing of a child burned brown by the sun, accustomed to wearing loose Chinese trousers at home, and speaking an idiomatic street slang incomprehensible even to her parents (for whom Chinese was always a second language, as English was for Hermanus). Pearl was fluent enough to trade uninhibited insults with local boys who swore at her on the streets of her hometown. “She didn’t feel like she was an American,” said Cousin Grace. “It handicapped her terribly. Never felt like she belonged here… felt like she was odd.”
The practical, hardheaded Stultings took a dim view from the start of the austere, unwordly, incorrigibly intellectual Absalom Sydenstricker, whose unremitting righteousness made them uncomfortable. The marriage had been categorically forbidden by Carie’s father. Pearl’s comical account of her parents’ strangely impersonal courtship, in The Exile, started with her father finding his path barred by Hermanus, hopping mad and armed with a stick (“‘Sir, I know your intentions!… You shall not have my daughter!’ The young missionary… gazed down on the little man and answered mildly, ‘Yes, I think I shall, sir,’ and proceeded on his way”). By 1901 Pearl’s Sydenstricker grandparents were dead, the family scattered, and their home just outside Lewisburg, forty miles away in Greenbrier County, had been sold, but the child picked up stories then and later about the early life her father said as little as possible about. He was the youngest but one of nine children brought up on a large rough hillside farm in servitude to their father, Andrew Sydenstricker, a God-fearing giant of a man who read the Bible right through aloud to his family every year and drove his seven sons off the property one by one, cursing their ingratitude, as each became legally free to go at the age of twenty-one. All of them hated the land that remained their father’s abiding passion. All became ministers save one, who was a church elder.
Their mother, Frances Sydenstricker, born Feronica Kauffman, was a grandmother Pearl liked the sound of: clever, competent, combative, sharp-tongued and short-tempered, a fine cook, a formidable manager, and a powerful personality in her own right. She was responsible for the family’s intellectual ambitions, a member of the proud and prolific Coffman family, Swiss Mennonites descended from a celebrated eighteenth-century dissident and scholar (the name change from Kauffman to Coffman signified their new American identity). She and her two downtrodden daughters serviced the household with the help of a wood-burning iron stove and a washtub in the woodshed. She ran her big, rambling, ramshackle farmhouse and its floating population of children, relatives, and visitors lavishly and well until at the age of sixty in 1873, the year her son Absalom was old enough to leave home, she decided she had had enough and never did a day’s work again. Local legend said that for the next two decades and more old Mrs. Sydenstricker held court in her rocking chair, entertaining the wives of the neighborhood, impervious to her children’s bewilderment and the stupefaction of her outraged husband, dispensing gossip, providing a subversive role model, recruiting more and more subscribers to her tacit declaration of female liberation until, on one memorable day, twenty-two likeminded women gathered to give one another strength and support on her porch.
His mother permanently shaped Absalom’s ideal of womanhood, in which the only two qualities that mattered were meekness and docility. “In that house bursting with its seven great sons, roaring with the thunder of the quarrel between man and woman, he heard it often shouted aloud that the Bible said man was head of the woman. It had to be shouted often to that indomitable old woman, eternally in her rocking chair. It made no difference to her, but it made a deep impression on her seven sons.” Absalom was the smallest, skinniest, and most insignificant, ostensibly the plain, timid weakling in a handsome, burly, turbulent family. He grew up the butt of his brothers, afraid of his father, and terrorized by the ghost stories he heard from his Mennonite grandmother, who spoke only German, which Absalom said afterward was the language of his childhood (the Sydenstrickers came originally from Bavaria). Most of the attention and perhaps also the affection he got seem to have come from this grandmother, who died when he was seven. Two years later his older brothers started enlisting one after another in the Union Army to fight the Yankees, leaving only the three youngest—Hiram, Absalom, and Frank, age eleven, nine, and seven—to work the farm under their father for the duration of the war. Absalom endured the hardship and humiliation of these formative years by shutting down his feelings inside a protective shell, telling his daughter long afterward that the occasional day when he could sneak off to school was always his greatest pleasure.
“I saw him an overworked boy, starving for books, hungry for school, loathing the land and tied to it until he was twenty-one,” wrote Pearl, who came in the end to understand better than anyone except her mother the inner furies that scourged Absalom, “his austerities, his shynesses, his fires so deep and so strangely banked, the powerful mystic motive of his life.” He escaped by the same route his brothers had taken, putting himself first through college, then through theological seminary, living at subsistence level, working with a frenzied concentration that ensured outstanding academic success and cut him off more completely than ever from other human beings. He was twenty-eight before he was finally ready for action, which meant picking a wife (admittedly one who was neither meek nor docile) on his mother’s instructions and sailing halfway around the world to stake out a spiritual territory of his own on a scale incomparably grander than anything that had ever occurred to his father. Returning home on furlough always brought back the old sense of impotent grievance that Pearl gave long afterward to the youngest son of Wang Lung, the farmer in The Good Earth, another patriarch whose sons grow up crushed by a dread that comes back to haunt the youngest long after his father lies dead and buried. “It was the same sick helplessness he had been used to feel in the days of his youth when the earthen house was his gaol. Once more his father, that old man in the land, reached out and laid his earthy hand upon his son.”
At the age of nine or ten Pearl was too young to grasp the root of the problem, but she could see perfectly well that her cousins looked down on their Uncle Ab, with his long-winded sermons and his baggy suits made by a cheap Zhenjiang tailor. America robbed Absalom of the confidence and authority he possessed in China, and he spent much of his family’s time in Hillsboro away preaching or fund-raising (“when he came back no one was quite as much at ease as we were in his absence,” Pearl said). The only way she herself managed to inspire even a flicker of interest in him was by demanding to join the church on the same Sunday as her cousin Grace. The two girls were duly received by the local minister, Absalom’s oldest brother, the Rev. David Sydenstricker, an initiation Pearl dismissed afterward as a complete letdown, claiming she had only suggested it in the first place because it gave her the chance to show off a new frock. She was beginning to realize that the yellow curly hair and “wild-beast eyes” so repulsive to the Chinese had the opposite effect on Americans. Her younger
sister, Grace, remembered Pearl as already strikingly pretty with a “slender face, broad forehead, pointed chin, straight, stubborn mouth, narrow nose and gray-green eyes beneath black brows which contrast with the near-fair hair.” She certainly looked her best in the new white dress with a sash and a broad-brimmed Leghorn hat. But, whatever she may have felt later, joining the church looks like a gesture of solidarity at a stage when Pearl still badly wanted to please her father.
SHE WAS ALSO beginning dimly to sense the limitations of the cohesive, coercive, and highly judgmental Presbyterian society into which she was born. When the family returned to China in the autumn of 1902 Pearl qualified as a newly admitted church member at just ten years old to attend Zhenjiang Mission meetings, where she found her father once again under attack. Absalom disagreed with his fellow missionaries, on most issues as a matter of principle. His opposition roused unconditional loyalty from his wife in public and blind family patriotism in his children, all of them “impregnated,” as Pearl said, “with the feeling that the hands of their own kind were for ever against their parents and therefore against them.” Contact with her Puritan origins in West Virginia shed new light on a side of her father that others found hard to bear: “He was a spirit… made by that blind certainty, that pure intolerance, that zeal for mission, that contempt of man and earth, that high confidence in heaven, which our forefathers bequeathed to us.”
Station meetings were stormy affairs held once a week in the Sydenstrickers’ house in Zhenjiang, where mission personnel met to discuss strategy, review progress, and vote democratically on how to allocate the funds provided by the financial board of the Southern Presbyterian Church in the United States. There was constant wrangling over the cost of repairs, maintenance, building programs, the price and distribution of tracts, and whether or not to raise the salaries of native helpers, who received a meager monthly wage of eight to ten Mexican dollars (worth roughly half as much as U.S. dollars). The women recruited to help spread the Bible story got even less. Provision in the minutes for “Mrs. Sydenstricker’s Bible woman” was five dollars a month, in spite of bitter remonstrations from Carie in private (mission wives were permitted to attend but forbidden to speak at these meetings).
There was unanimous disapproval of Absalom’s interminable schemes for extending the Work, and constant protest that his increasing number of conversions reflected an obsession with quantity over quality. His colleagues deplored his reluctance to pool the funds entrusted to him by American benefactors, his obstinate insistence on educating his Chinese staff (the conventional view was that teaching the natives too much was asking for trouble), and his pointblank refusal to fall in with official policy of dividing the available territory among competing Christian denominations in much the same way as the European powers apportioned their landgrabs. What infuriated his fellows perhaps more than anything else was his unauthorized translation of the Bible into a vernacular that ordinary people could understand for themselves (“We are better judges than the Chinese of what they need,” ran an authoritative article in the Chinese Recorder, urging preachers to stick to the simple trusty formula of exhortation, admonition and reproof). Absalom was proud of his ability to whip up quarrels with himself at the center. Asked if he had succeeded in reconciling the two feuding missionaries in charge of his very first junior posting, he said with a disarming glint of self-mockery, “I succeeded to this extent—they united in turning on me!” At the end of her life Pearl told a close friend that as a girl she never felt free from the strain of his altercations. “My memory of that circle of half a dozen soberly dressed people is grim,” she wrote of the regular Monday afternoon sessions in her parents’ parlor:
On Sunday everyone had been religiously whetted by three church services—not only religiously whetted but physically exhausted and emotionally strained…. I have sat, hundreds of Mondays, a small bewildered child, looking from one stubborn face to the other of my elders, listening to one stubborn voice and then another…. Listening to them, my heart swelled with helpless tears. It seemed to me they were always against [Absalom] and Carie, those men with their leathery skins and hard mouths and bitter determined eyes. [Absalom] sat there never looking at them, but always out of the window, across the valley to the hills, that brow of his white and serene, his voice quiet and final…. “I feel it my duty to push further into the interior. I regret if it is against your will, but I must do my duty.”
AS AN ADULT Pearl came to feel that her father had been ahead of his time in his work on the Chinese vernacular, as in his belief that the Church could not hope to survive in China except on a basis of further education, local autonomy, and increasing participation by the Chinese in its administration and government. Some of the harshest and also the funniest passages in her brief, unsparing, beautifully balanced biography of her father, The Fighting Angel, come from these years, when she became a firsthand witness of church politics, viewing them retrospectively in double focus as part idealistic child, part skeptical adult, often with startling results. The juxtaposition of childish bias with adult impartiality gives an exuberant spin to her account of the rivalry between her father and Zhenjiang’s one-eyed Baptist minister, who for thirty years disputed Sydenstricker’s territory and persisted in poaching his converts. The problem was total immersion, which appealed to the pragmatic Chinese more than the Presbyterians’ modest baptismal sprinkle, on the grounds that “if a little water was a good thing for the soul, more was better.” Persuading good Presbyterians to sneak off to the Baptists was a form of blatant religious theft that assumed diabolical proportions in the Sydenstricker home: “We sat silent through many a meal while [Absalom] with unwonted fluency said what he felt about other denominations, especially about the folly of immersion.” The missionary with one eye became one of the arch bogeys of Pearl’s childhood.
Absalom, whose distrust of women meant that he could not quite bring himself to believe they had souls, never brought the full force of his excoriating zeal for salvation to bear on his daughters. Pearl’s problem was how to attract his attention, not how to deflect it. He whipped his children for serious infringements such as telling a lie, but he hit them in anger only on rare, terrifying occasions, “when something he kept curbed deep in him broke for a moment its leash.” Like her sister, Grace learned early to watch for warning signs when his hands shook and a muscle twitched in his jaw. At the age of eleven, as incipient teenage mutiny started to temper her first uncritical devotion, Pearl announced to her father’s face that she hated him. In these years, when she was increasingly aware of tension between her parents, she transferred her allegiance exclusively to her mother. The sense of perspective she finally achieved in her adult recollections is both persuasive and poignant, as if somewhere between the lines of her hard-won objectivity there still lurks the ghost of a small distressed child trying not to burst into tears. “I have seen other lesser and more bureaucratic missionaries grow almost demented trying to control [Absalom]. They shouted bitter words at him, they threatened him with expulsion if he did not cease disobeying rules, over and over they called him a heretic, once even called him insane because he seemed to hear nothing they said. He was… so determined, so stubborn… that I know there have been those who, seeing that high, obstinate, angelic tranquillity, have felt like going out, groaning and beating their heads against a wall in sheer excess of helpless rage.” Pearl admitted in private long afterward that the onset of puberty and adolescence in the period following the family’s return to China in 1902 was when she came closest to being actively unhappy at home.
These were triumphal years for her father. Absalom agreed for once with the rest of the mission community in putting the post-Boxer era of unopposed white supremacy down to the direct intervention of divine providence in China’s defeat by the West. Everything that had aggravated Christians about the Chinese—“Their language as well as their thought… contaminated by centuries of association with idolatry… Their ideas of truth and morals… dis
torted and wrong… The residuum from the old religions… a system of demon worship… the source of untold misery as well as of spiritual and moral degradation”—was to be swept away. A surge of rhapsodical jubilation swept through missionary ranks now that God had at last given them a sign that they were His chosen people. “Assyria, Babylon, Greece, Rome… have passed away. Only China remains,” wrote one of many exultant contributors to the Chinese Recorder, arguing that God had preserved this last great heathen empire intact for thousands of years precisely so that its inhabitants might be ripe for the plucking as the second millennium approached. “God has saved China for entire collapse. Morally, China is rotten to the core.” A wave of revivalist meetings swept the north in the aftermath of the 1900 uprising, with huge congregations of hysterical Chinese confessing their sins, lacerating themselves, forgiving their enemies, and declaring with tears pouring down their faces that their resistance had been broken in a grotesque spiritual reversal of the Boxers’ military campaign. “Even the smallest children began to cry out for mercy.”
Absalom approved of revivalist tactics (“so hopeful and encouraging,” he wrote with unusual warmth), conducting similar, if smaller meetings himself on spring and autumn tours of his expanding circuit, when he visited each one-room chapel in every walled city or market town, performing mass baptisms and preaching sermons that left him physically exhausted but emotionally transfigured. Pearl said that as a small girl she convinced herself she could see light streaming out from his body at these times. Even as a teenager, old enough to start learning Latin from her father, “I never stood up to recite to him—and not to stand was unthinkable—without feeling that more than man was listening.” A supernatural imperative consumed him. He was nearing the goal he had schooled himself to attain all his life, and the urgency of his mission raged in him like fever.
Pearl Buck in China Page 6