The habit of reading to distance herself from the life around her, hidden away alone in holes and corners where she could remain undisturbed, was an intrinsic part of the solitary, internalized Western world Pearl constructed for herself in these years, so different from the gregarious Chinese existence she was free to take up again once she had finished her daily lesson with Mr. Kung. In the late afternoons she ran down the hill to join her friends in the courtyards of any one of half a dozen neighboring farmhouses, where she was once again a welcome and familiar visitor. Pearl’s Chinese manners were excellent and she was an attentive listener, eager to hear all the stories, “plaguing everyone with questions sometimes too intimate and personal,” intrigued by the endless farming talk about crop failures, pest control, and appalling weather conditions. In times of drought she walked in procession with her friends’ families to ask help from the paper gods of the fields, who lived in mud shrines looking out over the land. When the semitropical rains finally arrived she skipped through the bamboo barelegged in a waterproof hat the size of an umbrella made of layers of plaited bamboo.
Eccentricity on this scale raised comment in the foreign community, which was perplexed by Pearl’s disorderly conduct at an age when most mothers were trying to wean their amah-raised children away from questionable habits and lax vocabulary picked up from servants in the kitchen. The mission wives would have been even more censorious if they had realized quite how frankly and freely Pearl discussed sex and religion with her contemporaries. The farmers’ daughters questioned her closely as to whether Americans made babies in the same way as their own Chinese parents. Anxious for clarification herself, Pearl asked her mother, who said unhelpfully that all babies were made by God, “and in His image.” Scarcely less baffling was the mystery hanging over Mary and Joseph and the conception of their problematic Son: “I heard talk about this from Chinese Christians who had no enthusiasm for Mary, and felt sorry for Joseph.”
Pearl’s closest confidants were the daughters of her Chinese sister, T’sai Yun, or Precious Cloud, whom she called Chieh-Chieh (Elder Sister), and who addressed Mr. and Mrs. Sydenstricker as Father and Mother. T’sai Yun seems to have been taken in as an unwanted child by Carie after the death of her own first daughter, probably around about the same time as Absalom selected Ma Pangbo as a young boy to train as his ally. Brought up in the Chinese manner and educated at a Chinese boarding school, T’sai Yun married before Pearl was born, producing six girls in rapid succession. “They grew up with me, and we told each other everything,” said Pearl, who was close in age to the two oldest. “These six little Chinese girls were the nucleus of my childhood.” Their father was the son of one of Absalom’s native assistants, Pastor Chang, who caused increasing trouble in the church with his disruptive public demands for a grandson. Prayers were offered up by the congregation each time the couple announced the arrival of another daughter: “A first girl they accepted with welcome, a second one a year later with equanimity, a third with gravity, a fourth with consternation.” Pearl remembered Pastor Chang as an aggressive old man with a skimpy white pigtail and a jutting goatee, preaching shrill sermons in which he threatened to revoke his allegiance to the Christian God, who had so abysmally failed to bring off a sex change for his fourth, fifth, and sixth granddaughters.
T’sai Yun’s story was tragic in a country where girls were dismissed as worthless, routinely crippled as children and often identified by numbers rather than names, bringing irredeemable loss of face at birth on their mother, her family, and in this case the Christian Church. Long afterward Pearl turned her adoptive sister’s experience into a captivating children’s book, The Chinese Children Next Door, about six little girls with scarlet bows on their black pigtails, who idolized the plump placid baby brother their mother eventually achieved on her seventh try. This was the fable that delighted Nehru and Gandhi who must have been as familiar as the author herself with the actuality underlying her story and its fairy-tale ending. Infertility, infanticide, the institutionalized physical and mental abuse of women, the suicides of young wives blamed for transgressions often far less significant than repeated failure to produce a son, all these were commonplace in Pearl’s childhood, constantly discussed and publicly dramatized in a society where nothing could be kept secret for long. Neither she not her sister ever forgot another of their neighbors, a childless wife from the Fu family, whom they watched one afternoon screaming curses for an hour or more at her husband as he stolidly followed the plow with his buffalo in the valley below their back gate: “She rocked back and forth in her howling, her voice broken and hoarse, the saliva dripping from her lips, her hair stringing down the sides of her face.” Both Sydenstricker sisters had grown up watching processions of women coming to confide their troubles to Carie or lay them at the feet of the clay figure of Kuanyin in the temple, the goddess Pearl adopted as her tutelary deity, bringing wild flowers herself as an offering in spring: “I used as a small child to go to sleep more quietly at night because of her.”
Disaster, and how to cope with it, were part of their practical education. At regular intervals, when the sky darkened and the wind rose to a sullen throaty roar, the whole Sydenstricker family retreated behind locked doors and windows to wait for a typhoon that hurled itself on the landscape, smashing trees, breaking down walls, tearing off the thatched roofs of mud huts, making their own brick-built mission bungalow quake on its foundations. Cholera raged in Zhenjiang every autumn, striking with terrible speed and finality. One year Wang Amah developed symptoms overnight and would have died if Carie had not risked her own life to fight the fever, shutting herself up with the patient for a week in a stone shed at the bottom of the garden, gripped by a bitter avenging rage for the lives she had already lost and the ones she still had to lose. She and Wang Amah had been friends and companions for so long and had gone through so much together that she said she had no intention of being left alone now. That same autumn Absalom left for the annual general meeting of the North Kiangsu Mission in Hsuchowfu, accompanied by their next-door neighbor, an energetic younger man named James Bear, father of the red-headed boy who played with Pearl under the veranda. Absalom came home alone, sick and shaken, very nearly defeated himself by the cholera that had killed Bear as soon as he reached Hsuchowfu.
Carie escaped every year with the children to Kuling, packing up to leave as the rice seedlings were transplanted to the flooded fields in the steamy disease-ridden heat of late June, traveling upriver for days to Kiukang (Jiujiang), and then another day’s journey inland across the parched plain. At the foot of Mount Lu the party transferred to flimsy bamboo chairs hanging from ropes on carrying poles, each borne by four mountain bearers, for the three-mile climb ending in one thousand twisting stone steps cut into the sheer side of the mountain:
The road wound around the rocky folds of the cliffs, and beneath us were gorges and rushing mountain rivers and falls. Higher and higher the road crawled, twisting so abruptly that sometimes our chairs swung clear over the precipices as the front bearers went on beyond the rear ones, still behind the bend. One misstep and the chair would have been dashed a thousand feet into the rocks and swirling waters…. Somewhere near the top of the mountain we turned a certain corner and were met… by a strong cold current of mountain air. Until then the air had gradually cooled but now it changed suddenly and the bearers welcomed it with loud hallooing calls and a spurt of running, the chair swaying between them. As a child I could never keep from laughing…. The air of the plains had been hot and heavy, breathed in and out by millions of human lungs, but here on top of the mountain it was charged with fresh cold purity, and one breathed it in like lifesaving oxygen.
The Sydenstrickers’ two-room stone house stood in a clearing on the sloping side of a valley with a stream running along the bottom between groves of acacia, bamboo, maple, and juniper, yellow-flowered dogwood, pink crape myrtle, and sweet-scented bushes of white osman. Pearl’s first job each morning was to climb up through the woods past
the rivulet at the side of the house to pick ferns, wild clematis, ornamental grasses, and lilies—“the tall white Madonna lilies, the red black-spotted tiger lilies or the white ones with red spots”—so that her mother could dress the house. There were picnics, walks, games, and even a handful of other mission children to play with as year by year more houses appeared along the brick paths, reached by shallow flights of stone steps and shaded by forest trees with everywhere the sound of water trickling or falling. The sense of being at home was intensified for Carie by the views from rocky platforms and sudden openings in the trees, where you could look down through layers of cloud on jagged peaks and crags or vertiginous drops to glimpses of river and lake far below. The mountain air, the pure water, and the paper-white mist reminded her of the famous “cloud seas” of Droop Mountain in the Alleghenies, where she grew up. After two or three magical months the family came back down again to make their way home by junk between the fields of high ripe yellow rice now lining the banks of the Yangtse.
At times like this Pearl forgot the forebodings of Teacher Kung, whose warning had been reinforced by the father of one of her friends: “Mr. Lu said there would be wars and more wars.” But sometimes she felt she was the only member of her family to realize that the way they lived was precarious and finite. “Peace covered China like a sheet of thin ice beneath which a river boiled.” The empress died in her seventy-fourth year in 1908, soon after Britain’s Queen Victoria, another great empress whom Tz’u Hsi had thought of in her last years as a sister. Mr. Kung died too, carried off in a single day by cholera in the autumn of 1905. Pearl observed the funeral rites, wearing a white mourning band and bowing to the coffin with her father (both of them on strict orders from her mother not to join in the feast afterward for fear of contagion). It was a salute to her teacher, and also to the rich, dense, complex past he had opened up for her. Teacher Kung had lost all he possessed, and his life had been ruined in the havoc that marked China’s entry into the twentieth century. If he understood and accepted that traditional scholars like himself had no part to play in their country’s immediate future, perhaps it gave him some faint satisfaction to have passed on the humane and rational core of Confucius’s teaching, even if only to one small, serious American girl. “Not until justice has been done,” he said gravely to Pearl, explaining why his country was unlikely to be safe for Westerners for many years to come. She held on to his saying as her guiding rule for the rest of her life.
TOO OLD TO run freely in the valley any more, indeed no longer allowed out at all without Wang Amah as escort, Pearl at thirteen was beginning to part ways with her Chinese contemporaries, whose mothers were preparing them for marriage. Her own mother, belatedly worried by Pearl’s intimacy with the local peasants and anxious to salvage what remained of her social credentials, encouraged her to make overtures to the few girls they knew in the expatriate white community, daughters of traders and business people temporarily posted abroad, all of them preoccupied with the life they had left and longing to get back to the West. None of these girls spoke more than kitchen Chinese or would have dreamed of having Chinese friends. Pearl made the most of a sweet-natured but thoroughly conventional English Agnes and three bright, smart, self-assured Longden sisters from the United States. The Longdens were the first American teenagers she had ever met, and they fascinated her, especially the oldest, Mary, who became for a while Pearl’s dearest friend. But in the Longdens’ terms she was young for her age, and could never keep up with their jokes or their expertise in the latest slang, clothes, and hairstyles based on fashion magazines from Shanghai. Her knowledge of their world came from nineteenth-century English novels and from the schooling she got from her mother in morning lessons with Grace. The Sydenstricker sisters worked through a correspondence course supplied by the Calvert School in Baltimore—history, geography, scripture, composition, and mathematics—with extra tuition in painting, music, and calisthenics (compulsory gym sessions on the veranda, led by Carie and detested by Pearl).
Carie compensated for the loss of Mr. Kung by enrolling her daughter in the Methodist school for Chinese girls, part of a new mission settlement a little farther around the hill from the Sydenstrickers’ house. The gray-haired American principal, Miss Robinson, seemed stiff and intimidating to Pearl, but she agreed to take the child three mornings a week as both pupil and part-time teacher. This was a highly unsatisfactory compromise. Chinese education was generally felt by Westerners to be a catastrophe (“mental infanticide on an enormous scale,” wrote the venerable Dr. Martin), consisting of learning by rote classical texts wholly incompatible with modern scientific principles, and in any case reserved exclusively for boys. Mission schools admitted the first generation of girl students in China and equipped them to face the twentieth century by giving them the rudiments of a Western education. There was no other white girl in Pearl’s school, and although she wore her American dresses to teach English to a class of eight pupils barely younger than herself, she kept her Chinese name, reverting to her own level in breaks between lessons, when she gossiped and giggled with contemporaries on the playground. Her best friends picked English names—Dottie Wei, Su-i Wang—and dreamed of becoming teachers or doctors themselves.
The experiment can’t have lasted much more than a year because, in the winter of 1906–7, it became too dangerous for either Pearl or her sister to leave their compound. Floods followed by famine on an almost unprecedented scale laid waste the north of the country, and for months on end vast, sluggish, menacing, unstoppable streams of refugees flowed into and around Zhenjiang. The exodus started in Anhui and North Kiangsu, provinces already scoured and picked clean when icy winds from the Gobi Desert drove the inhabitants south. Entire populations on the move devoured everything in their path, stripping bark from the trees and grass from the hills. No birds, animals, or children survived in their wake. They brought sickness, infection, contagion, violence, and rumors of cannibalism, which spread panic and were met with reciprocal savagery. The Manchu government’s response was ineffectual and slow. Ad hoc Western efforts to give aid were coordinated on a piecemeal basis. The Zhenjiang Mission force treated dying and destitute patients without adequate drugs or medical facilities. Pearl’s father spent the winter distributing American supplies in the north for the Famine Relief Committee, hastily formed in Zhenjiang as it became clear that many millions of people would die of hunger and disease.
Her mother worked in the city, visiting pitifully inadequate shelters and soup kitchens, returning appalled, unable to eat or sleep, almost unhinged at times from exhaustion, impotence, and grief. She had to work after dark, dressed in Chinese clothes to escape being mobbed, but somehow people found out her name and traced her back to where she lived. Sinister, barely human bundles of bone and rag shuffled up the hill to beat at the Sydenstrickers’ gate and lie in “dreadful shivering hordes,” heaped against the compound wall. All night they wailed Carie’s name: “The sound… drove her nearly mad… She no longer tried to shield her children; indeed, she could not.” They too lay awake listening to groans and whimpers and soldiers dragging bodies away every morning. Pearl spent Christmas day with her mother cooking “great vats of rice and distributing it bowl by bowl through a crack in the gate until none was left.” She recognized ever afterward the signs and stages of starvation in children and adults, gaunt pregnant women gnawed from within by their unborn babies, infants with sunken eyes and shriveled blue gums “like a toothless old woman’s lips,” swollen and distorted bellies, protruding bones with the skin glued to them turning an unmistakable dark purplish color, “the hue of a liver that has been dried for a day or two” which faded only when people started eating again.
At the time Pearl tried hard to blank out the images lodged at the back of her mind so tenaciously that, as her sister said, “not even her avid reading could make her entirely forget.” Amnesia was her sole defense against nightmares impossible to tame or withstand. “She could not think of suffering and so again she
went to the people of books. Now in an even more voracious way she began to read everything she could get hold of.” Pearl went back to school that spring as life stirred again in the countryside. Women and children could be seen emerging like insects from hibernation, as Pearl described them long afterward in The Good Earth, swarming over the grave lands in search of the first green leaves of dandelion and shepherd’s purse, “with bits of tin and sharp stones or worn knives, and with baskets made of twisted bamboo twigs or split reeds.” Northerners who had survived the winter straggled back to their fields as the time for rice planting approached. A sense of release and recuperation is palpable in Grace’s recollection of the five girls—herself and Pearl with Mary, Ruth, and Florence Longden—lounging companionably in late afternoon sun on the Sydenstrickers’ porch to listen to “the normal sounds of summer… the cheerful talking of the farmers, the call of evening vendors, the sleepy cooing of wild doves, the croaking of frogs.”
Pearl emerged from the crisis a disturbed and withdrawn adolescent, venting her own agitation in increasingly sharp conflict with her mother. Stormy, strong-willed and decisive, the two were so alike, according to Grace, that it was hard for either to back down from head-on collision. Carie was anxious and apprehensive, as she had been about Edgar when he too showed signs of rebellion at the same age. Pearl felt lonelier than ever before as the end of the school year approached and the gap between her and her friends began to reopen. Dottie Wei, Su-i Wang, and all the girls Pearl liked best left, one after another, weeping or stony-faced, to abandon their fantasies about independent careers and embark with men they had never seen on marriages arranged by their parents. Mary Longden was sent back to school in the United States, leaving Pearl cut off once again from contemporaries in the foreign community, who were themselves being groomed by their families as they approached marriageable age.
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