Pearl Buck in China

by Hilary Spurling

  She was welcomed by the whole community. “To other Americans in Zhenjiang, Pearl came as a fresh breeze from their homeland,” wrote Grace, who was not the only one captivated by her sister’s stylishness and sophistication. There were musical evenings when Pearl in black velvet with her fair hair pinned up in loose wavy curls sang American pop songs at the piano. But the experience that indirectly transformed her life was teaching the senior English class at the Presbyterian Mission’s high school for boys. “It was a wonderful time in which to live in China,” she wrote, looking back, “and I was at the right age for it.” Education, and mission schools in particular, were at the heart of a revolution that had started and spread spontaneously from one province to the next, achieving its prime aim almost before people fully realized what was happening. Sun Yatsen, the Nationalist leader, had been away in the United States when the old regime fell, returning only in time to be sworn in as the first president of the new republic. “He was the crest of a wave of revolution and such a wave is always the rise of a deep ground swell of human events,” Pearl wrote, “and Christian missionaries themselves continued to increase that ground swell, without knowing what they did.” The church schools set up in China in the 1880s and 1890s had instituted an empirical, knowledge-based approach to education wholly different from the ancient imperial system based on poetry and calligraphy. Missionaries taught mathematics and science, introduced modern medicine, promoted interventionist policies such as famine relief, and actively campaigned for less oppressive treatment of women. “The impact of these ideas was terrific and radical,” wrote Pearl, who grew up watching them take hold.

  A Christian convert himself, trained as a Western doctor, Sun Yatsen was almost immediately ousted from the presidency, only to take on a more powerful role as prophet and theorist, “a Lenin for the Chinese revolution,” in Pearl’s phrase. He became a charismatic figurehead for progressive young intellectuals, many of them mission-educated and deeply impressed not simply by Western inventions but by the subversive principles of Jesus Christ, which they interpreted in aggressive and uncompromising ways never envisaged by their missionary teachers. “The wonder is that none of them… realized how revolutionary these principles were,” Pearl wrote dryly. “They had been reared in the Western atmosphere where church members do not take literally the teachings of Jesus…. The Chinese, however, tended to be very practical, even about religion, and the result was often very upsetting indeed.”

  Pearl’s students gave her a first taste of the kind of intellectual, political, and social ferment she had missed in her own years at college. Her class was small (founded in 1907 with eight boys, the entire school had sixty pupils when Pearl taught there), but it made up in urgency what it lacked in size. The students were in their late teens or early twenties, nearly the same age as their teacher, many already married, some with children of their own. They were hungry for knowledge, buoyed by expectation, almost giddy with their sense of release from the burden of inherited repression and inhibition. Most of them would be hemmed in again soon, like the hero of the first story Pearl published a decade later in the Chinese Recorder, a thin, pale, feverish seventeen-year-old forcibly removed from school by his father in order to mind the family shop and produce sons for the ancestors. Pearl’s early fiction is full of quick, vivid, confident sketches of young men like this one, briefly confronted at school or college by the vision of a brave new world before being dragged back into line by their families and obliged to accept their submission “with the terrible sadness of defrauded boyhood.”

  Pearl brought her pupils probably as close to the West as they were ever likely to get, and they drank in all she could tell them. At a time when the country was already heading for chaos and anarchy, they stood for everything hopeful, generous, and forward-looking in a revolution commandeered from the start by the young. They marched under the Blue Sky and White Sun of Sun Yatsen’s banner. For them the symbol of conservatism and retrogression was the queue, imposed by the hated and now defeated Manchus. The stern, crop-haired young revolutionaries stationed at the gates of Zhenjiang to intercept country farmers and chop off their queues by brute force included students of Pearl’s. “They taught me far more than I taught them,” she said. She listened at school to their idealistic aspirations and at home to the counterarguments of elderly traditionalists among her parents’ Chinese friends. For her this was an intensely receptive period, when she absorbed impressions greedily and indiscriminately, soaking them up like a sponge as any prospective young writer must do. “It seems to me now, looking back, that I spent those first years of my return in almost complete silence,” she wrote in her memoirs four decades later.

  She heard the same progressive views repeated by the young husbands of her Chinese girlfriends, all of them mothers by this time and absorbed in family concerns of their own. Pearl’s single status at the advanced age of twenty-two puzzled her friends, who held her parents severely to blame for doing nothing about it. Her father, by now “far more Chinese in his mentality and feelings than he was American,” was inclined to agree with them, but Carie’s libertarian American instincts were outraged. She was equally suspicious of what seemed to her a new laxity Pearl had picked up in the United States, apparent in everything from her social manner to her frivolous hairdo and flirtatious outfits. Pearl herself provoked the unconditional disapproval of the entire mission community by going out occasionally with the only available unattached Americans, lonely young males working on the Bund for tobacco companies or Standard Oil.

  Her field of sexual experimentation had been even narrower than was normal for women of her age at the time. She had fallen briefly in love as a schoolgirl with a half-American student (now safely married to a Chinese wife), and there had been some sort of affair on shipboard coming back from America. Pearl confided her passionate response only to Emma Edmunds, who promptly tore up the letter at the writer’s request. In old age Pearl vaguely recalled receiving advances on the ship from a couple of older admirers, both of whom she turned down, although not before she had enthusiastically learned how to kiss from the younger of the two. Possibly this was the intense physical awakening she seems to have experienced at some point in that year or the next from a respectable middle-aged man who was also a serial seducer, expert in techniques of arousal that stopped just short of actual consummation. She described this encounter in convincing detail in her most autobiographical novel, The Time Is Noon, where the heroine finds herself driven almost wild by the “dry sterile pain” of unsatisfied desire. (“‘He’ll never marry you, that’s one comfort,’ her mother said bitterly…. ‘There’s something downright queer about him.’”) Absalom’s solution to the problem of his older daughter’s future was an arranged marriage to the handsome, clever, highly eligible son of one of his Chinese friends, a proposal that came to nothing after a heated dispute between the parents of the prospective bride, who remained wholly passive in the Chinese way. “I listened and reflected and did not take sides,” wrote Pearl.

  By the time Carie began at last to show signs of reviving in the warmth of her daughter’s energy and will, Pearl had dropped any idea of a return to the United States. Her immediate priority was to find work in China and, even more important, to get away from the dogmatic opinions and censorious eyes of the Zhenjiang mission community. As soon as her mother seemed well enough to be left, she wrote secretly to Cornelia Morgan, an independent American running a mission school at Tsuyung in Yunnan province in the far southwest. The letter that came back provisionally offering Pearl the job of assistant was intercepted by Carie, who lost her last shred of composure, weeping like a child and insisting that without her daughter she no longer wanted to live. Pearl protested that as a girl Carie herself had run away in direct defiance of her own father, and was shaken to the core by her mother’s reply. “‘I know it,’ she said, ‘and I did wrong. I wish I had obeyed him.’ This was a terrifying revelation and I was struck speechless.”

  Carie relaps
ed, losing weight again with shocking speed, reversing all the progress made since Pearl’s return. “Her flesh fell away until she was dreadful to see. Only her eyes looked bright and indomitable out of her little shrunken face.” She no longer wanted to die, but her emaciated body was so weak that the slightest touch jarred her. In June 1915 Pearl took her to Kuling, cushioned as far as possible from the jolts of the journey on a padded stretcher carried by two Chinese servants. The original tiny mission settlement had grown into a prosperous, whites-only summer community, drawing visitors from all over China with large handsome villas standing in their own leafy grounds, shops, a church and a school, conferences and a concert program, a place for social and business contacts where young people could meet one another at tennis or bridge parties and go dancing in the evenings. Pearl had no time for any of it. She called in the English doctor and set herself once more to revive her mother, who could not leave her bed. “I studied my Chinese books while she slept, and every day I went for a long and solitary walk.” Grace came from her school in Shanghai for the holidays, and Absalom joined them for the couple of weeks that was all he could spare from his work. Lying on a lounge chair on the porch, Carie made her daughters laugh by planning a riotous old age of leisure, pleasure, and placid self-indulgence. Gradually she began to tell stories again, entertaining their friends and inducing a subdued optimism in Pearl. By early autumn, when most other people had left and the town stood empty, Carie was strong enough to totter on her own legs into the garden. There was no one for company now but one American couple and the patients in the new TB sanatorium (Pearl had a brief encounter with one of them—“He was only a boy to my newly adult eyes”—which ended abruptly when she was warned off by his missionary parents).

  Muffled reports of the Great War came from the single English weekly paper to reach Kuling from Shanghai. Mother and daughter talked about the future, when both agreed that China in general, and Kuling in particular, would bid good riddance to the West. They also looked back to the past, drawing close again as they resumed the long, frank, free-ranging conversations interrupted by Pearl’s stormy adolescence. “My love for my mother was a thing apart. It was rooted in my blood and bones,” Pearl wrote of this period. In these months of grief and uncertainty Carie explained or implied enough for Pearl to begin to understand the underlying mechanism of her parents’ disastrous mismatch. She came to see more clearly her father’s part in the demoralization that had precipitated her mother’s illness. “Born a generation earlier he would have burned witches. There was a deep unconscious sex antagonism in him,” she wrote in Fighting Angel, describing Absalom’s struggles to hold his own against his wife’s quicker and sharper intelligence by invoking Saint Paul, as his own father had done before him. “Since those days when I saw all her nature dimmed I have hated Saint Paul with all my heart.”

  Carie said it was while she was nursing her own dying mother that she had sworn in her late teens to renounce the temptations of the flesh in the person of her current boyfriend, a big, blond, boisterous, good-looking, hard-drinking character named Neale Carter, a guitar-player with a rich singing voice and a hot lusty presence that threatened to unleash urges in herself she had been taught all her life to fear and repress. By her own account, she married Absalom Sydenstricker as an antidote to the lure of drink and desire. Her husband himself was still wrestling with the same problem alone in his study in his sixties, when he annotated steamy passages in a book about the Holy Ghost with penciled notes in the margin. “The word ‘flesh’ as used in… the Bible is interpreted as meaning ‘the natural self,’” he wrote at the head of the first chapter, returning to the question again fifty pages further on: “What is meant by the word ‘flesh’? It means the uncorrected human nature.” The solution proposed by the same book was to burn out vileness, filth, and impurity.

  Pearl had witnessed this process in practice throughout her childhood as a daily stifling of her mother’s natural warmth, gaiety, and impetuosity in innumerable small defeats and reprimands. Carie’s exuberance grated on her husband, and her spontaneity made him uneasy. He mistrusted everything that captivated other people about his wife: her infectious delight in pretty things, impromptu picnics and treats (“he did not enjoy whimsy and sudden plans and the discomfort of a plate and no table”), her full-throated singing when she flung back her head and belted out her favorite hymns, her rare zany jokes, and the absurd comic rhymes she could improvise until her children were helpless with laughter and her husband told her coldly to stop. All this Pearl had seen and resented as a girl. As an adult she was increasingly aware of the sensual and emotional deprivation that had made a desert of her parents’ life together, bleakly exposed in the years when the departure of their two daughters for college and school left husband and wife confronting one another alone for the first time since the birth of their oldest child. Carie’s talks with her daughter would be harshly reenacted in The Time Is Noon and touched on more briefly in the bright, shining, looking-glass world of Pearl’s first novel, East Wind, West Wind, where another dying mother confides to her daughter the scary side of a long-lasting marriage. “I sat in horror at her words,” says the young Chinese heroine, who might be Pearl herself speaking. “I saw suddenly into the inner halls of her heart. The bitterness and suffering there were bowels of fire within her. I had no words to comfort her.”

  As cold winter winds blew around the little house intended only for summer visits, Carie and her daughter moved partway down the mountain to be nearer the doctor, settling in a borrowed house, where Pearl faced the question of her own future: “I began what was to be the loneliest winter of my life…. I was struggling with the decision of what I was to do with myself.” Her twenty-third birthday that summer made her the same age as her mother had been when she married. Pearl had always known she was a writer, but she also knew she was nowhere near ready even to think about what that might entail. Her immediate problem was practical. Job offers had not been hard to get so far, but one of the conditions imposed by the few professional careers open to women (basically, teaching and nursing) was compulsory celibacy. The Church, which gave single women in the mission field schools, hospitals, even outlying stations of their own to run—an autonomy unthinkable for mission wives—demanded nunlike austerity in return. The price was too high for Pearl, who would enliven her Chinese stories with vigorous little snapshots, like gargoyles in the margins, of sexless, infantilized, and dried-up lady missionaries brooding over faded family photographs, pouncing hungrily on any stray widower, pursuing the hypothetical goal of wholesale conversion with dwindling enthusiasm and hope.

  Pearl’s own religious faith was contingent and variable. Like many ministers’ children, she had learned early to blank out during sermons, switching her attention instead to more promising activities such as making up stories. She was prepared to teach Bible classes or play the organ for her father, but she adamantly refused to lead religious meetings or have anything to do with proselytizing. The station pecking order meant that older women, theoretically subject to their husbands (“repressed, strong, vigorous mission wives… their faces… stormy and hewn into lines of determination and grimness”), exercised power in their turn over novices like Pearl. Her mild escapades with the boys from Standard Oil had ended in a head-on collision with one of these weather-beaten old battle-axes, who threatened her with expulsion if she persisted in her offense. Pearl’s critical detachment, and her inadmissible sympathy with the Chinese, would inevitably land her in further trouble, but for the moment she had no choice save to return to the mission school in Zhenjiang.

  In February 1916 Pearl left her mother, whose old irrepressible energy was flowing back under the tonic effect of mountain air, careful diet, and twelve months’ respite from her husband. This was the first time in her life that Carie had ever lived alone, and she celebrated her freedom in her sixtieth year by demolishing Absalom’s cramped little house and building a bigger one to her own design, simple, airy, and efficientl
y planned, with three bedrooms, two bathrooms, a living room, and steps leading up to a broad shady porch looking over the ferny glades of the garden and out to the valley beyond. Carie’s house embodied her American dream. Everything she disliked and feared about China was excluded from it. Even the plangent melancholy temple bell that had always given her the shivers when it sounded in the night on the hill below the house in Zhenjiang was replaced by the brisk reassuring little bell of the church a few hundred yards from her front door. The transformation, planned and carried out in secret from her husband as a surprise for her daughters, restored her sense of purpose. When she wasn’t supervising masons and carpenters, she went tobogganning with the children from the American School. “She did the things she had not done since she was a girl,” Pearl wrote, “and there was no one to be displeased with her merriment.”

  What Pearl herself felt that February when she climbed down one thousand steps cut in the rock and walked the rest of the way, turning and twisting for five miles down almost vertical slopes to the foot of the mountain, is hard to imagine. She was returning to keep house for her father and rejoin a mission community that seemed to her later—and was already beginning to seem to her then—blinkered, small-minded, and arrogant, above all in its invincible assumption of superiority to the people to whom it ministered. “The failure of missions and of Christianity… in China,” Pearl wrote somberly in My Several Worlds, “was that no first-rate Chinese minds joined the Christian movement.”

  Her own allegiance lay with the ambitious young radical thinkers beginning to emerge as the only leaders capable of shaping a coherent vision of the future in an era of rapid political disintegration. At the end of March 1916 Sun Yatsen’s successor (who had placed himself three months earlier on the imperial throne) abdicated and died. From now on the country was ruled in practice by intrepid, opportunistic, uneducated warlords, who split the territory and divided the spoils between them. Meanwhile a restive and increasingly militant student body in the big cities tackled the theoretical question of how to abolish the legacy of centuries of oppression by transforming the culture and consciousness of the Chinese people. Zhenjiang was swept up in a raging national debate that engaged the key figures of a whole generation, from Pearl herself to the young Mao Zedong.