For the moment Pearl had no option but to revert to the fortress mentality instilled by her mother, whose first move in any new place had always been to construct a refuge for her family filled with flowers, books, and pretty curtains to shut out the world beyond the windows. Carie herself, still struggling with pernicious anemia, had finally been forced to accept that she could never again make the voyage home. Absalom alone accompanied Grace when she started college in the United States in the autumn of 1918. He returned dazed and shaken by the wave of bacchic revelry released in America and Europe at the end of World War I, treating Pearl and her mother to hair-raising stories of lewd, raucous, short-skirted, hard-drinking modern youth: “‘Everywhere I went they all had their dresses up to their knees.’ We stared at him in shocked silence.” Mother and daughter exchanged regular visits in these years and spent the summer of 1919 together at Kuling. The Bucks had missed their annual break the year after their honeymoon because of Lossing’s inability to tear himself away from his work, but this time Pearl left her husband behind in Nanxuzhou, setting out alone on June 7, three or four weeks before the season began, to spend three months recuperating in her mother’s new house in the mountains. She discovered she was pregnant that summer in Kuling.
THE BUCKS WERE next in line after the Wiltsies for a new mission house built to their own design, in which Pearl fully expected to spend the rest of her life. The roof had just gone on when she left for Kuling, and she moved in with Lossing after he came to fetch her home in the autumn. Her Chinese friends, who had known only rambling one-storey family homes constructed around courtyards in the traditional way, were baffled at Pearl’s housewarming party by the first flight of stairs they had ever encountered in a private house (they teetered up cautiously, and Madame Chang solved the problem of how to go down by sliding on her backside). They were frankly incredulous when Pearl declared that her husband hoped the new baby would be a girl. “You can’t imagine what an impression that made on the women in Nanxuzhou,” said Marian. “To think anyone would want to have a little daughter.” The Bucks had barely settled in when word came that church funding for Lossing’s agricultural experiments had been cut off, a crushing blow promptly followed by a job offer from the head of the newly established College of Agriculture and Forestry at the University of Nanjing. The Bucks’ housewarming transposed itself into a farewell party, with a fond mutual exchange of gifts, tears, and promises to visit, before Pearl finally departed, once again without her husband, traveling alone in September to Nanjing, where she was to await the birth of her baby in a room in the house of the head of the college, John Reisner and his wife. Some kind of infection had broken out in Nanxuzhou, and Lossing, anxious to avoid any risk to his wife and unborn child, planned to join Pearl in the New Year.
His sponsors at the Madison Avenue Church felt badly let down by his departure, and so did his colleagues on the Nanxuzhou mission team. Although the Carters would leave China themselves two years later, the Hoods (who did in fact spend the rest of their working lives on the station) still hoped to persuade the Bucks to come back. But Nanxuzhou was a chapter that had closed for both Pearl and Lossing. Nearly twenty years later Pearl painted a grisly picture of the future they escaped at this point: “Imagine two, four, five, six—rarely more—white men and women, some married to each other, the others starved without the compensation of being consecrated to celibacy, imagine them thrown together, hit or miss, without regard to natural congeniality of any sort, in a town or city in the interior of China, living together for years on end, without relief, in the enforced intimacy of a mission compound, compelled to work together and unable, from the narrowness of their mental and spiritual outlook, to find escape and release in the civilization round them.”
Pearl’s doctor, Horton Daniels, Dr. Smith’s replacement, had anticipated problems, but in fact her pregnancy went smoothly apart from a mistake in the dates. The baby expected in late December or early January arrived on March 20, 1920. Caroline Grace Buck, named for her grandmother and aunt, impressed all who saw her, especially her mother, with “her unusual beauty and the intelligence of her deep blue eyes.” Grace said her sister’s ecstatic letter announcing the birth was “like a magnificat of motherhood.” But Dr. Daniels, whose suspicions had been correct all along, diagnosed a tumor in his patient’s womb and advised immediate surgery. The Bucks returned to the United States with Carol (short for Caroline), a few months old when she crossed the Pacific like her mother before her in a market basket. Fearful for her sister’s life, Grace came up from college to look after the baby, who was to be left with her grandparents on the Buck farm in Pleasant Valley, New York. Lossing and Pearl’s brother, Edgar, escorted her to the Presbyterian Hospital in New York City, where a benign tumor was successfully removed in early June. Pearl, who had counted on having a large family, was told she would never be able to bear another child. She returned to spend the summer convalescing with her parents-in-law, and making the most of Carol now that there could be no more babies.
The three of them returned to Nanjing in late autumn. Pearl divided her time that winter between her daughter and her mother, pitifully weakened and skeletally thin in Zhenjiang, which was two hours away by train. After a sudden relapse in the spring, Carie’s doctor pronounced her case hopeless. Pearl took her for the last time to Kuling, padded in quilts and carried on coolies’ backs. Carie fought hard against the knowledge that this time there would be no cure, admitting defeat only at the end of the summer, when she knew she was going back to Zhenjiang to die. Grace arrived home from the United States in early September to find her mother sitting up in bed chewing gum—“I hear chewing gum is the thing in America these days”—and waiting expectantly for the brand new Victrola, with a parcel of records to play on it, which she had ordered from Shanghai. It was a last spurt of defiance. “The poison of the disease had crept through her body and every sense seemed dulled,” wrote Grace. “She slept as if in stupor.”
One of her last requests was a foxtrot, danced to a jazz record on the Victrola by her nurse, an elderly English ex-prostitute from Shanghai with a ravaged face and died blonde hair, who was an unexpected hit with her patient. Carie told Pearl it had been a mistake to give up dancing as a girl, adding dreamily that, if she could start over again, she would give her life to America. Illness stripped away her faith, and with it her respect for her husband. His presence disturbed her, making her so tense and uneasy that her daughters kept him away. The hymns she had loved and sung all her life now seemed to mock her on the Victrola. “O rest in the Lord / Wait patiently for Him” was an old favorite, but when her daughters played it for her “she said with a quiet and profound bitterness, ‘Take that away. I have waited and patiently—for nothing.’” She died in her sleep with Absalom and Grace at her bedside on October 21, 1921.
More than a decade later Pearl described in The Time Is Noon a fictional daughter who stays away as if forcibly held back from her mother’s deathbed: “Something blinded her—not tears. She was not weeping. Her throat was thick, her eyes fogged, her heart beating all over her body. She was afraid. She turned blindly to the window and stood looking out.” In her biography of her mother Pearl saw this as the moment that finally cut her loose from the world of her childhood and the self that had been bound by its constraints. “When I think of her dying I still see that landscape, the bamboos swaying below the window, the valley beyond, the small farmhouses and the tawny fields, the late gleaners moving slowly across them, women and children in their peasant blue, and beyond them again the distant mountains. Those were long minutes in which I felt my very flesh being torn from hers. I longed to go to her and I could not.” Pearl’s account of Carie’s courage and composure at the end echoes the story of Mulan, the folk heroine who had thrilled her as a child, and whose brilliant career owed much to a fearless mother. “Any Chinese who reads this will recall… Mulan’s mother!” wrote a Chinese critic reviewing The Exile on publication. Carie might have relished the compar
ison. She was buried beside her son Clyde in the foreigners’ walled cemetery at Niupipo, down the hill and across the valley from the Sydenstricker house.
“Fiction is a painting,” wrote Pearl, “biography is a photograph. Fiction is creation, biography is arrangement.” She herself reworked the story of her mother’s death in three biographical books and two novels. The first was The Exile, an energetic vindication written immediately after Carie died, piecing together her life from her own diaries and from Pearl’s recollections, a collaborative and emotional rather than a factual reconstruction, certainly not a biography in Pearl’s prosaic and mechanical definition. Two years later she revisited the same subject in her first novel, East Wind, West Wind, where the mother’s long, slow, stoical dying hangs over the book’s last section, putting all other lives on hold as she struggles like someone trying to get rid of a burden, silent, immobile, looking more and more like her daughter, gnawed and savaged by pain that turns her face gray and shortens her breath. At the end, having glimpsed the hard truth of her mother’s marriage, the daughter shrinks from looking closer: “I drew the curtain at last, and shut her away, back into the loneliness in which she had lived.”
After another decade Pearl removed the concealing curtain in The Time Is Noon. She said the book insisted on being written—“I had to get rid of all my life until that moment”—at a time of transition and confusion, when she could see no hope for herself in the future. “In this mood I began to write The Time is Noon… writing out my thoughts and fears not in my own person, of course, but in a woman I had created out of myself.” By far the best and bleakest thing in the book is its frank and angry account of the minister’s daughter nursing her mother, whose voice grows hoarse and dry as her flesh swells and her eyes shrink (“death sat, looking out of her eyes, breathing its stenchy breath out of her nostrils”). The horror of physical decay is compounded by shock and incredulity as the daughter finds herself slowly and unwillingly confronted with the sexual coercion and emotional nullity at the core of her parents’ marriage. The wife shrinks from her husband’s touch, claiming tiredness and refusing to let him near her: “They looked at each other, father, daughter. The daughter cried at him in her heart, ‘What have you done to make her so tired?’ The father answered with his calm, righteous look. His look said, ‘I have done nothing that is not my right to do.’”
The one flicker of genuine feeling between the dying woman and her husband is a moment of mutual savagery when he finds that she has systematically put aside sums from her meager housekeeping allowance for their children. He turns on her, beside himself with fury at having been cheated of funds for his charitable causes, before rifling her trunk and helping himself to her savings. Afterward their daughter finds the contents of the ransacked trunk, family papers, baby clothes and shoes, a lifetime’s carefully preserved mementoes, all tipped out as trash on the attic floor. “It darted across her mind that there was nothing there of the man’s, nothing of their father at all. He had come and taken all he wanted and he had left nothing behind.”
As soon as Pearl got back to Nanjing in the winter of 1921–22 she began to put the story of her mother’s life down on paper, refilling that metaphorical trunk, writing out of grief and fury, dashing down her words with no time for correction, driven by the image of her mother that burned in her memory. She wrote without thought of publication, almost without realizing she was writing a book at all. The Exile starts with an exuberant image of Carie in her prime, the mother first imprinted on the mind of the infant Pearl, outlined against the sun and holding a trowel in her hand in the garden of the mission house at Tsingkiangpu, radiant, vigorous, all-powerful, at the furthest remove from the sad, shriveled, and defeated woman Pearl had sat with and watched over at the end of a life pointlessly sacrificed to a futile cause. The book ends with an effusive postscript (added fifteen years later, when The Exile was finally published), which makes it sound more like a biography of the Statue of Liberty than an actual human being: “Young in spirit to the end, indomitable, swift in generosity, eager after the fine things of life and yet able to live ardently if necessary in poverty, idealistic with the true idealism that is never satisfied with mere idealism not translated into actuality… To all of us everywhere who knew her this woman was America.” Between these two heroic evocations lies a sober story of rejection, submission, and resistance in which the author catches sight of herself reflected again and again in her mother’s mirror.
In the absence of all but the most rudimentary documentation, Pearl relied in The Exile on things her mother had told her backed up by a photographic memory apparently in working order from the day of her birth. But because even Pearl could not remember what had happened before she existed, she shaped her account of her mother’s early life on the pattern of her own recent experience. The key turning point for Carie as a young woman—her mother’s illness and death—becomes on one level a replay of Pearl’s own conscious or unconscious groping toward some still undefined sense of purpose: “She was beginning already to cut her life free, ready for a way to be shown her.” Carie rejected the passionate and sensual side of her nature represented by her first lover—“I could see in her eyes her memory hot still with the thought of him”—married Absalom to confirm her rejection, and spent the rest of her life coming to terms with the enormity of her mistake. Pearl, who had married for the opposite reason, found herself as a young wife deep in similar frustration and doubt. At times in The Exile she seems to be writing about her own exasperation as much as her mother’s, with a husband who makes it painfully clear that no wife can compete in attraction or significance with his work. In her story Absalom provides a focus for her mixed feelings about Lossing. “His somewhat pedantic speech, his slow rare humor, his complete absorption in his task, his inability to face or to understand the practical difficulties in human lives, his own ascetic and rigorous life which had no place for beauty or pleasure, came to repel her.”
The Exile is a study of sexual and emotional incompatibility “in an age stern to women,” when marriage had no exit. “However two might strain from each other, however barren might be the husks of union between them, however far they dwelt in spirit from each other, the outward bond was not to be broken.” In a poignant passage near the end of the book Carie in her fifties finally relinquishes her dream of working alongside her husband, realizes she will never find companionship in her marriage, and accepts that the most she can expect is to live out the rest of her life plodding on foot from one Chinese village to another, giving and getting what comfort she can from the local women. It was the existence Pearl had until recently envisaged for herself in Nanxuzhou.
The Exile is admittedly biased, sometimes factually inaccurate, and in places heavily romanticized, but it takes imaginative possession of its subject with a novelist’s aplomb while at the same time retaining a degree of biographical detachment exceedingly difficult for a child to bring to bear on a parent. It is a remarkable achievement, and one that restored Pearl’s innate balance and sense of proportion. It also clarified her priorities. For her, as for her brother Edgar, there could be no question of divorce in the lifetime of either of their parents, but with this book she distanced herself from her past, sharpened her understanding of her own predicament, and cleared the way for a very different solution when, like Nora in Ibsen’s Doll’s House, she too would eventually have to confront in her marriage what Hu Shi called the four evils of selfishness, slavery, hypocrisy, and cowardice.
When The Exile was finished Pearl showed the manuscript to no one, packing it up and putting it away in a closet, where it lay forgotten for years. Much the same would happen later with The Time Is Noon, which spent more than thirty years in a drawer before it was finally published. Both seemed initially too raw and intimate for public consumption. Pearl said she wrote The Exile as a family memoir for Carol to read and for her unborn grandchildren. But although she never thought of it at the time as a book, still less as publishable, she must
have known it had made her a writer. Judging by what she wrote next, she also realized that her real subject was China—not the China where her mother had lived all her adult life in exile, but the China where Pearl felt at home.
When the Bucks left Nanxuzhou, each of them already had the makings of a book that would shoot them both within twelve months of one another to the top of their respective career ladders. In the two and a half years Lossing spent collecting data from the farmers, Pearl had watched and listened, absorbing into her imagination the shapes and patterns of ordinary Chinese life, the kind of stories that no one had ever written down before and that would have been lost forever if she had not served her time as a solitary witness and confidant for the village women of Nanxuzhou. Her new life in Nanjing marked the start of a process of profound personal change. But it would be nearly another decade before she managed to rid herself completely of the narrow Western vision that could see only grimy, fetid, disease-ridden hovels in the Chinese homes so accurately recreated and inhabited with such warmth and generosity of feeling in The Good Earth.
CHAPTER 5
Pearl Buck in China Page 15