Thinking in Chinese
MRS. JOHN LOSSING Buck on arrival in Nanjing showed no sign of being anything but a typical mission wife. She dressed drably, furnished her house on a shoestring, and put the greater part of her energy into providing backup for her up-and-coming young husband. Almost immediately appointed acting dean of the agricultural college, Lossing replaced John Reisner (on two-year furlough in the United States) as head of what was already well on the way to becoming Nanjing University’s largest and most prestigious department. Pearl acted as hostess to a steady stream of international visitors, who landed in Shanghai and stopped off to inspect the department at Nanjing before going on by train north to Beijing or west by Yangtse river-boat into the interior. In the absence of hotels, her guests—scholars, writers, travelers, professors on sabbatical, and young American missionaries studying Chinese at the Language School—often stayed six months or more.
The Bucks’ house, conveniently near the university and not far from the center of town, was a standard gray brick faculty building, “too large and somewhat graceless,” according to Pearl, who subdued it with characteristic speed and style. Its heart was her hospitable sitting room on the ground floor at the back, looking out through a broad bay window over lawns and flower gardens falling away to a bamboo grove below. She filled the room with odds and ends picked up at bargain prices, capacious basket chairs, low Chinese blackwood tables, glazed ceramic bowls and jars, blue Chinese rugs, yellow curtains, and cushions made from a bale of faded silk that she had dyed herself in different colors. “The living room, large as it was, grew larger while she lived in this home,” wrote Grace, who moved in with her sister and married a fellow lodger, a missionary from the Language School. “Porches were taken into it, the south side was pushed out until it became almost an enclosure of a fragment of outdoors, it was so full of sunshine and light and flowers. The colors in the room were rich and warm… deep apricot and brilliant Chinese blue and a touch of jade green and the black of ebony.” The flowers Pearl planted beneath the window made another luxuriant mass of color. There were lilacs in spring, peach and cherry blossom, jonquils, violets, an orange grove, and a riotous pansy bed. A vine arbor led to the rose garden, shaded by big old trees, where sweet-scented China roses grew against the compound wall above beds of snapdragons, poppies, phlox, hollyhocks, and Sweet William. Lunch and dinner parties often took place on the upper terrace, with a view over the garden wall of Purple Mountain, where the first Ming emperor lay buried, rising in the distance beyond the city ramparts.
Pearl looked after her baby, managed her large household, and entertained her husband’s guests as well as teaching English courses at both the private, mission-backed Nanjing University and its Chinese-funded rival, National Southeastern University. She made friends with her next-door neighbor, Margaret Thomson, another highly educated faculty wife with literary aspirations and teaching commitments of her own. Their alliance was a comfort to Pearl, who always dreaded being marked down by other women as a misfit. “I admired her, and was sometimes a little awed by her,” another faculty wife said of Pearl. “She spoke her mind so clearly even then.” Her house was simple and plain but strikingly different from other people’s. “It was the most charming home I was ever in,” said a third mission wife, “and the most intellectual.” Pearl herself maintained afterward that she felt stifled and imprisoned in those early years. Her houseguests remembered her hunched over a book every morning in a corner by the window. One of the rare strangers who came specifically to see Mrs. Buck in her own right at this stage was Alice Tisdale Hobart, another reader and writer, who never forgot the books crammed into the big, comfortable, untidy living room, “not books lining the wall, the furnishings of so many libraries, but books of odd sizes standing on the tables, unusual looking books which gave the impression that somebody with a very unusual taste inhabited the room.”
It was a practical working library, dating back to the moment in the summer of 1922 when Pearl took a first tentative step toward cutting her life free. She was in Kuling with her daughter and her sister, spending the season in the Sydenstricker house for the first time without their mother: “I remember quite clearly one August afternoon that I said suddenly, ‘This very day I am going to begin to write. I am ready for it at last.’” What she wrote was a couple of magazine articles. It was no accident that she chose them in retrospect to mark her debut as a writer rather than the far more original, book-length typescript she had just finished about her mother. One was a private act of exorcism, the others were thoroughly professional; slick, chatty, formulaic pieces of a type churned out in industrial quantity for the Western market, remarkable in Pearl’s case only because of their unusual content. “In China Too” is a first attempt to articulate her experiences in Anhui, written in the first person by a fictionalized version of herself—the mild, inoffensive, prematurely middle-aged self she was currently projecting in Nanjing—stationed on the veranda of her old house in Nanxuzhou to watch the passing traffic on the street below:
In the early morning blue-coated farmers, and sometimes their sturdy barefoot wives, come to town carrying on either end of their shoulderpoles great round baskets of fresh dewy vegetables, or huge bundles of dried grass for fuel; caravans of tiny, neat-footed donkeys patter past, with enormous cylindrical bags of flour or rice crossed upon their backs, swayed down from excessive burdens borne too early. Sometimes their nostrils have been slit so that they may pant more rapidly under the weight of their cruel loads. Wheelbarrows squeak shrilly along… [carrying] anything, from a lean, itinerant missionary with a six weeks’ supply of bedding, food and tracts, to a double basket of squawking fowls—geese, perhaps, with yards of neck protruding from the loosely woven reeds, and viewing the passing landscape excitedly.
The tone is light, the material comical and picturesque but sharply observed, an outsider’s view of material Pearl would explore from inside in The Good Earth. The subject is undercurrents of change beginning to stir even in this remote and stagnant backwater. “In China Too” evokes a world wholly alien to the new breed of Chinese Pearl met for the first time in Nanjing: ultramodern, Western-educated faculty members who lived in carpeted and curtained two-storey houses, go-ahead young men and their fashionable wives with bobbed hair, unbound feet, and short-sleeved, tight-fitting satin dresses, a generation looking firmly to a future that took no account of the intractable realities of rural life. Flood, drought, pestilence, and crop failure had no place in this brave new urban world. In her second winter in Nanjing, the famine winter of 1920–21, Pearl’s new friends responded with blank disbelief to talk of starvation in the countryside. None of them could be persuaded to leave their cosmopolitan comfort zone and climb the city wall, where thousands of refugees from the surrounding villages huddled without food in makeshift shelters. “I saw such things in Chicago slums,” one young Chinese sociologist told Pearl smugly, “but I am sure they are not here.”
“In China Too” was published in the Atlantic Monthly in January 1924 and immediately followed by a commission for another article from the editor of Forum. “Beauty in China,” published two months later, is a second helping of highly colored travelogue containing in the middle a double-sided snapshot of the view from Mount Lushan that looks in retrospect like a statement of intent:
The other day I stood on a mountain top in Kiangsi. I looked over a hundred miles of lovely Chinese country. Streams glittered in the sunshine; the Yangtse wound its leisurely way along, a huge yellow roadway to the sea; clusters of trees cuddled cosily about little thatched villages; the rice fields were clear jade green and laid as neatly as patterns in a puzzle. It seemed a scene of peace and beauty.
And yet I know my country well enough to know that if I could have dropped into the midst of that fair land I should have found the streams polluted, the river’s edge crowded with little, wretched, mat-covered boats, the only homes of millions of miserable, underfed water folk. The villages under the trees would be crowded and filthy with fl
ies and garbage rotting in the sun, and the ubiquitous yellow curs would have snarled at my coming…. The homes would be small and windowless and as dark within as caverns.
The first of these pieces dramatizes the shock of exposure to sophisticated Nanjing, where Pearl became a professional writer. The second identifies an area of unmapped territory impossible to explore in the stylized and predigested format of a mass-market magazine. Pearl said it was publication of both articles in the United States that gave her confidence to start thinking about something more ambitious. By her own account she kept her project secret—“It was natural to me to tell no one about the novel…. I had no friends or relatives to whom I could speak about my writing”—but Lossing seems to have had a shrewd suspicion of where his wife was heading almost before she knew herself. “I am very proud of her,” he reported to his parents on February 18, 1923, “and I also am looking forward to the time when she will have a book out on China. It will be different than anything that has ever been published, and I will guarantee it to be interesting.” Lossing correctly predicted that the book would need years of preparation before it could actually be written. Pearl began her secret writing life by constructing a work space of her own in the living room, big enough to hold her desk and her upright piano, which now had a redwood screen mounted on the back, carved for her by the local carpenter with handsome and protective dragons.
Nanjing was full of symbolic guardians like these, ranging from the dragons and lions watching over private gateways to the majestic phalanx of stone beasts lining the ceremonial approach to the imperial tomb on Purple Mountain. In spite of the coming of the railway and the modern enclave formed by its two new universities, China’s ancient capital, with its decayed palaces, its temples, gardens, and pagodas, still belonged, when Pearl first settled there, to a world moving at the pace of the walker and the wheelbarrow. In five hundred years the city had shrunk inside its imposing wall, twenty-five miles around and sixty feet high, built by the fourteenth-century Ming emperor to be the biggest in the world, and still broad enough for four modern motorcars to drive abreast along the top. For her visitors Pearl organized excursions, boating parties on Lotus Lake, and picnics among the ruined splendors of Purple Mountain. But her own preference was to walk alone at night through narrow, noisy, cobbled streets filled with piles of refuse, goods for sale, and people drinking tea in front of their little, low, close-packed houses lit by bean-oil lamps. She said it was where any true novelist felt happiest: “His place is in the street.”
Back in her American world Pearl became an interpreter in Nanjing, as she had been in Nanxuzhou, translating the country and its people for Westerners demoralized as much by the sheer inscrutability of Chinese life as by its sights and smells. “She made things so much easier for us,” said Margaret Bear, newly married to Pearl’s childhood friend from Zhenjiang, James Bear junior, himself starting out on a mission career by taking a six-month language course from a base in the Bucks’ house. “I was a little homesick bride,” said Margaret. “James had been born there… but the cultural shock for me was just awful.” Cholera and smallpox were rife. Waste choked the gutters. The town’s vegetable and flower gardens were manured daily with human night soil (“when they watered there, we just thought we would die”). Pearl spent much time sorting out the problems of new arrivals like the Bears, and her old college friend Emma Edmunds, now Mrs. Locke White, who reached Nanjing with her missionary husband and two small children in 1922. Many of their difficulties with the Chinese boiled down to blank incomprehension on each side of the other’s expectations and assumptions.
Faculty members who consulted Pearl learned to trust her ingenious and surprisingly effective advice on questions of man management (“We depended on her for solutions that only a Chinese might understand or appreciate,” said Helen Daniels, the doctor’s wife). She gave talks at the Language School explaining the intricacies of an alien social system and pointing out that what looked to Westerners like filthy local habits had their counterparts in behavior no less disgusting to the Chinese: the loud laughter, braying voices, and indecently tight clothing of Western women; the men’s uninhibited expression of bad temper; the used handkerchiefs full of snot kept in their pockets by both sexes. Pearl cut through the layers of ignorance and prejudice that made foreigners routinely stigmatize their Chinese employees as greedy, lazy, or dishonest. “She was always on the side of giving more and more opportunity to the people around her,” said Lilliath Bates, another campus wife profoundly impressed by Pearl’s insistence on dismantling racial stereotypes. “After you meet people, and learn more about them… and realize what they have come through, and how much character there is underneath there, you don’t judge them by the same standards…. It’s a change in us really, in our attitudes towards people.”
Pearl had shed forever the categorical certainties of her upbringing. Even her religion now inclined to tolerance and inclusiveness. “Theologically she was miles away from where her parents and the rank and file of the missionaries were,” said James Bear, who enjoyed long heretical arguments with Pearl about the historical credentials of the Bible, and whether Jesus Christ could be classed as more than a great teacher, like Confucius. Chinese people had been telling Pearl their stories for as long as she could remember, and in these years she became steadily more attentive. Her American neighbors were often disconcerted not just by her habit of eating peanuts in the street but by her long talks with the peanut seller or the rickshaw puller, whose family lived in a dilapidated shack beyond her house. The vigorous uninhibited kitchen life confined to servants’ quarters at the back of other people’s houses spilled out, in Pearl’s, to a whole settlement of families in her courtyard. “That part of the household was as Chinese as the world beyond the walls,” said Margaret Thomson. “I can see the women squatting, sewing or weeding or drying their cabbages.” Pearl listened to the family tailor (whose story she eventually published as “The Frill”) and to the gardener’s wife, struggling to feed a growing family in a mud hut clamped against the Bucks’ side wall, with no help from a gambling husband who fathered another unwanted baby every ten or twelve months. At a time when her own small child made her more than usually aware of other mothers, Pearl paid particular attention to malnourished infants, making up bottles of formula for both the gardener’s wife and the rickshaw puller’s. “I think I never felt so touched and ashamed in my life,” said Margaret Thomson, who came back from a summer holiday to find the rickshaw man’s new baby—so skeletal and sickly she had thought best to let it die—grown plump and healthy thanks to Pearl’s daily bottles.
Pearl even had a single mother in her henhouse, a northerner with bound feet whose absconding husband had been the Bucks’ gardener in Nanxuzhou, and who turned up pregnant, destitute and desperate on their doorstep one winter soon after they reached Nanjing. “‘I came to you,’ the woman said with touching and I must say annoying naiveté, ‘I have no one else.’” Stoutly refusing all offers of practical assistance—a hospital delivery, a room in the Bucks’ house—Lu Sadze insisted on giving birth alone in the chicken shed, scrubbed out and whitewashed with a new brick floor and basic furnishings supplied by Pearl. She had already borne five babies, all of whom died of tetanus at or soon after birth. The new one, known as Little Meatball on account of his voracious appetite for life, had to be twice nursed back to health by Pearl as a result of his mother’s drastic hit-or-miss approach to child rearing (at one point she doused him by mistake in iodine, at another she accidentally inflicted severe ammonia burns). He died anyway as a toddler, and Mrs. Lu’s next pregnancy, the result of rape by a soldier from one of the many warlord armies prowling the country in those years, ended in a brutal self-inflicted abortion that almost killed the mother too. Pearl found her just in time for the hospital to save her from death by septicemia. When Mrs. Lu eventually recovered, her destiny was inextricably bound up with Pearl’s—at any rate in her own mind: “She declared that her life was mine and, though th
ere were times when I wished it belonged to anyone else but me, for she was an opinionated, devoted, loud-voiced person, yet I knew her loyalty.”
It was like being linked to a human tank. Indestructible and unstoppable, Mrs. Lu saw every obstacle as an opportunity to do battle, whether it was occupying the Bucks’ henhouse, scouring out their living room, or commandeering their lives. Graduating smoothly from running errands and doing odd jobs to acting as amah and housekeeper, she became the backbone of the Buck household and later, when Pearl finally left China, of the Thomsons’ too. “This illiterate woman fast revealed much brain-power, super loyalty and a will of iron,” wrote the Harvard historian James C. Thomson, Margaret’s youngest child, who was largely brought up by Lu Sadze (“my second mother and Pearl’s best legacy to me”). Her inexhaustible reserves of energy and endurance, her inarticulacy, the simplicity and force of her underlying vision fed directly into Olan in The Good Earth (whose first childbirth closely reproduces Meatball’s home delivery). Memories of her abortion initially inspired The Mother, which Pearl began writing immediately afterward.
As a novelist Pearl returned to her roots: “It is the Chinese and not the American novel which has shaped my own efforts in writing. My earliest knowledge of… how to tell and write stories came to me in China.” The books strewn about the Nanjing living room were the novels she had first encountered as a child and now read or reread as an adult, systematically devouring all the texts she could lay hands on, using their vitality and power to charge the batteries of her own imagination. The novel in China had always been a popular form, “wild stuff,” subversive, capricious and capacious, traditionally despised and at times actively prohibited by a powerful literary establishment that excluded fiction from the classical artistic canon. The word for story, hsiao shuo, meant something small and worthless (“even a novel was only a ts’ang p’ien hsiao shuo, or a longer something which was still slight and useless”), Missionaries, who learned Chinese exclusively by studying the classics, regarded the vernacular novel as crude, degraded, and “notoriously filthy.”
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