Pearl Buck in China

by Hilary Spurling

  Pearl discovered for herself the breadth, diversity, and depth of Chinese novels, their bluntness and vigor, their ability to grip and hold an audience by unselfconsciously reflecting the danger, drama, and the familiar everyday commotion of the world they came from. She said that the greatest novels—The Dream of the Red Chamber, The Romance of Three Kingdoms, and All Men Are Brothers—contained the imaginative development of a whole people, constantly renewed and kept alive by passing “not so often from hand to hand as from mouth to mouth” through storytellers. Pearl’s reading in these years was part of an idiosyncratic creative writing program. “Only a person with a free, untrammeled mind could have prepared herself thus,” wrote Alice Hobart, who had been amazed to find Pearl exploring China in the mirror of her fiction. “Mrs. Buck had come to the original, not to say apostate conclusion that the real Chinese is not in the classics…. Sitting in her living-room with the cries of the city reaching her faintly over her compound wall… she read the novels of China one by one, peering with the keenest pleasure and increasing curiosity into a mass of story stuff accumulated through the ages.”

  She also read voraciously the latest works by her own contemporaries, short books pouring from small presses in cheap paperback: “I could buy a basketful for a dollar or so and read for days.” In the years she had been away, undergoing reeducation from villagers in the country around Nanxuzhou, the language battles had been won. Pai-hua, the common speech of ordinary people, had finally achieved government backing as the national language. Contemporary literature was now an open field, no longer fenced off by the scholars who had monopolized and policed the culture because, as Pearl said, “they alone knew how to read and write.” What was derisively called the “rickshaw-coolie school” of writers experimented recklessly in all directions, opening up forbidden territory, defying ancient taboos, exploring themselves and their problems with an unprecedented directness that appalled and alarmed their elders. Romantic outpourings, based more or less superficially on European models, acquired in China the force of a call to arms. The new school’s imitation of Western forms might be shaky and repetitive, but Pearl responded unreservedly to the energy and freshness of their perceptions: “they provided for me the clearest mirror of the world we then shared, and through them and their books I understood what otherwise might have been inexplicable.”

  Literary revolution was closely linked to political upheaval. Anger at the growing threat of Japanese aggression had exploded at the end of World War I, when former German territories in Shandong were handed over by the victorious European Allies to Japan instead of China. Disillusionment with Western treachery and opportunism produced a spontaneous wave of strikes and student demonstrations, driving dissident young idealists toward the Marxist-Leninist prototype offered by the Russian Revolution. Hope for the future lay with New Youth (the journal of that name became a Communist organ, distributed by the young Mao Zedong in his first job for the Party), New Culture, and a New Language for New People. For most intellectuals it was not the tiny, still amateurish Chinese Communist Party but Sun Yatsen’s reorganized and rapidly expanding, Russian-backed Nationalist Party that claimed allegiance. Education became a priority at all levels. Nanjing’s Southeastern University was a former teacher-training college relaunched as a government flagship school in 1921. Bold, forward-looking, and fiercely competitive, Southeastern became the first Chinese university to admit women students, to appoint a woman dean, and to teach natural sciences. Pearl far preferred it to the missionaries’ wealthier and better equipped institution, whose comfortable, conservative, all-male student body responded more predictably than the mixed-sex crowd urgently seeking free tuition at Southeastern.

  Hungry, cold, hard-up, they packed into her English courses in huge, bare, unheated classrooms with sand sifting on north winds in winter through ill-fitting door frames and around the edges of paper pasted at the unglazed windows. Their English was inadequate, sometimes almost nonexistent, but their keenness often stopped her leaving at the end of class: “I learned far more from them than from the suave and acquiescent men students in the Christian university. I came away frozen with cold in my body but warm in my heart and stimulated in mind because between me and those eager young students, so thinly clad and barely fed, there were no barriers. They wanted to talk about everything in the world, and we talked.” Ten years later she put them into A House Divided, where one of Wang Lung’s grandsons also teaches literature at the same university: “Yuan, wrapped in his greatcoat, stood before his shivering pupils and corrected their ill-written essays and with the sandy wind blowing through his hair he set upon the blackboard rules for them on writing poetry. But it was nearly useless, for all their minds were bent on huddling in their clothes, which were for many too scanty in spite of their huddling.” Like Wang Yuan, Pearl came to feel affection as well as respect for these children of small shopkeepers, teachers, or merchants and the few bright village boys who had overcome almost impossible odds to get there, and who now strained to understand texts and concepts hopelessly beyond their level of formal preparation.

  Students like these wander in and out of Pearl’s early fiction, driven by an often inarticulate hunger for knowledge, some burning with desire for change, others stunned by the hopelessness of trying singlehandedly to overthrow cultural taboos entrenched for centuries. All her life Pearl had watched young men desperate for an education coming to her parents’ house in Zhenjiang, where her father taught them what he could before sending them on their way to the theological seminary he had helped found in Nanjing. Absalom Sydenstricker, like his daughter, believed passionately in democratic access to the means of learning and communication. “Wen-li is a dead language, like mediaeval Latin, inflexible… vague… inexact,” he wrote, protesting already in 1900 against the continued use of a language 90 percent of the population could neither read nor understand. He angrily refuted charges that the vernacular was intrinsically undignified and degrading. “A form of language spoken by millions of people… can surely not be called undignified,” he argued, finding “real dignity… in the colloquial language of the people, not in the stilted artificial style of books.” The same accusations were made in his daughter’s day against the “rickshaw-coolie school” by a group of Nanjing professors, whose last-ditch rearguard action was ably demolished by Pearl’s old mentor, Hu Shi, himself now one of Beijing’s most influential academics. In Pearl’s view, Hu’s own writing proved that the spoken word could be turned into “a beautifully clear and graceful written language, flexible and alive, expressing the most profound meaning and thought.”

  Pearl herself said that she spoke and thought in pai-hua more readily than she did in English. It was the language of her early stories, which she transposed into English in her head only when she came to put them down on paper. The first story she ever published as Pearl S. Buck—“The Clutch of the Ancients,” about a young student bitterly conscious that the knowledge he craves will always be beyond his reach—was subtitled in the Chinese Recorder in September 1924, “A Translation and Interpretation from the Chinese.” This method, peculiar to Pearl, practiced and perfected during her Nanjing years, made her fiction in some ways closer to that of her Chinese than her American contemporaries. Its strangeness was immediately apparent to Western readers. “The beautiful cadences of East Wind West Wind,” one critic wrote of her first novel, “are the direct result of Pearl Buck’s having written in English while thinking in Chinese.”

  PEARL WAS BEGINNING to live in her imagination with an intensity that cut her off even from those closest to her. The only person she knew with literary tastes was Margaret Thomson from next door, whose writing was a hobby that aimed no higher than occasional pieces for the local English press. Lossing’s enthusiasm was genuine but limited. He knew nothing about books (“Pearl didn’t think he read anything,” said Emma White), and was in any case increasingly preoccupied by the demands of a fast-growing university department that took everything he had to
give. Nanjing Agricultural College had been founded specifically to lead the way in the new postrevolutionary China, and Lossing’s first move was to draw up with the college head, John Reisner, an ambitious plan for research and rural reconstruction. He published a seed catalogue for distributing improved varieties throughout the country and instituted programs to investigate all relevant factors, from implements and farm size to crop distribution and soil erosion. His hands-on approach, in its way as radical as the parallel literary revolution, astounded students who had grown up with an immemorial gulf fixed between the scholar and any form of manual labor. “They not only knew nothing about their own country people, they did not even know how to talk to them or address them,” wrote Pearl, who became increasingly uneasy over the next few years about the automatic, ingrained contempt of young left-wing intellectuals for ordinary workers and peasants.

  Lossing taught his students that firsthand practical experience of farm conditions was their only hope of introducing scientific method to farmers who traditionally blamed malevolent spirits for blight or pests, and whose standard recourse was to consult their paper gods. “If you want to improve it, you should understand it,” became his catchphrase. He himself regularly visited the country to talk to farmers, inspect their crops, and ask questions about what they planted and how it grew. “He came alone and ate and lived in farmers’ homes,” said one of his first students, who introduced his teacher to the villagers of his own home region in 1923 and accompanied him on a return visit the year after. “They were surprised that the foreigner seemed to know more about local agriculture than they did themselves.” He established China’s first Department of Agricultural Economics, which grew from an initial group consisting of Lossing himself and two students in 1921 to a staff that numbered over sixty ten years later, with a team of one hundred working on his nationwide land-use survey. “He introduced the discipline to China in all its aspects: teaching, research and public service,” said the American Journal of Agricultural Economics in 1976.

  From the start he set the pace for other institutions (“They are feeling that we should go out of business and trying to get our men from us,” he reported of Southeastern in 1922). He pioneered extension courses for local farmers and set up specialist teams to provide crisis management in times of flood or famine. A windfall grant in 1923, when the China Famine Fund donated two-thirds of a million-dollar surplus to promote Buck’s work in Nanjing, was followed by even more substantial funding from American and British sources. By the early 1930s, when the college played an increasingly important role in Nationalist government policy, Buck’s long-term vision, practical organizing ability, and gift for teamwork were generally acknowledged as a driving force. He published papers, gave lectures, attended conferences, and spent his vacations traveling to remote rural areas all over China. He was often absent on business or away working in his office, and even when he was there visitors remembered him as a largely silent presence in his own home. “I don’t think he had any intimate friends,” said his boss’s wife, Bertha Reisner. “He was so absorbed in his own interests and his own doings…. He did a very good job in his own field, he concentrated on it, that was his whole life.”

  The lack of common ground between Lossing and his wife was plain to see. “He wasn’t Pearl’s type at all,” said Bertha Reisner. “I think he was really uninterested in her. He didn’t understand her, nor she him.” “They never should have married,” said Lilliath Bates, dismayed by Lossing’s insensitivity in dealings with his wife. He treated her as he might have a farmer’s wife whose functions were strictly practical—to work hard, save money, and take care of cooking, cleaning, and child rearing—and whose further needs were no concern of his. She responded by withdrawing into herself, ceasing to care what she looked like and putting on weight as she had done in her last year of college. At the time of their courtship and marriage she had been strikingly pretty, with fair skin, blonde hair set off by blue-green eyes, and the kind of curvy figure flattered by the fashions of the day. But by 1922 even Pearl’s faithful friend Emma White was taken aback by her size. A young Chinese colleague remembered a large frumpy Mrs. Buck teaching freshman courses at Southeastern. To young Margaret Bear, Pearl looked “like a bag of meal with a string tied round the middle. She was perfectly enormous, and she’d be all curled up in this big chair reading…. She just threw her hair up anyhow, and her belt looked like a string tied round a bag.”

  Pearl was perfectly aware of how she looked to other people, and especially to the Chinese. In “A Chinese Woman Speaks,” a long story or novella written in the summer of 1924, the young Chinese narrator catches sight for the first time of a female foreigner, who might well be Pearl herself: “she wore a long cotton gown instead of trousers and had a flat string about her middle. Her hair was… smooth and straight, although of an unfortunate yellow color. She also had a very high nose… and large hands with short square nails. I looked at her feet and saw that they were like rice-flails for size.” The story is full of private jokes with melancholy undertones like this one. The Chinese woman of the title, exquisitely groomed with perfumed hair, polished fingernails, and tiny feet, responds to the foreigner with baffled pity: “How could a man desire such women as that one…? Such light flat eyes and faded hair, such coarse hands and feet?” But she too has a painful history of sexual rejection by a young Chinese husband, scientifically minded and trained as a Western doctor, who accepts the marriage arranged for him by traditionalist parents but devastates his bride by delivering a stern homily on gender equality, and refusing to consummate a union forced on both of them by an unjust and tyrannical society. The fiasco of their wedding night neatly parodies the steamy marital rapes of Western fiction—“I ran to the door, thinking in my wildness that I might escape and return to my mother’s home”—ending with the helpless, terrified, and untouched young wife crying herself to sleep alone in the marital bed.

  Over the next months she tries unsuccessfully to attract the attention of a husband worn out by his daily battle to impose rational modern solutions on problems caused by China’s legacy of superstition and obsolete belief. Her own struggles against bewilderment and neglect take place in a house clearly based on the Bucks’ Nanjing home, with china doorknobs she can’t turn, steep stairs she can’t climb, scratchy unsightly basket chairs impossible to sit in, and thick cumbersome squares of woolen carpet that can’t be shaken out or spat on. Accustomed to the padded silk surfaces, protective screens, and subtly filtered lighting of her Chinese home, she feels cruelly exposed in a Western world as bleak and comfortless as the white walls, slippery polished floors, and harsh glaring sunlight pouring through the clear glass windows of her living room. “A Chinese Woman Speaks” is a light-handed comedy of errors, false assumptions, and reversed expectations played out between its Oriental narrator and its Western reader. On another level it is also a poignant projection of Pearl’s own marriage, exploring an alternative fictional self who spends long solitary days preparing for her husband’s return from work, experimenting with face creams, hair ornaments, and carefully planned outfits: “His eyes escape hastily to other things—his letters upon the table, his book. I am forgotten.” She fills the house with flowers he never notices, prepares bowls of fragrant tea he leaves untouched, and serves delicious dishes he doesn’t even taste: “I tried no longer therefore. There is nothing that my husband desires of me. He has no need of anything I can give him.” Defeat turns to triumph in a final fairytale reversal, when the husband turns to his wife in a wonderfully suggestive image, “like the river in spring-time flowing richly into the canals empty with the drought of winter.”

  Pearl herself found no comparable relief at this point in or outside her marriage. Many of the magazine stories she wrote in the 1920s (collected later in The First Wife and Other Stories) end with suicide, sexual bondage, or total loss of hope. The central characters in two of them kill themselves to escape from loveless marriages; in a third an elderly woman unwanted
by her family threatens to do the same. Pearl’s own dissatisfaction, dimly sensed between the lines of her account of her mother’s problems in The Exile, seems to have taken clearer shape after her father moved in with the Bucks in 1923. His presence shifted the balance of the household. Absalom Sydenstricker had never thought much of Lossing, and now made sure that his views were public knowledge. “When Dr. Sydenstricker lived with Pearl, we all knew he had considerable contempt for Lossing,” said Bertha Reisner. “The whole community knew he had not approved of Pearl’s husband.” The two met only at meals, where each pointedly avoided speaking to the other. It was a tricky situation, given that Absalom was technically a guest in Lossing’s house. Open clashes were avoided, at least to start with, by Pearl’s tact and skill in managing her father. “It did not occur to him that he might not be the head of any house in which he lived,” she wrote dryly in her memoirs. “The illusion was not lessened by the unfortunate fact that he did not like his son-in-law, and made no bones about letting me know it by considerable I-told-you-so conversation, which only my deepening affection for him and sense of humor made endurable.”

  The need to bolster his own superiority by sniping at someone else came in part at least from extreme humiliation. Absalom’s last eighteen months in Zhenjiang after his wife died had been disastrous. Once Carie was no longer there to reason with him behind the scenes and defend him in public against his critics, the obstinacy and highhandedness that had for decades provoked his colleagues almost beyond bearing proved his undoing. Questions were raised about lack of transparency, chronic mismanagement of funds, and irregularities bordering on fraud. Money donated by an American benefactor for a memorial chapel had been diverted by Sydenstricker to finance projects of his own. Deeds of another chapel on his circuit had mysteriously ended up in the possession of its native pastor. A third had been used as the headquarters of an opium ring. Charges were laid and evidence produced. He could give no coherent explanation of the conduct of his Chinese helpers, who not only hijacked his chapels for unauthorized and sometimes flagrantly illicit purposes, but systematically helped themselves to bonuses in cash and kind. The case against him had been painstakingly built up over many years. “The North Kiangsu Mission has no place for free lancers or free lance work,” declared an official report containing, as far back as 1915, an unmistakable warning to Sydenstricker that routine defiance of mission policy would not be tolerated forever. “No mission should grow by the coral reef method, each person adding what he wants, and when and where he wants it. A mission should not permit… the determination of a strong-headed man to veer the bark from its true course.”