Pearl Buck in China

by Hilary Spurling

  Absalom, who had always considered it beneath him to account for sums entrusted to him by the church, saw no need to change his tactics. “He went his way, serene and confident, secure in the knowledge of his own rightness,” wrote Pearl. “I never saw him in undignified argument with others.” From the point of view of the younger missionaries trying to repair the damage, he had very nearly wrecked their enterprise through credulity, poor judgment, and the certainty that his own motives were beyond human criticism. “Those meetings at the station were just a sheer agony to me,” said his daughter Grace. “I can remember sitting there and hearing him on the verge of being put out… but nothing on earth would stop him.” Feeling betrayed by his own kind, Absalom relied blindly on his Chinese followers, who had presented him at the start of his seventieth year with a gilded scroll, red silk banners, and a scarlet panoply on a pole. But once again his defective sense of other people let him down. He was definitively outmaneuvered a few days after his birthday by his brother missionaries. A new rule requiring compulsory retirement at the age of seventy—specifically aimed at Sydenstricker, who was the only missionary in North Kiangsu anywhere near this age limit—became official policy at the annual meeting in Kuling in August 1922. In her fictionalized version of her father’s downfall in The Time Is Noon Pearl described him dragging himself home after his enforced resignation: “His lips were moving, and he made angry futile gestures like weak blows.” He passed the winter “in a sort of stupor of dismay.” Reviving in time to set out on his annual spring itineration, accompanied by the stout-hearted Ma Pangbo (who had been accused of corruption along with all the rest), he found his chapels and schools closed down, his native preachers dismissed and their congregations scattered. “Everything was gone—his whole life’s work swept away.” A minor stroke followed, either just before or soon after Pearl moved him with Grace into her house in Nanjing in April 1923.

  This uprooting might have finished him off if Pearl had not, by sheer force of personality, obliged the reluctant seminary board to appoint him head of its correspondence department. “It was only by much contriving, infinite resourcefulness and great kindness that the whole thing was accomplished,” wrote Grace, who, like Pearl, dreaded seeing their parents’ forty years in China end in failure, disgrace, and death. It took diplomacy to persuade the authorities to offer their father a job, and even more to get him to accept it, but Absalom (who had initiated correspondence courses at the seminary many years before) was immediately at home in a university setting. He worked on his New Testament, preached on street corners, and gave the students keen attention, which they returned with interest. “All his life he rather wistfully admired handsome and clever young men,” wrote Pearl. “Many handsome and clever young Chinese certainly did what they liked with him.” He continued distributing money he couldn’t afford, providing textbooks, paying tuition fees, even handing over his own warm clothes to favored students. Pearl darned his woolen underwear, patched his threadbare overcoat, and rescued him from scrapes as her mother had done before her with a patience that amazed her friends. All the neighbors grew familiar with Absalom’s tall bony figure in a long black minister’s coat, passing their houses every day without looking to left or right. “He wouldn’t even see you,” said Pearl’s friend Ray Kelsey, whose husband, Dean, had been at Cornell with Lossing (it was at a picnic given by the Kelseys that the Bucks first met in Kuling). “I couldn’t stand her father.” All of them found him cold, hard, and overbearing. “I don’t think anybody could show him affection,” said Bertha Reisner. “No one could love him,” said Ray Kelsey, who had known Carie Sydenstricker at Kuling and hotly resented the way she had been treated by her husband.

  But Pearl developed unexpected solidarity with her father in the last ten years of his life. The two found common ground not simply in their mutual stubbornness and pride, nor even in their shared love for the Chinese people and their language. “He spoke Chinese as few white men ever do, with feeling and precision,” Pearl wrote. “It came at last to be more native to him than his own tongue—he spoke it far more.” Now that her brief uncharacteristic access of religious fervor had passed, leaving her as relaxed and skeptical as on the day she was received into the Church at the age of ten, she enjoyed an intellectual companionship with her father that her husband could not give. Like his daughter, Absalom had loved books all his life. “He had a remarkable mind, not scintillating but steady, penetrating, retentive,” she wrote when he died. Pearl took walks with him by day and sat alone with him at night: “He talked more in those hours than he ever had before.” According to Grace, who was living in the same house at the time, much of the material for Fighting Angel came from the countless evenings when Pearl asked questions and Absalom told her for the first time, with touching shamefaced shyness, stories of his childhood, his young manhood, and his marriage. “I put relentlessly aside Carie’s side of the story,” said Pearl, already adept at the biographer’s bifocal vision. “His own memories… were quite unlike Carie’s.”

  Absalom had begun his new life in Nanjing with a ruthless purge. Rejecting the big sunny room prepared for him by Pearl, he threw out curtains, cushions, and soft furnishings, together with his wife’s picture and every other personal memento intended to make him feel at home, ending up with an iron bedstead in a small bare monk-like cell above the kitchen. He extended the same frugality to the memoirs he wrote at Pearl’s suggestion. The two of them were the writers of the household—“I used to hear his old typewriter tapping uncertainly during hot afternoon hours when everyone else was sleeping”—but she was taken aback when he handed her twenty-five pages of typescript containing all that he considered worth recording. Our Life and Work in China is a factual record of his religious journey in the service of the Church, stripped of human interest and omitting all but perfunctory passing references to his wife and children (Carie’s favorite son, Clyde, doesn’t even rate a mention). Pearl could still be repelled by her father’s dysfunctional otherworldliness. Lilliath Bates remembered her anger and distress over a chilling incident in Shanghai, when he announced that he had found the grave of his son Arthur and was puzzled by Pearl’s question about the other two graves, having forgotten altogether the existence of his daughters Maude and Edith.

  In time Pearl came to admire, perhaps even to envy her father’s singleness of purpose: “He espoused early a cause in which he believed all his life without a shadow of doubt. Not even his own mind betrayed him. He had his mind in inexorable control.” But what touched her was the serenity, even gaiety of his old age—“Being always perfectly happy, he had a charm about him”—and his fondness for disconcertingly simpleminded jokes, something he had always shared more readily with colleagues than he could with his own family (“Kill Sydenstricker!” went a favorite one-liner passed round the missionaries of North Kiangsu. “That is the only way to stop his jokes”). Pearl discovered in these years aspects of her father she had never previously suspected, and it changed her attitude to him as well as insidiously affecting her view of her husband. She understood the defensive origins of Absalom’s fearful rigidity, while his childishness and helpless dependence appealed to the same maternal instincts aroused by her own little daughter.

  Carol Buck had grown from an exceptionally beautiful baby into a boisterous child, sturdy and big for her age but restless and demanding, slow to learn, uncoordinated, and lacking in physical control. She played wild games with the neighbors’ children, and she loved roughhousing with her father, rolling over and over, laughing and squealing on the sloping lawn below the house. She expressed her wants with jabbering and grunts, sniffing at visitors or jumping up at them like a dog. She had dry itchy skin, suffering from eczema so badly as a small child that her hands had to be bandaged night and day to stop her from scratching. Carol couldn’t speak, and she responded blankly to things that made other children laugh or cry, but she knew enough to be fiercely jealous of the writing that drew her mother’s attention like a magnet. The Bea
rs remembered her throwing porridge or scooping earth from the potted plants in the living room to clog the keys of her mother’s typewriter.

  Lossing sometimes tried to control the child, but Pearl could not bear to see her disciplined, nor was she convinced by her husband’s cheerful insistence that he and his three brothers had all been late talkers. Pragmatic and unflappable, he accepted his daughter’s limitations more easily than was possible for Pearl, who compared Carol to her friends’ babies and was cruelly conscious that some mothers kept their children away from hers. Even Emma White found being with Pearl’s daughter too upsetting for her two children, who were almost the same age. The young Thomsons and Reisners fooled about happily with Carol, but their mothers could not give the reassurance Pearl longed to hear. All her Nanjing friends recognized long before she did that something was seriously wrong. “I was to have nearly four years of happy ignorance about her,” wrote Pearl, who had learned very young how to ignore warning signals and look away from things too dreadful to contemplate. “She was three years old when I first began to wonder.”

  It took yet more time before Pearl could bring herself to go into action. “I was reluctant and unbelieving until the last.” The Bucks rented a beach house in the summer of 1924 at the popular seaside resort of Peitaho (Beidaihe) on China’s northern coast so that Lossing could visit farmers in Manchuria while his wife and child swam or paddled and hired ponies to ride along the sand. At a talk given by a visiting American pediatrician from Beijing, Pearl recognized her daughter’s symptoms and arranged for the lecturer and two other doctors to examine Carol at her house the next day. She retained forever a mental snapshot of Carol coming in from the beach that morning, sturdy and brown in a white swimsuit with a bucket in her hand, outlined against the sun like Carie on the first page of The Exile. “In spite of my terror, I was proud of my child as she stood before the doctors.” They refused to make a specific diagnosis but advised an immediate return to the United States for consultations. The Bucks went back to Nanjing, where Ray Kelsey remembered Pearl clinging to her in tears, unable to say anything but “What am I going to do? Oh God, God! What am I going to do?”

  The family crossed the Pacific by Empress liner in late summer. It was on this ship that Pearl wrote “A Chinese Woman Speaks,” dashing it down quickly in free moments in the dining salon on fifty sheets of ship’s notepaper. The story was a way of escaping from her own predicament, while at the same time reflecting one aspect of it in a Chinese looking-glass, and on arrival she forgot all about her manuscript. They headed for Ithaca, New York, where Lossing, who was on sabbatical, planned to take a master’s degree in agricultural economics at Cornell. He got down to work in lodgings near the campus, while Pearl set out alone with their daughter on a round of visits to specialists in every discipline that might conceivably be relevant. The verdict eventually delivered after exhaustive tests at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, was that the child was physically in good shape but mentally impaired for no known reason, and that nothing could be done to help her. The consultant advised Pearl kindly not to give up trying. She was thankful ever after to a small, unprepossessing clinician speaking broken English who intercepted her on the way out to urge her not to fool herself: “You will wear out your life and beggar your family unless you give up hope and face the truth. This child will be a burden to you all your life. Get ready to bear that burden.”

  She never forgot his words—“I suppose the shock photographed them upon my memory”—which shaped her future, both as a woman and as a writer. It would be another quarter of a century before scientists finally identified Carol’s condition (she was suffering from phenylketonuria, or PKU, brain degeneration caused by inability in the newborn child to process a chemical called phenyl, a deficiency that can be treated only if detected in its early stages). Pearl said that, although she struggled against the knowledge, she recognized deep down that the man was right because she had already unconsciously given up hope. Long afterward she compared the impact of this blow to deep internal bleeding, tearing flesh, a “monstrous ache of the heart which becomes physical and permeates bone and muscle.” In her fictional account in The Time Is Noon she wrote that at bedtime on that first night she felt “as though she were laying herself down to die by her own hand.”

  Pearl rejoined her husband in two small rented rooms in a minister’s house in Ithaca. Irrational guilt and a sense of her own failure as a mother gave a kind of dreary horror to the unfamiliar landscape of gray water and snow-covered hills, heightened by American Indian legends that the lakes around Ithaca were bottomless. She sought oblivion in punitive, mind-numbing drudgery. Looking after Carol for the first time without an amah, cooking, cleaning, washing, and shopping for a family of three on the single modest salary that was all they had now that she herself was no longer teaching, meant hard physical labor and stringent economy. The budget could be stretched to cover a single small cheap weekly cut of meat on top of their staple diet: a loaf of bread, a quart of milk, and one egg a day each for Carol and Lossing. A local farmer stocked the cellar with a cartload of potatoes, onions, carrots, and apples that had to last the winter. Otherwise their only other regular expense was the money paid to a neighbor to take care of Carol in the hours when Pearl was away, attending classes in English literature. “I felt it wise to plunge into some sort of absorbing mental effort that would leave me no time to think of myself,” she wrote, explaining her decision to enroll in a master’s degree program like her husband. She fit her studying into free hours in the college library late at night, after Carol had been put to bed.

  Everything she did or planned from now on was subordinate to Carol’s needs. Even her longing for another child reawakened only when a doctor suggested that a companion might help to stimulate her daughter. She persuaded Lossing that they should adopt a baby from a small private orphanage attached to the church that acted as his sponsor, the Second Presbyterian of Troy, New York. From the twenty babies available, laid out in their dormitory in rows of cribs, Pearl chose a tiny, bald, severely malnourished infant with a misshapen ear (pushed forward rather than flat against the skull because the child had lain for weeks on the same side), who refused to eat and had added nothing in three months to her birth weight of seven pounds. Ignoring professional advice not to waste time on a dying child, Pearl recognized stubbornness in her new daughter as well as a neediness that matched her own. Janice repaid her by taking to the bottle as soon as they got home, starting the long, slow, uneven process of rebuilding Pearl’s confidence in herself as a mother. The despair she felt did not lessen, but it became more manageable as she filled her life with barriers against it—studying for a degree, housekeeping on a shoestring with no human or mechanical help, the full-time care of two difficult and damaged children under five.

  She started writing again for the same reason, driven by the family’s precarious finances. Lossing taught Sunday school in lieu of rent, but tuition, fees, winter clothes, and mounting bills were more than he could manage. Pearl got out her shipboard story, tidied it up, and sent it to the editor of Asia magazine, who wrote back in June 1925, offering a fee of one hundred dollars and publication the following spring. Acceptance of “A Chinese Woman Speaks” launched her professionally as a fiction writer, but without the thrill produced by her articles in the Atlantic and Forum the year before. Success was now no more than a side effect of financial desperation. She attempted a sequel but abandoned it to concentrate on the Laura L. Messenger Memorial Prize, awarded for the best historical essay “in the field of human progress” and worth $250 to the winner, always in practice if not in theory a male history major. An experienced strategist ever since her days as a child prize-winner on the Shanghai Mercury, Pearl had researched the student award situation shrewdly—“Quite coldbloodedly I asked which was the largest”—and her assessment of what the Messenger judges wanted was spot on. She won with a long, scholarly, cogently argued analysis, “China and the West,” which articulated for
the first time the hard-hitting positions she would take later on the achievements and failures of the mission movement, and the imperialist and racist implications of American foreign and domestic policy. It gave her the impetus to finish her second story, which Asia immediately accepted. “I got back my faith in myself, which was all but gone in the sorry circumstances of my life.”

  “Endurance is only the beginning,” Pearl wrote long afterward, explaining that learning to bear grief that cannot at first be borne has to be done alone. It was an atrocious education. In retrospect she divided it into stages, beginning with devastation and disintegration: “Despair so profound and absorbing poisons the whole system and destroys thought and energy.” For Pearl it remained the underlying reality of her life long after the family left Cornell to return to China in the autumn of 1925. She could not share her feelings with Lossing, whose matter-of-fact acceptance of Carol’s situation seemed only to intensify Pearl’s guilt and apprehension. She tried to offload them instead by blaming him for not telling her about a history of similar problems in his family (in fact PKU can be inherited only from two parents each carrying the recessive gene, which means that both Pearl and Lossing must have been carriers). Her schedule became hectic. Every moment had to be accounted for: “guests always leaving or just coming, special meals, something always doing,” said Grace, who found it tiring even to contemplate the pressures of her sister’s life.