Pearl Buck in China

by Hilary Spurling

  Pearl could no longer listen to music. Routine claims on her attention—house, garden, plants, books, students, the company of friends—seemed null and pointless. “None of it meant anything,” she said. She existed on the surface, struggling, like the dowager empress in a fictional biography she wrote thirty years later, to contain feelings that threatened to overwhelm her: “She was frantic with anger and anxiety and the discipline she enforced upon herself to hide what she felt, drained the strength from her very bones.” Apart from her first outburst in Ray Kelsey’s kitchen, none of her friends, not even Grace, saw her break down in tears. She said she kept her weeping for the hours she spent alone with Carol, which were also the only times when she felt herself truly alive. Absalom remained oblivious as usual. Ray felt it was Pearl’s brother Edgar—by now an experienced statistician, invited by Lossing to accompany the Bucks back to Nanjing as a visiting lecturer—who became at this point “more like a father to Pearl.”

  The surface pleasures gradually returned—“Books, I remember, were the first”—but it was another fifteen years before Pearl recognized almost with surprise that rebellion had given way to a kind of resignation. “Agony has become static,” she wrote grimly. It took longer still for her to be able to explore dispassionately the meaning of her daughter’s life, and its impact on her own. “It is not shame at all,” she told Emma, explaining why for years she could not talk about Carol, or even admit her existence to anyone but old friends. “I am sore to the touch there, and I cannot endure even the touch of sympathy.”

  The process of acceptance took place so deep within her that it left only faint external traces, even on her novels. Carol stands behind Wang Lung’s disabled daughter in The Good Earth, and the girl in The Mother whose ceaseless scratching, whimpering, and red-rimmed eyes are discounted by her family until her mother realizes too late that the child has gone blind. Pearl’s own state of mind is reflected as always most directly in the mother of the brain-damaged baby in The Time Is Noon: “She would sleep a little and wake in the morning stifled, as one might wake in a dense smoke, or under a heavy weight. Before she was well awake, dragging her mind upward out of sleep, she knew something was wrong—terror waited. Then she was awake and there the terror was, fresh and sharp and new with the morning.”

  INNER PERTURBATION WAS compounded by external tension in China in those years. When the Bucks received their degrees from Cornell in June 1925 the situation was too volatile for them to think of going straight home. The unexpected death of Sun Yatsen in March had sparked a gathering wave of protest and police repression. Perennially simmering fury against foreign economic and military domination erupted in extended strikes, trade boycotts, riots, and student demonstrations suppressed with extreme government brutality backed by Western battleships and machine guns. Hope and apprehension focused on the Nationalist headquarters in Guangzhou, where systematic preparations for armed conflict were in progress under a bold general and prime contender for the party’s vacant leadership, Chiang Kaishek. The foreign community watched uneasily. “My own sympathies were entirely with the Chinese,” wrote Pearl, who had set out in her Messenger prize essay the long history of coercion and aggression that lay behind the current turmoil. “The driving force… was a passionate desire to get rid of the foreigners who had fastened themselves upon China through trade and religion and war, and set up a government for the reform and modernization of their country.”

  Idealistic students from all over China poured into Guangzhou to join Chiang Kaishek’s model army. The Nationalist Party, or Kuomintang, funded from Moscow and reorganized by Russian advisers along Soviet lines—“the same discipline, the same techniques of propaganda, and the same ruthless political commissars”—joined forces with the Chinese Communist Party in fragile, fractious alliance for the sole purpose of seizing power. The Bucks returned that autumn to a country once again on the verge of revolution. In November Nanjing became the capital of the eastern warlord General Sun Chuanfang, who would be defeated by the Nationalists a year later. Pearl sowed larkspur and snapdragons in her garden, and taught courses at Ginling Women’s College as well as at both universities. Intellectually she felt closer to her earnest, argumentative Chinese students than to her American compatriots: “I was increasingly conscious of the years of separation from my own people. My childhood had not been theirs, nor theirs mine…. Under the life of everyday I knew that the old cleavage was deepening. My worlds were dividing, and the time would come when I would have to make a final choice between them.”

  In the sweltering summer of 1926 the Bucks did not join the general exodus of foreigners to Kuling. Lossing had farms to visit, and Pearl, always acutely aware of the gossip provoked in any new environment by her two small daughters, preferred to remain behind in her familiar Chinese world. This was the last of what she called the “Waiting Summers,” when everyone knew that change was inevitable but no one could tell exactly when or how it would come. “It was difficult to know what was going on except from the Chinese newspapers which printed brief undigested items which had somehow to be connected by pondering and guessing, and then connected again with the grapevine of students’ confidences and complaints.” Pearl, who taught an extramural English course at home in the evenings, remembered sitting out on the terrace with her students to watch the moon rise over the pagoda beyond the garden wall. Temperatures of well over 100 were normal in these steamy, mosquito-ridden Yangtse lowlands. “You take Washington DC, and raise the temperatures several degrees, and you have Nanjing,” said one of Lossing’s colleagues. “You’d feel as if you had an iron band round your head and someone screwing it tighter every minute.” In July the National Revolutionary Army began marching north from Guangzhou, invading one province after another, capturing cities and recruiting soldiers from the defeated or defecting troops of provincial warlords. Rumors of their legendary exploits preceded them. Chiang Kaishek’s campaign relied as much on propaganda and psychological warfare as on military strategy: “all about the country and into every city there ran ahead of them and behind them and on every side of them the tales of their power and strength and never-failing victories,” Pearl wrote years later in A House Divided. “The soldiers of the rulers, who were hirelings, ran before them like leaves before a bitter wind.”

  For all the difficulties between husband and wife, Pearl and Lossing agreed that China’s best hope lay with the Nationalists. As civil war drew closer to Nanjing, both filled their time with work on their prospective books. Lossing had incorporated farm surveys as a core element in his students’ practical training program, and was beginning to shape the resulting data into the text subsequently published as Chinese Farm Economy. Pearl, who had just published a short story called “Lao Wang, the Farmer,” dramatizing the clash between ancient rural China and the modern Western world, was thinking about the kind of material that would eventually find its outlet in The Good Earth. She had been working on and off on a novel of one sort or another ever since she first read chapters to the literary club at Miss Jewell’s School in Shanghai. Now she signaled more serious intentions by taking over a room of her own, under the gable in the attic with a window looking out over the garden, and the roofs of the city within its curving wall, to the double-crested peak of Purple Mountain. Here she retreated in spare moments snatched from her students and her household to work steadily all winter on a novel.

  Westerners were warned to prepare for siege or flight. Bertha Reisner said she had already had her bags packed for a year or more. By December Nationalist armies controlled five key provinces in southern and central China. The two factions within their ranks split into rival camps, the Communists dominating a civilian government established at Wuhan in Hubei province, while Chiang Kaishek in Nanchang, nearly two hundred miles to the southeast, prepared to challenge Sun Chuanfang by marching on Nanjing and Shanghai. Refugees packed the Yangtse riverboats. Many missionaries headed for the coast, and some left China altogether. By the end of the winter there
were nearly two dozen Western warships ready for action in the river at Shanghai. Lossing, who dreaded American military intervention more than Chinese battles—“we are living… in fear of what our own home government will do”—persuaded 127 Nanking missionaries to sign a telegram advising Washington that any use of force would be counterproductive. At the beginning of February 1927 the Bucks took in the family of Pearl’s sister Grace, who had married a missionary three years earlier and moved to Yueyang in rural Hunan, one of the first provinces to be taken over by Communist cadres within the Nationalist coalition. Grace and her husband, Jesse Yaukey, with one young baby and another on the way, had escaped like all the other foreigners, with only as much as they could carry. They brought reports of school closures, mass meetings, mob violence, the forcible redistribution of land, and the persecution of any Chinese caught associating with foreign imperialists. Militant students commandeered the Yaukeys’ house, and the man who had helped transport their luggage to the river was paraded through the streets and jailed.

  The rout of Sun Chuanfang, with the fall of Hangzhou later the same month, put Nanjing next in line as a battlefield for the northern warlords, united only by opposition to the southern armies. Security was tightened within the city. Actual or suspected revolutionaries disappeared from Pearl’s classes at Southeastern. Lossing said his students were afraid to be seen on the streets for fear of having their heads chopped off. “All Bolshevist propaganda in Nanking has been put down with a firm hand by the government,” a British missionary reported with approval on February 15. “A few student agitators from the government’s Southeastern University have been executed and their heads have adorned the city gates.” Pearl put these heads into another story, this time about a farmer named Wang Lung, bewildered by his first contact with young revolutionaries as he watches a jeering crowd collect on the Bridge of the Three Sisters in Nanjing: “There at the bridge, on seven bamboo poles, were seven bleeding heads, bent on ragged, severed necks; heads with fringes of black hair hanging over their dull, half-closed eyes. One head had its mouth open and its tongue thrust out, half-bitten off between set white teeth…. They were all the heads of very young men.”

  On the last day of February Nanjing was overrun by the soldiers of General Chang Chung Chang, a former bandit chief, currently military governor of Shandong, who took over the city and its hinterland from the defeated General Sun with an army fifty thousand strong. These were rough, fierce, dirty fighters living by ransack and pillage, “bandits in uniform,” said Lossing. They came down from the north on foot, muleback, or shaggy little ponies, armed with whips, guns, swords, and sabers. Lossing watched a company of fifty foot soldiers marching down a narrow cobbled lane carrying long red-tasseled spears. Stalls vanished, shops closed, and streets emptied as they passed. “As soon as the people of Nanking surmised the change last Monday from Sun to Chang, the whole city was in a frenzy of fear of looting,” wrote Lossing on March 6. “It is generally believed that the Nationalists will be here within a week or two…. With the coming of the Northern soldiers under General Chang Chung Chang anyone in Nanjing who was neutral or opposed to the Nationalists has turned in favor of them.” The Nationalists were disciplined, highly motivated, and reasonably paid and could be counted on to restore order if they won the battle. Their leader had promised to protect foreign lives and property. The worst threat was the havoc likely to be caused by the defeated northerners being driven back through the city. “The people fear the Northern army as if they were great grey wolves,” wrote one of Pearl’s friends, Lillian Williams, wife of the vice president of Nanjing University, “because they loot and destroy and do unspeakable things…. The streets are full of these strange-looking Northern men, in grey clothes, with fur caps, with knives and bayonets and guns.”

  Pearl and Lossing debated whether to stay or go. Most other women with children had already left. By March 21 cannon could be heard booming in the distance. The U.S. consul warned all foreigners for the last time to leave the city. In the end the Bucks stayed put because Absalom, who had no intention of escorting his children and grandchildren to safety, fell ill at the last minute. “It was not conscious pretence—it was an actual disturbance caused by the distress of not having his own way,” wrote Pearl. By the afternoon, when he felt well enough to leave his bed, the city gates had finally been locked. The roar of cannon fire came closer. That night the Bucks’ attic and basement filled up with Chinese friends, servants, and tradespeople, bringing their relatives and neighbors with them for shelter. Foreigners’ houses, protected by gunboats and diplomatic treaties, were safer than Chinese homes in wartime. “I… laughed, and told my sister that the cellar was so full of people I felt as though the floors were heaving,” wrote Pearl: “the subdued noise gathered and mounted to the very roof in a stilled roar.”

  The battle lasted three days. When the guns fell silent in the early hours of March 24 the northerners fled without stopping even for plunder. The family woke that morning to an empty house. The people crammed into it from attic to cellar had slipped away noiselessly by night. “It did not occur to me even then that they were afraid to be found with us,” wrote Pearl. The family of eight—Pearl with her husband, father, and two children, Grace with her husband and small son—gathered for breakfast, relieved that all danger had passed. Pearl picked the first spring daffodils in her garden. “It was a strange night,” Grace wrote in The Exile’s Daughter. “The battle was over. The city had fallen. In the streets everything was utterly silent with that fearful stillness which falls on a Chinese city whenever there is fear.” Absalom had just left for work at the seminary and Lossing was preparing to head off for the university when they were interrupted just after eight o’clock by the family tailor. “His hands were shaking and he seemed scarcely able to speak,” wrote Grace. “‘Run, run!’ he was saying. ‘They are killing the foreigners.’” The university’s vice president, Jack Williams, Lillian’s husband, had been shot dead by a soldier on a nearby street. Parties of soldiers were searching foreign houses and hunting down their occupants. Pearl sent the gateman to stop her father’s rickshaw and bring him back, by force if necessary. The servants urged the family to hide, but no one could suggest where until Lu Sadze, now living in a mud house beyond the compound wall, arrived at a run to fetch them. “Her sun-browned hair was uncombed, her jacket half-fastened, her face grey,” wrote Grace. “Already there was banging and howling at the main gate.”

  All of them ran, carrying the two younger children, through the back gate over rough paths between vegetable plots, fish ponds, and grave mounds to a little clutch of huts built against a tiled brick wall. The Chinese inhabitants watched silently as the fugitives packed into Mrs. Lu’s low, dark rented room, ten feet by eight, furnished with a chair, a stool, a quilt, a plank bed, and a pot for sanitation. In the distance the individual shrieks and screams of people on the street fused into a collective roar. Inside the hut no one spoke. None of the children cried. They could hear the crowd burst through their garden gate a few hundred yards away and smash down their heavy front door. “I cannot well describe to you the horror of that moment,” Pearl reported three weeks later to the Mission Board. She put something very like it into The Good Earth, in the scene where Wang Lung finds himself caught up by a mob preparing to sack a city house: “howling together the deep tigerish howl that he had heard rising and swelling out of the streets… people pressed forward so tightly packed together that foot was on foot and body wedged tightly against body so that the whole mass moved together as one.”

  All day the five adults and three children stood or sat in silence, listening to the shooting, the splintering of wood, and the crash of falling masonry, knowing that at any moment someone could give away their hiding place. The doctor’s house opposite theirs was fired. Other neighbors’ houses followed. Absalom, peering through a single small opening under the roof, reported the seminary burning. This was a replay of stories Pearl had heard at the time of the Boxer uprising as a c
hild of eight, only a year older than her own daughter was now. Carol’s seventh birthday had been the day before the fighting started. Janice was almost two, the same age as Richard Yaukey. All of them seemed to understand their situation. Carol behaved with adult gravity; the others sat still and watchful on their mothers’ laps. When Pearl and Grace compared notes afterward each found that the other had been planning to see their children killed before their own lives were taken: “Worse than death would be the realization that the children were in the hands of those maddened men.”

  Soldiers crowded past the hut. By afternoon Lossing reckoned there were five hundred of them in the lane outside. The uproar reached a climax in late afternoon—“we had given ourselves up for lost, since we were just about to be discovered and killed”—when, after a sudden burst of shellfire, the noise stopped. The family waited, still without speaking, for another four hours. At intervals throughout the day Chinese friends had slipped in with food, clothing, bedding, or promises to intercede with the commanding officers. By evening the chance of rescue or remaining undiscovered seemed slim. A red glow of burning buildings filtered through the hole. A young Chinese teacher from the university arrived in tears to warn them that they were to be killed before midnight: “He… fell at once upon his knees and he made the ancient kotow.” About nine o’clock he returned, bringing a Nationalist officer with an escort of soldiers, who ordered the family to leave. They came out of the hut—“each thinking that now, this, was the moment of death for which they had been waiting all day”—and were taken back toward the university, past wrecked and burning houses between lines of soldiers. “They were all young, every face was young… ignorant faces, drunken faces, red and wild-eyed…. They glared back at us, and they grinned with a dreadful laughter, for what they saw was the downfall and the humiliation of the white people who had for so long been their oppressors.”