Pearl Buck in China

by Hilary Spurling

  The Buck party arrived intact at the building that housed the Agricultural College to find its upper floor filled with refugees from the university like themselves. Some were wounded, all had lost everything they possessed. The Thomsons had been held prisoner in their own house while soldiers ransacked their rooms for money or jewels and threatened, when Margaret’s aged mother could not remove her wedding ring, to lop off her finger as well. Everyone had suffered similar shocks. The few missionaries who failed to get away in time had been chased by soldiers through the streets, slapped, beaten, robbed, and in some cases stripped to their underwear. Most had been concealed at considerable risk by Chinese neighbors under piles of mats or brushwood, in cisterns, outhouses, coal bins, and storage bunkers. The British harbormaster, the port doctor, and two Catholic priests had been murdered like Dr. Williams. The British consul lay seriously injured. Missionaries had done better than the business and diplomatic community, cut off in their spacious compound near the port from contact with ordinary Chinese people, who made no attempt to help them. The men (whose wives and children had already been evacuated) barricaded themselves into one of their own big houses. The shelling at five o’clock came from gunboats in the river laying down a corridor of fire to provide sufficient cover for forty or fifty businessmen and traders to lower themselves on knotted sheets over the city wall.

  Almost immediately the general commanding the Nationalists’ Sixth Army intervened to stop the looting. Nationalist propaganda claimed later that what was gingerly called “the Nanjing Incident” had been accidental, spontaneous, and no fault of theirs, blaming Northern soldiers, Communist infiltrators, and civilian thugs, but contemporary eyewitness accounts agree that the perpetrators were soldiers speaking southern dialects, wearing the southerners’ brown uniforms, controlled by southern officers, and following a concerted plan to single out foreigners, break into their houses, and incite local people to help themselves to the contents. These were the kinds of terror tactics explicitly endorsed that spring by Mao Zedong and others on the left of the Nationalist spectrum. Chiang Kaishek, who seized Shanghai with Communist support in a double-pronged offensive at the same time as Nanjing, declared a Nationalist government in April. Its first move was to unleash a brutal purge aimed at systematically eliminating Communists from Nationalist Party ranks. Western recognition of the new regime required a total break with its former allies. The Nanjing Incident, conveniently downplayed at the time, is remembered today, if at all in China, as yet another instance of unprovoked attack by Western gunboats.

  The people who lived through it got the underlying message. The majority may have found shelter with sympathizers like Mrs. Lu, but the pillage feared by the Chinese from the Northern army had in fact been directed against Westerners and carried out by the citizens of Nanjing themselves, consumed by resentment and rage as much as greed. They had hacked up doors, banisters, window frames, and floorboards for firewood, but they had also torn down pipes and fittings, ripped out iron grates, smashed bathtubs and pianos for which they had no use, leaving their former masters’ homes, as one missionary put it, “looted clean as a Chinese rice bowl.” The departure of the occupants took place on the afternoon of Friday, March 25. Dazed, disheveled, exhausted, and comprehensively humiliated, the remnants of Nanjing’s foreign community withdrew on foot, walking the seven miles from the university to the river, watched by the city’s silent populace, and passing as they went the luckless remainder of the Northern army, heading for captivity in the opposite direction. The two-way traffic on the road that day was a fairly accurate foretaste of what the future held for China.

  The few remaining women with small children, such as Pearl and her sister, went in carriages supplied by the Red Cross. Sailors on the American destroyer that took them onboard served an evening meal of bread and meat that made the passengers violently sick with ptomaine poisoning. Unable either to eat or sleep, Pearl sat up all night reading a stray copy of Herman Melville’s great hymn to alienation and displacement, Moby-Dick. “My roots were abruptly pulled up,” she wrote, “and never again was I able to put them down so deeply.” It gave her an exhilarating sense of freedom when they landed next day in Shanghai, owning nothing but the clothes they had now been wearing for three days and two nights. The only thing the Bucks brought with them was the typescript of Lossing’s book. He had had the foresight to sleep with it in a briefcase beside the bed and the presence of mind to grab it as the family fled the house (“It was a godsend in a way,” he said in retrospect, explaining that expulsion gave him time at last to finish writing up his research). The script of Pearl’s novel, lying newly completed on her desk in the attic, disappeared forever, along with a mass of other books and papers stolen or destroyed in the Nanjing Incident.

  She would be thirty-five years old that summer. Her life had been drastically cut loose by no choice of her own and, whatever miserable complications lay ahead, her immediate response was a thrill of release and recklessness. “I fret sometimes over the years between 25 and 35, which were largely wasted,” she told her sister long afterward. “What was I doing in those years? And why didn’t I get to work? I see now that I was in a queer submerged state. It was like living in a solitary cell, nothing and no one came in and I seemed unable to communicate with anyone…. remembering it, I have the feelings of one having spent part of his life in jail.”

  CHAPTER 6

  In the Mirror of Her Fiction

  AFTER TEN HECTIC days in a refugee shelter in Shanghai with the foreign community close to panic, the family escaped in a bucketing little steamer that took twenty-six hours to cross the Yellow Sea to Nagasaki in Japan, where they split up. Grace, whose baby was due in a month’s time, headed north with her husband and son to Kobe in search of the nearest Western doctor. Absalom, reluctant to waste a day that could be given to his work, set off to inspect the mission field in Korea. The Bucks rented an out-of-season holiday cottage in a pine forest in the mountain resort of Unzen, a three hours’ drive from Nagasaki. It was cherry blossom time but still too cold for summer visitors, and at first (although the Thomsons joined them later) they were the only residents. Their small flimsy wooden house had cracks in the walls, no provision for heating, and paper screens dividing up the different rooms so that, as Pearl said, you couldn’t even whisper without everybody hearing. All of them jumped at small noises and were badly startled in their first week by a hunter shooting in the woods. “Almost every night we dream of some kind of attack by soldiers with knives or guns,” Lossing wrote to his parents on April 15. Pearl told Bertha Reisner that the stillness, safety, and silence of the forest made her hope they might wake one day to find everything that had happened in Nanjing had been a nightmare. “But the longer time goes on the more I begin to feel that part of our lives is chopped off short.”

  With no servants, no one for company, and no money except a small loan from the Mission Board, the family settled back into their old Ithaca routine. Lossing got out his papers and Pearl did the housework, cooking rice and fish on a portable charcoal stove on the back porch, baking her own bread, and washing their few clothes in the stream. “I keep very busy cooking, cleaning and looking after the children,” she told Bertha. “Lossing keeps regular work hours, and we don’t speak to him between the hours of 8 and 12, and 1 and 5.” Pearl organized day trips to local beauty spots, where the girls could picnic, play, and boil eggs in hot springs in the woods. Within a few weeks Lu Sadze tracked them down again, having followed the family to Shanghai and traveled steerage across the sea to reach the mountains without directions, and without a word of Japanese, because, in her view, Pearl needed help. “When I saw her standing there on the back porch in her blue cotton jacket and trousers,” wrote Pearl, “I suddenly knew that I did need her, and that I was glad to see her. We fell into one another’s arms and within minutes she was managing everything as usual.” Cranky, fierce, and obdurate as ever, Mrs. Lu was interrogated three times in her first week by the Japanese police for
littering, starting illegal fires, and traveling without a passport.

  Shortly after she moved in the Yaukeys arrived too, with their new baby, making nine people altogether in a space designed for half that number. “The little cottage was crowded,” Grace wrote. “The paper partitions grew damp and the paper blew off in the night leaving the entire house one room. [The baby] howled. It rained, it poured. The older children played in the mud for there was nothing else they could play in since the world was mud except for the tiny house.” Pearl took her two daughters and left, taking trains at random, traveling third-class, buying food on station platforms, and sleeping in village inns. She claimed later to have no memory of what lay behind her departure. All she could remember about her impromptu expedition was the reassuring sense of order and control she got from the Japanese: their cleanliness and courtesy, the neatness of their packed lunches, and the stony simplicity of the tiny moonlit gardens she gazed at through her bedroom window night after sleepless night. “I can’t imagine why I was alone,” she said, when asked long afterward what had happened to Lossing at this point, “but that shows how unimportant my marriage had already become to me. He had his own life and was living it. I was preparing for mine.”

  Forgetfulness was a useful mechanism for Pearl, a discipline she worked at from her earliest years until it became instinctive. “I have the habit of forgetting what I do not care to remember,” she wrote toward the end of her life. Her autobiography is full of references to canceled or obliterated episodes, nearly always periods of anxiety and disruption that led to major turning points. She forgot what happened after her family’s expulsion from Zhenjiang in the summer of the Boxer uprising—“for the next few months, I think it was almost a year, my memory falters”—just as she forgot the second great uprooting ten years later when she left for college: “My memories of China grow suddenly dim on that day we left our compound.” She blanked out her unhappiness at Randolph Macon (“Of my college days I remember shamefully little”), the summer she spent with Carol at Peitaho (“I forget it unconsciously since it was the place where I first knew that my child could never grow”), and the year at Ithaca that followed (“I had almost forgotten to mention it because it seems to have no relevance in my life”).

  When the family returned from Unzen to Shanghai in the autumn of 1927 Pearl tried hard to forget what followed. Her own longing to escape to the United States, at least for a few years, had been overruled by Lossing, who remained unbudgeably determined to pursue a career in China. The political situation was still chaotic. Chiang Kaishek’s bloody campaign to exterminate the Communists had reached a temporary lull that summer with the Party’s Russian advisers recalled to Moscow, Chiang himself in strategic retreat, and the eastern warlord Sun Chuanfang on the march once more. He was beaten off by the Nationalists in August, but no one could predict the long-term outcome. The Chinese staff of Nanjing University were carrying on business as usual in spite of turmoil in the city, and planning to start the new academic year with a full complement of students at the Agricultural College. Lossing hoped to get back himself as soon as it was safe to do so.

  Meanwhile the Bucks moved into a rented house, 1056 Avenue Joffre in the French Concession, shared with the Yaukeys and another refugee family, Pearl’s friend Lilliath Bates and her husband and new baby, all of them living on borrowed money until things calmed down sufficiently for them to resume their posts. At Christmas the three young mothers improvised a dinner with a single sprig of holly and homemade toys for the children. “That Shanghai Christmas was the most dismal and wretched I had ever had,” Pearl wrote. She retreated into herself and signaled that retreat by rejecting other people’s presents, buying herself instead on December 26 a book of essays, a six-foot length of rich soft blue Chinese silk, and a white ceramic bowl, “embossed with a spare branch of budded plum blossom,” to mark out her own secret space in “the rented house where nobody noticed anything anyway.” She was full of rage—“I was angry to the bottom of my soul”—and fear and foreboding. “And of that winter in Shanghai I can remember nothing else, wilfully of course, for there was plenty in our crowded house.”

  Pearl, her daughters, and two elderly amahs occupied the top floor. On his return from Korea Absalom moved in below with Grace, perhaps because his long-term grudge against his older son-in-law had broken out that summer in a public spat. Lossing’s latest agricultural bulletin, published in the Chinese Recorder in July, set out a five-point plan for a self-supporting Chinese Church based on the successful practice of the U.S. Farm Bureau: “We feel that helping the farmer to help himself is a very definite Christian act.” He urged the mission movement to scrap its inappropriate church buildings and stop trying to impose an alien system of religious observance, in favor of providing what people actually wanted: access to new seeds and pesticides, provision for cooperative saving schemes, and improvements in public sanitation (starting with church privies). “Few pastors can get self-support in return for words, words, words,” he wrote in a rare outburst of exasperation. “None will fail to build a self-supporting church where they make themselves indispensable to the country.” Both Buck’s general principle and his specific recommendations (less preaching and more specialist training for religious workers) were anathema to Sydenstricker, whose fighting spirit burned as bright as ever at seventy-five. The last piece he ever wrote for the Chinese Recorder contains a thumping denunciation of his son-in-law’s meddlesome schemes for Chinese farmers. “The farming implements compare favorably with those in use in the U.S. sixty years ago,” Absalom wrote tartly. “In fertilizing the land, and getting the best out of it, they certainly excel us…. It is thus perfectly clear that there is no need whatever for attempting to improve farming conditions in China…. What is needed is not a college graduate with his titles BA, BD etc.”

  Twenty-five years later Pearl would repeat the same complaints, downgrading her husband’s intellectual pretensions and dismissing his professional achievements in terms almost identical to her father’s. At the time she remained supportive, but although she never complained about any of her troubles, her close friends were highly critical of Lossing. “I do think she had a bad time,” said Lilliath Bates, shocked in those months by his stinginess with money, his lack of interest in the children, his overbearing and paternalistic attitude to his wife. “He made Pearl suffer very much.” Pearl accepted, however reluctantly, her husband’s refusal to consider leaving China. She did not question that his work came first nor, in spite of her own second salary, that he alone controlled their purse strings. She had stories to write herself that winter, but she still found time in the evenings to work on the typed reports that formed the basis of Lossing’s Chinese Farm Economy. “She’d go to her room and edit them, make them read well, before going to her own writing,” said Lilliath Bates. Grace remembered her sister’s steady encouragement and the many suggestions she gave Lossing for his book: “She entered very much into that project, and she did a great deal of editing.”

  Pearl took pride in putting on a good show in the role of model wife, but the person she was trying hardest to convince at this stage was herself. “I’m not going to fail at anything,” as her alter ego puts it in what she claimed to be the most autobiographical of all her novels, This Proud Heart. “I can do it all, wife, mother—and myself.” The same determination underlies an effusive letter she sent her mother-in-law from Shanghai in 1927. “I should like to tell you that the more the years pass the happier we are together and the more glad that we found each other,” she wrote of herself and Lossing: “ours is a real marriage of minds and spirits and we seem to grow more and more happy in it.” Over the past ten years Pearl’s parents-in-law had received a good few letters like this one, extolling the young Bucks’ married bliss, his family’s exemplary home life on their New England farm, and the stalwart qualities of Lossing and his brothers (“such splendid good true stock… how wise you have been in rearing four such sons…. Your daughters have to thank yo
u and Father for that”). There is an element of desperation in Pearl’s reassurances, as if on some level she recognized them to be phony. When she finally stopped pretending to herself that nothing had gone wrong in her marriage, she looked back in a very different light. “His house explained so much, when I saw it, of what seemed to me before cruel insensitivity,” she wrote to her old friend and Lossing’s, Marian Craighill, who had always had her doubts about the two of them as a couple.

  There was in fact nothing out of the ordinary about Lossing’s parents, strict and abstemious people who had given their lives to running their small, largely self-sufficient Pleasant Valley farm, with a dozen cows (all milked by hand), a hundred hens, and mixed crops of corn, wheat, oats, hay, and apples. Father and sons worked an eighteen-hour day with no hired help and no electricity on the farm. They had no indoor plumbing, and visitors were rare. When Pearl’s brother Edgar came to see his sister, the Bucks did not conceal their disapproval of his smoking in the yard. “You’d have to understand my folks, they’d have neither drinking nor smoking, nor coffee or tea,” said Lossing’s younger brother, Clifford. “He only stayed a night or two.” Pearl eventually relieved her feelings about the Buck farm in graphic accounts of the Holm and Pounder farms in two successive novels based, she said, on her marriage to Lossing. The heroine of Other Gods marries an undereducated but virile and good-looking New England farmer’s son she scarcely knows, only to find to her chagrin that he is dull, clumsy, unimaginative, and incapable of looking beyond his own immediate concerns. Her fastidious recoil is reinforced on visits to his family by a father-in-law who sweats, smells of cow, and washes at the kitchen sink. “It was Mr. Holm’s hands that she dreaded most—those great horrible ham-shaped hands, with the black dirt eternally in the creases…. They make her think of roots of trees turned up out of the soil.” Perhaps it was Pearl’s own earthy Stulting and Sydenstricker roots that threatened to drag her down at this point, as they had once threatened her father.