Worse still in The Time Is Noon is the heroine’s rash marriage to another caricatural farmer’s son, “a tall, thick-necked, oafish young man” with lumpy features, coarse limbs, thick pale wind-cracked lips, and meaty hands that make her shrink from his touch. She feels crushed by his family’s bovine physicality and by their stolid, censorious, closed minds. “It’s a flesh pander” is their dismissive phrase for every sensual indulgence, from cooking with sugar and wearing pretty clothes to the possibility of their new daughter-in-law spending too much time in bed with her young husband. When her baby turns out to be disabled, her husband’s family at first flatly deny that there is a problem, then urge her no less flatly to put the child out of sight in a home without making an embarrassing fuss.
The thing that chilled and alienated Pearl most about Lossing was her conviction that he acquiesced in the same fate for their daughter. She herself had understood on the day they spent in hiding from soldiers in Nanjing that, even if Carol emerged from that hut alive, China’s anarchic politics made it impossible to ensure the child’s future, and that her only hope of security lay in the United States. It was an intuitive decision that brought the same kind of relief as a rope thrown to someone trying to maintain a footing in shifting sand: “I clung to it and dragged myself out of despair day by day…. Knowing what I was going to do, and thinking how to do it did not heal the inescapable sorrow, but it helped me to live with it.” It also put paid forever to any prospect of appealing for support to Lossing, who was apparently in favor of committing Carol to a state institution in the United States. The prospect terrified Pearl and underlined more urgently than ever the need to make provisions for her daughter in the years ahead, when she herself would no longer be there to give protection.
In the winter of 1927–28 Lossing began commuting with John Reisner and Lillieth’s husband, Searle Bates, from Shanghai to Nanjing, still overrun by soldiers and under threat from hostile armies. The three resumed work at the university more or less clandestinely, concealed on campus by their Chinese colleagues and camping out at night in the Williams’ abandoned house. Lossing and Searle returned most weekends to their wives and children in the house on Avenue Joffre, run with her usual efficiency by Lu Sadze from a kitchen in the basement, where she turned out to be keeping a male prisoner under lock and key. Interrogated by Pearl, Mrs. Lu explained that this highly attractive young man had seduced and abandoned her for another woman in Nanjing (it was his defection that made her set out for Japan), so naturally, when she bumped into him again by chance in a Shanghai market, she had no choice but to kidnap him. The irresistible but indecisive Mr. Chu agreed at Pearl’s suggestion to marry his jailer, only to escape once more to his other concubine before returning to his bride in the basement, where he settled down finally to cook for the entire household.
Pearl’s remarkable power of conciliation was a function of an innate, abundant, emotionally exorbitant ability to enter imaginatively into other people’s lives. Her second daughter, Janice, now three years old and an intrepid talker, had grown into a tiny, startlingly pretty child with big brown eyes and a mass of tight golden curls. Her upbringing had its problems on both sides (inhibitions about eating dogged Janice throughout childhood), but although Lossing could never think of her as his own, to her adoptive mother she brought the healing energy and comfort Pearl herself had given to her own mother. “I have never seen the creative power of love more perfectly displayed than in the way Pearl loved this little girl into health and life and beauty,” said Margaret Thomson, who had known Janice from her emaciated and unprepossessing start. “I have never seen such absolute, self-giving devotion.” No one else could see the point of the two incompetent old peasant women taken on by Pearl as amahs because they had nowhere else to go. Lilliath Bates remembered their incredulous delight a couple of years later when a parcel arrived from Pearl, then in the United States, containing two luxurious wool robes, soft, warm, and feather light, the kind of thing neither had ever touched before, let alone dreamed of possessing: “They hugged them to their bosoms and wept.”
But by her own account Pearl was learning slowly and painfully to grow a defensive shell that cut her off from all but superficial contact with other people. “Doubtless they felt the surface bright and shallow, and were perhaps repelled by something hard and cold beneath which they could not reach,” she wrote, reviewing in retrospect the profound internal realignment that took place within that protective carapace. “Yet it was necessary to maintain the surface, for it was my own protection, too. It was not possible to share with anyone in those years my inner state.” Now that she had found a way to control, or at least contain the violence of her feelings about Carol, she set herself to explore her daughter’s mind and understand the extent of the stoppage that had shut down its mental and emotional development. For twelve months in Shanghai Pearl gave her attention unreservedly to Carol, playing with her, singing to her, and teaching her to sing, helping her to talk, showing her how to tell one color from another, coaxing her to read, perhaps even to write. Both Grace and Lilliath were astonished by Pearl’s gentleness and perseverance: “Hours every day went into the painstaking work of teaching and training with results so small that only Pearl could see them.” After everyone else had gone to bed they could hear Carol calling and clumping about upstairs and her mother getting up to calm her three or four times each night.
This was a period of enforced seclusion. It would be hard to overestimate the stigma attached to any form of abnormality or retardation in the 1920s and 1930s. Schools commonly refused to accept disabled children, neighbors were hostile, and other children responded with mockery and bullying. “It’s not a crime, but people… can behave as if it were,” Pearl wrote, discussing the shame and secrecy imposed on parents like herself. Families were expected to close ranks and shut away the kind of offspring still treated by the public as a village idiot. Shanghai’s foreign community was no different from any other group of Westerners. It was impossible for Pearl to take her daughter shopping or even to church on Sundays without reproving people turning to point and stare. Other mothers ostentatiously drew back rather than pass her in the park. “You can hear them almost whispering, ‘There’s that woman who has that strange child,’” she told Lilliath, who was appalled both by the routine callousness of strangers and by Pearl’s determination to confront it.
Pearl said she learned far more than her daughter in the year they spent alone together. Carol made progress, but her lessons had to be abandoned because of the excessive strain they put on a child who understood nothing but her own increasingly desperate desire to please her mother. “She was not really learning anything,” Pearl wrote. “It seemed my heart broke all over again. When I could control myself I got up and put away the books forever. Of what use was it to push this mind beyond where it could function?” Pearl realized that it was her own pride and aspiration—her longing for independence, achievement, some kind of fulfillment for her daughter—that had to change. She must school herself to expect nothing and be glad of what she had. She said the experiment taught her humility and patience: “I come of a family impatient with stupidity and slowness, and I absorbed the family intolerance of minds less quick than our own…. It was my child who taught me to understand so clearly that all people are equal in their humanity, and all have the same human rights.”
BOTH THE BUCKS were well aware of China’s precarious position that winter. Relations with Moscow had been formally broken off after Nationalist forces ruthlessly suppressed a Communist uprising in December in Guangzhou. Fear of another raised tensions in Shanghai. Soldiers were posted at every entrance to the ancient, insanitary, overcrowded Chinese town. Troops drawn from the fifty thousand White Russian exiles in China stood guard on the bridge. On January 1, 1928, Chiang Kaishek left the city for Nanjing in an armored train. Foreigners could no longer count on special privileges or protection. The Nationalists were planning to advance north on Beijing, and Lossing predicted he
avy fighting. Pearl warned Emma, who had taken refuge with her family in the United States, that it was too dangerous to return: “Missionaries in all Nationalist controlled areas must be prepared at any instant to run for their lives.” Widespread disillusionment added to the troubles of a government that had made no serious attempt at social or educational reform. “He was a soldier,” Pearl wrote of Chiang Kaishek, “and he had the mind of a soldier, and neither by nature nor experience was he fitted to be a civilian ruler of a republic…. He knew nothing about modern democratic government.” She was dismayed to see how quickly idealistic revolutionaries, once in power, fell back on their country’s ancient despotic remedies of repression, corruption, and reckless taxation.
Shanghai gangsters grew extravagantly rich on protection rackets and prostitution. Chiang and his new young wife, the beautiful, bold, American-educated Soong Meiling, presided over a celebrity culture of bobbed hair, slit skirts, and all-night jazz parties, rampant consumerism and sexual excess, underpinned by violence and graft. “I feel as if I were living at the capital of Louis of France before the French revolution broke,” Pearl wrote that winter. “This cannot go on for ever. Personally I feel that unless something happens to change it we are in for a real revolution here in comparison to which all this so far will be a mere game of ball on a summer’s afternoon.” She expressed her sense of menace in a powerful image from A House Divided, where Wang Yuan, briefly caught up in the nightlife of Shanghai’s gilded youth, is haunted by shadows at the edges of his mind, dim figures waiting for the dawn when the party will be over, crouched “like street dogs” ready to infiltrate the houses and snatch the leavings from the tables of the rich: “Against his will he saw them, and… even in the midst of the night’s pleasure… he remembered with great dread the moment when he must go into the grey street and see the cringing figures and the wolfish faces of the poor.”
The Shanghai literary scene was full of effete young poets like Yuan’s cousin Sheng, who publishes a slim silver-bound volume of derivative symbolist verses (“exquisite and empty, though they were so fluent in their line and sound”), printed on thick ivory paper and featuring moonlight on a dead woman’s hair, “an ice-bound fountain in a park, a fairy island in a smooth green sea.” This is an accurate if unflattering skit on the vogue for European pastiche among Western-educated intellectuals seeking escape from insoluble political and social problems nearer home. Most of the writers Pearl read and admired in her twenties had moved in the opposite direction, toward active political involvement. Chen Duxiu, whose campaign in New Youth alerted a whole generation to the possibility of literary revolution, was overthrown as leader of the Chinese Communist Party in 1927, afterward becoming a Trotskyite and narrowly escaping execution. Lu Xun, picked by Pearl as the first Chinese to write about the ordinary life of his own people (and later generally acknowledged as China’s greatest twentieth-century writer), turned to Marxism in those years. So did Pearl’s favorite, the poet Kuo Mo-jou (“that brilliant mind, whose habit was the utmost candor and whose passion was truth”), currently pioneering the use of propaganda as a tool of the Left in China. Of Pearl’s feminist contemporaries, Hsieh Ping-hsin and Ding Ling—“those two intrepid and fearless women writers who used to make me so proud”—Hsieh acknowledged no political allegiance in her work and faded from public view; Ding joined the Communists and, after fighting many bitter battles for women’s liberation, ended up as one of the Party’s model writers.
There is nothing to suggest that Pearl actually met any of these handsome and clever young Chinese (a species that touched her heart as, in a different context, it did her father’s). The exception was the popular and charismatic poet Xu Zhimo, who seems to have encountered her on a flying visit to Nanjing in May 1924. She said she used him as the model for the aloof young husband in “A Chinese Woman Speaks,” which she wrote later that summer. Thirty years afterward she singled Xu out in her memoirs in a dismissive account of the superficiality and “sickening romanticism” of contemporary Chinese writing at that period: “It even became the fashion to ape Western poets in person and one handsome and rather distinguished and certainly much beloved young poet was proud to be called ‘the Chinese Shelley.’ He used to sit in my drawing-room and talk by the hour and wave his beautiful hands in exquisite and descriptive gestures…. He was a northern Chinese, tall and classically beautiful in looks, and his hands were big and perfectly shaped and smooth as a woman’s hands…. Our Chinese Shelley died young, I am sad to say, for he had a sort of power of his own, and could he have outgrown the Shelley phase he might have become himself.”
One of half a dozen Chinese Shelleys, Xu (also known as the Chinese Byron) was the son of a banking family in Zhejiang who had spent time in Paris as well as studying in the United States, and spending a postgraduate year in England at Cambridge University. On his return to China he became an authority on the West and an arbiter of taste, a glamorous and sophisticated role model, founder of Crescent Moon and other experimental literary journals, a high-flyer who made a major impact when he left his Beijing base for Shanghai in 1927. Pearl included a second sketch of Xu, or someone very like him, in a bitter passage in her memoirs about the promiscuity of Shanghai intellectuals, “rootless young Chinese, educated abroad, who did not want to involve themselves in anything more trying than art and literature, the artists from the Latin Quarter in Paris, the postgraduates from Cambridge… who kept their hands soft and spent their time in literary clubs and poetry-making, who published little decadent magazines in English and pretended that the common Chinese did not exist. In such groups there were also a few American women who had come to China for adventure, women who took Chinese lovers and about whom the Chinese lovers boasted….” The American woman who was sleeping with Xu in Shanghai in the late 1920s was Agnes Smedley, an intrepid traveler, left-wing reporter, and notorious believer in free love, as indeed was Xu himself. Both had broken family ties, repudiated social convention, and taken a daring public stand on freedom and the future in a way impossible for Pearl, who was not only married to a missionary but living on mission funds under the close and prurient surveillance of the mission community.
Pearl was only four years older than Xu, but she still looked drab, middle-aged, and mousy. When she gave a talk at the Shanghai High School the girls were chiefly struck by the gap between her appearance and her aspirations. “She was just the wife of a missionary,” said one of them, “and we thought it very interesting that someone like her would actually be publishing stories about the people who were all round us.” That winter she began losing weight without premeditation and without conscious effort. By New Year 1928 she had lost forty-five pounds and reported that she looked “more like my old self than I have in years.” Previous biographers have assumed that Pearl too was having an affair with Xu, which seems unlikely, if only because he was one of the stars of his literary generation, while she was at best an onlooker on the sidelines, having published no more than a handful of pieces in mission publications and American magazines. None of his biographers has found a shred of evidence for this affair, and the only Chinese witness who knew them both, a young professor at Nanjing’s National Southeastern University, categorically denied the possibility that Pearl had been Xu’s lover, even if she might have liked to be: “She was stout, rather oldish-looking…. He mentioned to me the name of Miss Pearl Buck. My impression was that Miss Buck did not impress him much.”
No one in Pearl’s circle at the time in China, not even her husband, knew anything about this putative affair, apart from a vague assertion made fifty years later by Lilliath Bates that she had heard gossip linking their two names. Pearl admitted long afterward that, when she wrote “A Chinese Woman Speaks,” “she imagined herself… marrying a young man such as Xu Zhimo.” Like the hero of that story, Xu had been married young by his parents to a girl he’d never met and couldn’t love, eventually divorcing his wife to make a much publicized and ultimately disastrous love match in 1926. Pearl
also claimed that she put something of Xu into the half-Chinese hero of Letter from Peking, who was more closely based on the boy she fell in love with as a schoolgirl. The suggestion that either of these romantic heroes might have been based on more than fantasy originated with Theodore Harris, Pearl’s companion in old age, who ghost-wrote her official biography with her collaboration and whose testimony is highly ambivalent. “It is the privilege of a writer to grasp a situation as it stands and complete it in her own mind,” he wrote of Pearl’s relationship with Xu. “It could have happened. How much actually did is not for us to know.” Xu gave a course of lectures at Southeastern University in 1929, commuting from Beijing and resigning after twelve months. His early death in a plane crash the year after made him a legend. All that can be said for sure is that he produced a deep impression on Pearl, as on many of his contemporaries, and that her feelings for him grew in retrospect.
What seems to have restored her confidence in herself toward the end of 1927, when by her own account she went through a crisis of acute loneliness and isolation from her own kind, was that for the first time she was moving toward a position where she could begin to take her life into her own hands. Her decision to remove her daughter to the United States, and partial physical as well as moral separation from her husband, made it possible to envisage a professional future in her own right. All previous bids to establish herself as a writer had failed. The novel completed in March 1927 had been destroyed by looters in Nanjing, and she had apparently forgotten all about the book-length typescript of her mother’s life (which was in fact salvaged from its wall closet by her students). “A Chinese Woman Speaks,” and the story written as its sequel, packaged together as a novel in response to a request from the New York publishing house Brentano’s, had been turned down. The stories she posted off at random to American magazines took up to six months to elicit a response, which, when it came, was more often than not a rejection slip. Of the three U.S. literary agents listed in a writers’ directory Pearl found in a Shanghai bookstore, two eventually replied that there was no American market for Chinese material. The third was David Lloyd of the Paget Agency, who agreed to handle her stories and also to try to place the two-part novel, now titled Winds of Heaven. It was a small, unexpected check forwarded by Lloyd from a U.S. magazine that Pearl squandered so recklessly that Christmas on blue silk and white porcelain, precious symbols not just of her difference from her housemates, but of a new inner life that would mean more to her than any love affair.
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