Pearl Buck in China

by Hilary Spurling

  Sex was Pearl Buck’s territory as a novelist. One of the prime grievances of her critics from The Good Earth onward was the frank sexuality of women as well as men in her novels. Her own sensuous nature was not in question. She said that even the gardenia bushes in her Nanjing garden, opening their fleshy white petals in the early morning, could stir her senses so intensely that their heady perfume woke her from sleep. In her early stories she wrote with particular sensitivity about sexual frustration, thwarted desire, the twin miseries of marital rape and marital rejection. Her fictional Chinese lovers never offer sexual fulfillment; even the mixed-race hero of Letter from Peking is an American in bed. The American girl who moves with her Chinese husband into his family home, in the second part of Winds of Heaven, reluctantly acknowledges the gap opening up between them: “Locked in behind these high walls I imagine things…. He seems to slip back into strangeness…. I have always been used to frankness and cheerfulness and speaking straight out. And here it is all silence and bowing and sliding eyes at me.” Pearl dramatized her own predicament more clearly in “Repatriated,” another story written around this time, about a Frenchwoman married to a Chinese intellectual, who had charmed her as a student in France with his gravity and delicacy, his slender erect carriage, his calm oval face, sleek black hair, and golden skin, but becomes in his own country so elusive and inscrutable that he drives her back reluctantly to her irredeemably coarse and lecherous French lover.

  Although Pearl had warned Lossing at the beginning of the year that she had no intention of moving the children from the relative safety of Shanghai, he persuaded her in July to go back with him and their daughters to Nanjing. Beijing had capitulated to the Nationalists that spring, but Chiang Kaishek established his government in the old imperial capital of the Ming emperors. Still medieval in its lack of sanitation and running water, and its one-storey buildings lining a main street barely four feet wide, the city was now scarred by burned-out schools and churches, with trees cut down, and soldiers everywhere, camping out in gutted houses and using the gardens as latrines. The Bucks were the first white family to return. Horses had been stabled in the kitchen of their house, the living-room floorboards had been set on fire, the bay window ripped out, and the garden destroyed. Temporary repairs had made the place habitable for government officials, but for their first month the family stayed with Chinese friends while Pearl hired a team of masons, carpenters, and painters. The entire house, which had been used at one point as an army cholera ward, had to be sanded, scrubbed with strong-smelling disinfectant, and whitewashed. The work went on long after the family moved back, squeezed into two upstairs bedrooms where Pearl cooked on an oil stove. For months she was abnormally sensitive to the sound of unfamiliar voices at the gate and the ghostly presence of absent friends in the empty church. One of the first things she did was to dig up the surviving roots from the violet border in her garden and plant them on Jack Williams’s grave. She told Emma there was no way of knowing if she would ever pick the spinach, cabbages, and replacement violets she sowed that winter.

  It was a scenario familiar from her rootless childhood, only this time there was no amnesty for foreigners. On a last visit to Zhenjiang Pearl found her parents’ house engulfed by the revolution and its garden reduced to beaten earth: “Twenty families of refugees crowded into the rooms… and the plaster was stripped to the laths, and the floors were inches deep in human filth, and the starving people looked out of the holes of windows like desperate dogs.” Even in Nanjing food was short and prices high. People in the streets were mutinous and bitter. Posters everywhere denounced Chiang and the Kuomintang. Attempts at rural reform had turned out to be halfhearted and impossible to enforce. Outside the city walls bandits had instituted a reign of terror. Lossing estimated that eighty thousand farmers within a twenty-mile radius of Nanjing were paying illegal protection money on top of increased taxes. Pearl feared a popular uprising. The new administration was no match for crooks and grafters. Even the most hopeful government officials—some of them the Bucks’ friends and former students—were young, inexperienced, and wholly unprepared for the scale of problems posed by overmanned and inefficient agricultural production, the lack of industry and transport systems, the urgent need for educational expansion and public health initiatives, all exacerbated by a bankrupt economy and the presence of an enormously expanded mercenary army. The regime officially welcomed Westerners, but ordinary people no longer bothered to conceal an ingrained contempt reinforced by the ignominious loss of face so recently inflicted on the white community. Pearl got used again to the curses—“Kill the foreigner!”—she had heard shouted when she was a child. Once a fierce young ideologist preaching revolution on the street broke off to swear and spit at her.

  The modern world advanced implacably on a city designed to astound contemporaries nearly six hundred years before with a layout and infrastructure essentially unchanged ever since. The general dilapidation, stench, and backwardness of China’s new capital was brought home to its more sophisticated inhabitants by the installation of foreign embassies, the arrival of delegations from abroad, and the possibility of state visits. Attempts were made to eliminate rickshaw men, prostitutes, and beggars. Many hundreds of the mat huts adhering like wasps’ nests all along the bottom of the city wall were torn down. Mat screens thirty feet high were erected to hide the rest. There was talk of piped water, electricity, sewerage, drainage, department stores, telegraph poles, and tower blocks. Paved streets and even automobiles were already a reality. Pearl left various tragicomical accounts of the long wide straight avenue driven through the center of Nanjing by the first bulldozer the city had ever seen. She watched the machine work methodically down the main street, demolishing a broad swathe of low brick shops and houses first on one side, then the other, supervised by officers from the revolutionary army and watched by a silent crowd, whose livelihood and living quarters turned to rubble before their eyes. “The Communists in China gained their first victory that day,” Pearl wrote drily in her memoirs.

  She was torn between the horror she felt for the dispossessed people and a kind of pity for their idealistic oppressors, young Nationalists who had learned in the West a corrosive shame that made them desperate to scourge and purify the iniquity and turpitude of their own country and its illiterate people. Pearl recognized the fervor and the fury that had driven her own father nearly mad in face of the inert, uncomprehending indifference of a Chinese crowd. “He was so thin, so intense, so filled with missionary zeal,” she wrote of a speaker haranguing passers-by on a street corner: “he was angry with them in his heart because they stood before him unmoved, and laughed when the sweat ran down his poor young cheeks. He was so angry that he could scarcely keep from weeping, and I am sure he would have been glad if lightning had struck them dead.” She gave the same bitter rage and pain to Wang Yuan, who sympathizes in A House Divided with the stern and single-minded patriots marching back from their training grounds outside the city: “these young men came back silently, and their footsteps were in such solemn unison the sound was like a great single footstep… their faces all young, all simple and all grave. These were the new armies…. I knew, looking at them, that they can kill as simply as they eat their food.”

  The students in Pearl’s classes were no longer fiery and opinionated. Too many of them had been killed as part of the Nationalists’ systematic culling of actual or suspected Communists: “They were arrested for reading liberal magazines, for associating, perhaps accidentally and without knowing it, with a classmate who was a Communist, or for criticizing the new government.” Their attitude toward the future emerging from the wreckage of the past was wary and subdued. Throughout that first year Pearl could see from her attic window a white scar spreading across the slopes of Purple Mountain, where a second imperial mausoleum was being constructed as a final resting place for the founder of the Revolution, Sun Yatsen, on a scale to match the Ming emperor’s adjacent tomb. The funeral on June 1, 1929, was planned
as a state occasion by the new government, celebrating its accession to legitimacy and power with tributes from an international gathering of diplomats and dignitaries. A ceremonial cortege took six hours to process along the specially built new road through the city gates, passing under a triple archway and mounting nearly four hundred white marble steps to a sky-blue tiled gateway and a final white pavilion. After it was over and the crowds had left, Pearl climbed the steps herself in time to see Chiang Kaishek emerge alone from the inner hall and stand in the great gate, oblivious of spectators, gazing out over the countryside below: “I stood near watching his face, so strangely like that of a tiger, the high forehead sloping, the ears flaring backward, the wide mouth seeming always ready to smile and yet always cruel. But his eyes were the most arresting feature. They were large, intensely black and utterly fearless. It was not the fearlessness or composure of intelligence, but the fearlessness, again, of the tiger, who sees no reason to be afraid of any other beast because of its own power.”

  Within a few weeks of the funeral the Bucks sailed for the United States. Lossing’s book Chinese Farm Economy, due for publication in 1930, had already persuaded experts at the Institute of Pacific Relations to put his name forward for a more comprehensive survey of land use in China planned by the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Lossing got the job on the grounds that any such survey would be best carried out at first hand in China rather than compiled from published data in Washington. He had been summoned home to consult officials, recruit staff, finalize funding, and negotiate a major grant from the Rockefeller Foundation. It was an impressive coup, one that would transform both his career and the standing of Nanjing’s Agricultural College. Pearl planned to use the time to look into the possibility of finding some kind of shelter for their daughter in the United States. She had no immediate family of her own to turn to, and the Bucks had made their disapproval plain. Lossing’s refusal to consider leaving China meant that there was little hope of providing a stable and secure environment for Carol, given that country’s chaotic present and uncertain future. The current situation intensified the anxiety that had weighed on Pearl for years. Mental health professionals warned parents in those days that it was frivolous to suppose any child with learning or other difficulties could be adequately looked after at home. Pearl blamed herself for dreading the alternative. “I realize I must leave her in some place where she can be trained to the highest of which she is capable, and my heart is wrenched in two at the thought,” she had written to Emma White at the beginning of the year. “I can’t face it, really, yet.”

  Lossing’s sudden recall forced her to overcome her reluctance. They inspected special schools and care homes, working their way through an ad hoc list with no available guidance, official or unofficial, and no way of contacting other parents in a similar situation. Disability was a taboo subject. Society dealt with it by concealment and coverup, a policy that paid more attention to its own sensibilities than to the needs or wants of the disabled. Pearl was shocked by the impersonal severity of discipline in some of the most expensive and best appointed private schools she visited. Worse was the regimentation in overcrowded state-run institutions, where passive, unresisting children were lined up and made to sit for hours on benches, waiting day after day for nothing. Regarded as unteachable, not even given basic toilet training or shown how to hold a spoon, they were clothed in sacking, fed like animals off cement floors that the staff hosed down two or three times a day, and put to sleep on filthy pallets laid out on the ground. Already vulnerable, depressed, and apprehensive, Pearl was deeply shaken by her encounters with prison-like regimes administered by overworked, underpaid, often callous and desensitized staff, who herded their charges like animals. Twenty years later, when she wrote a book to publicize their predicament, The Child Who Never Grew, she told a friend it was “the hardest thing she ever did in her life.” Its message in 1950, the year of publication, was sharp and startling. “These too were human beings,” she wrote of the children she described, “and many of those who cared for them did not understand it. The children who never grow are human beings and they suffer as human beings, inarticulately but deeply nevertheless. The human creature is always more than an animal. That is the one thing we must never forget.”

  In the autumn of 1929 Pearl finally picked a small private institution, the Vineland Training School in New Jersey, run by Dr. Edward Johnstone, whose approach she liked and trusted. Each child was treated as a person in his or her own right and given an unusual degree of freedom by staff who were attentive, kind, and gentle. Education and research were central to Johnstone’s program (“The only child who can learn is a happy child,” he said). Carol was nine years old. Although it was impossible to explain to her what was about to happen, she understood her mother’s distress, and the two clung to one another. “We had never been separated, and the time was coming when there would be a separation almost as final as death.” At the end of September Pearl agreed to leave her daughter at the school for a trial month, during which she woke night after night, imagining Carol’s feelings and knowing there was no way her daughter could make them known. “Only the thought of a future with the child grown old and me gone kept me from hurrying to the railway station.” The final parting was excruciating. “If I had known how hard this leaving was going to be, I simply couldn’t have done it,” she wrote three months later, by which time she was back in China. “Left to my choice, I simply should have given up China absolutely and without question. It has been a dreadful time—having to go back because Lossing felt equally without question that he must go.”

  Lossing refused to consider leaving his wife behind even temporarily in the United States. He could not have afforded to pay school fees, even if he wanted to, so Pearl borrowed two thousand dollars to cover Carol’s first two years from a member of the Mission Board in New York. At the time she had no prospect of repaying the money, except for five hundred dollars offered by the Board for a children’s book that would popularize the mission movement. She said she dared not weep for fear that, once started, she could never stop again. Her one comfort was Janice, whose warmth, gaiety, and humor had always consoled and healed her mother. Without her, Pearl said, she wasn’t sure she could have endured the company of other children. “I continually marvel at my luck in finding her out of all the world,” she wrote to Emma White. “Janice just saves me.” Pearl herself told several people that she had been very nearly destroyed by grief and fear for Carol. Grace Yaukey believed that her sister never fully recovered from their enforced separation.

  Almost the last thing Pearl had done before leaving for the United States with her daughter was to attend Sun Yatsen’s funeral and send a report to the Mission Board that included a characteristic postscript: “it would not be fair to close this letter without some reference to the millions who did not come to the funeral, and who perhaps scarcely knew it was going on…. All over this country… men and women and children went about their accustomed tasks unmoved and unconscious of any great force gathering about that tomb. These also are China…. The common people, the workers had no great share in the day or the hour…. They are at once the burden and the strength of the country. They supply the food and the labor and the multiple life of the nation.” It was in its own oblique way a statement of intent. Pearl’s sympathy for human beings without a voice, the inert silent masses ignored, despised, and stripped of individuality by those who shaped their future, had been confirmed by her experiences in America. “The house in Nanjing was empty without my little elder daughter, and not all the friends and family could fill it. This I decided was the time to begin really to write.”

  THE LAST LEG of Pearl’s return to China in January 1930 is recreated in the closing section of A House Divided, where Wang Yuan, himself also a prospective writer, makes the same journey from Shanghai to Nanjing, reading on the train his cousin Sheng’s latest book:

  The rains of late winter were begun, and the train drove through the dark day
, and the water dripped down the window pane so that he could scarcely see the sodden fields. At every town the streets ran with liquid filth and the stations were empty…. Outside the villages slipped past, dark and huddled in the rain. At doorways men looked sullenly into the rains that beat through the thatched roof above their heads…. Too many days of rain drove them half-mad with quarrelling and cold misery…. Yuan saw the sullen beast-like faces, and he thought, very troubled, “As for me, I can write nothing. If I wrote these things Sheng does, which I can see well enough are exquisite, why, then I remember these dark faces and these hovels and all this deep under-life of which he knows nothing and will not know. And yet I cannot write of such life either.”… He came down from the train in rain and dusk, and in the rain the old city wall stood grim and black and high. He called a rickshaw and climbed in and sat chilly and lonely while the man dragged the vehicle along the slippery running streets. Once the man stumbled and fell, and while he righted himself and waited for a moment to pant and wipe the rain from his dripping face, Yuan… saw the hovels still clinging against the wall. The rains had flooded them and the wretched helpless folk within sat in the flood and waited silently for heaven to change.