One of the remarkable things about The Good Earth is its prosaic acceptance of a brutal world almost unimaginably strange to its Western readership, and the parallel slow growth of trust between writer and reader. The facts of life it depicts, the alien bodily habits and thought patterns, the unfamiliar farming practices and family relations are portrayed with such authority that they seem perfectly natural. Readers identified with these patient, stoical, illiterate people, especially with Wang Lung’s mute plain wife, whose character is rooted in gravity and silence: “Words were to her things to be caught one by one and released with difficulty.” Olan, the mother who could strangle one girl child at birth and offer to sell another into slavery, became for American readers the moral center of the book and the prime source of its emotional warmth.
It was not simply that the book reversed expectations, although initially these could hardly have been lower. The West in general, and America in particular, operated an unspoken cultural veto against China in these years. “Nobody thought anything by or about China was interesting for the U.S.,” said Helen Foster Snow, who with her husband, Edgar, did her best to reverse that implicit prohibition in the 1930s. “You couldn’t sell it. Nothing sold but The Good Earth, which was the mystery of all time.” For a period of just under a century, what Kang Liao calls the Age of Contempt, the Chinese had been systematically restricted, excluded, and penalized by U.S. legislation designed to protect the native workforce from migrant labor flooding into California. The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 was the first openly racist law passed by the U.S. government. The popular notion of a Chinaman was either a figure of fun or a monster of depravity. “He is politeness himself,” wrote a shrewd and witty young Chinese commentator, Lin Yutang, describing the current literary stereotype in a Shanghai paper in the year The Good Earth was published. “The yellowness of his face exactly matches the colour of his teeth. He wears long gowns and long finger-nails. Opium is his favourite smoke, and Fan Tan his favourite game. He never opens his mouth except to grin, he never moves but he shuffles his feet. His name is either Dr. Wu or Fu Man Chu.”
Pearl’s book eroded the foundations of that wall of ignorance and prejudice. In the early years of the dust bowl and the Great Depression Americans recognized all too well the cycle of prosperity and destitution that overtakes Wang Lung, however hard he struggles by grinding overwork and extreme frugality to keep his family together on a roller coaster of drought, flood, robbers, famine, flight, bandits, and war. Pearl Buck did for the working people of twentieth-century China something of what Dickens had done for London’s nineteenth-century poor. Readers saw their own worst fears reflected, magnified, and distorted in her pages in nightmare images of torment and humiliation when Wang is finally forced to find work as a rickshaw puller or join a night shift of men dragging cartloads of heavy goods to the city docks:
All night through the dark streets he strained against the ropes, his body naked and streaming with sweating, and his bare feet slipping on the cobbles…. Each stone he had come to know now as a separate enemy, and he knew each rut by which he might evade a stone and so use an ounce less of his life. There were times in the black nights, especially when it rained, and the streets were wet… that the whole hatred of his heart went out against these stones under his feet, these stones that seemed to cling and to hang to the wheels of his inhuman load.
ACCOUNTS OF WANG’S starving household—“They scarcely rose at all now, any of them. There was no need, and fitful sleep took the place, for a while at least, of the food they had not. The cobs of the corn they had dried and eaten and they stripped the bark from the trees”—and his deserted village—“stillness everywhere, the stillness of inactivity and of people, each in his own house, waiting to die”—run parallel to contemporary reports published in the New York Herald Tribune by Edgar Snow. As a young journalist on one of his first assignments in China, he traveled through the northwestern famine region, “a weird landscape swept of every growing thing as if by volcanic ash,” where up to half the population in the towns he visited had died within the previous twelve months: “Even the trees had been stripped of their bark and were dying… Most of the mud-brick houses were collapsing…. Here and there last-ditchers still sat or lay on their doorsteps, scarcely conscious.”
Snow’s dispatches were ignored and largely unread at the time. He and Pearl Buck would become the two most influential China watchers of their day in the United States, writers of very different character and background whose work probably did more than anything else to alter public perceptions of the country and its people. Snow went on to be singled out by Mao Zedong for special treatment as an apologist and in some sense spokesman for the Communist cause. Pearl had no ideological commitment, but her early novels share the energy and directness that make the literary agenda of her avant-garde Chinese contemporaries so different from the goals of modernism established in the West by Eliot, Joyce, and Kafka. “To educate the masses was a matter of life and death for China, especially in the first half of this century,” wrote Professor Liao in 1997, “and so the books were meant to be understood by as many people as possible, but in the U.S. what artists hated most was to lower the level of their works… to meet the needs of capitalist commercialisation.”
The Good Earth enters into the world documented from the outside in the 1930s by Western travelers, observers, and journalists like Snow. Pearl Buck borrowed techniques from the Chinese novel in episodic sagas covering vast territories and spanning several generations, preoccupied less with individual characterization than with the expressive power of a broad filmic vision and harsh Dickensian imagery, to penetrate the deep underlife of Chinese people, and to draw Western readers in after her. With The Good Earth she did for her international readership what she had once done in person for Marian Craighill in Nanxuzhou and Lilliath Bates in Nanjing. “It’s a change in us really, in our attitude towards people,” as Lilliath put it in retrospect, describing the effect on her of seeing China through Pearl’s eyes. She spoke for millions of readers in the years when Pearl Buck’s views captured the popular imagination. “She was the first to humanize the Chinese and make them comprehensible,” said Helen Foster Snow. The Good Earth opened a door between the American and Chinese worlds that had been firmly closed, and for the next four decades Pearl did all she could to stop it shutting again.
CHAPTER 7
The Stink of Condescension
IN NANJING IN the spring of 1931 Pearl’s triumph still seemed to her as unreal as a dream. It lifted the barrier that held her back—“Her stories came from her now in a great rush, like the waters of the mighty Yangtze in a flood”—but whatever satisfaction she felt was offset by the horror of an actual flood worse than any known in China for almost a hundred years. Water had been rising for months, seeping out of the land, overflowing the canals, bursting dikes, inundating villages, and melting their earthen houses. By the end of March the wells had been submerged in the upper reaches of the Yangtse, which meant that people were forced to drink floodwaters polluted by refuse, decomposing bodies, and human and animal excrement. Chiang Kaishek, said to have been a river god in a previous incarnation, was blamed for twenty-four inches of torrential rain that fell in two weeks in July, turning a relatively familiar calamity into illimitable, almost unprecedented disaster. There were rumors of cannibalism, and of parents in the country around Nanjing drowning children they could no longer feed. The yellow waters of the river climbed the stone embankment of the port seven miles from the city center to pour across the fields and “come creeping and crawling through the streets.” Pearl rode out along the dike wall on horseback and climbed on foot to the top of Purple Mountain, itself now transformed into an island: “lapping at its base, fifty feet deep over farmhouses and fields, were yellow Yangtze waves.”
Lossing organized a comprehensive survey of the devastated area, sending out his force of trained investigators to recruit local helpers with backing from the Nationalist government. Madam
e Chiang Kaishek’s brother, the finance minister T. V. Soong, personally authorized the project’s funding. Charles Lindbergh, the world-famous American pilot who had crossed the Atlantic in a monoplane, arrived to reconnoiter the devastation from the air after an initial trip in Lossing’s sampan. Pearl raised awareness in the United States with magazine stories describing the starving refugees who poured into Nanjing and the desperation of dying people huddled among piles of wreckage protruding from the surrounding waters that stretched in every direction as far as the eye could see. One of her first translators, Hu Zhongchi, cited in his preface to The Good Earth a letter from the president of the American Red Cross explaining how much the relief effort owed to the generosity of Americans moved by the sufferings of the Wang family. Twenty-five million people were affected in the flood plains of the Yangtse and Huai Rivers, according to Lossing’s final estimate; others put the number at more than twice as many, with half a million drowned.
On August 31 Absalom Sydenstricker died in his eightieth year at Kuling and was buried by his daughter Grace with his Greek New Testament in his hand. Pearl missed the funeral because it was impossible to cross the inland sea, now stretching the whole length of the Yangtse between Nanjing and Kuling. The two sisters paid dignified tribute to their father in obituaries for the Chinese Recorder and the Christian Observer respectively. “I miss him dreadfully!” Pearl told Grace. “During the past two years his tall ascetic frame had grown more and more frail, his nature more completely the saint,” she wrote long afterward in her memoirs, having by that time analyzed with unsparing honesty in Fighting Angel the price paid for his saintliness by other people. A stone tablet erected in his honor at the town’s south gate after he left Zhenjiang praised his good works, his faithful service over thirty years, and his perseverance in the face of slander and contempt. The text was composed by Ma Pangbo: “We carve this tablet in his honor to show our love just as people long ago expressed their love of Shaobo by cherishing the tree of Gantang” (Shaobo in ancient Chinese legend was a wise and just minister of the Western Zhou dynasty, who liked to sit beneath the tree of Gantang).
The death of her father coincided with the first round in what eventually became a public showdown between Pearl and the mission movement. She still drew her salary as a teacher, but she had stopped going to church when it became clear that she could expect no answer to her passionate prayers for her daughter. Her employers’ response to her book was harsh and swift. The first letter Pearl received from a reader in the United States—“several pages of blistering rebuke”—came from the secretary of the Presbyterian Board of Foreign Missions in New York, who threatened her obliquely with public denunciation. His tone was at once so sanctimonious and so squeamish that she did not immediately realize that his main complaint was her sexual frankness. Her friend Emma found herself defending The Good Earth against similar objections. “of course… it isn’t a nice book!” Pearl wrote back cheerfully. “Your friends or whoever they were who said it was a coarse book are perfectly right—it is a coarse book from this point of view.” She explained that her portrait of Wang Lung was as accurate as she could make it, and that behavior unmentionable in genteel American society—belching, urinating, sexual intercourse—was as natural and unselfconscious for him as for most Chinese. “I like their matter-of-fact attitude to all natural functions of life, including sex. I think it sane and wholesome…. They provide for these things as they do for hunger and thirst and there’s an end of it.” She confided to her brother Edgar her astonishment and initial incredulity over the missionaries’ perverse obsession: “sex is the devil to them, and seems to consume a great deal of their attention.”
The book’s first Chinese reviews were polite rather than enthusiastic. This kind of naturalism had no precedent in classical or contemporary writing (“The study of peasant psychology is… practically unknown,” wrote a Chinese critic, saluting the book as somber but serious: “The Chinese farmer in his individual element has never yet found proper expression in his own literature”). Olan was the first Chinese woman to be portrayed in fiction as she actually was rather than with the moth eyebrows, porcelain skin, and tiny flowerlike feet of the traditional heroine. The evident authenticity of The Good Earth was a source of aggravation from the start, especially given the book’s astonishing popularity. “I was surprised to find how the young Chinese intellectuals hated it,” said Helen Foster Snow, who reached China for the first time in 1931: “they were violent about it…. Also the missionaries disliked it. In fact, almost nobody living in China liked it at all, for different reasons.” The cosmopolitan, Western-educated Chinese community in Shanghai deplored the book’s portrayal of insuperable social problems which it was in nobody’s interest to spell out so plainly. “They wanted to make a good impression on the foreigners, and also they wanted to avoid facing facts themselves and to avoid doing anything to remedy the situation.” The students in Snow’s language classes bitterly resented a foreigner exposing their country’s poverty and lack of modern amenities in a book that already showed signs of becoming a world-class best seller.
Pearl encountered the same attitude herself, both in China and the United States, in patriotic young people whose experiences of the West had made them bitterly sensitive to racial slights and slurs. She even incorporated their response into the final volume of her Good Earth trilogy, in a passage in which Wang Lung’s grandson attends a mission fund-raising presentation designed to touch its soft-hearted American audience with slides of beggars, lepers, and starving children in mud huts: “Yuan could not bear it. All through the hour his anger had been rising, mixed with shame and dismay, so to see revealed before this staring, ignorant foreign crowd his country’s faults…. It seemed to him that this prying priest had searched out every ill that he could find and dragged it forth before the cold eyes of this western world.” Over the next half-century Pearl Buck would be heavily criticized and finally banned in China for spreading reactionary imperialist lies about the past in books that wantonly distorted the correct image of Chinese farmers. “The story is set in the benighted period of the Qing dynasty, portraying the Chinese as males with pigtails and females with bound feet in order to depict Chinese society as intrinsically backward,” ran a history of Nanjing published in 1985. “It is not hard to see the bad effect produced by The Good Earth on American society!”
In September 1931 Japanese troops began systematically seizing territory in Manchuria. There were rumors of Russia mobilizing and Britain proposing to support Japan. In Nanjing six thousand young people took to the streets to protest the Chinese government’s inaction. “It is very tense here,” Pearl wrote to Emma White on September 24. “Last night the government students gathered around the Japanese consulate and yelled hideously for about three hours, ‘Down with the Japanese!’” Four days later they attacked their own foreign ministry. Pressure mounted throughout the winter. In January an advance force of Japanese marines landed in Shanghai backed by a dozen naval destroyers and heavy aerial bombardment. Shells disrupted the rail link to Nanjing, and the government prepared to evacuate inland. Chinese and Japanese armies clashed in February around Shanghai, with fierce fighting inside the city. Roused in the middle of the night, with shells falling and gunboats advancing up the river toward Nanjing, the Bucks and their neighbors packed their bags and left. “We crawled up, dressed and I will confess I was simply terrified and shook life a leaf,” Pearl wrote to her sister. Janice, who was seven years old, retained all her life a terror of moonlight on her pillow.
They found temporary shelter in Beijing, where Pearl taught at the language school, spending mornings in the National Library researching illustrations for her translation of All Men Are Brothers and afternoons exploring the old city. She attended the Beijing Opera and visited the home of its greatest actor, Mei Linfang. The place that matched her mood most closely was the valley where the crumbling remains of imperial Ming tombs stood in a semicircle against a rocky hillside, “a somber, wild
, fierce landscape, the mountains warped and black and craggy against the brilliant sky.” All through that cold dry spring when sandy desert winds blew through the city streets, Pearl reviewed her future options: “It was in Peking… that I became convinced that sooner or later I must leave China and return permanently to my own country, for such wars and upheavals lay ahead that no white people would be allowed to remain.”
War with Japan ended with a cease-fire and suspension of hostilities in early March, and in June the Bucks returned briefly to Nanjing to prepare for their return to the United States on furlough. “I seem not to remember much about the departure,” Pearl wrote in her memoirs. Her husband planned to complete his PhD at Cornell, and she was in a fever to get back to Carol. They arranged to take with them Pearl’s American secretary, Adeline Bucher, who had turned out to be even more useful looking after Janice. Pearl found a telegram waiting for her in Nanjing with news that The Good Earth had won her a Pulitzer. Film rights had already been sold to Metro-Goldwyn-Meyer for fifty thousand dollars, more than any book had ever gotten from Hollywood before. She said she felt “like a common brown hen… who has seen a phoenix emerge from what she thought was an ordinary egg.” Now that she was in a position to do as she pleased, her plans for Carol and the Vineland School loomed far larger than her publisher’s counterplans to unveil his mystery author to the American public. “I shall avoid all publicity stuff, and want to slip in and out of America unnoticed” was the unrealistic scheme Pearl outlined to Emma. “My blood runs cold at the thought of meeting a lot of people.”
Pearl Buck in China Page 24