Pearl Buck in China

by Hilary Spurling

  The Mission Board, split between opposing factions, stepped up an exercise in damage limitation fronted by Dr. McAfee, who fielded vituperation and abuse, damped down press speculation, and expressed cordial support for Pearl, blandly denying any suggestion that she was a heretic. Reconciliation was his aim, and he pursued it with diplomacy and skill. Some of the harshest criticisms he received came from Absalom Sydenstricker’s former colleagues in China, who recognized as clearly as Pearl herself that this was on some level a private reckoning, containing a strong element of personal betrayal. “Everything she has uttered of late tends to discredit her father and the gospel,” observed a report submitted to the Board by Rev. James Graham, Absalom’s old friend, long-term adversary, and his successor as head of the Zhenjiang station. Graham, who had known Pearl since she was a baby in Tsingkiangpu, denounced her as demented and unwomanly, deliberately pandering to depravity in books based on filthy Chinese novels: “Is it any wonder that we missionaries are perplexed, disturbed, yes outraged, that a woman who committed an abomination in a printed book… should be quoted on all sides as an authority on what mission work should consist of and the kind of missionary that should be sent to China?”

  Strangely enough Pearl agreed with him. She refused to negotiate with McAfee or any of his emissaries on the grounds that the Church’s internal feuding was no concern of hers, insisting that she had had enough of the whole preposterous farrago. Her letter of resignation from the mission movement, sent on April 28, raised another storm of protest. Students, liberal church leaders, black people, and women’s groups at home and abroad rose to her defense. A Mrs. J. M. Guthrie of North Carolina spoke for many of Pearl’s readers in a dignified letter of rebuke, objecting to the spurious respectability lent by the Church to an assault by ignorant fanatics, and saying that for the first time in her life she felt ashamed of her Presbyterian allegiance: “I am only a humble farm woman, but I tell you that there are thousands of other women like me who will rise in indignation against this foolish affair being given further publicity.”

  Much of the uproar had been caused in the first place by Pearl’s increasingly high profile as a speaker on subjects like birth control, race relations, and discrimination against women and black people. She had been appalled by an exhibition in Harlem of black painters whose work depicted lynchings, burnings, ruined families and homes, the desolation caused by segregation in the South. Her feelings surfaced in an address that winter to the National Urban League in New York. “Some of the things my people do make me ashamed of the fact that I am white” was one of her remarks, quoted in the African American Chicago Defender with the rider, “from that point forward she was doomed to persecution by her Christian brothers.” Reports of her speeches were printed in newspapers around the world. The Madras Mail printed Pearl’s picture in early May under the headline “RESULT OF HERESY HUNT” with a caption attributing the attacks on her to “her attitude of fairness and justice toward darker races.” She shared a platform at Cornell in February with Eleanor Roosevelt, the formidable wife of America’s newly elected president, gave the alumnae address at Randolph Macon’s commencement in June, and went on to accept an honorary degree from Yale.

  In July the Bucks set out by a roundabout route to return to China, traveling via Europe with a large party consisting of Janice and Adeline Bucher, Richard and Ruby Walsh, a recently divorced Edgar Sydenstricker with his new wife, Phyllis, and Ardron B. Lewis, a young Cornell statistician roped in to join Lossing’s land utilization team. In England the party divided into two. Lossing’s three-man research group (they were joined by another agriculturalist, Charles Stewart of Illinois) set out in the Buick to conduct a scientific survey of farming practices and agricultural departments in England, Wales, Scotland, Ireland, Sweden, Germany, and France. Pearl and Richard led a more leisurely sightseeing tour of cultural sites and publishing houses in Great Britain and Europe. The two parties met up again in Paris at the end of the summer, when the U.S. residents turned back across the Atlantic, leaving the Bucks with Ardron Lewis and Adeline Bucher to take ship from Italy for China. They set off on the long, hot, sticky journey south in an overcrowded car with Lossing at the wheel and a fractious child in the back, oppressed by heavy silent tension between the driver and his wife.

  The attraction between Pearl and Richard had come to a head even before they left America and become almost more than they could handle on their foreign holiday, in spite of all the other people present. They had parted in Paris on the understanding that each would at least try to live without the other. Pearl’s resolution lasted until the Buick reached Nice, where she finally asked Lossing for a divorce. She claimed afterward that he had suspected nothing: “He was taken by surprise. ‘I thought I had made a success of our marriage,’ he said.” Lossing himself maintained that he knew perfectly well what was going on but had been too preoccupied to stop it; “I was busy, busy, busy, going back with all this Land Utilization data.” He was clearly distressed, according to Lewis, who sailed with them from Venice, but phlegmatic and reluctant to talk about what had happened. Pearl confided to Emma halfway through the voyage that, hard as she had tried to save her marriage, she could not endure her husband’s touch: “frankly if I am to live in the same house as Lossing I cannot go on with that.… My whole soul and body turns sick at the thought.” They landed on October 2 in Shanghai, where Pearl was fêted for the first and last time by the Chinese in China. She gave interviews before she even left the ship; attended a dinner hosted by the satirical weekly, The China Critic, for her to meet its brilliant young columnist, Lin Yutang; and spoke at a reception given in her honor by the city’s literary community on the night of the Moon Festival, October 5 (they had done the same in the spring for George Bernard Shaw).

  Shortly afterward she returned for the last time to Nanjing, where Lossing had already plunged back into work. His most urgent concern, prompted by the ravages of the Great Depression in Europe and the United States, was to establish a link between China’s current monetary problems and the fact that the Chinese yuan was pegged to the rising price of silver. A report on his findings published by the university that winter led directly to Chiang Kaishek’s decision to rebalance his country’s economy by dismantling the silver standard. “Dr. Buck’s prestige with the Chinese Nationalist government was very high,” said Ardron Lewis, who coauthored a statistical study, Silver and Prices, as well as working on the land utilization survey that had by this time taken over much of the Agricultural College building. In an age before computers, the labor of sorting, filing, and collating fieldwork results collected on an unprecedented scale from all over the country was carried out by teams of statisticians, clerks, and graduate students working at tables set up on the raked tiers of the central lecture theater. “To conceive such a project requires what you might call scientific imagination,” Professor Lewis wrote half a century later, assessing in retrospect the audacity of Lossing’s vision, his administrative flair, and powerful synthesizing intelligence. “You couldn’t conceive it without…. It remains the only authoritative picture we’ve got of the agricultural constitution of China…. It must be the benchmark of all measurements in all departments.” Lossing himself acknowledged a symbiotic relationship with The Good Earth in the first footnote of the first of three monumental volumes of Land Utilisation in China. On its publication in 1937 the work was immediately recognized as, according to the New York Times, “unquestionably the most detailed study ever made of any aspect of Chinese life.” Overtaken by the outbreak of war with Japan that year, set aside during the civil war, and dismissed for decades after the Communists came to power as the elitist product of futile, formalist, bourgeois science, Lossing’s survey is only now beginning to be assessed without bias in China. “It laid a solid foundation for China’s agricultural development and research,” said Cui Zechun, summing up proceedings at a conference held in honor of J. L. Buck at Nanjing University in 2008. “Professor Buck was the founder of China’
s agricultural economics.”

  By late autumn of 1933 the two Bucks had parted company in all but the most formal sense. Resuming her old routines as a faculty wife, this time with no job of her own to distract her, Pearl found her situation almost unendurable. “The strain was practically impossible before,” she wrote to Emma, “now utterly so…. I am quite desperate these days.” Her old friends let her know that they would not put up with anything that looked like pretension on her part. “oh, so we’ve got a secretary now, have we?” asked Margaret Thomson with a sarcastic intonation that Pearl remembered bitterly for the rest of her life. America receded, becoming once again the exotic unreal dreamland it had been throughout her childhood. She gave up any attempt to work on the novel she had planned to complete the Good Earth trilogy, promised for delivery by the end of the year. All she could do was housework and gardening, sunk in the kind of dismal stupor that had overtaken her father when he too saw his own life fall apart.

  Her stupor was interrupted by a cable from Richard, who had accepted a second job as editor of Asia magazine on condition that his first duty to the paper was an extended tour of his prospective territory, with the Bucks’ house in Nanjing as its starting point. He arrived at the end of the year, bringing with him an authentic whiff of Manhattan. Pearl met him in Shanghai, and the two became inseparable again. Back in conventional, conservative Nanjing, their free and easy behavior caused consternation. One of Lossing’s closest Chinese colleagues, R. H. Tsui, never forgot the shock of seeing him drive by in the Buick with Pearl and “the publisher Walsh” grinning and chattering side by side together on the back seat. “They were pretty brazen about it,” said Lossing, who left on a field trip for Tibet soon after Richard moved into his house. Pearl made it clear that she was planning her departure too. By the time her husband got back, she and Richard had set out alone together to cross Asia (more than thirty years later Pearl remembered pulling off her wedding ring and dropping it overboard from a Chinese riverboat at some point on their travels). They headed south, dropping in to present Richard to Pearl’s sister, pottering around the old city of Guangzhou, and exploring the country backtracks of Fukien, before moving on through Vietnam, Cambodia, Thailand, Laos, Burma, India, and back across China to Beijing. “I wanted as little as possible to do with white people,” Pearl said of this journey, which was her chance to initiate Richard into the world where she felt at home, just as he had made her free of his literary landscape in New York.

  They picked up again a dialogue about writing, politics, historical and cultural connections that spilled out when they got back to the United States into a comprehensive remake of Asia magazine. It had coasted along for nearly thirty years as an upmarket, vaguely philanthropical, increasingly ailing travel monthly, kept afloat recently by advertisements for Oriental holidays and luxury cruises. Richard’s first editorial, published in his absence in January 1934, signaled a change of course to a more demanding direction with special emphasis on new writing, serious analysis, and objective in-depth reporting by multicultural experts drawn from a broad field. The new management was a joint enterprise from the start. Richard signed up the Manchester Guardian’s Asian correspondent, H. J. Timperley, as a talent spotter in Beijing. Pearl, who had already submitted articles by Lin Yutang to Asia, now introduced him in person to the new editor. (Lin’s book My Country and My People would be a runaway bestseller for John Day in 1935.) In Beijing she telephoned a couple of enterprising young American writers, recently returned themselves from a honeymoon voyage of discovery, Edgar and Helen Foster Snow. Both would write for Asia, which pulled off a journalistic coup a few years later with prepublication extracts from Edgar’s Red Star over China. The five of them spent a productive and entertaining day together at the Snows’ Beijing home.

  An ambitious, energetic loner from Kansas City, Edgar Snow had married a clever, tough-minded, rebellious, runaway Mormon, who became the research end (and some said the brains) of their joint outfit during the ten years they spent together in China. With no previous knowledge of the country or its language, they aimed to educate themselves and undercut the standard Western view of Oriental inscrutability by reading what the Chinese wrote. In a time of widespread disillusion, political tension, and indiscriminate censorship under an increasingly authoritarian government, when more and more writers were being forced to go underground or leave the country, the Snows had built up an extensive collection of books, pamphlets, and periodicals banned as subversive by the Nationalists. Their long-term goal was to persuade America to look at China through Chinese eyes by turning many of these texts into English with the help of hired translators.

  When he met Pearl, Edgar was working on the first translation of Lu Xun’s alarming allegory, “Story of Ah Q,” probably the single best-known and most influential fiction produced by any Chinese writer in its day or since. Lu himself, living at the time in and out of hiding in the French concession in Shanghai, had included a disparaging comment in a letter to a friend soon after Pearl’s triumphal reception in that city: “It is always better for the Chinese to write about Chinese subject matter, as that is the only way to get near the truth. Even with Mrs. Buck… what her books reveal is no more than her stand as an American woman missionary who happens to have grown up in China…. Only when we Chinese come to do it, can we expect to reveal some truth.” Widely circulated after Lu’s premature death and formally endorsed as the politically correct view, this passing reference (which Lu seems subsequently to have regretted) irreparably damaged Pearl Buck’s reputation in China both before and after the Communist takeover in 1949. For her part she greatly admired his work, going out of her way to mention it in books, articles, and speeches and reviewing Ah Q and Other Stories enthusiastically when it finally appeared in the United States.

  It was an article by Edgar Snow published in 1935 in Asia, followed by translations of two short stories, that first alerted American readers to Lu’s existence. Foreigners rarely met contemporary writers of this kind, dissidents with no formal Communist allegiance, critical of their own society and anxious for reform under mounting threat from the Nationalists’ fascist regime. Lu was one of many introduced by Lin Yutang to the Snows, who in turn passed them on to the editors of Asia. Edgar was as fascinated by contemporary vernacular fiction as Pearl had been at the start of her career, and for the same reason: “It opened many doorways into the thinking of people of my own age in China, and taught me something of the conditions under which writers worked—in constant fear, mixed despair and hope, and nearly always semi-starvation. Pearl Buck and… Dick Walsh… encouraged me by publishing many of these translated stories.”

  Helen was deeply struck at that first meeting by the glow of happiness coming from the older couple, whose mutual magnetic field was so strong they could not stop paying one another extravagant, unnecessary compliments. Pearl blushed easily, spoke in a seductive throaty voice “with a cultivated lilt to it,” and was enviably well dressed in blue silk crepe with a fashionably draped cowl neck, high heels, and elegant silk stockings (rare in those days in Shanghai). “Her beautiful gray-green eyes were as clear as jade, frank and sparkling. They were not ordinary eyes. You could not say they were without witchcraft…. Valkyrean one might say…. Her uneven mouth was cut like a gash in her expressive face. She was attractive, friendly, natural, easy to be with, but I had a feeling that she had never been young.”

  The giddy, careless, rapturous youth Pearl had never really tasted was one of the gifts Richard gave her. She wrote her own account of their courtship twenty years later, recasting it as a comic romance of dreamlike absurdity: “The chase had… been a long one. We were past our first youth when we first met, each resigned, we thought, to unsatisfactory marriages…. I had firmly refused him in New York, Stockholm, London, Paris and Venice and then had sailed by way of India for home in Nanking, China.” Pearl’s account skates over their Asian trip together, saying only that she refused him once again in Shanghai, “and this time for ev
er. I went alone after that to Peking… and had been there less than a week when he appeared unexpectedly in the midst of a violent dust storm out of the Gobi desert. We parted again eternally, and he went to Manchuria and I went home again to Nanking to pack my bags for a summer visit to the U.S.”

  Her plan was to spend the next few months with Carol, returning to China in the winter, but whatever pretext Pearl offered—and whether or not she and Richard were technically yet lovers—she must have known this was in some sense a final break. Still nominally a Christian and a mission wife, Pearl had put herself beyond the pale of the only community she knew. Adultery meant social ostracism as well as theological anathema. Margaret Bear said she nearly fainted when she heard the news that Pearl had run away to India with her publisher. Forty years later Lilliath Bates was still incredulous. When the moment came to leave her house and garden, Pearl took nothing with her, as if pretending to the last that she might one day return. She sailed with Janice and Adeline Bucher on May 30, 1934, boarding a ship that put in at the Japanese port of Yokohama, where Richard turned up without warning. “There he was, lean, brown and handsome, and smoking his old briar pipe…. In spite of this I said ‘no’ every day on board ship and again in Vancouver and all winter in New York. But spring in that magic city was my undoing, and we were married on 11 June.”