In China she was admired but not read My professor at Berkeley, the novelist Maxine Hong Kingston, urged me to read The Good Earth after I mentioned the awful movie version, featuring white actors playing the leads, including the German-born Luise Rainer as the matriarch O-Lan (for which she won the Academy Award for Best Actress). Kingston, however, fondly recalled being assigned Buck. “I was lucky,” she told me. “When I was a student in the California public schools, Buck was still required, so I read The Good Earth in 1955, when I was in ninth grade. That book was very important to me. Jade Snow Wang influenced me as a writer, but Buck showed that Chinese people were people. She wrote about them with compassion. That book humanized Chinese people. It is written with so much empathy that, for the first time, Americans had to see Chinese as equals.”
Her most recent Chinese translator, however, told me Liu Haiping at Nanjing University. For a visit to her Chinese home and museum, see my New York Times Book Review piece, listed under “Meyer” in the Bibliography.
Professor Liu first read Buck in the United States, when he was a student at Harvard in the 1980s, though not in class. “When I would go to friends’ homes, it was usually a woman in her sixties who would ask me how I viewed Buck’s portrayal of China,” he told me. “I felt embarrassed because I had not read her. She was banned. The more I learned about her life, the more I wanted to do her justice.”
In 1986, Liu organized a literary conference in Nanjing that marked the beginning of Buck’s resuscitation in China.
In China Past and Present, Buck remembered of The Good Earth: “‘My only criticism of this book,’ a famous Chinese writer said, ‘is that it should have been written by a Chinese’” (p. 162).
“I became mentally bifocal” Buck, Pearl, 2, pp. 10 and 52. Paraphrased nicely in the excellent biography by Spurling.
Her father had translated the Bible Buck, Pearl, 1, p. 86.
Like John Steinbeck He wrote these columns in 1936 for the San Francisco News, since collected in a book titled The Harvest Gypsies.
After their divorce eighteen years later Ibid., p. 92. In the city of Nanjing, Lossing founded China’s first agricultural economics department, which grew into what was then the world’s largest, with a staff of one hundred. But his work fell out of favor after the Revolution; he had recommended mechanization and access to credit to alleviate farmers’ burdens, not Marxist land redistribution. Lossing continued to publish research about China from the United States, where he became a specialist at the State Department’s Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs. The better-known chronicler of Chinese agriculture became William Hinton, author of Fanshen, a six-hundred-page portrait of a village undergoing Communist land reform in 1948. It was not published until 1966, after Hinton sued for the return of his notes, seized by U.S. customs agents at the height of McCarthyism.
“To learn to be a farmer” Buck, John Lossing, 2, pp. 240–41.
Her sister Grace told a biographer Ibid., p. 166. In Chinese Farm Economy’s acknowledgments, Lossing cited ten other people—including “Miss G. C. Mertsky particularly for compiling the index; and of all others who have helped for briefer periods of time” before arriving at “For editing I am greatly indebted to my wife.” There was no mention of her name, her translations, or her work alongside him in the field.
In 1972, the year of Nixon’s visit to China Buck, Pearl, 4, p. 171. The actual letter appears on the page, dated May 17, 1972. The author, a functionary, wrote that he was “authorized to inform you that we can not accept your request for a visit to China.” It’s signed, “Sincerely yours . . .” Buck had wanted to visit her parents’ graves. She noted, on the last page of the last book she ever wrote, that “I was humbly happy that my parents were also mentioned [in the Nobel Prize citation] in the added phrase, ‘and for masterpieces of biography’” (Buck, Pearl, 3, p. 177).
Although Buck said that she had assiduously avoided visiting Taiwan or taking any sides in the Chinese civil war, she did, in 1970, allude to her politics, writing: “After I left China permanently in 1933, knowing that Communism would win because of its growing appeal to the peasantry, and knowing, too, not only that I could not live in a Communist-controlled country but also that Chinese Communists would not tolerate Americans who were not Communist, I then devoted my efforts to helping Chinese in the United States not to be deported to Communist China” (Buck, Pearl, 3, p. 294).
I was busy, busy, busy Spurling.
But there were other lessons, too I owe thanks to my friend Leslie T. Chang for this pithy notion. See Chang.
“Americans,” Pearl Buck wrote in 1970 Buck, Pearl, 3, pp. 294–95.
“What if you land in the Chinese countryside?” Buck, Pearl, 3, p. 175. She also told the men, “Perhaps the first Chinese phrase you ought to learn is ‘Wo shi Mei-kuo ren,’ or, ‘I am an American.’” (I hoped her lesson would continue on to one’s birth year on the Chinese zodiac, one’s height, and one’s ability to use chopsticks, but no.)
The nation was on a “global commodity hunt” Romig. The purchaser of the Argentine soya was Heilongjiang Beidahuang. The company’s name was a combination of the northernmost province and Manchuria’s former nickname of “the vast northern wasteland.”
Its food and energy purchases Barrionuevo.
The shift to overseas food sources I calculated the equivalence. The area plowed under came from Zhou Xiaozheng, a professor of sociology at Renmin University of China in Beijing. (See O’Neill.)
“Chasing ever-higher output levels” Chuin-Wei. Agricultural statistics, like budgetary numbers, made me cross-eyed as I tried to grasp the size of millions of hectares or how large a metric ton of rice was. Learning that 170 of them could fit in an average-size shipping container didn’t help; instead I held tight to comparative statistics that floated by, such as the average yield of a hectare of rice in China now at 6.3 tons, up from 1.5 tons fifty years ago. (The world average was 4.3 tons.) Yuan Longping, the “father of Chinese hybrid rice,” continued to break his own records with a 2013 yield of 19.4 tons in an experimental field, though seeds of his “super rice” were not yet commercially available. (Zuo 3 and Zhou.)
In 1949, when the Communist Party took power, China had 110 million hectares of cultivated land to feed a population of 542 million; now it has 122 million hectares to feed 1.3 billion. The area increased from reclaiming wasteland.
China classifies corn, wheat, and rice Ibid.
Food accounted for nearly $1 of every $5 China spent Wessel, and also Carlson.
An elated grower in Georgia Wessel.
China kept outsourcing Zuo 4. The project was reported to become China’s biggest overseas agricultural project. For decades China had aimed at being self-sufficient in grain production. Recently the target was lowered to 90 percent self-sufficiency.
It became China’s national anthem Lyrics were changed to exult the Communist Party and Chairman Mao following his death, although now the original words have been restored. A 2004 constitutional amendment finally decreed it as China’s official anthem.
It was sung from the perspective Shao, p. 289. I used the excellent translation that appears here.
Chapter 12: Puppets of Manchukuo
The two-story museum looked more like a workers’ sanatorium Before the Japanese installed Puyi here, the building had been the Bureau of Salt and Tobacco Taxation.
In a memoir, his childhood English tutor Johnston, p. 166. The tutor’s name was Reginald Johnston.
(In his memoir, Puyi wrote of the stay) Puyi, p. 129.
“Although he was now thoroughly Westernized” Johnston, p. 241. An excellent recounting of Puyi’s in-between years can be found in Scotland, pp. 37–39. In Tianjin, one can imagine him feeling a sense of freedom unlike any he had felt—or would feel again. Looking back on the twelve years he lived in the Forbidden City after abdication, he wrote, “I lived an aimless and purposeless life . . . While others could enjoy modern ways, I continued to breathe the air of the nineteen
th century and before. My life was an anachronism, a leftover of the type of life which had already become dust by that time” (Puyi, p. 37).
“My body,” he recalled, “would emit the combined odors” Puyi, pp. 154–55.
From around the world arrived letters Johnston, p. 241.
“My heart smoldered with a hatred I had never previously known” Puyi, p. 146.
In a private letter, an Australian journalist wrote Donald, letter to Harold Hochschild, February 14, 1927. In the It’s-a-small-world Department, I found Donald’s archives at Columbia University, began reading his correspondence, and then realized his most intimate letters were addressed to the father of Adam Hochschild, cofounder of Mother Jones magazine and author of books such as King Leopold’s Ghost and To End All Wars. The younger Hochschild was my professor at Berkeley, a mentorship that continues.
The correspondence halted in late 1941 and resumed on May 19, 1945, when Donald wrote to Harold: “I was in an internment camp, and remained there three years.” He had wasted away, surviving on foraged weeds, wishing, like many of his fellow starving prisoners, to die. “That I escaped is a marvel.”
In May 23, Harold replied, in part, “I was married on November 26, 1941, and the marriage has been, as you assume, a great success. We have a boy [Adam] who is now going on three years old.”
That autumn in 1945, aged seventy and frail, Donald begged off invitations to Manhattan speaking engagements. “As between friends, I do not want to talk any more about China” (September 9). He urged his friend not to cooperate with his biographer and returned to Shanghai, where he died the next year in the hospital. The Nationalists then ruling China gave him a state funeral.
But it was more than just a train A succinct overview of the SMR can be found in Young, pp. 31–33. The “one-third” figure comes from p. 33, where she adds that “a large fraction of the rest were involved in commercial operations indirectly dependent” on the railroad. See also Fogel, pp. 124–25.
Under the slogan “Military Preparedness in Civilian Garb” Fogel, viii. Goto said, “We have to implement a cultural invasion with a Central Laboratory, popular education for the resident populace, and forge other academic and economic links. Invasion may not be an agreeable expression, but [language] aside we can generally call our policy one of invasion in civil garb.”
Researchers collected the minutiae of Manchurian life It took the American researcher John Young eight years to track down surviving copies of South Manchurian Railway reports. In a seven-hundred-page bibliography published in 1966, Young documented 6,284 titles scattered in the Library of Congress, Stanford’s Hoover Institution Library, and libraries at the University of California, Berkeley; Johns Hopkins; Harvard; Michigan; Columbia; Oklahoma; Penn; and twenty-five universities in Japan. Many had been discovered by a Japanese-American soldier in the Occupation Army packed on a pier, where they had arrived from Manchuria. “Startled by the bulk and great value of the materials [including Russian and Japanese-language documents] he sent them hastily to the United States just as they had been packed for evacuation.”
In a dispute over irrigation The village was named Wanpaoshan, and the event is called the Wanpaoshan Incident. The killing of the Japanese spy, Captain Nakamura, is known as the Nakamura Incident.
It didn’t even disrupt rail traffic Within an hour an express train from Beijing traveling fifty miles an hour passed the blast site.
“There was no way we could win” Chang and Halliday, p. 120.
Officially, it was the army’s sole initiative. On a visit to Tokyo’s Yushukan—the war museum on the grounds of the Yasukuni Shrine, dedicated to soldiers who died fighting for the emperor—I understood why contemporary Chinese (and many Japanese) are angered by Japan’s official narrative of the war. The museum’s Manchukuo exhibit said the “Manchurian Incident” occurred because “resentment toward the overtly anti-Japanese polices of Zhang Xueliang’s government, and dissatisfaction with the Japanese government’s conciliatory approach to China, smoldered among Japanese residents in Manchuria (especially within the Kwantung Army). Chinese nationalism developed into a campaign for the removal of foreign interests, in violation of the existing treaties. The campaign spread to Manchuria, where anti-Japanese harassment and terrorism erupted. Under such circumstances the Kwantung Army resorted to force.”
Manji Ishiwara, the lieutenant colonel who was the incident’s co-plotter, thought he would be dishonorably discharged for it. Instead, he was returned to Japan and promoted to chief of operations for its entire army. On returning to Manchukuo six years later, Ishiwara was so disgusted with Japan’s blatant colonial occupation that he denounced the Kwantung Army commanders before being put out to pasture near Kyoto. Free of charges, he testified as a witness at the Tokyo War Crimes Tribunal. His co-plotter, Seishiro Itagaki, who surrendered Japan’s Southeast Asian forces to Mountbatten in Singapore in September 1945, was found guilty of war crimes and hanged—as was Kenji Doihara, the intelligence officer who oversaw the plot, and would control Manchukuo’s prostitution and opium traffic, including the secret insertion of the drug into the popular Golden Bat brand cigarettes, addling unsuspecting consumers.
“But there was one big problem that worried me” Puyi, p. 160.
Unbeknownst to him, a large drum of gasoline was on board Yamamuro, p. 97.
“Without waiting for the interpreter to finish translating” Puyi, p. 172.
“These words, when relayed to me” Ibid., p. 173.
“Even before the train had stopped” Yamamuro, p. 93. This was translated from the Japanese edition of Puyi’s memoir. It noted that Puyi arrived at 3:00 p.m. Unlike today—when all clocks are set to Beijing time—the nation then had five time zones. Changchun ran on Changbai Time, named for the Ever-White Mountains at Jilin province’s east. In the English edition of his memoir, Puyi said of this time: “Since I had already openly appeared in public there was absolutely no turning back, and besides, I thought that if I could maneuver the Japanese well, they would perhaps support my restoration as emperor” (Puyi, p. 180).
Puyi was inaugurated in a ceremony Yamamuro, p. 105.
But one of the masterminds of the September 18 bombing Ibid., p. 97.
“I soon discovered that my authority was only shadow” Puyi, pp. 181–82.
Tokyo means “Eastern Capital” At the time, the romanization of the Xinjng’s name was Hsinking.
It would be unlike other planned capitals “Capital Punishments,” Economist, December 18, 1997. In 1792, George Washington fired the District of Columbia’s planner, Pierre Charles L’Enfant, for refusing to water down his extravagant blueprint. The area around Delaware Avenue remained a swamp as late as 1850, while the National Cathedral wasn’t finished until 1991.
Around the time of Xinjing’s inception, an English reporter wrote Ibid.
Planners drew clean lines, circular plazas Buck, David, pp. 74–89. His article gives an excellent overview of the planning and construction, but also of the men who were drawing its lines. In 1906, Japan appointed Goto Shimpei as the first president of the South Manchurian Railroad. Born into a samurai family but educated in Germany as a physician, Goto planned freshwater and sewage systems for Japan, then Taiwan. As its appointed governor, Goto also oversaw a plan for Taipei that differed from the tangle of dense, narrow lanes that characterized Japanese cities, where urban planning did not exist as a field of study. After arriving in Manchuria, he oversaw the importation of the design in Mukden (Shenyang) and Changchun, whose planners bypassed the Russian and Chinese settlement areas and planned a settlement from scratch. These cities’ maps show his fingerprints today, with a grid pattern of streets bisected by diagonal boulevards that lead to plazas and parks.
Buck notes that Changchun’s first designer was Kato Yonokichi. Xinjing was drawn up by Sano Toshikata. Both were disciples of Goto Shimpei. Other architects who worked in Xinjing include disciples of Frank Lloyd Wright (who was in Tokyo, designing the Imperial Hotel) and Le Co
rbusier. See also Young, Louise, pp. 249–50.
See DuBois for a fascinating side note on the urban plan that built the city’s main road around a “filial son” tomb, evincing Manchukuo’s embrace of Confucianism.
Inside, schoolchildren stared up at the skeleton It looked like a smaller, upright brontosaurus. Fittingly, the validity of the Mandschurosaurus as a genus has been debated internationally, with some paleontologists branding it a nomen dubium, a scientific name of doubtful application, since only a partial specimen exists.
The buildings look unlike any other in China These ministry buildings were completed in 1936, a year before Japan launched attacks against greater China, and five years before bombing Pearl Harbor and attacking Hong Kong and Singapore, drawing the United States and its allies into war.
David Buck translates the style’s name as “Developing Asia,” but other authors, including Victor Zatespine, call it “Rising Asia” (p. 66).
“I have just heard that the League of Nations” Powell, p. 189.
The Lytton Commission, named for its head After Japan formed Manchukuo in 1932, China appealed to the nascent League of Nations to intervene. It ordered the withdrawal of Japanese troops, a resolution that Japan ignored. The West’s attention was diverted by domestic concerns: British sailors mutinied at the Royal Navy yard at Invergordon; the failure of one of Europe’s most preeminent banks threatened the entire continent with bankruptcy; the United States remained mired in the Great Depression. Its Stimson Doctrine, named for the secretary of state, said it would not recognize territorial changes resulting from force, therefore Manchuria remained part of sovereign China. No sanctions were applied; the toothless doctrine’s one noticeable effect was to further alienate Japan from American influence and to view the U.S. as a threat.
In Manchuria Page 36