The Child Who Never Grew (nonfiction)
Page 10
What The Child Who Never Grew does not delve into was how successful her writing was and how this success sometimes prevented her from nurturing the very family she had sought to provide for. But the fact is, she was quickly recognized for her writings, and was honored by both the Pulitzer and Nobel Prizes within a few short years. She had exploded upon the conscience of the peoples of the world, and she would not relent in her pursuit to examine the many social issues that gripped her attention. Her life at last had meaning.
With her writing a critical and commercial success, Pearl was not only able to provide for the financial needs of her child and herself, but also for members of her new family. At Vineland, she donated funds for the construction of Carol’s cottage, which housed about sixteen residents. Besides the suite that Carol occupied, the cottage included bedrooms and baths for the other residents, a large dayroom, a large dining room, a good-sized kitchen for meal preparation, and quarters for the housemother. Pearl also established a lifetime living contract for Carol to remain at the school. Naturally, she continued to provide Carol with clothing, toys, phonographs, roller skates, and anything else that my sister wanted or needed. And she assigned the royalties from the first edition of this book to the Training School, probably as a fund-raising gift.
For her second husband and new family—which eventually grew to include six adopted children in addition to myself—Pearl became the main breadwinner. She re-built an old farm house and acquired additional land, and also paid the salaries of numerous household staff. All the while she maintained a busy schedule of writing, social activities in and outside the home, speaking engagements for causes she supported, and many other activities.
Unfortunately, as she was reaching out to so many, there were times that my mother could not be there for her own family. Although she provided for our material needs, she often did not have the time to take care of our emotional needs. She needed to schedule her time carefully so that she had undisturbed hours to write and answer correspondence. And even when she had time to spend with us, I often felt that she lived in another world from ours, and did not really understand simple, everyday family life. She did not seem attuned to the enjoyment my siblings and I took in ordinary pleasures such as sports, and never seemed to recognize our achievements in this area. She placed intellectual pursuits above all else, and since none of us were particularly intellectual, I guess we were disappointments to her in a way.
My mother did her best to balance the different parts of her life, but as we all know, each of our lives can only reach so far. Only when she was close to death did I finally realize that—although she had reached out to all mankind—she had not been able to attend to some of the smaller details that would have made her life more fulfilling. My mother seemed to be at peace with herself when she died, but I know that she left with many dreams unmet. One of the biggest dreams, I am sure, was to make amends to her children, who did not understand the complexities of her life or the role that she felt she could have played in the world.
This magnificent woman—my mother—left a legacy that could not be duplicated, but she also left lives that would need healing. It cannot be denied that my siblings and I—all of us abandoned by our birth mothers and fathers—later felt abandoned by our adopted mother, Pearl. It also cannot be denied that Carol played an unwitting role in our abandonment—if only because she was one of the primary impetuses that spurred my mother to write. My siblings and I are not close, nor did they know Carol, or anything about her life or the bond between Carol and myself. They always remained separate. Not because they did not care; only because my mother did not involve them in Carol’s life. My younger siblings were almost seventeen years Carol’s junior, and so had contact with her only during her brief summer visits to Pennsylvania. This was a world that they were not a part of, and were not ever expected to participate in, unless, of course, I preceded my sister in death.
I therefore write this Afterword not only to update the story of Carol’s life, but also to explain the way my mother lived her life. In so doing, I hope that I might help my siblings and others familiar with my mother’s life to understand what happened in the past. My brothers and sisters were often hurt by my mother’s apparent aloofness, and did not understand how they fit into her life. The truth is, she did not intend to hurt them, but she needed to give meaning to her own life. And one of her primary methods of giving meaning to her life was to support those who were unable to speak for themselves—whether it be the minorities or oppressed peoples of the world, or those who were slow to learn, like my sister. As a public figure, she was able to reach out to all peoples of the world, and show her compassion and concern. She was able to leave a legacy of simple caring for all mankind who would listen and accept her challenge. Would this legacy have been different if she had not given birth to Carol? It is impossible to say for sure, of course, but I think that the answer is “yes.”
1Janice C. Walsh was Carol Buck’s sister and legal guardian. She is President of the Board of Directors of the Pearl S. Buck Foundation and has served on the Board of Directors of the Training School at Vineland, New Jersey. She works as an occupational therapist with the mentally retarded.
A Biography of Pearl S. Buck
Pearl S. Buck (1892–1973) was a bestselling and Nobel Prize-winning author of fiction and nonfiction, celebrated by critics and readers alike for her groundbreaking depictions of rural life in China. Her renowned novel The Good Earth (1931) received the Pulitzer Prize and the William Dean Howells Medal. For her body of work, Buck was awarded the 1938 Nobel Prize in Literature—the first American woman to have won this honor.
Born in 1892 in Hillsboro, West Virginia, Buck spent much of the first forty years of her life in China. The daughter of Presbyterian missionaries based in Zhenjiang, she grew up speaking both English and the local Chinese dialect, and was sometimes referred to by her Chinese name, Sai Zhenzhju. Though she moved to the United States to attend Randolph-Macon Woman’s College, she returned to China afterwards to care for her ill mother. In 1917 she married her first husband, John Lossing Buck. The couple moved to a small town in Anhui Province, later relocating to Nanking, where they lived for thirteen years.
Buck began writing in the 1920s, and published her first novel, East Wind: West Wind in 1930. The next year she published her second book, The Good Earth, a multimillion-copy bestseller later made into a feature film. The book was the first of the Good Earth trilogy, followed by Sons (1933) and A House Divided (1935). These landmark works have been credited with arousing Western sympathies for China—and antagonism toward Japan—on the eve of World War II.
Buck published several other novels in the following years, including many that dealt with the Chinese Cultural Revolution and other aspects of the rapidly changing country. As an American who had been raised in China, and who had been affected by both the Boxer Rebellion and the 1927 Nanking Incident, she was welcomed as a sympathetic and knowledgeable voice of a culture that was much misunderstood in the West at the time. Her works did not treat China alone, however; she also set her stories in Korea (Living Reed), Burma (The Promise), and Japan (The Big Wave). Buck’s fiction explored the many differences between East and West, tradition and modernity, and frequently centered on the hardships of impoverished people during times of social upheaval.
In 1934 Buck left China for the United States in order to escape political instability and also to be near her daughter, Carol, who had been institutionalized in New Jersey with a rare and severe type of mental retardation. Buck divorced in 1935, and then married her publisher at the John Day Company, Richard Walsh. Their relationship is thought to have helped foster Buck’s volume of work, which was prodigious by any standard.
Buck also supported various humanitarian causes throughout her life. These included women’s and civil rights, as well as the treatment of the disabled. In 1950, she published a memoir, The Child Who Never Grew, about her life with Carol; this candid account helped break the social
taboo on discussing learning disabilities. In response to the practices that rendered mixed-raced children unadoptable—in particular, orphans who had already been victimized by war—she founded Welcome House in 1949, the first international, interracial adoption agency in the United States. Pearl S. Buck International, the overseeing nonprofit organization, addresses children’s issues in Asia.
Buck died of lung cancer in Vermont in 1973. Though The Good Earth was a massive success in America, the Chinese government objected to Buck’s stark portrayal of the country’s rural poverty and, in 1972, banned Buck from returning to the country. Despite this, she is still greatly considered to have been “a friend of the Chinese people,” in the words of China’s first premier, Zhou Enlai. Her former house in Zhenjiang is now a museum in honor of her legacy.
Buck’s parents, Caroline Stulting and Absalom Sydenstricker, were Southern Presbyterian missionaries.
Buck was born Pearl Comfort Sydenstricker in Hillsboro, West Virginia, on June 26, 1892. This was the family’s home when she was born, though her parents returned to China with the infant Pearl three months after her birth.
Buck lived in Zhenjiang, China, until 1911. This photograph was found in her archives with the following caption typed on the reverse: “One of the favorite locations for the street barber of China is a temple court or the open space just outside the gate. Here the swinging shop strung on a shoulder pole may be set up, and business briskly carried on. A shave costs five cents, and if you wish to have your queue combed and braided you will be out at least a dime. The implements, needless to say, are primitive. No safety razor has yet become popular in China. Old horseshoes and scrap iron form one of China’s significant importations, and these are melted up and made over into scissors and razors, and similar articles. Neither is sanitation a feature of a shave in China. But then, cleanliness is not a feature of anything in the ex-Celestial Empire.”
Buck’s writing was notable for its sensitivity to the rural farming class, which she came to know during her childhood in China. The following caption was found typed on the reverse of this photograph in Buck’s archive: “Chinese beggars are all ages of both sexes. They run after your rickshaw, clog your progress in front of every public place such as a temple or deserted palace or fair, and pester you for coppers with a beggar song—‘Do good, be merciful.’ It is the Chinese rather than the foreigners who support this vast horde of indigent people. The beggars have a guild and make it very unpleasant for the merchants. If a stipulated tax is not paid them by the merchant they infest his place and make business impossible. The only work beggars ever perform is marching in funeral and wedding processions. It is said that every family expects 1 or 2 of its children to contribute to support of family by begging.”
Buck worked continually on behalf of underprivileged children, especially in the country where she grew up. The following caption was found typed on the reverse of this photograph in Buck’s archive: “The children of China seem to thrive in spite of dirt and poverty, and represent nature’s careful selection in the hard race for the right to existence. They are peculiarly sturdy and alert, taken as a whole, and indicate something of the virility of a nation that has continued great for four thousand years.”
Johann Waldemar de Rehling Quistgaard painted Buck in 1933, when the writer was forty-one years old—a year after she won the Pulitzer Prize for The Good Earth. The portrait currently hangs at Green Hills Farm in Pennsylvania, where Buck lived from 1934 and which is today the headquarters for Pearl S. Buck International. (Image courtesy of Pearl S. Buck International, www.pearlsbuck.org.)
Richard J. Walsh—Buck’s publisher and second husband—pictured in China with an unidentified rickshaw man. Walsh’s tweed suit and pipe are typical of his signature daily attire.
Buck receiving her Nobel Prize from the King of Sweden, Gustav V, in 1938. (Image courtesy of Pearl S. Buck International, www.pearlsbuck.org.)
Buck and Walsh with their daughter, Elizabeth.
Buck in the 1930s.
Walsh—with his ever-present pipe—pictured with an unidentified child.
Buck addresses an audience in Korea in 1964, discussing the issues of poverty and discrimination faced by children in Asia. She established the Orphanage and Opportunity Center in Buchon City, Korea, in 1965.
Buck in her fifties.
This family photograph was taken on Buck’s seventieth birthday, June 26, 1962. The gathering included Buck’s children, grandchildren, and some of the children supported by Pearl S. Buck International.
Buck on her seventieth birthday.
Pearl Buck’s legacy lives on through Pearl S. Buck International, a non-profit organization dedicated to humanitarian causes around the world.
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copyright © 1950 by the Training School at Vineland, New Jersey; copyright © 1978 by Janice C. Walsh, Richard S. Walsh, John S. Walsh, Mrs. Henriette C. Walsh, Mrs. Chieko C. Singer, Edgar S. Walsh, Mrs. Jean C. Lippincott, and Carol Buck
Foreword copyright © 1992 by James A Michener
Introduction copyright © 1992 by Woodbine House, Inc.
Afterword copyright © 1992 by Janice C. Walsh
cover design by Kathleen Lynch
978-1-4532-6359-4
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Table of Contents
Cover
Title Page
Contents
Foreword
Introduction
The Child Who Never Grew
I
II
III
Afterword
A Biography of Pearl S. Buck
Copyright
Table of Contents
Cover
Title Page
Contents
Foreword
Introduction
The Child Who Never Grew
I
II
III
Afterword
A Biography of Pearl S. Buck
Copyright