Pearl Buck in China (13 page)

The college already possessed a single Chinese student (who spoke no Mandarin, and whose dialect was unintelligible to someone from Zhenjiang), treated by her classmates with a distant civility that did not appeal to Pearl. Pearl’s plan was to create a new self, and she did it with superlative success:
“Externally I became an American
… by the end of my freshman year, I was indistinguishable from any other girl of my age and class.” Her first step was to get rid of the trousseau prepared with such effort and cost by her mother. She sewed her new wardrobe herself during her first vacation in her brother’s house on his wife’s sewing machine. One of the things that made her proud of Randolph-Macon ever after was the faculty’s firm refusal to grant the students’ annual petition for classes in home economy (“The theory was, and I think it entirely correct, that any educated woman can read a cookbook or follow a dress pattern”). Pearl’s outfits went down well, and her best effort—a chic little hat with pheasant-feather trim—was coveted and borrowed by every other student on campus. She acquired the right slang and the correct “soft drawl of Virginia speech.” She even outclassed the others as a practical joker, sabotaging the fancy-dress party of a rival faction by filling the fake fishnet decor with genuinely rotten fish.

In her junior year she was invited to join AMSAM, the oldest and most prestigious of the college’s secret societies, an accolade restricted to no more than a dozen girls at any one time. Pearl was treasurer in her sophomore year, and class president the year after. She wrote deftly accomplished stories for the college magazine and belonged to the exclusive Delta Kappa sorority. In 1913 she was chosen as one of two college delegates to the YWCA conference at Bryn Mawr (by this time she felt sufficiently sure of herself to turn down
the loan of a pair of corsets—an article of clothing considered barbaric in China—together with a request that she wear them at the northern gathering so as to uphold the honor of the South). She carried off prizes for both the best story and the best poem of her senior year but failed to anticipate the unspoken resentment this caused. Painfully sensitive herself to slight and rebuff, Pearl underestimated all her life the effect of her own successes on other people. She would have been voted president of the student government in her last year if she hadn’t answered frankly, when someone asked her who would win the election, “I think I shall.” It was her only false move, but it cost her the job.

If Pearl could not always conceal the fact that she found her contemporaries narrow and parochial, they hurt her in return by their lack of curiosity about the world she came from. This was her first prolonged exposure to the standard American view of China as a land of dirty, scavenging beggars and sinister, slit-eyed, yellow-skinned villains. Nobody asked, and she never told about her own background, anxieties, and preoccupations. The only person who understood was her brother Edgar, a kind, humorous, slow-spoken character whose deceptively bluff manner concealed a keen analytical intelligence and a sharp wit. He had grown into a big handsome man with the same broad open forehead, generous mouth, and strong features as Pearl herself. Brother and sister drew close in her years at college, when she spent much time at his house, getting to know him and playing with his children (a baby son was born during her time in Lynchburg). She realized in the hours they spent sitting and talking alone together on his porch in the evenings how alike they were, and how close Edgar too had been to their mother.

His early experiences had shut down a side of him that his sister opened up again. She understood probably better than anyone else the cumulative impact on a young boy of the terrifying loss at intervals without warning of his three younger siblings, his mother’s desolation, and her decision to send him away as soon as the next child looked robust enough to survive. If Pearl sympathized with Edgar’s sense of abandonment, he recognized only too well her struggles to
establish a footing in a strange, sometimes incomprehensible new environment. With him there was no need to hide her shock and shame when she discovered from Carie that their father had written begging letters trying to extract money for Pearl’s college fees from his charitable backers. Her immediate angry response was to find herself a part-time coaching job, but she never got over a betrayal that set her apart from her American contemporaries:
“No one of them knew
what it was to be always nothing in comparison to a cause, to a work, to a creed.” Only Edgar shared the bitterness of that particular bereavement (“For [Absalom’s] children were bereaved in what they never had, in what he could not give them, because he had given everything in him to God”). Like his sister, Edgar owed his moral balance and a residual belief in himself to their mother, who remained, in Grace’s words,
“the one against whom
he had measured the real importance of his life.” He relaxed in Pearl’s company, and she came to depend on his comforting presence and his quick quiet jokes. “She saw things in Edgar which he could not see himself,” wrote Grace: “a mind like Mother’s in warmth and human understanding, like father’s in careful, studious ability.”

After a slow and uncertain start, Edgar was beginning to look beyond a career as a newspaperman to the possibilities opening up in the comparatively new field of medical and social statistics. He had been married too young to a wife his parents considered unsuitable, and now that the marriage was beginning to fall apart it was Pearl who helped extricate him from the consequences of his own rashness. For his sake she gave up the pleasures and privileges she had worked so hard to achieve in her last year of college, abandoning her chance to edit the student magazine,
Tattler,
leaving campus and moving into Edgar’s house to provide support for his wife, while he left to take up a new job in Washington.
Pearl regretted her decision later
, claiming that her years at college had been overshadowed by the unhappiness and friction of her brother’s marital breakup. Certainly she was deeply disturbed by her role as go-between. When Edgar decided that divorce was his only option, he persuaded Pearl to plead his case with their parents, who were so appalled that the scheme had to be
dropped. For nearly twenty years he lived alone, apart from his wife, obtaining his divorce only after the deaths of both parents. Pearl explored his predicament (and her part in it) in two novels published long after he too was dead. The heroine’s brother in
The Time Is Noon
follows roughly the same path as Edgar, marrying early for the wrong reasons with disastrous results. In
Portrait of a Marriage
the brilliant, ambitious, and highly sophisticated hero marries a simple uneducated farmer’s daughter and takes the opposite course, making a decidedly implausible success of the marriage by allowing his career as an artist to fizzle out as he sinks steadily over half a century into professional obscurity and arrested development.

Pearl escaped from an oppressive situation in Lynchburg by spending summer vacations with the Stultings in Hillsboro. She also paid visits to her father’s family, questioning his two elder sisters and drawing her own cool sharp conclusions about his six brothers:
“most of them white-haired
by that time, an amazing array of tall, passionate angry men, not one of them under six feet, every one of them with the same shining bright blue eyes and dry humor and intolerant mind. The quarrel between them was as hot as ever.” Pearl got a first inkling of what lay behind her father’s furious solitude of spirit during her own long lonely summers in Pocahontas County and Greenbrier. Now that her grandfather was dead, she felt as much of a misfit in this world as her parents had done before her. Her fondness for her cousins was tempered by their disapproval of the escape route her family had chosen, and by her own need for outlets beyond their local round of gossip, visits, and calls.
“I did all that I could
to seem like everyone else, while I knew I never could be, however hard I tried.”

The same applied to her friends at college. The only close and durable relationship she made there was with a girl called Emma Edmunds, who singled Pearl out on their first day as someone even more out of place than herself. Tough, practical, and shrewd, Emma came from a large, unconventional, hard-up family that had gone down in the world. Hers was the only home where Pearl was welcomed and warmly invited to stay. Throughout their years in college Pearl confided freely in Emma, and for the next fifty years they continued
their conversation by post (
“It meant everything to me
to know that I could and can depend on you utterly,” Pearl wrote in an early letter; “I need you, Emma, and I need your friendship”). Pearl was popular and admired by the other girls but already protected by an aloofness that ruled out intimacy. She put it down to her background (
“I was trained by Asian women
to be self-effacing…. It shaped me in profound and basic ways”), recognizing detachment as part of the penalty she paid for her rapid remake as an American.

She would return again and again in her books to the drastic physical and emotional pressures on young people uprooted at a formative age, torn by conflicting cultures, attempting to adjudicate internally between the claims of America and Asia.
“The shock… of the departure
… and the end of all that she had known at a time when she was ceasing to be a child, was becoming a woman, the breaking off of deep emotional ties, not only with her friends, but with familiar landscapes, the necessity to conform to a… background, at once her own and yet alien, had set up restraints upon her spirit, certainly in her mind, which affected her body.” In her senior year Pearl complained of putting on weight (always a sign of inner perturbation with her) and removed herself bodily from campus. In retrospect her overall impression was of four years’ loneliness and isolation at Randolph-Macon, with details largely blotted out by the amnesia that runs like a refrain through her memoirs.
“Of my college days
I remember shamefully little,” she wrote. “Of my senior year I can remember very little that is pleasant or that added to my growth…. Summing it up I am amazed at how little I learned in college.”

Her graduation in June 1914 was attended by Edgar and their cousin Eugenia, the daughter of Carie’s sister Nettie, herself a music student in Richmond. Pearl had no intention of leaving America at this stage. She had been asked by her professor in the psychology department to stay on as his research assistant, a job designed in theory to lead to a scholarship at a major university, followed by a career as an academic or a practicing psychologist, options that clearly suited her better than work in the mission field. America’s limitless possibilities and its openness to the future spoke to something reckless and rootless in her. The
imperial China of her childhood lay in the past, swept away soon after her parents’ return in the autumn of 1911 by the uprising her father had so clearly predicted. The Sydenstrickers had come through the Revolution with characteristic aplomb, resisting diplomatic efforts to evacuate them with the rest of the foreign community, siding instead with the heterogeneous forces that finally toppled the corrupt and ineffectual Manchu Dynasty after more than two hundred years on the throne. Pearl’s mother described lying in bed that winter listening to distant cannon fire as revolutionary troops stormed the emperor’s former summer capital in Nanjing. Another night she reported rifle shots on the hillside at the back of their house and figures crouching in the bamboo grove beyond the compound wall; they were the wives and daughters of government officials, recognizable as Manchus by their elaborately styled hair, unbound feet, and court dress, put to flight by the gunmen of the new Republican regime. Powerless to intervene, Carie stayed indoors all through the next day with the twelve-year-old Grace, knowing and trying not to hear what was happening outside:
“She never forgot the pity
of those ladies, delicately nurtured and sheltered all their lives, hunted now like deer and lying among the bamboos dead, their satin gowns spotted with blood.”

This was not the kind of news Pearl could pass on to her college classmates and, even if they had wanted her to, she knew it was beyond her to explain the root causes of a revolution that seemed initially more apparent than actual. Men were forbidden to kowtow or wear pigtails. The binding of girls’ feet was discouraged. Absalom was stoned again in the street by revolutionaries whose fervor he cordially approved.
“It was a young man’s revolution
and [he] was always drawn to young men. He gloried in every step they took—even in their ruthless new laws that cut off queues by force. [Absalom] liked ruthlessness. A thing was always either right or wrong, and if it was right, it was right to enforce it.” He set up a language course for missionaries unable to leave Shanghai because of widespread unrest and pushed forward himself, patrolling his vast territory in a newly acquired junk, and ignoring as usual the increasingly determined attempts of younger colleagues to curb his plans for expansion. When the Sydenstricker
bungalow was torn down to make way for a dormitory attached to the new mission school for boys, Absalom designed their next house himself, eliminating with satisfaction all the unnecessary conveniences and grace notes introduced by his wife, who wrote despairingly to Pearl about the destruction of her garden and the impossibility of creating a new one. Grace left home to attend the new American School in Shanghai, and Wang Amah died, leaving Carie more alone than ever. The unaccustomed pessimism and plaintiveness of her letters worried Pearl (
“A little seed of anxiety
sowed itself,” Grace wrote, “and thrust down a torturing root”). When news came in the summer of 1914 that Carie was seriously ill, Pearl persuaded the Mission Board to find her a teaching job, a posting temporarily suspended by the outbreak of war in Europe in August. She started work in the psychology department at Randolph-Macon only to break off after a second bulletin from her father announced a sharp deterioration in her mother’s condition. Pearl sailed for Shanghai that November.