Pearl Buck in China (14 page)

S
HE PLANNED A
temporary visit, meaning to stay just long enough to nurse her mother back to health, but already on the boat she realized that in a fundamental sense she was going home:
“I began again to think in Chinese
.” The journey back marked a shift in perspective in some ways more startling than the voyage out four years earlier. Pearl had experienced at firsthand in Virginia the mixture of incredulity, indignation, and shame felt by her Chinese contemporaries when they first encountered the American view of their country as irredeemably backward and ignorant. Now for the first time she saw China as an adult through Western eyes. The spiritual dislocation of this return in 1914 was one of the key factors that shaped her as a writer. She explored it in essays, short stories, and novels, perhaps most graphically in
A House Divided,
the third volume of
The Good Earth
trilogy, in which the student grandson of Wang the farmer takes the same train from Shanghai as Pearl. He finds that his years in America have transformed the ordinary familiar sights and sounds of the journey—the grimy overcrowded railway carriage, the passengers’
belching and scratching, the floors sticky with spittle and urine, the blackened hands of attendants serving fly-spotted food—into the Chinese equivalent of a Dickensian underworld. An entire generation all over China in the long slow awakening that followed the 1911 Revolution would echo Wang Yuan’s involuntary cry:
“Why did I never see
all this before? I have seen nothing until now!”

For the first time Pearl subjected her parents to the clear dispassionate gaze she had acquired in America. Absalom, who met her in Shanghai, failed to recognize his daughter when the boat docked and could give only the vaguest answers to her urgent questions about her mother. Pearl realized that the religion that had always cut him off from other human beings now cushioned him completely from even the most intractable reality.
“In all the time
that so many things had been happening to her, nothing had happened to him nor could anything ever happen to him, in the sense of change,” wrote Grace, who was present at this meeting. “Nothing… would ever shake that unalterable inner security of his.” Too weak to travel, Carie was waiting with her Chinese daughter and a band of friends at the station in Zhenjiang, so frail and shrunken that this time it was Pearl who barely recognized her mother.

The illness that had aged her so rapidly was sprue, a form of tropical anemia that attacks the mucous membranes in the mouth, throat, and digestive tract, making it difficult to swallow or digest food. Pearl fought it vigorously by all available means. There was no known medication, but she consulted new doctors, treated her patient with massages and baths, experimented successively with a banana diet, a milk diet, diets of rice, gruel, fresh fruit, soft-boiled eggs, liver, and spinach juice. Nothing worked (it would be many years before sprue was first successfully treated with massive doses of vitamin B). Not normally fatal, the deficiency was visibly destroying Carie, whose defenses had been depleted over a lifetime in China by tuberculosis and repeated bouts of cholera, malaria, and dysentery. Physical weakness was compounded by a profound underlying depression. She was often fretful and fractious, but even anger could not help her now. Grace, helpless and terrified, was amazed by her sister’s strength, courage, and imaginative
sympathy with their mother at times when
“it seemed nothing Pearl could do
would please her.” The family regrouped around a new center. Pearl managed the sickbed, ran the household, reestablished her father’s routines, supervised her mother’s Bible classes, and played the wheezy little organ in church on Sundays. She had her own teacher-training class of up to twenty girls, and she took over the regular clinic her mother had established for women, listening attentively to the problems and confidences she had grown up hearing as a low troubled murmur in the background.
“I was always touched
and moved at their acceptance of me in her place,” she wrote long afterwards.

She was welcomed by the whole community.
“To other Americans in Zhenjiang
, Pearl came as a fresh breeze from their homeland,” wrote Grace, who was not the only one captivated by her sister’s stylishness and sophistication. There were musical evenings when Pearl in black velvet with her fair hair pinned up in loose wavy curls sang American pop songs at the piano. But the experience that indirectly transformed her life was teaching the senior English class at the Presbyterian Mission’s
high school for boys
.
“It was a wonderful time
in which to live in China,” she wrote, looking back, “and I was at the right age for it.” Education, and mission schools in particular, were at the heart of a revolution that had started and spread spontaneously from one province to the next, achieving its prime aim almost before people fully realized what was happening. Sun Yatsen, the Nationalist leader, had been away in the United States when the old regime fell, returning only in time to be sworn in as the first president of the new republic.
“He was the crest of a wave
of revolution and such a wave is always the rise of a deep ground swell of human events,” Pearl wrote, “and Christian missionaries themselves continued to increase that ground swell, without knowing what they did.” The church schools set up in China in the 1880s and 1890s had instituted an empirical, knowledge-based approach to education wholly different from the ancient imperial system based on poetry and calligraphy. Missionaries taught mathematics and science, introduced modern medicine, promoted interventionist policies such as famine relief, and actively
campaigned for less oppressive treatment of women. “The impact of these ideas was terrific and radical,” wrote Pearl, who grew up watching them take hold.

A Christian convert himself, trained as a Western doctor, Sun Yatsen was almost immediately ousted from the presidency, only to take on a more powerful role as prophet and theorist, “a Lenin for the Chinese revolution,” in Pearl’s phrase. He became a charismatic figurehead for progressive young intellectuals, many of them mission-educated and deeply impressed not simply by Western inventions but by the subversive principles of Jesus Christ, which they interpreted in aggressive and uncompromising ways never envisaged by their missionary teachers.
“The wonder is that none
of them… realized how revolutionary these principles were,” Pearl wrote dryly. “They had been reared in the Western atmosphere where church members do not take literally the teachings of Jesus…. The Chinese, however, tended to be very practical, even about religion, and the result was often very upsetting indeed.”

Pearl’s students gave her a first taste of the kind of intellectual, political, and social ferment she had missed in her own years at college. Her class was small (founded in 1907 with eight boys, the entire school had sixty pupils when Pearl taught there), but it made up in urgency what it lacked in size. The students were in their late teens or early twenties, nearly the same age as their teacher, many already married, some with children of their own. They were hungry for knowledge, buoyed by expectation, almost giddy with their sense of release from the burden of inherited repression and inhibition. Most of them would be hemmed in again soon, like the hero of the first story Pearl published a decade later in the
Chinese Recorder,
a thin, pale, feverish seventeen-year-old forcibly removed from school by his father in order to mind the family shop and produce sons for the ancestors. Pearl’s early fiction is full of quick, vivid, confident sketches of young men like this one, briefly confronted at school or college by the vision of a brave new world before being dragged back into line by their families and obliged to accept their submission
“with the terrible sadness
of defrauded boyhood.”

Pearl brought her pupils probably as close to the West as they were ever likely to get, and they drank in all she could tell them. At a time when the country was already heading for chaos and anarchy, they stood for everything hopeful, generous, and forward-looking in a revolution commandeered from the start by the young. They marched under the Blue Sky and White Sun of Sun Yatsen’s banner. For them the symbol of conservatism and retrogression was the queue, imposed by the hated and now defeated Manchus. The stern, crop-haired young revolutionaries stationed at the gates of Zhenjiang to intercept country farmers and chop off their queues by brute force included students of Pearl’s.
“They taught me far more
than I taught them,” she said. She listened at school to their idealistic aspirations and at home to the counterarguments of elderly traditionalists among her parents’ Chinese friends. For her this was an intensely receptive period, when she absorbed impressions greedily and indiscriminately, soaking them up like a sponge as any prospective young writer must do.
“It seems to me now
, looking back, that I spent those first years of my return in almost complete silence,” she wrote in her memoirs four decades later.

She heard the same progressive views repeated by the young husbands of her Chinese girlfriends, all of them mothers by this time and absorbed in family concerns of their own. Pearl’s single status at the advanced age of twenty-two puzzled her friends, who held her parents severely to blame for doing nothing about it. Her father, by now
“far more Chinese in his mentality
and feelings than he was American,” was inclined to agree with them, but Carie’s libertarian American instincts were outraged. She was equally suspicious of what seemed to her a new laxity Pearl had picked up in the United States, apparent in everything from her social manner to her frivolous hairdo and flirtatious outfits. Pearl herself provoked the unconditional disapproval of the entire mission community by going out occasionally with the only available unattached Americans, lonely young males working on the Bund for tobacco companies or Standard Oil.

Her field of sexual experimentation
had been even narrower than was normal for women of her age at the time. She had fallen briefly
in love as a schoolgirl with a half-American student (now safely married to a Chinese wife), and there had been some sort of affair on shipboard coming back from America. Pearl confided her passionate response only to Emma Edmunds, who promptly tore up the letter at the writer’s request. In old age Pearl vaguely recalled receiving advances on the ship from a couple of older admirers, both of whom she turned down, although not before she had enthusiastically learned how to kiss from the younger of the two. Possibly this was the intense physical awakening she seems to have experienced at some point in that year or the next from a respectable middle-aged man who was also a serial seducer, expert in techniques of arousal that stopped just short of actual consummation. She described this encounter in convincing detail in her most autobiographical novel,
The Time Is Noon,
where the heroine finds herself driven almost wild by the “dry sterile pain” of unsatisfied desire. (“
‘He’ll never marry you
, that’s one comfort,’ her mother said bitterly…. ‘There’s something downright queer about him.’”) Absalom’s solution to the problem of his older daughter’s future was an arranged marriage to the handsome, clever, highly eligible son of one of his Chinese friends, a proposal that came to nothing after a heated dispute between the parents of the prospective bride, who remained wholly passive in the Chinese way.
“I listened and reflected
and did not take sides,” wrote Pearl.

By the time Carie began at last to show signs of reviving in the warmth of her daughter’s energy and will, Pearl had dropped any idea of a return to the United States. Her immediate priority was to find work in China and, even more important, to get away from the dogmatic opinions and censorious eyes of the Zhenjiang mission community. As soon as her mother seemed well enough to be left, she wrote secretly to
Cornelia Morgan
, an independent American running a mission school at Tsuyung in Yunnan province in the far southwest. The letter that came back provisionally offering Pearl the job of assistant was intercepted by Carie, who lost her last shred of composure, weeping like a child and insisting that without her daughter she no longer wanted to live. Pearl protested that as a girl Carie herself had run away in direct defiance of her own father, and was shaken to the
core by her mother’s reply. “
‘I know it,’ she said
, ‘and I did wrong. I wish I had obeyed him.’ This was a terrifying revelation and I was struck speechless.”

Carie relapsed, losing weight again with shocking speed, reversing all the progress made since Pearl’s return.
“Her flesh fell away
until she was dreadful to see. Only her eyes looked bright and indomitable out of her little shrunken face.” She no longer wanted to die, but her emaciated body was so weak that the slightest touch jarred her. In June 1915 Pearl took her to Kuling, cushioned as far as possible from the jolts of the journey on a padded stretcher carried by two Chinese servants. The original tiny mission settlement had grown into a prosperous, whites-only summer community, drawing visitors from all over China with large handsome villas standing in their own leafy grounds, shops, a church and a school, conferences and a concert program, a place for social and business contacts where young people could meet one another at tennis or bridge parties and go dancing in the evenings. Pearl had no time for any of it. She called in the English doctor and set herself once more to revive her mother, who could not leave her bed.
“I studied my Chinese books
while she slept, and every day I went for a long and solitary walk.” Grace came from her school in Shanghai for the holidays, and Absalom joined them for the couple of weeks that was all he could spare from his work. Lying on a lounge chair on the porch, Carie made her daughters laugh by planning a riotous old age of leisure, pleasure, and placid self-indulgence. Gradually she began to tell stories again, entertaining their friends and inducing a subdued optimism in Pearl. By early autumn, when most other people had left and the town stood empty, Carie was strong enough to totter on her own legs into the garden. There was no one for company now but one American couple and the patients in the new TB sanatorium (Pearl had a brief encounter with one of them—“He was only a boy to my newly adult eyes”—which ended abruptly when she was warned off by his missionary parents).