Pearl Buck in China (15 page)

Muffled reports of the Great War came from the single English weekly paper to reach Kuling from Shanghai. Mother and daughter talked about the future, when both agreed that China in general, and
Kuling in particular, would bid good riddance to the West. They also looked back to the past, drawing close again as they resumed the long, frank, free-ranging conversations interrupted by Pearl’s stormy adolescence. “My love for my mother was a thing apart. It was rooted in my blood and bones,” Pearl wrote of this period. In these months of grief and uncertainty Carie explained or implied enough for Pearl to begin to understand the underlying mechanism of her parents’ disastrous mismatch. She came to see more clearly her father’s part in the demoralization that had precipitated her mother’s illness.
“Born a generation earlier
he would have burned witches. There was a deep unconscious sex antagonism in him,” she wrote in
Fighting Angel,
describing Absalom’s struggles to hold his own against his wife’s quicker and sharper intelligence by invoking Saint Paul, as his own father had done before him.
“Since those days
when I saw all her nature dimmed I have hated Saint Paul with all my heart.”

Carie said it was while she was nursing her own dying mother that she had sworn in her late teens to renounce the temptations of the flesh in the person of her current boyfriend, a big, blond, boisterous, good-looking, hard-drinking character named
Neale Carter
, a guitar-player with a rich singing voice and a hot lusty presence that threatened to unleash urges in herself she had been taught all her life to fear and repress. By her own account, she married Absalom Sydenstricker as an antidote to the lure of drink and desire. Her husband himself was still wrestling with the same problem alone in his study in his sixties, when he annotated steamy passages in a book about the Holy Ghost with penciled notes in the margin. “
The word ‘flesh’
as used in… the Bible is interpreted as meaning ‘the natural self,’” he wrote at the head of the first chapter, returning to the question again fifty pages further on: “What is meant by the word ‘flesh’? It means the uncorrected human nature.” The solution proposed by the same book was to burn out vileness, filth, and impurity.

Pearl had witnessed this process in practice throughout her childhood as a daily stifling of her mother’s natural warmth, gaiety, and impetuosity in innumerable small defeats and reprimands. Carie’s exuberance grated on her husband, and her spontaneity made him
uneasy. He mistrusted everything that captivated other people about his wife: her infectious delight in pretty things, impromptu picnics and treats (
“he did not enjoy whimsy
and sudden plans and the discomfort of a plate and no table”), her full-throated singing when she flung back her head and belted out her favorite hymns, her rare zany jokes, and the absurd comic rhymes she could improvise until her children were helpless with laughter and her husband told her coldly to stop. All this Pearl had seen and resented as a girl. As an adult she was increasingly aware of the sensual and emotional deprivation that had made a desert of her parents’ life together, bleakly exposed in the years when the departure of their two daughters for college and school left husband and wife confronting one another alone for the first time since the birth of their oldest child. Carie’s talks with her daughter would be harshly reenacted in
The Time Is Noon
and touched on more briefly in the bright, shining, looking-glass world of Pearl’s first novel,
East Wind, West Wind,
where another dying mother confides to her daughter the scary side of a long-lasting marriage.
“I sat in horror
at her words,” says the young Chinese heroine, who might be Pearl herself speaking. “I saw suddenly into the inner halls of her heart. The bitterness and suffering there were bowels of fire within her. I had no words to comfort her.”

As cold winter winds blew around the little house intended only for summer visits, Carie and her daughter moved partway down the mountain to be nearer the doctor, settling in a borrowed house, where Pearl faced the question of her own future:
“I began what was to be
the loneliest winter of my life…. I was struggling with the decision of what I was to do with myself.” Her twenty-third birthday that summer made her the same age as her mother had been when she married. Pearl had always known she was a writer, but she also knew she was nowhere near ready even to think about what that might entail. Her immediate problem was practical. Job offers had not been hard to get so far, but one of the conditions imposed by the few professional careers open to women (basically, teaching and nursing) was compulsory celibacy. The Church, which gave single women in the mission field schools, hospitals, even outlying stations of their own to run—
an autonomy unthinkable for mission wives—demanded nunlike austerity in return. The price was too high for Pearl, who would enliven her Chinese stories with vigorous little snapshots, like gargoyles in the margins, of sexless, infantilized, and dried-up lady missionaries brooding over faded family photographs, pouncing hungrily on any stray widower, pursuing the hypothetical goal of wholesale conversion with dwindling enthusiasm and hope.

Pearl’s own religious faith was contingent and variable. Like many ministers’ children, she had learned early to blank out during sermons, switching her attention instead to more promising activities such as making up stories. She was prepared to teach Bible classes or play the organ for her father, but she adamantly refused to lead religious meetings or have anything to do with proselytizing. The station pecking order meant that older women, theoretically subject to their husbands (
“repressed, strong, vigorous
mission wives… their faces… stormy and hewn into lines of determination and grimness”), exercised power in their turn over novices like Pearl. Her mild escapades with the boys from Standard Oil had ended in a head-on collision with one of these weather-beaten old battle-axes, who threatened her with expulsion if she persisted in her offense. Pearl’s critical detachment, and her inadmissible sympathy with the Chinese, would inevitably land her in further trouble, but for the moment she had no choice save to return to the mission school in Zhenjiang.

In February 1916 Pearl left her mother, whose old irrepressible energy was flowing back under the tonic effect of mountain air, careful diet, and twelve months’ respite from her husband. This was the first time in her life that Carie had ever lived alone, and she celebrated her freedom in her sixtieth year by demolishing Absalom’s cramped little house and building a bigger one to her own design, simple, airy, and efficiently planned, with three bedrooms, two bathrooms, a living room, and steps leading up to a broad shady porch looking over the ferny glades of the garden and out to the valley beyond. Carie’s house embodied her American dream. Everything she disliked and feared about China was excluded from it. Even the plangent melancholy temple bell that had always given her the shivers when it sounded in
the night on the hill below the house in Zhenjiang was replaced by the brisk reassuring little bell of the church a few hundred yards from her front door. The transformation, planned and carried out in secret from her husband as a surprise for her daughters, restored her sense of purpose. When she wasn’t supervising masons and carpenters, she went tobogganning with the children from the American School.
“She did the things
she had not done since she was a girl,” Pearl wrote, “and there was no one to be displeased with her merriment.”

What Pearl herself felt that February when she climbed down one thousand steps cut in the rock and walked the rest of the way, turning and twisting for five miles down almost vertical slopes to the foot of the mountain, is hard to imagine. She was returning to keep house for her father and rejoin a mission community that seemed to her later—and was already beginning to seem to her then—blinkered, small-minded, and arrogant, above all in its invincible assumption of superiority to the people to whom it ministered.
“The failure of missions
and of Christianity… in China,” Pearl wrote somberly in
My Several Worlds,
“was that no first-rate Chinese minds joined the Christian movement.”

Her own allegiance lay with the ambitious young radical thinkers beginning to emerge as the only leaders capable of shaping a coherent vision of the future in an era of rapid political disintegration. At the end of March 1916 Sun Yatsen’s successor (who had placed himself three months earlier on the imperial throne) abdicated and died. From now on the country was ruled in practice by intrepid, opportunistic, uneducated warlords, who split the territory and divided the spoils between them. Meanwhile a restive and increasingly militant student body in the big cities tackled the theoretical question of how to abolish the legacy of centuries of oppression by transforming the culture and consciousness of the Chinese people. Zhenjiang was swept up in a raging national debate that engaged the key figures of a whole generation, from Pearl herself to the young Mao Zedong.

Its forum was the magazine
New Youth,
founded the year before by a popular professor at the university in Beijing, Chen Duxiu, whom Pearl singled out as the most powerful mentor of her youth:
“I think before all others
of Chen Duxiu [Ch’en Tu-hsiu], brilliant, bold and radical.” Chen (who would go on to become the founder and first secretary of the Chinese Communist Party in 1920) aimed to overthrow an entrenched, institutionalized, ossified Confucianism by launching a literary revolution with his magazine. An article in
New Youth
fired the first shot in the battle between
wen-li,
the ancient classical written language intelligible only to scholars, and
pai-hua
(baihua), the despised medium of ordinary speech. This was far more than a linguistic dispute. Its implications reached into every area of social and political reform.
Pai-hua
was an essential tool for understanding, or even thinking about, the three planks with which the movers and shapers running
New Youth
planned to build a new China: science, democracy, and modernization.
“When in 1916
the magazine took up the cause of literary reform, the flame of new intellectual life spread everywhere through China,” Pearl wrote in her memoirs.

At the heart of the furor as far as Pearl was concerned stood the Chinese novel. Fiction had been popular but despised by anyone who could read as intrinsically primitive and crude, fit only for illiterate storytellers and low-grade traveling actors, the kind of thing no one with the slightest literary credentials would have in the house. The first serious scholarly attempt to argue that the vitality, inventiveness, and range of vernacular literature had shifted it into the mainstream, ready and able to replace an impoverished and now obsolete classicism, was published in
New Youth
by Hu Shi. A Columbia PhD student newly returned from the United States, Hu was the champion of
pai-hua,
arguing his case with a “brilliance and persuasiveness” that electrified young people like Pearl: “We recognized a fresh force in modern China.” The stories she had loved as a child and continued to read in secret in spite of Teacher Kung’s prohibition became all the rage almost overnight. European novels published for the first time in translation—by Dickens, Scott, Hugo, Dumas, Tolstoy, Cervantes—sold in increasing numbers. Young people were not only reading fiction but beginning to write it as well. Little magazines published a flood of confessional stories, expressing straightforward emotion in a vigorous vernacular at the furthest extreme from the
arcane and allusive literary rituals of the past. Pearl read everything she could find and discussed it avidly with her Chinese friends, whose sudden sense of intellectual empowerment—
“vivid, articulate
, world-questioning”—was part of a combustible atmosphere that made anything seem possible.
“This was an enormous release
to educated men and women. To be able to say what one felt without having to think whether it was written in a rigid and antiquated style was to free an energy suppressed for centuries…. It was a wonderful hour, young enough to be still pure.”

Hu Shi, the most fearless of all the young iconoclasts Pearl admired, attacked another immemorial taboo by taking over a whole issue of
New Youth
to publish his translation of Ibsen’s
A Doll’s House,
with an introduction explaining that the heroine, Nora, freed herself from a society corrupted by the four evils—selfishness, slavery, hypocrisy, and cowardice—at the end of the play when she slammed the door on her husband and family. Nora promptly became a role model for radical young women all over China. Published in June 1918, the Ibsen issue came too late for Pearl, who was married by then to a friend of Hu’s, and busily engaged in constructing a doll’s house of her own.

CHAPTER
4
Inside the Doll’s House

P
EARL’S HUSBAND WAS
John Lossing Buck, who had met Hu Shi as
a fellow student at Cornell University
when they were both in their early twenties. The two took the same agriculture courses together, until Hu switched to an arts program at Columbia and Buck sailed for China as an agricultural missionary at the end of 1915. Retreating to Kuling in the heat of his first summer, he met
“that darling Mrs. Sydenstricker’s daughter
, Pearl,” at a Sunday picnic given by another Cornell graduate and embarked on a whirlwind courtship. She was “the nicest girl in all Kuling.” he wrote home to his parents. “She is just one peach of a girl.” In the first week of September he escorted her down the mountain, accompanying her by boat as far as Nanjing, where he took the train to regain his mission station at Nanxuzhou in the northern province of Anhui. They corresponded that winter, and he made the long journey to Zhenjiang to see her again, treating himself to a first-class ticket on the train (
“She was worth it
”). The couple had been alone together no more than four or five times when, in January 1917, they announced their engagement.