Pearl Buck in China (16 page)

Lossing was twenty-six years old, the oldest of four boys reared by frugal, hardworking, God-fearing parents on a small farm in upstate New York. He looked
“like a nice big overgrown farmboy,”
said one of his colleagues at Nanxuzhou, who was surprised and taken aback by Lossing’s impressive catch when Pearl came on a visit of inspection. “She was so pretty… oval face, slender, wore her hair done attractively, pretty eyes, lovely smile.” Asked many years later what he and his wife had in common, Lossing cited
Sunday school teaching
and Bible classes. It was not enough for Pearl’s parents, who were united
for once in disapproval. Carie warned her daughter against rushing into marriage, pointing out that Lossing had never read a book in his life and that an agricultural degree was hardly what the Sydenstrickers considered education. But he was everything Pearl wanted at this stage: tall, purposeful, and strong, physically confident, passionate about his job, and reassuringly unfanatical in other directions:
“he was not at all religious
so far as I could see.” Also, he thought she was perfect.
“I am happier every day,”
Pearl wrote to Emma Edmunds at the end of April. “Lossing is all any woman would wish him to be and makes me completely happy. He is so
thoroughly good
and so fine and true.” They were married a month later at a simple ceremony in the Sydenstrickers’ garden. The bride wore white crepe de chine trimmed with chiffon, and shocked her younger sister by the lavish lace trimmings she considered essential on her honeymoon underwear. The young couple spent the next two months getting to know one another for the first time in Pearl’s parents’ house at Kuling before moving north to Anhui in mid- or late August.

Nanxuzhou was a nondescript settlement, mud-walled with mud houses and unpaved mud streets, barely a mile across, on the vast, flat, featureless, deforested flood plain of the Hwei River. Its drabness filled visitors from outside with dismay. Pearl’s mother was horrified by its dry and dusty monotony when she came for Christmas with Grace. Pearl herself said it took time to adjust to the
“downright ugliness”
of a landscape that stretched like a desert without change as far as the eye could see. “Earth and houses were all of one color, and even the people were of the same dun hue, for the fine sandy soil was dusted into their hair and skin by the incessant winds.” But the countryside transformed itself when Pearl saw it for the first time in spring, becoming radiant, alive with promise, and full of entrancing mirages, like her marriage:

The bare willow trees
around the villages put forth soft green leaves and the wheat turned green in the fields and the blossoms of the fruit-trees were rose-colored and white…. When the earth was still cold but the air was warm and dry
and bright, wherever I looked I could see mirages of lakes and trees and hills between me and the horizon. A fairy atmosphere surrounded me, and I felt half in a dream.

The young couple were enchanted by one another in those early months. They had been allocated a small, bare, boxlike mission house belonging to somebody else (George and Mary Hood, the previous occupants, were absent on furlough), but Pearl astonished the station by turning her husband’s cramped bachelor quarters—two small rooms with bathroom and kitchenette over his agricultural work-shop—into a family home. She extended the living room, resurfaced the floors, put up bookshelves, and painted the walls a rich warm ochre which she mixed herself, toning down a bilious mustard color with a handful of red earth from the yard. She hung yellow silk curtains, painted pictures to furnish the walls, and made her first garden in the courtyard with ferns in pots that came inside in winter, and fresh flowers in every room so that
“the garden seemed part
of the house.” She grew sweet peas, nasturtiums, golden Shantung roses for summer, and chrysanthemums in the autumn. Lossing planted beds of asparagus and strawberries and a vegetable patch with rows of peas, beans, tomatoes, radishes, and pumpkins. Pearl kept a caged canary in the window and four hens in the yard. She taught herself to cook, writing to her mother-in-law for simple all-American recipes to try, experimenting with tinned cow’s milk and improvised local ingredients, sometimes so disastrously that the young couple and their guests fell about laughing. Lossing installed two mud-and-brick Chinese beehives and planned to keep goats so they could have their own milk. Pearl made date jam and plum jelly. “My
new housekeeper
is working to perfection,” her husband wrote exultantly to his younger brother after four months of marriage. “I wouldn’t change for all the rest of the housekeepers in the world put together.”

Pearl learned to use a typewriter to write her husband’s business letters for him and type up his notes. He spoke only halting beginner’s Chinese, so she became his go-between with the local farmers. Lossing had been recruited as the first step in an ambitious plan for
“the economic salvation
of the region” drawn up by the head of the Nanxuzhou mission station, the Rev. Thomas Carter, a Columbia graduate who had founded the station five years earlier, and staffed it with idealistic young people like himself: the Hoods, Dr. James Wiltsie and his wife, and an energetic schoolteacher, Marian Gardner, who promptly became Pearl’s best friend. Lossing’s role was central in Tom Carter’s schemes for expansion—“We ought to have an agricultural man here… a fellow with a good practical turn of mind”—worked out in consultation with the dean of China’s first agricultural college at Nanjing University. Dean Baillie had been guest of honor at the first formal lunch party given by the young Bucks on honeymoon in the Sydenstricker house at Kuling. Mission funds had been allocated to build them a house of their own, with a farm and workstation attached. Six months before his wedding Lossing officially registered Nanxuzhou Agricultural Experiment Station on the mailing list of the Department of Agriculture in Washington.

Like their friend Hu Shi in a different sphere, the Bucks were part of a nationwide drive to build a new China, and Pearl threw herself into the work. Together they visited the villages and hamlets that would be part of the station’s outreach program, Lossing on a bicycle and Pearl for propriety’s sake in a curtained sedan chair borne by four coolies. The Revolution had brought the railway to Nanxuzhou in 1915, and with it the first Westerners ever encountered by farmers scratching a subsistence living on these bare flatlands ravaged by harsh winds, cold winters, bandits, and a regular cycle of drought, flood, and famine. People no longer threw stones or cursed foreigners openly on the road, but they could not contain their amazement at the sight of this freak on wheels. “
Poor devil
, he’s eating dirt,” one of them said sympathetically when Lossing bit into a chocolate bar.

Pearl was the first white woman the country people had seen. They were aghast, like
The Good Earth
’s Wang Lung at the sight of an American woman in a winter coat with a fur collar:
“He had no idea
of whether it was male or female but it was tall and dressed in a straight black robe of some rough harsh material and there was the skin of a dead animal wrapped about its neck.” Crowds gathered at
the gates of any town Pearl approached, accompanied her to the inn, and returned no matter how many times the innkeeper drove them away.
“They would bend down
to the ground where for six inches or so there was no door and stare at me upside down. If the windows were papered, they licked their fingers wet and melted holes in the soft rice paper and applied an eye to watch me.” Once they pressed around her on market day in a small town—
“literally hundreds
of people packed against my chair”—tearing at the sides and trying to get the top off because Lossing had ridden ahead on his bike. Later the same day Pearl was mobbed in a stable, the only room the inn had to offer, by men trying to break the door in while her husband was away fetching their bags. She shoved a chair against the door, climbed on the seat, and drew up her feet. When Lossing got back they pinned sheets over the windows and barricaded themselves in, spending an uncomfortable night on a wooden sleeping platform above a manure heap. They finally got home to find that their cook and houseboy had very nearly killed each other in a knife fight over a dishcloth, which left Pearl’s kitchen bloodspattered. Lossing as always remained calm. “Mother, he grows better every day,” Pearl wrote, describing this eventful trip to her mother-in-law. “We are happier all the time. He is so good to me in every little way and makes life so happy for me.”

They had been married almost exactly a year.
“They were having fun
together in those early days,” said Marian Gardner, who remembered Pearl as a great giggler and a natural diplomat, always able to make others laugh with a comforting knack of defusing potential catastrophes by turning them into tall stories. “We’d all go off into gales. We got along by laughter… she was a wonderfully humorous person… bubbling over with humor in those early days.” For bewildered young Americans, almost all straight from college, highly trained in their particular spheres but ignorant and inexperienced in this context, Pearl was not just a translator. She interpreted conventions and customs, advised on how best to approach the local people, explained their reactions, and reported their gossip. “She got a great deal from her amah,” said Marian. “She would sit and talk to her for
hours… she was one of the best listeners I ever knew…. She could draw out torrents of conversation by a few questions and come back convulsed with mirth at the tales she had been hearing, or indignant at the injustice done someone, or grieving at the results of poverty and neglect.” Pearl investigated the nearest villages on foot, walking from one farm to the next, talking to the women and playing with their children, listening to their stories as her mother had done before her, only with the advantage of being bilingual, indigenous, and familiar from infancy with their world. “
You see, she understood
what they said as we didn’t,” said Marian. “She knew the things that were going on…. Pearl had an uncanny ability to explain the Chinese to us. It came out in
The Good Earth,
which was laid right there.”

Pearl herself felt like a stranger to start with in Anhui. After the active, restless, cosmopolitan interchange of a rich treaty port, the isolation and remoteness of Nanxuzhou belonged to another world,
“a world as distant
from the one I was living in as though it had been centuries ago.” The place seemed immune to change. News that China was falling apart and Europe being torn to pieces mattered little to anyone in these parts: “The vivid intellectual and political turmoil of the country did not reach us here. We lived as serenely as though the nation were not in revolution.” Poor, self-contained, and inward-looking, Anhui preserved intact a way of life barely touched by outsiders for thousands of years. There was no industry and virtually no trade except sale or exchange in the nearest market. Local transport meant shifting as much at a time as could be carried on a man’s back. Farmers practiced an agriculture efficiently adapted by time and experience to their own soil, climate, and conditions. They grew just enough grain and cotton to feed and clothe themselves on tiny family farms, varying their staple diet of wheat bread or porridge with garlic and beans, and burning dried grass for fuel. They worked the land themselves or with help from a buffalo, using wooden tools made at home. The little clay gods of the earth lived in clay houses at the edge of the fields, and the people lived clustered together in villages of bigger thatched clay houses that cracked apart in heavy summer rains and dissolved in winter floods. Humans and animals slept
together in a single unventilated room with the door closed and a charcoal stove burning in winter.

The villagers thought and talked in ways very different from the sharp incisive speech of Zhenjiang, where
“people spoke in syllables
which splintered from their lips and from the ends of their tongues.” In the unhurried seasonal pattern of life in the country around Nanxuzhou, “the language is slow and deep and it wells from the throat.” Nearly twenty years later in
A House Divided
Pearl described the delayed impact of village life on an impatient young intellectual, recently returned from college in America, who comes reluctantly to see a kind of grandeur in this harsh unprepossessing countryside under a sharp winter sun:
“The land stretched out
before him, far and smooth and plain, and he could see, upon its smoothness, the flecks of blue which were men and women working… and for the first time he saw the… hard bright beauty of this northern land, glittering in the cloudless sky, its very light seeming blue, it poured down from so blue a sky.”

Both Bucks gave this land their full attention. Together they explored and examined it, interrogated its inhabitants, and stored away their findings for future reference. Lossing would spend the greater part of his life systematically gathering, sorting, tabulating, and processing this kind of material.
His two monumental statistical surveys
of Chinese farm economy and land use were the first, and remained the only accurate record of China’s agrarian infrastructure in the early twentieth century. The picture he painted was bleak. Seventy-nine percent of the labor force (or 205 million men) were farmers. The average size of a family farm was 2.62 acres (40 acres was considered the minimum for raising a family in West Virginia). Food, virtually all grown at home, consisted of 77.8 percent grain of one sort or another in North China (too cold and dry for a rice crop), 10.3 percent beans, and 9 percent roots. Farmers ate no sugar, hardly any meat, and “practically no vegetables.” An average family consisted of 4.3 adult male units, and each unit consumed the equivalent of $22.91 worth of food a year, or $1.90 per month. Fuel was a cash crop saleable in the market, which meant that some northern farmers could
not afford to waste their own dried grass stalks on heating water for tea. 80.8 percent were in any case too poor to buy tea leaves, although 80.5 percent bought tobacco. They took no weekends off, and holidays were unknown except at New Year. Only 7.4 percent of households set aside money ($1.92 a year) for recreation. None of them had access to capital, and the 23 percent who gambled were crippled by gambling debt. “This hand-to-mouth existence works very well in normal years,” Lossing summed up laconically, “but in years of low crop yields it is often a hard race with starvation before the first cutting of barley in spring.”