Pearl Buck in China (18 page)

Madame Wu was a prototype for the supercilious grande dame
described in Pearl’s first published recollections of Nanxuzhou,
“a ponderous dowager
in plum-colored satin with proud drooping eyelids, opium-stained teeth, and a long bamboo pipe, silver-tipped, which she uses as a cane.” Hers was a draconian response to an unforgiving and rigidly repressive environment. But she showed another side in her friendship with Pearl, whose untapped potential and still unformed imaginative sensibility perhaps reflected something of Madame Wu’s own early history. Like all Chinese women in her day, she was illiterate (
“none of my friends
knew how to read and write,” said Pearl), but she had learned much as a girl from a father who recognized and prized his only daughter’s intelligence. He gave her a wide knowledge of Chinese poetry, which she passed on, together with her sense of style and some useful instruction in local etiquette, to this unexpectedly receptive young foreigner. “She taught me a great deal,” wrote Pearl.

Between them these two remarkable women completed the Confucian education begun by Teacher Kung. Each in her different way provided the kind of role model Pearl had never had before, and needed more than ever now that her own mother was preoccupied by other worries far away in Zhenjiang. She learned from her two neighbors the courtesy and calm, the unassertive authority, the unexpected reticence and often astonishing sexual frankness, the broad and impartial vision recognized all her life by everyone who knew her as her Chinese inheritance.
“I myself deliberately
departed from American ways and plunged myself deep into China,” Pearl wrote of these years. “I… spent much of my time in Chinese homes where a white woman had never been before; and there in long quiet talk with women whose lives had been shaped on a pattern totally different from mine, I learned again the inwardness of Chinese homes, as a woman now, and not as I had when I was a child playing with Chinese children.”

Anything approaching friendship with young women of her own age was almost impossible because, in this distant part of the interior, they were still strictly enclosed in family houses where their status was so low that they had no scope for independent maneuver. One of the few occasions when Pearl managed to make contact with a contemporary
was during a visit to
a family named Li
, on a field trip with Lossing to an ancient walled town which they were the first foreigners to penetrate. The wife of the youngest son explained, in a snatched conversation behind the locked doors of her bedroom, that she was forbidden to speak unless spoken to, ignored by her in-laws, permitted to talk freely only to servants and slave girls even more ignorant than herself. She was obliged to leave any room entered by her husband and remain silent in his presence except when they were alone in their room at night. The first question she asked was whether it was true that foreign husbands spoke openly to their wives in the company of other people. Like Madame Wu’s daughter-in-law, she was clever, helpless, hungry for education, and profoundly depressed.

The seismic changes beginning to shake China came too late for girls like these, but not for the next generation. The granddaughters of both Wu and Chang families were the first in their respective clans to be educated and to escape foot binding. They were pioneers at the only girls’ school in the region, founded in Nanxuzhou in 1912 by the South Presbyterian Mission, which refused to accept children with bound feet. The school was opened in defiance of immemorial tradition by Reverend Carter’s wife, with help from a Christian convert named Mrs. Hsu (who went on to work with Pearl when she too became a proselytizing missionary in her own right). Pearl’s friend Marian Gardner, who arrived fresh from the United States to take over the school in 1916, taught her pupils to read, write, and run relay races on the sound American principle
“that they were as good as boys
, and had minds and could use them.” Pearl included one of these infant revolutionaries in her first account of Nanxuzhou—part memoir, part fable, published in 1924 in the
Atlantic Monthly
—about the transformation of a girl from the Hsu family at boarding school in Shanghai. The shy, silent child with downcast eyes who left town hobbling on bandaged feet returns a year later as a cheerful and talkative teenager, still wearing a Chinese outfit of delicate brocaded satin but complacently displaying beneath it her fashionably unbound feet in a pair of sturdy square-toed black leather lace-ups (
“they looked like shoes
for a very rough little American boy, and they had steel taps
on the heels”). Fearless young Hsu Pei-yun belongs to the future. “A small-footed girl can get an old-fashioned husband and a big-footed girl, if educated, can get a new-fashioned husband,” was Madame Chang’s characteristic summing-up, “but small feet or schooling she must have, one or the other.”

Marian Gardner was precisely the kind of companion Pearl needed at this point. Intelligent, highly educated, practical, and outgoing, she liked and looked up to Pearl (who was four years younger), recognizing not only her greater knowledge and experience but a penetration and sense of perspective highly unusual in someone still in her early twenties: “
She had a great ability
in those early days at seeing things objectively. She would go from the particular to the general with no difficulty. It wasn’t easy for me to do that, but she did it remarkably, as though it were part of her heritage.” Marian was Pearl’s first audience, the person for whom she opened up the closed Chinese world despised or ignored by most Westerners. Marian’s memories of the year they spent together at Nanxuzhou were full of excitement and a sense of discovery. The two young women turned the hardship, and often the horrors, they encountered into a sharp, vivid serial comedy. Pearl loved her Chinese friends’ instinct for drama, the toughness and lack of hypocrisy that underlay their uninhibited jokes about local characters such as the schoolmaster and the town’s only rich man, the head of the Hsu family, whose home life was a battlefield between his wife and three intensely competitive concubines. She made a good story out of her own houseboy, a devout church member who married a recalcitrant slave girl—
“I played the wedding march
but I never played for so mournful or unwilling a bride”—only to find himself mercilessly bullied and shamed by his wife for trying to treat her in a spirit of Christian meekness and forbearance.

The humorous case histories Pearl relayed to Marian or in letters home had a fearful underside. The two women had been thrown together initially because, when they first met, there was no one else to run the station. Lossing was fully occupied setting up his farming program, and the Carters were absent on sick leave. The Hoods were also away on furlough and when they got back remained preoccupied
by their severely disabled new baby. Dr. Wiltsie’s wife, who had just lost her first child to meningitis, was struggling with grief and anger against the desperately primitive conditions that made human life in China so precarious. When Mrs. Wiltsie was too depressed to leave her house, her husband had to depend on Pearl or Marian to act as his anesthetist and surgical assistant in emergency operations performed in dirty, overcrowded huts, often reeking with smoke from an open fire on the beaten earth floor. Pearl learned on the job how to sterilize instruments in a tin can of water boiled on a fire of sticks and drip chloroform from a bottle onto a cotton pad laid over the patient’s nose.
“Once the breathing stopped
. ‘She’s dead,’ I whispered. The doctor reached for a hypodermic and stabbed her arm and she began to breathe again unwillingly.” These operations commonly took place in front of a silent hostile press of relatives and neighbors scrutinizing every move made by the foreign doctor, who was only ever called in as a last resort to treat cases already despaired of by Chinese practitioners. Pearl described working as Wiltsie’s anesthetist on a dying woman, who pulled through and showed signs of recovery after two or three days’ treatment but refused to allow the foreigners near her again as soon as she regained full consciousness (“
the last we heard
she was much worse again, and I suppose of course she will die”).

Retrospective accounts of episodes like this in Pearl’s memoirs are generally less brutal and raw than the descriptions in her letters at the time, where her cheerful composure risked slipping. She said that repeated exposure to misery the onlooker could do little or nothing about bred a thick skin and a hard heart, or alternatively an oversensitivity liable to end in nervous collapse. The only effective response was to fall back on survival by laughter.
“We had to,”
said Marian. “So much was tragic and sad, so poverty-stricken, in the famine area. If there was a drought, it hit us.
The Good Earth
is laid in Nanxuzhou. I recognized the people…. You were on the ragged edge of a famine permanently. It would rain till you were inundated. I have seen it when there would be water over the entire land. And despair. Everything was patched. Even the boat sails were made up of patches, hundreds of them.”

Marian was engaged to a fellow missionary, whom she married in the summer of 1918, leaving Pearl as the only member of the mission personnel assigned to women and children. Pearl supervised the girls’ school, ran her own Sunday school class, set up a refresher course for recent converts, a girls’ club, and a young mothers’ group to teach basic hygiene and child care. She also started regular “calling” with Mrs. Hsu, going on foot four afternoons a week from one village to the next to preach the gospel and distribute religious tracts. Pearl’s entry into a village always followed the same pattern. Before she could begin to point out to the women that they were worshipping the wrong gods, let alone put them in touch with the right one, she had to allow a settling-down period for them to stare at her huge feet and mountainous nose, finger her clothes, interrogate her in intimate detail about her personal habits and private life, and get over the shock of comprehension when she replied. “
How strange!
We can understand English, it’s the same as Chinese!”

One of the things that had always separated Pearl from the rest of the mission community was her prosaic acceptance of a world almost inconceivably strange to her American colleagues. All of them were taken aback at first sight by Nanxuzhou: “
flat and dirty and small
… just a mud hole,” Marian said long afterward. “The whole place stank…. The streets were absolutely filthy.” The stench was always what struck newcomers to China most forcibly. After forty years as a missionary Pearl’s own mother never got used to the smell of human excrement applied daily as fertilizer to the fields in the valley beyond her house. In Nanxuzhou people dried dung for fuel by plastering it over the outside of their houses, pigs roamed freely in streets ankle-deep in mud when it rained, and each bullock was followed by a small boy with a large basket to catch its copious, steaming droppings. Pearl listed the successive shocks—
“the lack of sanitation
, the congestion, the foul streets, the filthy and diseased beggars… the mangy dogs”—that drove visitors to distraction, sometimes to the point of hysteria. The standard American attitude was exemplified by one of her college friends from Randolph-Macon, Ruth Osborn, who never forgot the coating of flies on every surface or the town ponds where people
washed themselves and their clothes, dipped water for drinking, and often defecated as well. When she stayed with the Sydenstrickers in Zhenjiang, Ruth was enchanted by Pearl’s mother and nauseated by the stinking streets immediately outside the compound gate. She was even more bewildered by the absolute indifference of the Chinese people to the missionaries’ message of guilt and atonement (
“what we consider sins
are nothing to them”).

The doctrine of atonement was Pearl’s favorite starting point for her village homilies. She would look back afterward on her experience as a mission wife in Nanxuzhou as the period that brought her closest to ordinary Chinese people, especially the women, who treated her as an equal, enrolling her as an honorary member of their ingrained resistance to men in general, and their husbands in particular (
“girls knew from the first
that they had their own way to make…. Chinese women are witty and brave and resourceful, and they have learned to live freely behind their restrictions. They are the most realistic and least sentimental of human beings”). But at the time she wrote grimly to her American parents-in-law about “
the terrible degradation
and wickedness of a heathen people,” hinting at “things one cannot tell because of their unspeakable horror.” In her end-of-year report for the New York church that sponsored the Nanxuzhou mission, she itemized these things as idol worship, infanticide, alcoholism, gambling, and opium addiction, adopting the breezy, dismissive tone often used by missionaries to maximize the distance between themselves and their prospective converts. Pearl emphasized the darkness and dirt of the village houses, the smell of “
unwashed, garlic-filled humanity
,” the pernicious ignorance of the women crowding around her to poke and gawk. She referred to them as “natives” rather than as friends or equals. The impossible task of persuading them of their own moral turpitude preyed on her as it had on her father. “I have
sole
charge of the evangelistic work for the women in a district of about two million people!” she wrote to Emma Edmunds, newly married to a missionary herself in 1918. “It is absurd, of course, but it weighs on me terribly at times.” Pearl told Marian that she counted any call she paid without preaching the gospel a waste of time. “
How can we save her
from her own weaknesses?” she wrote, describing China’s plight in her report of December 1918. “How can we touch her heart to her own dreadful wickedness and weakness…. These are the thoughts that burn in us by day and night.”

The terminology of repentance and expiation, nearly always set out in a tone of paranoid self-righteousness, was standard usage for missionaries, and entirely appropriate in a letter intended like this one for circulation among charitable donors. It was a way of thinking Pearl would reject explicitly and unconditionally for the rest of her life, once she finally managed to distance herself from the mission community. But in the winter of 1918, without Marian to make her laugh and reinforce her sense of proportion, she was still capable of stepping right back into her American world and shutting the door. Religious solutions provided the only available means of dealing with constant, intolerable exposure to the consequences of slavery, forced marriage, the murder of female infants, and the suicide of young women the same age as herself. Pearl said that nine out of the eleven members of her women’s group admitted to having killed at least one female child at birth.
“The average is three or four
. One woman had eight daughters one after the other and killed them all as soon as they were born. They strangle them. Often they don’t trouble to kill them, but just throw them out to the dogs.” In Nanxuzhou Pearl came close to taking the conventional missionary view that pictured Chinese people not as individuals but as a menacing, faceless horde, morally obnoxious and numerically overwhelming:
“hard-featured, envious, curious
, unsympathetic and ungracious,” as the head of U.S. Presbyterian Missions put it on a tour of the Yangtse basin, “they flock to a foreigner and close him in, like ants to a piece of bread.”