Pearl Buck in China (19 page)

This was the spirit of the Nanxuzhou mission station from its inception in the aftermath of the 1911 Revolution, when China turned decisively to the West.
“It is the supreme moment
for the Church to march though these open doors and take possession of these fields,” wrote Thomas Carter in his initial bid for sponsorship from New York’s wealthy Madison Avenue Presbyterian Church, pointing out that no rival mission had designs on the barren, famine-ridden region
of Anhui, a territory the size of the state of Maine, or slightly larger than England.
“It is just the sort of mission life
I’ve dreamed of,” he reported at the end of his first year, when he was still struggling to master Chinese, and had by his own account little practical experience of the people or the place he had marched into and planned to take over. The chronic flooding that destroyed the spring wheat crop, causing routine food shortages and starvation in winter, rose to epic proportions that year. “We don’t measure results yet, but we do hold our breath when we think of possibilities,” he explained after another two years, during which the station had made a single local convert. Soldiers had sacked the girls’ school, and the people were proving less than cooperative. “No one can get any idea of the task that we are attempting without first realizing something of the depth, the deep-seatedness of the evil that we are fighting,” Carter reported, outlining the pernicious tendencies of his potential flock, the persecution of his lone convert, and the demoralization of himself and his staff with “no Christian sentiment in the community, no Christianized civilization, to stand back of us and cooperate with us in working for righteousness.” Shortly afterward both Carter and his wife were granted a leave of absence for health reasons. The Bucks’ arrival in 1917 brought a fresh injection of hope and energy to the station.
“By that time so many people
had got sick in Nanxuzhou and left,” Marian remembered sadly long afterward.

Pearl’s own crisis of disgust and futility came six months after Marian herself left, closely followed by the Wiltsies, who retired defeated to the United States at the end of 1918. “Without the Wiltsies, Pearl got very discouraged,” said Marian, who had been dubious about her friend’s marriage from the start and whose suspicions were confirmed long afterward, when Pearl herself confided that things had gone wrong quite soon between her and Lossing. The problem was that his preoccupation with his work left little attention for anything or anyone else. Outside his own professional sphere, Lossing’s instincts were conservative, conformist, low-key, perfectly in tune with the sober and pragmatic world he came from. He was an undemanding and incurious husband, perfectly satisfied with Pearl, and proud of
the energy and drive she put into playing the role of a devoted young mission wife.
“We both… have the best
and finest girl in the World,” he wrote a few years later when his younger brother got engaged. “It is a great experience… being married. You have wonderful days ahead of you.” His religious observance was sincere but perfunctory, which was no help to a wife trying to balance on a tightrope between two worlds and in danger of losing her footing.

An English doctor posted with his young family to replace Dr. Wiltsie, lasted only a few months in Nanxuzhou. Dr. Smith and his wife were repelled by the place, its inhabitants (the Smiths’ servants took a traditional revenge by emptying the family chamber pots immediately underneath their windows), and the new house designed by the Wiltsies as part of an ambitious hospital complex built with Rockefeller money.
“They just hit the ceiling
,” said Pearl. By this time she was starting to look through the eyes of outsiders at things she had grown up seeing from inside. Her feelings came to a head in a letter of sick revulsion written to her parents-in-law about yet another girl who managed to get away from a vindictive mother-inlaw long enough to hang herself from a beam. This was a common enough drama in any Chinese town, and the whole neighborhood knew exactly what to do. The first step was to cut the body down and bandage the orifices to keep in any remaining breath. The next was to attract the attention of the newly released spirit by beating gongs and shouting for it to come back. Any intervention from foreigners at this stage blocked the spirit’s path. Pearl found the hanged girl propped up in a small airless room packed with people and felt her pulse, which was still beating strongly.

To my horror
I found they had stopped her eyes, ears and nose and had gagged her so she could not get a breath of air. I told them at once that if she were not already dead she would certainly be smothered to death. I tried to get them to move her out into the yard, or at least stand back and take away the stoppage, and give her a chance, and let me try artificial respiration…. I wanted them to let me at least unwrap her face
to see if there were any sign of breath, but they would not. So I had to go away, knowing that the girl was being murdered. For murdered she was…. There was no reason for her death, they smothered her. Even the girl’s own Mother helped to do it…. I stood there that night and told them they were killing the girl, but they would not believe it. There is no limit to the ignorance and superstition of these people…. Every day of my life nearly I hear of or come into contact with some tragedy, which if it took place at home would ring over the country, but here is accepted as a matter of course…. China… is a country given to the devil.

Pearl’s appalled and appalling letter was written on Saturday, March 15, 1919, four days after the girl’s death the previous Tuesday. The less explicit, more clear-headed versions of this and similar episodes in her published memoirs have none of the immediacy of the letter she wrote straight away out of pain and anger in short sentences like gasps of shock, with harsh hammering repetitions as if she still could not credit what she had seen and tried to stop. The grim underlying realities of ordinary women’s lives in China had been familiar to Pearl all her life through her mother, who listened to the stories they told her as intently as if their wretchedness were her own. Carie’s response was instinctive where her husband’s was doctrinal.
“He did not, as she did
, feel on his own flesh and spirit the sufferings of others,” Pearl wrote two years later, by which time she had left Nanxuzhou: “the voice of human suffering… was too often for him the voice of those who cried out against the just punishment for their sins sent from a just God.” But Pearl was the child of both parents, and uncontrollable distress drove her back on the punitive teachings she had grown up hearing from Absalom.
“I felt the Calvinism
and fundamentalism of Pearl’s father in her ‘savage attacks,’” wrote Marian, who recognized the accuracy of Pearl’s account of the farm women but was profoundly shocked by her reaction. “Her underlying feeling that the people were sinners who needed to atone for their sins… is meaningless to me.” Marian saw rage and despair behind Pearl’s attempts to indoctrinate
villagers already brutalized by ignorance and poverty. “I don’t think happy people get so angry as she was at conditions which can be quite easily explained…. She was miserable, and it certainly shows itself in these letters.”

For the moment Pearl had no option but to revert to the fortress mentality instilled by her mother, whose first move in any new place had always been to construct a refuge for her family filled with flowers, books, and pretty curtains to shut out the world beyond the windows. Carie herself, still struggling with pernicious anemia, had finally been forced to accept that she could never again make the voyage home. Absalom alone accompanied Grace when she started college in the United States in the autumn of 1918. He returned dazed and shaken by the wave of bacchic revelry released in America and Europe at the end of World War I, treating Pearl and her mother to hair-raising stories of lewd, raucous, short-skirted, hard-drinking modern youth: “‘Everywhere
I went
they all had their dresses up to their knees.’ We stared at him in shocked silence.” Mother and daughter exchanged regular visits in these years and spent the summer of 1919 together at Kuling. The Bucks had missed their annual break the year after their honeymoon because of Lossing’s inability to tear himself away from his work, but this time Pearl left her husband behind in Nanxuzhou, setting out alone on June 7, three or four weeks before the season began, to spend three months recuperating in her mother’s new house in the mountains. She discovered she was pregnant that summer in Kuling.

T
HE BUCKS WERE
next in line after the Wiltsies for a new mission house built to their own design, in which Pearl fully expected to spend the rest of her life. The roof had just gone on when she left for Kuling, and she moved in with Lossing after he came to fetch her home in the autumn. Her Chinese friends, who had known only rambling one-storey family homes constructed around courtyards in the traditional way, were baffled at Pearl’s housewarming party by the first flight of stairs they had ever encountered in a private house (they teetered up cautiously, and Madame Chang solved the problem of how
to go down by sliding on her backside). They were frankly incredulous when Pearl declared that her husband hoped the new baby would be a girl.
“You can’t imagine
what an impression that made on the women in Nanxuzhou,” said Marian. “To think anyone would
want
to have a little daughter.”
The Bucks had barely settled
in when word came that church funding for Lossing’s agricultural experiments had been cut off, a crushing blow promptly followed by a job offer from the head of the newly established College of Agriculture and Forestry at the University of Nanjing. The Bucks’ housewarming transposed itself into a farewell party, with a fond mutual exchange of gifts, tears, and promises to visit, before Pearl finally departed, once again without her husband, traveling alone in September to Nanjing, where she was to await the birth of her baby in a room in the house of the head of the college, John Reisner and his wife. Some kind of infection had broken out in Nanxuzhou, and Lossing, anxious to avoid any risk to his wife and unborn child, planned to join Pearl in the New Year.

His sponsors at the Madison Avenue Church felt badly let down by his departure, and so did his colleagues on the Nanxuzhou mission team. Although the Carters would leave China themselves two years later, the Hoods (who did in fact spend the rest of their working lives on the station) still hoped to persuade the Bucks to come back. But Nanxuzhou was a chapter that had closed for both Pearl and Lossing. Nearly twenty years later Pearl painted a grisly picture of the future they escaped at this point:
“Imagine two, four
, five, six—rarely more—white men and women, some married to each other, the others starved without the compensation of being consecrated to celibacy, imagine them thrown together, hit or miss, without regard to natural congeniality of any sort, in a town or city in the interior of China, living together for years on end, without relief, in the enforced intimacy of a mission compound, compelled to work together and unable, from the narrowness of their mental and spiritual outlook, to find escape and release in the civilization round them.”

Pearl’s doctor, Horton Daniels, Dr. Smith’s replacement, had anticipated problems, but in fact her pregnancy went smoothly apart from a mistake in the dates. The baby expected in late December or
early January arrived on March 20, 1920. Caroline Grace Buck, named for her grandmother and aunt, impressed all who saw her, especially her mother, with
“her unusual beauty
and the intelligence of her deep blue eyes.” Grace said her sister’s ecstatic letter announcing the birth was
“like a magnificat
of motherhood.” But Dr. Daniels, whose suspicions had been correct all along, diagnosed a tumor in his patient’s womb and advised immediate surgery. The Bucks returned to the United States with Carol (short for Caroline), a few months old when she crossed the Pacific like her mother before her in a market basket. Fearful for her sister’s life, Grace came up from college to look after the baby, who was to be left with her grandparents on the Buck farm in Pleasant Valley, New York. Lossing and Pearl’s brother, Edgar, escorted her to the Presbyterian Hospital in New York City, where a benign tumor was successfully removed in early June. Pearl, who had counted on having a large family, was told she would never be able to bear another child. She returned to spend the summer convalescing with her parents-in-law, and making the most of Carol now that there could be no more babies.

The three of them returned to Nanjing in late autumn. Pearl divided her time that winter between her daughter and her mother, pitifully weakened and skeletally thin in Zhenjiang, which was two hours away by train. After a sudden relapse in the spring, Carie’s doctor pronounced her case hopeless. Pearl took her for the last time to Kuling, padded in quilts and carried on coolies’ backs. Carie fought hard against the knowledge that this time there would be no cure, admitting defeat only at the end of the summer, when she knew she was going back to Zhenjiang to die. Grace arrived home from the United States in early September to find her mother sitting up in bed chewing gum—
“I hear chewing gum
is the thing in America these days”—and waiting expectantly for the brand new Victrola, with a parcel of records to play on it, which she had ordered from Shanghai. It was a last spurt of defiance. “The poison of the disease had crept through her body and every sense seemed dulled,” wrote Grace. “She slept as if in stupor.”

One of her last requests was a foxtrot, danced to a jazz record
on the Victrola by her nurse, an elderly English ex-prostitute from Shanghai with a ravaged face and died blonde hair, who was an unexpected hit with her patient. Carie told Pearl it had been a mistake to give up dancing as a girl, adding dreamily that, if she could start over again, she would give her life to America. Illness stripped away her faith, and with it her respect for her husband. His presence disturbed her, making her so tense and uneasy that her daughters kept him away. The hymns she had loved and sung all her life now seemed to mock her on the Victrola. “O rest in the Lord / Wait patiently for Him” was an old favorite, but when her daughters played it for her
“she said with a quiet
and profound bitterness, ‘Take that away. I have waited and patiently—for nothing.’” She died in her sleep with Absalom and Grace at her bedside on October 21, 1921.