Pearl Buck in China (2 page)

F
OREWORD
Burying the Bones

T
HE FIRST BOOK
I remember from my early childhood was called
The Chinese Children Next Door.
It was about a family of six little girls with red cheeks and black pigtails who had given up hope of ever having a baby brother when one day their wish came true: the family’s seventh child was a boy, the answer to his parents’ prayers, a plaything to be waited on and adored by his older sisters. Many years later I came across this story again as a chapter in Pearl Buck’s reminiscences. It turned out that she had taken a true episode from her own early years, and recast it in the form of a children’s fable. The story’s absurdity made Mahatma Gandhi laugh out loud when it was read to him on his sickbed by Jawaharlal Nehru. Its fairytale charm is if anything heightened by the realities of poverty, misogyny, and female infanticide that lurk in the backgound. Reading it for the first time as an adult, I recognized echoes of stories my mother told me about her own childhood when she, too, had been the last of six unwanted girls. After she was born her mother—my grandmother—turned her face to the wall. Two years later came the birth of the son who was all either of my grandparents had ever wanted in the first place. I knew
The Chinese Children
Next Door
by heart when I was little, presumably because its consoling warmth and optimism made my mother’s past seem more bearable.

I had no idea at the time who wrote the book that meant so much to me. Now I know that it is based on the life of Pearl’s much older adopted sister, a Chinese girl abandoned by her own family and brought up as their own by Pearl’s parents. The first two of this sister’s six daughters were almost the same age as Pearl, who grew up
seeing them count for nothing, and watching their mother publicly disgraced for bearing her husband six girls in succession. There is no hint of this sediment of suffering in Pearl’s story. As a small child running free in a Chinese town where wild dogs foraged for babies routinely exposed to die on waste land, she often came across half-eaten remnants on the hillside outside her parents’ gate. She tried hard to bury them just as she buried her memories of being sworn at as a foreign devil in the street, of fleeing for her life from marauding soldiers, of the young brides sold into slavery who hanged themselves at intervals in her neighbors’ houses. Memories like these surface in her novels from time to time like a dismembered hand or leg. This ambivalence—the territory that lies between what is said, and what can be understood—is the nub of my book.

Fiction never lies; it reveals the writer totally.

—
V. S. NAIPAUL

CHAPTER
1
Family of Ghosts

P
EARL SYDENSTRICKER WAS
born into a family of ghosts. She was the fifth of seven children and, when she looked back afterward at her beginnings, she remembered a crowd of brothers and sisters at home, tagging after their mother, listening to her sing, and begging her to tell stories.
“We looked out over the paddy fields
and the thatched roofs of the farmers in the valley, and in the distance a slender pagoda seemed to hang against the bamboo on a hillside,” Pearl wrote, describing a storytelling session on the veranda of the family house above the Yangtse River. “But we saw none of these.” What they saw was America, a strange, dreamlike, alien homeland where they had never set foot. The siblings who surrounded Pearl in these early memories were dreamlike as well. Her older sisters, Maude and Edith, and her brother Arthur had all died young in the course of six years from dysentery, cholera, and malaria, respectively. Edgar, the oldest, ten years of age when Pearl was born, stayed long enough to teach her to walk, but a year or two later he was gone too (sent back to be educated in the United States, he would be a young man of twenty before his sister saw him again). He left behind a new baby brother to take his place, and when she needed company of her own age, Pearl peopled the house with her dead siblings.
“These three who came before
I was born, and went away too soon, somehow seemed alive to me,” she said.

Every Chinese family had its own quarrelsome, mischievous ghosts who could be appealed to, appeased, or comforted with paper people, houses, and toys. As a small child lying awake in bed at night, Pearl grew up listening to the cries of women on the street outside calling back the spirits of their dead or dying babies. In some ways
she herself was more Chinese than American.
“I spoke Chinese first
, and more easily,” she said.
“If America was for dreaming about
, the world in which I lived was Asia…. I did not consider myself a white person in those days.” Her friends called her Zhenzhu (Chinese for Pearl) and treated her as one of themselves. She slipped in and out of their houses, listening to their mothers and aunts talk so frankly and in such detail about their problems that Pearl sometimes felt it was her missionary parents, not herself, who needed protecting from the realities of death, sex, and violence.

She was an enthusiastic participant in local funerals on the hill outside the walled compound of her parents’ house: large, noisy, convivial affairs where everyone had a good time. Pearl joined in as soon as the party got going with people killing cocks, burning paper money, and gossiping about foreigners making malaria pills out of babies’ eyes.
“‘Everything you say is lies
,’ I remarked pleasantly…. There was always a moment of stunned silence. Did they or did they not understand what I had said? they asked each other. They understood, but could not believe they had.” The unexpected apparition of a small American girl squatting in the grass and talking intelligibly, unlike other Westerners, seemed magical, if not demonic. Once an old woman shrieked aloud, convinced she was about to die now that she could understand the language of foreign devils. Pearl made the most of the effect she produced, and of the endless questions—about her clothes, her coloring, her parents, the way they lived and the food they ate—that followed as soon as the mourners got over their shock. She said she first realized there was something wrong with her at New Year 1897, when she was four and a half years old, with blue eyes and thick yellow hair that had grown too long to fit inside a new red cap trimmed with gold Buddhas.
“Why must we hide it
?” she asked her Chinese nurse, who explained that black was the only normal color for hair and eyes. (“It doesn’t look human, this hair.”)

Pearl escaped through the back gate to run free on the grasslands thickly dotted with tall pointed graves behind the house. She and her companions, real or imaginary, climbed up and slid down the grave mounds or flew paper kites from the top.
“Here in the green shadows
we played jungles one day and housekeeping the next.” She was baffled by a newly arrived American, one of her parents’ visitors, who complained that the Sydenstrickers lived in a graveyard. (
“That huge empire
is one mighty cemetery,” Mark Twain wrote of China, “ridged and wrinkled from its center to its circumference with graves.”) Ancestors and their coffins were part of the landscape of Pearl’s childhood. The big heavy wooden coffins that stood ready for their occupants in her friends’ houses, or lay awaiting burial for weeks or months in the fields and along the canal banks, were a source of pride and satisfaction to farmers whose families had for centuries poured their sweat, their waste, and their dead bodies back into the same patch of soil.

Sometimes Pearl found bones
lying in the grass, fragments of limbs, mutilated hands, once a head and shoulder with parts of an arm still attached. They were so tiny she knew they belonged to dead babies, nearly always girls suffocated or strangled at birth and left out for dogs to devour. It never occurred to her to say anything to anybody. Instead she controlled her revulsion and buried what she found according to rites of her own invention, poking the grim shreds and scraps into cracks in existing graves or scratching new ones out of the ground. Where other little girls constructed mud pies, Pearl made miniature grave mounds, patting down the sides and decorating them with flowers or pebbles. She carried a string bag for collecting human remains, and a sharpened stick or a club made from split bamboo with a stone fixed into it to drive the dogs away. She could never tell her mother why she hated packs of scavenging dogs, any more than she could explain her compulsion, acquired early from Chinese friends, to run away and hide whenever she saw a soldier coming down the road.

Soldiers from the hill fort with earthen ramparts above the town were generally indistinguishable from bandits, who lived by rape and plunder. The local warlords who ruled China largely unchecked by a weak central government were always eager to extend or consolidate territory. Severed heads were still stuck up on the gates of walled towns like Zhenjiang, where the Sydenstrickers lived. Life in the countryside was not essentially different from the history plays Pearl saw performed in temple courtyards by bands of traveling actors, or
the stories she heard from professional storytellers and anyone else she could persuade to tell them. The Sydenstrickers’ cook, who had the mobile features and expressive body language of a Chinese Fred Astaire, entertained the gateman, the amah, and Pearl herself with episodes from a small private library of books only he knew how to read. This was her first introduction to the
old Chinese novels
—
The White Snake, The Dream of the Red Chamber, All Men Are Brothers—
that she would draw on long afterward for the narrative grip, strong plot lines, and stylized characterizations of her own fiction.

Wang Amah, Pearl’s nurse, had an inexhaustible fund of tales of demons and spirits that lived in clouds, rocks, and trees, sea dragons, storm dragons, and the captive local dragon pinned underneath the pagoda on the far hill, who lay in wait for a chance to squirm free, swamp the river, and drown the whole valley. They inhabited an ancient fairyland of spells, charms, incantations, sensational flights, and fights with “
wonderful daggers
that a man could make small enough to hide in his ear or in the corner of his eye but which, when he fetched them out again, were long and keen and swift to kill.” But even as a small child Pearl liked her fairy stories more closely rooted in reality, and she pestered Wang Amah to tell her about when she was little and how she grew up into a flawless young beauty with pale porcelain skin, plucked forehead, black braided hair that hung to her knees, and three-inch-long bound feet, so lovely that she had to be married off early for fear of predatory soldiers. By the time Pearl knew her thirty or forty years later,
Wang Amah was wrinkled
and practically toothless (the heartless little Sydenstrickers laughed when she knocked out all but two of her remaining teeth in a fall on the cellar steps), with scanty hair, heavy flaps of skin over her eyes, and a protruding lower lip. She was strict but kind and dependable, a source of warmth and reassurance, the only person in Pearl’s household who ever gave her a hug or took the child onto her lap and into her bed for comfort.

She had been the daughter of a small tradesman in Yangzhou with a prosperous business destroyed in the seismic upheavals all over China that left at least twenty million people dead after the Taiping Rebellion.
Wang Amah lost her family—parents, parents-in-law, husband—and with them her means of subsistence. She scraped out a living in the sex trade until hired by Pearl’s mother to look after her children (an appointment badly received by the rest of the mission community). The traumas of her youth resurfaced in her new life as a sequence of thrilling set pieces, starting with her miraculous escape, when she was lowered on a rope down a dry well to save her from Taiping marauders, and going on to the firing of the great pagoda in her hometown, which was burned to the ground with all its priests inside it.
Interrogated by Pearl
about the smell of roasting men and whether the Chinese variety smelled different from white flesh, Wang Amah replied confidently that white meat was coarser, more tasteless and watery,
“because you wash yourselves
so much.”

Even the dire process of having her feet bound became heroic in retrospect. Wang Amah explained that her father made her sleep alone in the kitchen outhouse from the age of three so as not to disturb the rest of the family by her crying at night. Rarely able to resist Pearl’s coaxing, she took off the cloth shoes, white stockings, and bandages that had to be worn, even in bed, by women with the infinitely desirable “golden-lily” feet that enforced subjugation as effectively as a ball and chain. Pearl inspected the lump of mashed bone and livid discolored flesh made from forcing together the heel and toes under the instep, leaving only the big toe intact. She had witnessed the mothers of her contemporaries crippling their own daughters’ feet and even suspected she might have ruined her chances of getting a husband by failing to go through the procedure herself. She watched her nurse put the bindings back on without comment. It was one of her first lessons in the power of the imagination to cover up or contain and make bearable things too ugly to confront directly. It was the same lesson she learned from the body parts she found on the hillside. The potent spell Pearl cast later, as a phenomenally successful writer of romantic best sellers, came in large part from this sense of a harsh hidden reality, protruding occasionally but more often invisible, present only beneath the surface of her writing as an unexamined residue of pain and fear.

The second major storyteller of Pearl’s early years was her mother, whose repertoire transported her children to
“a place called Home
where apples lay on clean grass under the trees, and berries grew on bushes ready to eat, and yards were un-walled and water clean enough to drink without boiling and filtering.” In the enchanted idyll of her mother’s West Virginia childhood, America lay open and free, untouched by the taint of disease, corruption, injustice, or want. (
“I grew up misinformed
,” Pearl wrote dryly, “and ripe for some disillusionment later.”) The family were Dutch immigrants who had ended up a decade before the Civil War in a small settlement sixty miles west of the Shenandoah Valley, a corridor that allowed Confederate forces to launch raids on Washington from one end and move supplies into Richmond through the other, fought over with relentless ferocity for four years until victorious Federal troops finally laid waste the valley, destroying buildings, slaughtering livestock, and burning crops. Five years old when the war began, Pearl’s mother grew up in a borderland repeatedly occupied by the scavenging, sometimes starving armies of both sides. Like Wang Amah, she reorganized her memories in later life into broad-brush narrative paintings depicting sudden dramatic reversals and hair’s-breadth escapes, with streams of galloping gray and blue cavalry superimposed on the pagoda and the groves of bamboo her listeners could see beyond the veranda.