Pearl Buck in China (20 page)

More than a decade later Pearl described in
The Time Is Noon
a fictional daughter who stays away as if forcibly held back from her mother’s deathbed:
“Something blinded her
—not tears. She was not weeping. Her throat was thick, her eyes fogged, her heart beating all over her body. She was afraid. She turned blindly to the window and stood looking out.” In her biography of her mother Pearl saw this as the moment that finally cut her loose from the world of her childhood and the self that had been bound by its constraints.
“When I think of her dying
I still see that landscape, the bamboos swaying below the window, the valley beyond, the small farmhouses and the tawny fields, the late gleaners moving slowly across them, women and children in their peasant blue, and beyond them again the distant mountains. Those were long minutes in which I felt my very flesh being torn from hers. I longed to go to her and I could not.” Pearl’s account of Carie’s courage and composure at the end echoes the story of Mulan, the folk heroine who had thrilled her as a child, and whose brilliant career owed much to a fearless mother.
“Any Chinese who reads this
will recall… Mulan’s mother!” wrote a Chinese critic reviewing
The Exile
on publication. Carie might have relished the comparison. She was buried beside her son Clyde in the foreigners’ walled cemetery at Niupipo, down the hill and across the valley from the Sydenstricker house.

“Fiction is a painting
,” wrote Pearl, “biography is a photograph. Fiction is creation, biography is arrangement.” She herself reworked the story of her mother’s death in three biographical books and two novels. The first was
The Exile,
an energetic vindication written immediately after Carie died, piecing together her life from her own diaries and from Pearl’s recollections, a collaborative and emotional rather than a factual reconstruction, certainly not a biography in Pearl’s prosaic and mechanical definition. Two years later she revisited the same subject in her first novel,
East Wind, West Wind,
where the mother’s long, slow, stoical dying hangs over the book’s last section, putting all other lives on hold as she struggles like someone trying to get rid of a burden, silent, immobile, looking more and more like her daughter, gnawed and savaged by pain that turns her face gray and shortens her breath. At the end, having glimpsed the hard truth of her mother’s marriage, the daughter shrinks from looking closer:
“I drew the curtain at last
, and shut her away, back into the loneliness in which she had lived.”

After another decade Pearl removed the concealing curtain in
The Time Is Noon.
She said the book insisted on being written—
“I had to get rid of
all my life until that moment”—at a time of transition and confusion, when she could see no hope for herself in the future. “In this mood I began to write
The Time is Noon
… writing out my thoughts and fears not in my own person, of course, but in a woman I had created out of myself.” By far the best and bleakest thing in the book is its frank and angry account of the minister’s daughter nursing her mother, whose voice grows hoarse and dry as her flesh swells and her eyes shrink (
“death sat
, looking out of her eyes, breathing its stenchy breath out of her nostrils”). The horror of physical decay is compounded by shock and incredulity as the daughter finds herself slowly and unwillingly confronted with the sexual coercion and emotional nullity at the core of her parents’ marriage. The wife shrinks from her husband’s touch, claiming tiredness and refusing to let him near her: “They looked at each other, father, daughter. The daughter cried at him in her heart, ‘What have you done to make her so tired?’ The father answered with his calm, righteous look. His look said, ‘I have done nothing that is not my right to do.’”

The one flicker of genuine feeling between the dying woman and her husband is a moment of mutual savagery when he finds that she has systematically put aside sums from her meager housekeeping allowance for their children. He turns on her, beside himself with fury at having been cheated of funds for his charitable causes, before rifling her trunk and helping himself to her savings. Afterward their daughter finds the contents of the ransacked trunk, family papers, baby clothes and shoes, a lifetime’s carefully preserved mementoes, all tipped out as trash on the attic floor. “It darted across her mind that there was nothing there of the man’s, nothing of their father at all. He had come and taken all he wanted and he had left nothing behind.”

As soon as Pearl got back to Nanjing in the winter of 1921–22 she began to put the story of her mother’s life down on paper, refilling that metaphorical trunk, writing out of grief and fury, dashing down her words with no time for correction, driven by the image of her mother that burned in her memory. She wrote without thought of publication, almost without realizing she was writing a book at all.
The Exile
starts with an exuberant image of Carie in her prime, the mother first imprinted on the mind of the infant Pearl, outlined against the sun and holding a trowel in her hand in the garden of the mission house at Tsingkiangpu, radiant, vigorous, all-powerful, at the furthest remove from the sad, shriveled, and defeated woman Pearl had sat with and watched over at the end of a life pointlessly sacrificed to a futile cause. The book ends with an effusive postscript (added fifteen years later, when
The Exile
was finally published), which makes it sound more like a biography of the Statue of Liberty than an actual human being:
“Young in spirit to the end
, indomitable, swift in generosity, eager after the fine things of life and yet able to live ardently if necessary in poverty, idealistic with the true idealism that is never satisfied with mere idealism not translated into actuality… To all of us everywhere who knew her this woman was America.” Between these two heroic evocations lies a sober story of rejection, submission, and resistance in which the author catches sight of herself reflected again and again in her mother’s mirror.

In the absence of all but the most rudimentary documentation,
Pearl relied in
The Exile
on things her mother had told her backed up by a photographic memory apparently in working order from the day of her birth. But because even Pearl could not remember what had happened before she existed, she shaped her account of her mother’s early life on the pattern of her own recent experience. The key turning point for Carie as a young woman—her mother’s illness and death—becomes on one level a replay of Pearl’s own conscious or unconscious groping toward some still undefined sense of purpose:
“She was beginning already
to cut her life free, ready for a way to be shown her.” Carie rejected the passionate and sensual side of her nature represented by her first lover—“I could see in her eyes her memory hot still with the thought of him”—married Absalom to confirm her rejection, and spent the rest of her life coming to terms with the enormity of her mistake. Pearl, who had married for the opposite reason, found herself as a young wife deep in similar frustration and doubt. At times in
The Exile
she seems to be writing about her own exasperation as much as her mother’s, with a husband who makes it painfully clear that no wife can compete in attraction or significance with his work. In her story Absalom provides a focus for her mixed feelings about Lossing. “His somewhat pedantic speech, his slow rare humor, his complete absorption in his task, his inability to face or to understand the practical difficulties in human lives, his own ascetic and rigorous life which had no place for beauty or pleasure, came to repel her.”

The Exile
is a study of sexual and emotional incompatibility “in an age stern to women,” when marriage had no exit. “However two might strain from each other, however barren might be the husks of union between them, however far they dwelt in spirit from each other, the outward bond was not to be broken.” In a poignant passage near the end of the book Carie in her fifties finally relinquishes her dream of working alongside her husband, realizes she will never find companionship in her marriage, and accepts that the most she can expect is to live out the rest of her life plodding on foot from one Chinese village to another, giving and getting what comfort she can from the local women. It was the existence Pearl had until recently envisaged for herself in Nanxuzhou.

The Exile
is admittedly biased, sometimes factually inaccurate, and in places heavily romanticized, but it takes imaginative possession of its subject with a novelist’s aplomb while at the same time retaining a degree of biographical detachment exceedingly difficult for a child to bring to bear on a parent. It is a remarkable achievement, and one that restored Pearl’s innate balance and sense of proportion. It also clarified her priorities. For her, as for her brother Edgar, there could be no question of divorce in the lifetime of either of their parents, but with this book she distanced herself from her past, sharpened her understanding of her own predicament, and cleared the way for a very different solution when, like Nora in Ibsen’s
Doll’s House,
she too would eventually have to confront in her marriage what Hu Shi called the four evils of selfishness, slavery, hypocrisy, and cowardice.

When
The Exile
was finished Pearl showed the manuscript to no one, packing it up and putting it away in a closet, where it lay forgotten for years. Much the same would happen later with
The Time Is Noon,
which spent more than thirty years in a drawer before it was finally published. Both seemed initially too raw and intimate for public consumption. Pearl said she wrote
The Exile
as a family memoir for Carol to read and for her unborn grandchildren. But although she never thought of it at the time as a book, still less as publishable, she must have known it had made her a writer. Judging by what she wrote next, she also realized that her real subject was China—not the China where her mother had lived all her adult life in exile, but the China where Pearl felt at home.

When the Bucks left Nanxuzhou, each of them already had the makings of a book that would shoot them both within twelve months of one another to the top of their respective career ladders. In the two and a half years Lossing spent collecting data from the farmers, Pearl had watched and listened, absorbing into her imagination the shapes and patterns of ordinary Chinese life, the kind of stories that no one had ever written down before and that would have been lost forever if she had not served her time as a solitary witness and confidant for the village women of Nanxuzhou. Her new life in Nanjing marked the
start of a process of profound personal change. But it would be nearly another decade before she managed to rid herself completely of the narrow Western vision that could see only grimy, fetid, disease-ridden hovels in the Chinese homes so accurately recreated and inhabited with such warmth and generosity of feeling in
The Good Earth
.

CHAPTER
5
Thinking in Chinese

M
RS
. J
OHN
L
OSSING
Buck on arrival in Nanjing showed no sign of being anything but a typical mission wife. She dressed drably, furnished her house on a shoestring, and put the greater part of her energy into providing backup for her up-and-coming young husband. Almost immediately appointed acting dean of the agricultural college, Lossing replaced John Reisner (on two-year furlough in the United States) as head of what was already well on the way to becoming Nanjing University’s largest and most prestigious department. Pearl acted as hostess to a steady stream of international visitors, who landed in Shanghai and stopped off to inspect the department at Nanjing before going on by train north to Beijing or west by Yangtse river-boat into the interior. In the absence of hotels, her guests—scholars, writers, travelers, professors on sabbatical, and young American missionaries studying Chinese at the Language School—often stayed six months or more.

The Bucks’ house, conveniently near the university and not far from the center of town, was a standard gray brick faculty building,
“too large and somewhat graceless
,” according to Pearl, who subdued it with characteristic speed and style. Its heart was her hospitable sitting room on the ground floor at the back, looking out through a broad bay window over lawns and flower gardens falling away to a bamboo grove below. She filled the room with odds and ends picked up at bargain prices, capacious basket chairs, low Chinese blackwood tables, glazed ceramic bowls and jars, blue Chinese rugs, yellow curtains, and cushions made from a bale of faded silk that she had dyed herself in different colors.
“The living room, large as it was
, grew larger while
she lived in this home,” wrote Grace, who moved in with her sister and married a fellow lodger, a missionary from the Language School. “Porches were taken into it, the south side was pushed out until it became almost an enclosure of a fragment of outdoors, it was so full of sunshine and light and flowers. The colors in the room were rich and warm… deep apricot and brilliant Chinese blue and a touch of jade green and the black of ebony.” The flowers Pearl planted beneath the window made another luxuriant mass of color. There were lilacs in spring, peach and cherry blossom, jonquils, violets, an orange grove, and a riotous pansy bed. A vine arbor led to the rose garden, shaded by big old trees, where sweet-scented China roses grew against the compound wall above beds of snapdragons, poppies, phlox, hollyhocks, and Sweet William. Lunch and dinner parties often took place on the upper terrace, with a view over the garden wall of Purple Mountain, where the first Ming emperor lay buried, rising in the distance beyond the city ramparts.

Pearl looked after her baby, managed her large household, and entertained her husband’s guests as well as teaching English courses at both the private, mission-backed Nanjing University and its Chinese-funded rival, National Southeastern University. She made friends with her next-door neighbor, Margaret Thomson, another highly educated faculty wife with literary aspirations and teaching commitments of her own. Their alliance was a comfort to Pearl, who always dreaded being marked down by other women as a misfit. “
I admired her
, and was sometimes a little awed by her,” another faculty wife said of Pearl. “She spoke her mind so clearly even then.” Her house was simple and plain but strikingly different from other people’s. “It was the most charming home I was ever in,” said a third mission wife, “and the most intellectual.” Pearl herself maintained afterward that she felt stifled and imprisoned in those early years. Her houseguests remembered her hunched over a book every morning in a corner by the window. One of the rare strangers who came specifically to see Mrs. Buck in her own right at this stage was Alice Tisdale Hobart, another reader and writer, who never forgot the books crammed into the big, comfortable, untidy living room, “
not books lining the wall
,
the furnishings of so many libraries, but books of odd sizes standing on the tables, unusual looking books which gave the impression that somebody with a very unusual taste inhabited the room.”