Pearl Buck in China (23 page)

Over the next months she tries unsuccessfully to attract the attention of a husband worn out by his daily battle to impose rational modern solutions on problems caused by China’s legacy of superstition and obsolete belief. Her own struggles against bewilderment and neglect take place in a house clearly based on the Bucks’ Nanjing home, with china doorknobs she can’t turn, steep stairs she can’t climb, scratchy unsightly basket chairs impossible to sit in, and thick cumbersome squares of woolen carpet that can’t be shaken out or spat on. Accustomed to the padded silk surfaces, protective screens, and subtly filtered lighting of her Chinese home, she feels cruelly exposed in a Western world as bleak and comfortless as the white walls, slippery polished floors, and harsh glaring sunlight pouring through the clear glass windows of her living room. “A Chinese Woman Speaks” is a light-handed comedy of errors, false assumptions, and reversed
expectations played out between its Oriental narrator and its Western reader. On another level it is also a poignant projection of Pearl’s own marriage, exploring an alternative fictional self who spends long solitary days preparing for her husband’s return from work, experimenting with face creams, hair ornaments, and carefully planned outfits: “His eyes escape hastily to other things—his letters upon the table, his book. I am forgotten.” She fills the house with flowers he never notices, prepares bowls of fragrant tea he leaves untouched, and serves delicious dishes he doesn’t even taste: “I tried no longer therefore. There is nothing that my husband desires of me. He has no need of anything I can give him.” Defeat turns to triumph in a final fairytale reversal, when the husband turns to his wife in a wonderfully suggestive image, “like the river in spring-time flowing richly into the canals empty with the drought of winter.”

Pearl herself found no comparable relief at this point in or outside her marriage. Many of the magazine stories she wrote in the 1920s (collected later in
The First Wife and Other Stories
) end with suicide, sexual bondage, or total loss of hope. The central characters in two of them kill themselves to escape from loveless marriages; in a third an elderly woman unwanted by her family threatens to do the same. Pearl’s own dissatisfaction, dimly sensed between the lines of her account of her mother’s problems in
The Exile,
seems to have taken clearer shape after her father moved in with the Bucks in 1923. His presence shifted the balance of the household. Absalom Sydenstricker had never thought much of Lossing, and now made sure that his views were public knowledge. “When
Dr. Sydenstricker
lived with Pearl, we all knew he had considerable contempt for Lossing,” said Bertha Reisner. “The whole community knew he had not approved of Pearl’s husband.” The two met only at meals, where each pointedly avoided speaking to the other. It was a tricky situation, given that Absalom was technically a guest in Lossing’s house. Open clashes were avoided, at least to start with, by Pearl’s tact and skill in managing her father.
“It did not occur to him
that he might not be the head of any house in which he lived,” she wrote dryly in her memoirs. “The illusion was not lessened by the unfortunate fact that he did not like
his son-in-law, and made no bones about letting me know it by considerable I-told-you-so conversation, which only my deepening affection for him and sense of humor made endurable.”

The need to bolster his own superiority by sniping at someone else came in part at least from extreme humiliation. Absalom’s last eighteen months in Zhenjiang after his wife died had been disastrous. Once Carie was no longer there to reason with him behind the scenes and defend him in public against his critics, the obstinacy and highhandedness that had for decades provoked his colleagues almost beyond bearing proved his undoing. Questions were raised about lack of transparency, chronic mismanagement of funds, and irregularities bordering on fraud. Money donated by an American benefactor for a memorial chapel had been diverted by Sydenstricker to finance projects of his own. Deeds of another chapel on his circuit had mysteriously ended up in the possession of its native pastor. A third had been used as the headquarters of an opium ring. Charges were laid and evidence produced. He could give no coherent explanation of the conduct of his Chinese helpers, who not only hijacked his chapels for unauthorized and sometimes flagrantly illicit purposes, but systematically helped themselves to bonuses in cash and kind. The case against him had been painstakingly built up over many years.
“The North Kiangsu Mission
has no place for free lancers or free lance work,” declared an official report containing, as far back as 1915, an unmistakable warning to Sydenstricker that routine defiance of mission policy would not be tolerated forever. “No mission should grow by the coral reef method, each person adding what he wants, and when and where he wants it. A mission should not permit… the determination of a strong-headed man to veer the bark from its true course.”

Absalom, who had always considered it beneath him to account for sums entrusted to him by the church, saw no need to change his tactics.
“He went his way
, serene and confident, secure in the knowledge of his own rightness,” wrote Pearl. “I never saw him in undignified argument with others.” From the point of view of the younger missionaries trying to repair the damage, he had very nearly wrecked their enterprise through credulity, poor judgment, and the certainty
that his own motives were beyond human criticism. “Those meetings at the station were just a sheer agony to me,” said his daughter Grace. “I can remember sitting there and hearing him on the verge of being put out… but nothing on earth would stop him.” Feeling betrayed by his own kind, Absalom relied blindly on his Chinese followers, who had presented him at the start of his seventieth year with a gilded scroll, red silk banners, and a scarlet panoply on a pole. But once again his defective sense of other people let him down. He was definitively outmaneuvered a few days after his birthday by his brother missionaries. A new rule requiring compulsory retirement at the age of seventy—specifically aimed at Sydenstricker, who was the only missionary in North Kiangsu anywhere near this age limit—became official policy at the annual meeting in Kuling in August 1922. In her fictionalized version of her father’s downfall in
The Time Is Noon
Pearl described him dragging himself home after his enforced resignation:
“His lips were moving
, and he made angry futile gestures like weak blows.” He passed the winter
“in a sort of stupor
of dismay.” Reviving in time to set out on his annual spring itineration, accompanied by the stout-hearted Ma Pangbo (who had been accused of corruption along with all the rest), he found his chapels and schools closed down, his native preachers dismissed and their congregations scattered. “Everything was gone—his whole life’s work swept away.” A minor stroke followed, either just before or soon after Pearl moved him with Grace into her house in Nanjing in April 1923.

This uprooting might have finished him off if Pearl had not, by sheer force of personality, obliged the reluctant seminary board to appoint him head of its correspondence department.
“It was only by much contriving
, infinite resourcefulness and great kindness that the whole thing was accomplished,” wrote Grace, who, like Pearl, dreaded seeing their parents’ forty years in China end in failure, disgrace, and death. It took diplomacy to persuade the authorities to offer their father a job, and even more to get him to accept it, but Absalom (who had initiated correspondence courses at the seminary many years before) was immediately at home in a university setting. He worked on his New Testament, preached on street corners, and
gave the students keen attention, which they returned with interest.
“All his life
he rather wistfully admired handsome and clever young men,” wrote Pearl. “Many handsome and clever young Chinese certainly did what they liked with him.” He continued distributing money he couldn’t afford, providing textbooks, paying tuition fees, even handing over his own warm clothes to favored students. Pearl darned his woolen underwear, patched his threadbare overcoat, and rescued him from scrapes as her mother had done before her with a patience that amazed her friends. All the neighbors grew familiar with Absalom’s tall bony figure in a long black minister’s coat, passing their houses every day without looking to left or right. “He wouldn’t even see you,” said Pearl’s friend Ray Kelsey, whose husband, Dean, had been at Cornell with Lossing (it was at a picnic given by the Kelseys that the Bucks first met in Kuling). “I couldn’t stand her father.” All of them found him cold, hard, and overbearing. “I don’t think anybody could show him affection,” said Bertha Reisner. “No one could love
him,
” said Ray Kelsey, who had known Carie Sydenstricker at Kuling and hotly resented the way she had been treated by her husband.

But Pearl developed unexpected solidarity with her father in the last ten years of his life. The two found common ground not simply in their mutual stubbornness and pride, nor even in their shared love for the Chinese people and their language.
“He spoke Chinese as few
white men ever do, with feeling and precision,” Pearl wrote. “It came at last to be more native to him than his own tongue—he spoke it far more.” Now that her brief uncharacteristic access of religious fervor had passed, leaving her as relaxed and skeptical as on the day she was received into the Church at the age of ten, she enjoyed an intellectual companionship with her father that her husband could not give. Like his daughter, Absalom had loved books all his life.
“He had a remarkable mind
, not scintillating but steady, penetrating, retentive,” she wrote when he died. Pearl took walks with him by day and sat alone with him at night:
“He talked more
in those hours than he ever had before.” According to Grace, who was living in the same house at the time, much of the material for
Fighting Angel
came from the countless
evenings when Pearl asked questions and Absalom told her for the first time, with touching shamefaced shyness, stories of his childhood, his young manhood, and his marriage.
“I put relentlessly aside
Carie’s side of the story,” said Pearl, already adept at the biographer’s bifocal vision. “His own memories… were quite unlike Carie’s.”

Absalom had begun his new life in Nanjing with a ruthless purge. Rejecting the big sunny room prepared for him by Pearl, he threw out curtains, cushions, and soft furnishings, together with his wife’s picture and every other personal memento intended to make him feel at home, ending up with an iron bedstead in a small bare monk-like cell above the kitchen. He extended the same frugality to the memoirs he wrote at Pearl’s suggestion. The two of them were the writers of the household—“I used to hear his old typewriter tapping uncertainly during hot afternoon hours when everyone else was sleeping”—but she was taken aback when he handed her twenty-five pages of typescript containing all that he considered worth recording.
Our Life and Work in China
is a factual record of his religious journey in the service of the Church, stripped of human interest and omitting all but perfunctory passing references to his wife and children (Carie’s favorite son, Clyde, doesn’t even rate a mention). Pearl could still be repelled by her father’s dysfunctional otherworldliness. Lilliath Bates remembered her anger and distress over a chilling incident in Shanghai, when he announced that he had found the grave of his son Arthur and was puzzled by Pearl’s question about the other two graves, having forgotten altogether the existence of his daughters Maude and Edith.

In time Pearl came to admire, perhaps even to envy her father’s singleness of purpose:
“He espoused early a cause
in which he believed all his life without a shadow of doubt. Not even his own mind betrayed him. He had his mind in inexorable control.” But what touched her was the serenity, even gaiety of his old age—“Being always perfectly happy, he had a charm about him”—and his fondness for disconcertingly simpleminded jokes, something he had always shared more readily with colleagues than he could with his own family (“
Kill Sydenstricker!”
went a favorite one-liner passed round the missionaries of North Kiangsu. “That is the only way to stop his jokes”). Pearl
discovered in these years aspects of her father she had never previously suspected, and it changed her attitude to him as well as insidiously affecting her view of her husband. She understood the defensive origins of Absalom’s fearful rigidity, while his childishness and helpless dependence appealed to the same maternal instincts aroused by her own little daughter.

Carol Buck
had grown from an exceptionally beautiful baby into a boisterous child, sturdy and big for her age but restless and demanding, slow to learn, uncoordinated, and lacking in physical control. She played wild games with the neighbors’ children, and she loved roughhousing with her father, rolling over and over, laughing and squealing on the sloping lawn below the house. She expressed her wants with jabbering and grunts, sniffing at visitors or jumping up at them like a dog. She had dry itchy skin, suffering from eczema so badly as a small child that her hands had to be bandaged night and day to stop her from scratching. Carol couldn’t speak, and she responded blankly to things that made other children laugh or cry, but she knew enough to be fiercely jealous of the writing that drew her mother’s attention like a magnet. The Bears remembered her throwing porridge or scooping earth from the potted plants in the living room to clog the keys of her mother’s typewriter.

Lossing sometimes tried to control the child, but Pearl could not bear to see her disciplined, nor was she convinced by her husband’s cheerful insistence that he and his three brothers had all been late talkers. Pragmatic and unflappable, he accepted his daughter’s limitations more easily than was possible for Pearl, who compared Carol to her friends’ babies and was cruelly conscious that some mothers kept their children away from hers. Even Emma White found being with Pearl’s daughter too upsetting for her two children, who were almost the same age. The young Thomsons and Reisners fooled about happily with Carol, but their mothers could not give the reassurance Pearl longed to hear. All her Nanjing friends recognized long before she did that something was seriously wrong.
“I was to have nearly four years
of happy ignorance about her,” wrote Pearl, who had learned very young how to ignore warning signals and look away from things
too dreadful to contemplate. “
She was three years old
when I first began to wonder.”