Pearl Buck in China (24 page)

It took yet more time before Pearl could bring herself to go into action. “I was reluctant and unbelieving until the last.” The Bucks rented a beach house in the summer of 1924 at the popular seaside resort of Peitaho (Beidaihe) on China’s northern coast so that Lossing could visit farmers in Manchuria while his wife and child swam or paddled and hired ponies to ride along the sand. At a talk given by a visiting American pediatrician from Beijing, Pearl recognized her daughter’s symptoms and arranged for the lecturer and two other doctors to examine Carol at her house the next day. She retained forever a mental snapshot of Carol coming in from the beach that morning, sturdy and brown in a white swimsuit with a bucket in her hand, outlined against the sun like Carie on the first page of
The Exile.
“In spite of my terror
, I was proud of my child as she stood before the doctors.” They refused to make a specific diagnosis but advised an immediate return to the United States for consultations. The Bucks went back to Nanjing, where Ray Kelsey remembered Pearl clinging to her in tears, unable to say anything but “What am I going to do? Oh God, God!
What am I going to do?
”

The family crossed the Pacific by Empress liner in late summer. It was on this ship that Pearl wrote
“A Chinese Woman Speaks,”
dashing it down quickly in free moments in the dining salon on fifty sheets of ship’s notepaper. The story was a way of escaping from her own predicament, while at the same time reflecting one aspect of it in a Chinese looking-glass, and on arrival she forgot all about her manuscript. They headed for Ithaca, New York, where Lossing, who was on sabbatical, planned to take a master’s degree in agricultural economics at Cornell. He got down to work in lodgings near the campus, while Pearl set out alone with their daughter on a round of visits to specialists in every discipline that might conceivably be relevant. The verdict eventually delivered after exhaustive tests at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, was that the child was physically in good shape but mentally impaired for no known reason, and that nothing could be done to help her. The consultant advised Pearl kindly not to give
up trying. She was thankful ever after to a small, unprepossessing clinician speaking broken English who intercepted her on the way out to urge her not to fool herself:
“You will wear out your life
and beggar your family unless you give up hope and face the truth. This child will be a burden to you all your life. Get ready to bear that burden.”

She never forgot his words—“I suppose the shock photographed them upon my memory”—which shaped her future, both as a woman and as a writer. It would be another quarter of a century before scientists finally identified Carol’s condition (she was suffering from phenylketonuria, or PKU, brain degeneration caused by inability in the newborn child to process a chemical called phenyl, a deficiency that can be treated only if detected in its early stages). Pearl said that, although she struggled against the knowledge, she recognized deep down that the man was right because she had already unconsciously given up hope. Long afterward she compared the impact of this blow to deep internal bleeding, tearing flesh, a “monstrous ache of the heart which becomes physical and permeates bone and muscle.” In her fictional account in
The Time Is Noon
she wrote that at bedtime on that first night she felt
“as though she were laying
herself down to die by her own hand.”

Pearl rejoined her husband in two small rented rooms in a minister’s house in Ithaca. Irrational guilt and a sense of her own failure as a mother gave a kind of dreary horror to the unfamiliar landscape of gray water and snow-covered hills, heightened by American Indian legends that the lakes around Ithaca were bottomless. She sought oblivion in punitive, mind-numbing drudgery. Looking after Carol for the first time without an amah, cooking, cleaning, washing, and shopping for a family of three on the single modest salary that was all they had now that she herself was no longer teaching, meant hard physical labor and stringent economy. The budget could be stretched to cover a single small cheap weekly cut of meat on top of their staple diet: a loaf of bread, a quart of milk, and one egg a day each for Carol and Lossing. A local farmer stocked the cellar with a cartload of potatoes, onions, carrots, and apples that had to last the winter. Otherwise their only other regular expense was the money paid to a neighbor to
take care of Carol in the hours when Pearl was away, attending classes in English literature. “I felt it wise to plunge into some sort of absorbing mental effort that would leave me no time to think of myself,” she wrote, explaining her decision to enroll in a master’s degree program like her husband. She fit her studying into free hours in the college library late at night, after Carol had been put to bed.

Everything she did or planned from now on was subordinate to Carol’s needs. Even her longing for another child reawakened only when a doctor suggested that a companion might help to stimulate her daughter. She persuaded Lossing that they should adopt a baby from a small private orphanage attached to the church that acted as his sponsor, the Second Presbyterian of Troy, New York. From the twenty babies available, laid out in their dormitory in rows of cribs, Pearl chose a tiny, bald, severely malnourished infant with a misshapen ear (pushed forward rather than flat against the skull because the child had lain for weeks on the same side), who refused to eat and had added nothing in three months to her birth weight of seven pounds. Ignoring professional advice not to waste time on a dying child, Pearl recognized stubbornness in her new daughter as well as a neediness that matched her own. Janice repaid her by taking to the bottle as soon as they got home, starting the long, slow, uneven process of rebuilding Pearl’s confidence in herself as a mother. The despair she felt did not lessen, but it became more manageable as she filled her life with barriers against it—studying for a degree, housekeeping on a shoestring with no human or mechanical help, the full-time care of two difficult and damaged children under five.

She started writing again for the same reason, driven by the family’s precarious finances. Lossing taught Sunday school in lieu of rent, but tuition, fees, winter clothes, and mounting bills were more than he could manage. Pearl got out her shipboard story, tidied it up, and sent it to the editor of
Asia
magazine, who wrote back in June 1925, offering a fee of one hundred dollars and publication the following spring. Acceptance of “A Chinese Woman Speaks” launched her professionally as a fiction writer, but without the thrill produced by her articles in the
Atlantic
and
Forum
the year before. Success was now
no more than a side effect of financial desperation. She attempted a sequel but abandoned it to concentrate on the Laura L. Messenger Memorial Prize, awarded for the best historical essay “in the field of human progress” and worth $250 to the winner, always in practice if not in theory a male history major. An experienced strategist ever since her days as a child prize-winner on the Shanghai
Mercury,
Pearl had researched the student award situation shrewdly—“
Quite coldbloodedly I asked
which was the largest”—and her assessment of what the Messenger judges wanted was spot on. She won with a long, scholarly, cogently argued analysis, “China and the West,” which articulated for the first time the hard-hitting positions she would take later on the achievements and failures of the mission movement, and the imperialist and racist implications of American foreign and domestic policy. It gave her the impetus to finish her second story, which
Asia
immediately accepted.
“I got back my faith
in myself, which was all but gone in the sorry circumstances of my life.”

“Endurance is only
the beginning,” Pearl wrote long afterward, explaining that learning to bear grief that cannot at first be borne has to be done alone. It was an atrocious education. In retrospect she divided it into stages, beginning with devastation and disintegration: “Despair so profound and absorbing poisons the whole system and destroys thought and energy.” For Pearl it remained the underlying reality of her life long after the family left Cornell to return to China in the autumn of 1925. She could not share her feelings with Lossing, whose matter-of-fact acceptance of Carol’s situation seemed only to intensify Pearl’s guilt and apprehension. She tried to offload them instead by blaming him for not telling her about a history of similar problems in his family (in fact PKU can be inherited only from two parents each carrying the recessive gene, which means that both Pearl and Lossing must have been carriers). Her schedule became hectic. Every moment had to be accounted for: “guests always leaving or just coming, special meals, something always
doing,
” said Grace, who found it tiring even to contemplate the pressures of her sister’s life.

Pearl could no longer listen to music. Routine claims on her attention—house, garden, plants, books, students, the company of
friends—seemed null and pointless.
“None of it meant anything
,” she said. She existed on the surface, struggling, like the dowager empress in a fictional biography she wrote thirty years later, to contain feelings that threatened to overwhelm her:
“She was frantic
with anger and anxiety and the discipline she enforced upon herself to hide what she felt, drained the strength from her very bones.” Apart from her first outburst in Ray Kelsey’s kitchen, none of her friends, not even Grace, saw her break down in tears. She said she kept her weeping for the hours she spent alone with Carol, which were also the only times when she felt herself truly alive. Absalom remained oblivious as usual. Ray felt it was Pearl’s brother Edgar—by now an experienced statistician, invited by Lossing to accompany the Bucks back to Nanjing as a visiting lecturer—who became at this point “more like a father to Pearl.”

The surface pleasures gradually returned—
“Books, I remember
, were the first”—but it was another fifteen years before Pearl recognized almost with surprise that rebellion had given way to a kind of resignation.
“Agony has become static
,” she wrote grimly. It took longer still for her to be able to explore dispassionately the meaning of her daughter’s life, and its impact on her own. “
It is not shame
at all,” she told Emma, explaining why for years she could not talk about Carol, or even admit her existence to anyone but old friends. “I am sore to the touch there, and I cannot endure even the touch of sympathy.”

The process of acceptance took place so deep within her that it left only faint external traces, even on her novels. Carol stands behind Wang Lung’s disabled daughter in
The Good Earth,
and the girl in
The Mother
whose ceaseless scratching, whimpering, and red-rimmed eyes are discounted by her family until her mother realizes too late that the child has gone blind. Pearl’s own state of mind is reflected as always most directly in the mother of the brain-damaged baby in
The Time Is Noon:
“She would sleep a little
and wake in the morning stifled, as one might wake in a dense smoke, or under a heavy weight. Before she was well awake, dragging her mind upward out of sleep, she knew something was wrong—terror waited. Then she was awake and there the terror was, fresh and sharp and new with the morning.”

I
NNER PERTURBATION WAS
compounded by external tension in China in those years. When the Bucks received their degrees from Cornell in June 1925 the situation was too volatile for them to think of going straight home. The unexpected death of Sun Yatsen in March had sparked a gathering wave of protest and police repression. Perennially simmering fury against foreign economic and military domination erupted in extended strikes, trade boycotts, riots, and student demonstrations suppressed with extreme government brutality backed by Western battleships and machine guns. Hope and apprehension focused on the Nationalist headquarters in Guangzhou, where systematic preparations for armed conflict were in progress under a bold general and prime contender for the party’s vacant leadership, Chiang Kaishek. The foreign community watched uneasily.
“My own sympathies
were entirely with the Chinese,” wrote Pearl, who had set out in her Messenger prize essay the long history of coercion and aggression that lay behind the current turmoil. “The driving force… was a passionate desire to get rid of the foreigners who had fastened themselves upon China through trade and religion and war, and set up a government for the reform and modernization of their country.”

Idealistic students from all over China poured into Guangzhou to join Chiang Kaishek’s model army. The Nationalist Party, or Kuomintang, funded from Moscow and reorganized by Russian advisers along Soviet lines—“the same discipline, the same techniques of propaganda, and the same ruthless political commissars”—joined forces with the Chinese Communist Party in fragile, fractious alliance for the sole purpose of seizing power. The Bucks returned that autumn to a country once again on the verge of revolution. In November Nanjing became the capital of the eastern warlord General Sun Chuanfang, who would be defeated by the Nationalists a year later. Pearl sowed larkspur and snapdragons in her garden, and taught courses at Ginling Women’s College as well as at both universities. Intellectually she felt closer to her earnest, argumentative Chinese students than to her American compatriots: “I was increasingly conscious of the years of separation from my own people. My childhood
had not been theirs, nor theirs mine…. Under the life of everyday I knew that the old cleavage was deepening. My worlds were dividing, and the time would come when I would have to make a final choice between them.”