Pearl Buck in China (27 page)

Twenty-five years later Pearl would repeat the same complaints, downgrading her husband’s intellectual pretensions and dismissing his professional achievements in terms almost identical to her father’s. At the time she remained supportive, but although she never complained about any of her troubles, her close friends were highly critical of Lossing.
“I do think she had a bad time
,” said Lilliath Bates, shocked in those months by his stinginess with money, his lack of interest in the children, his overbearing and paternalistic attitude to his wife. “He made Pearl suffer very much.” Pearl accepted, however reluctantly, her husband’s refusal to consider leaving China. She did not question that his work came first nor, in spite of her own second salary, that he alone controlled their purse strings. She had stories to write herself that winter, but she still found time in the evenings to work on the typed reports that formed the basis of Lossing’s
Chinese Farm Economy
. “She’d go to her room and edit them, make them read well, before going to her own writing,” said Lilliath Bates. Grace remembered her sister’s steady encouragement and the many suggestions she gave Lossing for his book:
“She entered very much
into that project, and she did a great deal of editing.”

Pearl took pride in putting on a good show in the role of model wife, but the person she was trying hardest to convince at this stage was herself.
“I’m not going to fail
at anything,” as her alter ego puts it in what she claimed to be the most autobiographical of all her novels,
This Proud Heart.
“I can do it all, wife, mother—and myself.” The same determination underlies an effusive letter she sent her mother-in-law from Shanghai in 1927.
“I should like to tell you
that the more the years pass the happier we are together and the more glad that we found each other,” she wrote of herself and Lossing: “ours is a real marriage of minds and spirits and we seem to grow more and more happy in
it.” Over the past ten years Pearl’s parents-in-law had received a good few letters like this one, extolling the young Bucks’ married bliss, his family’s exemplary home life on their New England farm, and the stalwart qualities of Lossing and his brothers (“such splendid good true stock… how wise you have been in rearing four such sons…. Your daughters have to thank you and Father for that”). There is an element of desperation in Pearl’s reassurances, as if on some level she recognized them to be phony. When she finally stopped pretending to herself that nothing had gone wrong in her marriage, she looked back in a very different light.
“His house explained so much
, when I saw it, of what seemed to me before cruel insensitivity,” she wrote to her old friend and Lossing’s, Marian Craighill, who had always had her doubts about the two of them as a couple.

There was in fact nothing out of the ordinary about Lossing’s parents, strict and abstemious people who had given their lives to running their small, largely self-sufficient Pleasant Valley farm, with a dozen cows (all milked by hand), a hundred hens, and mixed crops of corn, wheat, oats, hay, and apples. Father and sons worked an eighteen-hour day with no hired help and no electricity on the farm. They had no indoor plumbing, and visitors were rare. When Pearl’s brother Edgar came to see his sister, the Bucks did not conceal their disapproval of his smoking in the yard.
“You’d have to understand
my folks, they’d have neither drinking nor smoking, nor coffee or tea,” said Lossing’s younger brother, Clifford. “He only stayed a night or two.” Pearl eventually relieved her feelings about the Buck farm in graphic accounts of the Holm and Pounder farms in two successive novels based, she said, on her marriage to Lossing. The heroine of
Other Gods
marries an undereducated but virile and good-looking New England farmer’s son she scarcely knows, only to find to her chagrin that he is dull, clumsy, unimaginative, and incapable of looking beyond his own immediate concerns. Her fastidious recoil is reinforced on visits to his family by a father-in-law who sweats, smells of cow, and washes at the kitchen sink.
“It was Mr. Holm’s hands
that she dreaded most—those great horrible ham-shaped hands, with the black dirt eternally in the creases…. They make her think of roots of trees turned up out of
the soil.” Perhaps it was Pearl’s own earthy Stulting and Sydenstricker roots that threatened to drag her down at this point, as they had once threatened her father.

Worse still in
The Time Is Noon
is the heroine’s rash marriage to another caricatural farmer’s son,
“a tall, thick-necked, oafish
young man” with lumpy features, coarse limbs, thick pale wind-cracked lips, and meaty hands that make her shrink from his touch. She feels crushed by his family’s bovine physicality and by their stolid, censorious, closed minds. “It’s a flesh pander” is their dismissive phrase for every sensual indulgence, from cooking with sugar and wearing pretty clothes to the possibility of their new daughter-in-law spending too much time in bed with her young husband. When her baby turns out to be disabled, her husband’s family at first flatly deny that there is a problem, then urge her no less flatly to put the child out of sight in a home without making an embarrassing fuss.

The thing that chilled and alienated Pearl most about Lossing was her conviction that he acquiesced in the same fate for their daughter. She herself had understood on the day they spent in hiding from soldiers in Nanjing that, even if Carol emerged from that hut alive, China’s anarchic politics made it impossible to ensure the child’s future, and that her only hope of security lay in the United States. It was an intuitive decision that brought the same kind of relief as a rope thrown to someone trying to maintain a footing in shifting sand:
“I clung to it
and dragged myself out of despair day by day…. Knowing what I was going to do, and thinking how to do it did not heal the inescapable sorrow, but it helped me to live with it.” It also put paid forever to any prospect of appealing for support to Lossing, who was apparently in favor of committing Carol to a
state institution
in the United States. The prospect terrified Pearl and underlined more urgently than ever the need to make provisions for her daughter in the years ahead, when she herself would no longer be there to give protection.

In the winter of 1927–28 Lossing began commuting with John Reisner and Lillieth’s husband, Searle Bates, from Shanghai to Nanjing, still overrun by soldiers and under threat from hostile armies. The three resumed work at the university more or less clandestinely,
concealed on campus by their Chinese colleagues and camping out at night in the Williams’ abandoned house. Lossing and Searle returned most weekends to their wives and children in the house on Avenue Joffre, run with her usual efficiency by Lu Sadze from a kitchen in the basement, where she turned out to be keeping a male prisoner under lock and key. Interrogated by Pearl, Mrs. Lu explained that this highly attractive young man had seduced and abandoned her for another woman in Nanjing (it was his defection that made her set out for Japan), so naturally, when she bumped into him again by chance in a Shanghai market, she had no choice but to kidnap him. The irresistible but indecisive Mr. Chu agreed at Pearl’s suggestion to marry his jailer, only to escape once more to his other concubine before returning to his bride in the basement, where he settled down finally to cook for the entire household.

Pearl’s remarkable power of conciliation was a function of an innate, abundant, emotionally exorbitant ability to enter imaginatively into other people’s lives. Her second daughter, Janice, now three years old and an intrepid talker, had grown into a tiny, startlingly pretty child with big brown eyes and a mass of tight golden curls. Her upbringing had its problems on both sides (inhibitions about eating dogged Janice throughout childhood), but although Lossing could never think of her as his own, to her adoptive mother she brought the healing energy and comfort Pearl herself had given to her own mother.
“I have never seen the creative power
of love more perfectly displayed than in the way Pearl loved this little girl into health and life and beauty,” said Margaret Thomson, who had known Janice from her emaciated and unprepossessing start. “I have never seen such absolute, self-giving devotion.” No one else could see the point of the two incompetent old peasant women taken on by Pearl as amahs because they had nowhere else to go. Lilliath Bates remembered their incredulous delight a couple of years later when a parcel arrived from Pearl, then in the United States, containing two luxurious wool robes, soft, warm, and feather light, the kind of thing neither had ever touched before, let alone dreamed of possessing:
“They hugged them
to their bosoms and wept.”

But by her own account Pearl was learning slowly and painfully to grow a defensive shell that cut her off from all but superficial contact with other people.
“Doubtless they felt
the surface bright and shallow, and were perhaps repelled by something hard and cold beneath which they could not reach,” she wrote, reviewing in retrospect the profound internal realignment that took place within that protective carapace. “Yet it was necessary to maintain the surface, for it was my own protection, too. It was not possible to share with anyone in those years my inner state.” Now that she had found a way to control, or at least contain the violence of her feelings about Carol, she set herself to explore her daughter’s mind and understand the extent of the stoppage that had shut down its mental and emotional development. For twelve months in Shanghai Pearl gave her attention unreservedly to Carol, playing with her, singing to her, and teaching her to sing, helping her to talk, showing her how to tell one color from another, coaxing her to read, perhaps even to write. Both Grace and Lilliath were astonished by Pearl’s gentleness and perseverance:
“Hours every day
went into the painstaking work of teaching and training with results so small that only Pearl could see them.” After everyone else had gone to bed they could hear Carol calling and clumping about upstairs and her mother getting up to calm her three or four times each night.

This was a period of enforced seclusion. It would be hard to overestimate the stigma attached to any form of abnormality or retardation in the 1920s and 1930s. Schools commonly refused to accept disabled children, neighbors were hostile, and other children responded with mockery and bullying.
“It’s not a crime
, but people… can behave as if it were,” Pearl wrote, discussing the shame and secrecy imposed on parents like herself. Families were expected to close ranks and shut away the kind of offspring still treated by the public as a village idiot. Shanghai’s foreign community was no different from any other group of Westerners. It was impossible for Pearl to take her daughter shopping or even to church on Sundays without reproving people turning to point and stare. Other mothers ostentatiously drew back rather than pass her in the park.
“You can hear them almost
whispering, ‘There’s that woman who has that strange child,’” she told Lilliath,
who was appalled both by the routine callousness of strangers and by Pearl’s determination to confront it.

Pearl said she learned far more than her daughter in the year they spent alone together. Carol made progress, but her lessons had to be abandoned because of the excessive strain they put on a child who understood nothing but her own increasingly desperate desire to please her mother.
“She was not really learning
anything,” Pearl wrote. “It seemed my heart broke all over again. When I could control myself I got up and put away the books forever. Of what use was it to push this mind beyond where it could function?” Pearl realized that it was her own pride and aspiration—her longing for independence, achievement, some kind of fulfillment for her daughter—that had to change. She must school herself to expect nothing and be glad of what she had. She said the experiment taught her humility and patience: “I come of a family impatient with stupidity and slowness, and I absorbed the family intolerance of minds less quick than our own…. It was my child who taught me to understand so clearly that all people are equal in their humanity, and all have the same human rights.”

B
OTH THE BUCKS
were well aware of China’s precarious position that winter. Relations with Moscow had been formally broken off after Nationalist forces ruthlessly suppressed a Communist uprising in December in Guangzhou. Fear of another raised tensions in Shanghai. Soldiers were posted at every entrance to the ancient, insanitary, overcrowded Chinese town. Troops drawn from the fifty thousand White Russian exiles in China stood guard on the bridge. On January 1, 1928, Chiang Kaishek left the city for Nanjing in an armored train. Foreigners could no longer count on special privileges or protection. The Nationalists were planning to advance north on Beijing, and Lossing predicted heavy fighting. Pearl warned Emma, who had taken refuge with her family in the United States, that it was too dangerous to return:
“Missionaries in all Nationalist
controlled areas must be prepared at any instant to run for their lives.” Widespread disillusionment added to the troubles of a government that had made
no serious attempt at social or educational reform.
“He was a soldier
,” Pearl wrote of Chiang Kaishek, “and he had the mind of a soldier, and neither by nature nor experience was he fitted to be a civilian ruler of a republic…. He knew nothing about modern democratic government.” She was dismayed to see how quickly idealistic revolutionaries, once in power, fell back on their country’s ancient despotic remedies of repression, corruption, and reckless taxation.

Shanghai gangsters grew extravagantly rich on protection rackets and prostitution. Chiang and his new young wife, the beautiful, bold, American-educated Soong Meiling, presided over a celebrity culture of bobbed hair, slit skirts, and all-night jazz parties, rampant consumerism and sexual excess, underpinned by violence and graft.
“I feel as if I were living
at the capital of Louis of France before the French revolution broke,” Pearl wrote that winter. “This cannot go on for ever. Personally I feel that unless something happens to change it we are in for a
real
revolution here in comparison to which all this so far will be a mere game of ball on a summer’s afternoon.” She expressed her sense of menace in a powerful image from
A House Divided,
where Wang Yuan, briefly caught up in the nightlife of Shanghai’s gilded youth, is haunted by shadows at the edges of his mind, dim figures waiting for the dawn when the party will be over, crouched
“like street dogs”
ready to infiltrate the houses and snatch the leavings from the tables of the rich: “Against his will he saw them, and… even in the midst of the night’s pleasure… he remembered with great dread the moment when he must go into the grey street and see the cringing figures and the wolfish faces of the poor.”