Pearl Buck in China (3 page)

She applied the same bold graphic technique to her early experiences in China. Caroline Sydenstricker had set sail for the Orient as an idealistic young bride with only the haziest notion about what a missionary career might entail. For her it turned out in practice to mean housekeeping and child rearing in cramped, inconvenient lodgings in the poorer quarters of the more or less hostile cities where her husband parked his growing family, while he himself pushed forward into unknown territory in search of fresh converts. He drove himself on by totting up the staggering totals of heathen sinners to be saved and the pitifully thin line of men like himself standing between them and damnation, an insoluble equation that appalled and maddened him to the end of his life. When the Sydenstrickers first landed in Shanghai to join the Southern Presbyterian Mission in the autumn of
1880, they brought its numbers in the field up to twelve. Apart from a handful of foreign compounds in or near the main trading ports, the interior of China seemed to be theirs for the taking. Seven years later Absalom Sydenstricker persuaded the Mission Board to let him launch a personal assault on the vast, densely populated area of North Kiangsu, setting up his campaign headquarters in the walled city of Tsingkiangpu, nearly three hundred miles north of Shanghai on the Grand Canal, where no missionary had ever settled before.
“He had to himself an area
as large as the state of Texas, full of souls who had never heard the Gospel,” his daughter wrote later. “He was intoxicated with the magnificence of his opportunity.” The local people received him with passive and often active resistance. A younger colleague eventually dispatched to join him boasted that for three years he made not a single convert, coming home from country trips with spit on his clothes and bruises all over his body from sticks and stones hurled as he passed. Almost overwhelmed by the numerical odds stacked against him, Absalom spent more and more time on the road.

His wife had long ago learned to manage without him.
One of the thrilling stories
she told her children later was about the night she faced down a mob of farmers with knives and cudgels, who blamed an unprecedented drought on malevolent local gods provoked beyond bearing by the presence of foreign intruders. This was the sweltering hot August of 1889, when rice seedlings withered in the parched fields around Tsingkiangpu. Alerted by men beneath her window plotting in whispers to kill her, Carie found herself alone with Wang Amah and the children (by this stage there were three: eight-year-old Edgar, four-year-old Edith, and the baby Arthur, age seven months), surrounded by an angry populace, a hundred miles from the nearest white outpost, with no one to turn to and no time to send a runner for her absent husband. Her response was to stage a tea party, sweeping the floor, baking cakes, and laying out her best cups and plates. When her uninvited guests arrived at dead of night they found the door flung wide on a lamplit American dream of home-sweet-home, with the three small children waked from sleep and playing peacefully at their mother’s knee. This preposterous story passed into family
legend, along with its triumphant outcome: the hard heart of the ringleader was so touched by the spectacle laid on for him that he repented of his murderous mission, accepted a cup of tea instead, and left with his men shortly afterward, only to find rain falling as if by magic later that very same night.

This and similar incidents became part of a folkloric family epic, whose episodes were conflated, transposed, and repeated so often that Pearl, and in due course her younger sister, Grace, knew them and their punch lines by heart. The same stories figure in accounts published later by both sisters, where their mother’s courage, resourcefulness, and determination stand out, burnished to a high gloss against a dull undertow of futility and waste, unfulfilled ambition, stifled hope and desire. There were other stories Carie knew but didn’t tell. At Tsingkiangpu she set up one of a succession of informal clinics for women, where she taught young girls to read and offered sympathy and practical advice to their mothers. Even before they were old enough to understand what was said, her children could hear the urgent, uneven monotone of Chinese women explaining their problems to Carie. Pearl said it was a
first-rate novelist’s training
.

As a public figure in the second half of her life, Pearl campaigned tirelessly for what were then unfashionable causes: women’s rights, civil rights, black rights, the rights of disabled children and the abandoned children of mixed-race parents. As a writer she would return again and again to her mother’s story, telling and retelling it from different angles in her various memoirs and in the biographies she wrote of each of her parents. Her analysis of Carie’s predicament in
The Exile
and elsewhere is searching, frank, and perceptive. But it is in the daughter’s fiction that the mother’s voice echoes most insistently between the lines, at times muted, plaintive, and resigned, at others angry and vengeful. In her sixties Pearl published a lurid little novel called
Voices in the House
about a prime fantasist, a brilliantly precocious and imaginative child who might have grown up to be a novelist herself but descends instead into gruesome madness and murder. All the other characters in the novel are lifeless and bland compared to this energetic self-projection at its core.
Voices
is the book in which
the author said
her “two selves”
finally merged, meaning not just her American side and her Chinese side, but also her outer and inner selves, reason and instinct, the two aspects of her own personality embodied in the cool, clever observer through whose eyes the story is told, and the implacable heroine who ends up possessed,
“people would once have said
by a devil, and yet there was no devil… except the reverse energy of dreams denied.”

Pearl Buck knew perfectly well that most of her later novels had few literary pretensions, just as she understood why critical opinion dismissed popular fiction as trash.
“But I cannot
, I keep going back to it. It is what most people read.” She wrote initially for herself and was genuinely astonished when her work spoke directly to the mass market, which she promptly adopted as her own, vigorously defending the magazine stories that kept her in close touch with her public. “One cannot dismiss lightly a magazine bought and read by three million people…. It is a serious thing for literature if three million read—not literature, but something that gives them greater satisfaction.”
The Good Earth,
published in 1931 and still in print, sold tens of millions of copies worldwide in its author’s lifetime and since.

Buck is virtually forgotten today. She has no place in feminist mythology, and her novels have been effectively eliminated from the American literary map. In the People’s Republic of China her fiction remains unique because it accurately depicts the hard lives of an illiterate rural population ignored by the Chinese writers who were Buck’s contemporaries and subsequently obliterated from the record by Communist Party doctrine.
“In China she is admired
but not read,” ran a recent article in the
New York Times,
“and in America she is read but not admired.” Both views could do with reappraisal.
The Good Earth
transformed the West’s understanding of China, partly because of the picture it painted, and partly because it reached a readership most other books never could. Buck won a Pulitzer Prize for it and went on to become the first of only two American women ever to receive the Nobel Prize for literature. Everyone read her in her day, from statesmen to office cleaners. Eleanor Roosevelt was her friend.
Henri Matisse said
she explained him to himself as no one else
ever had.
Jawaharlal Nehru read
her
Chinese Children Next Door
aloud to Mahatma Gandhi. My book aims to look again at the early years that shaped Buck as a writer and gave her the magic power—possessed by all truly phenomenal bestselling authors—to tap directly into currents of memory and dream secreted deep within the popular imagination.

S
HE WAS BORN
Pearl Comfort Sydenstricker on June 26, 1892, in her mother’s family home in America, where her parents had returned to recover from a catastrophe that very nearly wrecked their marriage. A year after Carie’s night with the farmers her youngest child, Arthur, who had never been strong, fell ill with a raging fever and died the day before his father could get back from the north. The family set out with the body in a sealed coffin on the long journey by canal and riverboat to bury him beside his sister Maude in Shanghai. There Carie and her surviving daughter immediately succumbed to a cholera epidemic. Edith died a fortnight after her brother, on September 5, 1890. Absalom, who had looked after the child while the doctor struggled to save Carie, retreated behind what had long since become an impenetrable barrier against emotions that threatened to swamp him.
“We had a full cup
of sorrow” was the most he would say then or later. The only flicker of personal feeling that surfaced in spite of himself in the many articles he published over a quarter of a century in the
Chinese Recorder
was an aside, in a piece written that autumn, on
“the heart-rending bereavements
that come to so many houses in spite of all medicine can do.” Carie lay in stony silence, barely alive herself, unable to absorb or accept what had happened.
“The deaths of these two children
, coming so close together, almost deranged our mother,” her daughter Grace wrote half a century later.

Husband and wife emerged from their ordeal each holding the other in some sense to blame. Every year Carie dreaded the tropical summer months, when disease flared in the towns, mosquitoes swarmed on ponds and streams, flies gathered in clouds over the great jars of human excrement used for fertilizer, and Absalom overruled
her pleas to take the children to the comparative cool of the coast or the hills.
“I shouldn’t have listened
to him,” she said of an earlier defeat, “but I always did.” Now that her worst fears had materialized, all she wanted was to go home. Warned by the doctor that Carie was on the verge of losing her mind, her husband reluctantly agreed to take her.
“He went about Europe
like a chained and quarrelsome lion,” Pearl wrote of her father on their long slow journey, punctuated by sightseeing stops on the westward route to America. Absalom remained as always incredulous at his wife’s inability to put the crying need of a whole nation of infidels before her own private setbacks.
“I never saw so hard a heart
, so unreasoning a mind as hers in those days,” he said, looking back gloomily twenty years later. “Nothing I could say would move her.”

It was an ignominious homecoming for both of them. Lively, pretty, and pleasure-loving, Carie had married the saintly younger brother of the minister in her hometown of Hillsboro, West Virginia, because he was preparing to go as a missionary to China, and she wanted to give herself to God. She said she had sworn a vow at her mother’s deathbed, and she stuck to it in spite of stiff opposition from her father. Now she was returning damaged in body and mind, with only the oldest of her four children to show for a decade away. Pearl’s birth eighteen months after they landed brought the consolation signaled by her middle name, Comfort, but it also marked yet another defeat for her mother, who was finally forced to accept that her marriage was a life sentence,
“irrevocable as death
,” and that she must go back to serve it in a country she already feared and was beginning to hate. This new child tied her to both.
“Had it taken the death
of the other three to break her to God’s will…?” Pearl wrote somberly in
The Exile
. “She was broken, then, and she would do that will.”

Absalom had extended his twelve months’ furlough when his wife became pregnant, and now he could not wait to get back. In the ten years he had spent in China he had made, by his own reckoning, ten converts. Millions more awaited his call.
“We are by no means overtaking
these millions with the Gospel,” he wrote grimly after another twenty years. “They are increasing on us.” He was haunted by the
specter of populations growing uncontrollably so that, as fast as young men migrated to the towns, “their place was taken by grinning boys.” He listed with relish the components of a nightmarish vision: “a great and increasing host against us… Heathenism with all its vices still living and active… The darkness, widespread and deep, sin in all its hideous forms, intense worldliness as well as hydra-headed idolatry.”

But the immediate problem confronting Absalom on his return to Tsingkiangpu in January 1893 was not so much heathen obstinacy as the intransigence of his fellow missionaries. The younger man who had arrived as an assistant twelve months before the Sydenstrickers left was not only living in their house but had stored their possessions in an outbuilding, where Absalom found his books mildewed and his bookcases eaten by termites. In the two years of his absence his system had been overhauled and Rev. James Graham, the colleague now starting to look more like a usurper, had pointed out its shortcomings to the mission meeting, which voted diplomatically to let Sydenstricker go. Interpreting this outcome as a triumphant endorsement of his vocation as a
“Gospel herald
,” Absalom repossessed the house, settled his family back into it, and promptly set off with two new recruits by mule cart to stake out a fresh claim of his own in virgin territory seventy-five miles to the west. His new base of Hsuchien was a collection of straw-roofed mud houses on the edge of the immense, crowded, and poverty-stricken flood plain of the Yellow River, where he aimed to establish a network of small outstations within reach of his own post at the center, while incidentally putting as much space as possible between himself and the mission authorities, always far too ready to query his decisions in favor of crackpot schemes of their own.

His departure set a pattern for Pearl’s childhood. Her father remained physically and emotionally distant, shut up in his study if not actually away prospecting for souls, never seeming particularly at home even when he was living in the same house.
“His children were merely accidents
which had befallen him,” she wrote, describing the sense of relief his absence always brought to the family he left behind.
“My father set off on a long trip
northward, heady with excitement
and hope,” wrote her sister of one of these periodic partings that left everyone feeling as if a weight had lifted. Throughout the time Pearl spent in Tsingkiangpu, Carie was the center of a world confined to the house and its walled compound, where she had planted a garden. Respectable Chinese women were never seen on the streets; mission wives could expect to be cursed and spat at if they tried to go out alone. Two other American couples trying to establish a mission station a few years later in Hsuchowfu, eighty miles northwest of Hsuchien, reported that for six months the two wives were
prisoners in their own houses
, neither of them daring to walk even the few hundred yards to call on the other. Pearl’s only view of anything beyond her high garden wall was the procession of feet she was short enough to see passing in the gap between the heavy wooden gate and the ground.