Pearl Buck in China (31 page)

Pearl reached a low point that winter, missing Carol more than ever after a year away, with another eighteen months to go before the time came to return to the United States on furlough. She ended
The Mother
with the death of the blind daughter from neglect and abuse at the hands of strangers in a far distant valley.
“She was always thinking
about Carol,” said Lossing. In the first week of January 1931 he took her with him on a boat trip south down the coast to investigate the possibility of extending survey work into the country around Guangzhou, where heavy fighting made their progress difficult. Grace and her family, newly back from the United States, returned with considerable reluctance to their post in the Communist stronghold of Hunan. The Bucks got back to Nanjing to find a cable from Pearl’s publisher announcing her Book-of-the-Month Club selection (she wrote back innocently that she had never heard of it:
“Do they know
that I am not a member of their club?”). Janice caught whooping cough, Lossing had several rotten teeth extracted, and Pearl told Emma she was starting a new novel to pass the time.
The Good Earth
was published in New York on March 2. Pearl said nobody at home knew of its existence,
“or knowing had forgotten
it.” When she showed her first copy to her father, he complimented her politely on the jacket but handed the book back after a few days on the grounds that he did not feel up to reading it. Bulletins from the publisher, packages of reviews, and the first fan mail began reaching Nanjing toward the end of the month. Pearl wrote to Emma White that under different circumstances she might have felt excited—
“I think I would have been
wildly thrilled”—but success mostly mattered to her now because the money it brought made Carol’s future safe.

The book’s impact was phenomenal. The first prepublication readers responded, like Margaret Thomson, with admiration bordering on awe. Pearl’s agent, David Lloyd, had felt that way before she even wrote it, recognizing star quality in the very first parcel delivered to him from China.
“That first novel
by this girl who could really write,” said his daughter, remembering the buzz in the office when she was still at school. “That was pretty thrilling.” For Richard Walsh, whose flair, judgment, and publisher’s nose for the right book at the
right time were exactly what Pearl needed at this point, it was the chance of a lifetime.
“He could feel in his hands
already the new big book,” as Pearl put it in a mildly sardonic portrait of Walsh in
The Long Love.
“He was in the grip of his own private frenzy of creation.” Dorothy Canfield Fisher, a literary heavyweight and Book-of-the-Month Club judge, had started by dismissing her unpromising proof copy from a virtually unknown author—
“it seemed to be about agriculture
in China”—only to sit up reading the book all night, creeping out at dawn the next morning to alert her fellow judges, who unanimously endorsed her choice. Reviewers did the same, and the American public followed suit. The book topped the best-seller charts for two years running, was translated into virtually every language, and has sold steadily ever since. It won its author a Pulitzer Prize in 1932 and the American Academy of Arts’ prestigious Howells Medal three years later (the previous winner was Willa Cather). In 1938 Pearl Buck became the first American woman to win the Nobel Prize for literature (the second was Toni Morrison in 1993).

One of the remarkable things about
The Good Earth
is its prosaic acceptance of a brutal world almost unimaginably strange to its Western readership, and the parallel slow growth of trust between writer and reader. The facts of life it depicts, the alien bodily habits and thought patterns, the unfamiliar farming practices and family relations are portrayed with such authority that they seem perfectly natural. Readers identified with these patient, stoical, illiterate people, especially with Wang Lung’s mute plain wife, whose character is rooted in gravity and silence:
“Words were to her
things to be caught one by one and released with difficulty.” Olan, the mother who could strangle one girl child at birth and offer to sell another into slavery, became for American readers the moral center of the book and the prime source of its emotional warmth.

It was not simply that the book reversed expectations, although initially these could hardly have been lower. The West in general, and America in particular, operated an unspoken cultural veto against China in these years.
“Nobody thought anything
by or about China was interesting for the U.S.,” said Helen Foster Snow, who with her
husband, Edgar, did her best to reverse that implicit prohibition in the 1930s. “You couldn’t sell it. Nothing sold but
The Good Earth,
which was the mystery of all time.” For a period of just under a century, what Kang Liao calls
the Age of Contemp
t, the Chinese had been systematically restricted, excluded, and penalized by U.S. legislation designed to protect the native workforce from migrant labor flooding into California. The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 was the first openly racist law passed by the U.S. government. The popular notion of a Chinaman was either a figure of fun or a monster of depravity.
“He is politeness himself,”
wrote a shrewd and witty young Chinese commentator, Lin Yutang, describing the current literary stereotype in a Shanghai paper in the year
The Good Earth
was published. “The yellowness of his face exactly matches the colour of his teeth. He wears long gowns and long finger-nails. Opium is his favourite smoke, and Fan Tan his favourite game. He never opens his mouth except to grin, he never moves but he shuffles his feet. His name is either Dr. Wu or Fu Man Chu.”

Pearl’s book eroded the foundations of that wall of ignorance and prejudice. In the early years of the dust bowl and the Great Depression Americans recognized all too well the cycle of prosperity and destitution that overtakes Wang Lung, however hard he struggles by grinding overwork and extreme frugality to keep his family together on a roller coaster of drought, flood, robbers, famine, flight, bandits, and war. Pearl Buck did for the working people of twentieth-century China something of what Dickens had done for London’s nineteenth-century poor. Readers saw their own worst fears reflected, magnified, and distorted in her pages in nightmare images of torment and humiliation when Wang is finally forced to find work as a rickshaw puller or join a night shift of men dragging cartloads of heavy goods to the city docks:

All night through the
dark streets he strained against the ropes, his body naked and streaming with sweating, and his bare feet slipping on the cobbles…. Each stone he had come to know now as a separate enemy, and he knew each rut by
which he might evade a stone and so use an ounce less of his life. There were times in the black nights, especially when it rained, and the streets were wet… that the whole hatred of his heart went out against these stones under his feet, these stones that seemed to cling and to hang to the wheels of his inhuman load.

A
CCOUNTS OF WANG’S
starving household—“They scarcely rose at all now, any of them. There was no need, and fitful sleep took the place, for a while at least, of the food they had not. The cobs of the corn they had dried and eaten and they stripped the bark from the trees”—and his deserted village—“stillness everywhere, the stillness of inactivity and of people, each in his own house, waiting to die”—run parallel to contemporary reports published in the
New York Herald Tribune
by Edgar Snow. As a young journalist on one of his first assignments in China, he traveled through the northwestern famine region,
“a weird landscape
swept of every growing thing as if by volcanic ash,” where up to half the population in the towns he visited had died within the previous twelve months: “Even the trees had been stripped of their bark and were dying… Most of the mud-brick houses were collapsing…. Here and there last-ditchers still sat or lay on their doorsteps, scarcely conscious.”

Snow’s dispatches were ignored and largely unread at the time. He and Pearl Buck would become the two most influential China watchers of their day in the United States, writers of very different character and background whose work probably did more than anything else to alter public perceptions of the country and its people. Snow went on to be singled out by Mao Zedong for special treatment as an apologist and in some sense spokesman for the Communist cause. Pearl had no ideological commitment, but her early novels share the energy and directness that make the literary agenda of her avant-garde Chinese contemporaries so different from the goals of modernism established in the West by Eliot, Joyce, and Kafka.
“To educate the masses
was a matter of life and death for China, especially in the first half of
this century,” wrote Professor Liao in 1997, “and so the books were meant to be understood by as many people as possible, but in the U.S. what artists hated most was to lower the level of their works… to meet the needs of capitalist commercialisation.”

The Good Earth
enters into the world documented from the outside in the 1930s by Western travelers, observers, and journalists like Snow. Pearl Buck borrowed techniques from the Chinese novel in episodic sagas covering vast territories and spanning several generations, preoccupied less with individual characterization than with the expressive power of a broad filmic vision and harsh Dickensian imagery, to penetrate the deep underlife of Chinese people, and to draw Western readers in after her. With
The Good Earth
she did for her international readership what she had once done in person for Marian Craighill in Nanxuzhou and Lilliath Bates in Nanjing.
“It’s a change in us really
, in our attitude towards people,” as Lilliath put it in retrospect, describing the effect on her of seeing China through Pearl’s eyes. She spoke for millions of readers in the years when Pearl Buck’s views captured the popular imagination.
“She was the first
to humanize the Chinese and make them comprehensible,” said Helen Foster Snow.
The Good Earth
opened a door between the American and Chinese worlds that had been firmly closed, and for the next four decades Pearl did all she could to stop it shutting again.

CHAPTER
7
The Stink of Condescension

I
N
N
ANJING IN
the spring of 1931 Pearl’s triumph still seemed to her as unreal as a dream. It lifted the barrier that held her back—
“Her stories came from her
now in a great rush, like the waters of the mighty Yangtze in a flood”—but whatever satisfaction she felt was offset by the horror of an actual flood worse than any known in China for almost a hundred years. Water had been rising for months, seeping out of the land, overflowing the canals, bursting dikes, inundating villages, and melting their earthen houses. By the end of March the wells had been submerged in the upper reaches of the Yangtse, which meant that people were forced to drink floodwaters polluted by refuse, decomposing bodies, and human and animal excrement. Chiang Kaishek, said to have been a river god in a previous incarnation, was blamed for twenty-four inches of torrential rain that fell in two weeks in July, turning a relatively familiar calamity into illimitable, almost unprecedented disaster. There were rumors of cannibalism, and of parents in the country around Nanjing drowning children they could no longer feed. The yellow waters of the river climbed the stone embankment of the port seven miles from the city center to pour across the fields and
“come creeping and crawling
through the streets.” Pearl rode out along the dike wall on horseback and climbed on foot to the top of Purple Mountain, itself now transformed into an island:
“lapping at its base
, fifty feet deep over farmhouses and fields, were yellow Yangtze waves.”

Lossing organized
a comprehensive survey
of the devastated area, sending out his force of trained investigators to recruit local helpers with backing from the Nationalist government. Madame Chiang Kaishek’s
brother, the finance minister T. V. Soong, personally authorized the project’s funding. Charles Lindbergh, the world-famous American pilot who had crossed the Atlantic in a monoplane, arrived to reconnoiter the devastation from the air after an initial trip in Lossing’s sampan. Pearl raised awareness in the United States with magazine stories describing the starving refugees who poured into Nanjing and the desperation of dying people huddled among piles of wreckage protruding from the surrounding waters that stretched in every direction as far as the eye could see. One of her first translators,
Hu Zhongchi
, cited in his preface to
The Good Earth
a letter from the president of the American Red Cross explaining how much the relief effort owed to the generosity of Americans moved by the sufferings of the Wang family. Twenty-five million people were affected in the flood plains of the Yangtse and Huai Rivers, according to Lossing’s final estimate; others put the number at more than twice as many, with half a million drowned.

On August 31 Absalom Sydenstricker died in his eightieth year at Kuling and was buried by his daughter Grace with his Greek New Testament in his hand. Pearl missed the funeral because it was impossible to cross the inland sea, now stretching the whole length of the Yangtse between Nanjing and Kuling. The two sisters paid dignified tribute to their father in obituaries for the
Chinese Recorder
and the
Christian Observer
respectively. “
I miss him
dreadfully!” Pearl told Grace.
“During the past two years
his tall ascetic frame had grown more and more frail, his nature more completely the saint,” she wrote long afterward in her memoirs, having by that time analyzed with unsparing honesty in
Fighting Angel
the price paid for his saintliness by other people. A stone tablet erected in his honor at the town’s south gate after he left Zhenjiang praised his good works, his faithful service over thirty years, and his perseverance in the face of slander and contempt. The text was composed by Ma Pangbo: “
We carve this tablet
in his honor to show our love just as people long ago expressed their love of Shaobo by cherishing the tree of Gantang” (Shaobo in ancient Chinese legend was a wise and just minister of the Western Zhou dynasty, who liked to sit beneath the tree of Gantang).