Pearl Buck in China (5 page)

A
BSALOM’S INORDINATELY AMBITIOUS
plans for extension had ended in total rout. There was no longer any place for him in Tsingkiangpu, where the team that functioned well under Graham had no wish to jeopardize its smooth running by taking on Sydenstricker.
“My father seemed oblivious
to the fact that there were those in the mission group who opposed his individualistic way of working,” his
daughter Grace put it crisply long afterward. In the end an opening was found for him as stand-in for a colleague on furlough in Zhenjiang, the city he had left a decade earlier to open up Tsingkiangpu and its hinterland. A newly declared treaty port, commanding China’s prime trade routes from the junction where the Grand Canal meets the Yangtse River, the rich, cosmopolitan, rapidly expanding city of Zhenjiang was the last place Absalom wanted to be.
“No large cities
have any considerable number of converts in them,” he had written when he moved out. He had spent his first seven years in China delivering impromptu sermons on street corners, distributing tracts, and setting up street chapels, and it left him no illusions about an urban population inured to being preached at and skeptical about the promised rewards. Absalom preferred to push forward into unspoiled countryside, where villagers believed his stories and listened open-mouthed, once they got over their initial stupefaction, to his colorful accounts of abominable sin and the pains of hellfire.

Zhenjiang, prototype for
“the great sprawling opulent city”
in
The Good Earth,
with food spilling out of its markets and merchandise crammed into its warehouses, proved Absalom’s point. After laboring for thirteen years the Southern Presbyterian Mission force of two men and their wives had made little impact. By January 1896, when the Sydenstrickers arrived, one couple had returned on furlough to the United States, and the other had been posted elsewhere, leaving behind ten Chinese converts, two street chapels, and a small boys’ school. Proposing to waste no more time on the city’s ungrateful inhabitants, Absalom carried on itinerating instead. The physical weakness and moral depression of the past year dropped away as he set about recreating the country networks successively smashed or seized from him at Hsuchien and Tsingkiangpu.

Zhenjiang would become from now on the family base. After much anxious correspondence with her siblings, Carie had decided that the only way for Edgar to grow up truly American was through further education beyond anything she could provide, and he was dispatched a few weeks after his fifteenth birthday to sail home alone to a country he had seen only once. At the age of four and a bit, Pearl now became
the oldest child at home. Clyde had grown into a handsome, comical, intelligent little boy, precocious like all Carie’s children, and old enough to join in his sister’s games. Their mother, who had always loved the way the hills swept up from the river in Zhenjiang, was happy again, and in his own strange absent way their father was too (
“they did not even know him well enough
to miss him”). The children took walks along the magnificent, newly built stone embankment, or Bund, on the riverfront, picnicked on the grassy slopes above the town, and were regularly invited to tea aboard the Jardine-Matheson hulk by the river master, a retired Scottish ship’s captain, and his hospitable wife. They celebrated Thanksgiving and the Fourth of July with firecrackers and a homemade flag, attended birthday parties for Queen Victoria at the British Club, and put up a tree hung with gingerbread men at Christmas, when they were allowed one toy each from the annual box of supplies shipped out by mail order from Montgomery Ward. They watched steamers discharging and taking on the cargoes stored in the Bund’s high shadowy
godowns that smelled
“of hemp and peanut oil and the acrid sweetness of crude red-brown sugar.” Once a young English customs officer slid with them down the long sloping chute that transferred loads to the backs of donkeys or men on the ground.

But the Sydenstrickers never properly belonged to the foreign community that occupied the British concession, a spacious orderly enclave with green lawns and shady trees protected by strong walls and iron gates, reinforced when necessary by British or American gunboats moored in the river. After a few months, when the occupants of their borrowed mission house arrived back from the United States, Pearl’s family moved downhill to noisier and more cramped quarters behind the port, with no sanitation and refuse piled in the streets. Absalom rented what seem to have been the same lodgings he and Carie had first occupied as a young couple ten years before:
three small rooms
above a liquor store in an alley opening onto the brothels and bars of Horse Street, the widest thoroughfare in Zhenjiang after the Bund itself, smelly, crowded, and dangerous, frequented by drug dealers, prostitutes, and drunken sailors who congregated under the Sydenstrickers’ windows at night.

The apartment’s main advantage was cheapness. Mission salaries, generally lower than those paid to doctors, lawyers, or teachers, did no more than cover basic necessities, even in Asian countries, where domestic help cost next to nothing. But the Sydenstrickers were poorer still because of the great passion of Absalom’s life, second only to conversion itself, which was his translation of the New Testament into the Chinese vernacular. He had been a member of the official committee set up in Shanghai in 1890 to produce a revised Mandarin version of the Bible, but he resigned or was pushed off at the committee’s first working meeting the following summer. A natural linguist himself, he never concealed his opinion of other translators’ work as misguided, inept, or inaccurate. The year before Pearl was born he decided to produce an unauthorized rival edition and publish it in installments himself, an enterprise that drained his wife’s household budget for the next three decades.
“It robbed her of the tiny margin
between bitter poverty and small comfort,” Pearl wrote, describing her mother’s progressively more desperate attempts to economize. It was why they left a mud house in Hsuchien to end up in Zhenjiang’s red-light district.

For Pearl the new surroundings were magical. Still too young to read fluently, she was already a voracious observer, intensely curious about the new world outside her window and the people in it. She asked questions so insatiably that her mother had to tell her not to ask any more for fifteen minutes (during which Pearl just as assiduously watched the clock). She was mesmerized by the sights Carie tried to keep from her: beggars (
“They snatched at us
with hands like the skinny claws of fowls”), lepers with chewed-up faces and stumps for arms or legs, street brawls, and the street vendors whose sweetmeats she was forbidden to touch. Just watching a man divide flat round cakes of barley-sugar brittle into pieces with a tiny chisel, or dip up strands of hot thick melted sugar to twist into sticks of candy, was a delight. In the evenings she listened with interest to the songs and shouts of American sailors disembarked from the merchant ships in the port and the high cries of Chinese girls floating over the crash of broken bottles. Whiskey and opium fumes drifted up through cracks
in the floorboards. Once an intruder got into Pearl’s bedroom, or she dreamed he did, in spite of Wang Amah’s laying out her bedding roll to sleep on the trapdoor in the passageway that provided the family’s only access to the street. Another time revelers woke the whole household by smashing up the shop downstairs. This was altogether too much for Carie, and after a marital showdown with packed bags and another terse ultimatum, Absalom was obliged to move his family to more sheltered accommodation inside the Baptist compound farther along Horse Street.

With her brother and Wang Amah Pearl explored streets lined with portable one-man cook shops and puppet shows, barbers, tailors, and letter writers at work in the gutter. They listened to professional storytellers and watched entertainers like the Pig Butcher in her novel,
Son
s (
“if he took a pair of chopsticks
he could pluck the flies out of the air as they flew, one by one he plucked them… and they roared with laughter to see such skill”). Even the markets were a form of street theater:
“the silk shops flying brilliant banners
of black and red and orange silk,” the vegetable market with glittering stalls of red radish, green cabbage, and white lotus root, mounds of live yellow crabs and silver fish in the fish market, rows of shiny brown ducks turning on spits over hot coals in front of the duck shops. The children stopped to look at men measuring out grain from baskets big enough for an adult to step into and suffocate: “white rice and brown, and dark yellow wheat and pale gold wheat, and yellow soybeans and red beans and green broadbeans and canary-colored millet and grey sesame.” They sucked illicit unhygienic candy from paper cornets and bought paper lanterns shaped like birds, butterflies, or a rabbit on wheels. Pearl even had a horse lantern made in two parts, the head held in front and the tail strapped on behind, so she could walk the streets in the dark as a horse.

In spring they climbed up the hill behind their house to fly homemade kites and watch teams of up to twelve men launching a gigantic paper pagoda, a dragon or a centipede thirty feet long. Sometimes there were soldiers tilting with spears and swords on the parade ground or firing off the antiquated cannon embedded in the mud
walls of the fort. When she wasn’t out walking in the afternoons with Wang Amah or doing morning lessons with her mother, Pearl spent her time at the window, looking down at the street or out over the vast expanse of the Yangtse River:

I learned to know its every mood
during the hours I spent at the window. On a crisp spring morning it looked as innocent as beauty itself, the sun caught in all its pointed yellow wavelets and shining upon brown and white sails and painted junks and bobbing sampans…. But there were other days when the river boiled like a muddy cauldron. Storms could beat upon it as fiercely as though it were a sea, and in the rough waters I have seen a ferry ease over upon its side and slide hundreds of people off as though they were insects, and turn still further until it floated bottom up. Those black bobbing heads were visible only for a moment and then the river sucked them down.

Pearl’s mother drew the curtains even in daytime to shut out sights like this. Carie hated the Yangtse because it symbolized the overwhelming, implacable, impersonal forces that governed human life in China and made her own attempts at resistance seem futile. Like other mission wives, she did what she could to treat the sores, boils, cankers, ulcerated and gangrenous limbs, the infections and contagious diseases contracted by people who drank the polluted waters of the river, and worked waist-deep in the flooded rice fields. She saw to it that the family’s three rooms on Horse Street were scrubbed with carbolic acid, all utensils dipped in boiling water at table, all fresh food either thoroughly cooked or disinfected with potassium permanganate before being touched. The children lived under perpetual surveillance to stop them putting anything, even their fingers, into their mouths. Carie’s vigilance never let up, but it was Absalom who, for all his apparent indifference, solved the problem of summers spent in temperatures of 100 degrees or more on the fetid malarial flatlands of the Yangtse Valley.

In 1897 he was one of the first five missionaries to buy a building plot from
the Kuling Mountain Company
, set up the year before by an enterprising young English missionary-cum-businessman to market the top of a mountain that rose sheer from the stifling hot plain three hundred miles upstream of Zhenjiang. Nearly five thousand feet above sea level, thickly wooded, and laid out like an Oriental equivalent of Hampstead Garden Suburb in London, with cool air, fresh streams, and luxuriant greenery, Kuling on Mount Lu (or Lushan) was the first purpose-built mountain resort in China. It was also, as Pearl said,
a lifesaving station
. Absalom put up a stone shack on plot number 310, where for the first time in their lives his children could run barefoot on the hillside, drink water straight from the stream, and eat the wild strawberries they picked in the woods without boiling them first. From now on summer holidays became the high point of their year.

Pearl was six years old when this period of relative normality came to an end.
Clyde contracted diphtheria
in January 1899, struggling convulsively for breath with rasping throat and livid gray face, and dying (as Arthur had done before him) too suddenly for his father to be fetched back from the field. Pearl, who caught the fever from her brother, said she understood what had happened when she heard a Chinese woman’s voice calling to the spirit of a dead child, and realized that the cries came from inside the house instead of outside on the street. Absalom came home to bury his son. Carie, who was five months pregnant, roused herself sufficiently to see Pearl past the worst danger, then relapsed into oblivion and torpor, exhausted in body and spirit, too weak even to nurse her remaining child back to health. Mother and daughter were looked after by a friend, who moved into the house once Absalom had gone back to work. By February Carie was well enough to help Pearl compose a letter to the
Christian Observer
in Louisville, Kentucky, describing the siblings whose invisible presence filled the child’s life and her mother’s:
“I have two little brothers
in heaven. Maudie went first, then Artie, then Edith, and on the tenth of last month, my little brave brother, Clyde, left us to go to our real home in heaven. Clyde said he was a Christian Soldier, and that heaven was his bestest home.” The sentiments and phraseology,
if not the actual wording of this melancholy epistle, must have come from Pearl’s mother, who was struggling herself at this point to retain her faith in God. Pearl remembered a passionate outburst as the coffin was carried out of the house in the rain, and someone urged Carie not to worry about the child’s body because his soul was in heaven.
“But his body is precious
,” she cried. “I gave it birth. I tended it and loved it…. They are taking his body away, and it is all I have.”