Pearl Buck in China (6 page)

When Grace Caroline Sydenstricker was born on May 12, Carie developed puerperal fever. Her milk dried up, and the house filled with the hungry baby’s cries. Pearl prayed in her father’s church and also, on Wang Amah’s advice, to Kuanyin in the local temple, a small dusty inconspicuous goddess who looked after women in childbirth. Bewildered by loss and by her own inability to comfort her mother, Pearl had for months added desperate private prayers for another baby, and now she helped their nurse tend the new sister and coax her to accept tinned milk.
“I was so happy
I did not know how close my mother was to death,” she wrote long afterwards. Carie recovered slowly. When she began to tell stories again there was a new edge of bitterness to her childhood memories of the mountains of West Virginia.
“Bred in this sparkling
and cool sunshine, in these pure and silvered mists of America, it was no wonder that sometimes she fainted in the thick sultriness of an August noon in a southern Chinese city, filled too full of human breath and of the odor of sweating human flesh…. The stench from the garbage-filled streets rose into the three little rooms…. The flies swarmed from the piles of half-rotting filth smoking under the burning sun. The hot air hung like a foul mist.”

Having tried and failed to provide consolation, Pearl now became her mother’s confidant. At some point after the child’s seventh birthday in June, Carie told her for the first time how Maude died. As an adult Pearl would retell this story three times over thirty years in biographical and autobiographical narratives, expanding and elaborating on a scenario conceived in the operatic terms of a Gothic novel to match the horror and pathos of the event. It happened in a typhoon on a boat carrying the Sydenstrickers with their first two children back from an unaccustomed holiday at a seaside resort in Japan.
Maude at eighteen months was tiny, frail, and malnourished, unable to digest the artificial milk that was all her mother had to give her that summer. Carie said she had been forced to wean the child early because she was already starting a third pregnancy (if so, she must have miscarried), and that they were returning too soon in great heat on account of Absalom’s work. The baby died on September 15, 1884, in a stranger’s arms because she refused to go to her father and her mother was too seasick to hold her. In the graphic account Carie gave Pearl she spent a whole night rushing from the heaving deck down to the cabin and back again, nauseous, soaked by saltwater, frantic with dread, rounding hysterically on her husband when he tried to calm her:
“If it had not been for this other one
coming too soon, I could have nursed her through the summer and saved her.” The story ended with Carie huddled on a pile of rope in the ship’s stern, cradling the body in her arms. “The sea was in great black waves, a leaden, livid light gleaming where a faint dawn shone upon them…. A wave of spray fell over them. How she hated this sea, the great heaving, insensate thing!… Over the roaring grey sea hung the grey sky. Where was God in all of this? No use praying…. She wrapped her arms about the child defiantly and crouched staring out to sea.” Forced back below decks by sickness and vertigo, she found her husband staring through the thick glass porthole: “The dark water covered it as though they were running under the sea.”

Images like these imprinted on a receptive and still unformed imagination bred a protectiveness that colored Pearl’s view of her mother ever afterward. Carie’s bouts of seasickness took the form of migraine, vomiting, and back pain. All three had afflicted her ever since her honeymoon voyage, when she found herself alone at close quarters for the first time with a husband she hardly knew in a ship’s cabin crossing the Pacific, which
“remained for Carie to the end of her life
an ocean of horror.” She conceived her first child on this voyage, and years later she spelled out the horror in question in terms a child could understand. After Maude’s death she had collapsed mentally and physically, developing the early symptoms of tuberculosis and being ordered by her doctor back to the United States for a cure. Her religious faith
wavered, and she contemplated leaving her husband, an unattainable fantasy that she abandoned, settling instead for the riskier but more realistic option of treating herself by fresh air and bed rest at the resort of Chefoo (Yantai) on China’s northern seacoast. The couple set out (if Carie was indeed pregnant, she must have lost the child on or soon after this journey) on a slow dirty Yangtse junk infested by rats that ran up and down the low beams over their bunk. Still distraught with grief, Carie woke one night to find a huge rat squirming in her long loose hair.
“She had to plunge her hand
in and seize it and throw it to the floor, and the sleek writhing body in her hand turned her sick, and she would have cut off her hair if she could for loathing of it.” Carie’s account of the crisis in her marriage is immediately followed in Pearl’s narrative by this sickening symbolic rat.

Pearl understood well enough even then. She and Grace both remembered conversations at night in their parents’ bedroom next to theirs, a low murmur of voices, their mother’s rising occasionally to vehement remonstrance, interrupted by weeping or the urgent angry creaking of her rocking chair. The same conversations recur in Pearl’s novels, most notably in the semi-autobiographical
The Time Is Noon
and
The Townsman
(where Mary repulses her husband for fear of yet another unwanted conception, and has nightmares of snakes emerging from the sod walls to invade her bed). For the Sydenstrickers there would be no more babies after Grace.

Seven months after the birth they moved up above the town to a newly vacated property belonging to the Presbyterian Mission, with broad verandas looking out over green grave lands to a pagoda on the far side of the hill. This was the place Pearl remembered fondly ever after as her childhood home, with a climbing rose spilling over the covered porch that ran around two sides of the house, and a garden already planted with old trees and now filled by her mother with flowers. In blacker moods she saw it as
“a small, decrepit brick cottage
, whose sagging floors were full of centipedes and scorpions.” She remembered her parents inspecting the bedrooms every evening, her father holding a lantern while her mother batted with an old slipper at the six- to eight-inch-long centipedes that fascinated the child:
“Their segments were covered
with hard black shell, each having a double pair of bright yellow legs, and on the tail a stinger which could give a dangerous wound. In spite of them I loved the tropical nights, the great luna moths, jade green and spotted with black and silver, clinging to the big gardenia bushes in the garden, and the bamboos dim in the mists from the river.” Pearl explored the hillside beyond the back gate, made friends with the farmers’ daughters who lived in the valley below, and kept her own rabbit with a cage of pet pheasants in the dark shady storage space under the veranda. She attended classes for Chinese girls at the mission school and played with the American boy next door, a redheaded missionary’s son named James Bear, who taught her to smoke (he later denied the charge). In the afternoons it was Pearl’s job to rock her sister to sleep in their mother’s rocking chair.

This was the most dangerous period of Absalom’s professional career.
“In the year 1900
the famous ‘Boxer’ uprising broke over the land like a tremendous tornado,” he wrote with an uncharacteristic flourish in his memoirs, “and all work was more or less suspended while it raged.” The Boxers were a militant sect recruited initially from young northern farmers who blamed foreigners—which meant missionaries in rural China—for their country’s misfortunes: social and political inanition, the inability to repel Western or Asiatic predators, and a cycle of flood and famine that devastated Shandong and Honan as the Yellow River burst its embankments and the Grand Canal silted up in the late 1890s. The movement spread rapidly with tacit and eventually open backing from the imperial throne, itself helpless to contain or control the opportunistic incursions of Japan, Russia, and the great European powers. Xenophobia simmered and flared in the countryside. Absalom never went out without a stick big enough to beat back the dogs loosed on him wherever he went in these years. People started cursing him in the street again. Once an innkeeper almost killed him with a cleaver. He was forced to close down chapels rented from landlords no longer prepared to do business with Christians. He spent much time cooped up at home, visiting local converts only in secret with a lantern after dark. All through
the spring and early summer of her eighth birthday Pearl slept with her clothes folded ready for flight on a chair beside the bed. Her mother kept a bag beside the door packed with spare shoes and a set of underwear for each of them, together with a basket of tinned milk for the baby.

After fierce arguments about whether to go or stay, Pearl’s parents compromised by hiring a junk to wait on the river at the far end of a concealed escape route, down through the bamboo at the back of the house, so that Carie could get away fast if she had to with the children and Wang Amah. For the first time the Sydenstrickers were shunned. Chinese visitors stopped calling on Pearl’s parents, and her friends no longer came to play or shared her desk at school. On one of his clandestine visits to the city to administer communion to the aged mother of a parishioner, Absalom was caught by soldiers who raided the house, roped him to a post, and forced him to watch them torture to death his Christian convert, Lin Meng, before carrying off Lin’s ten-year-old son. Lin’s mother died the same night. When he was eventually released the next day, Absalom came home exultant and bloody.
“Then he looked at us all strangely
, his ice-colored eyes shining, his voice solemn and triumphant: ‘Lin Meng has entered into the presence of our Lord, a martyr, to stand among that glorified host!’” Buoyed by the prospect of martyrdom himself, Absalom refused even to consider evacuation long after most of the white population had left Zhenjiang.

White refugees began trickling down from the north, small groups of ragged, hungry, frightened adults whose children had died from starvation or fever on the way. Carie told brave stories of Civil War battles in the United States and buried her few valuable possessions in the yard as her own mother had done forty years before. An imperial edict dated June 20, a week before Pearl’s eighth birthday, declared war and death to all foreigners. Chinese troops opened fire the same day on the foreign quarter in Beijing, laying siege to Western diplomats in their own legations. On July 9 forty-five Christians were killed in the governor’s compound at Shanxi. More atrocities followed. The American consul in Zhenjiang ordered the few remaining white people to
evacuate by gunboat at a prearranged signal, which came at noon on a day so hot that the whole family of Sydenstrickers was resting in a darkened room (
“even Father with his collar off
,” said Grace). Looking back half a century later Pearl described their departure as if it were a scene on a Chinese willow pattern plate:
“The air that summer’s day
was hot and still and from the verandas the landscape was beautiful, the valleys green as jade with their earthen farmhouses shaded beneath the willow trees. White geese walked the paths between the fields and children played on the threshing floors…. Beyond the dark city the shining river flowed toward the sea…. The actual leave-taking was entirely unreal.”

Absalom escorted his family to Shanghai, taking only what they could carry, and returned alone to Zhenjiang, the only white man in the region, dressed once again in formal Western clothes, looking weirdly conspicuous in the Chinese crowds on account of his crumpled white suit and pith helmet as much as his great height. When his two chapels were burned to the ground he preached on the streets to people who responded by stoning him. The single Chinese disciple who stayed with him told Pearl years later that he had expected her father over and over again to be killed. Absalom lived through the summer, by his own account in an ecstatic trance:
“I seemed without the body
. For I was conscious of the presence of God with me like a strong light shining, day and night. All human beings were far away from me.” He came as close as he could to claiming a martyr’s crown, regarding this near miss ever afterward as one of the high peaks of his life.

Pearl retained almost no memory of her own time in Shanghai, where the foreign community buzzed with rumors about Western troops preparing to move on Beijing and every steamer brought yet more refugees from the farthest parts of the empire.
“The white people in Shanghai
seemed to be clinging to the edge of China, waiting to be shoved off.” Pearl saw great gray foreign warships in the harbor, and listened to her mother’s stories of sanctuary in America. She remembered reaching up to pull the pigtail of a portly Chinaman ambling ahead of her and being terrified, not by his anger but by Carie’s abject attempt to placate him:
“I had never seen her afraid
before
in all my life.” In the semi-tropical heat of that ominous summer Pearl played with her little sister in a tub of cold water in their boardinghouse on Bubbling Well Road, where for the first time she saw water come out of a tap. Afterward she thought they were away for almost a year, but in fact it was a few months before their father arrived to fetch them home that autumn, looking so strange Grace didn’t recognize him. The Boxers had been defeated, their leaders executed, the countryside pacified, and humiliating public capitulation forced on the dowager empress, who surrendered to virtually all the demands of the victorious Western powers.

In October Absalom convened
the annual meeting of the newly formed North Kiangsu Presbyterian Mission, which assembled in Shanghai, and tabled a formal resolution urging him to go home at once on furlough to the United States. On July 8, 1901, he finally sailed with his family for San Francisco, taking the train on to West Virginia, the home his children had heard so much about and now saw with alien eyes as they traveled
“down through the states
, through wooded hills that looked strange and furred after the shorn Chinese hills, over rivers that looked like creeks after the flooding Yangtse and the Yellow River, through towns that looked unreal, they were so orderly and clean after the heaped mud and the confusion of Chinese villages.”