Pearl Buck in China (7 page)

CHAPTER
2
Mental Bifocals

W
HEN PEARL LANDED
at nine years old in America, she came in effect from a war zone. Pitched battles had been fought against Christians in northern China, foreign railroads ripped up, churches looted and destroyed, their adherents murdered or driven out. According to figures established later, no more than two hundred foreigners were in fact killed, none of them (thanks to a prescient political pact negotiated by two local governors) in the Yangtse Valley. But at the time white people lived in an atmosphere of terror heightened by stories, real and imaginary, of whole communities imprisoned and slaughtered by Boxers. Three thousand Chinese Christians lost their lives, many tortured to death like Lin Meng by the often ingenious and always excruciating standard procedures of Chinese punishment. Pearl had heard adults telling individual horror stories in whispers in Shanghai all through the previous summer. Children had been included in the massacres, and she herself had got used to people shouting routine death threats on the street. In the eight months between the suppression of the Boxers and the Sydenstrickers’ departure, she heard many more dreadful accounts of missionaries who survived persecution or failed to, and whose followers were caged, hanged, sliced to pieces, or left out to shrivel in the sun. Christian newspapers published rolls of the glorious dead. Her father, who had hoped to join their ranks himself, totted up the numbers with satisfaction:
“thousands of Christians suffered
martyrdoms, which gave us great encouragement, as showing that the work which had been accomplished was not merely on the surface, but a genuine fruit that would stand the severest test.”

Pearl, already expert in strategies for dealing with fears she could not face, suppressed many of these memories.
“Did I not see sights
which children should not see, and hear talk not fit for children’s ears?” she asked rhetorically half a century later. “If I did, I cannot remember.” The mood in her American world was upbeat. Missionaries returning to their posts all over China found themselves indemnified, amply compensated, privileged and protected more effectively than ever before by new government treaties that provided opportunities even Absalom conceded were
“immensely better
than they had been.” The defeated Chinese were acquiescent, even obsequious, and almost suspiciously eager to enlist in the ranks of a religion that had so decisively demonstrated superior supernatural strength. Pearl moved uneasily between the two worlds of her childhood now that she had seen for herself the sudden ferocity that could erupt from beneath a surface as sunny and calm as the Yangtse. She said that in all this unaccustomed civility only the dogs still snarled at her,
“for those savage
, starving village dogs alone still dared to show the hatred they had been taught to feel against the foreigners.”

It was high time to exchange the ambivalent actuality of China for the dreamworld of the West. When Pearl finally saw her mother’s home at Hillsboro, tucked under the Allegheny Mountains in Pocahontas County, West Virginia, she knew as in a dream exactly how it would be: a handsome, unpretentious, white-painted house with a pillared portico set in a wide level valley beneath gently sloping green hills, surrounded by a broad meadow and shaded by sugar maples, with flower beds under the windows and wild honeysuckle growing along the picket fence. She recognized everything from the layout of the rooms and the grapevine shading the porch to the family spilling out onto the front steps: her tall brother Edgar dressed as a student in a high collar, straw boater, and glasses; her aunts and cousins and the two gray-haired old gentlemen she knew to be her grandfather, Hermanus Stulting, and his oldest son, her mother’s favorite brother, Uncle Cornelius. She made friends at once with Cornelius’s youngest daughter, Cousin Grace Stulting, who was two years older. For the first time Pearl had an American contemporary to play dolls and swap confidences
with in the bedroom they shared at night. The two girls fed the turkeys together, built tree houses, picked grapes trained along the side of the big wooden barn and ate the fallen apples lying on the grass in the orchard. (
“I knew every tree
,” said Cousin Grace, “the Early Harvest and the Early Ripe, the hard apples and the Maiden’s Blush.”) Pearl’s mother slipped back into the routines of her girlhood, sitting gossiping and sewing with her sister-in-law on the front porch, baking bread, bottling preserves, churning butter, washing clothes in the shade of an elm tree and ironing them in the cool stone buttery under the house.

Everything was exactly as Carie had said it would be, and yet Pearl could see that her mother never felt entirely at home in the house she had inhabited for so long in her imagination. For one thing, her memories of living there were more fantasy than fact. Throughout her childhood her family had lived in rented accommodation in Hillsboro, scraping together the funds to buy enough land for a house of their own only a few years before Carie married and left the country, at which point her family began to break up. Within four years the two Stulting brothers and four of the five sisters had married and moved away, all except Cornelius, who for as long as anyone could remember had been their mother’s mainstay and a father in all but name to his younger brother and sisters. Their actual father, Hermanus, eighty-five years old when Pearl met him, was a small, fastidious, immaculately turned-out figure, aloof and choleric, a lover of music and painting, who had apparently played no more part in family life than her own father in China. Born and bred in Utrecht, nostalgic all his life for the thriving Dutch metropolis he had left as a married man with a wife and two children, he described himself in official documents variously as carpenter, silversmith, and clockmaker, but his attempts to start a business in the United States had failed, and he seems to have resigned the practical running of his domestic economy to his wife and son.
“He was a city man
, never anything else,” Grace Stulting said pityingly long afterwards. “He would chop kindling and do it like a woman.”

Pearl’s mother inherited her hot temper from Hermanus and also
her gift for telling tales. He warmed to his strange little semi-Chinese granddaughter, leading her away to the room full of clocks and watches where he lived separately from the rest of the family, and enthralling her—as Carie had done before him—with highly romanticized accounts of “the Old Country,” which in his case meant Holland. He filled Pearl’s receptive ears with stories of her great-grandfather, Mynheer Cornelis Johannis Stulting, a pious and prosperous merchant who had uprooted his five sons to set out at the head of a party of three hundred persecuted pilgrims seeking religious liberty in the promised land of America, where, after many disastrous setbacks along the way, the family finally settled in Virginia, clearing primeval forest, hauling tree stumps and facing down parties of Indians, “frightening and savage to see.” Very little of this was strictly true. The history of the Stultings’ arrival in New York in 1847 and their subsequent establishment in Hillsboro, carefully documented from local archives by Grace Stulting more than a century later, was decidedly more prosaic than the alternative version published by her cousin Pearl. But his children and grandchildren all agreed that Hermanus (who had first learned English in his thirties) was a first-rate storyteller: “all that he said was like a fairy-tale,” said Grace.

The heroine of the stories Carie told was always her mother, Johanna Stulting, who, like her daughter, had also abandoned her own familiar world to follow her husband to an unknown continent, where she made a life for her family from scratch, with scant support from Hermanus. Survival meant physical labor almost beyond the strength of a woman contending with regular pregnancies, whose only helper was a young son (Cornelius was not yet into his teens when the family reached West Virginia, and his only brother, Calvin, still unborn). Daily life consisted of digging, planting, hoeing, chopping, keeping a cow and chickens, making bread, butter, and cheese, spinning and weaving wool, cotton, and flax, producing enough to feed and clothe seven children. The family boasted that they eventually emerged from the Civil War self-sufficient in everything except tea, coffee, and chocolate. Carie, who idolized her mother, was eighteen when she nursed her through the final stages of the tuberculosis that
killed her, worn out and used up at the age of sixty. Nearly all of her children became teachers. Having had to make do without education during the war, Carie herself was sent away by Cornelius to catch up in two years at boarding school after their mother’s death. She had seen enough of life at home to know that she needed more. If social and religious convention required her to sacrifice herself for others, she planned to do it in a completely different way from her mother. Foreign missions offered the nearest means of self-immolation, and at the same time the only available escape route from unending domestic drudgery together with the narrow horizons that closed down round it.

The Stultings were admirably suited to their time and place. They were stubborn, resilient, puritanical people shaped by the Calvinist teachings of their Presbyterian church, which still saw China and its inhabitants in much the same terms as Carie had done when she sailed away with her young husband for God’s sake in search of a cloudy vision,
“a harvest of dark, white-clad heathen
being baptized, following them with adoring eyes… two brave young missionaries… two white and cloud like shapes, blessing the dark, bowed multitudes bending in devotion before them.” The gap between reality and imagination, which would be Pearl’s chosen territory as a writer, opened up for her wider than ever before in the Stulting household. Her new family were the first Americans she had ever known at close quarters, and they made her feel foreign in the country she had been taught to call home. None of them had any inkling of the suppressed anxieties she lived with, or how exposed she felt in a house and garden without the protection of high compound walls. The assembled household was baffled and faintly embarrassed by her hysterical tears when her grandfather gravely announced the assassination of President McKinley in September 1901. Only Carie understood the shock and terror—
“must we have the revolution
here, too?”—released in her daughter by news of regime change.

The Stultings had never owned black slaves and they could not afford to pay servants, but their allegiance lay with the southern states. They had bitterly resented finding themselves just inside the
border of Federal West Virginia when war split the state in two (Carie said that as a small child she believed the grown-ups who told her that
Yankees had horns
like devils). Although in theory they opposed slavery, they belonged by instinct and choice to a white society that treated black people as subhuman. For all their idealism, the same prejudice accompanied Pearl’s altruistic parents when they left for China. After more than twenty years in the field neither Carie nor Absalom could ever quite see the Chinese in the way their daughter did, as people like any others.

Layers of mistrust and mutual incomprehension blocked any traffic between Pearl’s two worlds. Dearly as she had loved her cousin as a child, Grace Stulting in later life disapproved strongly of Pearl’s upbringing in a household of Chinese servants who expertly subverted all Carie’s efforts to discipline her children, and ensure that they grew up in the hardworking, egalitarian, self-reliant American way. The Stultings were dismayed to find that Pearl had no idea how to sew, cook, clean, or wash up.
“That amah, she raised her
,” Grace said sniff-ily. At the end of the summer holidays the Sydenstrickers moved to Lexington, Virginia, where Edgar was due to start as a freshman at his father’s old college of Washington and Lee, and Pearl entered school in third grade. This was one of the periods she preferred to forget, for she could no more blend in with her southern classmates than she had gotten on in Zhenjiang with the sheltered and segregated daughters of foreign businessmen and diplomats, growing up behind the barred gates of the British concession. The ladylike white girls she met at Zhenjiang’s British Club seemed condescending and dull to Pearl, and for their part they could make nothing of a child burned brown by the sun, accustomed to wearing loose Chinese trousers at home, and speaking an idiomatic street slang incomprehensible even to her parents (for whom Chinese was always a second language, as English was for Hermanus). Pearl was fluent enough to trade uninhibited insults with local boys who swore at her on the streets of her hometown. “She didn’t feel like she was an American,” said Cousin Grace. “It handicapped her terribly. Never felt like she belonged here… felt like she was odd.”

The practical, hardheaded Stultings took a dim view from the start of the austere, unwordly, incorrigibly intellectual Absalom Sydenstricker, whose unremitting righteousness made them uncomfortable. The marriage had been categorically forbidden by Carie’s father. Pearl’s comical account of her parents’ strangely impersonal courtship, in
The Exile,
started with her father finding his path barred by Hermanus, hopping mad and armed with a stick (“‘
Sir, I know
your intentions!… You shall not have my daughter!’ The young missionary… gazed down on the little man and answered mildly, ‘Yes, I think I shall, sir,’ and proceeded on his way”). By 1901 Pearl’s Sydenstricker grandparents were dead, the family scattered, and their home just outside Lewisburg, forty miles away in Greenbrier County, had been sold, but the child picked up stories then and later about the early life her father said as little as possible about.
He was the youngest but one
of nine children brought up on a large rough hillside farm in servitude to their father, Andrew Sydenstricker, a God-fearing giant of a man who read the Bible right through aloud to his family every year and drove his seven sons off the property one by one, cursing their ingratitude, as each became legally free to go at the age of twenty-one. All of them hated the land that remained their father’s abiding passion. All became ministers save one, who was a church elder.