Pearl Buck in China (11 page)

At times like this Pearl forgot the forebodings of Teacher Kung, whose warning had been reinforced by the father of one of her friends: “
Mr. Lu said
there would be wars and more wars.” But sometimes she felt she was the only member of her family to realize that the way they lived was precarious and finite. “
Peace covered China
like a sheet of thin ice beneath which a river boiled.” The empress died in her seventy-fourth year in 1908, soon after Britain’s Queen Victoria, another great empress whom Tz’u Hsi had thought of in her last years as a sister. Mr. Kung died too, carried off in a single day by cholera in the autumn of 1905. Pearl observed the funeral rites, wearing a white mourning band and bowing to the coffin with her father (both of them on strict orders from her mother not to join in the feast afterward for fear of contagion). It was a salute to her teacher, and also to the rich, dense, complex past he had opened up for her. Teacher Kung had lost all he possessed, and his life had been ruined in the havoc that marked China’s entry into the twentieth century. If he understood and accepted that traditional scholars like himself had no part to play in their country’s
immediate future, perhaps it gave him some faint satisfaction to have passed on the humane and rational core of Confucius’s teaching, even if only to one small, serious American girl. “
Not until justice
has been done,” he said gravely to Pearl, explaining why his country was unlikely to be safe for Westerners for many years to come. She held on to his saying as her guiding rule for the rest of her life.

T
OO OLD TO
run freely in the valley any more, indeed no longer allowed out at all without Wang Amah as escort, Pearl at thirteen was beginning to part ways with her Chinese contemporaries, whose mothers were preparing them for marriage. Her own mother, belatedly worried by Pearl’s intimacy with the local peasants and anxious to salvage what remained of her social credentials, encouraged her to make overtures to the few girls they knew in the expatriate white community, daughters of traders and business people temporarily posted abroad, all of them preoccupied with the life they had left and longing to get back to the West. None of these girls spoke more than kitchen Chinese or would have dreamed of having Chinese friends. Pearl made the most of a sweet-natured but thoroughly conventional English Agnes and three bright, smart, self-assured
Longden sisters
from the United States. The Longdens were the first American teenagers she had ever met, and they fascinated her, especially the oldest, Mary, who became for a while Pearl’s dearest friend. But in the Longdens’ terms she was young for her age, and could never keep up with their jokes or their expertise in the latest slang, clothes, and hairstyles based on fashion magazines from Shanghai. Her knowledge of their world came from nineteenth-century English novels and from the schooling she got from her mother in morning lessons with Grace. The Sydenstricker sisters worked through a correspondence course supplied by the Calvert School in Baltimore—history, geography, scripture, composition, and mathematics—with extra tuition in painting, music, and calisthenics (compulsory gym sessions on the veranda, led by Carie and detested by Pearl).

Carie compensated for the loss of Mr. Kung by enrolling her
daughter in the Methodist school for Chinese girls, part of a new mission settlement a little farther around the hill from the Sydenstrickers’ house. The gray-haired American principal, Miss Robinson, seemed stiff and intimidating to Pearl, but she agreed to take the child three mornings a week as both pupil and part-time teacher. This was a highly unsatisfactory compromise. Chinese education was generally felt by Westerners to be a catastrophe (
“mental infanticide
on an enormous scale,” wrote the venerable Dr. Martin), consisting of learning by rote classical texts wholly incompatible with modern scientific principles, and in any case reserved exclusively for boys. Mission schools admitted the first generation of girl students in China and equipped them to face the twentieth century by giving them the rudiments of a Western education. There was no other white girl in Pearl’s school, and although she wore her American dresses to teach English to a class of eight pupils barely younger than herself, she kept her Chinese name, reverting to her own level in breaks between lessons, when she gossiped and giggled with contemporaries on the playground. Her best friends picked English names—Dottie Wei, Su-i Wang—and dreamed of becoming teachers or doctors themselves.

The experiment can’t have lasted much more than a year because, in the winter of 1906–7, it became too dangerous for either Pearl or her sister to leave their compound. Floods followed by famine on an almost unprecedented scale laid waste the north of the country, and for months on end vast, sluggish, menacing, unstoppable streams of refugees flowed into and around Zhenjiang. The exodus started in Anhui and North Kiangsu, provinces already scoured and picked clean when icy winds from the Gobi Desert drove the inhabitants south. Entire populations on the move devoured everything in their path, stripping bark from the trees and grass from the hills. No birds, animals, or children survived in their wake. They brought sickness, infection, contagion, violence, and rumors of cannibalism, which spread panic and were met with reciprocal savagery. The Manchu government’s response was ineffectual and slow. Ad hoc Western efforts to give aid were coordinated on a piecemeal basis. The Zhenjiang Mission force treated dying and destitute patients without adequate
drugs or medical facilities. Pearl’s father spent the winter distributing American supplies in the north for the Famine Relief Committee, hastily formed in Zhenjiang as it became clear that many millions of people would die of hunger and disease.

Her mother worked in the city, visiting pitifully inadequate shelters and soup kitchens, returning appalled, unable to eat or sleep, almost unhinged at times from exhaustion, impotence, and grief. She had to work after dark, dressed in Chinese clothes to escape being mobbed, but somehow people found out her name and traced her back to where she lived. Sinister, barely human bundles of bone and rag shuffled up the hill to beat at the Sydenstrickers’ gate and lie in
“dreadful shivering hordes
,” heaped against the compound wall. All night they wailed Carie’s name: “The sound… drove her nearly mad… She no longer tried to shield her children; indeed, she could not.” They too lay awake listening to groans and whimpers and soldiers dragging bodies away every morning. Pearl spent Christmas day with her mother cooking “great vats of rice and distributing it bowl by bowl through a crack in the gate until none was left.” She recognized ever afterward the signs and stages of starvation in children and adults, gaunt pregnant women gnawed from within by their unborn babies, infants with sunken eyes and shriveled blue gums
“like a toothless
old woman’s lips,” swollen and distorted bellies, protruding bones with the skin glued to them turning an unmistakable dark purplish color,
“the hue of a liver
that has been dried for a day or two” which faded only when people started eating again.

At the time Pearl tried hard to blank out the images lodged at the back of her mind so tenaciously that, as her sister said,
“not even her avid reading
could make her entirely forget.” Amnesia was her sole defense against nightmares impossible to tame or withstand. “She could not think of suffering and so again she went to the people of books. Now in an even more voracious way she began to read everything she could get hold of.” Pearl went back to school that spring as life stirred again in the countryside. Women and children could be seen emerging like insects from hibernation, as Pearl described them long afterward in
The Good Earth,
swarming over the grave lands
in search of the first green leaves of dandelion and shepherd’s purse,
“with bits of tin
and sharp stones or worn knives, and with baskets made of twisted bamboo twigs or split reeds.” Northerners who had survived the winter straggled back to their fields as the time for rice planting approached. A sense of release and recuperation is palpable in Grace’s recollection of the five girls—herself and Pearl with Mary, Ruth, and Florence Longden—lounging companionably in late afternoon sun on the Sydenstrickers’ porch to listen to
“the normal sounds
of summer… the cheerful talking of the farmers, the call of evening vendors, the sleepy cooing of wild doves, the croaking of frogs.”

Pearl emerged from the crisis a disturbed and withdrawn adolescent, venting her own agitation in increasingly sharp conflict with her mother. Stormy, strong-willed and decisive, the two were so alike, according to Grace, that it was hard for either to back down from head-on collision. Carie was anxious and apprehensive, as she had been about Edgar when he too showed signs of rebellion at the same age. Pearl felt lonelier than ever before as the end of the school year approached and the gap between her and her friends began to reopen. Dottie Wei, Su-i Wang, and all the girls Pearl liked best left, one after another, weeping or stony-faced, to abandon their fantasies about independent careers and embark with men they had never seen on marriages arranged by their parents. Mary Longden was sent back to school in the United States, leaving Pearl cut off once again from contemporaries in the foreign community, who were themselves being groomed by their families as they approached marriageable age.

She was charmed and disconcerted that summer by a missionary couple newly arrived from America,
Charles Hancock
and his young wife, who lodged with her parents and took Chinese lessons from her father. She said it was the Hancocks, newly married and still clearly in love, who provided her first inkling that there could be more to marriage than working out a practical compromise between the wife’s duty and her husband’s needs. Carie had struggled to contain her own mutinous feelings, but her efforts had not deceived even Grace, by far the more submissive of her two daughters. Both girls understood the tension released in the emphatic creaking of the rocking chair
in their mother’s room and the eloquent speeches rehearsed under her breath. “
Mother is angry
,” Grace wrote of one of these occasions. “Not angry at anyone, for Father is away—but just angry at Things.” They both knew and feared the bright red stripes on their father’s white forehead, when he emerged from the study after long solitary prayer sessions with his head resting on a chair back pressed against two bony fingers. “Only when he goes and shuts himself in the study is there any peace,” wrote Grace.

Like his father, Absalom looked for justification to Saint Paul, announcing flatly and often
“that as Christ was head
of the church, so man was head of the woman.” Quicker, bolder, and more intellectually agile than he was, Carie unequivocally repudiated the Pauline doctrine that tolerated females as a necessary evil, denied them souls or minds of their own, and prohibited them from participating in or even speaking at meetings of the mission to which they belonged. She brought up her daughters to think in ways that flummoxed her husband (
“It did not occur to him
to look for or desire intellectual companionship or spiritual understanding in a woman”). In these years the prime cause of friction between them was further education for Pearl. She turned fifteen in the summer of 1907, and her mother had no intention of repeating the mistakes that had been made with Edgar. Sent away too soon with too little backup or preparation, he had shocked both his parents by squandering his chance to polish a brilliant mind in favor of drink and girls. Marriage had made Carie a proto-feminist—
“and I must say
with cause,” wrote Pearl—and nothing was going to stop her sending this next child to college. The problem was how to pay for it, since Absalom had a rooted objection to spending money on his wife or daughters. In spite of his own long absences from home and the fact that Carie earned nearly half their joint salary (eight hundred dollars for a married missionary, five hundred dollars for a single man), he banked the money and refused her a checkbook of her own.
“He was penurious
for God’s sake,” wrote Pearl, “that everything might go into that cause to which he had dedicated his life—and to which also he ruthlessly and unconsciously dedicated all those lives for which he was responsible.”

These were the years when he published his Chinese New Testament in defiance of the Church, putting it out gospel by gospel and funding publication with the housekeeping money. His daughters had grown up picturing their father’s translation as a bottomless well that swallowed the toys, books, and dresses they never had. As they got older Pearl was painfully conscious of the
“incredible pinchings
and scrapings and even begging” that marked the Sydenstrickers out from other missionaries at a time when, as Grace said,
“Absalom’s New Testament
stood like a boulder between her parents.” Both sisters dreaded the scenes Absalom made on journeys, when he refused to tip coolies or porters in spite of their furious complaints and Carie’s pleading. Pearl detested her beautiful lace-trimmed underwear, handmade by charitable ladies as gifts for the needy, and she traveled reluctantly by coolie class now that her family could no longer afford the fares to go
“upstairs with the other white people”
on the Yangtse riverboats: “We put on Chinese clothes and traveled below decks with the Chinese.” They slept at night crammed into small dirty berths doused with carbolic lotion by Carie and spent their days in the crowded salon, dimly lit by oil lamps, with a couch for opium smokers down one side and a big central table for gamblers:

As for me, beginning then to see and feel, to perceive without knowing, I can never forget the smells of those ships… the thick foul sweetish fumes rising and creeping into every cranny. From the half-closed doors of the tiny cabins came the same smell, so that the close air seemed swimming with it…. In the middle of the table was a pile of silver dollars, which every one watched closely, covetously, with terrible longing…. Occasionally it was swept away by a single lean dark hand. Then a strange growl went over the crowd of gamesters and over the crowd of onlookers.