Pearl Buck in China (12 page)

Absalom’s indiscriminate preaching embarrassed Pearl in her new role as her father’s most hypersensitive critic. She said she could never bring Chinese friends home in case he set about saving their souls.
She had long since stopped listening to his sermons herself, and now she watched him at work on the boats with a captive audience of drug addicts, who responded to his fervid exhortations with yawns of boredom. “They did not know what he meant by sins, or who this man was who wanted to save them, or why he did. They stared, half listening, dropping to sleep in grotesque attitudes upon the deck, where they slept, leaning against their bundles.” Pearl would come eventually to understand and feel for her father, and to write calmly and humorously about his predicament, but at this stage her entire future hinged on her mother’s will and the frugality that was its practical expression.

One of the results of Carie’s stringent economizing was a term at the newly formed
Kuling American School
, an experience Pearl did not repeat and afterward preferred to forget. Her mother complained that the teaching was substandard and transferred her daughter to a school in Shanghai run by a couple of puritanical New England spinsters. Miss Jewell’s School was next door to a mission boardinghouse kept by an older sister in a seedy part of town very different from the prosperous tree-shaded French concession inhabited then as now by business people. Pearl’s account of this heavily barred, grim, gray brick establishment, and its frightening headmistress with her short heavy figure, cold eyes, and limp handshake, owes more to
Jane Eyre
than to anything in Dickens.

Absalom delivered his daughter as a boarder to Miss Jewell’s School in the autumn of 1909. Pale, slender, and studious, socially immature but intellectually advanced for her age, Pearl made no headway with the other girls, who were as shocked by her knowledge of Confucius as she was by their contempt for the heathen Chinese. She got on better with the staff, who found her shy, aloof, and almost suspiciously clever.
“She said she read
Lewis Carroll’s
Alice in Wonderland
at least once a year for its deeper insight,” one of her teachers told Grace thirty years later. She impressed her classmates by reading aloud to the Friday Literary Club from work in progress (“a real novel with chapters”), and having a long poem published in the
Shanghai Mercury
(Pearl was an old hand at the
Mercury,
having won its monthly children’s competitions so often that she treated the prizes as regular pocket money).
She also fell in love for the first time, with a handsome, charming, and sensitive college boy. The older brother of a school friend, son of an American father and a Chinese mother who had died, this intelligent and unhappy boy discussed his divided heritage at length with Pearl (fifty years later she used his story, by her own account, as the basis for her novel
Letter from Peking
).

Pearl was not used to living under surveillance, nor to being tightly hemmed in by rules, and least of all to the perfervid religiosity that pervaded the school. Martha Jewell and her younger sister Eugenia belonged to a sect of Holy Rollers, American fundamentalist fundraisers, who called regularly to collect donations and conduct prayer meetings in the school parlor. Prayers that began normally enough rapidly degenerated into gibberish as teachers and pupils began “speaking in tongues,” moaning and crying for the Holy Ghost, repenting nameless sins, and urging Pearl to join in while she tried with glazed eyes to absent her mind.
“Religion I was used to
, but not this dark form of it, this grovelling emotion, the physical confusion, a loathsome self-indulgence of some sort that I could not understand.” When it became clear that Pearl was never going to conform like the others, the school turned against her. Miss Jewell declared her a heretic, and she was ostracized by fellow pupils, including her roommates, Ruth and Florence Longden, Mary’s younger sisters. The preparatory training that was to have taught her to mix with girls of her own age and kind ended with Pearl being exiled alone (“lest I contaminate the others”) to a small room in the attic.

Looking back later, Pearl recognized in Miss Jewell a passionate, iron-willed idealism that had corroded, leaving as its residue only the indestructible need for power and control.
“She was expressing
… a sort of sex instinct,” Pearl wrote of her teacher in the first article she ever published in the
Chinese Recorder.
“She would have been horrified to have heard it called that.” As part of Pearl’s rehabilitation program, Miss Jewell took her to revivalist meetings and charitable reformatories. “Both terrified me,” said Pearl. Once a week she was obliged to teach knitting and sewing at the
Door of Hope
, a refuge for women undergoing correction after careers in prostitution and slavery. As
the only one of the white lady volunteers who spoke the language of the Chinese inmates, Pearl heard atrocious accounts of physical and mental abuse, violence, torture, starvation, and rape inflicted on girls thrown out or sold by their families into forced labor, working in brothels or as domestic slaves terrorized by the mistress of the household and passed from hand to hand by the master, his sons, and his menservants. She listened to their stories by day and dreamed about them by night. Still haunted by her experiences in the famine, Pearl was too young to be exposed so soon and so brutally to the exploitive squalor of Shanghai sex trafficking. Miss Jewell’s School had been cheap (the fees barely covered expenses), but Pearl paid a heavy price. She was removed after two terms, as soon as Carie realized what was happening.

Pearl’s formal schooling so far had been a series of steadily more disastrous experiments. Once again the sound of low voices arguing and occasional weeping emanated from her parents’ bedroom at night. The campaign to secure university entrance for Pearl was one of the few that Carie won by settling for a compromise solution. Wellesley College ruled itself out as a Yankee institution, and in any case prohibitively expensive, so they settled instead on Randolph-Macon Woman’s College in Lynchburg, Virginia, where the fees were just over half of Wellesley’s, which pleased Absalom. The curriculum suited Carie:
“My mother approved it
because the education there was planned to be exactly what a man would get.” In academic terms this was the best the South had to offer girls. Carie emerged triumphant from the last of a series of confrontations behind closed doors to announce that there would be a new dress for Pearl and that the rest of the family would accompany her on furlough, traveling home westward by the overland route.

Hostilities continued intermittently right up to the packing. Carie planned this journey as a do-it-yourself induction course, during which she and Pearl would study a trunk full of books about Europe at the same time as sampling its highlights in practice. Absalom washed his hands of the whole affair.
“There was nothing
of very special importance or interest in this our last visit home as a family,”
he wrote defiantly in his memoirs. His own packing consisted of the official, newly completed
Revised Mandarin New Testament,
which he subsequently demolished in a succinct and
scathing review
. They set out in early June, traveling north to Harbin in Manchuria, then for ten days through imperial Russia by the trans-Siberian railway, with a day’s stop in Moscow, where Pearl was sickened by a poverty and degradation beyond anything she had seen before. They went on via Warsaw and Berlin to spend a month at a small Swiss pension in Neufchâtel so that Absalom might enjoy himself at last visiting Calvinist shrines, and Pearl could practice her French. They stayed one day in Paris (where Grace said her father was so disgusted by the
naked statues
that he refused to look), and a week at the China Inland Mission in London.

Pearl spent the last leg of the journey, onboard ship from Southampton to New York, contemplating the new world she was about to enter and the old world she had left behind. Sights she had seen in Zhenjiang and was still struggling to put into some sort of perspective would finally resurface decades later in her books. She mentally filed away the “
grave and bitter look
” on the faces of porters with no redress against unjust treatment by white men, and the grimaces of old men pulling rickshaws:
“Their faces in repose
were twisted as though in anger, only it was not anger. It was the years of straining at loads too heavy for them which had lifted their upper lip to bare their teeth in a seeming snarl.” She had witnessed firsthand the hard labor, stench, and danger that made up daily life for the boat people living in picturesque sampans moored along the banks of the Yangtse, and she could not forget the coolies who lived on those boats, men she had watched as a child loading and unloading merchandise on the Bund:
“They were always sweating
… summer and winter, and their thighs and knees quivered under their heavy loads. Their eyes bulged… and their breath came out of them in singsong grunts and they kept step with each other and swung into rhythms to lighten their intolerable loads.”

Pearl’s premonition of an inevitable uprising was confirmed in a rare and surprising conversation with her father on the Atlantic crossing.
He predicted a revolution within ten years in Russia (
“It is clearly foretold
in the Scriptures”) that would spread to engulf the white races in Asia, including Americans. “The Chinese owe us nothing,” was his stern response to Pearl’s protest. “We must never forget that missionaries went to China without invitation and solely from our own sense of duty…. We have done the best we could but that, too, was our duty and so they still owe us nothing. And if our country has taken no concessions, we have kept silent when others did, and we too have profited from the unequal treaties. I don’t think we shall escape when the day of reckoning comes.”

They took the train straight to Lynchburg, where they were to stay with Edgar, now established in the town as a newspaper editor with a wife and a little daughter whom her grandparents had never seen. Pearl was just eighteen years old. “I entered America in September, 1910, with a sober heart and a mind too old for my years.”

CHAPTER
3
The Spirit and the Flesh

A
T
R
ANDOLPH
-M
ACON
W
OMAN’S
College Pearl encountered a tribe unlike any she had met before. Her fellow students were confident, competent, energetic, and often highly intelligent southern girls brought up to run households and organize communities in a homogeneous, highly stratified, hierarchical society initially set up by long-established landowning families. This was a community very different from the rugged individualism of more recent settlers like Pearl’s family in the mountains of West Virginia. Her mother’s efforts to help out the women she met in Tsingkiangpu or Zhenjiang reproduced the straightforward neighborliness of Pocahontas County and Greenbrier. Nothing had prepared Pearl for the elaborately mannered and coded behavior of the society she came across for the first time at Randolph-Macon. Even its throwaway gestures typified a kind of worldliness that would have infuriated her father.
“He never troubled himself
to be thoughtful of anyone in small ways,” Pearl wrote in
Fighting Angel.
“No one ever saw him pick up a woman’s handkerchief… or rise to give her his seat.”

Everything about Pearl betrayed an alien sensibility. She looked and felt wrong in this crowd of girls with bare throats, rounded bosoms, and curvy hips emphasized by tight-waisted, low-cut, flouncy frocks over boned corsets, and bouffant hairstyles bulked out with artificial curls and pads. Pearl’s dresses were plain, high-necked, and long-sleeved, made from handwoven Chinese linen and silk to designs carefully copied by a Zhenjiang tailor from back numbers of outmoded American magazines. The cut of her jackets was dubious (Chinese women wore loose-fitting clothes designed to hide, not hug,
the figure), and her skirts were the wrong length. Her leather shoes had been specially made for her in Zhenjiang, where cloth shoes were the norm, and her hair was plaited or pinned in a bun on the nape of her neck.
“She knew she must seem
almost severe in comparison with the coils and puffs and ruffles of the others,” wrote her loyal younger sister.
“Girls came in groups
to stare at me” was Pearl’s bitter memory fifty years later. The fact that she had been pointed out as a freak all her life in China made it no easier to bear the casual cruelty of her American contemporaries. Their attitude stiffened her resistance. The only full-scale portrait of a southern belle in Pearl Buck’s books is the seductive, imperious, and irresistibly pretty Lucinda Delaney in
The Angry Wife,
who is also a mean-minded, cold-hearted, and egotistical racist shrew.

If Randolph-Macon girls were in some ways far more sophisticated than anything Pearl was used to, in others they were more childish. They readily accepted a time table regulated by bells, rising and going to bed when they were told, indulging in nothing worse than routine ragging or a little mild horseplay in the corridors after lights out. There was no smoking or drinking, and dancing took place in the gym only at Christmas and Easter. Girls rarely left the campus, although they were permitted to receive closely supervised visits from boys on a list vetted beforehand for social credentials. They amused themselves by getting up clubs, “college fights” (when they tore out each other’s hair, leaving the ground littered with fake curls on pins), picnics, pageants, and parties enlivened by a good deal of intensely competitive same-sex petting and courting rituals. Excessive reading and scholarship for its own sake were not encouraged. Most students had little experience of anything beyond their immediate horizons, and their interest in the outside world was strictly limited.

Randolph-Macon was just ten years old when Pearl got there (the earliest women’s colleges had been in existence in the United States for less than a century). Its founders had envisaged a haven of peace and learning in handsome and spacious surroundings, but the complex of Italianate brick buildings, surrounded in rainy weather by a sea of liquid red mud, still looked exposed and raw on its hillside above the
town. Pearl found the work undemanding, and was not impressed by her teachers (“There was nothing I could do to help her,” the English professor reported years later to Grace, “for she knew all I could teach already”). She majored in philosophy and psychology, escaping to spend hours in the library—“I read prodigiously, extravagantly and greedily”—and wasting no time on the sports facilities. Her main education came by her own account from the other girls.