Pearl Buck in China (17 page)

Listening, watching, and interpreting for her husband, Pearl saw for herself the same story written in the lined dun-colored faces, bent backs, and sinewy calves of men who had never eaten their fill from the day they were born. She could read a farmer’s whole life in his body without even looking at his face.
“There was something eloquent
in this man’s two bare feet, knotted and gnarled in the toes, and the soles like the dried hide of a water buffalo.” Things seen and heard on field trips with Lossing would be absorbed and distilled a decade later in the magical opening sequence of
The Good Earth,
which slides the reader imperceptibly into a mud house, where Wang Lung the farmer on his wedding morning lights a fire of dried grass and recklessly squanders twelve tea leaves in a bowl of hot water for his aged father. Wang takes as his wife a discarded slave girl from the local big house, who bears him a son and celebrates the birth by scheming and saving to scrape together materials for a batch of sweet pastries decorated with wild red haws and chopped green plums from the field. Wang feels unaccustomed respect for his wife when he realizes that these moon cakes are not for home consumption, but to present to the big house, where she had endured a lifetime of humiliation, abuse, and rejection. Sold into slavery by her parents as a child of three or four years old, too young for her mother even to have begun binding her feet, Olan had grown up as a kitchen drudge, mute, coarse-featured, big-footed, beaten daily with a leather strap, bullied by the women and ignored by the men of the household as too plain to be worth raping. Her fragile red-and-green moon cakes, made with
white sugar and lard—luxuries even more wildly extravagant in a poor farmer’s economy than a pinch of tea—answer a secret need. Handing them over to her oppressors as a free gift expressed a dumb silent pride she had neither means nor cause to articulate before.

Pearl got to know ordinary farming people—
“so charming, so virile
, so genuinely civilized in spite of illiteracy and certain primitive conditions of life”—for the first time as an adult in Nanxuzhou. “They were the ones… who made the least money and did the most work. They were the most real, the closest to the earth, to birth and death, to laughter and weeping. To visit the farm families became my search for reality.” The search in these early years was a joint enterprise, initiated by Lossing and energetically seconded by Pearl (“
He has a great future
before him here,” she wrote to her mother-in-law; “I try to help him all I can”). His life’s work began by his own account as an attempt to speak to and for the illiterate, inarticulate, ignored, and excluded farmers who made up four-fifths of China’s population. He investigated soil, seed, and irrigation problems, set up comparative trials of American and Asian varieties of wheat, beans, and sesame plants, tried out American strains of corn, cotton, and sweet potatoes, and planned crop rotation experiments, all on a three-acre plot that he hoped shortly to double. But his practical research was rapidly overtaken by the need to go deeper, to establish, document, and analyze the underlying
“situations which limit or affect
, in one way or another, the lives of millions of China’s people.” He aimed specifically to promote the kind of self-knowledge without which there could be no improvement by supplying Chinese college students with meticulously accurate data, “and not only data, but methods of collecting such information, so that these students might in the future discover for themselves the facts of their own country.”

Lossing drew up questionnaires, gave lectures, and published progress reports in the
Chinese Recorder
. As chairman of the newly formed agricultural committee of the
Honan-Shandung Education Association
, he campaigned vigorously for more and better education. He started a club in Nanxuzhou for the exchange of ideas, and organized
classes for young farmers coming in from the country as well as a more intensive winter program for the town’s landowners to study scientific advances in farming. Pearl claimed that
Lossing’s questionnaires
were her idea in the first place, and she certainly helped formulate the questions beforehand and evaluate the answers afterward. But this was two-way traffic. Pearl knew the background, sometimes also the wives and mothers, of Lossing’s first students, who belonged to a handful of leading families,
“the elders, merchants and teachers
of Nanxuzhou,” representing between them what Tom Carter called “all the style and dignity that our little town can boast.” She heard Lossing talk about promising individuals like young Mr. Hwang, a rich idle playboy who made good by running fertilizer experiments on his farm, and the even more enthusiastic Mr. Wang, who took part in
“the testing of new grains
and grasses for this region.” Wang was Lossing’s star pupil in the pilot study program that started in November 1918 with twelve students and finished two months later with a waiting list of a hundred. “
Mr. Wang the farmer
(the one I speak of so often) said the other night, ‘This is the first agricultural class Nanxuzhou has ever had in its four thousand or more years of history,’” Lossing wrote proudly to his parents. Wang the farmer figured in Lossing’s bulletins in the
Chinese Recorder
long before he lent his name, and perhaps something more, to the hero of
The Good Earth.

It was Wang who warned Lossing that Ni Shi Chung, the minor warlord officially installed as military governor of Anhui, was the worst in China. Warfare was endemic in these years, when powerful, ruthless, and ambitious generals and politicians jockeyed for power. Soon after the Bucks set up home in Nanxuzhou, the town’s thirty thousand citizens were overrun by seven thousand soldiers (“
idle, reckless
… lawless… noted ruffians and of the very lowest class,” Pearl wrote to her parents-in-law). They belonged to the disgraced and defeated army of Chang Hsun, a loyal Manchu general who had tried and failed to restore the emperor to the throne in July 1917. His disaffected troops quartered themselves in the houses, looted the shops, and terrorized the people, like the horde of men who come swarming
out of the north toward the end of
The Good Earth,
“filling the street
, filling the town… as though air and sunlight had been suddenly cut off because of the numbers of grey men tramping heavily and in unison through the town…. Before Wang Lung could move in his horror the horde was pouring past him into his own gates…. Into his courts they poured like evil filthy water, filling every corner and crack.”

Pearl knew firsthand how it felt to live under occupation and to retreat behind locked doors in the run-up to one of the regular gun battles when Nanxuzhou’s four great gates were barred and martial law was imposed on the town. Lossing sent his parents a graphic description of
one of these battles
in the autumn of 1918, when hundreds of bandits had been massing for weeks at the railway station outside the town wall, while people inside pondered reports of pillaging and burning farther down the line. The fight itself lasted a day, with bullets whizzing over the Bucks’ compound and an answering cannonade every four or five minutes from inside the town. Pearl, who had lived with bandits all her life, dismissed these assaults later, claiming that anyone who took precautions had nothing to fear (
“At least once or twice a year
bullets would fly over our town…. These old-fashioned wars were often amusing rather than dangerous, provided one stayed out of the range of gunshot”). Neither Lossing nor Grace Sydenstricker shared Pearl’s optimism.
“This does not tell
what a bandit attack is like,” Grace wrote of her sister’s account. “It does not describe the smothering stillness which falls on a Chinese town when word is brought by runners from the outlying country that the tu-fei [bandits] are coming. Nor does it make you see that hurried secret rush to hide every valuable thing from the shelves of shopkeepers…. It does not give the feeling of fear for daughters and babies, and the quick concealment of these in lofts, beneath heaps of fuel…. Most of all, it does not bring the clutching of the pit of the stomach which is fear of human violence. These all come and stay through interminable nights.” During this interlude the town shuts down with barricaded houses and silent empty streets waiting for the screams, shouts, and crashes that accompany the battle itself, followed by battering at the gates. “The shattering blow comes…. The hinges hold against the
next blow and the next. A voice shouts
‘K’ai!
—open!’ Another says in a lower tone, ‘Foreigners in there.’”

Bandits lived by ransom, and foreigners paid more. Old hands like Pearl knew that at some point the bandits always moved on, leaving their dead behind if they had been significantly beaten, taking their plunder and a substantial bribe with them if not. Predatory stragglers still lay in wait on the roads, and even Pearl was afraid of the half-starved, wolfish dogs that infested the villages. The Bucks solved the problem by acquiring a motorbike, which Lossing drove at speed with Pearl hanging on behind. “
I defy any bandit
to catch up with us,” she wrote home airily at the end of the year.

B
UT THERE WAS
a limit to when and where a wife could accompany her husband in a society that imposed almost entirely separate lives on men and women. Chinese women were confined to homes traditionally organized for multiple occupation by different branches and generations of the same family. Housekeeping for two persons in the American style could be, by comparison, a dismally isolated business. Pearl did her own cooking after both cook and houseboy had to be sacked for trying to murder each other, but with no running water, no heating or lighting except open fires and oil lamps, no sanitation save commodes that had to be emptied daily, servants were essential. Lossing grew steadily more absorbed by his work. “
He seems so busy
all the time,” Pearl wrote to his mother as her world closed in on her and his opened out.
“Agriculture was his life
,” said Marian Gardiner, who was fond of Lossing but dismayed by his blank indifference to history, literature or art (“to have Pearl marry Lossing made me wonder”).

Pearl countered her loneliness by diving back into the Chinese world, where she felt most at home. Her sister’s chief memory of the Bucks’ hospitable little house was of the visitors who poured through it,
“an endless stream
of Chinese people who came in to talk over everything.” As a married woman Pearl had regained the freedom of movement lost when she reached puberty and was no longer allowed out alone. She resumed her solitary roaming, taking long walks in the
cool of the evening on the town ramparts, shifting once again between her two worlds:

The enchantment of moonlight
… upon the city wall and the calm waters of the moat outside is still in my memory, half unreal, and it was in this little northern town that I first felt the strange beauty of Chinese streets at night. The dusty streets were wide and unpaved… lined with low one-story buildings of brick or earth, little shops and industries, blacksmiths and tinsmiths, bakeries and hot-water shops, dry-goods and sweetmeat shops, all the life of a people confined geographically and therefore mentally and spiritually to an old and remote area. I walked the dim streets, gazing into the open doors where families gathered around their supper tables, lit only by thick candles or a bean oil lamp, and I felt closer to the Chinese people than I had since childhood.

She made friends with her immediate neighbors, matriarchs and their daughters-in-law from the town’s cultivated and ultraconservative leading families. She and Marian gave a highly successful tea party for the ladies of the Chou family, hosts and guests each treating the other with exquisite courtesy, the one laying out an elegant American dinner table with silverware and starched white linens, the other exclaiming in delight and astonishment over strange contraptions like salt cellars and exotic delicacies like bread and butter. Pearl’s greatest friend was the head of the Chang family, a widow who lived with her children and grandchildren farther along the same cobbled street in a spacious old house with many courtyards and a curving tiled roof, protected by high walls and a doorman to guard its imposing carved gateway. Madame Chang was considerably older than Pearl,
“a tall and ample figure
dressed in a full skirt and knee-length coat… hair drawn tightly back from her round kind face.” A powerful personality, energetic and active in spite of six-inch-long bound feet (“when she walked it was as though she went on pegs”), Madame Chang knew everyone and was relied on for practical advice by the whole town. She was a
diplomat and a peacemaker, generous, broadminded, even-handed, a Buddhist and a practicing Christian (she told Pearl she had joined the Church out of politeness to the foreigners, whose good works she approved of and wished to encourage).

Pearl learned by her example how to run a large, complicated, orderly household in the Confucian way, “
by being kind
, courteous, temperate and deferential,” without impatience or anger.
“Madame Chang remains
as one of the greatest women I have ever known,” Pearl wrote more than thirty years later (by which time her international circle of friends provided a wide field for comparison, headed by Eleanor Roosevelt). As a young woman confronting often intractable problems with no one to consult or depend on, Pearl turned to her neighbor for comfort: “when my own heart ached for reasons I could not reveal it did me good just to lay my head down on her broad soft shoulder and be still for a bit.”

Next door to the Bucks lived another formidable widow, Madame Wu, autocratic and elegant, still beautiful in old age, immaculately coiffed and painted, robed in rich silks with fine jewels and perfect three-inch feet (Madame Wu came to visit leaning on two young slave girls). She was a harsh disciplinarian to herself and others, imperious and manipulative, ruling her own large extended family with absolute authority. She was said to have married her favorite oldest son to a plain girl on purpose, growing so jealous when the boy fell in love with his wife that she drove her young daughter-in-law to suicide (traditionally the only way out for those without power to change an intolerable situation). When the girl finally hanged herself Pearl was summoned immediately, but although she got there in time to find the body still warm her attempt at first aid was vetoed by Madame Wu:
“The Buddhist funeral priests
had already arrived and the death chant had begun. I met hostile looks when I persisted, and Madame Chang… hurried me away.” The son, whose overriding filial duty gave him no option but to go on living in his own courtyard inside the family house, never spoke to his mother again.
“If Madame Wu felt this
, she gave no sign of it.”