Pearl Buck in China (32 page)

The death of her father coincided with the first round in what eventually became a public showdown between Pearl and the mission movement. She still drew her salary as a teacher, but
she had stopped going to church
when it became clear that she could expect no answer to her passionate prayers for her daughter. Her employers’ response to her book was harsh and swift. The first letter Pearl received from a reader in the United States—
“several pages of blistering rebuke”
—came from the secretary of the Presbyterian Board of Foreign Missions in New York, who threatened her obliquely with public denunciation. His tone was at once so sanctimonious and so squeamish that she did not immediately realize that his main complaint was her sexual frankness. Her friend Emma found herself defending
The Good Earth
against similar objections.
“of course… it
isn’t
a nice book!” Pearl wrote back cheerfully. “Your friends or whoever they were who said it was a coarse book are perfectly right—it
is
a coarse book from this point of view.” She explained that her portrait of Wang Lung was as accurate as she could make it, and that behavior unmentionable in genteel American society—belching, urinating, sexual intercourse—was as natural and unselfconscious for him as for most Chinese. “I like their matter-of-fact attitude to all natural functions of life, including sex. I think it sane and wholesome…. They provide for these things as they do for hunger and thirst and there’s an end of it.” She confided to her brother Edgar her astonishment and initial incredulity over the missionaries’ perverse obsession:
“sex is the devil
to them, and seems to consume a great deal of their attention.”

The book’s first Chinese reviews were polite rather than enthusiastic. This kind of naturalism had no precedent in classical or contemporary writing (
“The study of peasant
psychology is… practically unknown,” wrote a Chinese critic, saluting the book as somber but serious: “The Chinese farmer in his individual element has never yet found proper expression in his own literature”). Olan was the first Chinese woman to be portrayed in fiction as she actually was rather than with the moth eyebrows, porcelain skin, and tiny flowerlike feet of the traditional heroine. The evident authenticity of
The Good
Earth
was a source of aggravation from the start, especially given the book’s astonishing popularity.
“I was surprised
to find how the young Chinese intellectuals hated it,” said Helen Foster Snow, who reached China for the first time in 1931: “they were violent about it…. Also the missionaries disliked it. In fact, almost nobody living in China liked it at all, for different reasons.” The cosmopolitan, Western-educated Chinese community in Shanghai deplored the book’s portrayal of insuperable social problems which it was in nobody’s interest to spell out so plainly. “They wanted to make a good impression on the foreigners, and also they wanted to avoid facing facts themselves and to avoid doing anything to remedy the situation.” The students in Snow’s language classes bitterly resented a foreigner exposing their country’s poverty and lack of modern amenities in a book that already showed signs of becoming a world-class best seller.

Pearl encountered the same attitude herself, both in China and the United States, in patriotic young people whose experiences of the West had made them bitterly sensitive to racial slights and slurs. She even incorporated their response into the final volume of her
Good Earth
trilogy, in a passage in which Wang Lung’s grandson attends a mission fund-raising presentation designed to touch its soft-hearted American audience with slides of beggars, lepers, and starving children in mud huts:
“Yuan could not bear it
. All through the hour his anger had been rising, mixed with shame and dismay, so to see revealed before this staring, ignorant foreign crowd his country’s faults…. It seemed to him that this prying priest had searched out every ill that he could find and dragged it forth before the cold eyes of this western world.” Over the next half-century Pearl Buck would be heavily criticized and finally banned in China for spreading reactionary imperialist lies about the past in books that wantonly distorted the correct image of Chinese farmers. “T
he story is set
in the benighted period of the Qing dynasty, portraying the Chinese as males with pigtails and females with bound feet in order to depict Chinese society as intrinsically backward,” ran a history of Nanjing published in 1985. “It is not hard to see the bad effect produced by
The Good Earth
on American society!”

In September 1931 Japanese troops began systematically seizing territory in Manchuria. There were rumors of Russia mobilizing and Britain proposing to support Japan. In Nanjing six thousand young people took to the streets to protest the Chinese government’s inaction.
“It is very tense
here,” Pearl wrote to Emma White on September 24. “Last night the government students gathered around the Japanese consulate and yelled hideously for about three hours, ‘Down with the Japanese!’” Four days later they attacked their own foreign ministry. Pressure mounted throughout the winter. In January an advance force of Japanese marines landed in Shanghai backed by a dozen naval destroyers and heavy aerial bombardment. Shells disrupted the rail link to Nanjing, and the government prepared to evacuate inland. Chinese and Japanese armies clashed in February around Shanghai, with fierce fighting inside the city. Roused in the middle of the night, with shells falling and gunboats advancing up the river toward Nanjing, the Bucks and their neighbors packed their bags and left.
“We crawled up
, dressed and I will confess I was simply terrified and shook life a leaf,” Pearl wrote to her sister. Janice, who was seven years old, retained all her life a terror of moonlight on her pillow.

They found temporary shelter in Beijing, where Pearl taught at the language school, spending mornings in the National Library researching illustrations for her translation of
All Men Are Brothers
and afternoons exploring the old city. She attended the Beijing Opera and visited the home of its greatest actor, Mei Linfang. The place that matched her mood most closely was the valley where the crumbling remains of imperial Ming tombs stood in a semicircle against a rocky hillside,
“a somber, wild, fierce landscape
, the mountains warped and black and craggy against the brilliant sky.” All through that cold dry spring when sandy desert winds blew through the city streets, Pearl reviewed her future options:
“It was in Peking
… that I became convinced that sooner or later I must leave China and return permanently to my own country, for such wars and upheavals lay ahead that no white people would be allowed to remain.”

War with Japan ended with a cease-fire and suspension of hostilities in early March, and in June the Bucks returned briefly to Nanjing
to prepare for their return to the United States on furlough. “I seem not to remember much about the departure,” Pearl wrote in her memoirs. Her husband planned to complete his PhD at Cornell, and she was in a fever to get back to Carol. They arranged to take with them Pearl’s American secretary, Adeline Bucher, who had turned out to be even more useful looking after Janice. Pearl found a telegram waiting for her in Nanjing with news that
The Good Earth
had won her a Pulitzer. Film rights had already been sold to Metro-Goldwyn-Meyer for fifty thousand dollars, more than any book had ever gotten from Hollywood before. She said she felt
“like a common brown hen
… who has seen a phoenix emerge from what she thought was an ordinary egg.” Now that she was in a position to do as she pleased, her plans for Carol and the Vineland School loomed far larger than her publisher’s counterplans to unveil his mystery author to the American public.
“I shall avoid all publicity
stuff, and want to slip in and out of America unnoticed” was the unrealistic scheme Pearl outlined to Emma. “My blood runs cold at the thought of meeting a lot of people.”

The secret of Pearl Buck baffled and intrigued American readers, who knew next to nothing about her. Requests for interviews could not be processed. Personal details were unavailable. Some people even doubted her existence. She had just passed her fortieth birthday when she slipped into the United States in July 1932, having landed with her family in Canada to be met by her publisher, who dealt with the demands of journalists, editors, PR mongers, and fans by whittling them down into a highly selective schedule, and delivering her himself to the secluded farm belonging to her parents-in-law in Poughkeepsie. The first the public knew of her arrival was a dinner in the Jade Room of the Waldorf Astoria Hotel in New York on August 3. Two hundred handpicked guests, representing the cream of the city’s fashionable intelligentsia in low-cut evening frocks and white tuxedos, were confronted by Pearl, who wore a high V-necked dress with sleeves, little or no makeup, and her hair pulled back in a plain bun, looking so nervous that at least one observer suspected she was about to run away. She made a short shy speech of thanks and captivated her audience by reading from the preface to
All Men Are Brothers,
written
three hundred years earlier by its original editor, Shih Nai-an:
“How can I know
what those who come after me and read my book will think of it? I do not even know if I myself afterwards can even read this book. Why therefore should I care?”

It was a characteristically cool and courteous way of capitalizing on her own ignorance and inexperience in a country where, as she said herself, she didn’t understand the first thing about anything, from motion pictures to the banking system. Pearl was courted, fêted, photographed, interviewed by press and radio, and showered with requests that autumn to address literary luncheons, teas, and cocktail parties organized by churches, clubs, and universities. She accepted no more than a handful, including a dinner invitation from
Chinese students at Columbia
, who urged her for the honor of their country to suppress her translation of
All Men Are Brothers
on the grounds that it made their heritage look barbaric to Western readers.
Sons,
her sequel to
The Good Earth,
was published in September to mixed reviews and escalating sales; eighty thousand copies sold in the first month, preceded by serialization in
Cosmopolitan
for an unheard-of $30,000, bringing Pearl’s total earnings in 1932 to roughly $100,000. The book starts with Wang Lung’s funeral and explores China’s twentieth-century politics through the careers of his three sons, all of whom ruthlessly exploit the land inherited from their father by becoming respectively an idle, venal landlord, a greedy and manipulative merchant, and a bandit chief. Schematic in format and essentially didactic in purpose, the novel’s vitality and force lie with the lonely, driven youngest son, Wang the Tiger, a born rebel—stern, disciplined, in some sense a stand-in for his author—who spends his first forty years preparing himself for a campaign that pits him against authority and isolates him more or less completely from weaker, less ambitious contemporaries.

Three months to the day after her first tentative performance at the Waldorf, Pearl initiated a campaign of her own by challenging America’s innate racism, bigotry, and cultural imperialism at a fund-raising event on November 2 organized by the Presbyterian Church. She was by now an international celebrity, lionized wherever she went and claimed as its own by a mission movement that should have
known better than to try to cash in on this Pulitzer-winning outsider, who charmed and disconcerted audiences by looking like a homely Dutch housewife while delivering observations that were anything but reassuring. Pearl had agreed under pressure to report in private to interested members of the Mission Board, over lunch at the Astor Hotel, on her findings in four decades as a mission child, wife, and teacher only to discover on arrival that this was to be a promotional event, staged in the hotel’s main ballroom before two thousand paid ticket holders.
“I did not know what to do
, and yet I didn’t know what to say except what I had prepared very carefully for a few people and certainly not for the public…. Well, I had to give that speech and I got up and gave it. When I had finished I sat down. Deadly silence fell upon the room. It was appalling to me.” A thunderous ovation eventually followed from the hall, but not from the grim-faced religious leaders seated at Pearl’s table.
“It gave us cold chills
as she went along,” said the Board’s secretary, Dr. Cleland Boyd McAfee, who found himself presiding over a comprehensive indictment of the mission enterprise in theory and practice by an authoritative and devastatingly articulate eyewitness.

If he or any of his colleagues had bothered to glance back over her career beforehand, they might have had a clearer idea of what to expect. Pearl’s speech, “Is There a Case for Foreign Missions?” was the final draft of a long, ongoing, internal debate formulated at intervals over the previous ten years in papers published in the
Chinese Recorder.
It began with a talk given to trainee missionaries at the Nanjing language school in 1923, when Pearl as a young woman was still trying to come to terms with her father’s expulsion from Zhenjiang. She warned her contemporaries against the intolerance of the previous generation, urging them to understand and make allowances for their elders’ stubborn self-righteousness:
“It is too much to expect
of them in general to get our viewpoint. But we ought to be able to get theirs.” She urged them to acknowledge their own aggressive instincts so as to avoid falling into the same trap themselves: “Don’t mistake a psychological complex for religious emotion or divine leadership…. Don’t mistake a wish of your own for the will of God, nor hurt vanity
… for a call of duty to persist in your own way.” It was sensible, practical advice based on painful personal experience. Pearl’s recommended strategy was to cultivate a sense of humor and proportion; to recognize the notion of a single, fixed, unalterable truth as superstitious absurdity; and never to be deluded into operating on anything less than a basis of absolute equality: “We simply cannot express the Gospel with any force if we have hidden within us a sense of racial superiority…. We are no better than anyone else, any of us.”