Pearl Buck in China (4 page)

Her impression of this period afterward was of happiness and security. Sun shone on the garden and poured into the house. Carie could transform any lodgings, however unpromising, by applying the same cheap speedy formula (which would later be Pearl’s): windows open to let in light and air, whitewashed walls, grass mats on the floor, the polished oval table she never traveled without, plain rattan chairs, and flowers everywhere. She planted a white rose grown from a cutting taken on the porch of her American home and hung up frilly curtains to shut out sights she didn’t want her children to see. Edgar, who had been reading Dickens, Thackeray, and Scott since the age of seven, was currently working on a novel of his own and producing a weekly newspaper, which he printed on a toy press for subscribers among the tiny scattered mission community. In the mornings he had lessons with his mother, who had been a schoolteacher before her marriage and provided a basic education that included learning how to draw, sing, and play the violin. For Carie this was a time of renewal and hope. By the end of the year she was pregnant again.

Pearl learned to talk from Wang Amah, who fed, bathed, and dressed her, crooned tunes to her, and taught her riddles and rhymes. In the summer of the child’s second birthday her mother was eclipsed altogether by the nurse. For three months Carie lay seriously ill,
racked by dysentery, unable to eat or keep food down if she did, struggling to nourish the baby she was carrying, and too weak to see even her children for more than a few minutes at a time. Pearl remembered twice-daily visits to
“the other one’s, the white one’s room
,” when her mother could only stare at her from the bed. Wang Amah made the child put on a fresh white muslin frock, a petticoat and leather shoes for these inspections; she combed her long hair free of tangles and pinned a fat yellow curl in a sausage shape on top of her head. But most of the time Pearl wore the Chinese jacket, trousers, and cloth shoes in which she felt comfortable (unlike her father, who forced himself to dress like the Chinese so as not to stand out more than he must, but never got used to the loose cotton robes that flapped around his long limbs, impeding his stride and making it impossible to move at more than a slow amble).

Pearl escaped thankfully from the tight clothes and strict rules of her parents into the indulgent world of the kitchen, where the whole household—nurse, cook, houseboy, and anyone else who dropped by—played with her and told her stories. They brought her kites, whistles, and sugar candies from the market. Wang Amah kept hens’ eggs inside her jacket, where Pearl could reach in and find them when they hatched into chicks. She ate the simple, highly flavored food of the poor, dishes she loved ever afterward: soup, brown rice, bits of salt fish or meat, pickled mustard greens, bowls of white cabbage and bean curd, crisp chewy crusts from the bottom of the rice pot. For Pearl China always remained the place where she felt at home. When she looked back from the far end of her rootless and fractured existence, the landscape of her childhood shone in her memory as America did for her mother. She loved even the hot rainy season that Carie dreaded, and the rice harvest in September when low autumn light made everything hazy and soft. Her descriptions have a hypnotic, almost incantatory rhythm:
“The masses of feathery
, waving bamboo, the low green hills, the winding, golden waters of the canal, the small brown villages of thatched houses… the drowsy rhythm of the flails beating out the grain upon the threshing floors… deep blue skies above the shorn gold fields and the flocks of white geese picking up
the scattered grains of rice…. The very air is sweet and somnolent with that broken, rhythmic beating of the flails.”

In the fiercest heat of the summer of 1894 Pearl’s father came home to announce that they were moving again.
“My memory of his middle years
when I was a child and a young girl was the ceaseless journeying to and fro,” she wrote when he died. Tension always rose at this time of year for Carie, who had already lost three children at the end of long hot summers. Eight months pregnant, still shaky from prolonged illness, she was reluctant to pack herself and her family into carts to head for an unknown town so violently opposed to foreigners that it had taken Absalom nearly two years to find anyone prepared to rent him a place fit to live in. War had recently broken out with Japan, exacerbating the suspicions of the Chinese, who now lumped all foreigners together with the Japanese enemy, regardless of race or color. Absalom was tall and rawboned with reddish hair, a beard, and piercing blue eyes. In the traditional plays and stories, which were the main source of information available to country people, red hair and colored eyes were the distinguishing marks of a villain. Pearl’s father produced much the same shock and dismay in the villagers of North Kiangsu as Wang the farmer feels in
The Good Earth
when he sees his first missionary:
“a man very tall
, lean as a tree that has been blown by bitter winds. This man had eyes as blue as ice and a hairy face…. His hands were also hairy and red-skinned. He had… a great nose projecting beyond his cheeks like a prow beyond the sides of a ship.” In places where no one had seen a white man before, people treated a missionary preaching in the teahouse as a one-man traveling freak show, or else set the dogs on him.

Absalom was in his element. Difficulty and danger proved that he was getting to grips at last with the practicalities of wholesale conversion. The only way it could be done was by regular “itinerations,” when he crisscrossed the region, methodically visiting and revisiting every town, village, and clutch of mud huts (his wife said his brain was a map of China). Genuine converts were still hard to come by, but he was planting chapels—often no more than a borrowed room in a local home—and recruiting lay helpers to run them. His grotesque and
alarming appearance had always drawn crowds, but now they were starting to listen. As his grasp of the vernacular increased and grew saltier, he gained confidence, learning the tricks of a professional showman to rouse Chinese audiences often, as he freely admitted, sedated with opium:
“almost as devoid
of mental and spiritual life as the idols they worship.” Absalom had no patience with more conciliatory colleagues who liked to point out the many similarities between Christ and Buddha, an approach he compared scornfully to dosing a drug addict with chloroform. “When we deal with a case of opium poisoning we do not administer soothing doses and put him to sleep, but on the contrary force down an emetic and trot him round the court, in spite of his resistance and his protests.” Part showman, part salesman, Absalom liked to start his pitch with a bang: “Give them the Jehovah God and the divine savior of the Bible. Instead of dwelling on their good qualities show them their sins and abominations in fiery colors.” His model was Jesus Christ, who brought not peace but a sword. “Such was the effect of His preaching,
and it produced results
.”

His unshakeable conviction made Carie give in as usual, but even Absalom felt dubious about the premises he had finally secured from a landlord in need of the rent to feed an opium habit. The family’s new home was one of a pair of unfurnished village inns, hardly more than stables with dirt floors, mud walls, rough thatched roofs sealed with paper inside, and gaping holes for windows and doors. Crowds of sullen unwelcoming men collected to inspect the newcomers from the far side of a low earthen wall. Doors could be fitted but they gave limited privacy, and there was no space for a garden. The family slept on improvised plank beds. The new baby, born in Hsuchien on September 16, was no more robust than Arthur had been. Carie called him Clyde Hermanus after his Dutch grandfather.

Absalom’s departure after the birth left her more isolated than ever before and farther from any American or European support line. She was starting to worry about Edgar growing up for all practical purposes without a father, cut off from contact with boys of his own age and kind, beginning to turn moody and mutinous at thirteen with the onset of adolescence. Jealousy made even Pearl, so far the sturdiest
and most responsive of babies, hard to manage now that Wang Amah’s attention had shifted to the new little brother. Cold weather set in, rain fell, and water welled up through the earth, turning the floor to liquid mud. Carie’s portable organ, a gift from her oldest brother in America, had to be hoisted on boards out of the wet. Absalom himself admitted in his memoirs that the situation was dire:
“The people were afraid of us
and official influence unfavorable…. We… suffered much from sickness during the winter.” In one of his father’s absences Clyde contracted pneumonia.

Pearl skimmed over this period in her nonfiction accounts, or left it out altogether. But the details—whether taken in at the time or picked up from what others said afterward—lodged deep in her memory, surfacing half a century later in a novel called
The Townsman,
set on the rolling prairie of the American West at the time of the Gold Rush. Like Carie, Mary Goodliffe in
The Townsman
gives birth without doctor or midwife to her sixth child (not counting the first, who plays no part in the story and seems indeed to have been largely forgotten by the author). She, too, had been persuaded to abandon a relatively settled existence in order to follow her husband, a perennially dissatisfied visionary driven westward all his life in search of an illusory future prosperity that blinds him to the hardships imposed on his wife and family in the present.
“They were living like beasts
in a den. She had no furniture. Her bed was a mattress on posts driven into the ground and crossed with slats. The children slept on pallets spread on dried grass.”
The Townsman
is a solid, workmanlike family saga with inadequate emotional underpinning and a fairy tale ending, except for this bleak portrait of a woman pushed to the limits of endurance, camping out in winter in a mud dugout on the prairie with an absent husband, a restive teenage son, a refractory toddler, and a sickly newborn baby.

Clyde survived the first part of an exceptionally hard winter thanks to intensive care from his mother and Wang Amah. When Absalom got back from itinerating he found his wife waiting with the house dismantled, its contents sorted and packed, the organ tied up in matting, even the rose dug up and ready to go. This was the first head-on collision Pearl witnessed between her parents, and, like everything to
do with Absalom, its scale was transcendental.
“For neither of them was it a struggle
between a man and a woman. It was a woman defying God. She fought against God, against [Absalom’s] call, against the success of his work, against the promise of the future.” Pearl’s father told her long afterward that his wife in this mood was unstoppable, “like a wild wind.” Ambushed and outmaneuvered, he had no choice but to accept her ultimatum when she threatened to return alone with the children to America if he didn’t. Carie’s eloquent and carefully rehearsed declaration of independence shaped her daughters’ future. It is repeated almost word for word in Pearl’s biographies of her parents,
The Exile
and
Fighting Angel,
and it returns even more circumstantially in her sister’s
The Exile’s Daughter,
where their mother speaks in a voice that must have been only too familiar to both daughters, uttering words neither of them ever forgot:

In the white hot temper which was hers when she was provoked too much, she said in a dreadful still voice: “You can preach from Peking to Canton, you can go from the North Pole to the South, but I and these little children will never go with you again…. I have no more children to give away to God now.”

Absalom never fully forgave his wife for once again sabotaging a critical campaign just as it began to get going. After dropping off his family by mule cart in Tsingkiangpu, he raced back to Hsuchien to retrieve the situation, failing in his haste and distress to grasp the depth of disturbance caused by the war. Japan’s modernized army and navy, trained and equipped to Western standards, had inflicted a series of crushing defeats by land and sea in the north on outmoded and ill-prepared imperial forces, still armed in some sections with bows and arrows. Atrocities took place on both sides. Rumor and counterrumor swept the country. News of what was happening filtered down to the rural population via cheap garish prints of the demonized foreign enemy sold in markets and fairs. Disorganized groups of soldiers, bandits, and criminals headed north all winter toward the fighting in
Manchuria. Mounting tension erupted in violence. Absalom driving his mule cart picked up a colleague at Hsuchien and hurried on to Hsuchowfu, where they were besieged in an inn by a mob who stoned the two Americans and chased them up the main street, attempting to rope them like steers using girdles as improvised lassos.

Hampered by their heavy padded Chinese coats, long skirts, and the clumsy cloth shoes that came off as they ran, the two men sought refuge in the office of the local magistrate, who had signally failed to come to their aid. Even in peacetime there was widespread resentment against the aggressive meddling of missionaries, their automatic assumption of superiority, unlimited sense of entitlement, and ruthless exploitation of the unequal treaties that put them above Chinese law. Ejected under guard from the city, Absalom retreated via Hsuchien only to be badly beaten on the road by brigands or soldiers, who claimed he was Japanese and made off in his cart with all his possessions. By his own account, the thick wadding of his coat saved his life. He walked the last thirty miles back to Tsingkiangpu barefoot in his underwear, bleeding from three sword wounds on his back. When he burst in on his family at breakfast they were about to be evacuated again with the other wives and children by Yangtse riverboat to safety in Shanghai. Absalom stayed behind to make one last abortive attempt to regain Hsuchien, accompanied this time by his old adversary, Jimmy Graham. Heavy snowfall blocked their way, the Grand Canal froze over, and the pair had to retreat, carrying their baggage on foot through ice and snow to the Yangtse River, where they finished the journey by junk, eventually rejoining their wives in Shanghai in time for the Chinese New Year, January 26, 1895.