Pearl Buck in China (9 page)

Absalom approved of revivalist tactics (“
so hopeful and encouraging
,” he wrote with unusual warmth), conducting similar, if smaller meetings himself on spring and autumn tours of his expanding circuit, when he visited each one-room chapel in every walled city or market town, performing mass baptisms and preaching sermons that left him physically exhausted but emotionally transfigured. Pearl said that as a small girl she convinced herself she could see light streaming out from his body at these times. Even as a teenager, old enough to start learning Latin from her father,
“I never stood up
to recite to him—and not to stand was unthinkable—without feeling that more than man was listening.” A supernatural imperative consumed him. He was nearing the goal he had schooled himself to attain all his life, and the urgency of his mission raged in him like fever.

Absalom gathered around him a small group of young Chinese followers, modeled by his own account on Jesus Christ’s band of disciples, who met in his study in Zhenjiang for theological and practical training. This class, a perpetual irritation to Absalom’s fellow missionaries, had started in Tsingkiangpu and was still running strong two
decades later, when it was finally disbanded in 1906 on the foundation of the Nanjing Theological Seminary, another of Absalom’s pet schemes for training Chinese evangelists, fiercely opposed by his peers. The most faithful of all his disciples was Ma Pangbo, who had begun as his prize pupil in Tsingkiangpu and remained at his side throughout every subsequent campaign. A Muslim from the north with Arab blood, disowned by his own family when he entered the Christian Church, the boy was still in his early teens when he joined forces with Pearl’s father before she was born. Ma collaborated on Absalom’s translations, accompanied him on his travels, preached in his chapels, planned strategy with him, and supervised his native staff, standing in as a kind of adoptive son in place of the actual Sydenstricker sons, who were absent or dead, becoming a trusted collaborator, consultant, second-in-command, eventually a spiritual brother. Both men were tall, dark, and lean, with strong bony features, hooded eyes, and hawk-beak noses. A Calvinist predestinarian and believer in the Second Coming, Absalom was a justified sinner who found his alter ego in Ma. Pearl said it was almost impossible to tell with your eyes closed which of the two was preaching or praying.
“There is fire in him
,” Ma said when she asked what had drawn him as a boy to her father. “There is fire in me. The flame in his soul leaned over and caught at the flame in me, and I was compelled.”

Ma had been Absalom’s sole human companion in the summer of 1900, when the Boxer storm raged in Zhenjiang.
“Many times I stood there
,” he told Pearl, “thinking I must, like Saul of Tarsus, be witness to the death of a martyr.” Missionaries were frequently urged to model themselves on Saint Paul, but Absalom was among those who embodied in practice “
the Pauline spirit
of consecration,” “the living aggressive force,” “that spirit which irreligious people will call variously ‘fanaticism,’ ‘intolerance,’ ‘narrow-mindedness,’” qualities every missionary strove in theory to emulate. For someone as steeped from infancy in the Bible as he was, accustomed to set aside hours every day for translation and exegesis, a large part of China’s appeal lay in its superficial resemblance to Old Testament Israel. Absalom was not the only one to find conditions unchanged since the time of Abraham
in China with its lepers and devil-worshippers, its superstitious rites, sympathetic magic and belief in demonic possession, its temples full of painted idols, and its stringent solutions to the problem of women. In spite of or possibly because of his refined erudition, he believed literally in every tenet of his fundamentalist faith, from bodily resurrection to miracle working.
“The power to work miracles
is promised, their need is apparent, real and great,” he wrote, deploring what he hoped was only a temporary suspension. “No one seems to have the power in exercise, but the reason why the power is withheld we are unable to give.”

There is a kind of insular absurdity about attempting to superimpose nineteenth-century biblical orthodoxy on an ancient, highly civilized culture underpinned in its customs and thought by Confucianism, Daoism, and Buddhism, a broad consensus organized, in Pearl Buck’s words,
“into three great types
, naturally tolerant, non-evangelical, and mellowed by long human experience to a philosophy of humanism.” Militant Christianity, backed up by armed force and gunboats, subverted deep-rooted systems of ethical belief, judicial practice, and administrative organization in favor of a simplistic morality that denounced any but the most basic education as elitist claptrap, regarded tolerance as a vice, and prized
“aggressive evangelistic work”
as a self-evident good. Of all the punitive measures imposed on China in 1900—freedom for Westerners to travel, trade, and settle where they wished, the payment of huge indemnities, and the lifting of virtually all restrictions on missionaries—the one that dismayed Pearl most in later life was the tacit insistence on an exclusive, prohibitive, alien religion.
“The effrontery of all this
still makes my soul shrink,” she wrote half a century later.

The right to pride of place assumed by the Christian Church was possible only because, as many observers pointed out at the time and afterward, it chose to confine its attention to illiterate porters, gatemen, servants, and rural laborers. Absalom Sydenstricker himself freely admitted that
“a stinging conviction of sin”
was easier to induce in this sort of people. Without sin, guilt, and atonement, concepts with no place in Confucius’s definition of virtuous conduct, the puritan
mechanism of reward and punishment became frankly meaningless. People who failed to understand they had sinned could not be brought to repent. Simple mathematics starkly outlined the scale of the difficulty for the handful of Southern Presbyterian missionaries who had elected to hold themselves responsible for saving the souls of ten million people in North Kiangsu. The logical answer was to set up the redemptive equivalent of a production line, calculating two minutes per person as sufficient to spell out the message. Absalom himself managed to compress
“all the essentials of Salvation”
into a single sermon so short that, by his own account, “the unsaved soul, hearing perhaps but once, could understand and so take upon itself its own responsibility.” Pearl, who must have heard her father’s homily countless times as a girl, could recite the formula by heart: “God—His Son—believe—not perish—everlasting life. His whole creed was there.”

Seen from Absalom’s point of view in
The Fighting Angel,
his patent sermon was a reasonable, ingenious, and eminently practical device. But to his daughter, looking back
“in anger and indignation”
as an adult from a different perspective, this kind of quick-fix solution had little or no relevance to the Chinese peasants taught to repeat it by rote on the promise of rewards that never materialized from hellfire-breathing missionaries more interested in their own than their converts’ problems. “I hear them repeat a memorized jargon to a group of eager, suffering, uncomprehending men and women,” Pearl wrote after her father was dead, in a detailed, dispassionate analysis of mission practice that caused scandal throughout the United States and severed forever her connection with the Presbyterian Church.

In the first decade of the twentieth century all this lay far in the future. But already as a young girl, just beginning to distance herself from her father, Pearl felt uneasy about his preaching.
“Somehow I had learned from Thoreau
, who doubtless learned it from Confucius, that if a man comes to do his own good for you, then must you flee that man and save yourself.” Pearl first encountered Confucius through Mr. Kung, who was engaged as her tutor in the autumn of 1902, a singular act of intellectual bravado on the part of her parents
at a time when more conventional missionaries dismissed Chinese reverence for Confucius as rank idolatry. Perhaps the Sydenstrickers recognized that China had marked Pearl indelibly, and perhaps they felt she should learn literary
wen-li
as an antidote to the racy popular language she spoke with her friends and Wang Amah. Possibly her father wanted to help out a fellow scholar in need of a job, for Mr. Kung was a refugee, forced to flee after German soldiers had smashed up his ancestral home in the sacking and looting unofficially sanctioned by Western powers as part of the post-Boxer reprisals in Beijing. Whatever the reason, for the next three years Mr. Kung came for two hours every afternoon to teach Pearl calligraphy and to read aloud to her
“in his beautiful polished Peking Mandarin”
the ancient classical texts of Confucius, Mencius, and the canonical poets.

Teacher Kung was tall, slender, and stately, with courtly manners, long swaying robes, and an elegant black silk queue. Pearl had often watched elderly Chinese scholars disappearing into her father’s study, but this was the first time any of them paid her the slightest attention. Her teacher seemed old to her, but in fact he was in his late forties, shrewd, kind, and, in his own judicious and considerate way, radically subversive. He gave her a solid grounding in Confucian ethics and their contemporary implications, pausing often to fill in the historical context of whatever book they were reading and to explain simply and clearly to his young pupil the relationship of China’s past to its present and its future. He instilled in her a sharp sense of the hatred and humiliation smoldering behind the deferential faces of his proud and envious people, and of their perfect right to feel as they did. Mr. Kung was the only teacher Pearl ever had (apart from her mother) who commanded her unconditional respect. He laid the foundations of a liberal, inquiring, secular education, based on a breadth of vision and a tolerance beyond the reach of her father. He opened her eyes to much she had seen but not understood. His version of events was often at odds with that of the mission community, and under his guidance her view of the turmoil she had lived through began to shift and expand.
“I became mentally bifocal
, and so I learned early to understand there is no such condition in human affairs as absolute truth.”

One thing Mr. Kung made unequivocally clear in their first lessons together was that the current state of truce in the country could not last. He quoted the Bible in ways that might have surprised its Western adepts:
“His favorite text
was the one about reaping the whirlwind if one sowed the wind, and he reminded me often, in his gently lofty manner, that one could not expect figs from thistles.” He warned Pearl explicitly that revolutionary violence would erupt again, and that next time she and her family could not be sure of getting away with their lives. The shock overwhelmed her and she burst into tears, just as she had done in America when she heard from her grandfather that President McKinley had been assassinated. Afterward Pearl tried to find a way of passing on to her parents what her teacher had said, giving up in the end for fear they might overreact or misunderstand. Like many children who successfully negotiate the treacherous ground of a divided inheritance, she did it by cultivating two distinct personalities:
“When I was in the Chinese world
, I was Chinese, I spoke Chinese and behaved as a Chinese and ate as the Chinese did, and I shared their thoughts and feelings. When I was in the American world, I shut the door between.” Keeping that door closed was the price of survival for Pearl as a child, but she spent the greater part of her adult life trying to open it, and keep it open.

I
N THE GAMES
of Chinese cops and robbers Pearl played with her friends on the hillside, she was generally cast because of her dubious looks as a trusty American ally, bearing gifts to aid the noble Chinese in their ceaseless battle against rapacious and ruthless Europeans. Now that she was starting to realize the ambiguous nature of American gifts, she looked back with new eyes on what was
“so strangely called
in Western history” the Boxer Rebellion, pointing out that it had been essentially a nationwide resistance movement aimed at strengthening the ruling Manchu Dynasty by cleansing the country of foreigners. At the head of the dynasty sat Dowager Empress Tz’u Hsi, whose fairy-tale history fascinated Pearl. A real-life Cinderella, she had started as a penniless orphan, working as a kitchen maid for
her uncle until she was picked out to become an imperial concubine and embarked on a steady ascent, rising up through palace plots and intrigue to end up ruling China, installing successive young puppet emperors and remaining for nearly half a century the ultimate authority behind the Dragon Throne. Like every single one of her playmates, Pearl herself had believed for a time that she too was descended from this Venerable Ancestor. Tz’u Hsi’s attempt to exterminate foreigners in the summer of 1900 had been one of the traumatic shocks of Pearl’s childhood. But the defeated and pragmatic empress had rapidly returned from exile, regained her composure, and reversed her policies, staging a magnificent reentry into Beijing and eagerly embracing the modernizing process of Westernization she had so adamantly opposed for so long.

In 1904 Pearl watched the coming of the railroad from Shanghai, a British investment that involved the construction of China’s first railway tunnel in the teeth of stubborn opposition from people who feared that any form of excavation would drive the dead from their graves, scatter the ancestral spirits, and rouse the dragons that lay waiting under the hills to destroy the world. Migrant laborers poured into Zhenjiang from city and countryside, beggars, outcasts, desperate and destitute refugees from famine areas, putting up makeshift hovels at the side of the line they dug out by hand, gouging into the rock with hammers and shifting the clay soil with shovels.
“Gradually the workers disappeared
into the depths of the earth, to come out white-faced and covered with moisture. Once there was a cave-in and panic stopped all work…. Soon the digging was going on at both ends…. The people darkened the banks of the cuts where they entered the hill, standing for hours, watching and talking.” Pearl sat on Fort Hill above the Sydenstricker house with her mother and sister to witness the ceremonial arrival of the first train, belching smoke and breathing flame, erupting from the hill with a roar that changed forever the Zhenjiang her parents had known even before its transformation into a treaty port, in the days when it was still a sleepy country marketplace clustered along a single main street. “The West had pushed in. Like possessive arms of steel, the rails lay glistening in the sun.”