Pearl Buck in China (10 page)

Pearl idealized the empress as a child and identified with her as an adult, following her career, collecting a small library of books about her, and eventually writing one of her own,
Imperial Woman,
part biography, part fiction, and on some level a transposed and refocused self-portrait of Pearl herself. As the emperor’s chief concubine, Tz’u Hsi had studied history, philosophy, and literature with a tutor (clearly based in Pearl’s book on Teacher Kung), while at the same time pursuing her passion for the popular plays that brought real and imagined characters from the past back to life. The history and folklore Pearl studied were rich in the kind of heroines she needed at this stage, clever, powerful and beautiful women like the empress herself and the semimythological Mulan, a Chinese Joan of Arc, who put on her father’s armor to fight for her country in the army of a fifth-century khan. Mulan was a particular favorite with audiences in these years, silencing restless or gossipy spectators by her dramatic first entrance,
“a brilliant figure”
heralded by flutes and drums, galloping in on an invisible horse, singing in high falsetto as she “dashed upon the stage… in the ancient garb of a warrior, and shouts burst from the people.”

Pearl was a regular playgoer, always the only foreigner in the crowd squatting in temple courtyards or on hillside threshing floors, and she was also by now an enthusiastic reader of the novels she had first gotten to know through the family cook.
“I decided well before
I was ten to be a novelist,” she said, relinquishing her ambition only briefly, when Teacher Kung scornfully dismissed her taste for pop fiction.
“Such books poison the thoughts
, especially of females,” says the empress’s tutor in
Imperial Woman.
“Such books ought not even to be mentioned by a virtuous lady.” But Pearl could never resist these ancient stories for long. The countryside around Zhenjiang was impregnated with them. The heroine of
The White Snake
still lay in captivity beneath the pagoda on Golden Island, where she had once lived with her lover in a cave on Jingshan Mountain, inscribed with texts carved into the rock in or before the time of Confucius. The hero of
The Romance of Three Kingdoms,
another of Pearl’s favorites, had married the princess of Wu in Ganlu Temple overlooking the Yangtse, just outside the old city wall.

Pearl had started reading fiction in English almost as soon as she could read at all. She claimed to have consumed every book on her parents’ shelves by the age of seven, searching out anything that promised stories about real people—Plutarch’s
Lives,
Foxe’s
Book of Martyrs—
and surreptitiously combing her father’s bound volumes of
Century Magazine
for fictional content. She devoured the works of Charles Dickens, a complete set of small blue cloth-bound volumes that she read over and over again, curled up in a corner of the veranda with a pocketful of peanuts or lodged in the branches of an old elm tree looking down on the road over the compound wall:
“And there quite alone
above the crowded Chinese scene I sat and read or sobbed and dreamed, not there at all but thousands of miles away, in a land I had never seen, among people I never knew.” She read these particular volumes until they became interchangeable, so that she could reach one down at random from its high shelf, knowing it would serve her purpose without even bothering to check which title she held in her hand.

At one point Carie grew so alarmed by her daughter’s inability to do without what had evidently become an escape mechanism that she tried hiding the books, but nothing could break Pearl’s addiction to Dickens. “He was almost the sole access I had to my own people,” she wrote. “I went to his parties for I had no other.” In spite of disapproval from her parents, who shared Mr. Kung’s view of fiction as inherently coarse, trashy, and time-wasting, she read Shakespeare, Scott, Thackeray, and George Eliot. She even tried
Tom Sawyer
and
Huckleberry Finn
by Mark Twain, but put them aside on the grounds that boys’ adventures set on the Mississippi River had too little in common with anything she herself knew (an objection equally applicable to Dickensian London). None of them left any obvious trace on her own fiction, and none produced on her the same narcotic effect as Dickens. Her obsession with him lasted for a decade or more, during which she read everything he wrote at least once a year. Perhaps it was the art of popular fiction in general, as much as anything specific to Dickens, that held her attention. As a prospective writer herself, she responded avidly to the haunting power of an imagination that
accesses horrors lurking deep beyond the reach of the conscious mind through symbolic imagery and drama, gluing the narrative together on the surface with a bland sentimentality that soothes and reassures readers. The split between dreamlike purity and contaminated reality, bred into Pearl at her mother’s knee and rediscovered in Dickens, would become a crucial part of the implicit bargain she too would make later with her American public.

The habit of reading to distance herself from the life around her, hidden away alone in holes and corners where she could remain undisturbed, was an intrinsic part of the solitary, internalized Western world Pearl constructed for herself in these years, so different from the gregarious Chinese existence she was free to take up again once she had finished her daily lesson with Mr. Kung. In the late afternoons she ran down the hill to join her friends in the courtyards of any one of half a dozen neighboring farmhouses, where she was once again a welcome and familiar visitor. Pearl’s Chinese manners were excellent and she was an attentive listener, eager to hear all the stories,
“plaguing everyone with questions
sometimes too intimate and personal,” intrigued by the endless farming talk about crop failures, pest control, and appalling weather conditions. In times of drought she walked in procession with her friends’ families to ask help from the paper gods of the fields, who lived in mud shrines looking out over the land. When the semitropical rains finally arrived she skipped through the bamboo barelegged in a waterproof hat the size of an umbrella made of layers of plaited bamboo.

Eccentricity on this scale raised comment in the foreign community, which was perplexed by Pearl’s disorderly conduct at an age when most mothers were trying to wean their amah-raised children away from questionable habits and lax vocabulary picked up from servants in the kitchen. The mission wives would have been even more censorious if they had realized quite how frankly and freely Pearl discussed sex and religion with her contemporaries. The farmers’ daughters questioned her closely as to whether Americans made babies in the same way as their own Chinese parents. Anxious for clarification herself, Pearl asked her mother, who said unhelpfully that all babies
were made by God, “
and in His image
.” Scarcely less baffling was the mystery hanging over Mary and Joseph and the conception of their problematic Son:
“I heard talk about this
from Chinese Christians who had no enthusiasm for Mary, and felt sorry for Joseph.”

Pearl’s closest confidants were the daughters of her Chinese sister, T’sai Yun, or Precious Cloud, whom she called Chieh-Chieh (Elder Sister), and who addressed Mr. and Mrs. Sydenstricker as Father and Mother. T’sai Yun seems to have been taken in as an unwanted child by Carie after the death of her own first daughter, probably around about the same time as Absalom selected Ma Pangbo as a young boy to train as his ally. Brought up in the Chinese manner and educated at a Chinese boarding school, T’sai Yun married before Pearl was born, producing six girls in rapid succession.
“They grew up with me
, and we told each other everything,” said Pearl, who was close in age to the two oldest. “These six little Chinese girls were the nucleus of my childhood.” Their father was the son of one of Absalom’s native assistants, Pastor Chang, who caused increasing trouble in the church with his disruptive public demands for a grandson. Prayers were offered up by the congregation each time the couple announced the arrival of another daughter:
“A first girl they accepted
with welcome, a second one a year later with equanimity, a third with gravity, a fourth with consternation.” Pearl remembered Pastor Chang as an aggressive old man with a skimpy white pigtail and a jutting goatee, preaching shrill sermons in which he threatened to revoke his allegiance to the Christian God, who had so abysmally failed to bring off a sex change for his fourth, fifth, and sixth granddaughters.

T’sai Yun’s story was tragic in a country where girls were dismissed as worthless, routinely crippled as children and often identified by numbers rather than names, bringing irredeemable loss of face at birth on their mother, her family, and in this case the Christian Church. Long afterward Pearl turned her adoptive sister’s experience into a captivating children’s book,
The Chinese Children Next Door,
about six little girls with scarlet bows on their black pigtails, who idolized the plump placid baby brother their mother eventually achieved on her seventh try. This was the fable that delighted Nehru
and Gandhi who must have been as familiar as the author herself with the actuality underlying her story and its fairy-tale ending. Infertility, infanticide, the institutionalized physical and mental abuse of women, the suicides of young wives blamed for transgressions often far less significant than repeated failure to produce a son, all these were commonplace in Pearl’s childhood, constantly discussed and publicly dramatized in a society where nothing could be kept secret for long. Neither she not her sister ever forgot another of their neighbors, a childless wife from the Fu family, whom they watched one afternoon screaming curses for an hour or more at her husband as he stolidly followed the plow with his buffalo in the valley below their back gate:
“She rocked back and forth
in her howling, her voice broken and hoarse, the saliva dripping from her lips, her hair stringing down the sides of her face.” Both Sydenstricker sisters had grown up watching processions of women coming to confide their troubles to Carie or lay them at the feet of the clay figure of Kuanyin in the temple, the goddess Pearl adopted as her tutelary deity, bringing wild flowers herself as an offering in spring:
“I used as a small child
to go to sleep more quietly at night because of her.”

Disaster, and how to cope with it, were part of their practical education.
At regular intervals
, when the sky darkened and the wind rose to a sullen throaty roar, the whole Sydenstricker family retreated behind locked doors and windows to wait for a typhoon that hurled itself on the landscape, smashing trees, breaking down walls, tearing off the thatched roofs of mud huts, making their own brick-built mission bungalow quake on its foundations. Cholera raged in Zhenjiang every autumn, striking with terrible speed and finality. One year
Wang Amah developed symptoms
overnight and would have died if Carie had not risked her own life to fight the fever, shutting herself up with the patient for a week in a stone shed at the bottom of the garden, gripped by a bitter avenging rage for the lives she had already lost and the ones she still had to lose. She and Wang Amah had been friends and companions for so long and had gone through so much together that she said she had no intention of being left alone now. That same autumn Absalom left for the
annual general meeting
of the
North Kiangsu Mission in Hsuchowfu, accompanied by their next-door neighbor, an energetic younger man named James Bear, father of the red-headed boy who played with Pearl under the veranda. Absalom came home alone, sick and shaken, very nearly defeated himself by the cholera that had killed Bear as soon as he reached Hsuchowfu.

Carie escaped every year with the children to Kuling, packing up to leave as the rice seedlings were transplanted to the flooded fields in the steamy disease-ridden heat of late June, traveling upriver for days to Kiukang (Jiujiang), and then another day’s journey inland across the parched plain. At the foot of Mount Lu the party transferred to flimsy bamboo chairs hanging from ropes on carrying poles, each borne by four mountain bearers, for the three-mile climb ending in one thousand twisting stone steps cut into the sheer side of the mountain:

The road wound around
the rocky folds of the cliffs, and beneath us were gorges and rushing mountain rivers and falls. Higher and higher the road crawled, twisting so abruptly that sometimes our chairs swung clear over the precipices as the front bearers went on beyond the rear ones, still behind the bend. One misstep and the chair would have been dashed a thousand feet into the rocks and swirling waters…. Somewhere near the top of the mountain we turned a certain corner and were met… by a strong cold current of mountain air. Until then the air had gradually cooled but now it changed suddenly and the bearers welcomed it with loud hallooing calls and a spurt of running, the chair swaying between them. As a child I could never keep from laughing…. The air of the plains had been hot and heavy, breathed in and out by millions of human lungs, but here on top of the mountain it was charged with fresh cold purity, and one breathed it in like lifesaving oxygen.

The Sydenstrickers’ two-room stone house stood in a clearing on the sloping side of a valley with a stream running along the bottom between groves of acacia, bamboo, maple, and juniper, yellow-flowered dogwood, pink crape myrtle, and sweet-scented bushes of white
osman. Pearl’s first job each morning was to climb up through the woods past the rivulet at the side of the house to pick ferns, wild clematis, ornamental grasses, and lilies—“
the tall white Madonna lilies
, the red black-spotted tiger lilies or the white ones with red spots”—so that her mother could dress the house. There were picnics, walks, games, and even a handful of other mission children to play with as year by year more houses appeared along the brick paths, reached by shallow flights of stone steps and shaded by forest trees with everywhere the sound of water trickling or falling. The sense of being at home was intensified for Carie by the views from rocky platforms and sudden openings in the trees, where you could look down through layers of cloud on jagged peaks and crags or vertiginous drops to glimpses of river and lake far below. The mountain air, the pure water, and the paper-white mist reminded her of the famous “cloud seas” of Droop Mountain in the Alleghenies, where she grew up. After two or three magical months the family came back down again to make their way home by junk between the fields of high ripe yellow rice now lining the banks of the Yangtse.