Pearl Buck in China Read online

  Praise for Pearl Buck in China

  “Penetrating…. Ms. Spurling writes well, and with real feeling…. The resulting portrait is a complicated one, but it has an absorbing glow…. It’s a good story, easily as curious as any Buck herself put to paper.”

  —Dwight Garner, The New York Times

  “A vivid biography of the early years of the now mostly forgotten novelist who was once America’s most celebrated writer…. Ms. Spurling is an exquisite writer, and Pearl Buck in China is beautifully paced.”

  —Melanie Kirkpatrick, The Wall Street Journal

  “Sparkling…. An extraordinary portrait, rich in detail, ambitious in scope, with a vast historical backdrop that informs but never overwhelms its remarkable subject…. Throughout her gripping account, Spurling’s touch is sure, light and nuanced.”

  —Stacy Schiff, The New York Times Book Review

  “Pearl Buck is one of the greatest writers on China, and Hilary Spurling has brought her and the China of her time to life with amazing immediacy and perception.”

  —Jung Chang, author of Wild Swans

  “This elegant, richly researched work is at once a portrait of a remarkable woman ahead of her time, an evocation of China between the wars, and a meditation on how the secrets and griefs of childhood can shape a writer. At a time of heightened interest in China, Spurling’s biography is a compelling tribute to the woman who first focused American attention on the country.”

  —Leslie T. Chang, The Washington Post Book World

  “A magnetic new biography…. You can learn much from Spurling’s poised account, written with sweep, pace and insights into what Aldous Huxley called the ‘enigmatic lesson’ of history: ‘Nothing changes and yet everything is completely different.’”

  —Bloomberg News

  “Hilary Spurling has given us a riveting, multidimensional portrait of a writer torn between her Chinese childhood and her American roots. Haunting, yet firmly rooted in Chinese history, Pearl Buck in China shows the real Pearl Buck behind the well-known iconic image.”

  —Hannah Pakula, author of The Last Empress

  “As dramatic and enjoyable as any of Pearl Buck’s novels…. Evocative… well-paced… an excellent summer read.”

  —The Philadelphia Inquirer

  “A compelling study of a woman who tried to make sense of the poverty, violence, and suffering she saw as a child in rural China by setting down everything that happened to her, stripping away both the lies of her family and society in her search for self-identity and truth. Spurling’s penetrating insight and virtuoso style create a fascinating portrait of an author’s coming of age.”

  —Jennet Conant, author of Tuxedo Park and The Irregulars

  “Succeeds in making Buck herself a compelling figure, transforming her from dreary ‘lady author’ into woman warrior…. Rescues Buck and some of her best books from the ‘stink’ of literary condescension.”

  —Maureen Corrigan, NPR

  “Hilary Spurling’s devastating ability to uncover secrets… gives her biographies the breathless pace and menacing undercurrents of thrillers… a biographical masterpiece.”

  —Financial Times

  “This book has been an eye-opener for me… a brilliant account… Hilary Spurling is a terrific storyteller.”

  —The Observer (London)

  “From its wonderful opening sentence to its poignant close, this is a superb biography. Spurling has brought her characters to robust life. Readers will learn what they need to know about China in that tumultuous time and place at the beginning of the twentieth century.”

  —Peter Conn, Vartan Gregorian Professor of English, University of Pennsylvania, and author of Pearl S. Buck: A Cultural Biography

  “Boldly conceived and magnificently written, original, enlightening, and with a narrative as thrilling as an epic film, Pearl Buck in China is a triumphant landmark in the development of creative biography.”

  —Elaine Showalter, author of A Jury of Her Peers

  “Spurling, Matisse’s splendid biographer, adeptly matches factual rigor with enthralling insights in this brilliantly contextualized and beautifully crafted portrait of a unique cultural interpreter.”

  —Booklist (starred review)

  “Emphasizing the imagination’s power to ‘make bearable things too ugly to confront directly,’ Spurling sensitively traces the biographical background of Buck’s writing.”

  —The New Yorker

  “A thrilling biography of the Nobel prize–winning writer…. Spurling, who has never written a dull sentence, also has magic power as a writer.”

  —The Sunday Times (London)

  “Hilary Spurling’s riveting biography should bring Buck and her work back to the forefront of public consciousness as China once again looms large in our political and cultural lives. A marvelous book.”

  —Erica Wagner, literary editor of The Times (London) and author of Ariel’s Gift

  “An elegant and sympathetic portrait of one of the most extraordinary Americans of the 20th century…. An illuminating and compelling biography.”

  —The Guardian (UK)

  “Fascinating… revealing.”

  —The Economist

  “A terrific story, told with rare intelligence and refinement.”

  —Daily Mail (UK)

  “Spurling’s compelling examination of the imaginative sources of Buck’s fiction succeeds triumphantly.”

  —The Daily Telegraph (London)

  “A gripping biography…. Haunting stuff.”

  —Daily Express (London)

  “Absorbing…. Spurling shows how China and the Chinese shaped Buck as a person and as a writer.”

  —USA Today

  “This compassionate biography, which focuses on the first half of Buck’s life, when she lived in China, should move readers to rediscover her work as a source of insight into both revolutionary China and the United States’ interactions with it.”

  —Foreign Affairs

  “Elegant, timely.”

  —The Independent (UK)

  “Adds valuable perspective…. Respectfully resets her life and work in its appropriate contexts.”

  —Kirkus Reviews

  “A nuanced biography of the writer’s 40-year residence in China…. Spurling rediscovers a trailblazing heroine whose life speaks to her legacy as deeply as her books do.”

  —More magazine

  “An immensely readable account of Buck’s life, which encompassed all the violent upheavals that turned Imperial China into a Communist state. Spurling marshals her material beautifully.”

  —Metro (UK)

  ALSO BY HILARY SPURLING

  The Unknown Matisse: A Life of Henri Matisse, vol. #1, 1869–1908

  Matisse the Master: A Life of Henri Matisse, vol. #2, 1909–1954

  The Girl from the Fiction Department: A Portrait of Sonia Orwell

  La Grande Thérèse: The Greatest Scandal of the Century

  Paul Scott: A Life

  Ivy: The Life of I. Compton-Burnett, 1874–1969

  PEARL BUCK

  Simon & Schuster Paperbacks

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  Copyright © 2010 by Hilary Spurling

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever. For information address Simon & Schuster Paperbacks Subsidiary Rights Department, 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020.

  First Simon & Schuster trade paperback edition June 2011.

  SIMON & SCHUSTER PAPERBACKS and colophon are registered trademarks of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

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  Text designed by Paul Dippolito

  Manufactured in the United States of America

  1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

  The Library of Congress has cataloged the hardcover edition as follows: Spurling, Hilary.

  Pearl Buck in China : journey to the good earth / Hilary Spurling.—1st Simon & Schuster hardcover ed.

  p. cm.

  1. Buck, Pearl S. (Pearl Sydenstricker), 1892–1973—Homes and haunts—China. 2. Buck, Pearl S. (Pearl Sydenstricker), 1892–1973—Knowledge—China. 3. Authors, American—20th century—Biography. 4. Americans—China—Biography. 5. China—In literature. I. Title.

  PS3503.U198Z845 2010

  813'.52—dc22

  [B] 2010007712

  ISBN 978-1-4165-4042-7

  ISBN 978-1-4165-4043-4 (pbk)

  ISBN 978-1-4391-8044-0 (ebook)

  Extracts from works by Grace Yaukey by permission of The Estate of Grace Yaukey.

  Extracts from published works by Pearl S. Buck by permission of The Pearl S. Buck Family Trust and Estate of Pearl S. Walsh aka Pearl S. Buck in care of Harold Ober Associates Incorporated.

  Unpublished material by Pearl S. Buck is Copyright © 2010 by The Pearl S. Buck Family Trust.

  Photo credits

  Pearl S. Buck International: 1, 3, 4, 8, 14, 15, 16, 18, 19; Pearl S. Buck Birthplace Foundation: 2, 6; Courtesy of MU De-hua, Vice Chairman, Lushan Federation of Literature and Art Circles, Guling: 5; Pearl S. Buck Research Center, Jiangsu University of Science and Technology: 7; Randolph-Macon Woman’s College Archives: 9; Courtesy of J. Lossing Buck family: 10, 11; Courtesy of Jiang Qinggang and Ye Gongping: 12, 13, 17

  To the memory of Diane Middlebrook

  who saw the point of this book from the beginning

  CONTENTS

  Map

  Foreword: Burying the Bones

  Chapter 1: Family of Ghosts

  Chapter 2: Mental Bifocals

  Chapter 3: The Spirit and the Flesh

  Chapter 4: Inside the Doll’s House

  Chapter 5: Thinking in Chinese

  Chapter 6: In the Mirror of Her Fiction

  Chapter 7: The Stink of Condescension

  Postscript: Paper People

  Sources and Acknowledgments

  Key to Sources

  Notes

  Note on Transliteration

  Index

  FOREWORD

  Burying the Bones

  THE FIRST BOOK I remember from my early childhood was called The Chinese Children Next Door. It was about a family of six little girls with red cheeks and black pigtails who had given up hope of ever having a baby brother when one day their wish came true: the family’s seventh child was a boy, the answer to his parents’ prayers, a plaything to be waited on and adored by his older sisters. Many years later I came across this story again as a chapter in Pearl Buck’s reminiscences. It turned out that she had taken a true episode from her own early years, and recast it in the form of a children’s fable. The story’s absurdity made Mahatma Gandhi laugh out loud when it was read to him on his sickbed by Jawaharlal Nehru. Its fairytale charm is if anything heightened by the realities of poverty, misogyny, and female infanticide that lurk in the backgound. Reading it for the first time as an adult, I recognized echoes of stories my mother told me about her own childhood when she, too, had been the last of six unwanted girls. After she was born her mother—my grandmother—turned her face to the wall. Two years later came the birth of the son who was all either of my grandparents had ever wanted in the first place. I knew The Chinese Children Next Door by heart when I was little, presumably because its consoling warmth and optimism made my mother’s past seem more bearable.

  I had no idea at the time who wrote the book that meant so much to me. Now I know that it is based on the life of Pearl’s much older adopted sister, a Chinese girl abandoned by her own family and brought up as their own by Pearl’s parents. The first two of this sister’s six daughters were almost the same age as Pearl, who grew up seeing them count for nothing, and watching their mother publicly disgraced for bearing her husband six girls in succession. There is no hint of this sediment of suffering in Pearl’s story. As a small child running free in a Chinese town where wild dogs foraged for babies routinely exposed to die on waste land, she often came across half-eaten remnants on the hillside outside her parents’ gate. She tried hard to bury them just as she buried her memories of being sworn at as a foreign devil in the street, of fleeing for her life from marauding soldiers, of the young brides sold into slavery who hanged themselves at intervals in her neighbors’ houses. Memories like these surface in her novels from time to time like a dismembered hand or leg. This ambivalence—the territory that lies between what is said, and what can be understood—is the nub of my book.

  Fiction never lies; it reveals the writer totally.

  —V. S. NAIPAUL

  CHAPTER 1

  Family of Ghosts

  PEARL SYDENSTRICKER WAS born into a family of ghosts. She was the fifth of seven children and, when she looked back afterward at her beginnings, she remembered a crowd of brothers and sisters at home, tagging after their mother, listening to her sing, and begging her to tell stories. “We looked out over the paddy fields and the thatched roofs of the farmers in the valley, and in the distance a slender pagoda seemed to hang against the bamboo on a hillside,” Pearl wrote, describing a storytelling session on the veranda of the family house above the Yangtse River. “But we saw none of these.” What they saw was America, a strange, dreamlike, alien homeland where they had never set foot. The siblings who surrounded Pearl in these early memories were dreamlike as well. Her older sisters, Maude and Edith, and her brother Arthur had all died young in the course of six years from dysentery, cholera, and malaria, respectively. Edgar, the oldest, ten years of age when Pearl was born, stayed long enough to teach her to walk, but a year or two later he was gone too (sent back to be educated in the United States, he would be a young man of twenty before his sister saw him again). He left behind a new baby brother to take his place, and when she needed company of her own age, Pearl peopled the house with her dead siblings. “These three who came before I was born, and went away too soon, somehow seemed alive to me,” she said.

  Every Chinese family had its own quarrelsome, mischievous ghosts who could be appealed to, appeased, or comforted with paper people, houses, and toys. As a small child lying awake in bed at night, Pearl grew up listening to the cries of women on the street outside calling back the spirits of their dead or dying babies. In some ways she herself was more Chinese than American. “I spoke Chinese first, and more easily,” she said. “If America was for dreaming about, the world in which I lived was Asia…. I did not consider myself a white person in those days.” Her friends called her Zhenzhu (Chinese for Pearl) and treated her as one of themselves. She slipped in and out of their houses, listening to their mothers and aunts talk so frankly and in such detail about their problems that Pearl sometimes felt it was her missionary parents, not herself, who needed protecting from the realities of death, sex, and violence.

  She was an enthusiastic participant in local funerals on the hill outside the walled compound of her parents’ house: large, noisy, convivial affairs where everyone had a good time. Pearl joined in as soon as the party got going with people killing cocks, burning paper money, and gossiping about foreigners making malaria pills out of babies’ eyes. “‘Everything you say is lies,’ I remarked pleasantly…. There was always a moment of stunned silence. Did they or did they not understand what I had said? they asked each other. They understood, but could not believe they had.” The unexpected apparition of a small American girl squatting in the grass and talking intelligibly, unlike other Westerners, seemed magical, if not demonic. Once an old woman shrieked aloud, convinced she was about to die now that she could
understand the language of foreign devils. Pearl made the most of the effect she produced, and of the endless questions—about her clothes, her coloring, her parents, the way they lived and the food they ate—that followed as soon as the mourners got over their shock. She said she first realized there was something wrong with her at New Year 1897, when she was four and a half years old, with blue eyes and thick yellow hair that had grown too long to fit inside a new red cap trimmed with gold Buddhas. “Why must we hide it?” she asked her Chinese nurse, who explained that black was the only normal color for hair and eyes. (“It doesn’t look human, this hair.”)

  Pearl escaped through the back gate to run free on the grasslands thickly dotted with tall pointed graves behind the house. She and her companions, real or imaginary, climbed up and slid down the grave mounds or flew paper kites from the top. “Here in the green shadows we played jungles one day and housekeeping the next.” She was baffled by a newly arrived American, one of her parents’ visitors, who complained that the Sydenstrickers lived in a graveyard. (“That huge empire is one mighty cemetery,” Mark Twain wrote of China, “ridged and wrinkled from its center to its circumference with graves.”) Ancestors and their coffins were part of the landscape of Pearl’s childhood. The big heavy wooden coffins that stood ready for their occupants in her friends’ houses, or lay awaiting burial for weeks or months in the fields and along the canal banks, were a source of pride and satisfaction to farmers whose families had for centuries poured their sweat, their waste, and their dead bodies back into the same patch of soil.

  Sometimes Pearl found bones lying in the grass, fragments of limbs, mutilated hands, once a head and shoulder with parts of an arm still attached. They were so tiny she knew they belonged to dead babies, nearly always girls suffocated or strangled at birth and left out for dogs to devour. It never occurred to her to say anything to anybody. Instead she controlled her revulsion and buried what she found according to rites of her own invention, poking the grim shreds and scraps into cracks in existing graves or scratching new ones out of the ground. Where other little girls constructed mud pies, Pearl made miniature grave mounds, patting down the sides and decorating them with flowers or pebbles. She carried a string bag for collecting human remains, and a sharpened stick or a club made from split bamboo with a stone fixed into it to drive the dogs away. She could never tell her mother why she hated packs of scavenging dogs, any more than she could explain her compulsion, acquired early from Chinese friends, to run away and hide whenever she saw a soldier coming down the road.