Pearl Buck in China by Hilary Spurling

Author:Hilary Spurling
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Published: 2010-09-20T04:00:00+00:00

INNER PERTURBATION WAS compounded by external tension in China in those years. When the Bucks received their degrees from Cornell in June 1925 the situation was too volatile for them to think of going straight home. The unexpected death of Sun Yatsen in March had sparked a gathering wave of protest and police repression. Perennially simmering fury against foreign economic and military domination erupted in extended strikes, trade boycotts, riots, and student demonstrations suppressed with extreme government brutality backed by Western battleships and machine guns. Hope and apprehension focused on the Nationalist headquarters in Guangzhou, where systematic preparations for armed conflict were in progress under a bold general and prime contender for the party’s vacant leadership, Chiang Kaishek. The foreign community watched uneasily. “My own sympathies were entirely with the Chinese,” wrote Pearl, who had set out in her Messenger prize essay the long history of coercion and aggression that lay behind the current turmoil. “The driving force… was a passionate desire to get rid of the foreigners who had fastened themselves upon China through trade and religion and war, and set up a government for the reform and modernization of their country.”

Idealistic students from all over China poured into Guangzhou to join Chiang Kaishek’s model army. The Nationalist Party, or Kuomintang, funded from Moscow and reorganized by Russian advisers along Soviet lines—“the same discipline, the same techniques of propaganda, and the same ruthless political commissars”—joined forces with the Chinese Communist Party in fragile, fractious alliance for the sole purpose of seizing power. The Bucks returned that autumn to a country once again on the verge of revolution. In November Nanjing became the capital of the eastern warlord General Sun Chuanfang, who would be defeated by the Nationalists a year later. Pearl sowed larkspur and snapdragons in her garden, and taught courses at Ginling Women’s College as well as at both universities. Intellectually she felt closer to her earnest, argumentative Chinese students than to her American compatriots: “I was increasingly conscious of the years of separation from my own people. My childhood had not been theirs, nor theirs mine…. Under the life of everyday I knew that the old cleavage was deepening. My worlds were dividing, and the time would come when I would have to make a final choice between them.”

In the sweltering summer of 1926 the Bucks did not join the general exodus of foreigners to Kuling. Lossing had farms to visit, and Pearl, always acutely aware of the gossip provoked in any new environment by her two small daughters, preferred to remain behind in her familiar Chinese world. This was the last of what she called the “Waiting Summers,” when everyone knew that change was inevitable but no one could tell exactly when or how it would come. “It was difficult to know what was going on except from the Chinese newspapers which printed brief undigested items which had somehow to be connected by pondering and guessing, and then connected again with the grapevine of students’ confidences and complaints.

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