BIOGRAPHY/FICTION: JERUSHA McCORMACKreviews Burying the Bones: Pearl Buck in ChinaBy Hilary Spurling Profile, 340pp. £15
AS A GIRL, in late imperial China, Pearl Buck used to roam the fields surrounding the family home. There she would find bones, “so tiny that she knew they must belong to dead babies, nearly always girls, suffocated or strangled at birth and left for dogs to devour”. Collecting these pathetic remains, Pearl would bury them to rites of her own childish devising.
Telling this story early in her biography, Hilary Spurling efficiently conveys the banal brutality of peasant life within the China of more than a century ago. Later, this anecdote also becomes a metaphor for the way, as a woman, Buck chose to recall the past. Both in memoirs as well as her more fictive writings, Buck continued to bury the bones; amnesia became one way of coping with the most disturbing details of her own life in China; her fiction, a way of burying these details in convenient plots.
Indeed, as Spurling’s account reveals, Buck had much to bury. There were her American missionary parents. Her father, Absalom, a religious zealot, was so possessed by the task of converting the heathen that he virtually abandoned, both physically and emotionally, his wife and children. Of these, there were seven: only three survived. That sentence alone might give some idea of what his wife, Carie, endured. As Spurling makes clear, writing about them was Buck’s way of making peace with two lives sacrificed to a mission in which she came no longer to believe. Of her abhorrence for this “exclusive, prohibitive, alien religion” that was her father’s brand of evangelical Christianity, Buck wrote, “The effrontery of all this makes my soul shrink”. But its devastating effect on her parents’ lives did nothing to save Buck herself from its fury, as she came to live it out in other terms: through her own mission to render the Chinese human in Western terms, as people her own people could comprehend.
Only someone with Buck’s upbringing could do this. She not only spoke Chinese, she thought in Chinese, allowing that language to compose her novels before she translated them into English. She was able to translate them because she lived between several worlds. To call these merely China and America is too simple. As Spurling perceptively shows, Buck as a woman also lived between the bound-feet strictures of her beloved Chinese amah and the heady freedom of the 1914 American girl-graduate. Buck territory is always contested, always the place between, sustaining what she called a “bifocal” vision: a woman’s view of her place in a man’s world; a “foreign devil’s” view of her Chinese neighbours; a missionary daughter’s view of her own parents’ misguided mission.
From her childhood, Bucks favourite author was Dickens. True to her mentor, Buck wrote popular fiction – so popular that, in 1938, she won the Nobel Prize for Literature. Though many did not regard her writing as "literature", no one can dispute that through such novels as The Good EarthBuck succeeded in giving the Chinese, and particularly the Chinese woman, a human face – and a voice.
Then she disappeared, first gradually, then absolutely. By the late 1970s Buck was almost as despised as her subjects. Attempts to redeem her literary reputation (as, for example, Peter Conn’s “cultural biography”) did little to change her status. Spurling’s genius has been to recognise to what degree Pearl Buck allowed her writing to conscript her life. What emerges from this insight is an entirely new kind of literary biography: not one that uses the life to explain the work, but one that uses the work to write the life.
And what a life! During her roughly 40 years in China, Buck lived through one of its most turbulent periods: from the 1900 Boxer Rebellion (and its slaughter of “foreign devils”, particularly missionaries) to the fall of imperial China in 1911; from the chaos of the following war-lord period to the massacres and mayhem of the “Nanjing Incident” of 1927 – in which Buck and her family narrowly escaped with their lives. In the way these events register in her writing, it is often difficult to tell the fictive from the actual; as Buck herself admitted, “all my work comes from my life”. In relying on that work, Spurling writes a biography that itself reads as a novel: one as passionate, as furious, as doomed in some ways as Buck herself, who, at the end of her days, no longer cared to distinguish between her “paper people” and those surrounding her in actual life.
Mere fiction dims by comparison. Coinciding with the publication of Spurling's biography, Anchee Min's novel about Buck's childhood, Pearl of China, appears by comparison thin and contrived. Like Buck, Min grew up in China during turbulent times. As a schoolgirl during the Cultural Revolution, Min was forced to denounce Buck as an American cultural imperialist; years later, as an immigrant to America, she rediscovered China through Buck's novels. Perhaps this is the difficulty, for Min's story of two young girls who form a life-long friendship – an imaginary Pearl Buck and an even more imaginary Chinese friend – falls into many of Buck's own sentimental tricks and too-tidy plot-lines. An example might be the floridly elaborated love-affair with "the Chinese Shelly", the handsome poet Hsu Chih-mo, an affair which, on the available evidence, Spurling regards as highly speculative.
Given Min's background, it is ironic that her novels should seem so flimsy. During the Cultural Revolution, Min was sent to a labour collective, from whence she was plucked to become a star in Madame Mao's propaganda films. Min must have been tough to have survived; but in this novel, unfortunately, film-fantasy wins out over toughness. In starker terms, Buck wrote about Chinese women that "they are the strongest women in the world . . . Their men are weak beside them. Whence comes this strength? It is the strength that centuries have given them, the strength of the unwanted". The Good Earthis almost unbearable in its testimony to what was, and in notable instances, still is, much the case. When Olan, the stoical woman at the heart of the story, suffocates her new-born girl-baby, her act conflates centuries of such practice. Today, it is selective abortion following (officially illegal) ultra-sound scans that has driven up the gender ratios: to 119 boys for every 100 girls now born in China.
“Better to raise geese than to raise girls” was the mantra of Maxine Hong Kingston’s mother. Significantly, Hong Kingston says that only in Buck’s writings did she find the means to “translate her parents”. Today that project of interpreting China to the West is more important than ever. Two crises – the economic, which is now upon us, and the ecological, which is now overtaking us – mean that both China and the West must, as a matter of urgency, find new ways of talking to each other. In this enterprise, Buck proves to be a prophet of the future, staking her ground on that of a common humanity. Upon her successors, such as Anchee Min, this momentous work now devolves: to break down centuries of publicly cultivated prejudice to allow us to enter, with fresh eyes, the once-closed world of China through the ordinary lives of its people.
Jerusha McCormack is a visiting professor at Beijing Foreign Studies University, where she helped set up the first Irish Studies Centre in China. Her most recent book, an edition of the Thomas Davis Lectures, is China and the Irish(New Island, 2009)
