Read Online Pearl Buck in China by Hilary Spurling - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Hilary Spurling
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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Unpublished material by Pearl S. Buck is Copyright © 2010 by The Pearl S. Buck Family Trust.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
F OREWORD
Burying the Bones
T HE 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 upseeing 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
S OURCES AND A CKNOWLEDGMENTS
The Los Angeles art critic Edward
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
F OREWORD
Burying the Bones
T HE 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 upseeing 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
S OURCES AND A CKNOWLEDGMENTS
The Los Angeles art critic Edward
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