The Exile: Portrait of an American Mother

By Pearl S. Buck

The Exile: Portrait of an American Mother is Pearl S. Buck’s intensely moving memoir of her mother, Caroline (Carrie) Stulting Sydenstricker, who set off to China as the bride of a zealous Presbyterian missionary in 1880. She would spend the rest of her life there, enduring a harsh, isolated existence in the poor, hostile int

• Language: English
• Publisher: Eastbridge Books
• Release date: Sep 19, 2019
• ISBN: 9781788691185

Pearl S. Buck

Pearl S. Buck (1892–1973) was a bestselling and Nobel Prize–winning author. Her classic novel The Good Earth (1931) was awarded a Pulitzer Prize and William Dean Howells Medal. Born in Hillsboro, West Virginia, Buck was the daughter of missionaries and spent much of the first half of her life in China, where many of her books are set. In 1934, civil unrest in China forced Buck back to the United States. Throughout her life she worked in support of civil and women’s rights, and established Welcome House, the first international, interracial adoption agency. In addition to her highly acclaimed novels, Buck wrote two memoirs and biographies of both of her parents. For her body of work, Buck received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1938, the first American woman to have done so. She died in Vermont. 

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THE EXILE

The Exile

Portrait of an American Mother

by Pearl S. Buck

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Published by Eastbridge Books, an imprint of Camphor Press Ltd

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First published 1936.

This edition copyright © 2019 Eastbridge. First e-book edition 2019.

All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

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978-1-78869-118-5

Contents

Introduction to The Exile & Fighting Angel by Pearl S. Buck

Pearl Buck’s Many Worlds

America’s World in China

The World of China in Revolution

Pearl Buck’s China Books and America’s Mission in China

Pearl Buck and Her Biographies of Her Parents

The Exile: Portrait of an American Mother

Fighting Angel: Portrait of a Soul

The Exile: Portrait of an American Mother

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Introduction

to

The Exile & Fighting Angel

by

Pearl S. Buck

Pearl Buck,

says her recent biographer, was a woman of magnitude and range who has been hidden in plain sight.[1] These long out of print biographies of her parents tell compelling stories, but they also help us to see Buck herself more clearly and to look deeper into her other China books, including The Good Earth. They lead us into her own character for Buck was herself both an exile and a fighting angel.

The Exile: Portrait of an American Mother is a memoir of Caroline Stulting Sydenstricker (1857–1921). Although it was not published until 1936, Buck wrote a draft just after her mother died, then stashed the manuscript in the wall so that her future children might know their grandmother. Carie, as she calls her mother in the book, as a child had longed to hear God’s voice. Carie sat beside her mother’s death bed, listened, but heard nothing. She went to China in hopes that God would speak to her if she made the sacrifice of becoming a missionary, but soon found she had exiled herself from her American home and family. When the deaths of three of her children in China made her sacrifice seem meaningless, she exiled herself also from the traditional patriarchal God of her parents and finally even from her husband, whose tight theological mission kept him from seeing either his family or actual China. Carie saw and understood the horror around her as China disintegrated, but finally found her mission in secular, daily life: she built a succession of homes for her children and bestowed practical, unjudging charity on neighbors and strangers, even as she offered unbending moral judgment on her family. Carie’s daughter, as Pearl called herself, determined to never make her mother’s mistake of subordinating herself to either a man or to a zealous creed.

Fighting Angel: Portrait of a Soul, the conflicted portrait of her father, Absalom Sydenstricker (1852–1931), was written in 1936 to take advantage of the success of The Exile but also to tell a different part of her parents’ story. Andrew, the less craggy name she uses for her father in the book, had a swordlike singleness of heart, for the early missionaries, she wrote, were born warriors and very great men who were proud and quarrelsome and brave and intolerant and passionate. He dedicated himself to the Work, as Buck sardonically called it. A lifetime of evangelizing produced few converts, but at the cost of scarcely recognizing the existence of his wife or family and of failing to understand a perilous, unyielding China. Though Absalom professed not to know what the word imperialism meant, Buck sees his mission as part of the astounding imperialisms of the West. [FA 76, 302][2] Buck remarked that reading Herman Melville’s Moby Dick saved her soul, and perhaps she saw something of her father in Captain Ahab, a figure also bent on a mission.

The two books are first of all energetic cameo portraits of two Americans who challenged China in its painful transition from a nineteenth century empire to a twentieth century republic. The Western powers violently forced open the doors to bring guns, electricity and the telegraph, steam engines, and Christianity. The Sydenstrickers were in the first generation of Westerners allowed to live inside China, so portraying their American mission against the historic backdrop of violence and progress led Buck beyond personality and individuals into politics. For, in 1936, when she published these books, just as today, Americans were debating their role in the world. Buck contrasted her father’s blissful but fixed and sterile mission with her mother’s anguished but down-to-earth spiritual progress. In the telling, their stories made a comment on America’s approach to China and to the world.[3]

Pearl Buck’s Many Worlds

Buck

called her 1954 memoir My Several Worlds.[4] Some of these worlds were geographic or cultural: I grew up in China, in one world and not of it, and belonging to another world and yet not of it. One was the small, white, clean Presbyterian world of my parents and the other the big, loving, merry, not-too-clean Chinese world. There was no communication between them. [MSW 10, 51] In this Chinese world she studied classical Chinese with a tutor said to be descended from Confucius and listened to illiterate villagers telling stories of heroes, bandits, and schemers from China’s vast oral encyclopedia of history.

She lived through several worlds in time. The China of her childhood was one of Confucian ideals and village religion but the China of the 1920s was one of nationalism and revolution. She also lived through several Americas. Her mother’s West Virginia family survived starvation during the Civil War but then prospered by hard work. She saw this West Virginia good earth when she spent a year there in 1901, but when she returned for college in 1910, America was already becoming urban, cosmopolitan, and secular. She and her brother Edgar drifted away from the church and puritanical values of their parents and both eventually had divorces. (Edgar, however, put off his divorce until after his mother died; she aggressively shamed him by tearfully blaming herself for his sinful moral failure.) By 1934, when she returned to the United States, Buck still wrote of simple rural values, but her own life became cosmopolitan and sophisticated; as she joined Eleanor Roosevelt to work for racial equality and denounce Western imperialism in Asia, she lived on Park Avenue in New York and commuted to a comfortable farm house in Buck’s County, Pennsylvania.

Each world taught things about the others which were not apparent to people who lived in only one of them. I became mentally bifocal, she claimed and realized that there was no such condition as absolute truth. [MSW 52] To make sense of the lives of her father and mother, however, she had to figure out how these worlds were related and to ponder how history changed them.

America’s World in China

Absalom

was impractical, gawky, self-absorbed, and not an attractive match, but when he announced that it was his duty to go to China, Carie readily accepted his marriage proposal in the hopes that God would be open to her if she made this sacrifice. [TE 87] Her father opposed: What, a young and handsome woman go to a country where people were heathen and would as soon eat a Christian as not? [TE 85] They were married on July 8, 1880, and left almost immediately. Absalom bought only one train ticket and had to be reminded that his new wife was going along.

Absalom and his generation of missionaries believed the hymn which said in Christ there is no East or West. He wore Chinese shoes and clothing when he went out among the villages and let his hair grow long and tied it in a queue, as Chinese men did. When Pearl became old enough to think of marriage, he remarked that his preference would be for her to marry a Chinese. He began his study of the Confucian classics the morning after arriving in China, but his motivation was to acquire a cultivated vocabulary, not to study the ideas. His daughter later concluded that the philosophy of Confucius was essentially the philosophy of Jesus, but Absalom disagreed: Confucius says some very nice things, he allowed, but he knew nothing of God. [FA 65] His life project was the translation of the Bible into language which the common man could understand when read aloud, in contrast to literary Chinese which could only be understood on the page, and then by only the very educated. Caroline, whose knack for the spoken language annoyed her husband, developed a warm network of friends, but Absalom wanted only to build an empire of churches and disciples.

Mission boards in England and North America made grand plans for the evangelization of the world in our generation and what they later called the Christian occupation of China. Diplomats and traders often viewed missionaries with a mixture of contempt and annoyance, fearing they would interfere with their more important matters by stirring up resentment with their schemes to buy land, set up schools, and protect females and orphans. When these conflicts with local interests created incidents, missionaries invoked their protected status. Over the course of the 1890s, Chinese watched in fear as Europeans carved up the world and took positions of authority in China’s countryside. One evening, village hooligans encircled the Sydenstricker house. Caroline, sensitive to Chinese courtesy, defused the threat by inviting the older men of the group into the house and offering tea. But when Boxer fighters spread across northern China killing Christians and foreign missionaries, Caroline and the children moved to Shanghai for the winter as European, Russian, Japanese, and American armies launched a calculated campaign of retribution. Absalom could not conceive that anyone would harm him, but when the family returned, he was safe but shaken and never spoke of his experiences.

The American Open Door Policy originally aimed to defend commercial interests without involving costly action, but Open Door soon became an alluring phrase which portrayed America as the model and benefactor to an emerging New China. When the Qing dynasty gave way to the Republic in 1912, middle-class Americans too easily assumed that Uncle Sam would walk through the Open Door and that a New China would adopt the Anglo-Saxon Protestant values which they took to be universal. The theology of newly arrived missionaries backed this up. Absalom and his colleagues believed that their mission was simply to evangelize the Gospel. The younger missionaries — of the Social Gospel persuasion and more likely to be college graduates — doubted the value of proselytizing poverty stricken villagers in a chaotic country; they worked to build an urban middle class which would prepare the way for Christianity through social reform, economic development, and education. President Woodrow Wilson, like the Sydenstrickers a Presbyterian, welcomed the new Republic of China in 1912. Many of the leaders were Western-educated and some were professing Christians, including Sun Yatsen, the president. China, it seemed, would follow the same path as the United States, but a few steps behind.[5]

In 1910, Caroline and Absalom took Pearl and her younger sister Grace on a tour through Russia and Europe, with a six-month stopover in Switzerland to study French, after which Pearl enrolled at Randolph-Macon Women’s College in Lynchburg, Virginia. In Russia, Absalom was prophetic; no country based on such exploitation of the common people could long endure. In Europe, Pearl and Carie visited the museums to enjoy the source of so much beauty, but Absalom complained in Rome that there were too many naked statutes.

On landing in the United States, Pearl was shocked by that foreign country called home. On her 1901 visit, she had been surprised to see white men working on the docks in San Francisco, as she thought only Chinese performed manual labor; and, even in later years, she found the air in movie theaters so foul that she had to leave. She agreed with Chinese that eating meat gave American audiences an offensive smell. At college, she was at first an object of curiosity for having grown up in Asia, a region of the globe in which my college mates had not the slightest interest; and this fact lent her an aura of strangeness, more unkindly called queerness. College mates and even her West Virginia family never asked about China or the people there or what they ate. [MSW 92, 94, 274]

After graduation in 1914, Pearl intended to stay in America to teach, but returned to look after her mother when she contracted sprue, an especially gruesome tropical infection of the bowels. In 1917, she married, with a quickness she was to regret, John Lossing Buck, a Presbyterian missionary and agronomist who was surveying Chinese farmers and teaching them scientific agriculture. Pearl’s parents objected that Lossing was not intellectual enough to fit into their family — he had attended Cornell, which they considered only an agricultural college. Lossing’s work fit into the Social Gospel mission and Woodrow Wilson’s vision of a world made safe for democracy by social and economic development.[6] The couple traveled through the villages of Anhui, in the Central Yangzi valley, Lossing on his bicycle, Pearl carried in proper Chinese style in a palanquin, talking with village women and children, interpreting for Lossing to fill out the survey forms. She later wrote that I had often wondered secretly what a young American could teach the Chinese farmers who had been farming successfully for generations on the same land and by the most skillful use of fertilizers and irrigation were still able to produce extraordinary yields. She tartly observed that it was disturbing to any American man, I am sure, to find that he had more to learn than to teach. However, she held her tongue, as living with her parents had taught her that it is important that a woman does not reveal her skepticisms to a man. [MSW 139]

Nanking University had started in the late nineteenth century by offering classes in the living room of its founder, but by the time Lossing joined its College of Agriculture and Forestry in 1920, it had grown into a thriving and comfortable institution. The Bucks moved into a spacious university house with a large garden. Pearl, with the help of a team of household servants, was busy but far from satisfied. In 1920, she gave birth to her first child, Carol, but complications from the birth made it impossible for her to bear further children. Carol was eventually diagnosed with PKU, or phenylketonuria, a genetic disease which led to mental retardation, and in 1921 Caroline died. After a few years, Absalom moved into the Buck household to finish his translation of the Bible and teach at the Nanking Theological Seminary. He expected (without asking) Pearl to look after him as his wife had done. Pearl, Lossing, and Carol spent the academic year 1924–1925 at Cornell, where Lossing immersed himself in the study of agriculture and Pearl worked for a Master’s degree in English. A local church helped them find Janice, the first of many children Pearl would adopt. During that year, Pearl concluded that to live an independent life, or even buy a winter coat for the cold upstate winter, she would have to earn her own living.

The World of China in Revolution

On

May 30, 1925, British officers in Shanghai ordered their troops to fire on Chinese students demonstrating against Japanese factory owners, killing a dozen and crystallizing the demands for radical change which had been building for nearly a decade. The proud but vague new term revolution seemed anathema to Wilsonian Americans, but to young Chinese it meant the establishment of a strong political force to carry out a double mission of anti-imperialism and anti-feudalism.

Pearl, Lossing, Carol, and Janice returned to Nanking in October. Pearl understood the yearning among young Chinese for social reform and their attacks on the arrogant and thieving ways of the foreigners, but she struggled with the problem of revolution. In 1924, as Sun Yatsen used Soviet advisers to reorganize his party, she had written:

Bolshevism? No, I think not. The young Chinese rants a little and philosophizes a great deal, but he has an inner foundation of unemotional, hard commonsense, a practical gift from his ancestors, which will make him stop and see what Bolshevism has done thus far, and finding it barren of fruit, he will cling to a saner, slower order of progress.[7]

Yet she also was impatient with the affluent university students she taught who knew little of village life and lived in a different world from the poorer students. One frequent visitor, the poet, Xu Zhimo (1898–1931), was proud to be called the Chinese Shelley. The handsome and distinguished poet used to sit in her living room and talk by the hour and wave his beautiful hands, big and perfectly shaped and smooth as a woman’s hands, and guiltless, I am sure, of any real manual labor. [MSW 178–179] (Recent biographers have speculated that Pearl and Xu were lovers.) An airplane crash in 1931 ended Xu’s life but ensured his romantic reputation.

Politics and chaos once more challenged the safety of the foreigner. Chiang Kaishek emerged as leader of the revolutionary Nationalist Party after the death of Sun Yatsen and launched the Northern Expedition to reunite China and expel foreign imperialism. In March of 1927, Nationalist troops reached the Nanking University campus; when the vice-president refused to surrender his watch, they shot and killed him. Other troops ransacked the houses of foreigners, killing six of them. Pearl’s sister Grace Yaukey and her family had fled from their mission post in Hunan, but Absalom again refused to believe that any Chinese would do him harm and turned down the American consul’s offer of evacuation. When the looters came too close to ignore, one of the household servants, at the risk of her own life, led the missionary families over the back wall to her nearby hut.

As they sat in a windowless back room and listened to the sounds of destruction around them, Pearl thought of the Chinese Christians and foreign missionaries killed by the Boxers and concluded that the wild winds had been sown and the whirlwinds were gathering. It was only chance that they had been born of the white race, but none of us could escape the history of the centuries before any of us had been born. True, she claimed later, with perhaps the slightest tinge of sanctimony, she had taken the side of the Chinese against her own race, had felt that she never committed even the smallest unkindness against them, and was sensitive to the injustices which others had committed. But none of that mattered: We were hiding for our lives because we were white. [MSW 208]

When the American Navy shelled Nanking, Nationalist troops led the hidden families to meet U.S. Marines who took them to Shanghai on a gunboat. On board, all except Pearl got food poisoning from canned meats left over from the Spanish-American War, but Pearl found an old copy of Moby Dick, a book which she said saved her soul. The family spent the rest of the year in a mountain village in Japan where she got an knowledge of Japanese people which kept her from joining the racist attacks on Japanese and Japanese-Americans during World War II.

That winter frightened Pearl. She became even more skeptical of a missionary enterprise which required gunboats to protect it and she acknowledged the criticism that missionaries lived more luxuriously than the Chinese they had come to serve. She vowed to live a simpler life, in a smaller house. The number of missionaries in China fell as Chiang’s new government required foreign schools and hospitals to come under Chinese control and it became harder to raise money at home.

When she returned from Japan in late 1927, Pearl devoted herself in earnest to the vocation of writing. She wanted to fulfill the ambitions denied to her mother, but she also needed money to support herself if she left her marriage, which had become increasingly lonely as Lossing spent little of his warmth on his family and perhaps had interest in other women. Finally, since the mission board could not provide it, she needed money for Carol’s specialized care. Pearl went once more to the States in 1929 to find long-term care for Carol; and, while there, Richard Walsh, editor at John Day publishers in New York, accepted East Wind, West Wind, a collection of her stories. She and Richard began a relationship that would end in marriage and many years of professional teamwork. Back in Nanking, she retreated every morning to the attic of their university bungalow and within the year completed the manuscript for The Good Earth.

This simple novel of work and family in village China was the American number-one best-seller in both 1931 and 1932, won the Pulitzer Prize, and has been a favorite among readers ever since. One historian called it the most influential non-Chinese book on China since Marco Polo. At a time when Chinese could not legally emigrate to the United States from China, The Good Earth challenged racist images and helped prepare Americans to see Chinese as wartime allies.[8] For Pearl, freed from nursing duties by her father’s death in 1931, the income from The Good Earth also meant that she could pay for a safe placement for Carol. When they returned to Ithaca, she announced to Lossing that she wanted a divorce and in 1934 went to New York City to marry Walsh. She never returned to China.

Pearl Buck’s China Books and America’s Mission in China

The

1938 Nobel Prize in Literature went not for just The Good Earth but for the entire body of her China books, with special mention of the biographies of her parents. These China books, written in the attic of her bungalow in Nanking or just after she returned to the States, were not planned as a body of work, but they hang together as a whole.[9] After receiving the Nobel Prize in 1938, she went through a dry spell which marked the end of the China chapter in her life.

Since The Good Earth is so widely known, it is easy to forget that Buck’s China books are unusual. Most American and European China fiction featured white heroes set against a Chinese background, often pitted against or menaced by it. In contrast, Buck’s novels are set in village China and the heroes are Chinese, joining a line of minority thought going back to the 1840s which debated the American enterprise in China and often sided with the Chinese.

S. Wells Williams’ The Middle Kingdom (1848; 1872) described China in meticulous and unreadable detail in order to demonstrate that it could become a Christian country. Arthur Smith (1845–1932) in his Chinese Characteristics (1894) argued that China needed Christianity but should not rely on Western technology. Carl Crow (1884–1942) came to Shanghai and ran a successful public relations firm after World War I, but his 400 Million Customers (1937) cautioned clients that they had to adapt to Chinese characteristics, not expect Chinese to adopt Western ones. Alice Tisdale Hobart (1882–1967) in her novel Oil for the Lamps of China (1933) showed that Standard Oil Company agents brought the ideal of literal and figurative light to China which ended in destruction brought by Western notions of progress. Edgar Snow (1905–1972) discovered Mao; his Red Star Over China (1937) portrayed revolution as the means to oppose Japan and liberate the peasant from centuries of feudalism. In his Mountain Road (1954), Theodore White (1915–1986), probably the first American reporter to study Chinese before coming to China, dramatized the wartime experience of a team of originally well-disposed American soldiers who end up destroying a Chinese village.

The point here is not whether the various Chinas portrayed in these books were rosy or dark and not even whether the analysis in any of the books was correct. The point is that these books are knowledgeable and engaged; although in some ways quite misleading, they offer a dramatic view of how those first generations grappled with China and the self-knowledge they gained. They debated whether modernity in China would be built by returning to classical roots, destroying those roots by Westernizing, or creating some alternative modernity. Would China embrace Wilsonian democratic change or turn to direct and violent revolution?[10]

Buck’s China books, especially The Exile and Fighting Angel, are part of this debate. Buck had seen a range of programs designed to uplift China but none of them convinced her. Her father, of course, simply presented the Bible, which to him was program enough. Her husband, following Open Door ideals and Woodrow Wilson, introduced the book of science. Still a third male out to transform China was Mao Zedong, who staged his 1927 Autumn Harvest Uprising in Hunan, a few hundred miles upriver from Buck’s Nanking bungalow. Mao’s program was to liberate the Chinese peasant from feudalism by violent destruction of the landlord class and the Confucian tradition.

The Good Earth implicitly rejects the programs represented by each of these three men. Buck did not portray a Chinese peasant, a word which does not appear in the book. The book only uses farmer, the word which writers in English consistently used until the late 1920s, when China was redefined as feudal and by definition became full of peasants.[11] Wang Lung the farmer, as she has him call himself, was a petty capitalist and head of his family who did not need the Bible, scientific farming, or revolution. He did need his wife, though, and Buck shows her not simply as a victim, but as the roof ridge pole of the house upon which everything leans.

This opposition to Western paternalism and support of Chinese moral autonomy reflects the rethinking of missions in theologically liberal circles which went beyond the Social Gospel. When the Harvard professor William Ernest Hocking came to China for the Laymen’s Foreign Missions Inquiry in 1931, he met and became good friends with Pearl. Hocking’s report called for world understanding on the spiritual level, not hostility to other world religions or seeking to displace them.