“How can the son of my mistress leave these courts? It is time that I died—it is time that I died!”
They live now in a little two-story house like ours on the Street of the Bridges. My brother within this short time has grown older and more quiet. For the first time in his life he has to think where food and clothes must come from. He goes every day early in me morning to teach in the government school here, he who never rose in the morning until the sun was swinging high in the heavens. His eyes are resolute, and he speaks less often and smiles less easily than he used. I ventured to say to him one day,
“Do you regret anything, my brother?”
He flashed one of his old quick looks at me from under his eyelids, and he replied,
“Never!”
Ah, I think my mother was wrong! He is not the son of his father. He is wholly the son of his mother for steadfastness.
Now what do you think has happened, My Sister? I laughed when I heard of it, and suddenly without understanding it I wept.
Last night my brother heard a mighty knocking on the door of his little house. He went to open it himself, since they keep but one servant in these days, and to his amazement, there stood Wang Da Ma. She came on a wheelbarrow, and with her she brought all her possessions in a large woven bamboo basket and a bundle tied in a blue cloth. When she saw my brother she said with great calmness and self-possession,
“I have come to live with my lady’s son and to serve her grandson.”
My brother asked her,
“But do you not know that I am no longer accounted my mother’s son?”
Wang Da Ma answered obstinately, grasping the bundle and the basket firmly in either hand,
“Now then! Do you stand there and say that? Did I not take you from your mother’s arms into these arms when you were scarce a foot in length and as naked as a fish? Have you not fed from my breasts? What you were born, that you are, and your son is your son. Let it be as I say!”
My brother said he scarcely knew what to reply. It is true that she has known us all our lives and is more to us than a servant. While he hesitated she moved her bundle and her basket into the little hall, and grumbling and panting, for she grows old and fat now, she fumbled within herself for her purse. When she had found it she turned to quarrel mightily with the wheelbarrow man over the price of the fare, and thus she established herself as in her home.
This she has done for my mother’s sake. It is absurd to notice over-much the behavior of a servant, nevertheless my brother laughs with an edge of tenderness in his laughter when he speaks of her. He is pleased that she is come and that in her arms his son will sleep and play.
This morning she came to pay her respects to me, and she was as always. One would think she had lived with my brother in this foreign house for years, although I know she is secretly astonished at many things. My brother says she pretends to notice nothing strange, although she distrusts especially the stairs, and nothing will induce her to climb them, for the first time, in the presence of others. But to-day she told me that she could not swallow the changes that have taken place in my mother’s house.
She said that the fat concubine has become the First Lady in my mother’s place. It has been declared in the ancestral hall before the sacred tablets. She walks proudly about clad in red and purple, and on her fingers are many rings. She has even moved into my mother’s rooms! Hearing Wang Da Ma tell of this, I know I can never go there again. Ah, my mother!
He is tender to her, his wife, more tender now than ever since he has given up everything for her sake. He who has lived in ease all his life on his father’s wealth has now become poor. But he has learned how to make her happy.
Yesterday when I went to see her she looked up from a page on which she was writing long twisting flowing lines. When I came into the room with my son she looked up smiling as she always does when she sees the child.
“I am writing to my mother,” she said, her eyes suddenly illumined as they are when she smiles. “I can tell her everything at last. I shall tell her that I have hung yellow curtains at the windows and that there is a bowl of golden narcissus on the table. I shall tell her that to-day I have lined a little basket with pink silk for him to sleep in—silk the color of American apple-blossoms! She will see through every word and know how happy—how happy I am, at last!”
Have you ever seen a lovely valley, My Sister, gray beneath a heavy sky? Then suddenly the clouds part, and sunshine pours down, and life and color start out joyous and shouting from every point of that valley. It is so with her now. Her eyes are things alive in themselves for joy, and her voice is a continual song.
Her lips are never still. They are always curving and moving with little smiles and fragments of quick laughter. She is really very beautiful. I have always doubted her beauty before, because it was not like anything I had seen, but now I perceive it clearly. Storm and sullenness have gone from her eyes. They are blue like the sea under a bright sky.
As for my brother, now that he has done what he decided to do, he is quiet and grave and content. He is a man.
When I think that these two have left, each of them, a world for the other’s sake, I am humbled before such love. The fruit of it will be a precious fruit—as marvelous as jade.
As for their child, I am moved in two ways. He will have his own world to make. Being of neither East nor West purely, he will be rejected of each, for none will understand him. But I think, if he has the strength of both his parents, he will understand both worlds, and so overcome.
But this is only as I think, when I watch my brother and his wife. I am only a woman. I must speak to my husband of it, since he is wise, and he knows without being told where the truth lies.
Ah, but this I do know! I long to behold their child. I wish him to be a brother to my son.
XXI
THE FOREIGN ONE SINGS. Hour after hour songs bubble from her heart to her lips, and she is gay with a joy amazing. I, who have borne a son, rejoice with her, and in our common human experience we are knit together. We sew upon the clothes, little Chinese clothes. When she ponders upon what colors to choose she knits her brows above her smiling lips and she questions herself thus,
“Now if his eyes are black he will need this scarlet, but if his eyes are gray, he must have rose-pink. Will his eyes be black or gray, little sister?” She turns her laughing eyes to me.
Then I, smiling back, inquire,
“What color are they already in your heart?”
And she says, flushing and suddenly shy before me,
“They are black, always; let us take the scarlet.”
“Scarlet is the color of joy,” I tell her, “and it always is suitable for a son.”
Together we know that we have chosen wisely.
I showed her then the tiny first clothes of my son, and together we placed the patterns upon the scarlet flowered satin and upon the soft scarlet silk. I myself have embroidered the little tiger-faced shoes. On such tasks we have grown near, each to the other. I have forgotten that she was ever strange. She has become my sister. I have learned to call her name. Mary—Mary!
When all was complete she made a little set of foreign clothes such as I had never seen for simplicity and fineness. I marveled at the gossamer cloth. The minute sleeves were set into the long, skirt-like robe with lace more fine than embroidery, and the cloth, though not silk, was as soft as mist. I asked her,
“How will you know when to clothe him in these?”
She smiled and patted my cheek swiftly. She has sweet, coaxing ways now that she is gay.
“Six days of the week he shall be his father’s child, but on the seventh I shall dress him in linen and lace, and he shall be American.” Then she was suddenly grave. “At first I thought I could make him wholly Chinese, but now I know that I must give him America also, for it is myself. He will belong to both sides of the world, my little sister—to you and to me both.”
I smiled again at her. I see how it is that she has dr
awn my brother’s heart out of him and holds it fast!
Now has their child come to us, My Sister! I have received him in my arms from the hands of Wang Da Ma. Murmuring and laughing with pride she gave him to me. I gazed upon him with eagerness.
He is a man child, a child of strength and vigor. It is true that he is not beautiful as my son is beautiful. A son like my husband’s and mine could not be born a second time. But the son of my brother and of my sister is not like any other. He has the great bones and the lusty vigor of the West. But his hair and his eyes are black like ours, and his skin, though clear as jade, is dark. I can see already that in his eyes and about his lips is a look of my own mother. With what a mingling of pain and gladness do I see it!
Yet to my sister I did not speak of the likeness. I bore her child to her laughing. I said,
“See what thou hast done, my sister! Into this tiny knot hast thou tied two worlds!”
She lay back faint, exhausted, smiling.
“Place him here beside me,” she whispered, and I did it.
He lay against her milk-white breast, dark and black-eyed. His mother rested her eyes on him. She touched his black hair with her white fingers.
“He must wear the red coat,” I said, smiling at the sight. “He is far too dark for the white.”
“He is like his father and I am satisfied,” she said simply.
Then her husband came in and I withdrew myself.
Last night after the child’s birth I stood beside my husband in our son’s room. Together we looked out of the open window into the moonlit night. The air was very clear, and our little garden was like a painting, brushed in black and white. The trees stood pointed against the sky, ebony tipped with the silver of the moon.
Behind us our son lay sleeping in his bamboo bed. He is growing too big for it now, and as he slept he flung out his arms, and his hands struck softly against the sides. He is a man altogether these days! We looked at each other in pride, my husband and I, as we heard his strong, sturdy breathing.
And then I thought of the little new-born child, and how already he looked like my mother, whose life went out as his began. I said softly with a faint sadness,
“With what pain of separation has the child of our brother and our sister taken on his life! The separation of his mother from her land and her race; the pain of his father’s mother, giving up her only son; the pain of his father, giving up his home and his ancestors and the sacred past!”
But my husband only smiled. He put his arm about my shoulders. Then he said gravely,
“Think only of this—with what joy of union he came into the world! He has tied together the two hearts of his parents into one. Those two hearts, with all their difference in birth and rearing—differences existing centuries ago! What union!”
Thus he comforted me when I remembered past sadness. He will not allow me to cling to anything because it is old. He keeps my face set to the future. He says,
“We must let all that go, my Love! We do not want our son fettered by old, useless things!”
And thinking of these two, of my son and his cousin-brother, I know that my husband is right—always right!
A Biography of Pearl S. Buck
Pearl S. Buck (1892–1973) was a bestselling and Nobel Prize-winning author of fiction and nonfiction, celebrated by critics and readers alike for her groundbreaking depictions of rural life in China. Her renowned novel The Good Earth (1931) received the Pulitzer Prize and the William Dean Howells Medal. For her body of work, Buck was awarded the 1938 Nobel Prize in Literature—the first American woman to have won this honor.
Born in 1892 in Hillsboro, West Virginia, Buck spent much of the first forty years of her life in China. The daughter of Presbyterian missionaries based in Zhenjiang, she grew up speaking both English and the local Chinese dialect, and was sometimes referred to by her Chinese name, Sai Zhenzhju. Though she moved to the United States to attend Randolph-Macon Woman’s College, she returned to China afterwards to care for her ill mother. In 1917 she married her first husband, John Lossing Buck. The couple moved to a small town in Anhui Province, later relocating to Nanking, where they lived for thirteen years.
Buck began writing in the 1920s, and published her first novel, East Wind: West Wind in 1930. The next year she published her second book, The Good Earth, a multimillion-copy bestseller later made into a feature film. The book was the first of the Good Earth trilogy, followed by Sons (1933) and A House Divided (1935). These landmark works have been credited with arousing Western sympathies for China—and antagonism toward Japan—on the eve of World War II.
Buck published several other novels in the following years, including many that dealt with the Chinese Cultural Revolution and other aspects of the rapidly changing country. As an American who had been raised in China, and who had been affected by both the Boxer Rebellion and the 1927 Nanking Incident, she was welcomed as a sympathetic and knowledgeable voice of a culture that was much misunderstood in the West at the time. Her works did not treat China alone, however; she also set her stories in Korea (Living Reed), Burma (The Promise), and Japan (The Big Wave). Buck’s fiction explored the many differences between East and West, tradition and modernity, and frequently centered on the hardships of impoverished people during times of social upheaval.
In 1934 Buck left China for the United States in order to escape political instability and also to be near her daughter, Carol, who had been institutionalized in New Jersey with a rare and severe type of mental retardation. Buck divorced in 1935, and then married her publisher at the John Day Company, Richard Walsh. Their relationship is thought to have helped foster Buck’s volume of work, which was prodigious by any standard.
Buck also supported various humanitarian causes throughout her life. These included women’s and civil rights, as well as the treatment of the disabled. In 1950, she published a memoir, The Child Who Never Grew, about her life with Carol; this candid account helped break the social taboo on discussing learning disabilities. In response to the practices that rendered mixed-raced children unadoptable—in particular, orphans who had already been victimized by war—she founded Welcome House in 1949, the first international, interracial adoption agency in the United States. Pearl S. Buck International, the overseeing nonprofit organization, addresses children’s issues in Asia.
Buck died of lung cancer in Vermont in 1973. Though The Good Earth was a massive success in America, the Chinese government objected to Buck’s stark portrayal of the country’s rural poverty and, in 1972, banned Buck from returning to the country. Despite this, she is still greatly considered to have been “a friend of the Chinese people,” in the words of China’s first premier, Zhou Enlai. Her former house in Zhenjiang is now a museum in honor of her legacy.
Buck’s parents, Caroline Stulting and Absalom Sydenstricker, were Southern Presbyterian missionaries.
Buck was born Pearl Comfort Sydenstricker in Hillsboro, West Virginia, on June 26, 1892. This was the family’s home when she was born, though her parents returned to China with the infant Pearl three months after her birth.
Buck lived in Zhenjiang, China, until 1911. This photograph was found in her archives with the following caption typed on the reverse: “One of the favorite locations for the street barber of China is a temple court or the open space just outside the gate. Here the swinging shop strung on a shoulder pole may be set up, and business briskly carried on. A shave costs five cents, and if you wish to have your queue combed and braided you will be out at least a dime. The implements, needless to say, are primitive. No safety razor has yet become popular in China. Old horseshoes and scrap iron form one of China’s significant importations, and these are melted up and made over into scissors and razors, and similar articles. Neither is sanitation a feature of a shave in China. But then, cleanliness is not a feature of anything in the ex-Celestial Empire.”
Buck’s writing was notable for its sensitivity to the rural farming class, which she came to know during her childhood in
China. The following caption was found typed on the reverse of this photograph in Buck’s archive: “Chinese beggars are all ages of both sexes. They run after your rickshaw, clog your progress in front of every public place such as a temple or deserted palace or fair, and pester you for coppers with a beggar song—‘Do good, be merciful.’ It is the Chinese rather than the foreigners who support this vast horde of indigent people. The beggars have a guild and make it very unpleasant for the merchants. If a stipulated tax is not paid them by the merchant they infest his place and make business impossible. The only work beggars ever perform is marching in funeral and wedding processions. It is said that every family expects 1 or 2 of its children to contribute to support of family by begging.”
Buck worked continually on behalf of underprivileged children, especially in the country where she grew up. The following caption was found typed on the reverse of this photograph in Buck’s archive: “The children of China seem to thrive in spite of dirt and poverty, and represent nature’s careful selection in the hard race for the right to existence. They are peculiarly sturdy and alert, taken as a whole, and indicate something of the virility of a nation that has continued great for four thousand years.”
Johann Waldemar de Rehling Quistgaard painted Buck in 1933, when the writer was forty-one years old—a year after she won the Pulitzer Prize for The Good Earth. The portrait currently hangs at Green Hills Farm in Pennsylvania, where Buck lived from 1934 and which is today the headquarters for Pearl S. Buck International. (Image courtesy of Pearl S. Buck International, www.pearlsbuck.org.)
Richard J. Walsh—Buck’s publisher and second husband—pictured in China with an unidentified rickshaw man. Walsh’s tweed suit and pipe are typical of his signature daily attire.