As if our childhood had returned, Pearl welcomed me to Nanking. We climbed the famous Purple Mountain together. Beneath our feet spread the city of Nanking. Temples, shrines, and the tomb of the fourteenth-century Ming emperor were scattered over the mountainside. The city had a twenty-four-mile-long wall and nine elaborately decorated, forty-foot-high gates. Running beside the city was the Yangtze River, which flowed on to Chin-kiang.
“I love the winding cobbled streets and the little shops glimmering with candlelight at night,” Pearl said. “I adore the flickering oil lamps that light the streets. I can’t help but imagine the family life of the people within these ancient walls.”
After I settled into my small apartment near the newspaper office, we began to visit each other regularly. Pearl lived in a three-room brick house. It was modest compared to the residences of other foreigners. The house belonged to the university compound occupied mostly by faculty. Lossing had been living here for four years now. Like Carie, Pearl tended to her garden. Besides roses and camellias, there were tomatoes and cabbages.
I was pleased to see Carol again, although I was sad to witness her condition. She was five years old. I tried to communicate with her, but she did not respond. I also saw Lossing. His skin was whiter than I had remembered. He taught in the classroom, where he felt that he was wasting his time. He longed to return to the field.
“Please, Willow, stay for dinner,” Pearl insisted one evening. “It will be no trouble for me at all. The servants do everything for three bags of rice at the end of the month. It makes me feel guilty even though almost every white family in the city enjoys such help. My chef is from Yangchow, but he can also cook Peking and Cantonese style.”
It was at the dinner table that I witnessed the couple fight. Lossing needed Pearl to be his translator for his new field experiment, but Pearl refused.
“I no longer know who this woman is.” Lossing turned to me, speaking half jokingly. “She certainly doesn’t need a husband. She is having an affair with her imagined characters.”
“Perhaps writing eases her anxiety.” I tried to make peace.
Lossing interrupted me with laughter. “No, you don’t know her, Willow. My world is too small for this woman. Vanity and greed are the true demons here. And yet if Pearl has ambition, she has little skill or training. She wants to be a novelist, but she has no academic training and no material. She is lost as a mother, and she is bound to lose if she tries to make it as a writer.”
Pearl stared at Lossing, disgusted.
Lossing ignored her and continued, “It is destructive when a hobby turns into an obsession.”
“Stop it, Lossing,” Pearl said, trying to control her anger.
“You have a responsibility,” Lossing went on. “You owe this family!”
“Please, stop.”
“I have the right to express myself. And Willow has the right to know the truth.”
“What truth?” Pearl’s eyes were burning.
“That this marriage is a mistake!” Lossing said loudly.
“As if we even have a marriage!” Pearl responded.
“No, we don’t,” Lossing agreed.
“You have no right to ask me to give up writing,” Pearl said.
“So you have made up your mind.” Lossing looked at her. “You have decided to ignore my needs and abandon this family.”
“How have I abandoned this family?”
“You disappear mentally when you write. We don’t exist. I know I don’t. You refuse to work with me to support this family. You well know that without your help I can’t do my job. You treat your writing as if it is a job, but all I see is an amateur at play. Let me remind you, I am the one who earns the money, who pays for the rent, all the living expenses, and Carol’s doctor fees!”
“Writing helps me stay sane.” Pearl was on the verge of tears.
“It doesn’t seem to be helping on that score.”
Pearl struggled to compose herself.
Lossing carried on.
Pearl looked defeated. She got up and went to the kitchen.
From the living room, I heard Carol’s screaming and the maid’s voice, “Put it down!”
“I am only talking common sense,” Lossing said to me. “I can understand that Pearl wants to write novels to escape her life. But who wants to read her stories? The Chinese don’t need a blonde woman to tell their stories, and the Westerners are not interested in China. What makes Pearl think that she stands a chance of succeeding?”
CHAPTER 14
Taking the Nanking Daily job proved to be the best decision I ever made in my career. I was surrounded by people who were intelligent and open-minded. Our staff competed with the Peking Daily and the Shanghai Daily. I often brought work home that I couldn’t finish in the office. After a year, I had moved to a new place, a little bungalow located outside the ancient city gate. It was close to the woods and mountains. The fresh air, the views, the privacy—all of these did me good. Clearing the weeds, I discovered that I actually had a garden. I planted roses, lilacs, and peonies. It pleased me that I would be able to bring fresh flowers to Carie’s grave site by the time of the Spring Memorial Festival.
Pearl continued her teaching at Nanking University. We celebrated our birthdays together. We had reached our midthirties and we joked and teased each other about our lives. I was still legally married to my former husband, since China didn’t have such a thing as divorce. I had no idea how many new concubines my husband had married and how many children he had. I asked my father if he, as the head of the church, would make an announcement to disassociate me from the man.
Papa didn’t think that it was necessary. “Out of sight, out of mind,” he said. “Your husband has been telling everyone that you are dead. I am getting tired of explaining to people that you are not dead.”
I asked Papa if he would like to come to Nanking so that I could take care of him. He declined. He said that he was God’s foot soldier. The church was his home, its members his family.
Pearl, on the other hand, talked the head dean of Nanking University into offering Absalom a nonpaying position teaching a course on Western religion. Pearl convinced the seventy-three-year-old Absalom to slow down, to move to Nanking and live with her. He finally agreed.
Following Absalom, Carpenter Chan and Lilac also moved to Nanking. They found a modest place a mile from Pearl’s house. Carpenter Chan believed that Absalom would need him, for he “will never stop expanding God’s kingdom.”
Lilac was convinced that it was her husband’s commitment to Absalom’s causes that brought her happiness. Lilac was one among hundreds of Absalom’s followers.
I said to Pearl, “Absalom feels content enough to quit risking his life going inland.”
“Remember the beginning, when Absalom preached on the streets of Chin-kiang?” Pearl smiled.
“Oh, yes. Everyone thought he was mad.”
Pearl tried to get Carol to say the one word she had been teaching her all week. But Carol would not deliver. It drove both of them crazy. The Chinese servants had been feeding Carol relentlessly, for they believed that the fatter the child, the better the health. Although mentally handicapped, Carol developed a strong body. One day Carol hit Pearl on the forehead with a stone paperweight.
Blood crawled down Pearl’s face like an earthworm. Carol, unaware of what she had done, went on playing. Pearl sat on the floor, quietly wiping the blood from her forehead.
Lossing, meanwhile, made peace with reality. He avoided Pearl and Carol. He spent long hours working in his office, even on Sundays.
Pearl’s refusal to give up on Carol aggravated the strain in their already suffering marriage. Pearl called Lossing a coward when he tried to convince her that there was no point in fighting God’s will.
Pearl often expressed her anger in Chinese. Lossing understood but couldn’t respond fast enough. Pearl would say, “Maggots don’t just breed in manure pits, they breed in expensive meat jars too.”
&nb
sp; When Pearl yelled, “Only the toes know when the shoe doesn’t fit,” it was unclear whether Lossing understood her meaning.
Fighting with her husband and caring for her daughter consumed Pearl. She no longer paid attention to her appearance. She wore the same wrinkled brown jacket and black cotton skirt every day. More and more, she looked like a local Chinese woman. With her hair tied up in a bun, she walked in a hurry with a stack of books under her arm.
Eventually Pearl quit making demands on Carol. I often found Pearl sitting quietly, watching her daughter. Her expression was infinitely sad.
At the university, Pearl was a beloved teacher. The fact that she was a native Chinese speaker made her the most popular foreign instructor on campus. She was promoted and became an official university staff member. Besides English, Pearl taught American and English literature. Pearl was sincerely interested in her students. She loved it when they compared their lives to those of the characters in Charles Dickens’s novels. Pearl taught older students, too. As they practiced their conversation skills, Pearl learned about their families and their lives outside of school.
Pearl shared with me one of her students’ stories. “This happened only three months ago,” she began. “A massacre took place in the town of Shao-xing. A group of young Communists were beheaded by the nationalist government. Their bodies were chopped up, ground, and made into bread stuffing. The bread was advertised for sale at the local bakery! Can you believe that, Willow? What a way to scare people into submission!”
Pearl discovered that her servants had been hiding something from her. “Last night,” she came to tell me, “I followed a noise to the back of my house and found a woman living there with her newborn baby. The woman was my age, perhaps younger. Her name was Soo-ching. She told me that she had been living there for six months and had given birth to her son only days before.”
“She begged you to let her stay?” I asked.
“Of course.”
“What did you say to her?”
“I didn’t know what to say. I can’t kick her out. The strangest thing was that this beggar lady named her son Confucius.”
I was not surprised. It could have been my name too. When Papa was a beggar, he decided that if I had been born a boy, he would have named me after Confucius, or Mencius, or the ancient Chinese philosophers Lao Tse or Chuang Tzu.
“Will you publish such stories if I write them?” Pearl asked. “I mean the stories of real people?”
“Personally, I’d love to. But I’m not sure if the newspaper would agree,” I responded.
“Why not?” Pearl asked. “They are moving, human stories. Readers would be interested and the stories might do some good.”
“Yes, perhaps. But the paper has a tradition of publishing only what will inspire, not what will depress. Remember, this is the Nanking Daily, not the Chin-kiang Independent. Our funding is from the government.”
“What is the purpose of a newspaper if not to tell the truth?” Pearl said. “People will get a false picture of what is truly happening in China.”
“Read the alternative papers published by the Communists if you want the truth. I have books by Lu Hsun, Lao She, and Cao Yu.”
Pearl couldn’t wait. She came to my home and borrowed the books I recommended.
Though I continued to attend church regularly, great changes were happening in the outside world, and my job brought me into their midst. For Pearl, her reading soon expanded beyond my recommendations and helped push her marital troubles to the back of her mind. Her enthusiasm returned. She was once again the Pearl I used to know.
* * *
We discussed works by Lu Hsun. Pearl’s favorites were The True Story of Ah Q and The Story of Mrs. Xiang-Lin. Although the author’s criticism of society was sharp and original, we didn’t love the stories. Pearl’s trouble with Lu Hsun was that he depicted his characters as if he were standing on a roof looking down.
“The peasants he portrays are all narrow-minded, stubborn, and stupid,” Pearl pointed out.
“Well, it was considered revolutionary that he even made peasants his subjects,” I commented.
Pearl and I both loved Lao She and Cao Yu. Among their best were The Big House, Full Moon, and The Marriage of a Puppet Master. We favored Full Moon in particular for the author’s sensitivity. The story was about a single mother who was driven into prostitution. Although her daughter tries to avoid following in her mother’s footsteps, she ends up succumbing to the same fate.
Pearl liked the story but resented the novel’s bitter hopelessness. She preferred stories that offered hope in the end, however tragic. “The character must believe in himself, and he must have the stamina to endure.”
“Beautiful, heart-wrenching tragedy has been central to the Chinese tradition for thousands of years,” I reminded her. “Both novelists and readers relish what you call hopelessness.”
“That is not always true,” Pearl challenged. “The novel All Men Are Brothers is the best example. The poor peasants were forced to become bandits. But the novel is filled with energy. There is no bitterness to it. To me, this is the Chinese essence!”
“Chinese critics don’t share your opinion,” I argued. “They say All Men Are Brothers lacks sophistication. They consider it folk art, not literature.”
“That is exactly why things must change,” Pearl shot back. “Everyday life has a power of its own. And it’s important to pay attention to it. Look at Soo-ching, the lady who delivered her son in my backyard! I bet she bit off the umbilical cord like the character Er-niang in All Men Are Brothers! I didn’t see her pity herself. She was ready to go on. That poor lice-infested beggar lady! I think her a worthy subject, even heroic!”
I remembered the first time Pearl and I discussed the Chinese classic Dream of Red Mansion. I was sixteen and had just learned to read. Pearl didn’t like the novel, especially the hero, Pao Yu.
“Have your views changed regarding Dream of Red Mansion?” I asked.
“No. Pao Yu is nothing but a playboy,” Pearl replied.
“By Chinese estimations, Pao Yu is a rebel and an intellectual prince,” I said, smiling. “The popular view is that Pao Yu deserves more respect than an emperor.”
“What do you mean by popular? The people who hold such views are only a tiny minority.”
“Well, that minority rules the literary world.”
“Are you telling me that the majority, who happen to be peasants, don’t count in China?” Pearl was annoyed.
I had to agree with her that it was not right.
Dream of Red Mansion was a classic, Pearl admitted. “But it is an ill beauty, so to speak. It is about escapism and self-indulgence. I am not saying that the novel doesn’t deserve credit for criticizing the feudalism of the time.”
“I am glad that you acknowledge that. It is important.”
“However,” Pearl continued, “the novel, in its essence, reminds me of Goethe’s Sorrows of Young Werther. The difference is that Werther fell in love with one girl, Lotte, while his Chinese counterpart Pao Yu fell in love with twelve maidens.”
“In China, educated men still spend their lives imitating Pao Yu.”
“Drinking clubs and brothels have become the only source of inspiration. What a pity!” Pearl went on. “I think it is a crime that there is no representation in literature for the greater part of the Chinese people.”
CHAPTER 15
Days of drizzle announced the coming of spring. Camellias blossomed. Leaves shone glossy green. Heavy with moisture, massive flowers began to plop to the ground. I was working late at night when I heard a knocking on the door.
It was Pearl without an umbrella. Her hair was drenched and she looked devastated.
“What happened?” I let her in and closed the door.
“Lossing . . .” Unable to go on, she passed me a piece of wadded paper.
It was a letter, a hand-copied ancient erotic Chinese poem.
“It’s not his handwriting,” Pearl p
ointed out.
“From a female student, you think? Where did you find it?”
“In his drawer. I went to his office looking for an address. I was writing to his aunt, who had some questions concerning Carol.”
I was stunned. “Do you think that Lossing is having an affair?”
“How could I think otherwise?” Tears welled from her eyes.
“Where is Lossing now?”
“I don’t know.”
“Does he know that you know? How long could this have been going on?”
“I haven’t paid attention to anything else but Carol.”
“Who is this girl?”
“I think I know who she is. Her name is Lotus, a first-year student in the agricultural department. I ran into her several times at Lossing’s office.”
“Is she pretty?”
“I don’t remember . . . that she was particularly pretty. She was the translator he hired for his fieldwork. He has taken trips with her. I was foolish to trust him.” She took the towel I offered and wiped her face. “I can’t say that I didn’t see it coming.”
I sat down with her and made tea. “What are you going to do?” I asked quietly.
“If I didn’t have Carol, I’d leave now,” she answered. Her eyes became tearful again.
“The trouble is that you don’t earn enough money.”
“No, I don’t.”
I thought about Pearl’s mother and the way she had felt trapped all her life.
“Would you put up with him for Carol’s sake?” I asked.
Pearl’s hands went through her wet hair. She bit her lower lip and shook her head, slowly but firmly.
“The reality is . . .”
“Listen, Willow. Last month I succeeded in placing two essays, in South East Asia Chronicle and the American Adventure Magazine. Although the payments weren’t much, it gave me hope.”
“Pearl, look, it’s difficult for anyone to make a living these days. It’s doubly hard for a woman. You know that.”