Middlebrow Mission: Pearl S. Buck's American China: Pearl S. Buck's American China [1. Aufl.] 9783839431085

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Contents
Acknowledgments
An Aromatic Blend of America and China: Introducing Pearl Buck’s Middlebrow Mission
Pearl Buck and the Misssionary Theme
Pearl Buck in the Context of Middlebrow Literature
The Critical Dismissal of Pearl Buck
1. The Sentimental Imperialism of American Women Missionaries in China
American Missionaries as Cultural Imperialists
Women Missionaries – Competing Concepts of Womanhood Abroad?
Women Missionaries and their Home Audiences
‘The Work of Women for Women’: Ambiguities in the Social Gospel
Missionary Marriages and the ‘Burden of Motherhood’
The Missionary Home as Empire
2. The Exile and Fighting Angel: Pearl Buck’s Gendered Critique of Missions
The Parents’ Representativeness: Introducing Pearl Buck’s Recovery Project
Between Fact and Fiction: Pearl Buck as a ‘New’ Biographer
The American Mother and the Saintly Prophet: The Biographies of Pearl Buck’s Missionary Parents
Rethinking the Biographies – Pearl Buck’s My Several Worlds
“Is there a Case for Foreign Missions?” Pearl Buck’s Official Break with the Missionary Movement
‘Making Use of Missionary Pamphlets’? The Missionary Theme in Buck’s Fiction
3. Pearl Buck’s Coming of Age: East Wind, West Wind
Pearl Buck’s Rise on the American Literary Scene and the Publication Background of East Wind, West Wind
The Style and Narrative Perspective of East Wind, West Wind
The Missionary Husband and the Practice of Footbinding
4. Reversing the Middlebrow: The Good Earth
The Marketing and Reception of The Good Earth
The Good Earth as a Depression Novel
The Iconicity of O-lan
5. China/Town Hybridity and (Neo-) Missionary Nostalgia:His Own Country” and “Kinfolk
“His Own Country” – The Return to One’s ‘Roots’?
‘Showing what it is to be Chinese’: Staging China/Town in Kinfolk
The ‘Elegant Fake’: Enter Dr Liang
“We must show this vast new country what it is to be Chinese”: Dr Liang as an ‘Old’ Missionary
‘Dissolving the Beautiful Cloud of Confucianism’: The Neo-Missionaries in China
‘Belonging to all of them’: Mrs Liang and the Promise of Hybridity?
6. Coda: “We haven’t deserted Him exactly, we just haven't known how to fit Him in.” The Missionary Legacy in Pearl Buck and her Fiction
Works Cited

Citation preview

Vanessa Künnemann Middlebrow Mission: Pearl S. Buck’s American China

Lettre

Vanessa Künnemann (PhD) works as Assistant Professor of American Studies at the University of Göttingen, Germany. Her research interests include 19th to 21st century American Literature, Asian-American studies, Gender Studies, and Middlebrow Studies.

Vanessa Künnemann

Middlebrow Mission: Pearl S. Buck’s American China

Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available in the Internet at http://dnb.d-nb.de © 2015 transcript Verlag, Bielefeld

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. Cover layout: Kordula Röckenhaus, Bielefeld Printed in Germany Print-ISBN 978-3-8376-3108-1 PDF-ISBN 978-3-8394-3108-5

Contents

Acknowledgments | 7 An Aromatic Blend of America and China: Introducing Pearl Buck’s Middlebrow Mission | 11

Pearl Buck and the Misssionary Theme | 15 Pearl Buck in the Context of Middlebrow Literature | 21 The Critical Dismissal of Pearl Buck | 28 1. The Sentimental Imperialism of American Women Missionaries in China | 41

American Missionaries as Cultural Imperialists | 43 Women Missionaries – Competing Concepts of Womanhood Abroad? | 48 Women Missionaries and their Home Audiences | 59 ‘The Work of Women for Women’: Ambiguities in the Social Gospel | 65 Missionary Marriages and the ‘Burden of Motherhood’ | 71 The Missionary Home as Empire | 78 2. The Exile and Fighting Angel: Pearl Buck’s Gendered Critique of Missions | 89

The Parents’ Representativeness: Introducing Pearl Buck’s Recovery Project | 94 Between Fact and Fiction: Pearl Buck as a ‘New’ Biographer | 97 The American Mother and the Saintly Prophet: The Biographies of Pearl Buck’s Missionary Parents | 103 Rethinking the Biographies – Pearl Buck’s My Several Worlds | 119 “Is there a Case for Foreign Missions?” Pearl Buck’s Official Break with the Missionary Movement | 123 ‘Making Use of Missionary Pamphlets’? The Missionary Theme in Buck’s Fiction | 130

3. Pearl Buck’s Coming of Age: East Wind, West Wind | 133

Pearl Buck’s Rise on the American Literary Scene and the Publication Background of East Wind, West Wind | 136 The Style and Narrative Perspective of East Wind, West Wind | 144 The Missionary Husband and the Practice of Footbinding | 150 4. Reversing the Middlebrow: The Good Earth | 163

The Marketing and Reception of The Good Earth | 167 The Good Earth as a Depression Novel | 177 The Iconicity of O-lan | 183 5. China/Town Hybridity and (Neo-) Missionary Nostalgia: “His Own Country” and Kinfolk | 199

“His Own Country” – The Return to One’s ‘Roots’? | 202 ‘Showing what it is to be Chinese’: Staging China/Town in Kinfolk | 210 The ‘Elegant Fake’: Enter Dr Liang | 213 “We must show this vast new country what it is to be Chinese”: Dr Liang as an ‘Old’ Missionary | 216 ‘Dissolving the Beautiful Cloud of Confucianism’: The Neo-Missionaries in China | 222 ‘Belonging to all of them’: Mrs Liang and the Promise of Hybridity? | 229 6. Coda: “We haven’t deserted Him exactly, we just haven't known how to fit Him in.” The Missionary Legacy in Pearl Buck and her Fiction | 231

Works Cited | 265

Acknowledgments This book, the outcome of the doctoral dissertation that I completed at the Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Universität Hannover, has its origins in a class on the “Art of Life Writing” which I attended as a graduate student at Hannover. Anna Maria Stuby, the course instructor and my academic mentor in those days, mentioned the name Pearl S. Buck almost as an aside and got me curious in this author in the first place. I would like to thank Anna Maria Stuby very much – not least because she served me as a role model in the academic world and outside of it. The book, as well as my academic career as a whole, got off the ground thanks to my PhD advisor Ruth Mayer at Hannover. She invested an extraordinary amount of time, energy, and patience in my project and – with an admirable speediness and accuracy – commented on my work in progress over the years, and I wish to express my deepest gratitude for all of this. I count myself lucky to be able to call her an exceptional supervisor, colleague, and friend. Also, Ruth Mayer provided the framework in which Middlebrow Mission came into being. First, she supported my application for a research stipend by the Graduiertenförderung des Landes Niedersachsen in the early stages of the project, and then she was instrumental in establishing and leading the research project “Diasporic Self-fashionings: Exchanges of Chinese American and American Chinese Identities,” which provided the institutional ‘home’ of my work on Buck. Generously funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG), this research project granted me two extended archival stays in the United States: the first at Yale Divinity School in New Haven; Randolph College in Lynchburg, Virginia, which hosts the Pearl S. Buck Collection; and Harvard’s Houghton Library. At Yale and Randolph College, in particular, I was met with a warm welcome and exceptional help by the administrative and library staff. I want to express my thanks for their assistance, especially

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Joan Duffy’s at Yale Divinity School and Frances E. Webb’s and Professor Elizabeth Lipscomb’s at Randolph. A year later, the second research trip took me to the Graduate Theological Union and the University of California at Berkeley, the San Francisco Public Library, and the California Historical Society – the excellent research facilities there made a big difference in the course that my project took. I would also like to thank Dominika Ferens very much for the support and expertise that she provided as the second advisor of my project. Without her recommendations, subtle insistence, and overall encouragement, Middlebrow Mission might not have been completed. Furthermore, my thoughts were informed by the participation in the DFG research network “The Futures of (European) American Studies,” based at Bonn University. The discussions there, in particular with my ‘middlebrow friend’ Birte Christ, were highly fruitful for my study and my take on New American Studies in general, and I want to express my thanks. At Hannover, I have profited from the lively discussions in the doctoral colloquium of American Studies. I am particularly grateful to Christina Meyer, Regina Schober, Florian Groß, Shane Denson, Jatin Wagle, Kirsten Twelbeck, Bettina Soller, Jana Wachsmuth and – in the formative stages of both the colloquium and my project – Barbara Krah, Nirit Cordes, Melania Anastasiadou, and Stefan Hautke. In particular, I would like to thank Christina Meyer (again) and Regina Schober (also again), as well as Janna Odabas, MaryAnn Snyder-Körber, Jutta Schulze, and Svenja Fehlhaber, who all supported and encouraged me immensely in the frantic final months of the manuscript’s completion and who meticulously read and commented on the draft before its submission to the committee. They have been true friends. As I am writing these lines in the summer of 2015, I realize how much the work on this book has changed me over the years – as a scholar, but also as a person in ‘real life.’ And this ‘real life’ cannot be thought of without my family as a constant ne(s)t of support, encouragement, and love. Most of all, I thank my parents, my grandma, and my sister who have always believed in me, my wish to write the dissertation, and my ability to complete this project. Perhaps most importantly in this process, they were the ones whose ‘mission’ was to (at least try to) bring me down to earth.

Für Opa

An Aromatic Blend of America and China: Introducing Pearl Buck’s Middlebrow Mission When reviewer Stirling North discussed Pearl Buck’s novel God’s Men for a local paper, the Buffalo Courier-Express, on 01 April 1951, he made use of a vivid – and rather tasty – imagery to describe not only Buck’s latest publication, but her fiction as a whole: Pearl Buck’s prose has many of the qualities of tea. Though blended in America, it still retains a faint aroma of China. It is non-intoxicating, mildly stimulating, and needs lemon to make it potable. There is usually sugar left in the bottom of the cup. […]

This statement provides an appropriate point of departure to introduce some major concerns which are central to this book. For one, North’s assessment of Buck’s fiction as “non-intoxicating” and “mildly stimulating” is representative of the widespread views held vis-à-vis the oeuvre of one of America’s most successful writers of the twentieth century: Pearl Buck’s work was often seen as harmless, trivial, but at the same time appealing, entertaining, and informative. Furthermore, North’s idea of the lemon which needs to be added to the tea as well as his reference to the remaining sugar in the cup indicate that there is something ‘missing’ or not altogether ‘perfect’ about this tea: read as an analogy to the quality of Buck’s fiction and her skill as a writer, this image suggests that Buck did not exhaust the full potential of her material. Perhaps most importantly, the mixture of America and China mentioned in this review introduces the motivation and objective that lie at the heart of Pearl Buck’s project. Predominantly carried out in the realm of fiction but

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extending to a wide array of other areas (such as cultural commentary, journalistic pieces, political essays, and even reaching to Asian cook books), this project was fundamentally concerned with a discussion of the relationship between the United States and Asia (and China in particular). Although “images of China [had] populated the American imagination” for much longer, the fascination with China and the Chinese reached unprecedented heights towards the middle of the twentieth century (Leong 2005: 1; see also Klein 2003; Yoshihara 2003). Pearl Buck can be credited as one of the leading figures responsible for this increase in Americans’ – and more generally Westerners’ – interest in China at the time. Following Buck’s lead, her audience started to invest in China – as an imagined idea and concept, as a geographical place, and as a concrete political entity. This happened to the extent that Pearl Buck and her work frequently came to be seen as synonymous with China. When The Good Earth, the most renowned of Buck’s novels, was published in 1931, critic Henry Seidel Canby stated that “The Good Earth is China” (Canby 1931; qtd. in Qian 2005: 162; my emphasis). For more than a generation of Americans, Buck defined and shaped the concept of China. To them, what Buck said and wrote about China, was perceived as ‘true.’ Thus, there was a discrepancy between the success which Buck had among her audience and critical views of her work, as North’s ambivalent review indicates. While I will discuss the critical dismissal of Buck later on in this introduction, I would first like to focus on the reasons for her popularity. Why and in what sense exactly, then, was this woman writer more successful and effective in changing people’s awareness and perception of China than other groups or individuals – ranging from politicians to intellectuals, merchants, missionaries, and other writers of fiction – before her? It was predominantly on the grounds of her biography that Pearl Buck, née Sydenstricker (1892-1973) – or Pearl S. Buck, as she officially made her entry into literary and cultural history – became America’s “best-known authority on Asia” (Conn 1996: 257) and most important “popular expert” on China (Hunt 1977: 39), especially in the 1930s and 40s. As the daughter of American Presbyterian missionaries, Absalom and Carolyn Sydenstricker, she grew up in China where she spent the first half of her life before she relocated to the United States in the early 1930s for good. As a result, she had an in-depth knowledge of the Chinese way of life, China’s customs, and its

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people. Throughout her career, the American public at large, her audience, and many of her other supporters as well as opponents perceived her as a ‘quasi Chinese.’ This image helped propel Buck to fame when The Good Earth, her second novel, was published. It became a bestseller and Buck’s biggest success, winning her the Pulitzer Prize in 1932 and constituting a major factor in her being awarded with the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1938. For much of her career, Buck herself embraced this image of her public persona and in fact helped to amplify her status as an authority on China further when she consciously and strategically fashioned herself as a cultural insider. Looking back on her childhood in her autobiography, published in 1954 and appropriately titled My Several Worlds, Buck recalled her Sinification of these years: […] But I did not consider myself a white person [as a girl aged 7]. Even though I knew I was not altogether Chinese, still I was Chinese enough to eat [Chinese] sweets from the market place […]. Thus I grew up in a double world, the small white clean Presbyterian American world of my parents and the big loving merry not-too-clean Chinese world, and there was no communication between them. When I was in the Chinese world I was Chinese, I spoke Chinese and behaved as a Chinese and ate as the Chinese did, and I shared their thoughts and feelings. When I was in the American world, I shut the door between. (My Several Worlds 10)

It is already in this statement that some of the many contradictions, breaks, ambivalences, and tensions which can be found in Pearl Buck’s project are first indicated. When she writes of the strict separation of American and Chinese influences in her upbringing in this passage, she leaves unmentioned the fact that the Sydenstricker family – by contrast to many other missionaries who lived on special compounds comparable to today’s gated communities – had lived among the (poor) Chinese for most of their stay in China. Thus, there was, in fact, contact between these two worlds, as scholars like Buck’s biographer Peter Conn have shown (1996). If Buck remained silent about this aspect in her autobiography, this silence served an agenda and can be seen as an example of the manipulation of biographical facts which should become a part of Buck’s project, as I will show in chapter 2. When Buck describes her switching between worlds and cultural co-

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des in this episode, this attests to a certain skill, flexibility, and adaptability – and hence it implies a set of characteristics at the disposal of a cultural go-between. In this sense, Buck’s self-proclaimed childhood practice of shutting doors between the American and the Chinese world is more than the coping mechanism of a child seeking to come to terms with life in foreign surroundings and desiring to become one of the Chinese rather than remaining a yang kwei-tse, the foreign devil with the blue eyes, as Chinese children had dubbed the young Pearl Sydenstricker (see Conn 1996). Rather, it becomes a component of Buck’s strategic self-enactment as a “cultural mediator,” to take up the term which Conn has famously used with reference to Buck throughout his cultural biography. To understand Buck’s project and her idea of herself as a cultural mediator it is helpful to once again refer back to Stirling North’s idea of Buck as a ‘tea maker’ who blends America and China. By blending I understand Buck’s complicated position as a broker between the East and the West: in her fiction, as well as through her various political and humanitarian activities and offices, she pleaded for the universalism of human experience, promoted interracial understanding and tolerance and thus aimed to open the very doors of communication between the American and the Chinese world which she claimed to have kept shut in her childhood. Most prominently, in The Good Earth she introduced her Western audience to ordinary Chinese characters – peasants – and depicted these figures from their own perspective and not from some detached Western stance. Through Buck, the marginalized, the unheard – often female figures – ethnic ‘Other’ gained a voice. At the same time, she still maintained a certain repertoire of ‘Orientalist’ exoticism in her fiction, catering to her readership’s expectations about the subject matter. Additionally, despite her marked self-Sinification, Buck was, after all, the offspring of American missionaries and did not altogether cast off her heritage. In fact, in many respects Buck’s very upbringing in the foreign missionary context triggered her quest for a distinct American selfawareness and identity. Her project, then, became one of constructing ‘her’ America, a country which she had known largely through the teachings of her missionary parents, Western books, and schools in China. In accordance with Karen Leong and Mari Yoshihara, who have both argued that Buck retained a Western perspective in spite of her close attachment and identification with the Chinese (see Leong 2005; Yoshihara 2003), I have

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chosen to address this important point in the subtitle of my study: it is a distinctly American China that we encounter when engaging with Buck’s work. Sometimes successfully, sometimes ending in failure, Buck walked this tightrope to construct her American China – in order to educate her American readership about China and, simultaneously, to negotiate her own identity as a cultural go-between. I call this project the middlebrow mission of Pearl S. Buck. By this title, I wish to put emphasis on the two aspects which I regard as most influential in a discussion of the (cultural) work performed by this writer. The first part, middlebrow, pertains to the mode and aesthetics inherent in Buck’s writing and to her situatedness in the context of middlebrow studies. This part of the title approximates Buck’s construction of an American China in terms of genre and writing style. The title’s second part, mission, is meant to draw attention to Buck’s dominant fictional theme and her underlying (biographical) motivations for choosing her topic. The middlebrow and mission in Buck’s work, I argue throughout this book, are negotiated in close conjunction and reciprocally inform and reinforce each other.

P EARL B UCK

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M ISSIONARY T HEME

In the following paragraphs, I would first like to elaborate a bit more closely on the ‘mission’ part of the title. While I do not seek to follow the lead by scholars like Nora Stirling (1983), Beverly Rizzon (1989), Peter Conn (1996), Kang Liao (1997), or, most recently, Hilary Spurling (2010) and write yet another biography of Pearl Buck, it is inevitable to consider her vita in order to understand her project. As mentioned above, Buck was exposed to the realities of missionary life from her earliest childhood. Her parents had taken her to China as a three-months-old baby in 1892 and – apart from the hiatus of her college years in Virginia from 1910 to 1914 and her graduate studies at Cornell University in the 1920s – she lived in China throughout her adolescence and young adulthood before her permanent return to the United States in the 1930s. Above all, to live in China as a missionary meant experiencing the many ups and downs which the foreign mission movement and its members underwent in China in what should prove to be a crucial period of American-Chinese relations. Ranging from Chinese tolerance and occasional benevolence to opposition, xenophobia,

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or even overt violence directed at Westerners (such as during the Boxer rebellion from 1899 to 1901 or, later, the Nanking Incident in 1927), missionaries had met with a wide spectrum of sentiments in China over the years, as the young Buck had witnessed. Yet, from fairly early on, she realized that time and again, missionaries had to take their fair share of responsibility in the Chinese attitudes toward them, as they had too often been ignorant, inconsiderate, arrogant, and ruthlessly imperialist in their contacts with the locals. In the years to come, Buck’s stance vis-à-vis the foreign missionary movement should be deeply informed by these insights. What is more, Buck also criticized what she diagnosed as fundamental deficiencies and injustices within the missionary movement. According to her, there was a clear gender imbalance: male missionaries ruled supreme and behaved in misogynist and arrogant ways, while the female missionary experience in China was characterized by exilic passivity and victimization. What might at first sound like a rather abstract charge was, in fact, based on Buck’s personal observations: the situation in her own family and the gender allocation as she had traced it in the marriage of her missionary parents, Absalom and Carolyn, made her question the overall outlook, structures, and motivations of the foreign missionary movement. To Buck, her father was a generic representative of the male missionary enterprise and embodied old approaches to missionary work which she felt needed to be overcome. While she admired his commitment on the one hand, she still despised his stubborn, self-righteous, and misogynist attitude on the other hand. These traits, as Buck believed, were the cause of her mother’s unhappiness: Carolyn Sydenstricker – in her daughter’s eyes – was exemplary of many female missionaries of the first generation who were treated as secondary in the movement, who suffered from homesickness and insularity and a lack of scope outside of the domestic realm. Out of these personal observations, Buck developed a concern with the recovery of voices which became pivotal in her entire project. The use of voices – both as a form of self-expression and as a literary motif – was a central means for Buck to lay bare the misogyny of the male missionary project; in her fiction, she reclaimed the voices of female missionaries – especially her mother’s – and time and again expanded her project to her fictional characters. As I will show in chapter 2, Pearl Buck used her family biography as a springboard for what turned out to be her vehement critique of the overall missionary movement which she expressed from the mid-1920s on. In this

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critique – expressed in a heterogeneous body of texts which encompassed fiction, speeches, and journalistic articles – she initially relied on an understanding of missions that is both static and uncompromisingly gendered. With this, I contend, she strategically distorted the complexity of a missionary project which was far more dynamic and at times also transgressing the boundaries of gender, as my discussion of women missionaries to China in chapter 1 will reveal. For the foreign missionary enterprise rightfully can be called “feminized” (see Thorne 1999: 40; Brouwer 1990: 13): it was couched in an ideology and language of sentimentalism and domesticity which relied on women as its agents – especially in the wake of a transformative process called the ‘social gospel’ which emerged in the first decades of the twentieth century. Women’s active – and ambivalent – roles in the missionary movement can be understood as ‘sentimental imperialism,’ a concept on which I will elaborate in detail in the first chapter. Pearl Buck should not simply be seen in contrast to this background but she was, in fact, also very much influenced by it. After all, it was not only the missionary movement as such which underwent transformations, but also the people who practiced in and were affected by it. The missionary enterprise in China increasingly became a story of “cultural exchange and interaction, of borrowings back and forth across a selectively permeable cultural border,” as Gael Graham, a historian working on missionary cultures, has observed (1995: 1). In a similar vein, Ruth Brouwer asserts that [m]issionaries often emerge […] as men and women incapable of change, too rigid or obtuse to learn from new circumstances. That some of them were like that is unlikely to be disputed by anyone who has spent much time in mission archives. But the same records also reveal individuals who changed considerably in the course of their careers and provide evidence of significant generational differences in missionaries’ attitudes to their cultural environment. (Brouwer 2002: 6, emphasis in original)

When she mentions generational differences in this passage, Brouwer raises a crucial aspect of the missionary movement’s transformation. Indeed, important changes can be observed if we compare the older generation of missionaries to a younger one: within this second generation, there tended to be less insistence on the parental culture; viewed as a group, younger missionaries were more willing to become involved with Chinese life and engage

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in processes of cultural “transplantation and adaptation,” as Leslie Flemming put it (1989: 3).1 In his insightful monograph The Conversion of Missionaries (1997) historian Xi Lian has called this group “liberal missionaries.” Rather than completely abandoning missions, these modern missionaries of the 1920s and 30s – like Henry Luce, the publisher of Time and Life magazines, Edward Hicks Hume, a doctor, or Frank J. Rawlinson, the editor of The Chinese Recorder2 – worked themselves through the parental missionary projects and turned them into something of their own.3 I argue that Pearl Buck should be placed in line with this younger generation, instead of being seen as an “embittered child of Presbyterian missionaries” (Welter 1993: 205) who in her own career became an “ex-missionary” and barely “revisited the subject” (Wacker 2003: 199). Like the ventures of most other second generation missionaries, Buck’s project, too, can be read as a direct response and renegotiation of the hierarchical and patriarchal missionary projects of the parental generation. In order to better understand Buck’s approach and self-conception, it is once again helpful to consider her own statements about her role, as she reflected upon it in her autobiography: I have never been an evangelical missionary, and indeed abhor the general notion, and yet I know very well that my missionary beginnings have shaped me to the extent of feeling responsible at least for what I can personally do about a given situation which needs mending. What then could I do, I asked myself, to help my countrymen, even a few of them and even on a small scale, to know something of the lives and thoughts of the peoples with whom they must inevitably deal, either as friends or enemies, in the future and that very near? The one gift I had brought with me to my own country was the knowledge of Asia and especially of China and Ja-

1

On the specific differences between first and second generation missionaries, see also Dana Robert 1997, Xi Lian 1997, or Thoralf Klein 2009.

2

For an in-depth discussion of these three ‘liberal missionaries,’ see Xi Lian’s The Conversion of Missionaries (1997). In the coda chapter of this book, I will focus on the career of Henry Luce and Pearl Buck’s fictionalization of him in her novel God’s Men.

3

On the missionary commitment of these second generation missionaries, see also Barbara Welter (1993: 197) and Patricia Grimshaw (1993: 276).

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pan, gained not only through years of living there but through years of concentrated study, travel and observation. (My Several Worlds 371-372)

We can see here that Buck understands herself as a secular missionary who is endowed with the special gift of intercultural competence. This missionary figure is powerful (she even sees herself as capable of healing – “mending” – the American-Asian relations in the post-war context in the 1950s), because she has an in-depth knowledge of the Chinese, their customs, and their feelings after “years of concentrated study, travel and observation.”4 As such an insider, she has an authority which, in the eyes of her readers, turns her into an ethnographer of China and the Chinese.5 In my discussions of her novels, I shall repeatedly refer back to the concatenation of Buck’s roles as missionary, ethnographer, and “cultural expositor” (Liao 1997: 40). These combined roles put Buck in a position to educate Americans about China – a mission “in reverse,” as Karen Leong has put it (2005: 33). Seen

4

Widely seen as the first Westerner to depict the lives and lifestyles of ordinary Chinese in a ‘genuine,’ ‘authentic’ manner, Buck as a missionary-ethnographer could easily claim a degree of representativeness, universal knowledge, and larger ‘truth’ when she crafted her fictional characters and their fates. On this aspect, see Conn 1996, or Liao 1997.

5

The close entanglement of foreign missions and ethnography has been explored by Dominika Ferens in her study on the Eaton sisters, Edith and Winnifred Eaton: Chinatown Missions and Japanese Romances (2002). Going ‘into the field,’ carefully observing and taking notes of their surroundings and communicating these observations and ‘findings’ to their home constituency, missionaries to Asia also acted as ethnographers, as Ferens has shown (2002: see especially chapter 1). In fact, missionaries can be seen as geographically expanding the principles and practices of ethnography to Asia, for, upon the rise of the discipline “in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, China and Japan fell outside [academic ethnography’s] purview. Professional ethnographers were interested in cultures that had little or no contact with the West, and neither China nor Japan qualified as ‘primitive.’ Consequently, most of the ethnographic writings we have on China and Japan from that period are those by Protestant missionaries, diplomats, and tourists,” as Ferens has explained in a later essay (Ferens 2009: 186).

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from the perspective of liberal missionaries, this mission is more humanitarian, cushioned, or tempered if compared to the evangelical project of the older generation. If assessed from other perspectives (such as that of the Chinese), this mission is, of course, still problematic as it relies on cultural and racial hierarchies. Buck’s self-fashioning and understanding of missionary activity was characteristic of the approaches of the second generation of missionaries. Yet, even within this group, Pearl Buck’s position was unique. By contrast to most other members of this group, she became much more popular and closely covered by the media of her day. To a certain extent, this was due to her colorful personality and the fact that she was never shy to fight her battles in public. More than that, however, Buck was arguably more successful than any other second-generation missionary in her work because her project unfolded at the threshold between biography and fiction. Her mission took place in the realm of a fiction which enthralled a large – mostly female – readership for a long time in the twentieth century. In this fiction, Buck made ample use of the missionary theme and sought to overthrow the old generation’s missionary project and rectify her parents’ roles in retrospect. Buck’s middlebrow mission is transported by neo-missionary figures, as I call her fictional characters in this book. These figures – to be discussed from chapter 3 onwards – are missionaries of the second generation and represent a more ‘modern,’ secular, and humanitarian approach to missionary activity than the first generation. Sometimes, Buck still conceives them as religious men; but most often, these figures are placed in secular professions, ranging from physicians, to philanthropists, and on to social workers, as we shall see. Buck’s neo-missionaries can be seen as hybrid characters, as they represent complicated, ambivalent fictional fusions of her father and mother – they are male and sometimes display the stubbornness and sense of vocation of Buck’s father, but many of them also carry traits which Buck associated with her mother: warmth, benevolence, and humanity. Comparable to Buck’s own self-fashioning as a cultural mediator, her fictional neo-missionaries time and again try to act as brokers between cultures, but importantly, they do not always fare well, as we will see. Through these figures, Buck takes a distance from the parental missionary project and calls for its revision. At the same time, she still continues her missionary activity or, to be more precise, appropriates ‘mission’ as a trope for her own purposes – to sketch a ‘better’ version of the world.

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Pearl Buck’s project can be placed squarely in the logic of the phenomenon called ‘middlebrow,’ to take up the first part of my study’s title. As a body of literature which is neither exactly high nor completely low (read: trivial or even debased), the middlebrow is a space ‘in-between’ and characterized by a certain openness. It is in this openness, as I will argue in what follows, that we can observe how the logic of the middlebrow and of mission complement each other in general and how they conflate in Pearl Buck’s project in particular. Both in the middlebrow and in (secular) missions we find a clear theme or a ‘cause’ which addresses the reader, or, more generally, some kind of target audience. Already on this level, the middlebrow with its in-betweenness or existence on the fringes can be seen as an appropriate mode and style for Buck to carry out her fictional mission, craft her characters, and develop her themes. The nexus of (neo-) missionary topics and concerns, middlebrow aesthetics, and author/readership relations, then, proved central to the success of Buck’s fictional project, as I will show. Pearl Buck belonged to a popular and broad literary scene of the day. This is worth mentioning, because the 1920s and 30s are often presented as an exclusive project of a masculine (high) modernism with its intellectual elitism and ‘highbrow’ audiences. For example, in literary histories and anthologies, we often look in vain for references to writers who published their works of fiction in the same time span as their modernist counterparts, who were frequently more widely read and ‘accessible’ than modernist writers, and who were actually still much higher in numbers. Writers like Dorothy Canfield Fisher, Zona Gale, or Pearl Buck are representatives of what might be called ‘modernism’s opposite,’ a branch of commercially successful fiction of the early twentieth century reaching into the 1950s: the middlebrow.6

6

The term and the concept of the ‘middlebrow’ have been problematic since their inception in the early twentieth century, as Joan Shelley Rubin has stressed: “The reference to the height of the brow originally derived from phrenology and carried overtones of racial differentiation. Transformed into a description of in-

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Writers of this type of fiction had been persistently marginalized (or in some cases even completely ignored) by literary criticism until the project of middlebrow studies started in the 1990s. The publication of Joan Shelley Rubin’s The Making of Middlebrow Culture (1992), in particular, got the – to date rather small – field of middlebrow studies going. Following Rubin’s lead, most middlebrow scholars have engaged with what can be described as revisionist or recovery projects.7 Janice Radway’s study A Feeling for

tellectual caliber, ‘highbrow’ was, in the 1880s, already synonymous with ‘refined’; twenty years later, ‘lowbrow’ came to denote a lack of cultivation” (Rubin 1992: xii). Perhaps most prominently, Virginia Woolf – thus, a female spokesperson of highbrow modernism – in her 1942 essay of the same title first systematically used the term middlebrow, and she did so in a mocking fashion. To her, the middlebrow was a “mixture of geniality and sentiment struck together with a sticky slime of calf’s-foot jelly” (Woolf 1942: 200). In this essay, which should become programmatic for most ensuing assessments of the phenomenon, Woolf addresses an uneasiness and discomfort with the middlebrow as a cultural category or genre, as well as with middlebrow people (whose “brows are betwixt and between,” Woolf 1942: 199) as representatives of a certain lifestyle. Similar critical views on the middlebrow in the mid-twentieth century are expressed in Russell Lynes’s article “Highbrow, Lowbrow, Middlebrow” (1949), Leslie Fiedler’s “The Middle Against Both Ends” (1955), and – perhaps most widely known – Dwight MacDonald’s “Masscult and Midcult” (1960). 7

One could argue that Tania Modleski’s Loving with a Vengeance. MassProduced Fantasies for Women (1982) or Janice Radway’s Reading the Romance. Women, Patriarchy, and Popular Culture (1984) initiated a more serious academic engagement with commercial (and among them also middlebrow) texts already in the 1980s. Yet, it was Radway’s 1991 revised edition of Reading the Romance – which more or less coincided with the turn to New American Studies in the 1990s – that triggered a broader and sustained interest in (female) popular culture. In the wake of Rubin’s pioneering study of 1992, a wave of works on middlebrow literature emerged in the 1990s: examples are Christopher Wilson’s White Collar Fictions. Class and Social Representation in American Literature, 1885-1925 (1992); Ruth Pirsig Wood’s Lolita in Peyton Place: Highbrow, Middlebrow, and Lowbrow Novels of the 1950s (1995) or, on the British side, Rosa Maria Bracco’s Merchants of Hope: British Middlebrow

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Books (1997), which traces the history and dynamics of the Book-of-theMonth Club as a hallmark of middlebrow fiction, is part of this context. Her book is especially important because of its focus on middlebrow market dynamics and the institutions which were pivotal for middlebrow literature. Founded by Harry Sherman in 1926, the club soon became the leading channel of distribution of middlebrow literature and a shaper of literary taste. The club’s literary judges compiled bestseller lists, recommended to its subscribers the texts they considered ‘good reads,’ and with their criteria created a counter-canon to the avant-garde modernist literature of the day. As a disseminator of public taste, the Book-of-the-Month Club hyped certain books and was thus in a powerful position to promote the careers of many writers, as Radway has shown. Middlebrow periodicals such as Collier’s, Ladies Home Journal, Cosmopolitan, or Harper’s Magazine had boomed on the market since the 1910s. Like the Book-of-the-Month Club, they, too, printed bestseller lists and became influential multipliers of middlebrow literature. Moreover, these magazines often printed (preliminary versions of) novels in serial form before publishing houses released the final novels, making them significant media for middlebrow writers. Pearl Buck clearly benefited from these institutions of middlebrow culture. A great number of her books, among them The Good Earth, but interestingly also her two biographies about her parents, became selections of the Book-of-the-Month Club (see, for example, Conn 1996: 188).8 Similarly, many of her novels gained higher publicity because of their prepublication in serial form in middlebrow periodicals. The commercialization revolving around the middlebrow became a crucial factor in Buck’s fictional mission: although it was a major reason for her exclusion from the canon and her critical dismissal, commercial success meant access to her readers. These two aspects – commercial success and accessibility – can be regarded as criteria that help to define middlebrow literature. This is impor-

Writers of the First World War, 1919-1939 (1993). One of the most recent (and comprehensive) studies in the field is Gordon Hutner’s monograph What America Read: Taste, Class, and the Novel, 1920-1960 (2009). 8

I will revisit the importance of the Book-of-the-Month Club for Buck when I focus on The Good Earth in chapter 4.

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tant to note given the fact that it has always been difficult to determine distinguishing characteristics of the middlebrow. The considerable degree of fuzziness which surrounds the term and concept as well as middlebrow’s overall openness have made the field rather diffuse: “Middlebrow studies has not produced a coherent account of a distinct middlebrow aesthetics” or found an agreement on “a shared distinct aesthetics” and “specific subject matters,” as Birte Christ has put it (Christ 2010: 23). Despite the heterogeneity of the field, however, there are certain features and strategies which provide a common ground among many middlebrow texts. Most of the texts are situated in an overall conventional framework: they display straight forward plots which typically have a happy ending; they are set in the domestic realm and often focus on female protagonists (see Christ 2010: 23); and many of them present large social issues as personal stories and thus discuss complex realities by means of strategies of reduction and simplification (see Klein 2003: 65). Middlebrow’s conventionality also manifests itself in the texts’ immediate, didactic, and sentimental style which is clearly opposed to the irony, cynicism, and detachment of the modernist project (see Radway 1997). This is hardly surprising given that the sentimental fiction of the nineteenth century is generally seen as the model for middlebrow fiction as it emerged in the years after World War I. Building on Nina Baym’s study Woman’s Fiction (1978), Jaime Harker, for example, linearly traces middlebrow writing back to the sentimental novel. She draws direct parallels between the two, referring to the readership of sentimental fiction as “primarily middleclass white women,”9 its plot pattern as clearly constructed and recognizable, its heroine standing in triumph at the end of the novel, its writer as being professional and in “obligation to their audience,” and to the readers’ identification with the heroine (Harker 2007: 5).10 The central focus on the female reader in sentimental literature, which Harker introduces here, can also be found in middlebrow literature. As a

9

Conversely, Jennifer Parchesky has identified the typical middlebrow reader as white, female, middle-class, and often originating from the American heartland, the mid-west (see Parchesky 2002: 229-258).

10 For a detailed definition of the sentimental mode, see also Nina Baym (1978: esp. 16-18); or Jane Tompkins’s Sensational Designs (1985: esp. 145).

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distinctly feminized phenomenon,11 the middlebrow revolves around a close-knit female triad of writer, reader, and text. The reader needs to be willing to engage with the text and enter into the communication process with the author so that the middlebrow agenda can come into its own. In the middlebrow, author and reader become “partners” who have an exchange based on emotion, as Jaime Harker has suggested (2007: 10). Harker also calls this bond a “sympathetic communion between reader and writer” (2007: 19). In the case of Buck, her readers often reciprocated in this communication process and – in typical middlebrow fashion – ‘replied’ to her by means of fan letters.12 Buck herself praised these letters and stressed the ‘power of sentiment’ which they established between her readers and herself: “A person so secluded as a writer must not lose touch with them [the readers]. I value their letters, often so foolish. I feel them. Their minds reach mine, and I try to make mine reach theirs” (Harris 1969: 259, emphasis in original; see also Stirling 1983: 265). The readers’ emotional involvement, which comes to the fore here, became a crucial element of Buck’s project. In this project, she sought to entertain her readers and evoke their sentiments, empathy, and identification. On top of this, however, Buck also wanted to teach her audience. With this, she followed an important middlebrow principle which Janice Radway has famously called the “sentimental education” of the reader (1997: 17; 263).

11 Middlebrow studies has “over-proportionately turned to female writers of middlebrow fiction,” as Christ has stated (2010: 23). The domination of female writers of middlebrow fiction neglects the fact that there are important male contributions as well: for instance, Sloan Wilson’s The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit (1955) can be seen as the male counterpart to Grace Metalious’s novel Peyton Place, which was the middlebrow success of the 1950s. Similarly, John Cheever sketched American suburbia of the 1950s and 60s in middlebrow aesthetics in his short stories. Jonathan Franzen serves as a contemporary example of a male writer who has – controversially – been associated with the middlebrow. On the problematic case of Franzen and the reconsideration of the boundaries between ‘high’ and ‘middle’ art, see, for example, June Dwyer, “Canon-Openers, Book Clubs, and Middlebrow Culture” (2006). 12 On the importance of fan letters for middlebrow authors, see, for instance, Jennifer Parchesky (2002: 229-58).

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This pedagogical impulse of the text is fundamentally dependent on its interlinkage of personalism and universalism: Exploring large social, political, or historical issues [through] the experiences of a single individual, […] middlebrow texts strived to produce an emotional and emphatic response: they encouraged their readers to feel intensely about other people. In doing so, […] they facilitated a ‘social habit of mind’ in which the reader entered into a state of identification and connection with a text’s subject. By enabling this imaginative communion, middlebrow texts facilitated the transgressing of boundaries and the bridging of differences through the workings of sympathy. Readers learned about the world beyond themselves by emotionally entering into a universe somehow foreign to their own. The defenders of middlebrow understood this aesthetic as an alternative to the reigning modernist one, that, in their eyes, produced primarily alienation, cynicism, and despair. Middlebrow purveyors kept an eye on the social implications of culture: they believed that by enabling a sense of imaginative community, their texts could encourage a sense of engagement and commitment with the world that had utopian possibilities. (Klein 2003: 65; my emphases)13

I added italics to Christina Klein’s explanation of the middlebrow’s universalism in and through personalism, because her vocabulary here perfectly captures the roles and positions which middlebrow readers (should) assume: with a “sense of engagement and commitment,” they enter a foreign world, carefully observe it with sympathy,14 and become initiated and transformed in the process.

13 Christina Klein expands on Janice Radway’s term of the “middlebrow personalism” in this passage. For Radway’s term, see her A Feeling for Books (1997: 283-284). 14 Birte Christ argues against an ongoing importance of the discourse of sympathy in middlebrow texts from the 1920s onwards, claiming that “these middlebrow texts […] replace the imperative of sympathy with the imperative of success and individualism, which warrants different kinds of remediations of poverty” (Christ 2010: 26). Christ uses Joseph Fichtelberg’s Critical Fictions: Sentiment and the American Market, 1780-1870 (2003) as a back-up to her claim, stating that he shows that the discourse of sympathy “already begins to lose its pervasiveness before and during the Civil War” (Christ 2010:26). I contradict this argument and suggest that sympathy was not replaced, but at best complemented

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These dynamics are clearly at work in Pearl Buck’s novels: at first glance, the experiences of Buck’s female characters could not be more different from those of her (female) American middle-class readers. In this sense, the racialized, poor ‘Other’ is the binary opposite of a white, privileged middle-class Western audience. At the same time, however, Buck’s discussions of race frequently work with strategies of identification and alignment between these two groups and strongly draw on a universalism of their experiences and emotional closeness on the part of the reader, the process which Radway has called “sentimental education:” Buck’s Chinese characters – and her female protagonists such as feet-bound Kwei-lan in East Wind, West Wind (chapter 3) and poor farmer’s wife O-lan in The Good Earth (chapter 4) – often serve her readership as role models and projection surfaces as they represent an integrity, honesty, and hard-working ethos and embody traditional values and morality. In these texts, then, Buck juxtaposes East and West with the seemingly paradoxical aim to bring them together. In her study Pearl S. Buck’s Chinese Women Characters, Xiongya Gao summarizes this important aspect: “The individuality of Buck’s characters has had a strong universal appeal to readers. English-speaking readers find themselves able to relate to Buck’s characters even though these characters belong to a people foreign to them” (Gao 2000: 21). With her approach, Buck on the one hand draws on the strategies of alignment between reader and character that many other middlebrow authors employ. Yet on the other hand, she deviates markedly from most other writers of her day. We can find the explanation of this deviation in the very nature of Buck’s project. There were other middlebrow writers of the time who – if not discussing mission as a theme per se – made use of missionary strategies in their fiction. This is owed to middlebrow’s overall affinity to missionary cultures, as I have explained. However, Buck’s middlebrow mission was still exceptional: Buck politicized a genre widely per-

by individualism in middlebrow texts of the 1920s and 30s. Especially during the Great Depression, this discourse loomed large in middlebrow fiction, as I will show by illustration of Buck’s The Good Earth and (general) literary trends of the 1930s in chapter 4. I am in line with scholars like Christina Klein on this aspect, who has equally observed a persistent power of sympathy in middlebrow texts and musicals of the mid-century (see, for instance, the quote by Klein above).

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ceived as apolitical and she appropriated it for her own purposes. Different from most others, this political project operated in a close-knit triad of middlebrow, mission, and ethnic ‘Other.’15 With this missionary ethnicization of the middlebrow, as this project can be called, Buck gave this body of literature a unique and important twist and in many respects complicated the processes of categorization, the dynamics and cultural assumptions generally revolving around middlebrow fiction, as I will discuss in this book.

T HE C RITICAL D ISMISSAL

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In this last part of my introduction, I am concerned with the critical dismissal of Pearl Buck. This dismissal is, after all, responsible for the long academic neglect of her, a circumstance which triggered my interest in Buck and her oeuvre in the first place. In what follows, my intention is not

15 Among the few other examples of middlebrow writers that come to mind in this context are the Eaton sisters, whose projects – like Buck’s – were similarly built on a concatenation of the strands mission, middlebrow, and ethnic ‘Other.’ For an in-depth discussion of Edith and Winnifred Eaton’s work, see Dominika Ferens’s Edith and Winnifred Eaton: Chinatown Missions and Japanese Romances (2002). Ferens’s monograph can be placed in a more recent phase of middlebrow studies in the new millennium. In this phase critics have begun to focus more closely on questions of ethnicity/race in middlebrow texts. Books that exemplify this trend in middlebrow studies are, next to Ferens’s study, Christina Klein’s Coldwar Orientalism: Asia in the Middlebrow Imagination, 1945-1961 (2003), and the volume Middlebrow Moderns. Popular American Women Writers of the 1920s, edited by Lisa Botshon and Meredith Goldsmith (2003). As different and diversified as these studies are in approaching middlebrow literature and culture, they share the basic assumption of the middle(brow) as a feminized sphere in-between the often diffuse categories of ‘high’ and ‘low’ art. The middlebrow here features in the form of texts and films for middle-class women which negotiate the (middle-class) fates of female characters as (exoticized) racial ‘Others’ who become projection surfaces or figures of identification for a white middle-class audience.

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to reclaim Buck as a ‘serious’ writer or vindicate her writing. Rather, a closer analysis of why she was rejected by critics further helps to explain in what sense the concatenation of the middlebrow, mission, and the oscillation between Americanness and Chineseness in Buck’s project became problematic in her reception. These critical views, in turn, affected the course of Buck’s project. It is interesting to trace how Buck responded to the reproach that there was “usually sugar left in the bottom of the cup [her fiction],” to recall Stirling North’s imagery one last time. Buck’s reactions to the dismissal of her skills as a writer are intricately intertwined with the missionary context. For one, the criticism, resistance, or occasional ignorance that she met with on various levels ran analogous to the endeavors of missionaries to China: they, too, were not always well received, heard, and consequently not as effective in their missionary work as they sought to be. The strategies of responding to this rejection are again something that Buck shared with religious missionaries: being pushed into a position of defense, she insisted more urgently on her style and theme, and her missionary quest became even more intense. While her approach to ‘mission’ as a fictional topic was rather intuitive in the first stages of her career (as my discussion of her debut novel East Wind, West Wind in chapter 3 will show), her missionary topic and style became much more strategic later on. In fact, this style became distinct to an extent that it turned into Buck’s trademark. This trademark was much appreciated by her readers and followers, but rejected by those who set the academic and critical agenda. The most frequent explanation for Buck’s dismissal – both in her own days and in contemporary criticism – has been found in her belonging to the framework of the feminized middlebrow. To an extent, the (maledominated) distrust of women writers and the middlebrow in general explains the rejection of Buck’s fiction by fellow writers and critics of her time. For example, William Faulkner’s notorious indignation at being placed in the same “pigeon hole […] with Mrs. Chinahand Buck” upon learning of his own Nobel Prize in 1950 (cited in Conn 1996: 210)16 can be read as an expression of a more widespread discomfort of male writers with the success of their female counterparts – a suspicion or resentment which

16 For the original print of Faulkner’s letter (dated 22 February, 1950), see Joseph Blotner, ed., Selected Letters of William Faulkner (1977: 299).

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can be traced back to the mid-nineteenth century and the context of sentimental writing (see Baym 1978; Douglas 1977; Tompkins 1985) and which is informed by commercial factors: “[W]omen authors have been active since the earliest days of settlement. Commercially and numerically they have probably dominated American literature since the middle of the nineteenth century,” as Nina Baym stated (1981: 124), only to observe that in the late 1970s the canon of major writers still did not really include women novelists (1981: 123). The fact that Buck took recourse to a male pseudonym, John Sedges, in the 1940s and 50s, might attest to her own perception of being discriminated against on the basis of her gender.17 Explaining the use of her male pseudonym in the preface of American Triptych, Buck

17 A woman writer’s recourse to a male pen name, was, of course, not a new strategy at the time when Pearl Buck used it. With this move, she followed a long tradition of writers like George Eliot, Henry Wood, or – in some version – the modernist writer Hilda Doolittle, who used the mere abbreviation H.D. By contrast to these writers, however, Buck’s use of the male pen name was somewhat differently employed. The novels she published under the pseudonym ‘John Sedges’ are: The Townsman (1945), Angry Wife (1947), A Long Love (1949), Voices in the House (1953), and American Triptych (1958, a trilogy volume which includes The Townsman, The Long Love, and Voices in the House). These novels are decidedly ‘American’ in that they depict American characters in American settings and do not treat the Chinese/Asian subject matter at all. Thus, they were experimental testing grounds for Buck. I would agree with Peter Conn, who has argued that “[t]he pen name gave her a measure of artistic freedom – and the chance to test her talent in the marketplace as an unknown writer” (Conn 1996: 288). A number of other novels of the same time span – such as Peony (1948), Kinfolk (1949), God’s Men (1951), or The Hidden Flower (1952) – were published under Buck’s real name. Not accidentally, these latter novels revolve around her ‘usual’ Asian topics and themes, and hence the set of styles and modes which both Buck and her readership were familiar with. She could rest assured that these novels would sell and be commercially successful once her name was associated with them. Thus, she relied on her well-established status as an ethnic middlebrow writer for the publication purposes of those novels. Purchasing a novel from the author Buck, readers knew what to expect, and were not disappointed – these are, of course, precisely the dynamics of how the middlebrow works.

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stressed that the reason was “a simple one, and [that the pseudonym was] masculine because men have fewer handicaps in our society than women have in writing as well as in other professions” (1958: viii). On another occasion, she again addressed the gender inequality among writers and artists, interestingly referring to the aspect of (commercial) popularity, this one pillar of the middlebrow: “[W]omen artists in any field are not taken as seriously as men, however serious their work. It is true that they often achieve high popular success. But this counts against them as artists,” she summarized her views in her collection of feminist essays, Of Men and Women (1941: 67). However, Buck’s status as a woman writer can only partly account for her scholarly neglect. As Kang Liao reminds us in the chapter “A Neglected Laureate” of his 1997 monograph on Buck, “[t]o say simply she was a woman would not answer the question [of why she has such a low position in American literature] completely, for women writers including Emily Dickinson, Edith Wharton, Gertrude Stein, Willa Cather, and Ellen Glasgow are often studied in American universities” (1997: 33).18 What distinguished Buck from most other writers of her time and even set her apart within the group of middlebrow writers like Canfield or Gale was her biographical background and the circumstance that her works dealt with “Chinese and Asiatic materials” (Doyle 1965: 8). Thus, Buck’s status as an ‘in-between’ author who wrote about a different subject matter and who used foreign and ‘exotic’ settings ran counter to the “nationalistic orientation” in American literary criticism (Baym 1981: 125-126; see also Liao 1997: 33), which can be found in both modernist/highbrow and middlebrow fiction of the day. At some point, she was even “charged with not being an American writer since her subject matter and even her places of residence were almost completely Chinese” (Doyle 1965: 82).

18 To be sure, Liao here gives the names of women writers who do not count among the middlebrow tradition, but whose works are generally characterized by modernist, sometimes experimental techniques, and/or ‘serious’ realism/naturalism, and thus the boundary markers against which middlebrow fiction is placed. Note that Joan Shelley Rubin uses the example of Willa Cather to point to the fact that these boundaries and classifications can be in flux: Cather, she writes, “can be called popular – or even middlebrow […]” (Rubin 2003: xiii).

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It can be argued that this very subject matter – the foreignness, ‘exoticism,’ or difference which China/Asia represented at the time – was a promising topic which held out the prospect of bringing critical acclaim to writers concerned with it. Especially in Buck’s case, her upbringing in China and her expert status as an ethnographer or teacher which emerged out of it might suggest that her fiction carried a huge potential to overthrow the perception of China as a “minor Other” and turn it into a respectable literary and cultural subject. Yet, this potential was not always fully exploited. This was, in particular, due to the way in which Buck enacted her theme – her missionary style and manner. As a result of her upbringing in a missionary environment in China, Dody W. Thompson argued, Buck’s mold was irrevocably set a generation behind what would have been her normal one. If later she exchanged the rickshaw for jet planes, if the deep peace of her childhood gave way to revolution, and she both read and traveled widely, her deepest roots nevertheless were locked away in time, as she herself had been in space. (Thompson 1968: 89)

This biographically motivated backwardness, Thompson claimed, shaped the nature of Buck’s fictional work significantly and set it apart from the writing of the day. According to Thompson, since the topics and problems Buck addressed were different from those of other authors and because she told them in a tone of missionary optimism, her fiction was “too simple for adults” and “convincing only to the young” and “unsophisticated” readers who needed authorial guidance and uncomplicated plots (Thompson 1968: 108-109). Buck’s missionary style, admired by her audience, also became her ‘trap:’ it was regarded as too urgent, old-fashioned, didactic, simple, schematic, dull, or even obtrusive. Typical of Buck, she did not remain silent, but replied eloquently to the critique of her work. Interestingly, in these responses she resorted to the Chinese tradition of story-telling. With this strategy, she referred back to her status as a cultural insider and fashioned herself as a ‘stranger’ who was unfamiliar with American traditions. For example, Buck sketched her literary credo in the alumnae address “On the Writing of Novels,” which she delivered at her alma mater, Randolph-Macon Woman’s College, Vir-

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ginia,19 in June 1933. In this speech, Buck stressed that she followed the socalled tse ran principle in her fiction: A good novelist, so I have been taught in China, should be above all else tse ran, that is, natural, unaffected, and so flexible and variable as to be wholly at the command of the material that flows through him. His whole duty is only to sort life as it flows through him, and in the vast fragmentariness of time and space and event to discover essential and inherent order and rhythm. (Buck 1933: 8)

As a ‘good novelist,’ Buck merely chronicles the flow of ‘real’ life and brings it into the right order, rearranges it, and communicates it to her readers. She is in command of her text, but she does not distort, or make things up. The actual material, ‘real’ life as it were, is already there for the ethnographer-novelist to pick up, record, and then translate to the readers. According to this understanding, the novelist “should not be a preacher, [but still,] didacticism is acceptable so long as the novel portrays life faithfully and forcefully,” as Gao has summarized this aspect (2000: 26). It is a harmonious imagery which Buck evokes here when she speaks of the ‘natural flow’ which runs through the novelist. In this flow, the medium, the novel, has to remain transparent and constitute a dialogue with the reader. Different from modernist aesthetics, the writer of this text must get involved with the audience. Again, this aspiration is very much consistent with the middlebrow. The phrase “so I have been taught in China,” which Buck uses in her alumnae address, became a favored strategy of hers whenever she defended herself against criticism of her writing in the following years. Most prominently, she made ample use of this phrase in the lecture “The Chinese Novel,” which she gave upon being awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature on 12 December 1938. The speech, which also repeated the passage on the tse ran principle of her earlier alumnae address, was published as a booklet one year later. After the announcement had been made that Buck had won this literary prize of high acclaim, a big controversy emerged over whether

19 Subsequent references to the college in my study are given as Randolph College. This is not out of inattentiveness or meant as an abbreviation, but owed to the fact that Randolph-Macon Woman’s College was renamed Randolph College in 2007.

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she had deserved the award or not.20 The Nobel committee awarded Buck the prize, giving “her rich and truly epic descriptions of peasant life in China and […] her biographical masterpieces” as the major reason (Hallström 1938: n. p.).21 This decision caused a stir with a number of people who were vehemently opposed to Buck’s winning of the award. The modernist establishment in the United States, in particular, objected to the fact that Buck was awarded with a prize they felt should have gone to Theodore Dreiser or Sherwood Anderson instead. On the American side of the critique, there was a considerable amount of polemics involved.22 In addition, Buck was also criticized on the other side of the Pacific: Asian critics had started to question her project ever since the publication of The Good Earth and now saw their critique even more justified. These critics took issue with the fact that a white woman had become the ‘insider voice’ of Asia; thus it was a

20 The extent of public critique or controversy was considerably lower when Buck had won the Pulitzer Prize for her most successful novel The Good Earth in 1932. Although critical voices had already existed back then, these were not really widely publicized at the time. I would offer several explanations for this lack of controversy in 1932: the sweeping celebrations of The Good Earth (see my discussion of the novel in chapter 4 of this book); the overall lower prestige of the Pulitzer Prize in comparison with the Nobel Prize; the fact that Buck was still living in China at the time and was thus far away from the public limelight; and the circumstance that in spring 1932 – when the announcement of her Pulitzer was made – she had not yet caused much political indignation and had not really been seen as a controversial person in the United States (see chapter 2 for the speech “Is There a Case for Foreign Missions?,” which represents a turning point in the perception of Buck). On Buck’s Nobel Prize and the controversy around it, see, for example, Wendy Larson and Richard Kraus, “China’s Writers, the Nobel Prize, and the International Politics of Literature” (1989: 148), or Dody W. Thompson (1968: 85-110). 21 For the complete reasoning of the committee, see the presentation speech by Per Hallström, secretary of the Swedish academy at the time (“Presentation Speech” 1938; for the URL of the online print of the speech, see the Works Cited list at the end of the book). 22 For example, Robert Frost declared in a mocking-sarcastic fashion: “If she can get it, anybody can” (qtd. in Liao 1997: 29). For an in-depth discussion of these reactions, see Conn 1996: chapter 5 and especially chapter 6.

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complex network of problems revolving around questions of usurpation, authority, access, and status which stood at the center of this debate.23 Faced with this array of criticism, Pearl Buck took even greater recourse in her status as an insider of China and insisted that she told her stories just ‘as she had been taught in China.’ The Nobel Prize lecture of 1938 epitomizes her defense, spelling out her stance towards fiction and the role of the novelist. Buck starts out this lecture by clearly positioning herself in the Chinese tradition of writing and claims the Chinese novel24 as a model for herself and for Western writers in general: […] But it is the Chinese and not the American novel which has shaped my own efforts in writing. My earliest knowledge of story, of how to tell and write stories, came to me in China. It would be ingratitude on my part not to recognize this today. And yet it would be presumptuous to speak before you on the subject of the Chinese novel for a reason wholly personal. There is another reason why I feel that I may properly do so. It is that I believe the Chinese novel has an illumination for the Western novel and for the Western novelist. […] In this tradition of the novel have I been born and reared as a writer. My ambition, therefore, has not been trained toward the beauty of letters or the grace of art. It is, I believe, a sound teaching and, as I have said, illuminating for the novels of the West. (Buck, “The Chinese Novel” 1938: n. p.)

In this opening of her lecture, Buck plays off the American tradition of novel writing against the Chinese tradition and, by extension, her own agenda of writing. When she takes her distance from the “grace of art” which Western writers are expected to possess and display in their fiction, she implicitly evokes the concept of ‘highbrow’ literature and sets it against the more down-to-earth ideal of the Chinese novel. This ideal or norm, which Buck

23 For the controversy between Buck and Asian critics, see my discussion of The Good Earth in chapter 4. 24 Buck specifies her understanding of “the Chinese novel” as follows: “When I say Chinese novel, I mean the indigenous Chinese novel, and not that hybrid product, the novels of modern Chinese writers who have been too strongly under foreign influence while they were yet ignorant of the riches of their own country” (Buck, “The Chinese Novel” 1938: n. p.). As we shall see again in chapter 5, Buck is highly wary of anything too hybrid, mixed, or modern.

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explains more closely a bit further on in her lecture, calls to mind some crucial principles of the middlebrow: For the Chinese novel was written primarily to amuse the common people. And when I say amuse I do not mean only to make them laugh, though laughter is also one of the aims of the Chinese novel. I mean amusement in the sense of absorbing and occupying the whole attention of the mind. I mean enlightening that mind by pictures of life and what that life means. I mean encouraging the spirit not by ruleof-thumb talk about art, but by stories about the people in every age, and thus presenting to people simply themselves. (Buck, “The Chinese Novel” 1938: n. p.; my emphasis)

The Chinese novel’s tasks, as Buck outlines them here, are reminiscent of the middlebrow’s mandate to entertain and captivate its readers and to get them involved with the text and its characters. The constructedness of this concept of literature, which comes to the fore in Buck’s description, is taken up again at the end of the lecture. Importantly, Buck establishes a rhetorical triangle in which her own Sinification, the middlebrow, and mission conflate: And like the Chinese novelist, I have been taught to want to write for these people. If they are reading their magazines by the million, then I want my stories there rather than in magazines read only by a few. For story belongs to the people. They are sounder judges of it than anyone else, for their senses are unspoiled and their emotions are free. No, a novelist must not think of pure literature as his goal. […] He must be satisfied if the common people hear him gladly. At least, so I have been taught in China. (Buck, “The Chinese Novel” 1938: n. p.)

When she associates herself with the Chinese novelist, she stresses that she, too, has a democratic understanding of literature: it has to be accessible for many people and “belong” to them. Emphasizing that the “common people” have to “hear [the novelist] gladly,” she points to the important communication between writer and audience and thus makes clear that she is aware of her dependence on the reader. This dependence is particularly given because “pure literature” is not and cannot be her goal as a writer. Her goal as writer is to teach, to educate, and to inform her readers in the

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best possible – read: entertaining – way. This approach and goal, then, becomes Pearl Buck’s American Chinese middlebrow mission. Before I discuss Pearl Buck’s middlebrow mission in the following chapters, I would like to round off my introductory considerations by way of focusing on the existing research on Buck in order to properly place my own project in this framework Overall, the body of studies on Pearl Buck is rather limited in size to date. As I have explained in this introduction, Buck was long almost completely ignored by the academia – irrespective of the discipline. Apart from some early studies, such as Paul Doyle’s overview of Buck’s fiction in a 1965 study, which offers summaries rather than in-depth analyses of her novels, and a journal article from 1977 by Michael Hunt, which is concerned with Buck’s role as a China expert, there is hardly any scholarly material at all until the 1980s. In the wake of second-wave feminism, some female scholars then ‘discovered’ Pearl Buck in the 1980s. As an outcome of this interest, Nora Stirling (1983) and Beverly Rizzon (1989) published biographies about Buck, which added to Buck’s own autobiography of 1954 and her (semi)autobiographical Pearl S. Buck, which she wrote “in consultation” with Theodore Harris in two volumes in 1969 and 1971. Similar to Stirling and Rizzon, Jane Rabb, whose preparatory notes are archived in the library of Buck’s alma mater, Randolph College in Virginia, had planned to write a biography of Buck around 1980, but never finished her project. Belonging to these feminist studies of the 1980s, Jane Hunter’s monograph on women missionaries to China, The Gospel of Gentility (1984), briefly focuses on Buck in the context of (mission) history and discusses Buck’s biographies of her parents as part of a chapter on “Married Women and Missionary Vocation.” A more serious, widely covered and somewhat more systematic interest in Pearl Buck was then initiated by Elizabeth Lipscomb, Frances Webb, and Peter Conn, who organized the “Pearl S. Buck Centennial Symposium” at Randolph College on the occasion of what would have been Buck’s 100th birthday in 1992. The immediate outcome of the symposium was a collection of the essays presented at the conference – The Several Worlds of Pearl S. Buck (1994) – which is interesting in its own right because of its interdisciplinary contributions. Even more importantly, however, the conference seems to have helped for good to overcome the long silence – or

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existence of only scattered pieces – on Buck. Most prominently, Peter Conn, one of the co-organizers of the 1992 conference, engaged in a booklength project on Buck at the time. This book, published as Pearl S. Buck. A Cultural Biography in 1996, is impressive in many respects: because of its comprehensiveness and simultaneous close attention to (literary, cultural, and historical) detail, it has proven indispensable for all studies that followed Conn – including my own. However, Conn’s biography also displays a clear bias for Buck which I consider at times problematic, as my discussion will show. After Conn, two further studies of the later 1990s are worthwhile to be mentioned here: Kang Liao’s monograph Pearl S. Buck, A Cultural Bridge Across the Pacific (1997), which, too, has an overview character; and Xi Lian’s seminal revisionist study of missions, The Conversion of Missionaries (published in 1997, as well). Written from a historian’s perspective, this book includes a chapter on Buck which assesses her in the light of secondgeneration missionaries. If we turn to the last decade, Xiongya Gao’s Pearl S. Buck’s Chinese Women Characters (2000) is noticeable: this book sparked the academic interest in Pearl Buck in the new millennium, and significantly, it represents the first book-length literary study on Buck by a Chinese American woman. Ten years later, in her 2010 article on Buck’s debut novel East Wind, West Wind, Haipeng Zhou would follow Gao’s lead. The field of Asian American studies has primarily discovered Buck through the studies of Mari Yoshihara, Embracing the East (2003), and Karen Leong, The China Mystique (2005). Both Yoshihara and Leong devote a chapter to Buck in their respective monographs which investigate the roles which (Asian) American women played in the formation of American Orientalism in the early to mid twentieth century. These two books are multi-faceted studies which are exceptionally well written – especially in their arguments of Buck’s construction of an American China. As far as studies on Buck in the 2000s are concerned, Alexa Weik’s dissertation “Beyond the Nation: American Expatriate Writers and the Process of Cosmopolitanism” (2008), which includes a chapter on Buck, and Hilary Spurling’s Burying the Bones. Pearl Buck in China (2010), a literary biography, complete the picture. Surprisingly enough, middlebrow studies has almost completely bypassed Pearl Buck. Scholars like Joan Shelley Rubin and Janice Radway hardly ever mention her in their comprehensive studies of the field. It took

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until 2003 when Christina Klein’s monograph Cold War Orientalism was published that Buck (although not in the form of a full chapter) was first included in the middlebrow canon. Published in the same year as Klein’s book, Jaime Harker’s chapter “Multicultural Middlebrow: Pearl Buck and the Liberal Iconography of The Good Earth” in her America the Middlebrow further helped to establish Buck in middlebrow studies. In line with the books by Harker, Klein, Yoshihara, and Leong, I situate my own study in the context of the revisionist projects of New American Studies. At the same time, in “Middlebrow Mission: Pearl S. Buck’s American China” I expand on these previous studies and bring together Pearl Buck’s positioning in the middlebrow and the missionary contexts for the first time.

1. The Sentimental Imperialism of American Women Missionaries in China I have so much to be thankful for that I am here in China, safe and sound and well, and really beginning on my work which I am so glad is to be my work. Certainly I have never had one bit of doubt that I’m in the place that needs me more than any other in the world, and that in itself is the greatest cause for thanksgiving. Then I contrast coming to China at a time like this, when, as we heard last night, the missionary has more influence than ever before, and probably than he ever will again, with the kind of reception that loads of the missionaries had who are working here now, and I realize how very grateful I should be to come at such a crucial time.1

These lines stem from a letter which American missionary Marian Gardner Craighill2 sent home to her family on Thanksgiving morning in 1915. Upon

1

This reference, like the rest of the missionary letters and diary entries which I cite in this chapter, is taken from the “China Records Project Miscellaneous Personal Papers Collection” at Yale Divinity School, New Haven. For the folder on Marian Gardner Craighill, see Yale Divinity School Library, RG8, Box 49. The “China Records Project,” part of the Day Missions Library at Yale Divinity School, is the preeminent collection documenting the missionary movement and world Christianity in the United States. For an overview of missionary libraries and archives, see Archie R. Crouch et al, Christianity in China. A Scholar’s Guide to Resources in the Libraries and Archives of the United States (1989).

2

For an in-depth account of the Craighills’ years in China, see Marian Craighill’s autobiographical account The Craighills of China (1972). As she married Lloyd Craighill soon after her arrival in China, I will refer to her as Marian Craighill

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her arrival in Nanchang, China, the enthusiastic Craighill, a graduate from Smith College, found herself as the only unmarried woman in the missionary community. Her above lines are indicative of the overall cheerful, optimistic spirit and the clear sense of vocation in Craighill’s bulk of letters which stretch into the late 1930s. In the course of her years in China, the single missionary Marian Gardner had turned into a missionary mother and the wife of Lloyd Craighill, an Episcopalian reverend who would later become a bishop in China. It is this personal development and her shifting roles as a missionary that make her correspondence with her family back home so interesting. Even more important for me, however, is the fact that Marian Craighill was one of the closest friends of Pearl Buck and her first husband, Lossing Buck, in China: although both women were part of the second generation of American missionaries and witnessed a transition within the American foreign mission movement in the first decades of the twentieth century, their experiences and perceptions of the missionary project could not have been any more different. Craighill’s account thus serves as a counterpoint to the vehement critique of missions which Pearl Buck expressed. When Marian Craighill was writing her letter in late 1915, the American missionary enterprise to China had long been blossoming. After the first American Protestant missionary, Elijah C. Bridgman, had been sent to China in 1829 (see, for example, Ahlstrom 1972: 423), Americans were increasingly setting sail for China in the nineteenth century to engage in the foreign missionary movement. There were several – partly overlapping – reasons which contributed to the popularity of ‘spreading the gospel’ in China in the later nineteenth and early twentieth century. Changes in China’s internal structures, international politics revolving around the ‘Chinese question,’ as well as domestic political and societal developments within the United States were important push factors that triggered the American missionary activity in China. As this study does not pursue a historiography of American missions,3 I will not attempt to retrace the con-

from here on. With this, I am also consistent with the references to her which can be found in missionary archives. 3

For overviews of American missions to China, see, for instance, Latourette 1929, Fairbank 1974, Hutchison 1987, and Ahlstrom 1972. See also the introductory chapters in Hunter 1984 and Lian 1997.

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catenation of these developments in their entirety here. Yet, I do think that an introductory reflection on the backgrounds and premises of American foreign missions is useful for my purposes: it helps to understand women’s situatedness in the missionary movement and their responses to it and thus, we can gain a more profound sense of where Pearl Buck’s gendered critique of foreign missions originated. As we will see, missionary ‘reality’ in China and the roles of female missionaries, in particular, deviated – in some respects markedly – from the way Buck presented them in her project. Accordingly, this chapter represents an indispensable negative horizon against which to read Buck’s work. However, the historical developments in their complexity and multilayeredness, as I will introduce them here, also have a more positive and productive function in the context of my overall study: they constitute the argumentative and conceptual framework on which Buck based her fictional project and its missionary theme. This project was Buck’s own version, her personal interpretation and, in some respects, also an oversimplified, strategically designed rendition of missionary ‘reality’ – but it nevertheless revisited important premises and concepts which had revolved around the American foreign missionary movement. If we can detect an oscillation between female missionaries’ victimization and (self-) empowerment in the historical missionary movement, for example, then this oscillation finds its entrance into Buck’s work, too. In a similar vein, if I elaborate on missionaries’ ‘sentimental imperialism’ in the following paragraphs, this concept can be traced prominently in Buck, who not only used it, but appropriated it for her own purposes, as I will argue in the next chapters. Recapturing some crucial steps in the development of American foreign missions to China and focusing especially on the position of women in this movement in what follows, then, I seek to open such a horizon for Pearl Buck’s engagement with the missionary theme.

AMERICAN M ISSIONARIES C ULTURAL I MPERIALISTS

AS

During the nineteenth century China became one of the most attractive and promising fields of missionary activity because of its increasingly open and liberal climate and the gradual turn away from Manchu rule within Chinese

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society. Reforms and modernization “pav[ed] the way for implantation of Western ideals in the Orient,” as historian Xi Lian summarizes the overall effects of these trends in the introduction to his insightful study The Conversion of Missionaries (1997: 5), drawing on the words of the one person who probably embodied American imperialist and expansionist policy at the turn of the century more than anyone else – Theodore Roosevelt. When President Roosevelt evoked “the Awakening of China” in a speech of the same title he celebrated China’s symbolic break with its cultural past and concluded that “[n]ow is the time for the West to implant its ideals in the Orient” (Roosevelt 1908: 665-67; here quoted in Hunter 1984: 8). In the logic of Roosevelt and others, these “Western ideals” were invariably suffused with economic and capitalist considerations. A modernized, openminded China was perceived as a “vast, undeveloped market for [American] products” which could enhance the United States’ global influence (Lian 1997: 6). To understand missionaries as key agents within a politico-economic framework seems to be at odds with the roles generally ascribed to them – as disseminators of the religious gospel. Yet, the missionary project in China was far from being exclusively concerned with religion and the effort to Christianize a foreign people. From the start, missionaries had been seen as benevolent intercultural translator figures (see Conn 1996); they were the only Western group to seek “direct contact with the common people in the two civilizations,” and can be considered “the principal if not the sole link between village China and small-town America” (Fairbank 1985: 2). As ideal bridge-builders (Liao 1997), they implemented Western ideals which facilitated a wide range of humanitarian, social, and medical improvements in the country. Especially at the turn of the twentieth century, the missionary project became more closely entangled in the network of politics, economics, and global capitalism. Increasingly, China was seen as a place where one could not only exercise one’s benevolence and humanitarianism, but also display or (re)define one’s Americanness. The missionary field across the Pacific turned into a possibility for missionaries to “prove themselves [as Americans] and test their civilization” (Thomson et al. 1982: 18), and their activity revolved more and more around larger questions of identity formation, cultural dominance, and discourses of nationalism, colonialism, and political imperialism. Historian Thoralf Klein has pointed to the imperialist

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backdrop of the missionary project: “Missionary work in nineteenthcentury China would have been impossible but for the political, legal, and military framework provided by imperialism” (Klein 2009: 143). With this assessment, Klein is in accordance with scholars of mission studies who have called missionaries “cultural imperialists” (Fairbank 1974: 3; see also Lutz 1965; Schlesinger 1974; Hutchison 1987, Lian 1997), because they embraced and imparted Western political ideologies, economic principles, teaching methods, and lifestyles and in their attitudes were largely ignorant of the needs of the Chinese. In their study on the American (missionary) experience in East Asia, James C. Thomson, Jr., Peter W. Stanley, and John Curtis Perry refined the label “cultural imperialist” and instead worked with the term “sentimental imperialists,” which they also chose as the title of their book (1982). This term, I believe, is particularly useful for the purposes of my study. In the first place, it draws attention to the roles of female missionaries. It is in their activities and attitudes that we can especially see how the language and discourse of sentimentality correlates with a wider framework of imperialism. Secondly, if couched in sentimentalism, the imperialist project comes across as more tempered or more moderate. Again, I would refer this effect of temperance or mitigation back to the female gender, and I will address in this chapter to what extent female missionaries’ work followed this logic of sentimental imperialism. Finally, the concept of sentimental imperialism becomes very productive if we turn to the fiction of Pearl Buck. The later chapters of this book will show how Buck’s missionary figures and their projects fit into this concept and in what sense they further complicate it. The concatenation of politics, economics, and religion was, of course, not exactly new or unique to the experience of American missionaries in China, but had been an integral part of the American project ever since the Revolutionary Wars (if not the Puritan era) and had particularly come to the fore in the framework of Manifest Destiny throughout the nineteenth century. These interconnections, however, gained an unprecedented intensity as the ideology of Manifest Destiny was transplanted to Asia by the help of missionaries. America’s westward push into the Pacific rim region was triggered by a complex set of ascriptions and myths revolving around East Asia, a mixture of fascination and fear, desire and repulsion. Thomson and his co-authors refer to this ambiguity when they write about the “growing

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constituency of Americans who shared strong desires about Asia and its future – to exploit it, ‘civilize’ it, ‘Christianize’ it, win its ‘hearts and minds,’ or perhaps all four” (1982: 1).4 These desires were closely associated with the idea of conversion, and missionaries were seen as the ideal agents to translate the one into the other. It is precisely this intricate set of desires, ascriptions, and projections and the ambiguity of sentimental imperialism that Pearl Buck would build on in her fictional work. From its inception, the story of American missionaries in China was marked by tensions which had to do with China’s domestic and international political conflicts and the turmoil that went along with it within the country. These conflicts always affected the daily lives of missionaries, which should in turn have an impact on how missionaries approached and shaped their activity. When Marian Craighill, in the above quoted letter, expresses her gratitude for being “safe and sound” in China “at a time like this” and when she points to missionaries’ wide range of influence in 1915, these remarks need to be seen as a reference back to the complicated and often dangerous lives of Western missionaries in China before. Throughout the nineteenth century, warfare and conflicts between the East and the West, such as the Opium War of 1839 to 1842 between China and Great Britain, the Treaty of Tientsin (1858), the Burlingame Treaty (1868), or the Boxer rebellion at the turn of the century impacted missionaries’ presence in China most severely and exposed missionaries to a constant cycle of acceptance and rejection by the Chinese.5 The extended legal rights for foreigners in the country, which stood at the end of some of these conflicts (such as the Treaty of Tientsin), did not always translate into a de facto improvement of missionary life in China. Also, periods of détente often came at a high price: when the Chinese showed Western missionaries a greater tolerance after the dissolution of imperial rule in 1911, this had emerged

4

“Winning the hearts and minds” is a phrase Thomson, Stanley, and Perry use in allusion to yet another American ‘mission’ in Asia – the Vietnam War.

5

Of course, it would be wrong to understand missionaries solely as victims of these conflicts. After all, their activities – especially if seen as an extension of political imperialism – time and again also triggered Chinese attitudes toward them. Thus, the cause and effect dynamics in many of the conflicts listed here were often highly complex. For a discussion of this aspect, see Fairbank 1974, Schlesinger 1974, or Hutchison 1987.

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out of the Boxer rebellion of 1900 and its ensuing revolution in the course of which many missionaries had been attacked and killed by Chinese nationalists. Thus, when we read Craighill’s reference to her own and fellow missionaries’ safety, we need to bear in mind that she made this statement during one such period of relative peace and stability, which ended when the New Culture Movement (1915-1921) set in and changed the situation of missionaries in the country yet again. In another letter home, even the optimistic Marian Craighill acknowledges Westerners’ exposure to the xenophobia gradually (re)emerging in these years: After I get to school I enjoy myself very much but my route there is certainly strewn with difficulties. Yesterday I had a lump of mud thrown in my neck. I was so mad I would gladly have vivisected the perpetrator, – which doesn’t sound like a proper missionary spirit, does it. […] Every child hails me as ‘Foreign devil’ till I think I would respond to that title in a roll call. (Nov. 25, 1916; Yale Divinity School Library, RG 8, Box 49)

Interestingly, this – tongue-in-cheek – evocation of the term “foreign devil” refers us back to Buck’s childhood memories of herself as the yang kweitse, the foreign devil, which I have mentioned in the introduction. Going abroad as a missionary was thus not solely a question of converting foreign peoples, but it was also an experience that was marked by a plunge into the unknown, into adventure, or, to put it in a more negative way, into danger. And indeed, missionaries went abroad by increasing numbers: after the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions had been established in 1810 and after Elijah Bridgman had arrived in China in 1829, Americans had steadily decided to become involved in the missionary project, so that “American Foreign Missions [eventually] became the leading force in world evangelism” in the early twentieth century, as Xi Lian has explained (1997: 4). A brief look at the numbers of American missionaries to China is illustrative of the project’s attractiveness to missionaries: while in 1890 American missionaries to China totaled just over 500, their number increased to approximately 5,400 by 1914. In 1925-26 – thus, shortly before Pearl Buck’s career kicked off – a peak was reached with Americans accounting for some 5,000 of the overall 8,300 Protestant mis-

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sionaries.6 In view of the uncertainties and dangers connected with missionary activity in China at the time, these statistics as such are remarkable. Even more important for my purposes, behind these sheer numbers we find a complex and variegated history of American foreign missions and its agents, one that is clearly gendered, as I will show in the next section.

W OMEN M ISSIONARIES – C OMPETING C ONCEPTS W OMANHOOD ABROAD ?

OF

While the constituency of the missionary force until the years of the American Civil War had predominantly been male, the post-war years brought significant changes, with more and more women flocking to the field: by 1890, “women constituted 60 percent of missionary volunteers and proved to be particularly persuasive voices in the crusade for American influence in China,” as Jane Hunter has summarized in The Gospel of Gentility (1984: 3),7 which represents one of the earliest and still most influential studies on women missionaries to China. Hunter’s use of the term “voice” in the quotation is interesting, because it points to the aspect which is central to my discussion of women’s roles in the missionary movement: the extent to which they articulated themselves, what they expressed, and how exactly they employed their voices – in short: their agency. The understanding of women’s roles in the foreign mission movement is closely interlinked with the debates around the concepts of womanhood in the United States which were taking place in the last decades of the nineteenth century. The concept of Victorian womanhood was still prevalent in the years after the Civil War, but the war had initiated gradual changes in the understanding of women’s roles in society. Single women, who had

6

For a list of the denominations within the missionary movement, see, for example, Latourette 1929, Ahlstrom 1972, Fairbank 1974, or Lian 1997.

7

For these numbers, see also Dana Robert, who observes that “[b]y 1909, at least 2,368 women had served as missionaries from thirty-six denominational women’s missionary societies” (2002: 68). Also refer to Helen Barrett Montgomery’s early study, Western Women in Eastern Lands: An Outline Study of Fifty Years of Woman’s Work in Foreign Missions (1910).

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taken on professional duties – sometimes ‘male’ jobs – during the war, were becoming increasingly independent. What might sound like a promising story of female liberation and societal acceptance at a first glance, however, was in fact the troublesome work of renegotiating long-established conceptions of what a ‘proper’ woman was. These renegotiations or revisions were time and again battles in which the married and motherly Victorian ‘true woman’ was pitted against a threatening, autonomous, single ‘new woman.’8 These two competing concepts of nineteenth-century American womanhood were now transferred into the context of foreign missions: married and single women missionaries were increasingly represented in terms of a competition of ‘true’ versus ‘new’ women. Missionary boards and publications as well as some female missionaries themselves evoked a competition and juxtaposition of the two types of womanhood which was later repeated by the cultural histories of missions. Such a contrast was, however, not given. I argue instead that the missionary framework constitutes a paradigmatic example which highlights that the concepts of ‘true’ and ‘new’ womanhood are too broad categories. They are inadequate to fully capture the dynamics of women’s experiences in the later part of the nineteenth century – both in the context of the American

8

The Cult of True Womanhood is an American version of the concept of Victorian womanhood which emerged in the late eighteenth century and idealized the domestic, private, and passive woman in the house. The concept does not allow for an idea of woman “except as something to be perceived and reacted to; she has no body and no personality,” as Ann Douglas has argued in The Feminization of American Culture (1977: 45; 46). A ‘true woman’ is thus a woman who is submissive, pious, domestic, sensitive, affective, and motherly. On the concept of “true womanhood,” see – as the most prominent scholarly piece on the subject – Barbara Welter, “The Cult of True Womanhood: 1820-1860” (1966; reprinted in: Locating American Studies, ed. Lucy Maddox 1999: 43-66). For an in-depth discussion of the counter-concept of “true womanhood,” the “new womanhood” in the last decades of the nineteenth and early twentieth century, see – among a vast body of secondary literature – for example, Carroll SmithRosenberg, Disorderly Conduct. Visions of Gender in Victorian America (1985), Martha Vicinus, Independent Women: Work and Community for Single Women, 1850-1920 (1985), or Ann Ardis, New Women, New Novels (1990).

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domestic scene9 and, in particular, in the context of foreign missions. With this reading, I claim a space in-between this ‘old,’ established understanding of the concepts of American womanhood. If we take a closer look at the roles of women in missions, it becomes clear that the concepts of true and new womanhood need to be reviewed and that most often they overlap. To regard these two ideologies as mutually exclusive and in competition with each other is problematic in two ways: firstly, such a view fails to acknowledge that concepts of American womanhood ‘traveled’ and were mobile. To send ‘new women’ abroad, then, did not at all erase the problem at home, as I will show presently. Secondly, the boundaries between ‘true’ and ‘new’ women in the missionary field were permeable to an extent that married and single missionary women often formed alliances of a sisterhood abroad, which can – and should – be read as a new, conflating version of established concepts of womanhood. Still, a wide-spread assumption – both by missionary institutions and non-missionary conservative groups at home and, later, by critics – was that the missionary field represented a chance ‘to get rid’ of some of the subversive new women by means of ‘outsourcing’ them to a faraway country. There, they could engage in charitable work, for instance, by working as medical doctors or teachers, but they were not threatening gender structures at home. This way, they did not present a “challenge to their own society” in the manner of American-based women who belonged to the social movements and organizations like the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union: after all, missionary women in China “battled only alien forces and men of another society of a ‘lesser’ race,” as Hunter summarized this argument (1984: xvi).10 Such views are questionable, I think, because they

9

With this, I place my argument in the context of the revisionist work done in American Studies. Amy Kaplan, for example, has similarly argued for the permeability of concepts of American womanhood in her monograph The Social Construction of American Realism (1988). See, in particular, her chapters “Edith Wharton’s Profession of Authorship” (65-87) and “The Sentimental Revolt of Sister Carrie” (140-160).

10 On the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU), see, for example, Barbara Epstein, The Politics of Domesticity: Women, Evangelism, and Temperance in Nineteenth-Century America (1981), or Ruth Bordin, Woman and Temperance. The Quest for Power and Liberty, 1873-1900 (1981). These studies ad-

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tend to understand the foreign missionary scene as a space of alterity, one which is quintessentially detached from the American situation. This fails to acknowledge the complex interlinkages which in fact existed between women’s participation in foreign missions and the home-based reform movements of the later decades of the nineteenth century.11 Leslie A. Flemming speaks of women missionaries’ emulation of the American social networks in Asia and expresses the connections of the two projects in terms of sisterhood: Like their sisters at home, women missionaries were also heavily involved in women’s voluntary organizations. Like other nineteenth century women involved in such issues as suffrage, temperance, peace, and the enhancement of civil life, missionaries participated in and were supported by an extensive network of domestic women’s missions [sic] boards in north America. More importantly […] women missionaries attempted to reproduce this network in Asia, founding and drawing Asian women into such organizations as mission support societies, temperance societies, church fellowships, and even the Y.W.C.A. (Flemming 1989: 5)

The image of sisterhood is not only useful when referring to the relationships between missionary women in China and the United States, but it is especially appropriate if we look at women’s interactions in China. In some cases, married women had internalized the prevalent concepts of womanhood to the extent that they themselves saw single women as their opposite. They envied the autonomy of these ‘new women,’ for whom it was easier to occupy ‘rooms of their own,’ since they did field work like their male counterparts. Occasionally, married women expressed resentment towards them and regarded their presence in China as disruptive (Hunter 1984: 101). For the most part, however, it makes sense to refer to women mis-

dress the similarities between social reform movements and organizations like the WCTU, the women’s home mission societies, and the foreign mission movements. 11 Ian Tyrrell, for instance, has analyzed this interrelatedness and shown that the international organization of the WCTU depended upon the sponsorship by women

missionaries

around

the

world.

See

Ian

Tyrrell,

Woman’s

World/Women’s Empire: The Woman’s Christian Temperance Union in International Perspective, 1880-1930 (1991). See also Robert 2002: 69.

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sionaries’ relationships as a community or an “exilic sisterhood” (Grimshaw 1993: 256), an idea which is expressed in many missionary letters to their families home. Single missionaries’ work often represented a continuity of the work done or begun by married women missionaries. The female mission seminary which prepared women for the missionary field, for example, was an institution which “would be a cooperative venture between wives and single women. Missionary wives would act as matrons, clothing, feeding, and supervising the students. Single women teachers would do the actual teaching,” as Dana Robert has shown (1997: 107). And finally, both, married and single women, engaged in missionary projects that represented alternatives to the imperialistically colored male projects, as I will show in the subchapter on the ‘social gospel.’ In consideration of the compatible goals of women’s projects and the overall framework of solidarity among women missionaries, Dana Robert in her monograph American Women in Mission (1997) speaks of a “unity among married and single women, prominent and ordinary women, missionary and homeside women and women of different Protestant traditions,” which she regards as “[t]he secret to the provenance of the woman’s missionary movement” (Robert 1997: 129). With this assessment, Robert differs from Jane Hunter, who in The Gospel of Gentility (1984) proclaimed a decisive gulf between the experiences of single and married women. The differences between Hunter and Robert can be explained by the dates of their publications and their belonging to two distinct phases of scholarly research on women in missions. In the following paragraphs, I seek to reflect upon the discourse prevalent in these two phases of research. There are several reasons for this discourse observation: in the first place, such an observation is interesting in its own right, because the approaches and objectives, as well as the style and tone which can be traced in the respective phases reflect how feminist contributions to mission history have evolved over the years. In the second place, the paradigm shift between the two phases helps to understand the complicated processes of the (re-)discovery of women missionaries and the different assessments of their activities in mission history. Finally, and most importantly for the purposes of my study, I review these different positions not because I intend to adopt one of them, but because my own position in these debates has emerged out of these phases and represents a revisionist

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middle ground between these often polarizing strands of feminist mission research. Jane Hunter’s study is part of a first important body of secondary literature concerned with women missionaries’ experiences which emerged in the context of second wave feminism of the 1970s and 80s. These early studies by Hunter and, for example, theologian Alice Hageman and historians Joan Jacobs Brumberg, Patricia Hill, and Barbara Epstein represent a correction or revision of the existent literature on mission history which, up to that point in time, had focused almost exclusively on male experiences.12 Contemplating about this long academic neglect, Ruth Brouwer – herself part of a ‘second generation’ of scholars investigating women and missions – comes up with the following explanation in her study from 1990: A specific concern with missions was relatively late in developing within this literature. Writing in 1974, feminist theologian Alice Hageman observed that missions and missionaries remained an unfashionable subject despite their importance in the history of women in American Protestantism. The reason for avoidance of the topic was not hard to find. The woman’s missionary movement with its close ties to conservative denominational structures and its imperialist and racist assumptions appeared to have little to offer to historians with an interest in finding congenial role models and a usable past. Fortunately, in the years after Hageman made her comment on the unfashionableness of missions as an area for study, scholarship on women and religion in the United States gained in confidence and maturity, and as that happened the woman’s foreign missionary movement came to be seen as too important a topic to be neglected. (Brouwer 1990: 7)13

Significantly, in this first phase of the 1970s and 80s, these scholars set out to recover the voices of women missionaries which had previously been unheard. With this aim, their studies can be placed in the overall context of

12 Some of the most prominent studies in this context are Latourette 1929, Lutz 1965, or Fairbank 1974. R. Pierce Beaver’s 1968 study All Love Excelling: American Protestant Women in World Mission (1968) is a rare and early example of a male scholar’s contribution which focuses on women in the missionary movement. 13 For mission and women as an ‘unfashionable’ combination of topics, see Alice Hageman, ed., Sexist Religion and Women in the Church (1974).

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the feminist project in the humanities of the time. They are comparable to literary studies, for example, which, too, performed important recovery work as it rediscovered women writers and helped to incorporate them into the literary and cultural canon. As part of their project of recovering female voices, these mission historians of the 1970s and 80s often presented the mission as an institution which was dominated by men and defined by patriarchal structures – an institution, that is, which did not give women missionaries enough room to express themselves. A focus on women missionaries’ withdrawal and passivity was thus a strategic means for these scholars to establish the grounds on which they expressed their critique of the male missionary project. Most of these studies avoided looking more critically into women’s active participation in an imperialist project. Instead, running through this early body of texts is an imagery of female sacrifice and a language that – largely in accordance with Pearl Buck’s depiction of her mother – stylizes women missionaries as martyrs, saints, or exiles living in isolation among foreign people thousands of miles away from home. Scholarly studies of this first phase did not altogether deny women missionaries agency, but they emphasized the weak starting position that these women had to overcome in order to engage in alternative missionary ventures and establish subtle niches of agency. A second – and rather substantial – wave of studies investigating the role of women missionaries can be regarded as responses to the pioneer work done in the first phase. Starting in the late 1980s and reaching well into the 1990s, studies by scholars like Patricia Grimshaw (1989), Leslie Flemming (1989), Ruth Brouwer (1990; 2002), or Dana Robert (1997; 2002) expanded on the work of Hunter, Brumberg, and others; they readjusted and sometimes clearly revised the earlier studies’ premises and approaches.14 Most of these studies suggest that women’s participation in the

14 In her monograph Missionary Women, which analyzes the role of gender in British Protestant missionary expansion into China and India between 1865 and 1910, historian Rhonda Anne Semple observes that the focus in mission studies has changed from studies that deal with the “impact of Western religious institutions dominated by middle-class males” (most prominently by Latourette) to “thematic studies that include the other players active in the mission field” (2003: 5). Semple also detects a recent trend of studies which shift back again to Western countries and the home base; she reads these new “considerations of

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American foreign mission movement was highly complex as it also carried a potential of female emancipation and self-empowerment. According to these views, women missionaries’ roles cannot exclusively be grasped in terms of passivity or retreat. Dana Robert’s inventory, American Women in Mission (1997), in particular, reappraises women’s roles in the missionary movement. Robert convincingly sums up the intricate dynamics behind images, ascriptions, and processes of stereotypification on the one hand, and reality and historical evidence on the other: The stereotype of the woman missionary has ranged from the long-suffering wife, characterized by the epitaph, “Died, given over to hospitality,” to the spinster in her unstylish dress and wire-rimmed glasses, alone somewhere for thirty years teaching “heathen” children. Like all caricatures, those of the exhausted wife and the frustrated old maid carry some truth: the underlying message of the stereotypes is that missionary women have been perceived as marginal to the central tasks of mission. Rather than being remembered for “preaching the gospel,” the quintessential “male” task, missionary women have been noted for meeting human needs and helping others, sacrificing themselves without plan or reason, all for the sake of bringing the world to Jesus Christ. Historical evidence, however, gives lie to the truism that women missionaries were and are doers but not thinkers, reactive secondary figures rather than proactive primary ones. (Robert 1997: xvii)

Reassessing women’s role within the missionary movement, a number of these later studies of the second phase (particularly from the mid-1990s on and those that were written against the backdrop of postcolonial theory) have commented on the problematic nexus of gender and imperialism, and evaluated women’s engagement in these discourses and practices more critically.15 In her 1990 monograph New Women for God Ruth Brouwer, for

home and field as two interconnected parts reflect[ing] the growing interest in the history of missions and the role played by missions and missionaries in the British Empire” (2003: 5). 15 Works which investigate the interrelation of gender and imperialism (yet not necessarily with an exclusive focus on missionaries), are, for example, Andrew Porter, “‘Cultural Imperialism’ and Protestant Missionary Enterprise, 17801914,” JICH 25: 3 (1997: 367-91); Helen Callaway, Gender, Culture and Em-

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example, concludes that “in the tradition-bound societies of the East, female missionaries would be among the most effective agents of what would later be called cultural imperialism” (Brouwer 1990: 14). Interestingly, in her follow-up study, Modern Women, Modernizing Men, Brouwer revisits her argument of women missionaries’ empowerment with yet another twist: In the realm of women and missions […] we have sometimes been too inclined to read the discourse of mission-minded women uncritically, interpreting a progressive language of sisterhood as proof of egalitarian practice while minimizing their personal investment in stereotyping and dramatizing the “plight” of “Oriental womanhood.” (Brouwer 2002: 5)

With this, she indicates a more recent turn in studies on women’s involvement in the missionary enterprise which has emerged out of the second phase of research. These ‘newer’ contributions are a trend rather than a distinct phase in its own right, but they clearly take a critical distance from the first phase and in many ways radicalize the arguments of the second phase

pire: European Women in Colonial Nigeria (1987); Vron Ware, Beyond the Pale. White Women, Racism and History (1992); Catherine Hall, Jane Lewis, Keith McClelland, and Jane Rendall, “Gender, Nationalisms and National Identities” (1993); or the edited volumes Gender and Colonialism (ed. Timothy P. Foley et al; 1995) and Gender and Imperialism (ed. Claire Midgley; 1998). “It is tempting to dismiss the authoritarian and exclusivist trajectory of missionary imperial feminism as simply the unfortunate residue of dominant ideologies for which dominated British women were not themselves responsible. Certainly, imperialism and the racial arrogance that it spawned predated women’s arrival on the colonial of missionary scene,” as Susan Thorne has argued (1999: 60). This last quote draws attention to the overall prevalence of British studies which address the nexus of gender, imperialism, and nationhood. In the American context, Amy Kaplan and Mary Ryan have worked on domesticity and empirebuilding, as I will discuss in the last section of this chapter when I focus on the “empire of the mother.”

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of research. These recent studies, in particular, have proven to be helpful to (re)formulate my own stance in the debate. They are productive because they focus not only on the relationship between male and female missionaries and its underlying power structures, but take more fully into account female missionaries’ relationship and attitudes toward the ‘heathen’ women. Brouwer reminds us of the overall position of women within the mission movement well into the twentieth century: “[W]omen remained the second sex […] given missions’ origins in patriarchal Western societies, and the deeply patriarchal cultures in which they were planted in Asia and Africa […]” (Brouwer 2002: 33), but at the same time she makes clear that there were ventures for women that helped them to make a more active and self-determined use of their status as the second sex. Pointing to this paradigm shift, Brouwer takes up a postcolonial argument which advocates that scholars should pay more attention to the role of the ‘white woman as colonizer’ within the missionary structures. She is in accordance here with Jane Haggis, for example, who criticized the tendency in many studies of the first phase to present the female missionary as an unproblematic counter-figure or corrective to a male missionary project suffused with imperialism. Drawing on scholars like Spivak or Kaplan, Haggis comments on the danger of these recovery projects to stylize women missionaries in too positive and uncritical terms: Rescuing Western women from the masculinist stereotypes of the existing historiography of empire runs the risk of continuing a colonizing discourse in reverse essentialist terms – the benevolent white woman softening the dominating agency of the […] male’s imperial ambitions. Writing a postcolonial feminist history of imperialism, however, involves more than capturing the complex qualities of hierarchy embedded in past narratives. It must also engage with the hierarchies of the present […]. (Haggis 1998: 83)

In some cases, this later strand of criticism has had a reversing effect of assessing women missionaries’ roles by means of another extreme: where they had long been approached in terms of passivity, women missionaries have now sometimes been presented as an integral part of the hierarchical and imperialist-colored structures of the foreign missionary movement. With this, some of these recent revisionist studies have run into the danger

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of turning women missionaries’ image from that as passive victims into one that saw them as active doers, ‘co-perpetrators’ in the imperialist project. On the basis of my readings of missionaries’ personal documents, I would opt for a middle ground in these debates, as I stated above, and argue that it is most productive to look more closely at the space in-between the two poles: for it is precisely here, between the extremes of utter victimization on the one hand, and clear-cut self-empowerment as part of imperialism on the other that the dynamics of women missionaries’ experiences can best be understood. It is here, in this space in-between these extremes, that female agency and self-fulfillment – of married and of single women missionaries, of those belonging to the first as well as the second generation – takes place, as we will see. As my ensuing discussion of foreign missions as a deeply complex and gendered project shows, women missionaries’ experiences in China were fundamentally marked by ambiguities, tensions, and oscillations.16 These internal contradictions resulting from women missionaries’ simultaneously marginal and superior roles – as “members of a sex considered to be inferior within a race that considered itself superior” (Strobel 1987: 375) – necessitate a more balanced analysis of women’s roles in missions.17 The personal documents of female missionaries offer us such a balanced view of the diverse roles which women missionaries could assume, I think. In their letters and diaries – and sometimes within the documents of a single biography – we come across a fascinating conflation of both tropes: the simultaneous feelings of victimization and self-empowerment, of a (temporary) rejection of life in the diaspora and an affirmation and enthusiasm for it,

16 The variety in which mission scholars have expressed these ambiguities is interesting, I think. For example, in the introduction to their edited volume Gendered Missions, Mary Taylor Huber and Nancy C. Lutkehaus refer to the “deep shadows” (1999: 8) which accompanied what they call the “dual position” of women missionaries (1999: 18). 17 In Missionary Women, Rhonda Anne Semple captures these ambiguities and the oscillation of women missionaries’ roles between victimization and selfempowerment by way of the term “diffuse.” Semple makes ample use of the term, for example, when she holds that “any real power wielded by women was exercised within the male-dominated religious structures through diffuse fundraising networks and mission auxiliaries” (2003: 21).

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and of homesickness and a sense of thrill and adventure to be abroad. Most often, these oscillations and ambiguities intertwine with the logic of sentimental imperialism. This concept, I suggest, is particularly helpful to understand the variegated motivations and experiences behind the composition of missionaries’ documents and to get a grip on the space in-between mentioned above.

W OMEN M ISSIONARIES

AND THEIR

H OME AUDIENCES

In this part of the chapter, I discuss the communication channels which linked women missionaries abroad with their home audiences. Through the missionary boards as their employer or ‘broker,’ through missionary publications, their own letters, or through fundraising, women missionaries interacted with the ‘home base.’ In these networks, too, the ambiguities and tensions which I have just discussed repeatedly come to the fore – and they work reciprocally. On the one hand, women missionaries themselves disclosed the contradictions within the missionary activity in their letters; and on the other hand, the constituency at home affirmed and sometimes reinforced them. Within the overall conservative structures and the organization of the missionary movement, there had been considerable changes in the course of the century which affected the situation of women missionaries: when the widow Charlotte White was appointed as the first single woman missionary to Africa by the Baptist mission board in 1815 (Robert 1997: 55), she was as much part of an exclusively male-organized missionary board as Henrietta Hall of Kilmarnock, Virginia, who married Lewis Shuck and became the first American woman missionary in China in 1835 (Robert 1997: 16; 49). By contrast, the situation of Clara Swain, who was the first fullytrained woman medical doctor to go to India as a foreign missionary, was significantly different when she went abroad in 1869 (Robert 1997: 162): Swain – like many other women in the aftermath of the Civil War – was appointed by a female-organized and -directed missionary board. Women’s and mission activist Helen Barrett Montgomery argued in 1910 that it was “no accident that it was the decade following the close of the Civil War that saw the launching of scores of organizations, among them the Missionary Societies” (quoted in Hunter 1984: 12). Montgomery called these post-war

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years the “baptism of power” of American missionary and church women (see Brouwer 1990: 18).18 Joan Jacobs Brumberg refers to these institutional changes as a rapidly developing “powerful and multifaceted sisterhood of agencies that took shape at the close of the Civil War” – and with this, she, too, resorts to the much-used image of female alliance. Brumberg goes on to summarize women’s emancipation from the male-dominated infrastructure of missions as follows: Between 1868 and 1873, in each of the major American Protestant evangelical denominations, women separated from what were called “parent boards” of male directors and generated their own foreign-mission organizations headed by a national directorate of exclusively female leadership. In 1868, Congressional churchwomen coalesced to form the Woman’s Board of Missions. A year later, Methodist Episcopal women followed suit, creating the Woman’s Foreign Mission Society. In 1870, women in the Presbyterian fold organized the Ladies Board of Foreign Missionary Societies of their church; in 1873, the Woman’s Baptist Foreign Missionary Society was formed. (Brumberg 1982: 350)

There was no complete independence or break away from the maledominated structures of the overall missionary movement. The “parent boards,”19 or general boards, as they were also called, presented “obstacles

18 For a full account of Montgomery’s argument, see her Western Women in Eastern Lands (1910: here 10). 19 The term “parent board” is interesting here: similar to the much evoked ‘sisterhood’ of women missionaries, it illustrates the popularity of family imagery to express the idea of closeness in missionary structures. While ‘sisterhood’ can be read in terms of equality between women, the term ‘parent board’ implies the idea of hierarchy and authority. Considering the nature of the relationship between the (male) boards and women missionaries, this expression is thus particularly suitable. Furthermore, the family imagery invoked here ties in with the nation-state discourse which was widely used in the Reconstruction era to consolidate ideas of national identity and unity. Later, for example in the context of World War I, the same imagery was often employed as an ‘excuse’ for the United States’ interventionist politics abroad. In the media of the day (newspapers, poster propaganda) the “American family” was frequently called upon to support “our boys” overseas; thus, the family imagery helped to promote a self-

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to the formation and functioning of women’s boards” (Hunter 1984: 12), often insisting on the continuation of their own selection of women for the field. The tensions between women’s and parent boards – which were considerably higher in the conservative American South than within northernbased organizations – were a reaction to the blossoming of women’s missionary societies, which should rise up to a total number of 41 by 1900 (see Hunter 1984: 12; Robert 2002: 69). Pearl Buck does not explicitly address these tensions between male and female organized missionary boards in her biographies or essays. She does, however, discuss men’s dominance in the Presbyterian station meetings which she attended with her parents in her childhood. Also, she points to the male supremacy within the Presbyterian church in general when she criticizes the doctrines of Saint Paul which hindered women from a full participation in the movement. Buck’s descriptions of these meetings, as I will show in chapter 2, are consistent with the image of female voicelessness which Dana Robert gives of those meetings: “As they [missionary women] sat silently at the missionary meetings, the movement of their sewing needles substituted for their voices” (Robert 1997: 4). It is reasonable to suggest that the opposition by men and general boards derived from a jealousy of the successful efforts of women’s boards when it comes to publicity and fundraising and the communication channels these boards established between missionaries and their home base. For an important instrument of women’s missionary societies were their publications. With journals and magazines such as Life and Light for Women, Woman’s Work for Woman, The Helping Hand, Heathen Woman’s Friend, and Woman’s Missionary Advocate, missionary societies sometimes reached a readership of up to 25,000. Geared to a middle-class female audience, one that was by no means restricted to a missionary constituency, these publications were increasingly turning into a “centerpiece of the auxiliary system” (Brumberg 1982: 353) for the mission to China – helpful because they spurred financial support for the project as well as recruiting

less, charitable, and humanitarian image of the United States. The use of family imagery in the missionary context follows a similar strategy and purpose, I argue.

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new missionaries to the field.20 For example by featuring interviews with missionaries who were home on furlough or by printing missionaries’ letters from China, the magazines introduced the stories and experiences of missionaries to a readership which was curious to learn more about the adventurous and courageous paths their ‘sisters’ had taken. In turn, missionary women in China around the 1920s often asked their families in the United States to send them ‘secular,’ middlebrow women’s magazines like Ladies Home Journal.21 These magazines helped them to stay in touch with

20 For a detailed discussion of these magazines and missionaries’ fundraising efforts see, for example, Robert 2002 or Brumberg 1982: 350-353. In addition to magazines aimed at female adults, missionary societies also set up children’s magazines as tools to make the young familiar with missionary discourse and prepare them as potentially new missionaries (see Brumberg 1982: 352). 21 Missionary women were often eager to get hold of these middlebrow magazines. For example, this can be seen in the correspondence of Clara Creighton, who served in China from 1916 to 1940 under the Presbyterian Mission Board with her husband Roy Lamont Creighton, an architect. Clara Creighton writes in a letter to her relative Molly: “[…] would you be so good as to subscribe to the Ladies Home Journal [sic] for me, and charge my a/c. I believe that lace you sold Hilma probably is mine – I haven’t looked it up but that is my impression. I just looked it up – yes it is mine so that three dollars ought to help on the Journal. I wasn’t going to get the Journal, but Roy [her husband] says we ought to” (Jan. 18, 1924). In another letter to a certain “A,” she again begs for the magazines to be sent to her, talking about her “starv[ing] for the sight of them” (Yale Divinity School Library, RG 177, Box 2). In a similar vein, missionary Ruth Carr mentions an extensive list of (middlebrow) magazines which she has subscribed to: “There were some other things in mother’s letter, too, which she asked about. First, about the magazines. We have, now, more than I can read – “Millard’s Review” pub. at Shanghai (a fine magazine published weekly. It has all sorts of missionary news in it. Then we have (in the family) “The Woman’s Home Companion”, “World’s Work”, “Atlantic Monthly”, “The Independent”, “Harper’s”, “North American Student”, “Association Monthly” and this month I notice the McCall’s Magazine. Then we new ones all have the “World’s Outlook” which is fine and Katharine Williams has the Christian Advocate and I, the S.S. Times. Isn’t that a list?” (letter Jan. 5, 1918 to her father; Yale Divinity School Library, RG 08, Box 36; underlining in original). The crisscrossing of

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topical women’s issues and concerns back home, and potentially allowed them to emulate American lifestyles, fashions, or interior designs in China, as I will show later on in this chapter when I discuss the importance of the missionary home. Next to individually reading the magazines and missionaries’ accounts, the American home base participated in the missionary enterprise as a collective, for “women’s missionary societies held regular meetings in local churches, during which women prayed, raised money, and studied information sent by missionary informants. [Additionally], [w]omen’s societies founded mission clubs for children in the church” (Robert 2002: 68). The responses were generally enthusiastic: “We must have missionaries’ letters, when we can get them, – anything, everything that will bring this most noble and Christly work close to our slow, selfish hearts” (anon. cited in Brumberg 1982: 353). For lack of other sources and out of an open, sometimes uncritical admiration for the courage of these missionary women, the audiences were all too eager to believe in the authenticity and truthfulness of what they read and heard. In fact, they perceived missionary journals and letters as “ethnological descriptions of manners, family life, politics, and culture […] [which] articulate[d] distinctions between Christian and heathens” (Brumberg 1982: 349). To their audiences, missionaries’ subjective accounts and individual experiences were thus often turning into objective history and reality. At the same time, readers at home devoured these letters under the assumption that they were personal, immediate, and honest. To understand the letters in this way is, however, fraught with problems. Although the contemporary “organizational leadership clearly expected these accounts to be ‘frank and confiding, such as can only be written to mothers and sisters’” (Brumberg 1982: 353), it would be misleading to think of them as invariably more intimate and balanced accounts than those of men. For the composition of letters was, at times, expected to meet the standards established by missionary boards, a circumstance which sometimes rendered these letters a “formulaic, uplifting tone,” as Brumberg has rightfully

non-missionary women at home reading missionary journals on the one hand and missionary women in Asia delving into middlebrow magazines on the other hand is an interesting reciprocity which refers back to the concatenation of mission and middlebrow cultures, as I discussed it in the introduction.

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explained (1982: 353). In some letters, we even find indications that the correspondence between missionaries and their families back home was censored. Missionary Ruth Carr mentions this aspect in a letter to her parents: “Your letter, mother, directed to the YWCA, Peking, was my first one to come straight through to Peking – and wasn’t even censored. We think probably this mail is a forerunner of some more which had to be censored” (Nov. 25, 1917; Yale Divinity School Library, RG 8, Box 36). Furthermore, on the long way across the Pacific letters often got lost or arrived belatedly so that missionary couples sometimes used the strategy of sending two letters simultaneously (for example, with the husband writing to his father and the wife writing to her mother-in-law), hoping that at least one would make its way through to the United States. Letters were thus not necessarily of an immediate nature and did not give evidence of the ‘true,’ or ‘real’ state of mind of their composers at the time of writing. Also, we often find typewritten letters which before being dispatched were revised and amended by handwritten words or phrases, suggesting the crafted, wellconceived, and reflected nature of these letters. It is obvious that at times, there were in fact more stories to be told than can actually be found in the material available. For example, some archival sources (letters and diaries) had undergone editing by family members before the papers were donated to libraries: we come across passages, phrases, or names in letters which are blackened out; sometimes, even entire parts of women’s diary entries were cut out. Fortunately, many family papers in archival collections have not been manipulated, and by far not all of them were censored. And, especially within the body of younger documents (of the early 1900s and afterwards), there are also many missionary letters that were, after all, written on the spur of the moment and that were composed in a style that suggests their writers wanted to get anecdotes, gossip, and little annoyances off their chest. Again, Marian Craighill serves as an example of this latter group of writers. She produced a bulky correspondence and addressed various topics in a rather disjointed way: “I’m going to give up trying to be connected in my letters, by the way, for I’ll never remember to tell things if I don’t write them down as soon as I think of them,” Craighill asserts at the end of one of her earliest letters home in a breathless and characteristically cheerful tone (Oct.29, 1915; Yale Divinity School Library, RG08, Box 49).

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One topic that was reiterated in many of these documents was the definition of women missionaries’ own roles in China against the backdrop of an ‘ethnic other’ or “antithetical other,” as Brumberg calls it. In many missionary letters and journals, there was “an entire vocabulary that implied the degradation of [Chinese] women” and an abundance of references to “[…] female infanticide and suttee; concubinage and polygamy; bride sale; foot-binding and ear and nose boring; consecrated prostitution and sacrifice; […] child marriage and slavery” (Brumberg 1982: 349). I will elaborate in greater detail on this aspect and missionaries’ roles as lay ethnographers in the following section on the ‘social gospel.’ What interests me here is that certain (self-) images of missionary women among ‘heathens’ as presented in missionary magazines, letters, and journals contributed to the funding of missions and the home audience’s enthusiastic reception of women’s missionary activity (see King 1989: 118-119). As a result, by the 1890s, Americans were donating as much as $1.5 million annually to missionary boards – the majority of the money deriving from women’s fundraising efforts (Welter 1993: 200).

‘T HE W ORK OF W OMEN FOR W OMEN ’: AMBIGUITIES IN THE S OCIAL G OSPEL The reasons for the greater incorporation of women into the missionary force in the last decades of the nineteenth century were diverse. As one reason, I have already discussed the consideration to send ‘new’ women to China as a means to outsource this supposedly subversive influence at home. A further – and highly important – incentive to accept women as foreign missionaries was similarly strategically motivated. Missionaries in the field as well as missionary boards at home had increasingly come to realize that the overall approach to missionary work needed to be readjusted. Given that the Chinese proved reluctant to convert to Christianity, the focus on a purely evangelical gospel was apparently not the adequate means to reach the souls of the Chinese. As a result of this insight, the missionary boards decided to focus on a more ‘secular’ version of the gospel to convert the Chinese – one that included social and educational aspects and that promised to be more successful and permanent.

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For a number of reasons, women were seen as the ideal agents to fulfill these tasks. Importantly, the presence of female missionaries in China served to reassure Americans at home that their intentions abroad were genuinely good and morally justified. Women were seen as the embodiment of American “national selflessness.” Imagining them as carrying out a distinct “female evangelism of love” (Hunter 1984: xiv) “allowed Americans at home to remain blind to the moral implications of their ambitions to power [in China],” as Hunter suggested (1984: 10). I argue that Hunter’s idea is closely related to the understanding of women missionaries as sentimental imperialists: calling to mind the logic of sentimental imperialism, Hunter’s reasoning here associates women with temperance and moderation and presents them as agents that can cushion morally dubious ideologies or activities. The activities of women missionaries I am discussing here anticipated a more general transformation of foreign missions into a “social gospel” that was to form the center of the liberal missionary enterprise in the twentieth century (see, for example, Hutchison 1974: 110-131). The idea of the social gospel referred to the work in the social sector and, in particular, encompassed medicine and education. Although single women were often more visibly active than married women, both groups devoted themselves to this work to an extent that these areas were soon turning into truly female spaces of missionary activity – the realms of women missionaries’ sisterhood mentioned above. These medical and educational missions were important because they helped win over the Chinese population and were acts of charity.22 Especially medical work as the most secular version of missionary activity can be seen as the “most popular and least propagandistic form of missionary social service, […] pioneered and dominated by women” (Brouwer 1989: 24; see also Robert 1997: 413). The steady increase and eventual prevalence of the social gospel in the missionary activity is a key reason of why the foreign mission movement came to be called “feminized” (Thorne 1999: 40; see also Brouwer 1990: 13). This feminization of the social gospel was not altogether free from the self-serving interests of its agents. Put differently, an analysis of the missionary activities in the context of the social gospel once again reveals the

22 On the impact of the social gospel on the Chinese population, see, for example, Thoralf Klein 2009 and 2002.

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ambiguous positions and tensions around women’s roles within the movement. The need for female doctors to attend to Chinese women, in particular, illustrates the way in which the Chinese sex segregation provided women missionaries with an important opportunity to leave the sphere of the home. Christianity here served as a “liberator” not only for Chinese but also for American women (Welter 1993: 198), for in those years female doctors could practice their profession more easily in Asia than back home (Robert 2002: 70). Barbara Welter conceives of this aspect in terms of female empowerment and claims that the influx of female doctors constituted a threat to male missionaries (Welter 1993: 202).23 I would agree with Welter here, yet with a slight reservation: we need to bear in mind that women doctors’ medical treatment was limited to Chinese women and children – and thus to groups that male missionaries did not have access to or did not show an interest in anyway. A significant part of the shift from a ‘pure’ evangelism to the social gospel was women’s pivotal role in reforming the educational and social system for Chinese girls and women. This “Work of Women for Women,” as it came to be called (Welter 1993: 200),24 too, needs to be seen as am-

23 Welter is in accordance here with Dana Robert, who has regarded professional women’s arrival to the missionary field as a most visible threat to the male project: “The arrival of large numbers of ‘single missionary ladies’ with full missionary appointments and salaries threatened the dominance of married men in the mission. While some missionaries supported the woman’s missionary movement, others disliked it, seeing in its attention to ‘women’s work’ a distraction from the essential task of church planting” (1997: 184). In this context, Robert mentions Lottie Moon, a Southern Baptist single missionary, as a textbook example of an “American woman […] defying male authoritarianism” (Robert 1997: 184). On Moon, see, for example, Catherine B. Allen’s biography The New Lottie Moon Story (1980) and Keith Harper’s compilation of Moon’s letters and writings, Send the Light. Lottie Moon’s Letters and Other Writings (2002). 24 Rhonda Semple views “women’s work for women” as a particular “niche for the single female workers […], and their professional efforts are credited with having provided an important impetus to mission giving throughout the nineteenth century. Their ‘good work’ contributed to an eventual secularisation of missions in the twentieth century as it began to dominate mission work and theology in response to disappointing mission results and a growing belief in the importance

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bivalent. This becomes perhaps most obvious in missionaries’ attitudes toward the practice of footbinding. In the bulk of missionaries’ letters that address footbinding, we can only find a few which present the topic in a neutral way and approach it according to ethnographic principles. A letter by Florence Manly, a Methodist who lived with her family in Szechwan province from 1893 to 1943, is one such rare example of a missionary’s self-understanding as an ethnographer. In her letter Manly describes women’s bound feet to her addressee back home rather objectively: […] These women’s feet are natural size, which probably indicates that they have come from Canton. No foreigner here has ever seen a woman in or about Chungking with unbound feet. A foot as long as this sheet of paper [about 5 inches] would be considered large. I have seen many no longer than my first finger. The prejudice in favor of bound feet is very strong. One of the first requisites a man makes for a wife is “small feet”. By this he means smaller than the average. So of course every girl’s ambition is to have smaller feet than those about [sic] her. The misery it brings cannot be measured. It brings on many diseases besides crippling a woman for life. […] (undated letter, tagged “probably belonging to the 1894 period,” Yale Divinity School Library, RG 82, Box 1; underlining in original)

Where Florence Manly’s letter is still rather neutral and shows but little instances of sympathy for these women, there are many letters which abandon the ethnographic principle of objectivity and clearly display sentiments instead. For instance, Emma Martin, a medical doctor for the Methodist Episcopal Church, rounds up her description of the situation – “Oh yes, the Chinese women have bound feet just the same the schoolgirls have to unbind theirs when they enter school and some of the church members unbind the little girls [sic] feet but not usually” – with a reference to her own helplessness: “I am often at my wits ends to know what I ought to do” (Yale Divinity School Library, RG 08, Box 137). On the one hand, missionaries’ benevolence, their concern for the ‘heathen,’ their own sense of helplessness, and their strong desire to improve the living conditions of the Chinese come most strikingly to the fore in letters like Martin’s. Yet, on the other hand, we also find comments on foot-

of a broader concern for the promotion of a moral and social reform” (2003: 192-193).

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binding in many of these letters which attest to a sense of missionaries’ own cultural superiority, as Marian Belcher’s letter exemplifies: You get both sides here and of the heathen sides are so black and dark [sic]. The women with their bound feet limping around so painfully, not a thing of interest in their lives, just continually held down, no books to read and they couldn’t read them if they had them, terrible sanitary conditions, diseased children, the awful marriages and hundreds of things I could keep on naming. Have we anything like that at home? (letter Dec. 10, 1914; Yale Divinity School Library, RG 08, Box 22)

Time and again, the anti-footbinding initiatives were suffused with Western women’s self-empowerment and displays of their own superiority. The tradition of female footbinding in China was abolished due to the intervention of women missionaries, who initiated a reform campaign that led to the anti-footbinding edict of 1902. It was especially the “entrance of single woman missionaries […] [which] elevated the elimination of foot-binding and other gender-based Chinese customs to a high missional [sic] priority,” as Robert argues (1997: 175). However, it is equally true that many missionaries in an almost arrogant way took the exclusive credit for achievements like this. Some even boastfully stressed that they were “‘largely responsible’ for the awakening and the new ambition of the Chinese women” (Hunter 1984: 25). By engaging in the project of abolishing the practice of footbinding, missionaries hoped to overthrow the gender relations in China and adapt them to Western standards. Gael Graham sums up this precarious endeavor: What historians have not understood is that gender ideology – missionaries’ deeply held beliefs about sex roles and the relations between the sexes – was a central part of the missionaries’ critique of Chinese society. The status of Chinese women, the roles they played within their families and in society, and practices such as female infanticide, footbinding, and polygamy, not only proved to missionaries the inferiority of Chinese culture but also the wickedness of “heathen” religions. […] Protestant missionaries in China thus had a dual goal: to convert the Chinese to Christianity and to alter their gender patterns. (Graham 1995: 2)25

25 Marjorie King has drawn attention to the different attitudes toward footbinding among missionaries. She has shown that most missionaries vehemently opposed

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Once again, I suggest, women missionaries’ roles in the practice of footbinding follow the logic of sentimental imperialism. Focusing on the deprivation of women and children in an alien culture and vowing to improve these conditions allowed women missionaries to present themselves as altruistic and charitable. On one level, they created an intercultural sisterhood among ‘heathen’ women and themselves (see Welter 1993: 199; Brumberg 1982: 362). This sisterhood and the missionaries’ benevolence refer back to the aspect of sentimentality inherent in sentimental imperialism. On another level, though, women missionaries still used “American expansion in their own interest” (Brumberg 1982: 367) and acted on the premises of imperialist discourse.26 Helping others let them forget the fact that their own feet, too, were often bound in a figurative sense – by the supremacy of male missionaries in the movement. A focus on abolishing footbinding thus helped missionary women to suspend their own frustrations with gender roles in the movement (see Hunter 1984: 87-89; King 1989). The ‘otherness’ of the ‘heathens’ – as demarcated by the bound feet – was instrumentalized by many missionary women: “Rather than examine their own social relations, the bulk of American Protestant women sought to define themselves by what they were not. Indeed, the ‘otherness’ of the non-Christian became the central message of their ethnology” (Brumberg 1982: 355). With this, many missionary women in their attempts to define their own identity relied on a strategy that can be called, drawing on Julia Kristeva, “counterinvestment” (1981: 24): as much as they tried to break away from the patriarchal structures of missions on one level, missionary women were still caught in them and identified with the male missionary project as they adopted this rhetoric of ‘otherness.’ Thus, out of their inferior position women missionaries sometimes adopted strategies which were reminiscent

the practice and made its abolition a requirement for Chinese girls to enter missionary girls’ schools. Other missionaries – although not endorsing the practice, either – were more lenient and considered footbinding as a part of Chinese culture (King 1989: 122-123). 26 Pearl Buck’s debut novel, East Wind, West Wind (1930), addresses the theme of footbinding, too, and discusses it in conjunction with a secular neo-missionary who acts on the principles of sentimental imperialism, as I will show in chapter 3.

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of the more aggressive and overtly imperialistic male missionary project. Within the framework of sentimental imperialism, then, hierarchies of gender were sometimes replicated as hierarchies of race.

M ISSIONARY M ARRIAGES OF M OTHERHOOD ’

AND THE

‘B URDEN

The ambiguities and complexities of women missionaries’ experiences, which I have discussed so far, can be traced back already to women missionaries of the first generation and their decisions to ‘marry into the field.’ Until about the Civil War, women had mostly accompanied their husbands, or sometimes followed their future husbands to China. It was not rare among missionary women to marry a man they hardly knew. Occasionally missionary brides were even picked by their future husband on the basis of photographs – a practice which calls to mind how bachelors in American Chinatowns chose their ‘picture brides’ – so that some “[m]ission couples had without a doubt been oddly yoked together” (Grimshaw 1989: 50). Barbara Welter writes on the driving forces behind missionary marriages in this first generation: If a woman had a call to this life of self-denying love it could, in the period before the Civil War, be fulfilled only by marriage to an appointed missionary, with certain rare exceptions. God who gave the vocation would provide the means, and the Mission Board sometimes played the role of marriage arranger or, more precisely, coordinator of marriages presumably already arranged in heaven. (Welter 1993: 194195)27

27 Patricia Grimshaw speaks of the Mission Board as a marriage “broker” in this context (1989: 9). Grimshaw, too, comments extensively on the arranged marriages and devotes an entire chapter (“Christian Brides,” 1-23) to the motivations of women to marry missionaries, and to the marital arrangements of missionaries. Although Grimshaw’s study focuses on Hawaii rather than on China missions, her descriptions of the dynamics of marriages are transferable to China, I think, because the overall structures and roles of missionary boards in this framework were largely the same.

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Marriages of missionaries were thus widely seen as either predetermined by God, as Welter explains, or as pragmatic arrangements because male missionaries believed to be better off in the foreign hinterlands with a companion by their side who would provide “protection among savages” or even represent a “cheap” missionary addition to the male missionary’s work (Welter 1993: 194) – a helpmate or an “assistant missionary,” as Welter has called these married missionaries (Welter 1993: 196). What might sound like an exploitation of women, can, however, also be read in more subversive terms: marriage was often a prerequisite, but it did allow women to fulfill their goals and commit themselves to a cause in which they could otherwise not participate (see Robert 1997: 32; see also Grimshaw 1989: 123). Of course, this does not mean that missionary marriages were invariably a mere means to an end, for in many instances, companionate partnerships – and sometimes true love – developed out of the circumstances (see Grimshaw 1989: chapter 4; Hunter 1984: chapter 4). To regard these missionary women exclusively as victims who were reluctantly transplanted to a faraway place would be oversimplified: “A significant number of missionary wives were mature women, beyond the normal age of marriage, who clearly saw marriage as a rational way to pursue their own vocations,” as Robert observes (1997: 20). In a similar vein, author and journalist John Hersey, himself the son of American missionaries to China,28 contradicts the wide-spread assumption of missionary wives of the first generation as naïve or passive women who did not know what to expect, stating succinctly that “most wives knew what they were getting into” (Jane Rabb Collection, Randolph College, Box 2, audio tape).29

28 John Hersey was born in Tientsin, China, in 1914, and spent the first ten years of his life there. As a journalist, he wrote for The New Yorker, Time Magazine, and Life Magazine, and particularly focused on American-Asian relations in his work. Writing for these publications made Hersey a part of the media empire of Henry Luce, Jr., who, too, was the child of China missionaries. In many respects, Hersey’s work can be seen as a ‘journalistic mission’ exemplary of the careers of missionaries’ children, the second generation which I mentioned in the introduction. For a discussion of Luce and his empire, see the coda chapter of this book. 29 The “Jane Rabb Collection,” which I use as a source here and in the ensuing chapters, is archived in the Special Collections of Lipscomb Library at

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Most women – like their male counterparts – did not start their missionary adventure in China totally unprepared, as they had been trained in preparatory seminaries for the missionary field and thus went to China with a considerable degree of professionalism. In general, they “knew what they were getting into” – at least, in theory. There were two types of preparatory seminaries: those that specifically catered to the training and preparation of missionary women and those that were co-educational institutions. Of the first type, some had already been established in the 1830s and 40s, thus before the watershed event of the Civil War that triggered women missionaries’ participation. Mount Holyoke Female Seminary, founded in 1837 by Mary Lyon, was one such important institution which “had fostered ideals of Christian service for several generations of students and had guided them to consider mission work” (Hunter 1984: 12) and which provided women preparatory training to the foreign missionary field.30 As to the coeducational seminaries, it is interesting to look at their syllabi: next to courses in religion, these preparatory institutions and language schools had Chinese history, politics, and language classes on the curriculum and mostly provided an equal training for both genders. On top of that, most

Randolph College, Virginia, Pearl Buck’s alma mater. The Rabb Collection “reflects the research of Jane M. Rabb which led to Rabb’s entry on Pearl Buck in the reference work Notable American Women: The Modern Period (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1980) and to a possible biographical or critical study that was never completed. This collection includes photocopies of numerous letters from Buck and more than forty audiotapes of interviews with individuals personally acquainted with Buck, as well as Rabb’s correspondence with Buck friends, acquaintances, and business associates,” as we learn from the library’s description of the collection. For an overview of the Rabb Collection and its contents, see http://faculty.randolphcollege.edu/fwebb/buck/rabb.pdf. 30 For a discussion of this well-known seminary, see, for example, Elizabeth Alden Green, Mary Lyon and Mount Holyoke: Opening the Gates (1979). Other important higher-education institutions which geared to the training of women missionaries at the time were Oberlin and Carleton colleges (Hunter 1984: 12). On women’s training for the missionary field, see also Glenn T. Miller’s chapter “Training Women for Mission” in his monograph Piety and Profession: American Protestant Theological Education, 1870-1970 (2007: 201-223).

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seminaries offered classes in household economics and childcare which were specifically geared to women. “A good education was a hallmark of the American missionary wife from the beginning,” as Robert has put it (1997: 16). However, there was often a discrepancy between the theoretical preparation and its transfer to the ‘real-life’ conditions in the field. As preparatory seminaries did not offer classes that provided cross-cultural training, a number of missionaries were unfamiliar with the Chinese and their customs; more severely, some displayed a profound “disdain for non-Christian religions” (Robert 1997: 75). In missionary letters, we often read about missionaries’ astonishment and shock upon their exposure to poverty and filth. Again, these descriptions of the local conditions are often expressed in a mixture of sympathy, disbelief, superiority, and distance. Florence Manly writes to her college friend Martha: […] The condition of the people is subject for a volume, so I can’t answer all at once. Poverty such as you cannot conceive, filth such as would sicken you at first, childishness of women that would draw out your deepest pity and sympathy for their ignorance and lack of development. Sickness and disease presents its unsightly and distressful sores everywhere. In body and soul, they are impure and diseased. In short this is their condition […]. (Sept. 22, 1894; Yale Divinity School Library, RG 82, Box 1)

Similarly, missionaries’ level of language proficiency was not tested until the daily routine in China set in. The knowledge of Mandarin or standard Cantonese turned out to be futile in the country’s interior where varieties of Chinese were spoken. Thus, due to their work in the field, some husbands soon gained a linguistic advantage over their wives (Grimshaw 1993: 265). In many cases, though, missionary wives – despite their confinement to the home – “found the spoken language easier to learn than did their husbands.” As a result, the issue of language acquisition at times caused “dismay” between missionary couples (Hunter 1984: 95-96). In the marriage of Pearl Buck’s parents, for instance, language became a source of power, as Absalom Sydenstricker found his wife’s skill ‘a little trying […] reared as he had been in the doctrine of male superiority.’ […] [He] exerted himself in the mastery of written characters,

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rarely considered necessary for women to acquire, thus making him a ‘real scholar’ and reestablishing his linguistic preeminence in this marriage. (Hunter 1984: 96)

In a similar vein, missionary Florence Manly understands the proficiency of Chinese in terms of empowerment. In a diary entry dating back to October 1893, she introduces the idea of language as a cultural barrier and her initial inability to speak Chinese by means of the image of the wall: “Began study of the Chinese at eleven o’clock. The first little step taken in surmounting the great wall that seaparates [sic] me from these people to whom I am a foreigner,” writes Manly and thereby expresses the idea that it is only by learning Chinese (Cantonese, in her case) that she can become an insider, bring about change, and gain a sense of belonging in China (diary entry Oct. 16, 1893; Yale Divinity School Library, RG 82, Box 1). Missionary wives occasionally made attempts to work outside of their home and concentrated on areas and people that their husbands did not have access to. I am referring back to the social gospel as discussed in the previous part of this chapter. “The prohibitions which barred male missionaries from converting Chinese women reserved them for Western women,” writes Hunter (1984: 15), who goes on to state that the “gender stratification of Chinese society worked to [female missionaries’] benefit” (1984:15).31 Where their husbands predominantly carried out missionary field work, women missionaries’ tasks focused more on educational or medical matters – if they had a chance to turn away from their domestic sphere at all. However, this participation in the public sphere most often was curbed when children arrived: for many women, it proved difficult to reconcile their responsibilities as mothers with those as missionaries. Missionary Clara Foster, for example, asserts that “I have about come to the conclusion that my work as a missionary is over, and that to settle down as a missionary’s wife and care for my little family is about all I am equal to” (letter May 04, 1893; Yale Divinity School Library, RG 01, Box 17). Interestingly, Foster presents her frustration about the end of her independent missionary ‘career’ not as her own defeat or inadequacy, but as a result of what she calls the “stupidity” of the Chinese and the toilsome process to convert them:

31 On the separate spheres of male and female missionary activity, see Barbara Welter (1993: 192), or Dana Robert (2002: 70).

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When they come to the class most of the women are very stupid […]. I have two young women about 33 years old in whom I am much interested. It is very difficult to teach women at this age. There are so few who are not tied down with little children. One of these is a widow with a two year old child with her. Arrangements have been made for her marrying one of our church members and he asked that she might study here a while and learn more of the truth before he took her to be his wife. She is a bright, wideawake [sic] woman, takes hold well. Both these young women are not yet Christians, but I trust may soon be – both of them asked for prayers at our little woman’s prayermeeting [sic] last Friday night. The other woman […] seemed very stupid, but she has been wakening up this last week or so. (letter to her motherin-law, July 1889; Yale Divinity School Library, RG 01, Box 17)

Replicating American domestic ideology and values for their children now became a priority, as we can see in Foster’s and many other missionaries’ letters, as well as in the case of Buck’s mother. In fact, the moves some women had made toward emancipation sometimes saw severe backlashes with the new duties of motherhood: the confinement to the home and the isolation within the walls of missionary compounds were most often intensified in the years of child-raising (Hunter 1984: 112-117). Writing from Swatow to her family back home in the summer of 1890, missionary Jennie W. Campbell addresses her frustrations about this. In her letters, she admits to her lack of success in the (permanent) conversion of Chinese women, and relates this back to her time-consuming responsibilities as a mother and to her own sense of loneliness in China: George [her husband] is away from home almost constantly. He is trying to open up work in a new region, and is finding it a hard tedious task, to break up old prejudices (against foreigners) and superstitions enough to allow him to get a house and move us there. […] It is very lonely without him, and hard to have the sole responsibility of the children’s training. My time is so much taken up in my home cares and in teaching the children lessons, that I do a very small amount of real missionary work. I find more and more what a poor sinful Christian I am. I do long to grow more like the Savior, and have him more in my life. Life here among the Chinese and foreigners of other lands has many trials to one’s faith and patience. They ought to make one grow Christlike, but they so frequently overcome one, rather than I them, until at times I think I must be very wicked. But God is so wonderfully patient and forbearing with me. Doing Christian work for the natives is discouraging too if we look to

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results, but trusting in God’s promises all is bright and we know these people are to be redeemed, and become a chosen people, ransomed from all sin and uncleanness and sanctified by the same Savior who is so patiently working […].” (letter June 23, 1890; Yale Divinity School Library, RG 07, Box 2)

The frustrations and disappointments with missionary life which Campbell expresses here are reflected in some other accounts which, too, describe women’s challenge to reconcile their roles as mothers with those as missionaries. The “burden of child-rearing,” as Grimshaw calls it (1993: 267), later on often entailed the experience of loss: when, according to common practice, adolescent children were sent home to the United States for secondary education, mothers frequently fell into depression and – after years of absence – needed to reintegrate into more active missionary ventures. To add to the frustrations of missionary wives of the first generation, many women who did (continue to) work were frustrated to see that they were still “under the salary and support of the parent men’s [missionary] boards” (Hunter 1984: 98) and that their projects remained subordinate to those of their husbands (Hunter 1984: 102). It was precisely this lack of institutional support by the home boards, the hierarchical structures inherent in foreign missions, and the denial of full-scale membership in their parent missionary societies that enhanced many married women missionaries’ self-perception as exiles and marginalized figures in the movement. Still, descriptions of missionaries’ frustration, loneliness, or depression in these letters are overall rare and strangely subdued. If they are addressed, then mostly in close conjunction with missionaries’ discussion of what they perceived as the inferiority, stubbornness, and foreignness of the Chinese, as I have shown above. Hardly ever are missionaries’ negative feelings and inadequacies couched in a rhetoric of failure.32 Instead, many missionaries focused on success stories in their letters. As one such image of success, they made out the place they were most familiar with – the missionary home and its cultural context.

32 In this respect, missionary letters are similar to American middlebrow fiction, which, too, tends to present stories of success and optimism rather than stories of victimization and failure.

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T HE M ISSIONARY H OME

AS

E MPIRE

Women missionaries considerably invested in their home – perhaps not so much in economic terms, but as an idea, a concept, and a concrete geographical place that needed to be turned into a ‘home.’ Indeed, (re-) negotiations and (re-)interpretations of the very category and meaning of ‘home’ in China loom large in missionaries’ letters and diaries. In her biographies of her parents, Pearl Buck, too, centrally addresses the missionary home in order to emphasize her mother’s isolation, as we shall see in chapter 2. In a similar vein, when Jane Hunter in her early study concludes that “[t]he preservation of the home as a place […] helped make women culturally resistant to indigenous cultures” (Hunter 1989: 159), she also implies that this home was a place of insularity. Contrary to Buck’s descriptions and Hunter’s assessment, however, the missionary home as a concept implied certain possibilities for female missionaries to overcome their passivity and seclusion. It could turn into a place and source of empowerment – once they managed to make proper use of their home and turn it into a place of (subtle) power. Rather than being a zone of exilic retreat, the missionary home could become an ‘empire,’ making permeable the boundaries between the interior and the exterior, as Amy Kaplan suggests in what she calls the concept of “Manifest Domesticity” or “traveling domesticity” (Kaplan 2002: 113): The border between the domestic and the foreign [. . .] deconstructs when we think of domesticity not as a static condition but as a process of domestication, which entails conquering and taming the wild, the natural, and the alien. Domestic in this sense is related to the imperial project of civilizing […]. (Kaplan 2002: 112)33

33 Amy Kaplan discusses the trope of “manifest domesticity” with respect to a variety of examples – both political and literary. She points to the “visions of imperial expansion as marital union” in the context of the annexation of Texas and Mexico (Kaplan 2002: 114) in order to show the relations between the domestic and the foreign. As literary examples of the permeable boundaries between internal and external spaces, she refers to domestic novels like Maria Cummins’s The Lamplighter, Emma Dorothy Eliza Nevitte Southworth’s The Hidden Hand, and Susan Warner’s The Wide, Wide World (Kaplan 2002: 129-130). In a similar vein, Kaplan discusses the connection of imperialism and domesticity with

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Women’s transgression of the “fraught and contingent nature of the boundary between the domestic and the foreign” (Kaplan 2002: 115) can therefore be seen in the context of the notion of the “empire of the mother” or the “empire of the home,” which Mary P. Ryan (with reference to the educational reformer Horace Mann) has used in order to refer to women’s political involvement through the ‘back door’ in the larger framework of domesticity and the Cult of True Womanhood. Ryan perceives mothers as powerful agents who can erect a domestic “moral empire” (1982: 144). “With motherhood their symbolic crown and the home the functional center of their empire women did, in fact, command a critical position,” writes Ryan (1982: 18). It was here, in the domestic setting, that women raised and educated their children; in this empire, then, they could impart ideas and ideologies to a future generation of missionaries. The idea of motherhood and domesticity was central in the missionary context. In A Treatise on Domestic Economy (1842) Catharine Beecher, the well-known nineteenth-century reformer and women’s educator and sister of Harriet Beecher Stowe, placed missionary women’s “maternal responsibility for molding the character of men and children” at the center of her argument, thereby linking “women’s work at home to the unfolding of America’s global mission of ‘exhibiting to the world the beneficent influences of Christianity, when carried into every social, civil, and political institution’” (quoted in Kaplan 2002: 116). Beecher believed married women and mothers were gaining their “symbolic sovereignty at the cost of withdrawal from the outside world” (Kaplan 2002: 115-116). According to this logic, then, even those missionaries who are presented as isolated victims or whose self-representation in letters followed this pattern could exercise a certain degree of power, albeit in a rather indirect way. Debates around American (inter)national expansion in the nineteenth century were thus based on the close entanglement of Manifest Destiny and domesticity. As Kaplan observes,

respect to the novelist and editor Sarah Josepha Hale, who “gave […] attention to the expansion of female influence through her advocacy of female medical missionaries abroad and the colonization of Africa by former black slaves” (Kaplan 2002: 121).

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[t]he rhetoric of Manifest Destiny and domesticity share a vocabulary that turns imperial conquest into spiritual regeneration in order to efface internal conflict or external resistance in visions of geopolitical domination as global harmony. [ . . .] The empire of the mother thus shares the logic of the American empire; both follow a double compulsion to conquer and domesticate the foreign, thus incorporating and controlling a threatening foreignness within the borders of the home and the nation. (Kaplan 2002: 118; 120)

Female missionaries were the ideal agents to bring about this “global harmony” and control of “threatening foreignness” – especially by means of their secularized versions of missions, the educational and medical work. Although the “empire of the [missionary] mother” was undeniably infused with (female) missionaries’ “ethnocentric attitude and national and religious absolutism” (Welter 1993: 205), the concept can be seen as a counterpart to that of the rugged imperialism of male missionaries that critics like John King Fairbank have seen as displays of “aggressive individualis[m]” (Fairbank 1985: 2). The notion of the woman missionary’s home as a place of a mitigated imperialism, which is implied in Kaplan’s Manifest Domesticity and the concept of the motherly ‘empire of the home,’ is once again consistent with the logic of sentimental imperialism, as I have discussed it in this chapter. Women missionaries’ attempts to keep ‘foreignness’ at bay often went hand in hand with their efforts to create American outposts of civilization in their Chinese homes – as models for their children as well as for Chinese women. Grimshaw remarks on this aspect: “As prudent housewives, the mission wives directed their labor toward reproducing American material living conditions. As faithful mothers, they faced an even more arduous task – reproducing young Americans” (1989: 129).34 Most often, missionar-

34 In her study on British missions Rhonda Semple, too, refers to the missionary home as a bulwark against the takeover of foreign influences: “Throughout the nineteenth century, women’s mission rhetoric in particular focused on the home […]. In part this reflected gendered expectations about women’s skills and interests, but it was also the result of experience; mission workers quickly became acutely aware of how dangerous was the influence that a foreign environment had on their own children. Their own precarious class position at the cusp between middle- and working-class respectability as well as financial pressures

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ies’ ideas of how to design and decorate these American-style homes went back to the American middlebrow magazines which many women eagerly requested from relatives at home, as I explained earlier. These magazines helped missionary women to learn about the current fashions and standards at home and thus they constituted important vehicles in the replication of American culture abroad. Also, magazines like Ladies Home Journal or The Woman’s Home Companion kept missionary women up to date about the hygienic standards back home – an aspect which proved particularly important to many. The function of the missionary home was often expressed by the rhetoric of cleanliness, order, and morality and the dichotomy of ‘inside’ and ‘outside.’ Time and again in letters, we can find an imagery of the order and cleanliness in the Christian missionary home (the ‘inside’), which is pitted against the filth and foreignness of the Chinese surroundings (the ‘outside’). Upon her arrival in Foochow in 1914, missionary Marian Belcher, for example, writes about the difference between the missionary interior and the external world: “At last we reached the compound which is walled in and doesn’t look at all attractive on the outside but inside it is the prettiest place” (letter Oct. 14, 1914; Yale Divinity School Library, RG 08, Box 22). After two months of settling in, Marian Belcher has not managed to tear down this – figurative – wall. To the contrary: apparently, it has increased, as we can tell from another letter which Belcher sends to her “dear Church Ladies” home: […] Why I thought some of the things we did have at home were terrible but there is not one thing that can begin to compare with the life here – there is nothing but filth, darkness, disease, unhappy marriages, etc., here in the heathen homes. In the Christian homes there is cleanliness, light, proper living, happier lives for women, healthier children and all good things. (letter Dec 10, 1914; Yale Divinity School Library, RG 08, Box 22)

In a number of letters by missionaries, we find evidence that sometimes even “years of exile did not distance these women from their American ori-

meant that mission families, keen to ensure their children’s souls, their future livelihood, and a welcome home in proper British society, remained preoccupied with this issue throughout this period” (2003: 193).

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gins,” as Patricia Grimshaw reminds us of missionaries’ persistent insistence on the notion of home (1993: 256). Yet, missionary mothers often felt that their insistence on cleanliness and order was undermined by what they perceived as filth or moral degradation, and feared that their children would excessively adopt Chinese lifestyles and customs. Florence Manly expresses her concerns about her daughter’s exposure to Chinese influences in a letter to her sister-in-law: I do not like her to play with Chinese children, for she learns many undesirable habits from them. Rearing children in China is not an easy task. There is so much to spoil them and so may [sic] home advantages of which they are deprived. The family life has to make up all the good influences that American children received from various sources. (letter July 27, 1898; Yale Divinity School Library, RG 82, Box 1)

It was common practice for a missionary mother to hire a Chinese nurse, an amah, to support her in the household and the children’s education. In the course of her work, however, the amah frequently turned out to be ‘too successful’ in her efforts to familiarize the Western children with Chinese customs. “Uncomfortable about the nature of an amah’s influence” on their offspring (Hunter 1984: 108), many missionaries regarded the amah with ambivalence. On the one hand, the integration of an amah into the missionary household allowed missionary women to show their intercultural openness and willingness to accept Chineseness into their home. Also, by taking an amah into her house, a missionary acted on the principle of charity – for often, the missionary home represented a haven of rescue for these (sexually) exploited ‘heathen’ women. In this sense, an amah was very much part of a missionary’s project. On the other hand, though, the amah could easily become a threat to the missionary’s efforts to preserve Western values for her children. The amah as a potential source of pollution thus needed to be balanced by motherly protection (Hunter 1984: 109; see also Grimshaw 1993: 270-71).35

35 It is once again by way of magazines that missionary mothers could seek advice as to how they could erect and maintain these zones of protection and uphold a ‘proper’ American education for their children. One such popular piece of missionary advice literature was Mother’s Magazine, which constituted a cultural link between home and China (see Grimshaw 1989: 129-133). As a communica-

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Another way for a woman missionary to defy detrimental, foreign influences was to implant ideas of American woman- and motherhood into Chinese women. In the American Chinatown, for example, missionaries had been quite successful in achieving these goals (see Twelbeck 2011; Pascoe 1990; Pascoe 1989). However, by contrast to the home mission, the foreign mission followed rules of its own. According to Marjorie King, despite their intentions, missionaries’ efforts in China often achieved the very opposite: [M]issionary women aspired to transform Chinese women into the nineteenth century American ideal of Christian wives and mothers but ultimately reinforced Chinese patriarchy. The middle class, American-style housewife role was seen to be a middle ground between traditional Chinese women’s domestic roles and modern feminist demands for inclusion in the public sphere. Missionary women hoped the role of Christian housewife would have the double virtue of liberating Chinese women from heathenism and converting them to Christianity without antagonizing Chinese patriarchs and community leaders. Ironically, the end result of missionary women’s efforts failed to strike the middle ground between traditional patriarchy and modern Western feminism. The overall evangelical goal of national Christian conversion pressured missionary women increasingly to compromise their social goals on behalf of Chinese women. By the turn of the century, most women who attended mission schools had experienced little social transformation. The women’s foreign missionary movement was largely a conservative force which reinforced Chinese women’s traditional social position. (King 1989: 118)

Apart from their political function and their understanding in terms of domestic empires, missionary homes and their surroundings, however, could also be places of gaiety, gossip, and frivolity. There are many letters by female missionaries that are cheerfully written and composed in a tongue-incheek tone which present little anecdotes of everyday life, excursions, short vacations, sports, fashion shows, or picnics in missionary compounds. Among the correspondence describing these day-to-day routines is the one by Marian Craighill, who herself believes that many of her letters give a

tion channel between writers and readers and with its advice section, this magazine stands very much in the tradition of middlebrow magazines, which, too, frequently included advice sections.

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“frivolous picture of missionary life” (Feb. 27, 1916 letter to her mother; Yale Divinity School Library, RG 8, Box 49). And indeed, the majority of Craighill’s letters is marked by a particularly witty tone, for instance, when she recounts a gymnastics class that she teaches to Chinese women: They all love the gym. Except the old ex-Buddhist nun, and she is so spunky that I can hardly keep a straight face when I see her. She always uses a Turkish towel for a muffler, and last time, when she was especially disgusted, she put it all over her head, like a cowl! That combined with the way in which she was waving her hands, like a newly born babe who is just discovering her appendages, made it difficult for her teacher. (April 2, 1916 letter, Yale Divinity School Library, RG 8, Box 49)

Couched in humor, cultural differences are recounted here by means of insignificant, trivial anecdotes that are meant to entertain the folks back home. With this, Craighill’s letters follow a pattern similar to those of other missionaries. In Clara Linn Creighton’s correspondence,36 these cultural differences are not so much expressed vis-à-vis the Chinese, but geared to the different nationalities of missionaries. Still, the tone is comparable to Craighill’s when Clara Creighton writes to her relative Elsie about her fellow German and English missionaries in town: Otto Klein, the most spectacular German in Hankow, is engaged. Sunday night Roy and I were out to dinner, and we heard rumors of it there from Mrs. Adams. Mrs. Adams, being English, of course detests Otto with all her heart – and I wish you could have heard the talk about ‘how hard it would be for the poor girl’ and ‘what

36 Like Buck’s mother and many other missionary women, Clara Creighton had to cope with the death of one of her children during her stay in China. By contrast to Buck, who stylizes her mother as a mourning victim, Creighton’s letters, however, give us the impression of a strong and optimistic woman who manages to overcome her grief and fight her way back to the routine of missionary life. Shortly after the death of her little daughter Marjory, who died of cholera, Creighton vows “not to let sorrow wreck [her life]”: “I feel that I must try to build for the future for Linn’s and Roy’s [her son and her husband] sakes and not dwell on this terribly tragic event too much. Roy is holding on wonderfully and if he can be so unselfish, I ought to be too.” (July 5, 1922 letter to her mother; Yale Divinity School Library, RG 177, Box 2)

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could she see in him’ etc.etc. […] but I am afraid that we will be ostracized hereafter for openly claiming to be friends with a German (Heavens what a crime). I don’t care – I’d rather have one friend like Otto than any number of these snobby English who think they’re such a great sight better than us ‘raw Americans’. Oh, they make me boil! (Jan. 4, 1917 letter; Yale Divinity School Library, RG 177, Box 1; underlining in original)

The letter is also interesting because it alludes to the culture of gossip among the missionary community. Creighton presents us here with a closeknit – if at times annoying – community of missionaries that hardly leaves any room for privacy or that would suggest an isolation and dullness in these missionaries’ lives. To the contrary: Creighton describes the tendency of her fellow missionaries to constantly interfere in her and her husband’s life: […] Also, being newly married – we are expected to come across at some time with confidential secrets (perhaps you can guess what) and everybody is waiting and expecting; and they lead the conversation around in such a tactful way as to make it easy for you to confide and get some good necessary advice. I just have to laugh inside when I watch how things talked about always lead up to a certain point; and then they are so disappointed when I have nothing to tell them or ask about. When I get home I will tell you about missionary life – you can hardly mind your own business. One’s private business is supposed to be community possession; but somehow it will take me a long time to live up to that. The more people fish, the more closemouthed I get. People think they ought to know all about your ancestry, etc. etc. etc. I guess I have caught the bug from Roy about being secretive. (Dec. 8, 1916 letter; Yale Divinity School Library, RG 177, Box 1)

Missionary life, we learn here and in many other letters, was centered on the community, on joint pastimes like tennis matches or cricket, card games, or knitting – all facilitated by the fact that missionaries usually lived together on compounds which they were turning into ‘hubs of home.’ The floor-plans and maps which some missionary women draw in their letters to give their addressees an idea of the architectural set up of their missionary houses largely resemble each other and suggest a uniformity of their lives that once again refers back to Patricia Grimshaw’s idea of the ‘exilic sister-

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hood’ within women missionaries’ community.37 These aspects of missionary letters and their mentioning of a daily routine in the company of other missionary women defy the impression of missionary life shaped by isolation and insularity, as Buck claims it for her mother in her biographies. As my discussion of missionaries’ personal documents in this chapter has shown, the experiences and stories of women missionaries’ in China were diverse and depended on various circumstances and factors, and they almost always challenged simplistic juxtapositions such as single versus married women, or first versus second generation missionaries. Most importantly, these letters and other personal accounts reveal that approaching women missionaries’ experiences exclusively in terms of victimization or self-empowerment respectively does not do the complex missionary project justice. This complexity follows from the fact that the missionary movement and its participants were in an ongoing state of flux, as I have explained in the introduction. The many changes and transformations were almost inevitably connected with tensions, ambivalences, and renegotiations of missionary approaches, objectives as well as identities. In many instances, then, neither male nor female missionaries can be understood as static figures that allow for a monolithic, immutable image of ‘the missionary.’ Missionaries’ attitudes to their cultural environment oscillated between an insistence on their own culture and a willingness to adapt to the Chinese way of life. Often, these oscillations occurred within the missionary experiences of individual missionaries – and this sometimes irrespective of their generational belonging. Accordingly, we can, for example, also find occasional descriptions of isolation and homesickness in the otherwise cheerful and uplifting letters of second-generation missionary Marian Craighill. Reading about the seasonal changes back home in a letter from a relative, she contemplates:

37 The homogeneity of the missionary houses’ architecture as well as the sisterhood of missionary women, I suggest, call to mind American suburban middleclass neighborhoods – and thus, arguably the geographical places in which middlebrow culture was set. The neighborhoods of American suburbia, too, displayed a uniformity of architecture and lifestyles, and most often, their female inhabitants, the notoriously stereotyped American housewives, formed sisterhoods of a similar kind.

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We sometimes wonder if we ever will be able to afford a furlough with prices up in the clouds that way. You were writing about week ends in Chester with the beautiful fall coloring and the cosmos and dahlias in the house. I’ve been pretty homesick lately anyway and really I felt as though I’d have to be transmigrated right off that minute. (Nov. 23, 1919; Yale Divinity School Library, RG 8, Box 49)

It is precisely these constant conflicts between cultural mediation and imperialism and women’s positioning as sentimental imperialists which makes it so difficult yet also fascinating to approach the (hi)stories of women missionaries to China. Women’s work within this framework perfectly illustrates the complexity and the many contradictions of American foreign missions which Pearl Buck tended to subdue and homogenize (especially in the biographies of her parents), yet which still profoundly affected her experience and her writing.

2. The Exile and Fighting Angel: Pearl Buck’s Gendered Critique of Missions Carie, gazing back at the mass of brown faces, was sorely divided in her heart. Here were the “heathen,” the people for whom she had given up her own country, for whom she had given her life – oh, she would give herself for them – she would spend herself for them! Then she was moved with revulsion. How dreadful they were to look upon, how cruel their narrow eyes, how cold their curiosity! (The Exile 98-99)

This is the description of a female missionary’s first encounter with ‘her’ Chinese converts to-be upon her arrival in Hangchow in 1880, following a long and tiresome sea journey with her husband. This journey had almost not come about for her, because her newly wedded husband had initially forgotten to purchase a ticket for his young wife. The inattentive husband and the woman introduced as sacrificing herself for the ‘heathen’ Chinese while feeling an inner division and revulsion toward their physical appearance are Absalom (Andrew) and Carolyn (Carie)1 Sydenstricker, Presbyterian American missionaries to China and the parents of Pearl Buck.

1

Buck’s mother, Carolyn, was called ‘Carie’ not only in her daughter’s biographies, but went by this name in real life, as well. By contrast, the name ‘Andrew’ for Absalom Sydenstricker was a fictional invention by Buck. Accordingly, I will differentiate between the two names of the father in this chapter, and refer to him as Andrew as the father figure in the biographies and as Absalom if I mean the historical missionary Sydenstricker. When I cite his name as “Absolom” in the context of archival sources, this is no misspelling; but I follow the label found on the respective folders in the archives.

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The above-quoted passage and episode from Buck’s biography of her mother, The Exile, is emblematic of the relationship between the missionary couple – at least, as Buck sketches it in that text and its counterpart on her father’s life story, Fighting Angel – Portrait of a Soul. The texts, both published in 1936 as The Spirit and the Flesh but already written in the early 1920s and early 1930s respectively, introduce a larger-than-life missionary father, the ‘fighting angel,’ who is detached from his family and pursues nothing but his religious zeal, and a victimized ‘exile,’ the warm-hearted mother, who is depicted as a Victorian woman. Pearl Buck’s writing of the biographies constituted both commemorative and therapeutic acts, which are two of the most important motivations behind biography writing as such (see, for example, Stanley 1992). She sought to create memories of her parents for her own offspring, and come to terms with her parents’ death. The first of the two biographies, The Exile, was written in 1921 in the direct aftermath of Carolyn Sydenstricker’s death. In her autobiography My Several Worlds (1954), Buck later on recalled the writing process and motivations of the book: When I went back to Nanking and to my new home there [after tending to her sick mother], I was filled with the need to keep my mother alive, and so I began to write about her. I thought and said it was for my own children, that they might have a portrait of her, since they were too young to remember her as she had been when alive. I did not know that this portrait, so carefully made from my exact memory, was to be my first book. I did not even think of it as a book until years later. […] I remembered her portrait and dedicated it to the cause and it was published as a book under the title The Exile. It was the seventh of my published books, but actually it was the first one to be written. (My Several Worlds 161-62)

Next to the aspects of commemoration and therapy, there were other personal motives for Buck to write the biographies. She composed them at a time when her own stance on American foreign missions was increasingly faltering: after her studies in the United States, Buck had returned to China as the wife of the agricultural missionary Lossing Buck and was about to replicate the role her own mother had occupied in her marriage. Thus, her project of writing down her mother’s life story, in particular, helped Buck

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to find a niche beyond her duties as a missionary wife and to carve out a space of her own as a writer. As in the case of The Exile, Buck used the time after her father’s death in 1931 to write her biography, Fighting Angel, on him. Buck decided to publish Fighting Angel in 1936 shortly after The Exile, partly to continue the success which had evolved from her mother’s biography, but especially because she felt the need to correct the image which many readers of The Exile had gained of her father: “To my amazement there were people who felt, after reading that book [The Exile], that I did not love or value my father, and in some indignation at so false a conclusion, I wrote Fighting Angel” (letter 4 October 1943; Nora B. Stirling Collection, Randolph College, Box 4 folder “Absolom”).2 Buck’s claim to present a correction of her father’s image in Fighting Angel is, however, fraught with problems. More than anything, an analysis of the text reveals Buck’s overall rejection of her father’s attitude and approach to missions, as we will see. The two biographies are not just the personal testimony of a daughter, but they are part of a broader concern of their author. It is precisely their situatedness in this larger framework which makes the texts important for the context of my book. First and foremost, as a political project, the two biographies represent a critique of the American missionary activity in China and are pivotal markers of Pearl Buck’s turn away from her missionary upbringing in the 1920s and 30s. Buck used her family background and her parents’ biographies to draw attention to the ambivalences and tensions

2

In this chapter, I use the “Nora B. Stirling Collection” and the “Jane Rabb Collection” as references. Like the Jane Rabb Collection, which I introduced in chapter 1, the Nora B. Stirling Collection is a resource of the Special Collections of Lipscomb Library at Randolph College, Virginia. The Stirling Collection “consists of the materials used by Nora Stirling in writing her biography, Pearl Buck: A Woman in Conflict (published by New Century Publishers in 1983). Included are drafts of the book, copies of interviews with those who knew Pearl Buck at various times in her life, copies of letters from Buck, members of her family, friends and acquaintances, several of her books annotated by Nora Stirling, and a large number of other sources of information on her life and work” (quoted from the library’s online synopsis of the collection. For this synopsis, see http://faculty.randolphcollege.edu/fwebb/buck/stirling.pdf).

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that she saw at the heart of American foreign missions (to China) in general. In her critique – which culminated in her controversial speech “Is There a Case for Foreign Missions?” in November 1932 – Buck openly attacked the motives, ideologies, and practices of American missionaries and missionary boards, thereby also questioning the missionary projects of her own parents. Buck’s biographies can be seen as a first reckoning with the missionary enterprise. She reflects on these projects and what they enable, but also evens up the balance sheet by articulating pointed critique from the perspective of a formerly involved insider turned outsider. It is a retaliatory form of payback to these male-dominated institutions and structures which transforms Buck’s personal debt into a critical asset useful for more general assessments of missionary work. With this, the two biographies also deeply informed the course which Buck’s fictional work should take throughout her career. An analysis of them is indispensable, then, to introduce us to the general premises, themes, styles, and patterns which Buck employed in her future writings. By turning to the genre of biography, Buck also established herself as an expert and authority. As Liz Stanley reminds us, biographers are dependent on people’s belief in their expertise, for otherwise, their biography would not “work” (see Stanley 1992: 7). And indeed, at the time of their publication, Buck’s biographies ‘worked’ well because readers understood them as ‘authentic’ accounts of the missionary experience in China, recounted by a first-hand and credible witness of the movement. Thus, the success of the texts was inextricably linked with Buck’s insider knowledge of China and missionary cultures. Yet, it was not only the audience’s set of ascriptions and expectations that gave the texts an air of truthfulness and authenticity. In fact, Buck herself fueled her readership’s expectations and the reception of the biographies in a number of ways. To begin with, Buck’s claiming of her parents’ representativeness of a larger missionary experience influenced her audience’s reaction toward the texts. Secondly, Buck repeatedly contended that she was depicting the true story of missions in her biographies. For example, when she states in Fighting Angel that the “real story of life in a mission story has never yet been told” (Fighting Angel 76), she insinuates that she is about to rectify this lack or ‘blind spot,’ step in and do exactly this: tell the ‘real story’ and fill the gap. As a third and final point, we need to bear in mind the publication date of the biographies. By the time they were released in 1936, Buck had already delivered

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her speech “Is There a Case for Foreign Missions?” and written other political pieces by means of which she had cemented her status as an authority on the subject. Given this background, what she wrote in The Exile and Fighting Angel appeared even more true to most of her readers. Such an understanding of the texts is, however, problematic. We shall see that Buck, in fact, strategically distorted a complex history of female missionary experiences in her project. If she depicted the story of her missionary parents, she was perhaps right to claim a certain degree of representativeness; yet, she did not – and as a biographer could not – give a comprehensive picture of missionary experiences at large. This has much to do with the texts’ placement in terms of genre: they are situated within the nexus of biography and fiction which runs through Buck’s entire project. With their oscillation between ‘fact’ and ‘fiction,’ the texts are prime examples of a transition phase of the genre of biography in the first decades of the twentieth century which has come to be known as the ‘new’ or the ‘literary’ biography. The ‘new’ – defined by scholars like Ina Schabert – is a hybrid space in-between fact and fiction that is loaded with tensions and ambiguities, as I will show. With her project, Buck becomes such a ‘new’ biographer who operates in this space in-between. Before I discuss the two biographies and their merging of fact and fiction, I believe it is necessary to briefly contemplate upon the question of what – fictionalized – biographies can offer that political speeches and essays might perhaps not provide. I consider Buck’s pivotal speech “Is there a Case for Foreign Missions?” from late 1932 and her other public attacks on missions, which I will focus on in the last part of this chapter, as a radical, but logical outcome of the critique first raised in the biographies. Yet, this does not mean that The Exile and Fighting Angel are merely vehicles or tools that animated Buck to express a more serious, politically ‘effective’ critique in the public realm. There is more to them: I argue that biographies in general – and especially in Buck’s case – can represent a promising and productive ‘space in-between.’ A space between ‘pure’ fact and ‘pure’ fiction, that is, which allows biographers to map out more playfully or provisionally their political agenda and express their critique; in this space biographers can experiment more unrestrictedly with their alternative visions of history and construct – a ‘better’ reality which is fashioned after their own idea(l)s – without facing direct political consequences. Understood as a space in-between, biographies do not simply entertain or are ineffective:

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they are deeply political underneath their apolitical guise. In this sense, they comply with the rules of the middlebrow and its often claimed apolitical agenda. It is this complex concatenation of aspects and the tensions which emerge out of it that I investigate in this chapter. In the overall context of my study this chapter represents a lynchpin between American women’s missionary experiences at large, as I presented them in the first chapter, and Pearl Buck’s fictional work, which I will discuss in the following chapters. As I will juggle with a number of aspects in this chapter, I think it is helpful to briefly explain this chapter’s organization: first, I approach the biographies by focusing on Buck’s claim of the representativeness of the texts, before I turn to Buck’s role as a ‘new’ biographer. As a next step, I will look into family documents which help to properly position Buck’s enactment of her parents in the texts. At the center of this chapter, I will then analyze The Exile and Fighting Angel, followed by a brief reflection on Buck’s modification of her parents’ portrayal in her autobiography My Several Worlds from 1954. Finally, I will discuss Buck’s speech “Is there a Case for Foreign Missions?”.

T HE P ARENTS ’ R EPRESENTATIVENESS : I NTRODUCING P EARL B UCK ’ S R ECOVERY P ROJECT In her (re)assessment and critique of the American missionary presence in China, Pearl Buck heavily relies on the category of gender and points to the doubly marginalized position of women – both in terms of ‘foreignness’ and gender – in the missionary movement. In this sense, The Exile and Fighting Angel need to be read in terms of a broader feminist statement. One of Buck’s expressions in her autobiography alludes to this function of her biographies. In this passage, which I cited above, she writes about dedicating her mother’s portrait to the “cause” (My Several Worlds 161). By this cause she means her idea of a reversal of missions which encompasses women more adequately and which pays closer attention to the social gospel I discussed in chapter 1. With this, Buck turns the personal story of her parents into a more general, all-inclusive cultural critique. Based on Buck’s personal reminiscences of her mother as well as on Carolyn’s diary entries and her conversations about her life with her daughter (see The Exile 71;

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31), The Exile casts Carie as a generic female missionary in China. Her fate is presented as exemplary of many cases of missionary women who suffered from feelings of alienation and isolation far away from the American home they desperately longed for and which they sought to re-enact abroad. Upon the publication of The Exile, Buck commented on the representative status of the text and her mother’s situation in a letter to an acquaintance: The story of my mother seems to stand for the story of so many women in her generation. I have had a good many letters like yours saying that they recognize her personality because of a mother or grandmother like her. It makes me feel that she really was what I always thought her – a universal woman. (letter to Mrs. Milbank Johnson, 18 March, 1936; Jane Rabb Collection, Randolph College, Box 1, notebook “Buck-libraries”)

Some years later, Buck reiterates the representativeness of her mother’s fate in a letter to another friend: “[…] I did publish [the text] under the title The Exile, because I felt somehow that her life belonged to more than just her family – she was such a worldwide sort of woman” (letter 4 October 1943; Stirling Collection, Box 4, folder “Absolom”). As a mother, Carie might be unique and extraordinary to her daughter, but simultaneously, her status as an exile in rural China reflects female missionaries’ experiences as a whole. Similarly, Buck’s father, Absalom Sydenstricker, epitomizes the male missionary project, one that represents an aggressive version or stubborn interpretation of foreign missions suffused with an imperialist ideology. In Fighting Angel, Buck sees ‘Andrew’ as part of a collective and refers to him as a representative of “the early missionaries [who] were born warriors” (Fighting Angel 74). In the missionary field, Andrew found himself, as all white men did at that period, possessing a power of which he had been unconscious [at home]. […] White men, being strong and swift and fearful in retribution, came to be feared and hated and envied and admired and used. Every white man was a little king. Andrew took it as God’s triumph. He proceeded in great strides over that part of China which he considered his spiritual kingdom. […] There was something curiously imperial about the whole thing […]. (Fighting Angel 178-79)

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Following Buck’s lead, most readers and reviewers acknowledged the representativeness of Buck’s parents and referred to the authenticity and realism of the texts. For example, Katherine Woods for the New York Times Book Review emphasized Andrew’s status as a generic male missionary, for “these men are that type of self-absorbed zealot” (New York Times Book Review, 9 February 1936). Woods expressed her belief in the credibility and authenticity of the biographies: according to her, The Exile was an “epic of our country” and the “antagonisms and paradoxes” of it were “universal” (9 February 1936). She also pointed to the book’s purpose and effect as a “revolt against Puritanism,” a term which in most of the reviews was used as a synonym for the foreign missionary enterprise.3 With this representativeness, Carie and Andrew become the key figures of what might be called feminist biographies. “The template of feminist biography characterizes the individual’s life as metonymically representative of larger groups’ structures and conditions affecting the subject as a member of this group,” as Catherine Parke defines the genre in her study (2002: 93). More precisely, Buck’s parents become national types, embodiments of American female and male missionaries respectively. Parke furthermore reminds us that American biography, in particular, has always reflected and negotiated identity in close conjunction with nationality (2002: 24).4 With their emphasis on the categories of ‘home,’ ‘belonging,’ and the nation,

3

Similar to Woods, John Chamberlain in The New York Times stressed The Exile’s universalism and realism and considered the biography as a “tremendous criticism of American Puritanism” (The New York Times, 6 February 1936). Reviewer Clifton Fadiman, too, concluded that the texts were “by no means a good propaganda for the missionary movement” and thus signaled his understanding of Buck’s biographies as universal texts and of Buck’s parents as generic missionaries (New Yorker, 14 February 1936).

4

Parke gives the examples of the following biographies to make her point: Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Representative Men (1850), Gamaliel Bradford’s ‘portrait’biographies (for example, Union Portraits (1916) and Biography and the Human Heart (1932)), and Gertrude Stein’s The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (1933). The most prominent examples of autobiographies which discuss identity formation in connection with the concept of nationhood and citizenship are left out by Parke, I believe. These are The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin (1771-1790) and The Education of Henry Adams (1918).

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Buck’s biographies belong to that genre, as I shall discuss in my analysis of the texts. As Carie and Andrew transcend their status as Buck’s mother and father and become ‘typically’ female and male missionaries, they form an integral part of what I call the recovery project of Pearl Buck. In this project she rescues her mother’s voice as well as those of other women missionaries – a project which she later expanded to her fictional female figures. “The missionary cemeteries are full of wives,” states Buck at some point on this collective history of female subordination and suffering (Fighting Angel 80), and she makes clear that the burials and graves need to be understood in a literal as well as a figurative way. Her job as a biographer is to ‘dig up these graves:’ by telling the story of her mother, Buck helps not only Carie to metaphorically resurge, but the ‘dead’ and suffering women missionaries as a whole. They get a voice and obtain agency through her. As she engages in this project of rescuing and recovering silenced or marginalized voices, Buck becomes an archaeologist, which is a crucial role among the vast set of possible roles which biographers can assume. This recovery project closely follows middlebrow principles, as Buck relies on her readers’ empathy for her mother (and, by extension, women missionaries) in this project. When she presents her mother in terms of marginalization, she establishes a framework of solidarity and sympathy for this figure which is consistent with the way middlebrow texts work.

B ETWEEN F ACT AND F ICTION : P EARL B UCK ‘N EW ’ B IOGRAPHER

AS A

As such a recovery project that serves an agenda, Buck’s biographies become personal enactments or stylized renditions of a more variegated (hi)story of American foreign missions. This indicates that Buck does not present ‘facts’ or an objective ‘truth’ in the two biographies, but that she crafts them as artifacts which abide by the rules of fiction. She accentuates and highlights certain aspects, she omits, and distorts – in short: she operates within the realm of representation. With this approach to the genre, Buck follows a new direction taken in post-Victorian or modernist biography writing. When The Exile and Fighting Angel were published in 1936, the genre was undergoing profound changes, and theories on the art of bi-

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ography were established. Buck’s texts are indicative of the trend toward the ‘new’ or ‘literary biography,’ as I will argue in the following paragraphs. When Buck distorts or manipulates ‘reality’ in her texts, she becomes a ‘new biographer.’ For this aspect is an important feature of the genre as such. The relation between fact and fiction in biography writing has always been intricate and comparable to walking a tightrope, as Ina Schabert explained in the appropriately titled seminal essay “Fictional Biography, Factual Biography, and their Contaminations” (1978), which is still one of the most influential discussions of the genre’s intersections of fact and fiction. Schabert argues that a pure version of these two is hardly ever given, nor desired – a circumstance which makes it difficult to come to terms with biographical texts. It is precisely this “contamination,” the tension between fact and fiction – yet another space in-between – that bears a potential which is useful for my purposes here: Schabert calls this new space the “fictional biography,” which she considers as a separate and new literary genre (1978: 2).5 The fictional biography follows artistic and narrative principles, puts emphasis on questions of aestheticism, and presents anecdotes (1978: 4-6), which are all components of how Buck sets up her texts. What is perhaps most crucial for Buck’s context is Schabert’s assessment that the fictional biography is “most successful with obscure lives” (1978: 13). Similar to Schabert, Liz Stanley points to the special significance of the lives of the “obscure” for the genre of biography (1992: 8). To focus on them is a counter project to the “near-obsession of modern biography with the ‘great’ and ‘in/famous’ [which] leads readers to misconstrue much of what passes for history” (Stanley 1992: 8).6 This makes sense, in

5

Ina Schabert’s term “fictional biography” largely corresponds to what Richard Ellmann, to this day one of the most renowned scholars of biography theory, called “literary biography” or “hybrid biography.” See Richard Ellmann, Literary Biography. An Inaugural Lecture (1971).

6

Catherine Parke uses a different, but equally useful term for the same phenomenon when she speaks of the “minority biography” as opposed to the “majority biography” (2002: xvii). This term is appropriate here, because Carie is a ‘double exile:’ as a woman in the male-dominated missionary movement and as an American among the Chinese, she is a representative of a minority. See also

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particular, if we look at The Exile. Buck’s Carie is without a doubt an obscure figure whose story would never be heard without the recovery work done by her daughter. That the text was indeed received as such a project can be seen in Mark van Doren’s review for The Nation: According to him, the purpose of The Exile was “to rescue Carie from oblivion” (12 February 1936). Since Carie is ‘obscure’ and hardly any facts are known about her, Buck as her biographer has some creative leeway. Apparently, the ‘new’ biography is most effective with women’s lives, as these are characterized by gaps, fragmentation, interruption, and discontinuity.7 According to Lyndall Gordon, it is this very “hidden aspect of women’s lives – in fact, all lives of the obscure – [that] may require […] more transgressive experiments” (1995: 96). In other words, the gaps in (obscure) women’s lives perhaps cannot but be filled by means of artistic mastery and exaggeration, or even distortion. Thus, the biographer becomes an “active agent in the biographical process, in the sense that she constructs the biographical subject rather than merely represents them ‘as they really were’” (Stanley 1992: 9, emphasis in original). In this process of construction, the biographer’s precarious position between closeness and distance becomes important. In Buck’s biographies, an “emphatic introspection,” defined by Richard Hutch as the “emotional relatedness between a subject and the life writer” (1997: 61), or the “love affair” between biographer and biographee, as Anna Maria Stuby has put it (1993: 67), gains particular relevance. Buck – as the exile’s daughter – inevitably struggles with “keeping the balance between love and detachment,” as Hutch calls the biographer’s task between objectivity and personal engagement (1997: 4-5). In fact, Buck is aware of her status as a ‘sleuth’ and explicitly addresses her “love affair” with her mother in the text: “I cannot here do otherwise than withdraw in delicacy from the spectacle of this woman […]. After all, I knew her too well, I was too intimately bound to her, to probe with the fingers of analysis into this part of her life […]” (The Exile 281). There are things and aspects about Carie’s life, then,

Richard Holmes’s discussion of the tradition of the “great minor life” in biography writing (Richard Holmes, “Biography. Inventing the Truth”, 1995: 18). 7

On these gaps and fragmentations in women’s lives and how they are negotiated in the genre of auto/biography, see, for instance, Leigh Gilmore’s Autobiographics (1994).

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which Buck does not want to – or is not able to – give away and share but which she keeps to herself. Again, as the biographer, she assumes the role of an active agent: she selects and omits anecdotes and aspects –she becomes a manipulator of facts. This idea of the “manipulation of facts” as a postulate of post-Victorian biography was famously addressed by Virginia Woolf in her essay “The New Biography” (1927). In this essay, and another essay called “The Art of Biography” (also written in 1927), Woolf first problematized the tension between fact and fiction, which scholars like Schabert should address more consistently from the 1970s on. Woolf reminds us once again of the aspect of tension between ‘authenticity’ and creativity/constructedness in biography writing, when she states that “the invented character lives in a free world where the facts are verified by one person only – the artist himself. Their authenticity lies in the truth of his own version” (“The Art of Biography”, 1927: 225). Although Carie and Andrew are, of course, no “invented characters” as such, their portrayals in The Exile and Fighting Angel are indeed Buck’s “own version” and stylization of her parents’ lives. When Buck changes Absalom Sydenstricker’s name into Andrew in the biographies, for example, she also ‘invents’ him. By this change of name, Buck distances herself from her father; but this distance does not result in her objectivity as a biographer. Rather, the invented ‘Andrew’ becomes a means for Buck to further stylize her father as someone who is entirely alien to her. Buck’s stylization of her parents becomes clearer if we look at documents of the Sydenstrickers’ family and friends. Although they are also subjective observations of the Sydenstrickers, these documents still help to show that Buck’s depiction of her parents did not necessarily reflect reality and that she made use of artistic license in the texts. Helen Foster Snow,8 a family friend and herself a

8

Helen Foster Snow (1907-1997) was an American journalist who started her career in China working at the American Consulate in Beijing. After her marriage to fellow journalist Edgar Snow, she reported from China in the 1930s. The couple was friends with Lossing and Pearl Buck. To distance herself from the name and political ideologies of her husband, a member of the Chinese and American Communist Party through the years, Helen Snow wrote under the pen name of “Nym Wales” to report on the developing revolution in China. She was a regular contributor to Asia Magazine, a cultural-political journal which Buck’s

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missionary to China, for instance, emphasized Buck’s “subjective truth” in the biographies and considered the texts “works of literary genius rather than history” (“On Re-reading Fighting Angel,” letter correspondence with Nora Stirling, Stirling Collection, folder “Fighting Angel”). The recollections by family members and friends balance Buck’s view of her parents, complement her one-sided presentation and thus add to the picture that she gives in the biographies. Family friends were largely in agreement about Absalom Sydenstricker’s sternness and stubbornness, some of them stating that there was “nothing loveable about him” (Stirling Collection, Box 5, folder “1921”). But there are also indications that he was closer to his family’s needs than Buck has it in her biographies. Conversely, the real Carolyn Sydenstricker also evoked impressions which were considerably different from the one given by her daughter. Dr Bear, a fellow missionary, recalls the Sydenstrickers in the following way: I was impressed by [Buck’s] lack of understanding of her father and attributing him less feeling for his family than he ought to have had. She did emphasize his overwhelming sense of duty, which was correct. I felt that the Angel was better than the Exile, which seemed to me widely different from what I remembered as a boy, of Mrs. S. and what my mother and the other Chinkiang missionaries who worked with her thought. They thought she was just a good average missionary, not brilliant but she did her work and was not the martyr Mrs Buck painted her. (Stirling Collection, Box 4, folder “Absolom”)

In a similar vein, Buck’s sister, Grace, gives a different version of the Sydenstrickers’ family life. She does agree with her sister that Carolyn’s life in China was not always happy and also confirms Buck’s depiction of her mother’s investment in Americanness: It wasn’t only her husband, it was the whole situation. She was desperately lonely for America, she kept trying to recreate America wherever she was, make something

second husband, Richard Walsh, had edited since the 1930s and which Buck herself came to be involved with, too. For Buck and Walsh’s role in the publication of Asia Magazine, see Conn 1996: 159-160; 171-175. For a study discussing Helen Snow’s role as a writer in China, see Kelly Ann Long, Helen Foster Snow: An American Woman in Revolutionary China (2006).

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that wasn’t there. She had terrible illnesses and deaths of her children, and more than that she had this husband who didn’t know what she was all about and yet who absorbed so much of the family income and really contributed so little to the family life. When I knew her she was already not very well. (Stirling Collection, Box 4, folder “Carie”)

However, Grace also asserts that she has more and better memories of her amah than of her mother. According to Buck’s sister, Carolyn was often absent and immersed in her own missionary work. Most importantly, Grace recalls the power relations within her parents’ marriage differently from Buck: As a child, I used to feel sorry for my father, when my mother used to fly at him. She would be very very quick and harsh. I can remember hearing them at night, I often cried, because they were discussing things in such an argumentative way, I knew, in a sense that he was taking from his family to give to the other people, rascals. But I knew he didn’t mean to do that, he meant to do what he thought was right for his work. […] I couldn’t bear my mother’s outbursts of anger at him. […] she was wounding him. […] That he would never explain to Mother the real compulsion that made him carry on this work and feel he had to do it. Even though to anyone else it might look like sacrificing his family to his own ambition or to his own goodness or something. I just remember as a child feeling sorry for him when she attacked him in anger. (Stirling Collection, Box 5, folder “1921”)

Grace presents us here with a missionary couple whose relationship – if characterized by a lack of understanding for each other – is more balanced and equal than the image Buck provides in her biographies. The Sydenstrickers argue with each other and Carolyn even becomes an attacker in this scene. By contrast, there is a complete silence about this side of Carie in the biographies – it is a gap which Buck purposefully leaves in order not to stain the image of her mother.

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T HE AMERICAN M OTHER AND THE S AINTLY P ROPHET : T HE B IOGRAPHIES OF P EARL B UCK ’ S M ISSIONARY P ARENTS In her biographies Buck manipulates and distorts a more complex reality of missions in order to highlight what she considers a fundamental difference between the male and the female missionary experiences, as I have argued so far. I would now like to focus more closely on the way this critique is enacted in the texts. To communicate her points effectively, Buck mostly resorts to oppositional pairs and juxtaposes the image of her mother with that of her father in the two biographies. The Exile’s Carie is predominantly a victim or “martyr,” as Dr Bear called Buck’s stylization of Carie. Andrew, the ‘fighting angel,’ on the other hand, is largely demonized. Already the collective title of the biography couple – The Spirit and the Flesh – suggests a binary opposition between the father (the ‘spirit’) and the mother (the ‘flesh’), as it reverberates the conventional Puritan dichotomy of the soul and the body.9 On the whole, Buck retains this dichotomy in her texts. Yet, there are some instances in which Buck’s presentation of her parents in terms of totalization becomes more permeable. At times, Buck’s father is no longer the male ‘perpetrator’ who is responsible for his wife’s suffering; nor is Carie a victim throughout, as we shall see. With respect to the title, The Spirit and the Flesh, Buck herself stated that she did not want it understood as merely antithetical: “I hope people will not interpret it to mean that my father was all spirit and my

9

Perhaps most prominently, the Puritan poet Ann Bradstreet wrote about the dichotomy of the soul and the body in “The Flesh and the Spirit” (1678). In this poem the ‘flesh’ and the ‘spirit’ are introduced as two sisters and represent the internal struggle occurring in the mind of the poem’s speaker. This internal struggle, which can be found as a motif in many Puritan writings, attests to two aspects of the Puritan self: the worldly and sinful flesh and the redeemed, saved side of the spirit. While the spirit in Bradstreet’s poem is at times tempted by the worldly, wicked flesh, it is the spirit that ultimately keeps the upper hand. In a sense, this is also the case in the Sydenstrickers’ marriage where Andrew maintains his supremacy over Carie.

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mother all flesh. My intent was to show that the conflict between body and soul was going on in each of them” (December 15, 1936; interview clipping in Stirling Collection, Box 6, folder 16:2 “Fighting Angel”). In this statement Buck refers to the internal struggles within the father and the mother respectively which she seeks to depict. Perhaps even more interesting, however, there are certain continuities between the two figures, their experiences, and activities. These subtle overlaps or intersections, as we might call these continuities, are much more implied – and arguably more tentatively employed – than strategically conceptualized in the biographies. Buck hints at them, but does not further elaborate on them. Thus, her project of criticizing the missionary movement and of recovering her mother’s voice and those of other missionary women does not falter or fall apart. Rather, the occasional dissolution of rigid binarisms in the biographies interestingly relates back to the ambiguities and tensions within women’s missionary activities, as I discussed them in the first chapter, and paves the way for Buck’s novels to come. In The Exile and Fighting Angel the differences between the parents come particularly to the fore in those passages where Buck discusses Carie and Andrew together: He was a man like Saint Paul, indeed, to whom he has been likened by many; a man by nature religious and a pioneer, in many ways fearless, devoted to his duty as he conceived it, seeing nothing else. To his children he was a figure always a little dim, living outside their world. He was strict with them when he thought of them, truly desiring the righteousness above all else, yet through some lack of understanding never able to make righteousness beautiful to them. They preferred their mother’s swift impetuosities, her sudden little tempers and warm instant apologies, her close embraces and her little jokes and merry looks to all the cool goodness of their father. (The Exile 188)

In Buck’s imagery, paternal cold and detachment are depicted against maternal warmth, closeness, and liveliness. Little surprisingly, the Sydenstricker children prefer their mother’s qualities to the remote, “dim” figure of the righteous and fearless, but distanced father who is living “outside their world.” Hunter aptly observed on this aspect that Buck “portrayed her father as emotionally impotent in his relations with his family” (1984: 226). Buck presents this impotence mostly in terms of disregard: the birth of his

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children – and especially the girls – “made no difference to Andrew” (Fighting Angel 99); the children “were merely accidents which had befallen him” (Fighting Angel 208), and “there was no fatherhood in him” (Fighting Angel 208). Buck, who decidedly refers to herself as “Carie’s daughter” in the text (Fighting Angel 260-61; 273, 274), makes unmistakably clear that in “Carie’s home” (The Exile 253) “nothing seemed quite natural until he was gone again” (Fighting Angel 197) and that a child-oriented atmosphere of freedom, carelessness, and gaiety can only unfold without him. Andrew leaves behind his children in quasi-orphanage to pursue his missionary zeal, and positions himself outside of the family circle: […] to his children he was a stranger, coming home very seldom, and when he did, not as one who came home but as one who came only for a night’s rest before he went on again. Their lives were built without him, their days filled with other presences than his. They were fatherless, because his life was dedicated to others […]. (Fighting Angel 151)

As much as this attests to Carie’s success in establishing a home that represents a zone of comfort for her children in the absence of her husband, it also emphasizes Andrew’s status as an outsider – an exile – in his own family. By contrast to Carie, who suffers from her insularity as an exile, Andrew’s isolation within the family does not affect him, if we trust Buck. After all, his ‘Work’ – strategically capitalized throughout the two biographies – is his priority: it is the only thing that makes him feel “intoxicated” (Fighting Angel 130); when he engages in his ‘Work,’ “[…] Andrew’s soul touched ecstasy. He was literally transfigured with a joy not of this earth. He came home to Sunday dinner looking as though a lamp were burning brightly within him. He was not gay – his joy was too deep for that” (Fighting Angel 136). The father’s distance from the family and his placement beyond “this earth” are already introduced in the title of Buck’s biography of him – Fighting Angel – Portrait of a Soul. When she asserts that “[…] he was the best of them, a son of God continually going forth to battle, a fighting angel” (Fighting Angel 67), Buck expresses a certain sense of admiration for Andrew – however, the title also indicates that she does not approve of this ‘fighting angel’ and his missionary methods. ‘Fight’ and ‘angel’ is an oddmatched pair that does not really go together. ‘Fighting’ mirrors Andrew’s

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stubbornness, sense of urgency, and activism – and hence all features which are opposed to the attributes Buck ascribes to Carie. Perhaps even more importantly, the ‘angel’ part of the title has a special significance. In My Several Worlds, Buck writes on the meaning of ‘angel’ by citing from the Century Dictionary: ANGEL – One of an order of spiritual beings, attendants and messengers of God, usually spoken of as employed by him in ordering the affair of the universe, and particularly of mankind. They are commonly regarded as bodiless intelligences. (My Several Worlds 258)

As an ‘angel,’ Buck’s Andrew is a spirit who “never lived on earth” (Fighting Angel 209), but ‘above’ the world: he is not really human, and remote and detached from the day-to-day life of his family. With this, the title of the biography sets the stage for Buck’s presentation of her father throughout the text. Most strikingly, the father as an angel cannot be grasped, because he does not have a body. This bodiless male missionary, I argue, can be read as an indication of Buck’s critique of the unworldly and incomplete male missionary project and of her plea for a more down-to-earth, pragmatic female project that counters or complements the male one. Andrew’s rejection of the body and the physical is repeatedly emphasized in the two biographies. He has “no patience at all with [people’s] bodies” (Fighting Angel 148), and reacts with repulsion when a Western woman “of the large, florid, overconfident type” visits the family: “[…] he hated the way she looked, […] her large bosom bursting under her tight gown. Bulk of flesh filled him with distaste to the point of rage” (Fighting Angel 56-57), as Buck recalls this episode. Andrew’s reaction is so strong because he associates the woman’s “bulk of flesh” with excess and lack of discipline – it is a contrast to his own ascesis. Consistent with Andrew’s turn away from the flesh is Buck’s description of his own physique: Andrew, we learn at the beginning of the biography, is a “tall, slender, slightly stooping” man with a “spare, big-boned frame, […] big, thin delicate hands, [a] nobly shaped head with […] large features [and a] jutting lower jaw” (Fighting Angel 9).

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Buck does introduce the category of the body to introduce her father here, but her reference to his lean and bony physique is used as a strategic means to underline that Andrew has no warmth about him, that he is larger than life and not really human: it serves to clarify that he is no figure of identification. If there is something like a ‘positive’ concomitant of Andrew’s unearthly status, it might consist in the fact that it makes him free from experiencing pain and suffering: “[Andrew] went unscathed through sickness and disease everywhere about him and remained whole and untouched” (Fighting Angel 218-19). As a spirit, he is above such earthly dangers as being harmed and falling ill. Although Buck does not present her father’s invulnerability in terms of admiration but rather employs it in order to establish a contrast between Andrew and Carie, her reference to his invulnerability still undermines her negative totalization of him. In this sense, Andrew’s representation becomes more nuanced than it initially appears. As an earthly or bodily figure, Carie is vulnerable and prone to physical pain. This makes her human – but it will also become her downfall, as Buck shows in The Exile. With a mixture of sadness and anger, Buck traces how Carie’s health steadily deteriorates in the course of time and emphasizes that this circumstance is dependent on Carie’s geographical whereabouts and her status as an exile. In ample detail, Buck presents the story of a woman who is severely affected by seasickness every time she goes home to America on furlough, whose bodily strength decreases with each of the seven times she gives birth and with each time she catches tropical diseases in China. Thus, when Carie dies at the end, this is not a sudden or an unexpected death, but it is the final – and logical – step of a long process of her suffering as an exile in China: “[…] she quietly began to die and […] the dying took months,” as Buck later recalls it in her autobiography (My Several Worlds 160).10 While Carie’s deteriorating health and her suffering are negotiated in close conjunction with her Chinese surroundings, everything that links her

10 With this stylization of female suffering, Buck follows the well-established tradition in sentimentalism (and especially the seduction novel). There, we frequently come across the trope of the long-suffering heroine who finally succumbs to death. O-lan’s prolonged death in The Good Earth, too, can be seen in this tradition. For a discussion of The Good Earth and this scene, see chapter 4.

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with America and Americanness is presented in terms of invigoration. Accordingly, The Exile strongly works with the dichotomy between America and China. Carie constantly perceives difference – between herself and the Chinese around her, between Americanness and Chineseness, between cleanliness and filth, between health and sickness. Out of her observations of these differences, she invests even more in her Americanness. It is in the image of Carie as a nurturing, ‘earthly’ figure that Buck’s stylization of her mother’s Americannness is introduced in the text. Significantly, we first encounter Carie in The Exile standing in her American garden. She is depicted as the epitome of bodily strength in this early scene: She is in the bloom of her maturity, a strong, very straight figure […] standing in the full, hot sunshine of summer. She is not tall, nor very short, and she stands sturdily upon her feet. There is a trowel in her hand; she has been digging in her garden. It is a good, strong hand that holds the trowel, a form brown hand not too whitely well kept, and bearing evidence of many kinds of labor. But it is shapely in spite of this, and the fingers are unexpectedly pointed and delicate at the tips. […] her eyes are open and clear to it, hazel brown eyes, gold-flecked, under dark brown brows, very direct in their gaze and set in short, thick, black lashes. […] One was caught and held with the vigor and the strength of life in her face […]. (The Exile 9)

The repeated references to the color brown here attest to Carie’s association with the earth, and her “hazel brown eyes, gold-flecked,” in particular, imply her warmth and human kindness. Described as a woman who is “not tall, nor very short,” Buck’s mother becomes the ‘average’ American woman, which makes it easy for the readers to relate to this figure right from the beginning. This introductory passage does not present the image of a victimized, unhappy woman – to the contrary: comparable to the “intoxication” which Andrew experiences in his ‘Work,’ Carie’s face takes on “the look of ecstasy” (The Exile 181) when she does her gardening work. The passion for their respective work can be read as an overlap between Carie and Andrew which cushions the strict binarism of their representation. Importantly, however, it is decidedly in this American garden that Carie’s vigor and liveliness unfold – and not outside of the domestic realm. Her garden becomes an ‘alternative space,’ a bulwark against foreignness, as Buck points out: “Strange strong figure there in that American garden she has made in

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the dark heart of the Chinese city!” (The Exile 10). The description which is given here calls to mind a tableau which presents Carie as an icon of Americanness. There are numerous other references to Carie’s gardening throughout the biography. When she cultivates the garden on her missionary compound, Carie ‘Americanizes’ the land. The earth as a symbol of national belonging and Americanness was a popular trope in American (middlebrow) fiction of the Depression years – thus, at a time when patriotism and the connection to the land were particularly important and when The Exile was published. Using the centrality of the earth in her biography, then, allowed Buck to represent her mother as a patriot as well as to position herself as a writer in the context of Depression literature.11 The categories of nation, home, and belonging are discussed beyond the scenes which revolve around Carie’s gardening. In fact, they become instrumental means for Buck to draw attention to the differences between Carie and Andrew in the biographies. Where Buck’s mother represents Americanness and ‘home’ to the children, the figure of the father is alien and in many respects Chinese. Consistent with her depiction of Carie as an ‘American gardener,’ Buck also stylizes her mother as an American in the rest of the text. The Exile insists on Carie as the “living embodiment of America” (The Exile 245). Buck, who in her mother’s biography refers to her own birth as that of “this little American daughter” (The Exile 177), describes Carie as an American to the core: throughout the text, she is referred to as an “American woman” (The Exile 180) displaying all-American features, up to the point that Buck tells of an episode of her dying, emaciated

11 After her return to the United States, Buck herself repeatedly stressed her own interest in cultivating American gardens. Significantly, she describes these efforts in her autobiography My Several Worlds, which was published in 1954 and thus in times of the Cold War when Buck increasingly became accused of being anti-American. The garden as the epitome of Americanness and the ‘root’ which tied oneself to one’s own nation became a particularly important trope if read against the political climate of the era. For Buck’s placement in the Cold War context, see my analysis of her autobiography at the end of this chapter and, in particular, my discussion of her later fiction in the coda chapter. On the centrality of the land during the Great Depression, see my discussion of The Good Earth in chapter 4.

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mother eating chewing gum on her deathbed, for she had heard that it was “‘the thing in America these days!’” (The Exile 311).12 Carie’s Americanness is addressed in close relation to her role as a mother. The “American mother” (The Exile 184) stages a miniature America for her children so that they will not forget about their origin. Carie provides her children with American music, American books, American furniture, and the American garden in a home with clean whitewashed walls […], wide windows opened in the walls and fresh ruffled curtains, clean matting on the floors, the court planted with grass, flowers again, chrysanthemums bought from flower vendors and gay little single roses of red and pink and yellow. Then when the beloved organ and table were in their places and beds and a few reed chairs and a kitchen made, there was home again. Outside the noisy street ran east and west through the city and was the great thoroughfare for business, and there was the roar of the city, the shouts of hawkers, the cries of chair coolies wending their way through the crowd, the squeak of wheelbarrows. But inside the wall and the gate there was this spot of peace and cleanliness where the American woman built again a little fragment of her own country where she might rear her children and into which she often brought Chinese women who marveled and sighed to see how fair it was. (The Exile 152)

We have learned about the idea and image of the Christian American home as an outpost of Western civilization in chapter 1. Buck’s juxtaposition of the ‘inside’ and the ‘outside,’ and cleanliness and peace versus chaos and filth mirrors the imagery employed by other missionaries to refer to the foreignness of their Chinese surroundings. Similar to missionary Marian Belcher, for example, who made use of the image of ‘light in Christian homes’ in one of her letters, Buck, too, discusses her mother’s anxious attempts to uphold the “white curtains” of the missionary home as a sign

12 I would like to draw attention to the fact that Carie has only ‘heard’ of the fashionability of chewing gum in modern America. As a woman missionary in China, she is unfamiliar with this ‘trend’ and has not tasted it herself. Her knowledge of modern customs in America, then, most likely stems from the communication channels which I discussed in chapter 1: the transpacific exchange of letters with her family or the reading of magazines.

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against the “dark tiled Chinese houses pressing against this American home” (The Exile 34).13 Like the missionary women introduced in chapter 1, Carie tries to erect an ‘empire of the’ with her efforts to ‘Americanize life’ for her children. However, Carie’s version of an empire comes across as considerably more moderate or subdued if compared to the projects discussed before. Again, the distortion or bias in Buck’s biographies accounts for this difference. In the overall context of the text, Carie’s ‘empire’ is so much intertwined with the trope of victimization that it appears as not really productive. She is so desperate to stage her miniature America that the project saps her energy. For long periods in the texts, Buck highlights that her mother’s strategy to uphold Americanness derives from her displacement and self-doubts in an alien country. She invests in her Western notion of home while constantly searching for a divine sign that could legitimize her missionary presence in China. Where her husband finds fulfillment in his life as a missionary, Carie is described as an unhappy woman whose initial motive to serve as a missionary was triggered by a sad event. On her mother’s deathbed, she had promised that she would give herself to God and go to China as a missionary. Yet, although thoroughly prepared after attending a Presbyterian seminary, and even after living in China for many years, Carie is still missing a sense of vocation. Unlike her husband, she never really feels the ‘Call’ that would justify sacrificing her own life. Living in China, Carie is exposed to many hardships, raises her children mostly without her often absent husband, and – depicted as the climax of her story – has to witness the death of four of her seven children because of the poor hygienic conditions in China and the children’s ensuing (tropical) diseases. Recounting the death of her brother Clyde at infant age, for instance, Buck describes her mother’s reaction as a “heart grown hopeless”: “Some virtue went out of Carie on that day, never to return; something of

13 Carie’s staging of the home calls to mind the homes of Eastern greenhorns on the Western frontier. For example, Caroline Kirkland in her frontier novel A New Home, Who’ll Follow (1839) presents a similar attempt by her heroine, Mary Clavers, to stage a miniature civilized American East in the West. Jane Hunter draws attention to the similarities between missionary women and pioneer women with respect to their social deprivation. See Hunter 1984: 117.

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her life ceased to exist” (The Exile 204). Investing in cleanliness and “keeping the children as antiseptic as possible with carbolic lotion” (Fighting Angel 125) is thus less of a strategic method on Carie’s part to create a motherly empire as an alternative or extension to the male missionary project, but rather the desperate struggle of a worn-out woman to contain sickness and disease. “So did this American mother shield her children and keep them gay,” as Buck summarizes Carie’s attempts in the text (The Exile 148).14 Like other women missionaries, Buck’s Carie is a keeper of American morality when she upholds American values to her children in China. Different from many others, however, she is incapable of turning this survival strategy into a more pervasive program of resistance or selfdetermination. The importance of the nation (and nationhood) in the biographies is further underlined by an imagery of the elements water and earth. ‘Water’ is linked with China and Sinification, whereas ‘earth’ is associated with America. Buck makes use of the imagery of water to highlight her mother’s isolation in China and her dissociation from America. Most importantly, it is Carie’s seasickness on the passages between America and China which gives proof of the destructive dimension of water. During her first journey to China (her honeymoon), the Pacific Ocean is cast as the “ocean of horror” (The Exile 93), and it brings forth Carie’s feeling of hostility vis-à-vis her husband as the one responsible for putting her into this situation. Similarly, the Yangtse River, described as a “cruel river” (The Exile 150) that causes floodings and subsequent diseases, becomes a symbol of Carie’s struggles abroad: it “swallow[s] up all other life” so that Carie has to protect herself and her children against it (The Exile 142). For Carie, then, water is disruptive and threatening, a barrier which keeps her from America and an element which drags her into foreignness.

14 The image of the shield is repeatedly used in The Exile. For example, it reappears in the context of Carie’s hiring of an amah. While depicted as a likeable woman, the amah simultaneously undermines Carie’s project of “shield[ing] her children from the Oriental life about them” (The Exile, 1936: 117). The Sydentrickers’ amah becomes a ‘potential source of pollution’ that needs to be balanced by motherly protection (Hunter 1984: 109; Grimshaw 1993: 270-71). With this, the amah has the same symbolic function as the other Chinese amahs discussed in chapter 1.

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For Andrew, by contrast, water is a connective tool that facilitates his mission and his Sinification. It represents a channel in a literal and metaphorical sense: it makes him mobile when he decides to travel to his converts on a raft on the Yangtse and thus, it helps him to cement his position as a missionary and brings about his empowerment. Yet, water also makes him drift further apart from his family. The more he travels and the more often he is away, the more of a stranger he becomes to his children. Time and again, he is associated with the ‘alien’ influences of the external Chinese world that Carie so eagerly tries to keep at bay. In fact, the family perceives Andrew as a figure almost as foreign to them as the Chinese. The ‘strange’ Andrew of the biographies is increasingly demarcated as a Chinese, epitomized by his wearing Chinese garments and growing his hair into a Chinese queue at some stage (Fighting Angel 131). While one might read this embrace of Chineseness as a missionary’s successful assimilation to the ‘alien’ world and as a sign of his open-mindedness and flexibility, this is not how Buck presents it in her text. Instead, Buck – following her mother’s logic – sets Americanness as the norm so that Andrew’s Chinese traits ultimately remain strange, alien, and different. When, late in her life, Carie laments that she “has already said farewell to America from which the cruel sea separated her” (The Exile 291), there resonates a sense of nostalgia in these words. And indeed, for Carie, the America and the American home which she recalls from her youth and which she stages for her children is no longer existent. Her idea of ‘America’ is a nostalgic construct rather than a contemporary reality. With this dilemma, the exile of Buck’s biographies becomes a blueprint for some of Buck’s later fictional characters. After a long absence, Carie and other figures are uprooted, irrevocably dissociated from their home country. A return home is no longer really possible for them and they remain in a perpetual state of exile. With this, they correspond to the dilemma of exiles which Edward Said explained in his “Reflections on Exile” (1984).15 Said defined exiles as

15 If I refer to Edward Said’s concept here, I am aware that Said does not really consider missionaries as exiles in his essay. Defining an exile as “anyone prevented from returning home,” Said implicitly excludes missionaries because they are not banished from living in a country, and a return ‘home’ is still possible for them (1984: 181). I still draw on Said’s definition because I think that we

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people who are cut off from their roots, land, and past (1984: 177). There is an “essential sadness” and “sorrow of estrangement” revolving around them (1984: 173), and “homecoming is out of the question” for them. Carie’s fate follows this logic. When she arrives ‘home’ to America on one of her furloughs, her initial exclamation sounds overtly enthusiastic: “America, America, how could she ever leave it again!” (The Exile 237). However, Carie soon realizes that she “did not belong to the big house [her family’s house] anymore” (The Exile 270). No one really needs her there, she has nothing to do as she does not have to home-school her children or tend to other people’s needs. The inventory of her situation is disillusioning: Twenty-two years now she had been away from this country of hers. She held it fast in her heart as she ever had, ever it was the fairest and best of lands, God-blessed. But the niche in it that had been hers was closing now. Twenty years, and her brothers and sisters had learned to live without her, although they loved her well. Twenty years, and the daughters of Cornelius [her brother] were young women in the room where she had lived as a young woman; their dresses, long skirts, and full leg-o’mutton sleeves hung where her crinolines had hung, and their snapshots of boarding school days were caught in a fish-net, as the fad was, on the wall where the little dark Madonna had been when she was young. (The Exile 239-40)

“America had forgotten her” (The Exile 240) is Carie’s (or rather Buck’s) bitter conclusion at the end of the furlough, and Buck’s personal assessment of the situation succinctly summarizes Carie’s ‘essential sadness’ and ‘sor-

need to reconsider the grounds on which Said does not identify missionaries as exiles in his essay. If we think of missionaries of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries (and this is Said’s frame of reference), I would agree that a return home was/is possible for most of them at any time – they usually are covered financially by the institutions that send them abroad, and they can rely on modern telecommunication to stay in touch with home. Thus, they would not count as exiles. However, if we look at the situation of missionaries in China at the end of the nineteenth century, it makes sense to include them as exiles. The return ‘home’ was in many respects – economically as well as culturally – not really possible, as I will argue in the ensuing paragraphs.

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row of estrangement:’ “I think to the very end of her life she was homesick for the America she had known” (The Exile 272). In this respect, Carie is once again different from her husband. The biographical Andrew, as a saintly figure, is unlikely to experience feelings like sadness, sorrow, or homesickness. But Buck still implies a common ground between Carie and him. The homecoming is impossible for Andrew, as well. The more he feels home in China (and poses as a ‘quasi Chinese,’ as we have seen above), the more foreign he becomes in his own country (see Fighting Angel 120). A return to America is out of the question for him, because it would constitute a “return to the old inferiorities” (Fighting Angel 111). Andrew – and with him missionaries at large – is insignificant in America: it is only in China, in the missionary field, that he can exert (male) power, agency, and authority. In America he would not have the social and economic standing that he has as a missionary in China. Furthermore, various developments in modern America would easily undermine his male supremacy – for example, the emergent new women. After his return from a furlough in America, a bewildered Andrew tells his family of the behavior of smoking and drinking American women: “‘The women are the worst. […] I scarcely know how to tell you about the women in America’” (Fighting Angel 227). But even back in China, Andrew is at risk of losing part of his authority. Importantly, Carie’s awareness that she does not belong to modern day America anymore makes it “easier for her at the end of the year to turn back to the Orient where there were so many who needed her still” (The Exile 239). This dissociation from America can finally give her a sense of vocation and offer an alternative to her exilic isolation. Carie might still be sad about the ‘impossibility’ to return home, but she is no longer altogether the static figure – the victim: she gradually copes better with life in China and finds a niche of activity when she decides to fight the deplorable conditions of the Chinese. In accordance with what was expected of married female missionaries, Carie increasingly tries to support her husband in his attempts to convert the Chinese, and thereby becomes an ‘assistant missionary’ in Barbara Welter’s sense: […] she went often to the chapels and played the baby organ, leading the singing in her clear voice, and after Andrew had preached she taught little groups of women who came to hear what the strange doctrine was about.

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[…] Stronger message than her words was the swift and native sympathy of her nature when she listened to their sad stories. Her instant impulse was always “to do something about it.” They learned to call her “The American of Good Works,” and many women came to her at her home, women whom she had never seen but who had heard of her, and when their stories were told the end was always wistfully said, “They tell me you always can do something – that you always think of a way.” (The Exile 153)

“The American of Good Works” is an active ‘doer’ in this scene. Carie experiences a form of empowerment by the “Work of Women for Women” (Welter 1993: 200). If Carie cannot create the exilic sisterhood with fellow American missionaries that Patricia Grimshaw has described as being common among female missionaries (1993: 256), then the advice-seeking Chinese women can be regarded as an alternative sisterhood of female solidarity which helps Carie to overcome her own isolation.16 “Carie’s home in these years became increasingly the gathering place for all kinds of people in trouble” (The Exile 253), as Buck underlines. Significantly, Carie’s bonding with the Chinese is not established on the grounds of religion. Instead, she is successful in her efforts to convert the Chinese precisely because she acts on the basis of humanity and pragmatism. “I do not think one of us would have called her a saintly woman. She was far too practical, far too vivid and passionate, too full of humor and change and temper for that. She was the most human person we have ever known [….],” writes Buck of her mother (The Exile 314). In truly female missionary style, Carie opens a clinic for mothers and babies and teaches reading classes (The Exile 183). Although not a strategic feminist move, steps like this reflect Carie’s pragmatism and a down-to-earth understanding of missionary activity which can be read as part of the liberal turn of foreign missions into the social gospel which I explained in chapter 1. This idea of the social gospel and a ‘hands-on’ approach to missionary work is picked up again in Buck’s fictional project, as we will see. According to Buck, Carie dreams of expanding her role as an assistant missionary even further:

16 This alliance between Carie and Chinese women is consistent with Welter’s notion of sisterhood between ‘heathen’ and American women (1993: 199), as I discussed it in chapter 1. See also Brumberg 1982: 362.

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She had had visions once of working with him side by side in a comradeship full and invincible. While her children were small and her life full of duties she had been able to achieve little of this comradeship, but now that the children were grown, she could, she thought, go with him into everything. […] (The Exile 279)

However, Andrew does not approve of Carie’s methods and rejects her help. If we recall the general sense of fear which male missionaries and missionary boards felt in view of the emergence of the feminized social gospel, it is fair to assume that he opposes Carie’s wishes out of selfprotection and fear. He keeps down Carie’s ambitions to carve out a more important role as a missionary and contains his wife’s social gospel, because he apprehends that it might undermine his own evangelical project and turn out to be more successful in the end. Buck, however, does not elaborate much on this possibility or take into account Andrew’s ‘human’ side, his fear, but she describes Andrew’s rejection in terms of blatant arrogance and egotism: Andrew preferred not to have his sermons aided in any way. He was quite satisfied with them and extremely doubtful that she aided anything to them by her suggestions, and as for the hymns she liked, he thought them strange and meaningless and too lively for religious decency. (The Exile 280)

Especially in Fighting Angel – which ironically, I would like to recall, Buck had claimed to have written in order to correct her father’s negative image – Buck presents Andrew as a chauvinist, if not misogynist: “Andrew could brook arrogance from no one, having plenty of his own, and especially he could not endure it from females, whom he considered should be meek and yielding,” as Buck summarizes it (Fighting Angel 174-75). There are numerous passages in the text which lay bare the misogyny within the missionary project: in all of these passages Buck makes unmistakably clear that she regards her father not as a singular case, but as a representative of the movement as a whole. This misogynist attitude is directed at both Chinese and American women. For example, Chinese women are “an aggravation to Andrew” (Fighting Angel 93) in the sense that he, as a male missionary, does not have access to them so that their presence reminds him of his own limitations and the need for female missionaries to partake in the missionary activity. Of course, following the logic of the male missionary project,

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this is something Andrew does not openly admit: officially, the conversion of a Chinese woman’s “soul could scarcely count as a full soul” for him (Fighting Angel 93). In a similar vein, Andrew does not take female missionaries seriously and is more than adamant to subdue their voices. In mission meetings, no woman ever raised her voice before men, either to pray or to speak […]. In their meetings the women knelt before the men, who knelt before God and alone could speak to him. And Andrew was one of them. Once at a prayer meeting an English woman of another faith in all innocence prayed aloud when, according to the custom, the meeting was thrown open for prayer. Three out of the five men present rose and stalked out. […] Andrew […] did not go out […] [but] [a]s far as he was concerned, there was no praying going on. (Fighting Angel 187-88)

Men are enacted (or, they enact themselves) as the agents – in this scene as well as in the missionary movement as a whole. The female voice counts as no voice at all. Thus runs the primary lesson we learn from reading The Exile and Fighting Angel. According to Buck, her mother’s humanitarian mission is not effective enough (yet) to change the structures of the American missionary movement. Where Andrew – and the ‘old’ missionary project at large – silences women, Buck seeks to recover these voices and endow them with agency in her own project. Toward the end of The Exile, Buck describes a scene in which Andrew departs for yet another field trip. With a mixture of anger, frustration, and defiance Buck recalls this scene: “It would be so nice,” [Carie] used to murmur sometimes, “to have someone to take a little walk with – someone of one’s own.” This she said watching Andrew’s figure going alone down the winding road. It would not occur to him, wrapped in his thoughts and services as he was always, to ask her to go with him, and she was too proud to suggest it. Strange remote soul of a man that could pierce into the very heavens and discern God with such certainty and never see the proud and lonely creature at his side! To him she was only a woman. Since those days when I saw all her nature dimmed I have hated Saint Paul with all my heart and so must all true women hate him, I think, because of what he has done in the past to women like Carie, proud free-born women, yet damned by their very

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womanhood. I rejoice for her sake that his power is gone in these days. (The Exile 283)

This departure at the end of the text, I suggest, represents a vision of Buck that should become emblematic of her own revisionary project: it is the ‘vanishing of the old missionary.’

R ETHINKING THE B IOGRAPHIES – P EARL B UCK ’ S M Y S EVERAL W ORLDS While Pearl Buck would not altogether overthrow the image of her parents which she presented in the biographies, she qualified some of her earlier assessments in her autobiography, My Several Worlds, published in 1954. The autobiography completely abandons the dichotomy of the earlier representation of her parents and is in many respects an ambiguous text, which makes it an interesting renegotiation of Buck’s views of the 1920s and 30s. In My Several Worlds, Buck repeatedly emphasizes the happiness of her own childhood and describes it as “carefree” and as an “idyl [sic]” (My Several Worlds 9). The autobiographical I is a happy child because she largely lives in a “big loving merry not-too-clean Chinese world” which is juxtaposed with the “small white clean Presbyterian American world” of her parents (My Several Worlds 10). In contrast to The Exile, Buck does not fashion herself as “Carie’s daughter,” and the distance between the parents has largely disappeared. Instead, Carie and Andrew are now presented as a unit, and Buck consistently refers to them as “my parents” (My Several Worlds 4-14). In some passages, Buck writes about her “Western parents” (My Several Worlds 14) and with this attributes even to her father the Westernization/Americanness which she had reserved for her mother in the biographies. In the older texts, we need to remember, Andrew was distinguished by his Sinification. If he now becomes a Western man, this change of ‘national belonging’ brings him closer to his American wife. In turn, Carie’s Americanness is no longer an aspect that connects her with her daughter as a child, for Buck stylizes herself as a quasi Chinese girl. In the early passages of the autobiography, then, Buck works with a new oppositional pair: the American parents and the Sinified child. This will change in the course

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of My Several Worlds, when Buck later on presents herself as an American woman. At the beginning of the autobiography, though, she uses her own ‘foreignness’ as a strategy to highlight her childhood separation from her parents. My parents had their work of teaching and preaching their religion, and this kept them busy and happy and out of their child’s way. […] But a solitary child learns lessons quickly and most of my day was free for play and dreaming. […] No wonder I was a happy child, and that my parents were happy, too. (My Several Worlds 1617)

As indicated by her sister Grace, Buck now gives the image of a mother who is not really part of her children’s world. In My Several Worlds Carolyn Sydenstricker is described as “happy,” and she seems to fully participate in the missionary activity. Further on, Buck even describes her mother as an “ardent feminist” (My Several Worlds 91). The mother in My Several Worlds is no longer the martyr of The Exile, but she is described as an active agent in the missionary enterprise. This assessment is also echoed in the short article “At Home in the World,” which was published in Wisdom Magazine in February 1956. There, Buck writes: My parents were only secondarily parents. I know my mother loved her children with all her heart, but certainly she never loved us with all her time. We shared everything with her. She took us to her religious meetings, and we went with her when she dispensed food and money to the poor, and we helped her with her clinics and her housekeeping. We were pressed into every sort of service – not for any obvious purpose of training us, but simply because she had to have help. She was deeply involved in life and she involved us with her. […] (Stirling Collection, Box 4, folder “Glimpses PSB”)

The image of Absalom Sydenstricker, too, is modified in Buck’s autobiography. In addition to his introduction as a Western man in this text, he now also comes across as more human and less aloof than in the biographies.17

17 Interestingly, Lossing Buck, Buck’s first husband, whom she divorced in the early 1930s, now becomes an ‘Andrew’ of some sort in the autobiography. He is ‘fleshless,’ detached, absent, and – like Andrew at the beginning of The Exile –

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Buck still does not approve of his missionary methods and she continues to depict him as the stern father and disciplinarian (see My Several Worlds 2021), but there are passages in the autobiography which also reveal another facet of Buck’s attitude toward her father: lenience and sympathy. In Fighting Angel such indications of Buck’s more positive sentiments had hardly occurred amidst the overall framework of rejection or ‘demonization’ of Andrew. At best, she had acknowledged that Andrew was “righteous […] and honorable in intent and good meaning,” but then had come to the harsh conclusion that he participated in a project of “unwarranted imperialism” and “belonged to the blind” (Fighting Angel 162-63). My Several Worlds is more nuanced in this respect. Buck almost presents her father as a victim in some episodes – but, in contrast to her earlier description of her mother as a victim, she now couches this ‘victimization’ in humor. For instance, during one of Sydenstricker’s lengthy sermons, the Chinese congregation becomes restless and some people start to walk out. Buck, a child witness to the scene, recalls this scene in her autobiography: My father was disturbed, however, and a kindly old lady on the front seat, seeing this, was moved to turn her head and address the people thus: “Do not offend this good foreigner! He is making a pilgrimage in our country so that he may acquire merit in heaven. Let us help him to save his soul!” (My Several Worlds 199)

Although it could be argued that there is an undertone of Buck’s superiority and ridicule here, I would contend that Buck’s sympathy for her helpless and ineffective father prevails in this scene, and importantly, we can now also find a trace of a human reaction in him: where the Andrew of Fighting Angel probably would have ignored the woman’s comment, the father now notices it and is “disturbed” by it. He has become human. In this sense, My Several Worlds complements Buck’s earlier portrayal of the father and presents him in a somewhat different light. Overall, Buck’s tone in the autobiography is more conciliatory vis-à-vis her father, and the portrayals of her parents appear more balanced if compared to The Exile and Fighting Angel. A number of reasons are responsible

remains nameless in the autobiography. Buck consistently refers to Lossing Buck as an anonymous figure: he is “the man in the house” or her “child’s father” (My Several Worlds 188) – but never close to her and her needs.

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for Buck’s change of perspective between the 1920s (or 30s, if we go by the publication date of the biographies) and the 1950s. My Several Worlds is, as I wrote above, an ambiguous text. While my aim is not to discuss the problematic nature of the genre of autobiography in length here, I do think that the genre itself has to do with this shift. If I explained earlier in this chapter that the aspect of subjectivity is a component of biographies, then this aspect is even more relevant in autobiographical writing. After all, the writers of this type of text give highly personal reminiscences of their own life and seek to enact themselves in a particular way. Autobiographies are, perhaps more than anything else, projects of self-fashioning which are often very much informed by their authors’ position in the political framework of the day. My Several Worlds, indeed, needs to be seen as such a project. In her 1954 autobiography Buck depicts her multi-faceted life story and negotiates her identity against the backdrop of the Cold War. In these years, her political situation and her place as a writer were complicated and deeply entangled in the Cold War context, as I will discuss in greater detail in the coda chapter. Suffice it here to point out that Buck became increasingly marginalized at the time: she was accused of being un-American and a shallow writer – circumstances which account for the many tensions and ambivalences in the autobiography. When she casts herself as a lonely, ‘foreign’ child at the beginning of My Several Worlds, for example, this loneliness reflects her isolation, otherness, and her own status as an ‘exile’ amidst the political climate of the 1950s. Her oscillation between the concepts of Americanness and Sinification and her eventual turn towards Americanness in the text reveal her inner conflict: she needs to give ‘proof’ of her patriotism, but at the same time, she still wants to gain public support (and money) for her mission of intercultural understanding. In this dilemma, she resorts to her father’s repertoire of missionary tactics and attitudes which she had formerly criticized. Because of the circumstances, she can perhaps more easily understand his stubborn missionary zeal and acknowledge his activity as an uncompromising ‘fighting angel’ in her autobiography now. All in all, then, things had become much more intricate than they still appeared to Buck in the 1920s and 30s – an insight, I think, which explains her more conciliatory approach in My Several Worlds. Nevertheless, Buck’s main idea of the missionary activity as an imperialist project still persists:

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[My parents] were deeply devoted to the Chinese we knew and indeed to all Chinese, and in greater or lesser degree so were all missionaries. Few of them were selfish or lazy, and most of them in those days came from homes well above the average. And yet I knew intuitively that they were not in China primarily because they loved the people […]. No, they were there, these missionaries, to fulfill some spiritual need of their own. […] And I was troubled when my father preached his doctrines and I wished he would be silent […] But I could not bear preaching from any white man, knowing what white men had done in Asia […]. (My Several Worlds 5051)

In her autobiography, Buck reflects upon all sorts of events revolving around her family, her upbringing, as well as on the background of her novels’ (and biographies’) publications, or on her Nobel Prize. The text also poses as a comment on the political relations between the East and the West, and Buck introduces her humanitarian projects like the adoption agency “Welcome House.” Thus, My Several Worlds covers rather comprehensively Buck’s life up to that point. Considering this, it is all the more remarkable that it leaves one decisive gap – the event which constituted Buck’s official break with the missionary movement in the early 1930s. In the following part, I will focus on this event which transported Buck’s critique of missions into a realm which was less tentative and experimental than her fictional biographies of the 1920s: it was the public realm of politics, in which Buck had to face more immediate consequences of her views and which further radicalized her critique.

“I S THERE A C ASE FOR F OREIGN M ISSIONS ?” P EARL B UCK ’ S O FFICIAL B REAK WITH THE M ISSIONARY M OVEMENT Of course, it would be oversimplified and somewhat polemic to pinpoint one particular date that changed American foreign missions once and for all. Rather, the changes in missionary thought, ideology, and influence in Asia in the early twentieth century were the results of complex and gradual processes of transition and transformation, as eminent mission scholars throughout the second half of the twentieth century showed (see Lian 1997; Cohen 1978; Fairbank 1974; Lutz 1965). Still, in early November 1932, a

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speech delivered to an audience of some 2,000 Presbyterian women at New York City’s Astor Hotel created “a stir” and “raised havoc” (Lian 1997: 114; 120) among the American missionary community. Not surprisingly, the woman who gave this speech was Pearl Buck. When she gave her speech, she had just won the Pulitzer Prize for her acclaimed novel The Good Earth, and because of that stood at the center of public attention. Like almost everything Buck did or said at the time, the public’s interest in the speech and the media coverage of it were extensive to begin with – even irrespective of the content of the speech. Furthermore, at the time, Buck and her husband, Lossing, were living in Ithaca, New York, where Lossing Buck was pursuing his Ph.D. at Cornell University. The two were still members of the Presbyterian board of missions and received financial support from the missionary organization, a fact which made the speech even more controversial. Some days after her speech, missionary authorities called Buck an “outstanding advocate of modern unbelief,” some demanded her dismissal from the Presbyterian Missions Board which she was still a member of, and one reverend said that he was glad Buck’s missionary father had died one year earlier and did not have to witness the “etherealized animalism” of his daughter (quoted in Wacker 2003: 188; see also Lian 1997: 119-123). What did Buck say in her speech that had this tremendous impact? In her speech titled “Is there a Case for Foreign Missions?” Buck came out with a scathing attack on the mediocrity, arrogance, and narrowmindedness of missionaries sent abroad by the Church, men and women fresh from college who were ‘disdainful of a great culture.’ Those ‘scornful, vulgar, [uncharitable, unappreciative,] ignorant and superstitious’ missionaries repeated to the suffering, uncomprehending peoples in the East their ‘memorized jargon.’ They were the lonely little figures, she said, who lived on a theological ‘formula’ and who were ‘dwarfed’ by the ‘vast people, the age-old history, the fathomless difference of race.’ (Lian 1997:120)

In Buck’s eyes, a new, inefficient, and badly-trained generation of missionaries does not share a life with the Chinese, but simply preaches to them

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(“Is There a Case…?” 1932a: 154).18 When they realize that their Western doctrines and missionary attempts have failed, these ‘new’ missionaries arrogantly dismiss the Chinese as xenophobic. The missionaries who come under Buck’s attack are the ones that were increasingly seen as “cultural imperialists” in the wake of the Chinese revolution (Fairbank 1974: 3; see also Lian 1997; Hutchison 1987; Schlesinger 1974; Lutz 1965) – embracing Western political ideologies, teaching methods, and lifestyles and being ignorant of the needs of the Chinese. Buck bluntly states that “[t]here can be no thoughtful missionary abroad to-day who has not seriously questioned his mission […]” (1932a: 144), and with this refers back to her own mother’s constant religious doubts. Full of “anger and indignation” (1932a: 145), she also dismisses those achievements of missions that were generally praised as humanitarian or secular (such as hospitals, schools, or relief programs), arguing that frequently the underlying purpose of setting up these institutions too was to “inveigle people to hear the gospel” (1932a: 146). Moreover, Buck accuses the American constituency of wasting money for superfluous, luxurious Christian symbols in China such as costly churches in the vicinity of poor neighborhoods (1932a: 153-54) and of sending abroad only mediocre missionaries (“Frankly, you wanted the best for yourselves,” 1932a: 146). Buck does not reject missions altogether in her speech, but juxtaposes a new generation of “mediocre” missionaries and their flaws with the older generation of “a few great missionaries” (1932a: 149). According to this line of thinking, her father – despite all his narrow-mindedness and detachment from his family – is one such great missionary. It is his very rigidity and quality as a warrior – still seen so critically in the biographies – which is turned into an asset here. For missionaries of the old generation, Buck claims, Christ was the reason to go abroad, and she now presents this

18 As I will discuss three of Buck’s pieces which date back to 1932 here, I will refer to them from here on in the following way for the rest of the chapter: Buck’s speech “Is There a Case for Foreign Missions?” will be cited as 1932a; “The Laymen’s Mission Report,” which appeared in The Christian Century on 23 November, will be indicated as 1932b; and references to “Give China the Whole Christ: Letter to the Editor” (published in the July issue of The Chinese Recorder) are given as 1932c.

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small group as overall altruistic and self-denying. The admiration for her father, which only rarely shines through in Fighting Angel, is more fully expressed in this speech, although Buck does not mention her father explicitly. Seen that way, Andrew’s capitalized Work, which is clearly a critique of the absent father in the biography, can be understood as an appraisal in this context. In fact, when Buck attacks the structures and decisions of the missionary boards, she even defends her father and his hard-working ethos, as Absalom Sydenstricker was often at odds with his missionary board.19 Still, Buck does not suddenly abandon her critique of the ‘old’ patriarchal project in this speech. To the contrary: she expands on her views, arguing for a more humanitarian, feminized understanding of missionary activity. The new type of missionary should combine the devotion of the “great old missionaries” with the social concern, which was merely indicated by the work of female missionaries of the first generation and which was to become the social gospel of the second generation. At a first glance, Buck does not broach the category of gender in her critique when she concludes: The basic reason for the lack of the success in spreading the spirit of Christianity has been because neither the messenger nor the message has been suited to the needs of the people. The truth is we have never considered the people. (1932a: 154)

Yet, Buck is implicitly referring to the impracticality and stubbornness of male missionaries who often insist on their own missionary projects rather than actually communicating with the Chinese and listening to their needs. “Considering the people” and running schools and hospitals for the right reasons, according to Buck, has often become the task of female missionaries, as we have seen by the example of her pragmatic mother. However, for Carie as an ‘exile,’ this project was still in its infancy and rather subdued; it now needs to be expanded and fully come into its own. For Buck, the only case for foreign missions is one in which Christians are willing to truly share Christ and to genuinely become part of Chinese life. Only such a

19 As far as Absalom Sydenstricker’s disputes with the missionary board are concerned, Buck’s allusions to them were backed up by her sister, Grace, who, too, mentioned the frequent quarrels Sydenstricker had with his board’s authorities (see Stirling Collection, Box 4, folder “religion and Pearl S. Buck”).

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transformed future mission, defined in broad humanist terms and also carried out at home, holds out a promise to Buck: It is essential that we strive to apply to ourselves those principles which we are asking others to apply. One of the great indignations of my life was to find certain women in Christian churches in America who would give money and time to a foreign missionary society for work among peoples ten thousand miles away but who would not open the doors of their homes to students and persons of other races in their own cities, strangers and foreigners in America. What is the use of preaching Christ abroad when we deny him by such acts as these at home? (1932a: 154-55)

What Buck says here about the position of American women at home, their roles in the operation of missionary boards, and the discrepancy between the ‘home base’ and the missionaries abroad also reflects missionaries’ dissatisfaction with the old structures of the movement, as I already outlined them in chapter 1. Furthermore, when Buck refers to the geographical remoteness of American foreign missionaries and their “work among peoples ten thousand miles away” in the above quotation, she once again hints at the isolation of missionaries and their status as exiles in China. Although Carie does not feature explicitly in the speech, this is how she enters through the back door. A couple of weeks after her speech, Buck reviewed the laymen’s mission report for The Christian Century. Buck summarized and commented upon the three-hundred-page study carried out under the leadership of Ernest Hocking, a professor of philosophy at Harvard University.20 Hock-

20 Buck and Ernest Hocking should come to be lifelong friends (see Conn 1996: 149-50; 350-52), and possibly even lovers, as some parts of their correspondence suggest (see Stirling Collection, Box 8, folder “26 A – Hocking”). Read as an autobiographical novel, Buck’s The Goddess Abides (1972) supports such speculation. Conn concisely summarizes the novel: “The main character, a woman named Edith, visits an aged philosopher named Edwin in his New England home. After dinner, they lie together through the night, naked in each other’s arms” (Conn 1996: 352). For a discussion of the novel and its autobiographical overlaps to Buck and Hocking, see also Beverly Rizzon, Pearl S. Buck: The Final Chapter (1989: 128). Irrespective of the allegedly intimate nature of their relationship, Buck’s connection to Hocking proved to be very influ-

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ing and his “Commission of the Laymen’s Foreign Missions Inquiry” – which consisted of seven leading men in the American churches like C. Luther Fry, Galen Fisher, and H. Paul Douglass, who were soon dubbed “missionary revolutionaries” – had made an inventory of American foreign missions a year earlier and come largely to the same conclusions as Buck.21 Unsurprisingly, Buck in her review praised the report as a “masterpiece of constructive thought” (1932b:1434) and felt animated to renew and refine her earlier speech. In her article, Buck now “protest[ed] […] against the enormous and cruel organization which […] puts the missionary into the place” (1932b: 1435). Yet it was not only the boards she attacked but “American Christians” at large (1932b: 1435) – and with accusations such as this, she dropped a bombshell. More programmatic and visionary than her speech “Is there a Case…?,” her article also abounds with enthusiasm: “I am more encouraged about missions now and about the Christian religion now than I have ever been in my life” (1932b: 1434), Buck claimed, and – following Hocking and his commission – she outlined a new type of missionary. This “new missionary” does consider the people, “touche[s] the average man,” and sees preaching as “his last task” (1932b: 1435). To the people who were close to Buck, her critique of missions in late 1932 did not really come as a surprise. Some weeks before her speech and article, she had, for instance, announced in a letter to her friend Margaret Thomson that “we have been sentimental [about missions] long enough”

ential and productive for her work, as they were both advocates of liberal missions and political progressivism. 21 Ernest Hocking should expand on his argument and publish the study under the title Re-Thinking Missions. A Layman’s Inquiry After One Hundred Years (1932). Re-Thinking Missions was long considered as the most influential book in mission studies, reaching into the 1960s and 70s when scholars like Fairbank, Lutz, and Cohen gave the field new impulses. Characteristically, there are hardly any references to female missionaries in Hocking’s voluminous book. The same is true for H. Richard Niebuhr’s The Social Sources of Denominationalism (1929), which, like Hocking’s book, is a study that calls for a revisionist understanding of foreign missions. For a discussion of Hocking, Niebuhr, and the overall popularity of studies of Protestant Christianity in the 1920s and early 30s, see Glenn T. Miller, Piety and Profession: American Protestant Theological Education, 1870-1970 (2007): especially chapter 20 (470-489).

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and indicated that a more outspoken critique was needed (letter November 1932, Stirling Collection, Box 4, folder “Missions”). And also a wider audience could have been prepared for the stir in late 1932. For in the July 1932 issue of The Chinese Recorder, Buck had provided a forerunner of her later argument. In a letter to the editor, Buck – in still rather moderate terms – had written about the “mistakes” of the “elders” in the missionary movement, bemoaned their “narrowness” (1932c: 450), and called the “‘old gospel’ methods” into question (1932c: 452). But then, this short letter to a Christian magazine was more or less overlooked and did not reach a wide audience. By contrast, the New York speech and its following pieces22 received much publicity and triggered a heated controversy between Buck and the Presbyterian missionary board as well as its constituency. National newspapers and journals, as diverse as The Nation (17 May, 1933), New York Post (13 April, 1933), The New York Times (14 April 1933), or Literary Digest (06 May 1933) reported on what came to be known as the heresy charges against Pearl Buck. Conn summarizes the escalation of events in spring 1933: […] She was shaken by rumors that a church court planned to put her on trial for heresy. The report proved untrue, but a crisis of some sort had clearly become inevitable. In the months following her Astor Hotel Speech, she had become the target of a bitter campaign, directed by conservatives on both sides of the Pacific. (Conn 1996: 153)

22 For example, Buck wrote a further piece under the bulky title “For those who believe and for those who doubt – here is a challenging message at this Eastertide of our most troubled year” for the May 1933 issue of Cosmopolitan magazine. The issue of the magazine was published in time for the most important holiday of the Christian World – Easter. With this, the timing of Buck’s statements about her religious doubts could not have been more perfect. While she ensured her audience that she believed in Jesus Christ, she still expressed her occasional doubts about where and how to find him. With statements such as “One seldom even hears his name except in places of formal worship, and there he is not to be found for me” (1933: 17), she once again hit the nerve of the missionary and religious establishment.

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Ironically, the charges were led by her father’s successor in the Chinkiang mission, the reverend James Graham (Conn 1996: 153). Eventually, Buck stepped down from her membership and resigned from the missionary board in May 1933.

‘M AKING U SE OF M ISSIONARY P AMPHLETS ’? T HE M ISSIONARY T HEME IN B UCK ’ S F ICTION The controversy revolving around Pearl Buck’s speech and the articles belonging to it, as well as her version of missionary life as presented in The Exile and Fighting Angel did not lead to Buck’s turn away from missions, as I explained in the introduction. As a part of the liberal missionaries of the second generation, she focused on an alternative, more secular field of involvement. In her case, this new and revised missionary activity turned out to be the realm of fiction. In this project, Buck centrally discussed missionary figures and themes. The biographies of her parents represented an important lynchpin for this fictional project, as we have seen in this chapter. The Exile and Fighting Angel with their juxtapositions (and their subtle transgressions) are an indication of the development which Buck’s fiction should undergo. Buck worked more openly and consciously with the transcendence of juxtapositions when she discussed her neo-missionary theme. She did not go as far as to radically present ‘male Caries’ and ‘female Andrews,’ namely fully emancipated woman missionaries and victimized male missionaries to revise her parents’ project. However, she reflected upon and addressed the more complex reality in the sense that she created more ambivalent missionary figures. In novels like Kinfolk and God’s Men, as I will show, Buck tried to correct the image of her father, ‘humanize’ him, and expand the (female) ideal of the social gospel to men. These texts introduce characters that are fusions of the figures of the mother and the father found in the biographies. These neo-missionary figures abound in Buck’s fictional work. They are predominantly male, but still share some of the qualities which Buck credited to her mother. In turn, the patriarchal missionary project of her father’s generation loses its momentum in Buck’s fiction, as we will see in the following chapters.

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I would like to end this chapter by means of referring to the text which to this day is Buck’s most celebrated novel and which is considered her masterpiece, but which features hardly any missionary figures at all – The Good Earth. In this novel, versions of ‘Andrew’ and ‘Carie’ come on the scene in a marginal, but revealing episode. The legacy of her stern missionary father lives on, but the power structures of the two biographies are starting to flatten. Buck pays a doubtful tribute to her missionary father when she introduces his doppelgänger in The Good Earth: A “man, very tall, and lean as a tree that has been blown by bitter winds [with] eyes as blue as ice and a hairy face” (The Good Earth 125) gives a pamphlet to Wang Lung, the novel’s protagonist, which shows a picture of Jesus on the cross. As he is unfamiliar with the meaning of the picture, Wang Lung hands the paper to his wife, O-lan. In a move that restores order in the Buckean sense and that resonates with the imagery of (female) feet in missionary and ethnographic writing on China, O-lan – endowed with a pragmatism which is modeled on Buck’s mother’s – “[takes] it and [sows] it into a shoe sole together with other bits of paper she pick[s] up here and there to make the soles firm” (The Good Earth 126).

3. Pearl Buck’s Coming of Age: East Wind, West Wind Pearl Buck’s debut novel, East Wind, West Wind, represents the point of departure for her fictional work. Written – in early forms – in the mid1920s and then published in 1930, the text marks the transition between Buck’s adolescent fiction and her career as a mature writer and can thus be seen as an integral part of Buck’s professional coming of age. Probably because of its overall sketchy and somewhat embryonic character, the novel was long overlooked by critics.1 Indeed, Buck’s approach in East Wind, West Wind is more intuitive if compared to her following fiction, in which her themes and styles are more refined and strategically developed. This might lend East Wind, West Wind an air of ‘trial and error,’ but it is precisely the experimental nature and the tensions and contradictions resulting from it that make this early novel so interesting for an analysis. East Wind, West Wind introduces the major pillars of Buck’s project: it is Buck’s first notable publication which explores her missionary theme and expresses her critique of missions in the fictional realm; it depicts her emergent feminism which is negotiated in close conjunction with her self-

1

There are a few exceptions to this critical neglect. In his early study on Buck’s fiction Paul Doyle briefly focused on East Wind, West Wind (Doyle 1965). In recent years, the interest in East Wind, West Wind has slowly increased: Peter Conn’s comprehensive cultural biography on Buck has given attention to her debut novel (Conn 1996) and Xiongya Gao has devoted a subchapter to the text in her analysis of Buck’s Chinese women characters (Gao 2000). The most recent contribution comes from Haipeng Zhou, who published an article on the text in 2010. In the course of my analysis, I will position my own argument in relation to these more recent studies.

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fashioning as a China expert; it displays traces of her personal and her family’s biography and in this sense functions as a sort of therapy; and finally, it is very much embedded in the conventions of sentimentalism and middlebrow aesthetics, but also variegates these and experiments with them, especially with regard to the narrative format. The novel, which is set in the China of the late 1910s or early 20s, tells the story of Kwei-lan, the 17-year-old daughter of a wealthy Chinese government official. She is newly wed to a man who was betrothed to her from her early childhood and who has just returned to China after 12 years of studying medicine in the United States. Kwei-lan, “reared during all her girlhood for the single purpose of marriage” (Gao 2000: 45), and her husband, who remains unnamed throughout the text,2 start out their marriage as an unhappy couple: they are perfect strangers who lack an understanding for each other and for their respective customs and ideologies. The two gradually approach each other, come to terms with their problems and, by the end of the novel’s first part, they will have turned their marriage into a real romance. In a subplot, the second part of the novel introduces a new conflict when Kwei-lan’s brother – also after his studies in the United States – returns home with his American bride Mary, much to the dismay of the entire family and his mother, in particular. However, in the course of the narrative, Kwei-lan grows to love her sister-in-law with all her heart. Although he is disinherited, the brother finds happiness with his wife and the two finally become parents of a little boy. With their emphasis on marital bliss, both plot strands seem to have a happy ending which is consistent with the outcome in most middlebrow texts. However, I argue that East Wind, West Wind’s ending and the development that leads up to it is, in fact, very problematic and needs to be read in the context of Pearl Buck’s appropriation of the middlebrow – her middlebrow mission. As I will show in this chapter, this project in East Wind, West Wind centers on the clash between Western modernization and Chinese tradition, as epitomized by the cultural practice of female footbinding.

2

The unnamed husband calls to mind Buck’s use of ‘anonymous characters,’ which we already encountered in chapter 2 and which I will address in greater detail in my discussion of The Good Earth in the next chapter. In East Wind, West Wind, Kwei-lan herself is referred to by her name way into the first third of the book, at precisely the moment when she adapts to the Western ways.

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The novel discusses this practice in relation to the theme of patriarchy and missionary intervention. When the female protagonist, Kwei-lan, abandons binding her feet because her Western educated husband vehemently rejects the practice, this decision can be regarded in terms of a female liberation from the old patriarchal structures of Chinese society and as an important and necessary step toward modernity – at least, if perceived from a Western perspective. To an extent, this perspective is given in the novel: it is represented by Buck as a Western author and feminist and by the missionary figure of the Western educated husband. Importantly, however, this Western point of view is juxtaposed with a second perspective which reflects Pearl Buck’s simultaneous self-fashioning as a ‘Chinese’ in the novel. This perspective questions the patriarchal missionary project and lays bare a Western liberalism which is suffused with the logic of imperialism. Looked at from this angle, the Chinese woman’s ‘liberation’ is anything but unconditionally positive and comes at a high price: Kwei-lan loses her cultural origins and has to subordinate herself to a Westernized lifestyle, as we will see. In her recent article “Feminism Lost in Translation?” Haipeng Zhou has convincingly discussed the complicated feminism in East Wind, West Wind. In this article, which will be pivotal for my argument in this chapter, Zhou has contended that the Chinese woman speaks through an American woman’s voice and that the novel “is an illuminating feminist document in the history of Western efforts to represent Chinese women” (Zhou 2010: 42). In agreement with Zhou’s reading, I would add to this the idea of ventriloquism as a narrative strategy. As such a ventriloquist – who inscribes herself as the figure ‘Buck’ in the text –, Buck lends her voice to Kwei-lan. The role of this ventriloquist is ambivalent and refers back to Buck’s position in-between the two cultural perspectives which I have just described: on the one hand, ‘Buck’ poses as a ‘quasi Chinese’ whose sympathies lie with Kwei-lan; but on the other hand, this figure still displays a Western authority and superiority when she makes Kwei-lan speak. Thus, Buck’s ventriloquism is characterized by an ‘American Chineseness.’ Through this American Chinese ventriloquism, Buck also includes her readers in the communication process of the novel. In one sense, as Westerners, they are at the same end of the text’s hierarchical spectrum as the ‘American Buck’ (and Kwei-lan’s husband) and are superior to Kwei-lan. At the same time,

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though, Buck encourages her readers’ emotional closeness, empathy, and identification with Kwei-lan. More than simply speaking to the readers’ emotions, East Wind, West Wind also seeks to teach its audience. With this, the novel is clearly positioned in the context of middlebrow fiction. Janice Radway, as I have explained in the introduction, expressed this twofold mandate of the middlebrow in terms of “sentimental education” (Radway 1997: 17). In line with this, Buck transports her readers into the alien and exotic world of a Chinese upper-class family3 by means of sentimentalism. In a second step, she informs and teaches them about Chinese lifestyles and manners and calls for an intercultural understanding. In this context, Alexa Weik has focused on what she calls the “transformative power of the readers’ sentiments” in Buck’s fiction. According to Weik, Buck draws on the emotions of her readers, but she also aims at the rational, namely her readers’ willingness to critically engage with the text and hence “change their overall thought patterns and resulting private, social and political behavior” (Weik 2008: 283). It is precisely these dynamics which are at work when Buck carries out her mission.

P EARL B UCK ’ S R ISE ON THE AMERICAN L ITERARY S CENE AND THE P UBLICATION B ACKGROUND OF E AST W IND , W EST W IND East Wind, West Wind, was, as I have mentioned above, an important first step in Pearl Buck’s fictional project and in her growing within the middlebrow literary tradition. In this subchapter, I seek to retrace Buck’s development as a writer in the years leading up to the publication of her debut novel: the circumstances along the way indicate how Buck made use of her

3

Considering this, East Wind, West Wind follows the principles of escapist literature, which allows its readers to immerse themselves in a whole different (fictional) life. The escapist element is frequently employed in romance fiction, which can be seen as an important background of the middlebrow phenomenon, as Janice Radway has argued in Reading the Romance. Women, Patriarchy, and Popular Culture (1991).

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status as a China expert and gradually wrote herself into the American literary scene, or more precisely, into the American middlebrow scene. The ‘American Chineseness’ of her project, then, already comes to the fore if we look at the publication background of East Wind, West Wind. As a young girl and during her college years at Randolph Macon Woman’s College in Virginia, Buck had already written fiction and published her first pieces,4 and she had continued to write after her return to China as a missionary wife in the late 1910s and early 20s. Writing in these years was rather a leisure time activity for Buck, as she mostly performed a modernized and secular version of the role of an ‘assistant missionary’ to her first husband, the agriculturalist Lossing Buck.5 Despite the many constraints that came with this role, there was also a part about it which turned out to be productive for her fictional project: when she accompanied her husband on his business trips to the interior of China, Buck took many notes of her experiences and encounters with Chinese people, their lifestyles, and customs which should later find entrance into her fiction (see Spurling 2010: 110). For instance, one episode in East Wind, West Wind, which I will discuss in the last part of this chapter, depicts a Chinese girl’s suicide. It is based on Buck’s experience during one such trip when she saw a girl trying to hang herself (Spurling 2010: 127). This example is representative of many other incidents which allowed Buck to make use of her ethnographic observations and benefit from her status as a cultural insider of China. With this background, Buck could count on her readers’ belief in her authority and the authenticity of her texts. In his review of East Wind, West Wind for the New York Times, critic

4

In Buck’s early fiction, we often come across the pattern of a young man who has the vision of a new world and a (vague) humanitarian quest, but who is then forced back into the old structures (see, for example, Spurling 2010: 92). I read these early pieces (for example, “The Young Revolutionist”) as first sketches of the neo-missionary figures which Buck later conceived more sharply.

5

Raising her daughter Carol, doing household chores, and teaching college classes in English at the University of Nanking were Buck’s main areas of occupation in these years. Writing thus offered her a chance to temporarily abandon her ‘housewife status,’ as Peter Conn has argued (Conn 1996: 115). On Buck’s years as a missionary wife, see, for instance, Spurling 2010: 138 ff., Conn 1996: 115, Stirling 1983: chapter 4 and especially p. 64.

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Nathaniel Peffer pointed to Buck’s conflation of middlebrow entertainment and ethnographic information: Mrs. Buck knows her China intuitively, and it is not necessary to read her biographical notice on the jacket to know that she was born there […]. [Buck] tells more of contemporary China than a year of newspaper headlines or a shelf of volumes by political minded experts, and tells it entertainingly. […] Only one, who like the author, has lived all her life in China, […] only a lover of China, but no convert to her code of family and clan supremacy over the individual, could have written this beautiful novel […]. (Peffer, ‘Chinese Life,’ 1930: 6; 8)6

This mixture already registers in some of Buck’s short fictional pieces7 of the mid-twenties, which helped her to carve out a small niche as a writer (see Spurling 2010: 140). Examples of these early pieces are “In China, Too,” which was published in Atlantic Monthly in 1923, “Beauty in China” (which appeared in Forum in March 1924), or “The Chinese Student Mind” (published in Nation in the fall of 1924). “In China, too” can be considered as a first and rough sketch of East Wind, West Wind. It addresses the clash between the ‘old’ and the ‘new’ ways in China by focusing on the issue of female footbinding and with this constitutes the thematic backbone of Buck’s debut novel. It introduces China and its people as exotic and backward, but then moves beyond this nostalgia and traces China’s gradual transition to (a Westernized) modernity. This transition is epitomized by the young girl Hsu Bao-ying, who – as a sign of these social and cultural changes – decides to unbind her feet. By contrast to East Wind, West Wind, this decision is not discussed in relation to the theme of patriarchy, but presented without any detailed explanation in this rather simple piece. Also different from the later novel, this text still relies on an “I” narrator who can be identified as Buck. Located in China, this narrator observes and comments on what is happening around her from a perspective which oscillates between the West and the East. Initially, she

6

For a discussion of Buck’s status as a China expert in East Wind, West Wind, see also Liao 1997: 17-18; Gao 2000: 45- 46; Qian Suoqiao 2005: 164.

7

I use the somewhat vague term “pieces” for these early writings, because they are a peculiar mixture of fictional short story, essay, article, and cultural comment.

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celebrates Chinese life and pits it against American modernity, which she has not experienced herself, but only learned about by reading American “newspapers and periodicals of the times.”8 The narrator is wary of the current cultural and social developments and trends in America and fears that they might sweep over to the East: “I am vaguely troubled by a sort of undercurrent of change,” as she puts it at some point. Triggered by Hsu Baoying’s story, however, she changes her mind and realizes that the old Chinese civilization and its sometimes cruel practices are anything but ‘better’ and she concludes that this system cannot and should not live on. The piece ends on a note which carries a tone of urgency and subtle optimism when the narrator exclaims: “For the world is marching on!” The feminism, cultural comment, as well as the narrative perspective in “In China, Too” are still elementary in comparison to East Wind, West Wind, but this early and often overlooked piece represents an interesting point of departure for the later novel. Buck went on to employ the theme of footbinding and the clash between tradition and progress in China in “A Chinese Woman Speaks,” which was her first ‘real’ fictional short story and the most evident model for East Wind, West Wind. In fact, it is the first part of Buck’s debut novel in almost unaltered form, and the title is retained as the subtitle of the first part, “printed in a tiny font and almost unnoticeable among several other empty pages at the front of the book” (Zhou 2010: 42). “A Chinese Woman Speaks” was accepted for publication with Asia magazine in the summer of 1925 and appeared in two installments in Asia’s spring 1926 issues (Conn 1996: 82-85).9

8

The citations from “In China, Too” are taken from the online archive of The Atlantic Monthly. See Pearl S. Buck, “In China, Too” and are therefore not paginated in the text. For the URL, see the Works Cited list at the end of my book. For (short) discussions of this story, see Zhou 2010: 41; Conn 1996: 75; or Stirling 1983: 68.

9

Buck had first started to write the story on the ship to the United States one year earlier (Spurling 2010: 163). In the summer of 1924, she and her husband embarked on a longer stay in the United States to study for their master’s degrees at Cornell University. Shortly after her graduation and before her return to China in the summer of 1925, Buck learned that Asia magazine had accepted “A Chinese Woman Speaks” for publication.

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Despite the fact that she was published in the renowned Atlantic Monthly and had achieved moderate success with “A Chinese Woman Speaks,” Pearl Buck had little understanding of the dynamics of the American literary market at this stage of her career, as Jaime Harker has pointed out (Harker 2007: 97). Thus, she hired a literary agent, David Lloyd, to act as her representative in New York when she decided to get East Wind, West Wind published in 1927.10 Lloyd busily took up his work and sent the manuscript of “Winds of Heaven,” as Buck had called the novel at the time, to publishing houses in the United States.11 After he had submitted the manuscript to “more than two dozen publishers – ‘every publisher in New York,’ as Pearl later told it […], John Day was the last company on Lloyd’s list; if they refused the book, he intended to withdraw it,” as Conn summarizes the bumpy road leading up to the publication of the novel (Conn 1996: 112). The widespread rejection of Buck’s manuscript can partly be explained by the economic crisis which was beginning to hit the U.S. publishing mar-

10 The rather accidental success story of the publication of East Wind, West Wind had its beginning with Buck’s equally accidental choice of Lloyd as her literary agent. Returning to China after her studies at Cornell, she came across Lloyd’s “advertisement in a dog-eared trade magazine that she found in a Shanghai book shop in the winter of 1927-28, contacted him and without much contemplation sealed a deal” (Conn 1996: 101). See also Harker 2007: 97. 11 The title change from “Winds of Heaven” to the eventual East Wind, West Wind, which came at the suggestion of Buck’s publisher for marketing purposes, was meant to reflect the prevalent themes of the novel – the “differences between Chinese tradition and American tradition and their effects on each other” (Liao 1997: 1), or, more accurately, the change (indicated by the ‘West wind’) which sweeps away old-fashioned customs and practices and which transforms Chinese society and, in particular, Chinese women’s position in society. Haipeng Zhou regards the “publication process of the book and its reception by critics” as an illustration of “a patriarchal domination” (2010: 42) and bases her argument on the change of the novel’s title from the original “A Chinese Woman Speaks” to its final East Wind, West Wind. This, however, neglects the fact that Buck’s publisher had not even read the manuscript under its original title, but as “Winds of Heaven,” and thus under a title already modified by Buck herself. On the publication history and the background of East Wind, West Wind, see also Doyle 1965: 29 ff.; Stirling 1983: 85-99; and Spurling 2010: 195, 207.

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ket in the late 1920s. In these conditions, many companies considered it too risky to publish the work of a newcomer in the first place. Furthermore, the prevalent ‘non-saleability’ of Asian subject matter and the weak status of Asian literature in general constituted an obstacle for Buck to get published in the America of the day. For example, the first agent she had contacted prior to David Lloyd had turned her down on the grounds that “no one was interested in Chinese subjects,” as he had put it (qtd. in Conn 1996: 101).12 With its decision to publish East Wind, West Wind, the John Day Company sought to challenge what its president and general editor, Richard Walsh, called “‘the well-known wall of prejudice against Chinese books’” (Walsh qtd. in Conn 1996: 113): by this “wall” he meant the influential opinions of the literary establishment which considered Asian/Chinese topics as too remote from the American experience, as too ‘alien’ and exotic, and as debased in terms of quality, especially if compared to the highbrow modernist literature of the day. Where a number of modernist presses (like Alfred Knopf) and writers at the time “influenced American culture through the translation of European highbrow literature” (Harker 2007: 112), the John Day Company, then, pursued a different – and daring – strategy when it accepted East Wind, West Wind for publication. The company was also willing to take a chance on Buck because of its own newness on the market and its affinity to middlebrow culture. Founded in 1926 by Richard Walsh, John Day “had no established authors or reliable backlist” when it chose to publish Buck’s novel (Conn 1996: 113). Earlier in the decade, Richard Walsh had worked for Judge, Woman’s Home Companion, and had been the editor of Collier’s – three magazines which clearly catered to a middlebrow audience.13 With this background or heritage, John Day, under Walsh’s editorship, regarded middlebrow themes and authors favorably to start off with. Bringing Buck in allowed the publishing house to strategically concatenate middlebrow literature with Asian (and

12 Given the fact that Buck’s concern with the Chinese subject matter had almost ended her career before it actually got started, it is somewhat ironic that it should be Buck who became one of the most pivotal figures to awaken Americans’ interest in China and change the perception of China as a ‘minor Other’ in the 1930s and 40s. 13 On the professional background of Richard Walsh, see Stirling 1983: especially chapter 6.

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especially Chinese) subjects.14 John Day soon gained a reputation for this conflation – even beyond Buck’s name. For example, the company published Lin Yutang’s novel A Moment in Peking (1939): it became an instant Book-of-the-Month Club selection after its publication (Harker 2007: 113) and with this was placed in the middlebrow context. Overall, though, the John Day Company was largely synonymous with the name and success of Pearl Buck and, especially in the aftermath of The Good Earth, became a hallmark of publishing “Asian subjects” related to her (Harker 2007: 113). Throughout her career, Buck published with the John Day Company, her contract being bound to that of Richard Walsh (Stirling 1983: 111). Pearl Buck and Richard Walsh came to form one of the most successful partnerships in American publishing history, as Helen Foster Snow argued in an interview with Buck’s biographer Peter Conn (Conn 1996: 112).15 Their professional relationship soon expanded to a much more personal level: they became friends, then lovers, and eventually married in the sum-

14 In addition to middlebrow literature, the John Day Company specialized in illustrated fiction and current affairs books and pamphlets and also published “educational materials” throughout its existence (from 1926-1968) (Stirling 1983: 95). After Buck had propelled John Day to fame, the company expanded its list of authors to political and public personae in the 1930s. For instance, John Day also published Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s compilation of speeches and essays about the Great Depression, Looking Forward, in 1933 (Stirling 1983: 136). 15 Buck’s phenomenal success as a writer – especially after The Good Earth – gave her a greater influence on the thematic direction of John Day (Harker 2007: 97), and her financial involvement with the company increased when Walsh ran into financial troubles some years later (Stirling 1983: 156). Buck and Walsh formed a successful business relationship when they took over Asia magazine in 1934, the magazine, thus, which had published Buck’s story “A Chinese Woman Speaks.” Buck and Walsh transformed Asia from a “tourist magazine into an influential policy journal” (Harker 2007: 113). Not exclusively a middlebrow publication but rather a cosmopolitan and liberal political periodical (Conn 1996: 172), Asia under Walsh’s and Buck’s editorship published authors as diverse as “Lin Yutang, Bertrand Russell, Charles Beard, Agnes Smedley, Helen Foster Snow, Margaret Mead, Anna Louise Strong, and Rabindrannath Tagore, the 1913 Nobel Prize Winner from India” (Harker 2007: 113). On Buck’s and Walsh’s involvement with Asia, see Conn 1996: especially 171-174.

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mer of 1935. Richard Walsh, then, was a key figure in both Pearl Buck’s biography16 and her development as a middlebrow author. As the general editor at John Day, Walsh turned out to be the one who was tipping the scales, “cast[ing] the deciding vote in favor, not because he thought East Wind, West Wind was very good, but because he believed her next novel would be better […]” (Conn 1996: 113). In his altogether benevolent study on Pearl Buck and her fiction, Paul Doyle echoes this idea of East Wind, West Wind as a springboard for Buck’s career rather than a mature text when he states that Buck’s debut novel “remains more interesting for its promise than for its effectiveness as a book in its own right” (Doyle 1965: 32). Doyle considers it “a solid hook on which she can hang innumerable stories […]” and develop her themes further (Doyle 1965: 32), but goes on to address what he calls “several weaknesses” in the novel. He names Buck’s “uncertainty in handling a story framework, tendencies to stylistic artificiality, and a pronounced sentimentality” (1965: 34) as the novel’s shortcomings.17

16 As discussed in the previous chapter, Buck’s upbringing in China and her experiencing of gender inequality in her family had already paved the way for her critical distance from the mission movement. Also, her college years in the United States contributed to this development, as Buck’s sister, Grace Yaukey, stated in an interview with Nora Stirling (see Stirling Collection, Randolph College archives, Box 4 “religion and Pearl S. Buck”). Richard Walsh, an “avowed atheist,” as his son recalled him (telephone transcript “Dick Walsh and Stirling”, Jan.11, 1977; Stirling Collection, Box 4), was widely regarded as a further decisive factor of Buck’s eventual move away from her missionary surroundings (see Conn 1996; Stirling 1983, Stirling Collection, Box 4). Marian Craighill assessed Walsh’s influence as follows: “[…] when Dick Walsh came upon the scene she found that he had no use at all for missionaries in the ordinary sense of the word […]. She must have discarded what little was left of her faith […]” (letter to Nora Stirling, Feb. 14, 1976; Stirling Collection, Folder 5). 17 In a similar vein, critic Isidore Schneider had dismissed East Wind, West Wind as excessively sentimental and too shallow in his review for the New Republic already shortly after the novel’s publication in 1930. According to him, East Wind, West Wind was an “ordinary, quite mechanical novel, full of plot and sentiment, but empty of any lifelikeness in its characters or significance in its thesis – the clash between modern and traditional China” (Schneider 1930: 6; qtd. in

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T HE S TYLE AND N ARRATIVE P ERSPECTIVE E AST W IND , W EST W IND

OF

I would like to focus more closely on what Doyle makes out as a deficiency of East Wind, West Wind, for it is precisely this “stylistic artificiality” which illustrates the experimental nature of the novel and Buck’s process of maturing as a writer. In the light of Buck’s overall fictional work, the style in East Wind, West Wind is exceptional: already one year later, in her acclaimed novel The Good Earth, Buck employed a style and narrative devices which were markedly different from her debut novel, as I will show in the next chapter. This change of direction, I would argue, was only possible because Buck had used her earlier writing as a case of ‘trial and error’ and probably had become aware that she needed other methods and devices in order to implement her mission more effectively. Although the style of the published version of East Wind, West Wind is already toned down or cut back if compared to Buck’s earlier manuscript,18

Liao 1997: 17; see also Gao 2000: 46). Interestingly, Schneider’s assessment is the exact opposite of an array of reviews at the time which praised the novel’s allegedly “simple and beautiful” style (see Stirling 1983: 101). Reviewer Edwin Seaver, for example, contended that “Mrs Buck has written with a fine simplicity and delicacy and charm. One would say East Wind, West Wind was an exquisite book, did not the word, in this connection, so often connote preciosity” (Seaver, qtd. in Liao 1997: 18). For a short overview of similar voices on this ‘simplicity’ of Buck’s style, see Qian Suoqiao 2005: 195 and Liao 1997: 40. That reviewers came to such conclusions is quite surprising, I believe: as I will show in my ensuing analysis of East Wind, West Wind, the style of the novel is rather overblown and heavily owed to the melodrama of the nineteenth century. 18 Buck had made the revisions to the text because Richard Walsh and his editorial team strongly urged her to do so. Conn has explained that Walsh “suggested a hundred changes, nearly all of which Pearl accepted with docility. She defended only one phrase, on the basis of Chinese usage. Richard objected to the exclamation ‘Oh my mother,’ which was used several times in a funeral sequence. Pearl retorted that it accurately rendered a repetitive Chinese mourning cry, and was therefore a necessary rhetorical device” (Conn 1996: 113). In her – singular –

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it is still exalted and somewhat stilted. The novel features an abundance of questions and exclamation marks – often used in combination with a set of amplifying adjectives – that attest to an (over)investment in emotion: for instance, “O my beloved home – O dearly beloved!” stands at the end of the protagonist’s childhood reminiscences (EWWW 20); 19 “O My Sister, such anguish – such bitter pain!” is her first outcry after her unconsummated wedding night (EWWW 23); and she laments the rejection by her husband in the wedding night: O Kwan-yin, Goddess of Mercy, pity me – pity me! Such a child – so young, so terrified in my loneliness! Never had I slept away from my home before! Now to lie in solitude, knowing at last that I found no favour [sic] in his eyes! (EWWW 24)

At times, this almost appears like an (unintended) parody of the melodrama of the nineteenth century and is thus reminiscent of a literary mode which was long outdated in the Western novel. Yet, even if we take into account the middlebrow’s overall indebtedness to sentimentalism and melodramatic modes, as I have outlined it in the introduction, this does not fully explain the exaggerated style of Buck’s text. I suggest that we find an answer instead in the novel’s situatedness within the – exotic – Chinese context and in Buck’s self-Sinification.20 The effect of this intertwining of exoticization

intervention, then, Buck evoked her insider knowledge of Chinese customs and insisted on the authenticity of her depictions. 19 For the sake of brevity, I use the abbreviation “EWWW” when citing from the novel here and afterwards. 20 For example, when she defended the style of her manuscript against her publisher, Buck implicitly resorted to her own Chinese socialization and named Chinese literature as her reference point: “[…] The publishers were also distressed by the large number of clichés and hackneyed phrases used in the text. Miss Buck had deliberately included such expressions from books she had read in English because in Chinese literature it is considered a mark of fine style to use well-known diction and phraseology found in the works of great writers. When she revised her manuscript, she omitted the borrowed phrases and put the ideas in her own style” (Doyle 1965: 30). For Buck’s references to Chinese literature as her model, see my introduction.

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and self-fashioning in East Wind, West Wind is what could be called a stylized Chineseness. This style is closely linked with the narrative perspective of the text and with the way that Buck inscribes herself into the text. I have argued earlier that the communication between author and reader is crucial to the functioning of middlebrow literature: it is most often based on the assumption that the author and the narrator conflate. In the typical middlebrow text the author speaks to her reader under the guise of an omniscient third person narrator and often by the additional means of the technique of focalization through a character. This constellation is different in East Wind, West Wind, as the novel is narrated in the first person, from the perspective of its protagonist, Kwei-lan. With this, the novel is unique in Buck’s oeuvre, as all her other novels set in Asian countries employ the omniscient third person as a narrative mode (Liao 1997: 39). Because of its perspective, the communication process is more immediate. This becomes already apparent in the opening paragraph of the first part of the novel, titled “A Chinese Woman Speaks,” when Kwei-lan raises her voice for the first time: These things I may tell you, My Sister, I could not speak thus even to one of my own people, for she could not understand the far countries where my husband lived for twelve years. Neither could I talk freely to one of the alien women who do not know my people and the manner of life we have had since the time of the ancient empire. But you? You have lived among us all your years. Although you belong to those other lands where my husband studied his Western books, you will understand. I speak the truth. I have named you My Sister. I will tell you everything. (EWWW 5)

Fashioning her narrative as a confession, Kwei-lan asserts that she will “tell everything” and “talk freely.” This intention and the invocation of the “Sister” creates proximity to her and seems to follow the conventions of sentimental literature, which frequently made use of the bond of female friendship, both among female characters as well as between fictional character and reader (see, for instance, Stern 1997). However, the sisterhood evoked here is not one between Kwei-lan and the Western female reader, whom Kwei-lan considers “alien” and ignorant of Chinese history and customs;

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but the “Sister” is Buck – as a figure.21 With this inscription of the author as a figure in addition to the first person narrator, East Wind, West Wind has a sort of ‘doubling perspective’ which, seen in the framework of middlebrow fiction of the time, demarcates the novel as rather unusual – and with this, also ‘awkward, ’ as we will see. ‘Buck’ as an addressee can understand Kwei-lan, because she has grown up in China, has “lived among us,” and is familiar with the Chinese ways as a result. Cast as an insider by Kwei-lan, ‘Buck’ gains trust: “Of course you, My Sister, have lived here always, and you are now one of us” (EWWW 62), asserts Kwei-lan further on in the story, pointing to Buck’s ‘Chineseness’ and the credibility which derives from her biography. At the same time, Kwei-lan is aware that the figure ‘Buck’ “belongs to those other lands” – she is an American and as such also an expert on the “far countries where [my] husband has lived for twelve years,” as Kwei-lan makes clear in the opening passage. Like Buck’s audience and Buck herself, Kwei-lan perceives her as an intercultural mediator and believes in her corresponding authority: this powerful “Sister” is someone to whom she can confess her sorrows and from whom she can seek advice. Kwei-lan’s opening paragraph, anticipating numerous other instances in the text, poses as a mixture of confessionary and help-seeking letter and as such calls to mind the style employed in advice letters often found in special sections in middlebrow women’s magazines.22 Seen this way, Kwei-lan and her addressee ‘Buck’ are not really ‘sisters’ who are on an equal footing: as an advisor figure, ‘Buck’ has more life experience and wisdom than young Kwei-lan. On a linguistic level, this imbalance is shown by the persistent capitalization of the word “Sister.” This sisterhood, then, is a constructed and strategic means of Buck to write herself into the text and establish her superiority. In terms of content, the advisor’s superiority manifests itself in Kwei-lan’s repeated references to her dependence on this “Sister.”

21 In the following, references to Buck as a figure in the text are indicated by the use of inverted commas. 22 On advice letters in women’s magazines, see, for example, Victorian Women’s Magazines. An Anthology, eds. Margaret Beetham and Kay Boardman (2001): especially chapter 17; pp. 166-177. On ‘letters to the editor’ as versions of these letters, see Nancy A. Walker’s edited volume Women’s Magazines 1940-1960. Gender Roles and the Popular Press (1998).

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Her need to confide in ‘Buck’ and seek help from her becomes apparent by the urgency with which she rushes to talk to her: I could not wait for your leisure, my Sister! I have come afoot. I have left my son, thrusting him into his nurse’s arms, regardless of his screams when he saw me departing. No – no tea! I must return immediately. I ran only to tell you. (EWWW 96)

This episode – set in the second part of the novel when Kwei-lan’s marriage is finally happy and when she has become a mother – is interesting because of the way that it creates immediacy and proximity. It evokes the impression of a conversation in which Kwei-lan talks face to face to ‘Buck’ rather than writing to her. This is noticeable given the fact that ‘Buck’ as an advisory figure does not directly respond to Kwei-lan in the text. Still, ‘Buck’ is more than a mere listener and in this sense more than just a horizon of the narrative. Without her, Kwei-lan is powerless and suffering in isolation, and her emotions remain hidden and do not find an outlet: “Oh My Sister, had you been here you might have taught me what to do! But I was alone. I had no friends. I could only ponder and grieve within myself […]” (EWWW 47, my emphasis). As she listens to her, the addressee of Kwei-lan’s confessionary story assumes the function of a therapist, a trigger for Kwei-lan to set free her emotions and come to terms with her sorrows. Closely connected to this therapeutic role is a second role – one which reveals Buck’s agency in the text perhaps most clearly: she becomes Kwei-lan’s ventriloquist, as I have suggested at the beginning of the chapter. As ‘Sister Buck’ she helps Kwei-lan to articulate herself and thus she engages in a project which is an interesting variation of her recovery of female missionaries’ voices. The Chinese woman here is cast as helpless and inferior and needs ‘Buck’ to express herself. As a grown-up and experienced woman, Buck – under the guise of the figure ‘Buck’ – does not only have a sympathetic ear for the young Kwei-lan, but she can assist her and make her speak. The therapeutic dimension of the text and Buck’s strategy of ventriloquism come particularly to the fore when Buck revisits a part of her own family biography. Through her portrayal of Kwei-lan and her parents, Buck can relive some of her own experiences and can – in this fictional retrospect – in some sense reclaim an agency which she did not have in her own past. Throughout her childhood and youth, Kwei-lan finds herself in a situation

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of paternal abandonment. Her father, a rich government official who lives with several concubines in a separate court on the family premises, is absent for the bulk of the story (EWWW 37; 88; 104). On the rare occasions that he is present, he remains largely ineffective and with this, he calls to mind Andrew Sydenstricker. Furthermore, we find a similarity to Buck’s family biography as regards the figure of the mother. Hilary Spurling has argued convincingly that the death of Kwei-lan’s mother in the novel resembles Carie Sydenstricker’s death scene in The Exile (see Spurling 2010: 133). Bemoaning her son’s marriage to an American wife, Kwei-lan’s mother falls ill and, toward the end of the text, dies after a long struggle. 23 This episode is couched in an excessively sentimental tone: O My Sister, My Sister! The gods have spoken at last and have showed us their wickedness! Look! I am robbed in sackcloth! See my son – he is wrapped from head to foot in the coarse white cloth of mourning! It is for her – for my mother! O my mother, my mother! Nay, do not stay my weeping. I must weep now – for she is dead! I sat alone with her at midnight. She lay as she has lain these ten days, a thing of bronze, immovable. She has not spoken or eaten. Her spirit had already heard the call of the higher voices, and only her strong heart was left to beat itself out into feebleness and silence. […] […] Then I, left alone with my mother, looked again on the silent, stiffening face. I was the only one who had ever seen her truly, and my heart melted itself into hot and burning tears. I drew the curtains slowly at last and shut her away, back again into the loneliness in which she had lived. My mother – my mother! (EWWW 138-139)

As the ‘real’ Buck has gone through this before, she knows how Kwei-lan feels, can emotionally align with her and lend her a voice to express her grief. Peter Conn has read Buck’s strategy of lending a voice to Kwei-lan in terms of admiration and innovation: to him, it is an “act of defiant feminist

23 Kwei-lan’s mother also has to die because she represents the old generation and an ideal of Chinese womanhood that cannot effectively work anymore in a modernized China. In this sense, her death can be seen as a punishment for her unwillingness and incapacity to adapt to the new ways, as Xiongya Gao has shown (2000: 47; 54-58).

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affirmation, encapsulating Pearl Buck’s pioneering desire to give voice to the voiceless women of China” (1996: 83). Yet, I believe that the dynamics at work here need to be seen more critically: as a ventriloquist, Buck stands behind her literary figure and makes her speak. With this, however, she also usurps her voice and thus displays her superiority over Kwei-lan. At first glance, such a way of inscribing herself into the text seems very effective for a novelist who, after all, sought to carry out a mission and educate her readers. However, I indicated above that Buck employed this strategy only in East Wind, West Wind and then turned to other narrative modes. She did this for good reason, I argue, because her self-inscription in her debut novel is too obtrusive, ‘awkward,’ and in the end, problematic. The American Chineseness of her double narrative perspective or ventriloquism becomes a challenge which she cannot solve in a satisfactory way at this early stage of her career. Buck – as the ‘real’ author and as a figure – is caught in a state of ‘in-betweenness:’ from her ‘Chinese’ perspective, she feels sympathy for her protagonist and is critical of the Western missionary movement. On the other hand, however, she is an American and still belongs to the missionary community, which creates a distance to Kwei-lan. It is because of this unresolved tension that Kwei-lan increasingly seems to elude her ventriloquist ‘Buck’ as the narrative proceeds.

T HE M ISSIONARY H USBAND OF F OOTBINDING

AND THE

P RACTICE

Buck’s complicated, ‘in-between’ status and the fact that Kwei-lan gradually slips away from ‘Buck’ can perhaps best be understood by focusing on the role of the husband in the novel. It is with this figure that Buck’s twist on the middlebrow – its concatenation with the missionary theme – becomes particularly evident. We are introduced to him when Kwei-lan describes the couple’s wedding ceremony: […] I stole a glance at him from under the red silken strands of my veil. I saw him standing there in his stiff, black foreign clothes. He was tall and straight like a young bamboo. My heart went cold and hot together. I was sick for his secret glance. But he did not turn his eyes to pierce my veil. We drank the cups of wine together. We bowed before the ancestral tablets. I knelt with him before his august parents. I be-

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came their daughter, leaving forever my family and clan. He never looked at me. (EWWW 22)

Kwei-lan perceives him as entirely strange. And indeed, his physical appearance, as it is introduced here, already alludes to his role as a missionary. Being “tall and straight,” he calls to mind the physique of Buck’s father, as she described it in Fighting Angel and The Exile; it is a tallness which should be the model for Buck’s future fictional neo-missionary figures. Furthermore, Kwei-lan stylizes her Western educated husband as an alien when she repeatedly mentions his “stiff, black, foreign clothes” at the beginning of the text.24 Everything about his looks, his behavior, the things he carries and uses, his culinary tastes (EWWW 32), or music preferences (EWWW 33), is completely strange and uncanny to Kwei-lan. His “foreign shoes clattered back and forth” on the wooden floors (EWWW 29), his use of a handkerchief is a “filthy Western habit” to her (EWWW 30), “on the walls [of their house] he hung framed photographs of his [American] schoolmates and a square piece of felt cloth with foreign letters on it,” and his American university diploma consists of “a piece of stretched skin inscribed with strange black characters” (EWWW 28). Likewise, their Westernized marital home – this “hideous Western house,” as Kwei-lan dismisses it (EWWW 29) – is cast as an alien place: she is unfamiliar with the furniture and unsure about the correct vocabulary in this new domestic realm: for example, the names of the rooms are given in quotation marks to indicate their strangeness (“[…] a secondary room he calls ‘dining room’ […]”; “[…] the main room, or what he calls ‘parlour’ […]”, EWWW 28). Buck’s strategy of defamiliarizing the familiar and presenting the West and its customs and people from the perspective from the ethnic ‘Other’ in this scene and others25 has been regarded as innovative and subversive by

24 The only image which, from Kwei-lan’s perspective, suggests familiarity in the opening scene is the bamboo. However, this comparison also implies that the husband is lacking human qualities. 25 In another episode of the novel, Kwei-lan describes an American friend of her husband in terms of alienation and expresses her fear of this man, a “creature,” as she perceives him: “The door was opened suddenly from within, and a tall male ‘foreign devil’ stood there, smiling all across his large face. I knew he was a man because he wore clothes like my husband’s, but, to my horror, his head,

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scholars like Xiongya Gao and Peter Conn. Gao has praised Buck’s technique of presenting the familiar as new and alien as skillful and argued that through Kwei-lan’s perspective, Buck subverts the well established pattern of the West’s exoticization of the East (see Gao 2000: 49; see also Spurling 2010: 264). In a similar vein, Conn has read East Wind, West Wind26 as a radically new approach to the Chinese subject matter and as an abandonment or disintegration of Asian stereotypes, regarding the text as an “unusual example of a Western writer trying to capture the oddity of Western appearance to a Chinese” (Conn 1996: 84).27 Conn refers to Buck’s strategy as “a kind of ‘occidentalism,’ in which Asian images have become the

instead of being covered with human hair, black and straight like that of other people, had on it a fuzzy red wool! His eyes were like pebbles washed by the sea, and his nose rose up a very mountain in the middle of his face. Oh, he was a frightful creature to behold – more hideous than the God of the North in the temple entrance!” (EWWW 61). The same strategy of defamiliarization of the West is at work when Kwei-lan’s American sister-in-law, Mary, is introduced. The gateman at the family’s estate panics upon meeting Mary and is even confused about her gender identity, referring to her as ‘it:’ “‘There is a man at the gate with a person whose like I have not seen! I do not know even whether it is male or female. It is tall like a man, and yet the face has the look of a woman’s face!’” (EWWW 97). 26 Conn’s analysis refers to Buck’s original short story “A Chinese Woman Speaks” (Conn 1996: 82-85). Since Buck adopted the story for her novel in virtually unaltered form, as I have explained above, I make use of Conn’s points for my discussion of the final text, East Wind, West Wind, here and in my following references to Conn. 27 Discussing Buck’s approach, Conn contrasts her novel and its female point of view with André Malraux’s Temptation of the West, published in 1926 and thus in the year when “A Chinese Woman Speaks” first appeared: “Malraux’s book is a densely textured contrast between China and the West in the form of an exchange of letters between a Frenchman named A.D. and a Chinese called Ling. Like most Chinese protagonists contrived by Western writers before Buck, Ling is male” (Conn 1996: 393, n92). Conn also mentions John Luther Long’s story “Madame Butterfly” (1898) as an example of a text which displays a point of view of an Asian woman, but whose “dominant attitude is [still] male and Western” (Conn 1996: 393, n 92).

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norm and the West is the source of comic deviance” (1996: 84). Such views of Buck’s subversion, and Conn’s approach of the novel in terms of ‘Occidentalism,’ in particular, are questionable, I think. ‘Occidentalism’ is, after all, the reversal of Edward Said’s concept of ‘Orientalism.’28 Yet, when Buck in East Wind, West Wind takes on the position of the ‘Other,’ she also claims this position for her own purposes and usurps the voice of the Chinese woman. With this, her strategy can, in fact, be understood in terms of Said’s ‘Orientalism.’ Contrary to Conn, I argue that Buck’s turns away from Chinese exoticization only works to a certain degree and that we find the reasons for this in Buck’s early middlebrow aesthetics and missionary agenda. Undoubtedly, the Western readers are encouraged to see with and through Kwei-lan’s eyes, delve into her world, and emotionally align with her. Yet, at the same time, this world still remains ‘artificial’ and exotic to them, as the text’s constructed, overblown style and language exemplify. I also disagree with Conn’s view of the West as a “symbol for comic deviance” in East Wind, West Wind. To the contrary: the West needs to be taken very seriously. In fact, this system will have taken over by the end of the novel. This Western takeover of the East, or, to put it more carefully, its cultural superiority, is epitomized by the theme of footbinding and the role that Kwei-lan’s husband plays in this context. Buck casts this American educated doctor as a missionary figure who urges his wife to give up the practice of footbinding, asking her to “follow the new ways” (EWWW 23) and “to try the new path with [him]” (EWWW 24). Buck is ambivalent in her depiction of this figure and his stance – an ambivalence which is reflected in the status in-between two cultures which the figure ‘Buck’ in the text – as well as the ‘real’ Buck – occupies. From a Western point of view, she presents the husband’s request as understandable and reasonable and shares his conviction that China is in need of modernization. In this sense, she takes up again the insight which she expressed at the end of her earlier piece “In China, Too”: “For the world is marching

28 On the concept of ‘Occidentalism’ as a reversal of Edward Said’s ‘Orientalism,’ see, for example, James Carrier’s Occidentalism: Images of the West (1995), Chen Xiaomei’s Occidentalism: A Theory of Counter-Discourse in Post-Mao China (1995), or Ian Buruma and Avishai Margalit’s Occidentalism: the West in the Eyes of its Enemies (2004).

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on!” Seen in this light, Kwei-lan’s husband is an advocate of common sense, modernity, humanitarianism, and social responsibility. These attributes make him an early version of the figure of the neo-missionary which Buck should employ prominently in her ensuing fiction. As a doctor who is engaged in the project of the unbinding of feet, he carries out a form of the social gospel which I discussed in the first two chapters. However, in East Wind, West Wind Buck is also critical of this project and the Western ‘guidance’ and presents it as the intrusion into a foreign culture. When he regards Chinese women’s bound feet as evidence of the inferiority of the old Chinese culture and campaigns for the abolishment of the practice, the husband displays a sense of cultural and political stubbornness and superiority – a legacy of the earlier religious missionary type that Buck so vehemently attacked. His project is moderate if compared to a reckless, politico-economic imperialism, but it can still be read as an imperialist takeover. The husband’s negative sides are introduced by means of the focalization through Kwei-lan and ‘Buck’ as a ventriloquist behind her. There is a repeated emphasis on the husband’s pride in his Western education as “the noblest in the Western world” (EWWW 27). It is on the grounds of this “scientific profession” that he insists on Kwei-lan’s unbinding of her feet. He virtually ignores his wife in the first weeks of their marriage and cares “for nothing except his books,” as Kwei-lan laments at some point (EWWW 31),29 but finally he approaches the topic: “Kwei-lan,” he said. My heart leaped. It was the first time he had called me by my name. What had he to say to me at last? I lifted my eyes timidly to him. He continued: “I have wished ever since our marriage to ask you if you will not unbind your feet. It is unhealthful for your whole body. See, your bones look like this.” He took a pencil and sketched hastily upon the leaf of his book a dreadful bare, cramped foot.

29 The reference to excessive book reading is a trope we frequently encounter in Buck’s fiction, mostly in connection to missionary figures. A further example is Dr Liang in Kinfolk, as I will show in chapter 5. The motif of the ‘missionary as a bookworm’ goes back to Buck’s depictions of her missionary father’s retreats into his study to read for hours on end (see chapter 2).

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How did he know? I had never dressed my feet in his presence. We Chinese women never expose our feet to the sight of others. Even at night we wear stockings of white cloth. “How do you know?” I gasped. “Because I am a doctor trained in the West,” he replied. “And then, I wish you to unbind them because they are not beautiful. Besides, foot-binding is no longer in fashion. Does that move you?” He smiled slightly and looked at me not unkindly. (EWWW 33-34)

The scene is interesting because it introduces the system of manipulation which forms the center of the husband’s tactics. Kwei-lan reacts with a ‘leaping’ heart when, after weeks of silence and neglect, her husband talks to her and addresses her by her name. This little gesture is indicative of the ‘give and take’ which the husband holds out as a prospect once Kwei-lan complies with his request and transforms into a modernized, Western(ized) woman. She will win his love and affection and thus get rewarded for her act (see Gao 2000: 53). As a further subtle manipulative strategy, the husband recounts stories of suffering Chinese women in order to point out the cruelties of Chinese customs (“the old methods,” as he calls them) to Kwei-lan and to convince her to adapt to his modern ways. In one of these stories – based on Buck’s ethnographic notes, as I explained at the beginning of the chapter – he tells Kwei-lan that he had been called to an emergency in which a woman tried to commit suicide: “[The woman] tried to commit suicide today by hanging herself! […] They called me in and, mind you, I could have saved her! She had only just let go the rope when they found her – only just! I prepared the remedies at once. Then in came the aged uncle […] He came in blustering and angry and at once demanded that the old methods should be used. He sent for the priests to beat the gongs to call the woman’s soul back, and the relatives gathered about and placed the poor unconscious girl – she is not twenty yet – into a kneeling position on the floor; then they deliberately filled her nose and mouth with cotton and cloth and bound clothing around her face!” (EWWW 45)

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This fictional account is also strikingly similar to the accounts which we can find in the letters by female missionaries.30 Kwei-lan’s husband – like the missionary women discussed before – basically has the genuine aim to ‘do good’ and to stop what he perceives as Barbarian customs and the misery of Chinese women. However, he seeks to substitute the Chinese system with his own cultural system, a system which he considers better, but which still treats women as inferior. In the process, one patriarchal system becomes replaced by another one in the novel. Thus, when the husband’s attempts to persuade Kwei-lan to unbind her feet are finally successful, the outcome is fraught with problems: Kwei-lan also figuratively ‘unbinds’ a part of her Chinese identity and is turned into an Americanized domestic woman who tends to the couple’s Westernized home.31 Considering this, I disagree with Xiongya Gao who has argued that

30 For example, missionary Emma Martin, a medical doctor in Peking (19201925), had described a suicide attempt by an unhappy Chinese woman, one that was equally rooted in the woman’s isolation and unhappiness in her family and also suffused with Chinese superstition. In a journal entry dated May 18, 1900, Dr. Martin gives a rather drastic report of her patient’s suicide attempt: “A woman had been brought in who had attempted to commit suicide by cutting her throat. The skin was cut thro [sic] and the smaller blood vessels and her clothes were all bloody. […] The young woman lay there and said she did not want to get well that she would throw herself in the river if she did get well. The old mother-in-law wanted her to get well because if she died her spirit would come back and haunt her. Not because she loved the girl. The poor thing made no fuss but the tears just rolled down. I gave the anaesthetic while Dr. George and Dr. Tsau, his assistant, sewed the wound up. I said, ‘Why don’t you ask them how this happened,’ and he said that there’s no use, you could not believe anything they tell you. Dr. Tsou said bitterly, ‘A pity it was not a little deeper’ and I thot [sic] – you awful man – but in the weeks to come when I knew more of the woes of heathenism I understood what he meant and would have thot so too had it not been for the hope that in some way she might hear the gospel. How my heart ached for her but I couldn’t say a word to her” (China Records Project, Yale Divinity School Library, RG 08, Box 137). 31 With this ‘success,’ the husband once again calls to mind real missionaries in their tendencies to convert Chinese women and girls into “American-style homemakers […] to resolve the explosive conflicts between traditional Chinese

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Kwei-lan’s abandonment of the practice of footbinding is for her own benefit and contributes to her emancipation. Gao sees it as an act of Kwei-lan’s “strength and determination” and a “first hint of [her] individuality” (Gao 2000: 51). Instead, I am once again in accordance with Haipeng Zhou’s diagnosis of a complicated feminism in East Wind, West Wind: “Kwei-lan’s story is not one of liberation, but rather of the painful process that young, traditional Chinese women had to go through during that time,” as Zhou has shown (2010: 44). And this process can rightfully be called painful – psychologically and physically: Kwei-lan suffers and succumbs to her husband’s will when she gives up binding her feet. When her husband suggests that the act of unbinding her feet is a political act rather than an individual decision (“Try to think that it is not only for us but for others, too – a protest against an old and wicked thing.” EWWW 50), she vehemently objects and reveals her actual motivation: “‘No!’ I sobbed. ‘I do it only for you – to be a modern woman for you!’” (EWWW 50; my emphasis). For him, Kweilan even accepts the pain of unbinding her feet and its after-effects:32 When my feet had been soaked and bound again more loosely, intolerable suffering set in. Indeed, the unbinding process was almost as painful as the binding process had been. My feet, accustomed to constriction, gradually stretched a little, and the blood began to circulate. There were times in the day when I tore at the bandages to unfasten them and bind them more tightly to ease me; and then the thought of my husband and that he would know at night made me replace them with trembling hands. The only slight respite I could get was to sit on my feet and rock back and forth. (EWWW 49-50)

society and Christianity” (King 1989: 132). While the Christian subtext is not given in East Wind, West Wind, there is still the precarious issue of cultural conversion and its implications. 32 On the (medical) implications of the abandonment of footbinding, see, for instance, Judy Yung, Unbound Feet. A Social History of Chinese Women in San Francisco (1995), or Jane Hunter, The Gospel of Gentility (1984).

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“[…] [T]he thought of my husband and that he would know at night […]” – this consideration expresses the perversion of the entire process most clearly. It is only when Kwei-lan takes on the pain that she will be rewarded with love and that she can please her husband and his (sexual) desires. This scene, then, can be read in terms of surrender: it is a renunciation of any kind of female self-determination whatsoever. At first glance surprisingly, even Kwei-lan’s mother, who is very aware of tradition, encourages her daughter to abandon the practice of footbinding. Yet, she regards it as an ostentatious act of Kwei-lan’s submission to the husband’s wish. Seen this way, Kwei-lan’s decision is consistent with the old Chinese patriarchal system and represents a reestablishment of patriarchal power rather than a strategic, emancipatory move. It is a “conversion […] forced upon her by marriage rather than by genuine conviction” (Doan 1965: 47). The forced nature of this conversion becomes apparent in the scene which depicts the unbinding of Kwei-lan’s feet. Significantly, it is the husband himself who unbinds Kwei-lan’s feet with what could be called a ‘sensitive authority’: “No,” I said faintly. “I will do it myself.” “You must not mind,” he answered. “I am a doctor, you remember.” Still I refused. Then he looked at me steadily in the face. “Kwei-lan,” he said gravely, “I know it costs you something to do this for me. Let me help you all I can. I am your husband.” Without a word then I yielded. He took my foot, and gently he withdrew the shoe and the stocking and unwound the inner cloth. His expression was sad and stern. “How you have suffered!” he said in a low, tender voice; “how wretched a childhood – and all for nothing!” (EWWW 49)

He might bring about something good, talk in “a low and tender voice” and be gentle in his methods, but in the end, he is in charge and the superior agent in this scene. Zhou argues that “the hidden message for her in this painful process is that in order to be heard, she must entirely renounce her past and adopt her husband’s Western ways” (2010: 45). Indeed, Kweilan’s past was “all for nothing,” the missionary’s ways prove to be omnipotent. Accordingly, Kwei-lan comes to a conclusion at the end of the scene which follows this logic only consequentially: “But my husband is wise. He knows all things, and speaks only what is true” (EWWW 55). In slight

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variation, she expresses this again at the end of the novel: “But this is only as I think […]. 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 is. […] I know that my husband is right, always right!” (EWWW 153; 156). Because he is “always right” and his authority remains unquestioned, Kwei-lan increasingly adopts her husband’s viewpoint – and ultimately, also his voice. Zhou has pointed out that he “does not give Kwei-lan an opportunity to articulate her own desires. […] He assumes that her desires are in keeping with his own […]” (2010: 44, my emphasis). Her voice more and more imitates her husband’s and soon echoes a Western(ized) discourse. Kwei-lan becomes his mouthpiece, taking on his patronizing tone and using ‘her’ voice to criticize the traditional Chinese ways. Most prominently, this is shown in her relationship with her mother. When she argues with her about the new American family member, the brother’s bride Mary, Kwei-lan turns into a sort of missionary herself and wants to ‘convert’ her mother. She might have developed a sort of agency in this process – the agency which Gao has problematically read in terms of “individuality” – but at the same time, she becomes dissociated from her cultural roots: We are estranged, my mother and I. She accuses me silently of befriending the foreigner [the brother’s American bride, Mary] and of taking my brother’s part against his mother. Although she does not say this, I know in her heart she speaks thus to herself. […] […] What has separated me from my mother? We cry aloud, but we do not hear each other. We speak, but we do not understand each other. I feel I am changed, and I know I am changed by love. (EWWW 144; 146)

Zhou has argued that Kwei-lan silences even her own mother with this newly gained voice: “[…] Kwei-lan can only think with a mind subjugated to her husband’s, she can never really speak […] to her mother to reach mutual understanding. Focusing merely on her brother’s love and happiness, Kwei-lan ‘cannot hear [her] mother speak’ anymore, and she ‘does not remember [her] mother’s sadness’ […]” (Zhou 2010: 48). On a narrative level, this development is reflected in Kwei-lan’s relationship to her ‘Sister.’ She is still communicating with ‘Sister Buck,’ but the figure’s importance for Kwei-lan seems to wane. For example, Kwei-

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lan’s questions to her are considerably reduced. At times, she suspends her story or keeps her emotions and innermost thoughts to herself, thus, she ceases to share everything with ‘Buck.’ I would explain this partial retreat of ‘Buck’ once again by the in-betweenness of this figure and the real Buck behind it – her torn position as someone who is American but also very close to the Chinese, someone who is still part of the American missionary movement but already takes a distance from it. The step back of the figure ‘Buck,’ then, reflects Buck’s own ambivalence toward Kwei-lan’s development and the takeover of Westernness in the novel. As I have argued, from a Western point of view, Kwei-lan’s abandonment of binding her feet and her ‘new’ voice or agency appears like a change for the better. To an extent, Buck seems to concur with this view. However, she is also suspicious of the neo-patriarchal supremacy and neo-missionary authority which constitute the backbone of this change. From this ‘Chinese’ perspective, she expresses her critique of a Western liberalism which is suffused with the logic of imperialism. As we can see here, Buck’s enactment of American Chineseness is still full of ambivalence in East Wind, West Wind: it is an unresolved back and forth and an ‘in-betweenness’ which can also be linked back to the style of the text with its peculiar mixture of an (outdated) Western sentimentalism and melodrama and its imposed ‘stylized Chineseness.’ Towards the end of the novel, Buck addresses this ambivalence when she uses the term ‘fragility’ in connection with Kwei-lan: “I am like a frail bridge, spanning the infinity between past and present” (EWWW 95). One last time, I suggest, ‘Buck’ here interferes as a ventriloquist who lends a voice to Kwei-lan. She invests ‘hope’ and sees a certain potential in her: as a “bridge,” Kwei-lan might perform the role of an intercultural mediator and act as a link between the ‘old’ Chinese ways and the Western modernity. Yet, on the other hand, Buck concedes that she is still too weak and dependent to fully assume this role. While Kwei-lan as a ‘cultural bridge’ is still “frail,” the true potential of intercultural understanding and humanity might come into its own in the next generation, as the text suggests. Consistent with the middlebrow’s vision of a brighter future, East Wind, West Wind ends with a hopeful contemplation on the role of the family’s children when Kwei-lan reflects upon her Amerasian nephew’s potential role as an intercultural mediator: “He will have his own world to make. Being of neither East nor West purely, […] he will understand both worlds, and so

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overcome” (EWWW 153). These final thoughts are rather vague and sketchy, or, to use critic Peffer’s words once again, “intuitive.” Buck’s American Chineseness, as a topic and as a style, should become more complex already in her next novel, The Good Earth, as we will see in the next chapter.

4. Reversing the Middlebrow: The Good Earth

The Good Earth is Pearl Buck’s most popular and widely known novel. It is a text which is centrally discussed in nearly all critical studies that engage with Buck. For the context of my study, the novel is particularly relevant because it represents a crystallization and condensation of Buck’s most important themes. More prominently than any other work in her oeuvre, The Good Earth shows the intertwining of Buck’s middlebrow aesthetics and politics with her missionary agenda and impulse to educate her readers. Published in 1931, the text needs to be read against the backdrop of the Great Depression, an era whose aesthetics and politics were for various reasons very well suited for Buck’s middlebrow mission. The Good Earth depicts the life-story of the Chinese farmer Wang Lung, his wife, O-lan, and their family against the larger background of the hardships of Chinese peasant life, natural catastrophes, and political turmoil in the (pre)revolutionary China of the early twentieth century. With this topic, Buck sets out to familiarize her American – or, more generally Western – readers with fictional characters and an environment entirely alien to them. At the same time, though, Buck discusses these plain Chinese figures and their poor living conditions in close relation to the economic crisis which had hit America in the late 1920s. Next to its obvious concern with China and the Chinese, The Good Earth, then, is also a truly American novel of its time: under the middlebrow umbrella, it negotiates contemporary ‘American’ issues at least as much as it introduces and humanizes the generic Chinese peasant to the audience. Thus, her Chinese topic helps Buck in her project to construct ‘her’ America, the country which she had known predominantly through the lens of her missionary upbringing and which was now undergoing a severe crisis. It was “[a]gainst the panorama

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of an unchanging China [that] Pearl S. Buck constructed her America,” as Karen Leong has put it (2005: 33).1 Leong’s description of the novel’s concern reveals the American Chineseness of Buck’s mission particularly well. In The Good Earth explicit missionary figures feature in only two episodes – and these are rather marginal in the overall context of the story at that. In the first scene, the reader encounters with and through the eyes of the novel’s protagonist, the Chinese peasant Wang Lung, a creature the like of whom he [Wang Lung] had never seen before. He had no idea of whether it was male or female, but it was tall and dressed in a straight black robe of some rough harsh material and there was the skin of a dead animal wrapped around its neck. As he passed, the person, whether male of female, motioned to him sharply to lower the shafts [of the rickshaw that Wang Lung pulled] and he did so, and when he stood erect again, dazed at what had befallen him, the person in broken accents directed that he was to go to the Street of Bridges. He began to run hurriedly, scarcely knowing what he did, and once he called to another puller whom he knew casually in the day’s work, “Look at this – what is this that I pull?” And the man shouted back at him, “A foreigner – a female from America – you are rich –” But Wang Lung ran as fast as he could for fear of the strange creature behind him, and when he reached the Street of Bridges he was exhausted and dripping in his sweat. This female stepped out then and said in the same broken accents, “You need not have run yourself to death,” and left him with two silver pieces in his palm, which was double the usual fare. (The Good Earth 108-109)2

1

Critics have stressed the fact that despite its Chinese setting, The Good Earth is a novel which decidedly addresses an American audience and marks the Americanness of its author (see, for example, Hunt 1977: 47). For instance, in a short piece titled “Authors between Books” (1931), Bernadine Kielty commented on the novel’s national affiliation as follows: “He [Hu Shih, a Chinese philosopher and former ambassador to the United States] said that Pearl Buck’s The Good Earth (which he thought as Chinese as pigtails) could not possibly have been written by any other than an American. For one thing the hero struck him as the counterpart of a certain American nineteenth-century hero who was something of a horse dealer. It turns out that he was referring to David Harum” (Nora Stirling Collection, Randolph College, Box 5, folder “TEN, 1931, G.E. Published, FLOOD, ABSALOM”).

2

Hereafter, I will use the abbreviation “GE” when citing from the novel.

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In this scene, the American female missionary is cast as an alien, she remains a blurry “it” of uncertain gender. She is even compared to an animal: this “creature” that has “the skin of a dead animal wrapped around its neck” appears almost monstrous. She might be friendly and makes efforts to speak Chinese, but her “broken accents” – together with her strange clothing – clearly demarcate her as foreign. The missionary’s payment of the short rickshaw journey is magnanimous on the one hand, but also comes across as somewhat patronizing on the other hand. The ambiguous depiction of her is consistent with Buck’s critical analysis of American missionary presence in China as a whole, a stance which also comes to the fore in the novel’s only other scene that depicts a missionary. Shortly after this encounter with the frightening Western woman, Wang Lung meets a “man, very tall, and lean as a tree that has been blown by bitter winds [with] eyes as blue as ice and a hairy face” (GE 125) who hands him a pamphlet. Once again, Wang Lung reacts with fear and bewilderment and perceives the stranger in terms of monstrosity and alienation: [A]lthough frightened to take anything from his hand, [Wang Lung] was more frightened to refuse, seeing the man’s strange eyes and fearful nose. He took what was thrust at him, then, and when he had courage to look at it after the foreigner had passed on, he saw on the paper a picture of a man, white-skinned, who hung upon a crosspiece of wood. The man was without clothes except for a bit about his loins, and to all appearances he was dead, since his head drooped upon his shoulder and his eyes were closed above his bearded lips. Wang Lung looked at the pictured man in horror and with increasing interest. There were characters beneath, but of these he could make nothing. He carried the picture home at night and showed it to the old man [his father]. But he also could not read and they discussed its possible meaning. Wang Lung and the old man and the two boys [Wang Lung’s sons]. The two boys cried out in delight and horror, “And see the blood streaming out of his side!” And the old man said, “Surely this was a very bad man to be thus hung.” […] (GE 125126)

Perfectly ignorant of the image and its meaning, Wang Lung carelessly gives the paper to his wife, O-lan. O-lan proves the male missionary’s methods ineffective and futile when she “took it and sewed it into a shoe sole together with other bits of paper she picked up here and there to make the soles firm” (GE 126). Christian symbolism and codes lose their value and

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power in the ‘heathen’ country, as the scene suggests: at best, the missionary pamphlet can be used as a daily item and thus gains a material or an economic value; at worst, Christianity is – literally and figuratively – being trampled on and treated with contempt. As I argued at the end of chapter 2, this second episode can also be regarded as an allusion to Buck’s missionary parents, with the strange male missionary as a (physical) doppelgänger of Absalom Sydenstricker and O-lan’s pragmatism as a reminiscence of the one which Buck so much admired in her mother, Carie. The two episodes can be read as Buck’s “slap” at Westerners and American missionary enterprise in China, as Michael Hunt has argued (1977: 38). More than that, however, it is the mode in which this critique is expressed that makes the scenes – and the overall conception of the text – so interesting. For the point of view is that of the Chinese figure. The Westerners, their looks, behavior and mannerisms, as well as their religious belief and codes are consistently focalized through Wang Lung.3 To Buck’s readers, then, the actually familiar is rendered alien just as the alleged alien becomes familiar and serves as the reference point in the narrative. The technique of a change of narrative perspective and the readers’ identification with the aggrieved ones as such are classical structures of the middlebrow and the cultural expressions of the Depression era. Yet, Buck’s contribution in this framework is still unique, as she reverses or radicalizes these strategies by means of her focus on the ethnic ‘Other.’ As always in her fiction, Buck works with established modes of sentimentalism and melodrama in The Good Earth, but she connects them here with the devices found in the social realism of the day. This conflation can be traced in her discussion of the typical motifs of the Depression era: the rags-to-riches and the aestheticization of poverty. Buck reverses the rags-to-riches pattern which is so prevalent in success stories of middlebrow fiction and depicts how economic rise and material wealth are undermined by moral corruption. As part of this lesson or mission, she aestheticizes a poor and simple way of life.

3

In a 1935 article on Buck’s novel, “The Art of Pearl S. Buck,” which is one of the first scholarly pieces concerned with Buck’s oeuvre at all, Phyllis Bentley identifies Buck’s narrative perspective of “see[ing] through Chinese eyes” as one of the most innovative elements in Buck’s “art” (1935: 794).

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This becomes particularly apparent in the portrayal of the plain Chinese peasant woman O-lan, whom I consider the most interesting character in the novel. With this figure, Buck challenges the concept of the sentimental heroine and inverts the middlebrow strategy of the alignment between reader and protagonist. Buck very successfully manages to mobilize her readers’ emotions vis-à-vis O-lan, but importantly, this happens ex negativo – by means of resorting to the aesthetics of social realism rather than by an overt sentimentalism or abundant melodrama, as I will show in this chapter.

T HE M ARKETING AND R ECEPTION T HE G OOD E ARTH

OF

Based on Buck’s earlier short story “The Revolutionist” (1928), the novel was first conceived under the title “Wang Lung” but then retitled The Good Earth.4 Following The Good Earth, Buck published two other novels – Sons (1932)5 and A House Divided (1935) – which can be regarded as sequels with their focus on the younger generations of the Wang family. The so-called House of Earth trilogy underlines the epic nature of the family story, describing the Wangs’ life cycle and continuous struggles with their

4

On “The Revolutionist” as a predecessor to the novel, see Doyle 1965: 37 and especially Conn 1996: 97-98. On the publication history of The Good Earth (and its ‘pre-version’ “Wang Lung”), see, for instance, Liao 1997: 65; Stirling 1983: 102-109; Spurling 2010: 204-213; Hunt 1977: 37ff, and Conn 1996. Hilary Spurling, in particular, shows that Buck’s writing of the novel was very much following a ‘housewife approach’ to writing which can often be found with female authors of middlebrow fiction. Spurling has shown that Buck organized her writing around her household chores (Spurling 2010: 206-07).

5

Like East Wind, West Wind and some other novels by Buck, Sons was first published in serial form in a typical middlebrow magazine, Cosmopolitan (Conn 1996: 141), an aspect which once again places Buck squarely in middlebrow (market) dynamics, as I have shown in the introduction.

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kinship, forces of nature, or wealth and poverty from one generation to the next.6 In the original title of the novel, “Wang Lung,” Buck had put emphasis on the protagonist and thus indicated her primary interest in and concern with the peasant figure. Like in the case of East Wind, West Wind before, however, Richard Walsh, her publisher, intervened and demanded a change to the final The Good Earth, stressing the importance of the earth and the land instead: “[…] [a]ccording to Walsh, it was not possible to use [‘Wang Lung’] as the book’s title because it did not mean anything in English and sounded awkward. Walsh then suggested the title The Good Earth, which directly placed it in the category of ‘novels of soil’” (Qian 2005: 161-162). With this marketing ‘trick,’ the publishing company built on the concept of familiarity and universal experience: in the Depression era, Americans were fundamentally concerned with the significance of the ‘earth’ and the question of how to deal with a rural economy and its processes of modernization. Marketing Buck’s text as a novel of the soil, the company animated Americans to reflect upon the shift from agrarian to urban life in their own society (see Leong 2005: 29; see also Harker 2007: 105-106). At the same time, the promotion campaign of The Good Earth also worked with cultural difference, as it highlighted the Chineseness of the book. Walsh suggested a “Chinese motif” – a courtesan – as the cover, a suggestion which Buck originally refused because she saw in it an evocation of the exotic stereotype which she wanted to overcome and which was at odds with her story: the image of the sexualized Oriental woman. Also comparable to East Wind, West Wind, John Day’s advertising campaign relied on Buck’s persona, emphasizing her cultural ‘authenticity’ and status as an insider on China.7 As an integral part of this advertising and public relations machinery, Dorothy Canfield Fisher, herself a leading middlebrow novelist and juror of the hallmark institution of middlebrow fiction, the Book-of-the-Month Club, proposed The Good Earth to her fellow club jurors shortly after its

6

For the classification of the novel as an epic, see, for example, Liao 1997: 80; Bentley 1935: 799; Van Doren 1966, or Doyle 1965. Doyle also refers to The Good Earth as a “saga tale” (1965: 42).

7

On the promotion of Buck and her (self-)fashioning as a Chinese insider, see also Leong 2005: 24.

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publication and thus accelerated the success story of the novel and the hype surrounding Buck even more: “The BOMC selection mattered a great deal; it changed Buck’s life forever,” as Harker somewhat dramatically but aptly put it.8 All in all, the “advertising and marketing was […] a large factor in the novel’s success,” as Jaime Harker has shown (2007: 100). And indeed, the success of The Good Earth set in instantaneously when the novel was published in March 1931. Despite the dramatic collapse of the American publishing market in the aftermath of the stock market crash in 1929 and the following Depression, there was still a comparatively good standing for women writers of middlebrow fiction at the time.9 Yet even

8

The Good Earth was the first of Buck’s novels to be selected and promoted by the Book-of-the-Month Club. Many others (such as Kinfolk or The Three Daughters of Madame Liang) should follow, equally profiting from the dense and highly effective networking of the institution. The BOMC printed 50,000 of its own copies of The Good Earth to send to its subscribers, acting as a “shortcut” to the audience (letter Earl Newson to Buck, 23 January 1931; qtd. in Harker 2007: 98). The fact that Buck’s novel was promoted by the club was rather accidental in the first place, as Jaime Harker sums up: “Fortuitous circumstances helped to catapult the novel into fame. Dorothy Canfield, conscientiously reading the second-tier options for the BOMC selection committee, stumbled across the manuscript and was immediately caught up in the prose and the portrayal of life in Asia. Her enthusiasm inspired the rest of the committee to choose The Good Earth as its March selection in 1931” (Harker 2007: 98). When The Good Earth became a BOMC-selection, Buck claimed that she was ignorant of this American institution, yet another indication of her self-fashioning as an outsider in the American literary establishment (see Harker 2007: 98-99; Leong 2003: 24-25, Spurling 2010: 212).

9

Publishing numbers decreased by some 50 per cent after the stock market crash. In these economic circumstances, successful women writers were often treated with contempt by male writers who envied them their success, as Elaine Showalter contended (2009: 331): “Critics [like Malcolm Cowley and Bernard DeVoto] also derided women’s best sellers of the 1930s as evidence of an innate female talent for a debased commercial fiction that could never compete with serious art” (Showalter 2009: 332). The gendered argument against middlebrow fiction as debased and ‘too light,’ as addressed in my introduction, was thus in-

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within this ‘lucky circle,’ Buck’s success was exceptional: The Good Earth soon became a “colossal best seller” (Showalter 2009: 331), topping U.S. sales’ lists in both 1931 and 1932 (Conn 1996: 123). The novel manifested Buck’s status as the West’s “singularly significant spokeswoman for China” (Liao 1997: 15), to give just one example of a wide array of labels ascribed to Buck in the years following the novel’s publication. Next to empowering Buck in cultural and political terms, The Good Earth propelled her literary career to unprecedented heights, as it won her a Pulitzer Prize in 1932 and constituted the major reference point in the Swedish Nobel committee’s decision to award her this most acclaimed prize for literature in 1938.10 With The Good Earth, Buck was “setting the high standard against which all her later works were measured,” as Kang Liao has aptly observed (1997: 17; see also Van Doren 1966: 352). Whereas in East Wind, West Wind, Buck had still depicted a family which is part of the Chinese upper class, she now turned to the poor Chinese peasant and aimed to depict Chinese rural life ‘as it really was;’ in other words, she claimed to present an authentic inventory of China.11 And

creasingly suffused with economic undertones during the Depression. See also Raub 1994. 10 Buck as a middlebrow author being awarded these two prizes might be read as a critical acknowledgment of this body of literature as a whole. However, the fierce reactions and controversies revolving around Buck’s Nobel Prize in 1938, which I have discussed in the introduction of this book, point to a more widespread skepticism vis-à-vis these texts and reveal the general difficulties middlebrow fiction – and the questions of literary taste and value judgments that accompanied it – was exposed to. For an overview of the controversy and the complex concatenation of questions of literary quality, taste and popularity in the 1930s, see Conn (1996: 209-10). Incidentally, fellow middlebrow author Dorothy Canfield Fisher was among the ones who congratulated Buck on the Nobel Prize, probably in a move to jump to the defense of Buck and middlebrow writing as such. On the dynamics of best-selling novels winning the Nobel Prize, see, for example, Kjell Espmark’s The Nobel Prize in Literature: A Study of the Criteria behind the Choices (1991). 11 Buck’s claim of authenticity and her audience’s willingness to believe in it are similar to the processes I described in my discussion of the biographies in chapter 2.

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indeed, Buck’s audience believed in precisely that – in the authenticity of her depictions and thus in her credibility as an ethnographer of China.12 The readership’s acknowledgment of the text as an ethnographic novel was prominently expressed by Henry Seidel Canby, the chairman of the Bookof-the-Month Club’s editorial board: Fiction, which is our history of the present, slowly extends its bounds. Quietly and almost unnoticed, the art of skillful realism has passed beyond our own people, beyond our own civilization, and has begun to deal with strange cultures, which we have never tried to know from the inside, as they see themselves. The Chinese, the South Sea Islanders, the Africans are no longer merely quaint or picturesque. The novelist begins to look at them as the scientist observes them, with industrious attempts to understand and explain. Mrs. Buck is an American long resident in China. Her The Good Earth is a superb example of this intuition, and in its way a unique book. China is the mysterious cloud on the horizon for all of us […]. The Good Earth is China. In this story […] Wang Lung, the hero, knows of no desire as strong as the Chinese desire for land, which means security; his customs are the only right customs; his misfortunes China has always suffered; he gets rich by Chinese industry, and his happiness is Chinese happiness. The people in this rather thrilling story are not ‘queer’ or ‘exotic,’ they are as natural as their soil. They are so intensely human that after the first chapter you are more interested in their humanity than in the novelties of belief and habit. (Canby 1931; qtd. in Qian 2005: 162)

Canby’s reaction is exemplary of the enthusiastic reception which The Good Earth got from its American readers and most critics: “For reviewers, The Good Earth created vicarious experience of an unknown culture. […] it provided a quintessential middlebrow reading experience” (Harker 2007: 101). Above all, Buck was praised for depicting an image of China which was markedly different from the exotic, distorted imagery which Western readers of ‘Chinese subjects’ had been familiar with.13 “Here no flutes of

12 On the placement of The Good Earth in the genre of ethnography, see also Yoshihara (2003: 152-158). 13 Edith Maud Eaton (1865-1914) can be seen as one of the very few other authors before Buck to defy an exoticized, Orientalist imagery. Eaton, who published under the pseudonym Sui Sin Far, too, had tried to move toward ‘authentic’ Chi-

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jade sound delicately across the moonlit courts, no meditative general sets brush to paper to catch for ever the susurration of dead leaves outside his door, no intricacy of self-abasing compliment unwinds itself from the lips of beggar or mandarin” (anon. review in the New Statesman 1931: 430; Stirling Collection, Box 3, folder “G”). It is exactly this aspect of The Good Earth’s authenticity, which Buck’s American audience appreciated so much, that also triggered – in some cases vehement – attacks on the novel and Buck as its author. The criticism came from Asian intellectuals, as I have already briefly mentioned in the introduction of my study. While referring to her oeuvre as a whole, this criticism was particularly geared toward The Good Earth and its depiction of China as a timeless and rural space. It purported that Buck’s novel presented a decidedly fictional or stylized version of China that did not reflect the reality of the 1930s. Thus, the novel did not pursue authenticity at all. This was the major line of criticism, most prominently expressed by Kang-hu Kiang, a professor of Chinese Studies at the University of Toronto, who accused Buck of distorting Chinese life, society, people, and customs.14

neseness in her Chinatown stories (especially in her collection Mrs. Spring Fragrance of 1912). In comparison to Buck, however, Eaton’s cultural impact on shaping or changing Western views on China had been considerably lower. For an in-depth discussion of Edith Eaton, see Dominika Ferens, Edith and Winnifred Eaton. Chinatown Missions and Japanese Romances (2002). In the same period as Buck, the American journalist and writer Agnes Smedley (1892-1950) depicted Chinese people and customs authentically – in the field of journalism. After the publication of her semi-autobiographical novel Daughter of Earth in 1929, Smedley lived and worked in Shanghai as a newspaper correspondent for the German Frankfurter Zeitung and the British Manchester Guardian until the late 1930s. Like Eaton before, though, Smedley was never as influential a voice on China as Buck. On Agnes Smedley, see, for example, Ruth Price, The Lives of Agnes Smedley (2005), or Janice MacKinnon and Stephen R. MacKinnon, Agnes Smedley: The Life and Times of an American Radical (1988). 14 Kiang’s critique is exemplary of an array of similar opinions by other Asian intellectuals. Next to Kiang, it was particularly Younghill Kang, a Korean writer, who took issue with Buck’s work. For detailed discussions of these critical voices, see, for example, Qian 2005: 154-160; Liao 1997: 22-23, 43; Stirling 1983: 105-109; Harker 2007: 110; or Conn 1996: 126.

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Published as an article in The New York Times in January 1933, Kiang contended that Buck had “paint[ed] China with a half-black and half-white face” and argued that her portrayal was not representative or authentic, as it focused on the Chinese peasant – and thus a member of the low class which was no longer existent in this form in contemporary China:15 The ‘China’ she represents is not representative, because her characters are chosen from the lowliest strand of people, peculiar to her own missionary contacts and acquaintance with Chinese coolies and amahs. Also, Buck is especially fond of describing in minute detail certain peculiarities and defects of these low-bred Chinese, emphasizing and exaggerating certain special aspects to make things appear ‘queer and unnatural’, such as the inhuman cruelty of bandits and sexual wantonness. (Kiang 1933, qtd. in Qian 2005: 154)

Listing what he considered Buck’s faulty depictions in ample detail, Kiang questioned Buck’s expertise on China and even her linguistic command of Chinese, concluding that she “did not know China well enough to write accurately about her people, although she had been reared there” (see Gao 2000: 18; see also Conn 1996: 126). What was at stake – here as well as in the criticism of other Asian intellectuals – is Buck’s status: Kiang questioned the authority of a white woman who enacted herself (and was received by her Western readers) as the ‘insider voice’ of Asia. With this, she usurped (and falsified) a geographical and cultural space which should have been reserved for an Asian elite. The New York Times gave Buck a chance to respond to Kiang’s critique in the same issue. She made a case for the authenticity of her depictions in her article, refuting Kiang almost point by point and declaring what was ‘false’ and what was ‘real’.16 In her reply – decidedly not apologetic – she invoked her ethnographic authority:

15 Michael Hunt supports this view of Buck’s overcome and static image of China and the Chinese peasant and argues that she was not complex enough in her depictions. In her insistence on such a stasis and her denial of a broader cultural context, Hunt holds, Buck “helped sustain an unfortunate ethnocentricism” (1977: 57). 16 In her study Xiongya Gao comes to the defence of Buck, arguing that cultural customs and practices have always varied significantly in China, depending on

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In the first place let me say that [Kiang Kang-Hu] is distinctly right in saying that I have painted a picture of Chinese that is not the ordinary portrait, and not like those portraits which are usually not completed after the death of the subject. Any one who knows those portraits must realize how far from the truth of life they are; the set prose, the arranged fold, the solemn, stately countenance, the official button. I have dealt in light and shades, I have purposely omitted the official button, I do not ask the subject if he recognizes himself – lest he prefers the portrait with the official button! I only picture him as he is to me. Nor do I apologize. (Buck 1933, qtd. in Yoshihara 2003: 156)

Buck further stressed “the vast regional differences in Chinese manners and customs and the fact that she was only depicting those northern regions out of her own lived experience […],” and she accused Kiang “of being guilty of holding an essentialist and elitist view of Chinese culture, typical of the modern Chinese intellectuals of the time,” as Qian has summarized this part of Buck’s argument (Qian 2005: 155). It is particularly the image of the “official button” which I find interesting in her reply. According to Buck, this “official button” is an image of the Chinese history as modern Chinese intellectuals proclaim it – an image which is “arranged” and distorted, because it leaves gaps. Buck’s mission, then, is a counter project to fill these gaps and present what she calls the “truth of life” in all its “lights and shades.” Buck’s project exposes cultural difference between America and China, while simultaneously insisting that there was a shared humanity, a sense of universalism – middlebrow’s “profound universalism” (Klein 2003: 65) – underneath these differences. Nancy Evans’s review attests to this interplay of difference and sameness: […] Though I may never see a rice-field, I shall always feel that I have lived for a long time in China. The strange power of a western woman to make an alien civilization seem as casual, as close, as the happenings of the morning is surprising; but it is less amazing that her power to illuminate the destiny of man as it is in all countries and at all times by quietly telling the story of one poor Wang Lung. It is true

the geographical area. According to Gao, various episodes in Buck’s fiction, which Kiang had tried to rebut, may have been true in certain regions of China (2000: 18).

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that religion, clothing, tradition, food and even the skies themselves are different from the things we know; and yet these differences are of no consequence. (Evans 1931: 324; Stirling Collection, Box 3, folder “G”)17

By her portrayal of ordinary Chinese “as if they were cousins and neighbors” (Canfield qtd. in Harris 1969: 194),18 Buck managed to “bridge […] the cultural gap” between Americans and the Chinese” (Liao 1997: 69). She employed the Chinese setting and the ‘alien’ to call for a universalism of human experience and thus to communicate her intercultural message: Buck believed “in The Good Earth as an act of service, to encourage understanding and sympathy between two vastly different cultures,” as Harker frames the motivation behind Buck’s mission (2007: 99). In my ensuing analysis of the novel I will address in how far Buck succeeded in creating this universalism and to what extent she still exploited exoticism and worked with difference in The Good Earth. Overall, I agree with Jaime Harker who holds that Buck was walking “the tightrope between sameness and difference better than did most middlebrow writers” (2007: 110-11). Buck was more successful in this project than other middlebrow writers because her novel was substantially rooted in contemporary aesthetics of social realism and in many respects reminiscent of the writings of John Steinbeck and especially of documentary photography, as I will show. I would like to end this part of the chapter by way of focusing on the missionary responses to The Good Earth. On the one hand, the novel was still favorably reviewed and disseminated by part of the missionary community in the United States, and the John Day Company even factored into

17 There was a multitude of similar reviews which highlighted the novel’s clarity, honesty, authenticity, as well as Buck’s skill in rendering the alien familiar. For an overview of these reviews, see, for example, Liao 1997: 20-21; or Yoshihara 2003: 151-152. 18 Carl Van Doren, too, made use of the ‘neighbor’ image when he discussed The Good Earth’s Chinese characters in his chapter on American revisionist fiction of the 1930s: “In the United States, which had a special friendly liking for China, The Good Earth for the first time made the Chinese seem as familiar as neighbors” (Van Doren, 1940; rev. ed. 1966: 353).

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the missionary support for the novel in its advertising strategy:19 following the positive secular reviews, missionary publications like The Christian Observer particularly praised the biblical style of the novel as well as Buck’s emphasis on Chinese humanity and intercultural message, which I have just described. On the other hand, however, The Good Earth revealed that Buck’s standing in the missionary community was gradually changing – even before Buck’s official fallout with missionary circles in the aftermath of her speech “Is there a Case for Foreign Missions?” in late 1932. For example, there were some missionaries who read Buck’s portrayal of missionaries in the novel with a sense of uneasiness or even indignation.20 What is more, the missionary community regarded the novel’s allegedly too explicit depiction of the characters’ sexual instincts and mores with apprehension.21 Some missionaries were alienated by Buck’s descriptions of the

19 The John Day Company explained in its promotion program for The Good Earth that “[…] we simply must not overlook the possibility of promoting this book through religious channels. There is a great deal of evidence that the popularity of East Wind, West Wind has been gained almost entirely through this channel. Copies must go to all of the factors – the Methodist Book Concern, Presbyterian, Baptist, Episcopal, etc. Boards of Foreign Missions, etc. In an attempt to get whatever advance orders, mailings or any other merchandising aid that we can from these sources” (Stirling Collection, Box 5, folder “TEN, 1931, G.E. Published, FLOOD, ABSALOM”). 20 For instance, Dr James Bear, the missionary friend of the Sydenstrickers whom I cited in chapter 2, regarded the scene in which O-lan transforms the pamphlet into a shoe sole as an unjust and polemic depiction of Christianity in China and bemoaned that “[t]he only religion in The Good Earth is where somebody finds a page out of a testament and pastes it on a board and makes a sole for a shoe” (Stirling Collection, Box 9, folder “Bear Margaret and James”). 21 In an earlier essay, “China in the Mirror of her Fiction” (1930), Buck had praised the Chinese “healthy attitude toward sex” and highlighted the importance of sexuality in Chinese life: “Like most folk-minded people the Chinese have frankly put the relation of the sexes upon sex and sex alone” (160). With regard to The Good Earth, however, Buck claimed that the she had only depicted “incidents dealing with sex, […] only incidents, after all” and not conceived the text as a manifesto of Chinese sexuality (letter to Richard Walsh, 3 June 1931; qtd. in Harker 2007: 100).

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Wangs’ wedding night (Wang Lung “seize[d]” O-lan (GE 24)) or Wang Lung’s “fevered and thirsty” bodily reaction upon meeting with a prostitute (GE 131). This ‘excess of human lust’ in The Good Earth, as many missionaries perceived it, ran counter to ‘proper’ Christian behavior and constituted a severe line of missionary critique which foreboded the escalation between Buck and the missionary community one year later.22

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At first glance, from a missionary point of view, an explicit, all too frank, or “coarse,” display of sexuality in The Good Earth (Conn 1996: 128) might be read in terms of a plea for the conversion of these ‘immoral’ Chinese and their acculturation to Western mores and norms. However, this is decidedly what Buck does not advocate in her novel. The Good Earth does not uphold a white middle-class lifestyle as a model to the Chinese, but vice versa: the economically poor-off Chinese peasant is made out as an example for the Westerners. This strategy of turning around well-established patterns lies at the heart of Buck’s project in this text and is paradigmatic of her concern with (re)negotiating relations between the East and the West. The Wangs’ attempt to secure their family’s livelihood and economics and the text’s emphasis on the toiling on the farm place The Good Earth “into the genre of the frontier novel, a popular form of women’s fiction from the turn of the century that was popular again in the twenties and thirties,” as Karen Leong explained (2005: 29).23 Like the frontier novel, The

22 After the publication of The Good Earth, Buck’s employer, the Presbyterian Board of Foreign Missions, had their secretary send a letter to Buck which consisted of “several pages of blistering rebuke.” Hilary Spurling calls this dispute the “first round in what eventually became a showdown between Pearl and the mission movement” (2010: 220). To a certain degree, Buck seemed to take pleasure in this controversy at the time, “insisting that Americans [and missionaries in particular, my addition] needed to get over their prudishness” (Harker 2007: 103). On this debate, see also Conn 1996: 128 and Spurling 2010: 220221. 23 On the Thirties’ popularity of the farm and frontier novel, see Patricia Raub’s monograph Yesterday’s Stories. Popular Women’s Novels of the Twenties and

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Good Earth is centrally concerned with the land and addresses economic issues that were highly topical in times of the Great Depression. Leong states on the interrelation between The Good Earth and the Depression years that their confidence shaken, [Americans] turned with renewed appreciation to common sense and a shared heritage of national myths. Buck’s subject matter thus paralleled a prominent concept in depression America, that of returning to the land. […] [R]eaders related to the Chinese family confronting challenges and struggles and this contributed to The Good Earth’s best-selling status. (Leong 2005: 29)

Against the Depression context, Buck’s view of the peasant as the “backbone of China” and the “key to interpreting” China (Hunt 1977: 37; 51) coincided with a general interest in rural communities and the theme of the earth in American literature at the time. As a further variant of this idea, Peter Conn called The Good Earth a “story of the land,” whose theme of farmers’ struggles, suffering, and endurance “on their soil had a particular appeal to Americans in the Depression decade” (Conn 1996: 131; see also Conn 1994: 113; Doyle 1965: 39, 41). Buck herself considered her novel a proletarian novel (see Conn 1994: 111), a classification which Carl Van Doren followed suit in his chapter on the 1930s as a revisionary decade in American literature (1966: 354). In his chapter Van Doren places Buck’s novel squarely in this literary tradition of the Depression years, stating that The Good Earth “brought to countless American readers an imaginative knowledge of human life on the barest sense of subsistence: a life which would once have seemed as remote from them as China but which now seemed a dreadful possibility in the America of the depression” (Van Doren 1966: 350). In terms of popularity, Van Doren considered The Good Earth as one of “the four novels of the decade” (1966: 350), identifying the other three novels as Hervey Allen’s Anthony Adverse (1933), John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath (1939), and Margaret Mitchell’s Gone With The Wind

Thirties (1994). Raub argues that these novels were so popular because they “valorize[d] social mobility while questioning the era’s growing emphasis upon materialism and the consumer ethic” (1994: xviii). On The Good Earth’s O-lan as a pioneering character, see Liao 1997: 68.

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(1936).24 Except for Allen’s novel, the three novels of Van Doren’s inventory share their theme of the land and approach American history with nostalgia.25 Despite the overall similarity of theme, Buck still chooses a different approach to the theme of the land from, for example, Mitchell, and with this holds an exceptional position within the body of middlebrow literature of the day which was (implicitly) concerned with the Depression. As an “icon of the middlebrow New Deal,” as Michael Denning has called her (1998: 447), Buck pits the experience of her (female) American middle-class readers against the depiction of poor, rural Chinese characters. The engagement with race is inevitably suffused with a discussion of economic issues: on the one hand, the racialized, poor ‘Other’ by default becomes the binary opposite of the white, privileged middle-class Western audience. At the same time, however, Buck’s discussion of race, in The Good Earth as well as in her other texts, works with strategies of identification and alignment between these two groups and strongly draws on a universalism of their experiences: Buck’s poor Chinese characters – and The

24 Van Doren’s judgment was unequivocal and succinct: “[…] among them the four novels said, directly or indirectly, almost everything the fiction of the decade had to say” (1940: 351). 25 Buck’s novel comes perhaps closest to Margaret Mitchell’s Gone With the Wind in this respect. While Buck relies on a difference of setting when approaching economic issues of the Depression years, Mitchell’s novel uses difference of time as an analytical category, as she chooses the Reconstruction era to discuss the value of the land and economic change. Thus, both texts work with difference and means of distanciation to draw parallels to the given economic situation. With that, they also allow for an escapism which lies at the heart of middlebrow texts (see Radway 1991: 11). The nostalgia depicted by Buck or Mitchell is indicative of a search for something lost in melodramatic texts, an “atavistic past,” as Christine Gledhill has called it (1994: 32). At the same time, the novels achieve a close identification of their readers with the two female protagonists O-lan and Scarlett. Despite their disparate characters, looks, and overall conditions/surroundings, Buck’s O-lan and Mitchell’s Scarlett share a sense of endurance, making the theme of female endurance against the backdrop of the Depression a further parallel between The Good Earth and Gone with the Wind, as Showalter has stressed (2009: 357).

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Good Earth’s O-lan in particular – serve her readership as role models and projection surfaces in times of the Great Depression as they represent a hard-working ethos and embody traditional values. Thus, one crucial function of The Good Earth – set in prerevolutionary, preindustrial, agrarian China – was to hold up a mirror to its middle-class American readers and confront them with an ethnic and social group whose (fictional) fate and economic situation was in fact far worse than their own. On one level, The Good Earth depicts the long and hard struggle of the Chinese family’s social and economic promotion in great detail and with empathy and wants to encourage the readers to emulate the hard-working ethos of the novel’s characters. At the same time, though, the text also warns its middle-class readers not to strive too aggressively for wealth, but to value and appreciate the (scarce) resources they have instead. Thus, The Good Earth performs the cultural work of consolidating the social status quo, as it was characteristic of middlebrow novels, and works to keep social unrest in a difficult economic time to a minimum by claiming that wealth, after all, is not that unambiguously desirable as it seems to be. “The novel both embraces the importance of class and disavows it,” as Harker has argued with respect to this tension in the text (2007: 104). With this plea for class consolidation, The Good Earth is consistent with the overall conservatism of the middlebrow. Importantly, Wang Lung and his family are content with their situation – at least, at the beginning of the story. In interesting analogy to the documentary photography of the Depression, Buck aestheticizes poverty by representing a simple lifestyle and its attributes as modest, ‘tasteful,’ and honest. This is already shown in the opening description of the barren kitchen in the Wangs’ farm house: He [Wang Lung] went into the shed which was the kitchen, leaning against the house, and out of its dusk an ox twisted its head from behind the corner next the door and lowed at him deeply. The kitchen was made of earthen bricks as the house was, great squares of earth dug from their own fields, and thatched with straw from their own wheat. Out of their own earth had his grandfather in his youth fashioned also the oven, baked and black with many years of meal preparing. On top of this earthen structure stood a deep, round, iron cauldron. (GE 2)

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Buck here introduces a setting which was at the same time familiar and alien to her readers – the domestic sphere of the kitchen, yet one that is characterized by utter depravity and, of course, remote from the readers’ middle-class kitchen interior. Thus, she once again works with the interplay of sameness/familiarity and difference. The episode is described in a very scenic way and generates the effect of the Depression photographs which Walker Evans took of rural poverty in Alabama for the volume Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. In photographs like “Farmer’s Kitchen” or “Floyd Burroughs’ Bedroom” (both taken in 1936) Evans depicted a similarly austere interior of houses of farmer families and achieved an effect comparable to Buck’s.26 What comes to the fore in Buck’s description of the kitchen is Wang Lung’s pride in his ancestor’s manual work in setting up this place, and the emphasis on its “earthen” qualities and materials. Clearly, this passage attests to the celebration of a plain, simple lifestyle and it encourages the readers’ sympathy and their willingness to follow the example of the poor Chinese farmer by valuing the family and tradition and acknowledging simple things. With this, The Good Earth is centrally concerned with a ‘usable past’ and a nostalgia for a time before an aggressive imperialism and capitalism set in and led to the Great Depression – in short, the novel promotes a return to old values. Through the lens of Chineseness, then, Buck ‘missionizes’ or reverses the rags-to-riches pattern which is so prominent in middlebrow fiction.27 As a Depression text, The Good Earth advertises hard work and perseverance as the basis of material success and at first glance calls to

26 For a discussion of Walker Evans’ and James Agee’s joint book project, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (published in 1941, but dating back to their field trip to the American South in 1936), see, for instance, Jeff Allred, American Modernism and Depression Documentary (2010), or Caroline Blinder, ed., New Critical Essays on James Agee and Walker Evans: Perspectives on Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (2010). 27 With this assessment, I differ from some scholars who rather unproblematically consider The Good Earth as a rags-to-riches story. Charles W. Hayford, for example, reads the novel in this way and regards it as a reassuring “Chinese Horatio Alger” version of the American rags-to-riches pattern (1994: 23).

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mind the typical pattern of the middlebrow success story:28 after all sorts of hardship, it seems, Wang Lung and his family are finally rewarded with wealth and become part of the upper class29 – in this sense, they comply with the middlebrow’s imperative of social and material advancement. But importantly – and in analogy to the proletarian novel of the day30 – Buck challenges the logic of rags-to-riches and breaks with its generic, or even formulaic, pattern: The Good Earth presents (the Western ideology of) material wealth as highly precarious, morally problematic, and dangerous to the family’s integrity. When economic prosperity arises, it almost inevitably brings with it the danger of corruption and impedes true happiness – and the novel falls short of a happy ending. Once the family – and particularly Wang Lung as the head of the family – is no longer content with its economic situation and manages to climb the social ladder, (moral) decline sets in. Shortly after the family finally moves into a lavish mansion, surrounded by servants and luxury, Wang Lung becomes haughty and takes two concubines. He marries one of them and his first wife, O-lan, dies – because of illness (probably cancer) as the text tells us, but the narrator’s underlying suggestion is that it is her emotional suffering that has triggered this illness. The narrative here evokes a didacticism which is impossible to miss: money clearly does not buy happiness and contentment in life can be found in poor economic conditions rather than in wealth.

28 For middlebrow narratives as success stories, see Christ 2010: especially 20; 2627. 29 Contingent with a class structure in preindustrial and prerevolutionary China that does not parallel the Western categorization of working-, middle- and upper-class, I use the rather vague term ‘upper class’ with reference to the Wangs’ economic and social situation in Buck’s novel to point to the general development the family undergoes, namely their rise from utter poverty to a luxurious life. Other critics like Mari Yoshihara seem to be aware of the difference between Western and Chinese class systems and the problem of appropriate terminology when they, for lack of an alternative, lump the two concepts together and somewhat vaguely refer to the family’s promotion to “middle-class and upperclass life” (Yoshihara 2003: 159-60). 30 On the American proletarian novel, see, for instance, Barbara Foley, Radical Representations. Politics and Form in U.S. Proletarian Fiction, 1929-1941 (1993).

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O- LAN

As far as O-lan’s death is concerned, its early placement in the novel is important because it draws attention to the ambiguous status of this female figure in the text. O-lan dies at the end of the second third of the story and thus decidedly before key events in her sons’ adult lives (such as the marriage of one of the sons and another son’s entry into the army) or before Wang Lung’s ever increasing wealth further unfold. James Hoban, for example, has suggested that her death does not have much of an impact on the proceeding story line (Hoban 1994: 132). However, such an observation fails to see that the Wangs’ family life disintegrates rather dramatically after O-lan’s death: Wang Lung’s old father dies soon after O-lan, struggles in the household intensify, Wang Lung’s concubines fight each other, one of the sons leaves after a rift with Wang Lung, and Wang Lung himself becomes increasingly discontent and restless. O-lan’s death, then, signifies the removal of the source of stability and integrity in the family (see Gao 2000: 104-106).31 In this respect, O-lan’s soothing or integrative function comes perhaps closest to that of the ideal heroine in domestic texts of the nineteenth century who embodied the backbone of the family, was a corrective to the public life’s ‘bad’ influence, and exercised a subtle power over her family members and their well being. Is it reasonable, then, to call O-lan the ‘secret’ heroine of The Good Earth, as some critics have assessed this figure? In his early study on Buck’s fiction, Paul Doyle, for example, considered O-lan as a character that is as multi-faceted and complex as Wang Lung (1965: 42-44). Almost thirty years later, Pradyumna Chauhan repeated or even surpassed this view, stating somewhat dramatically that O-lan “compels by her determination a comparison with the heroines of Greek tragedies” (1994: 123). These readings of O-lan are interesting because they are diametrically opposed to other critical views of this figure. For instance, Patricia Raub has contended

31 Shortly after the publication of The Good Earth, Buck made a similar argument about Chinese women’s integrity in an essay called “Chinese Women: Their Predicament in the China of Today” (published in October 1931). Probably with her fictional character O-lan in mind, Buck contended in this short piece that the “Chinese woman exhibits more integrity, more steadfastness, more endurance in the crises and affairs of life than does the Chinese man” (1930: 905).

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that “O-lan never comes into sharp focus as the heroine in the novel,” and opted to call her a “major secondary character” instead (1994: 86). Similarly, James Hoban has stressed O-lan’s overall marginalization, stating that she “plays a valuable though clearly secondary role” (Hoban 1994: 132). According to him, The Good Earth is a novel which centers on Wang Lung: Even the original title Buck gave to her story, Wang Lung, expresses his importance. The readers accompany him from the very beginning, when he arises to prepare himself for his wedding, to the very end, when, as an old man who has long ago buried O-lan, he is himself on the verge of death. (Hoban 1994: 133)

Among these positions which see O-lan as either a heroine or a marginal character, I take a middle ground and argue for O-lan’s positioning in a ‘space in-between’ such poles. With this, I am in line with Xiongya Gao, who in her study on Buck’s Chinese women characters has advanced a similar argument (2000). I propose that O-lan very effectively occupies this space in-between and invests it with meaning – a meaning, that is, which is pivotal for the functioning of The Good Earth and Buck’s mission to educate her readers as a whole. In order to more fully understand O-lan’s ‘in-between’ positioning and her significance, it is once again helpful to resort to the category of the middlebrow and the way that Buck makes use of it in her text. Perhaps more than in any of her other novels, it is because of Buck’s inversion or innovation of the established middlebrow pattern that she achieves a close identification between her female readers and her female lead figure. The Good Earth is deeply committed to middlebrow’s essential alignment of female reader and literary character, as I stated above, but different from most other texts of the genre, the alignment in this novel does not work with a female protagonist. O-lan offers various angles for the readers’ identification or sympathy – but it is precisely because she does not correspond to the conventional or ‘classical’ structure as the novel’s heroine that she can transport the message of the text so well. Importantly, the portrayal of O-lan as plain and unspectacular bestows an almost magnetic iconicity upon this figure that would not unfold if she were conceived as the clear-cut female protagonist or heroine we generally encounter in middlebrow and sentimental novels. There, the figure’s appeal is evoked via her function as the text’s focalizer or narrative center. This is

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doubtlessly not the case in The Good Earth, where O-lan’s iconic status derives from the aestheticization of her ordinary physical appearance, her lack of womanly attractiveness, her absence of emotions, and her overall inconspicuous behavior. Especially with the emphasis on O-lan’s body as a sign of her status as a laborer, Buck’s depiction was taking up a trend of the visualization and tangibility of the working-class female body in the media of the Thirties: “Thirties literary and photographic works by committed individuals […] attempted to refashion the domestic narratives of nineteenth-century realism by foregrounding the objects of labor – workers’ bodies, spaces, and tools,” as Paula Rabinowitz reminds us (1996: 196).32 And indeed, The Good Earth captures O-lan’s iconicity substantially by scenic arrangements of her plain body which emulate the documentary photography of the Depression years and, in particular, Dorothea Lange’s iconic “Migrant Mother” from 1936.33 The events in the novel are mostly focalized through Wang Lung’s eyes, as the scenes quoted at the chapter’s beginning have already indicated. It is from the narrative perspective of this male protagonist, then, that we are first introduced to O-lan and come across her aestheticization and ‘hidden’ potential – significantly, in an episode which works with the juxtaposition of wealth and poverty. When Wang Lung goes to the great House of Hwang to pick up his future wife, O-lan, he is unmistakably made

32 Paula Rabinowitz’s article primarily focuses on the documentary photography of Margaret Bourke-White. The dynamics of the “middle-class inspection of the poor,” which Rabinowitz makes out as a key characteristic of cultural expressions in the Thirties (1996: 188), can be traced in Buck’s novel as well. Furthermore, the reference to Rabinowitz’s article makes sense in another respect: Rabinowitz explains that for many female artists who belonged to the white middle class the depression provided an opportunity to “move out of their previously restricted role” and into the public limelight (Rabinowitz 1996: 195). This observation also holds true for Buck who, after all, gained prominence with the publication of The Good Earth. 33 For a discussion of Dorothea Lange’s documentary photography and her “Migrant Mother,” in particular, see, for example, Linda Gordon, Dorothea Lange. A Life Beyond Limits (2009), or Jeff Allred, American Modernism and Depression Documentary (2010).

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aware of class differences between the rich Hwangs and himself; he feels insecure and uncomfortable – and reveals first subtle signs of envy regarding the display of luxury all around the house. It is in these lavish surroundings that Wang Lung sees O-lan for the first time. From the outset, she is depicted as the epitome of poverty and economic hardship, as the descriptions of her physique reveal. The text aestheticizes poverty through O-lan’s body and with this evokes the readers’ sympathy for this character. Wang Lung’s father purchases her for Wang Lung out of domestic or economic considerations – and decidedly not for her beauty, as he makes clear in a conversation with his son: Wang Lung had suffered that she must not be pretty. It could be something to have a pretty wife that other men would congratulate him upon having. His father, seeing his mutinous face, had cried out at him, “And what will we do with a pretty woman? We must have a woman who will tend the house and bear children as she works in the fields, and will a pretty woman do these things? She will be forever thinking about clothes to go with her face! No, not a pretty woman in our house. We are farmers. Moreover, who has heard of a pretty slave who was virgin in a wealthy house? All the young lords have had their fill of her. It is better to be first with an ugly woman than the hundredth with a beauty. Do you imagine a pretty woman will think your farmer’s hands as pleasing as the soft hands of a rich man’s son, and your sunblack face as beautiful as the golden skin of the others who had had her for their pleasure?” (GE 8-9)

The selection of O-lan as a bride exemplifies “the objectification and commodification of women as laborers and reproductive tools,” as Mari Yoshihara has rightfully claimed, and it also shows “that a man’s wealth determined the sexual relations he practiced and a woman’s sexuality determined her economic value in the market” (Yoshihara 2003: 159). As an additional labor force to the family, O-lan is deprived of any trait of womanly attractiveness. Her plainness and lack of sensuality are repeatedly highlighted in the text and at stages virtually become a leitmotif: O-lan’s “hair was rough and brown and unoiled, [ … ] her face [ … ] large and flat [ … ] , [and] her features too large altogether and without any sort of beauty or

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light” (GE 169).34 The imagery of the land or the earth, already taken up in the description of the kitchen, is once again employed in the portrayal of Olan: descriptions of her “face […] streaked with the earth” and her complexion “brown as the very soil itself” (GE 30)35 further add to her commodification as a laborer and thus indicate her class belonging. By stressing O-lan’s physical appearance and her lack of womanly attractiveness so prominently and aligning her bodily features with her status as a poor laborer, then, the text points to the concatenation of economic questions or, more generally, class concerns with those of sexuality and gender issues, as critics like Yoshihara have shown. Buck’s novel addresses these issues in close connection and on the level of representation and aesthetic enactments. Thus, as long as the couple remains poor, Wang Lung does not care too much about his wife’s plainness, and her work ethos and

34 On a textual level, the focalizer of O-lan’s physical features is, of course, once again Wang Lung. He observes, examines, and judges her. Along these lines, Olan is subject to the notorious male gaze (although it is here the gaze by an ethnically ‘other’ man). I suggest, however, that the concept of the gaze can also be expanded to the (female) middle-class reader of Buck’s text here. It thus turns into the “gaze down,” which Eric Schoket has made out as a popular strategy to describe class differences in sentimental narratives: the look at the poor, or more precisely, the middle-class “gaze over the divide at the Other […] is an integral part of nineteenth-century narratives of sentiment” (Schoket 2006: 2; see also Christ 2010: 21; 26). As a twist to this argument, Stephen Spencer has discussed the numerous references to dark as opposed to light body features in the novel. According to Spencer, Chinese characters are time and again described in terms of brown, dark colors (like O-lan’s brown hair in the above scene, or her and Wang Lung’s brown, earthen skin color), whereas the female missionary’s complexion described in the scene at the beginning is light. “[L]ight skin is associated with urban life, wealth, and upper-class status,” Spencer sums up and argues that these examples can be as an underlying privileging of whiteness in the novel (Spencer 2002: n. p.). By contrast, Buck herself considered the “brownskinned, blue-coated men and women of the earth,” whom she had met in Chinese villages, as the epitome of the “flow of nature” (“China in the Mirror of her Fiction” 1930: 158) and thus as a paragon of rural perfection. 35 On O-lan’s looks and her role as a symbol of the ‘good earth,’ see also Gao 2000: 103.

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connection to the land are centrally negotiated – and described in a tone of appraisal – on the level of her physical features. What is particularly important about O-lan’s endurance and hardworking ethos is that in the early stages of her marriage, she and Wang Lung share their responsibilities. The success of the Wangs’ marriage is not based on romantic attachment, but on pragmatism, and it derives out of an economic necessity which, once again, is repeatedly described in a scenically aestheticized – if not romanticized – way: cultivating their farm land, they “mov[e] together in a perfect rhythm, without a word, hour after hour, [in a] perfect sympathy of movement” (GE 29). I read the depiction of the perfect physical harmony between the working couple as Buck’s critique of the Western capitalist system with its gendered distribution of labor and the separation of spheres, as it was advocated in many middlebrow texts of the time.36 In Buck’s fictionalized version of rural China, financial or economic ends can only be met once the couple joins forces and once a genderspecific division of labor is left behind. Again, the economic downtrodden and the ethnic ‘Other’ serve Buck as a projection surface to convey this message to her American readership. Wang Lung and O-lan can only overcome natural catastrophes because they cultivate and rebuild the land as “a union” (GE 29). The land is central because of its capacity to “tie the man and the woman together” (Yoshihara 2003: 163).37

36 For example, these dynamics are prominently at work in Dorothy Canfield’s The Home-Maker (1924). Like other middlebrow texts of the time, Canfield’s novel initially paves the way for a more progressive interpretation of gender roles in the economy and opens up a potential avenue for alternative lifestyles (with the woman becoming the – temporary – breadwinner of the family). Importantly, however, the novel ultimately falls back into rather conservative structures and re-establishes conventional gender roles at the end of the narrative. For a discussion of The Home-Maker and the conservatism of gender roles in the middlebrow, see, for instance, Christ/Künnemann 2010. 37 At a later stage in her career, Buck further expanded on this view and elaborated on the greater integration of women into the American labor force and the problematic gendered separation of (work) spheres. In her political essay collections Of Men and Women (1941) and What America Means to Me (1942) she called for a greater number of American women to leave the domestic sphere and enter the public sphere of the labor market. By contrast to Betty Friedan in The Femi-

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It is only when Wang Lung has climbed the social ladder that the separation of spheres in the marriage fully develops and that the couple becomes estranged, epitomized by Wang Lung taking his two concubines. With the advent of the family’s economic rise, then, gender relations and the Wangs’ marital relations, in particular, transform significantly. Yoshihara aptly observes on this aspect that As [Wang Lung] attains wealth, the reconstruction of his domestic life and his ideas about sexuality play a key role in his emulation of middle-class and upper-class life [and] his disgust with his wife for not being sexually attractive demonstrates how the transformation of his class status affected his ideas about women. (Yoshihara 2003: 159-60)

Upper-class belonging in The Good Earth is accompanied by an intensification of the patriarchal structures, as well as suffering and misery on the part of the wife – and the formerly ‘progressive’ couple now falls back into more traditional gender roles. Once again, the protagonist’s elevation of class status, usually represented as an asset in middlebrow texts and ragsto-riches stories, is depicted in negative terms – and significantly, the plain and enduring figure of O-lan is affected most severely by the changes. Olan – very literally – cannot survive in this ‘alien’ capitalist system, because she is a far cry from the representative, beautiful lady that Wang Lung now expects her to be. As a result, the readers side and suffer with O-lan and experience the “sentimental education” of the middlebrow (Radway 1997: 17) through her. This is particularly striking, as the typical identification dynamics in a middlebrow text usually rely on the female heroine’s overt display of her emotions which triggers the reader’s investment in the text, as I explained above. By contrast, this concept of an emotionally expressive female figure is not given in The Good Earth – a circumstance that further manifests Olan’s iconicity. In fact, next to her lack of physical beauty, the very absence of emotions is a key feature of O-lan, and, closely connected to that, the

nine Mystique (1963), Buck blamed no one but women themselves for the present conditions, urging them to take more active measures to achieve gender equality.

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novel moves beyond the romance plot often found in middlebrow texts.38 Long after her first encounter with Wang Lung in the House of Hwang and

38 In contrast to Buck’s 1931 novel, the 1937 film adaptation of The Good Earth largely represents a ‘Westernized boy-meets-girl’ love plot (Conn 1996: 192) along the lines of the notorious Hollywood romance delighting female audiences and deterring male viewers. By focusing on the love relationship between Wang Lung and O-lan and by emphasizing the close bonds among the family members, the film anticipated the family melodrama as established in the 1940s and 50s which presented the family as an ideological framework, or a microcosm indicative of the (mal)functioning of society (Klein 2003: 146). Although contemporary (American) reviews of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer’s adaptation of The Good Earth were consistently enthusiastic and, for example, celebrated the film as a “superb translation of a literary classic [of] uniform excellence” (Frank Nurgent in Conn 1996: 191), the film in fact strongly deviates from the original novel, as I have discussed elsewhere (Künnemann 2007). Buck herself was critical of MGM’s blockbuster, perceiving of it as having “taken on a new life of its own [ …] a life beyond my conception [ …] ” (qtd. in Hoban 1994: 127) and dismissing it as “too loud and too noisy” (qtd. in Conn 1996: 196). Most markedly, it is the emphasis on filmic O-lan’s extraordinary physical beauty that forms a stark contrast to the novel, further intensifying the film’s style as an “American romance,” as Buck angrily contested at some point (qtd. in Conn 1996: 196). Furthermore contrary to Buck’s concern to depict ‘authentic’ Chinese characters and customs, MGM ignored Buck’s suggestion to exclusively cast Chinese actors for the film and thus catered to the “assumed prejudices of American audiences,” as Peter Conn has pointed out (1996: 194). The major roles were played by European-American actors in Chinese costume and make-up, led by Paul Muni in the role of Wang Lung and Luise Rainer as O-lan, who won an Academy Award for Best Actress in a Leading Role for her performance. This added to the overall Westernized, melodramatic conception of the film and its transformation into a romance; at the same time, the reliance on a Caucasian cast indicates racist tendencies in the Hollywood of the 1930s which mostly allowed for Asian characters along the lines of the Charlie Chan stereotype. Critical studies of The Good Earth sometimes equate Buck’s novel and the film. While the film is clearly another outlet of middlebrow expression and aesthetics, it actually works on very different premises. For an in-depth discussion of the film version of The Good Earth, see Conn 1996, Hoban 1994, or Künnemann 2007.

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even after their wedding, O-lan is still anonymous. She remains a woman without a name far into the first third of the book.39 For example, after he has taken his new wife home with him and introduced her to her new home, “Wang Lung [goes] into the kitchen to bid the woman serve” (GE 23). In his wedding night, he thinks of “this woman of his” (GE 26), and even after some months of married life, “she [still] never talked, this woman, except for the brief necessities of life” (GE 28, my emphases). O-lan’s anonymity is indicative of her unemotional representation, inarticulateness,40 and passivity throughout the novel, as Mari Yoshihara has argued: Although many reviews of the novel have framed O-lan as the heroine, her heroism lay in the power of her silence and perseverance, rather than in her agency to change the world around her. Secondly, the novel differs from other domestic fiction because it does not highlight the emotional and sentimental intensity of the characters. On the contrary, the novel stresses the lack of, or repression of, emotions in the characters (Yoshihara 2003: 158, my emphases).

Contrary to well-established definitions of melodrama which demarcate abundance and excess of emotional display as the most important cornerstone of the composition and functioning of the melodramatic mode,41 I suggest that it is precisely O-lan’s lack of emotion that renders Buck’s text melodramatic and causes the “sentimental identification between spectator and character” (Brooks 1976: 83). Her enduring and “sacrificial” nature

39 The anonymity of characters is a device which Buck employed a number of times in her fiction of the 1920s and 30s. For example, the Andrew of her biographies remains unnamed well into Fighting Angel. Buck further made use of the figure of the anonymous husband in East Wind, West Wind, as we have seen. This device is also a characteristic feature of the generic “Mother” in Buck’s novel of the same name (published in 1934), as Phyllis Bentley explained (1935: 799). 40 Xiongya Gao has argued that O-lan’s inarticulateness should not be confused with a lack of intellect (2000: 94) and chosen to call her an astute “observer rather than speaker” (2000: 100). 41 Most prominently, Peter Brooks in his seminal study The Melodramatic Imagination defines emotional abundance and excess as the epitome of melodrama (Brooks 1976: viii; 199).

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(Leong 2005: 29)42 allows for a dramatic increase in the audience’s emotional bonding with O-lan – she indeed manages to “catch […] the reader’s heart” (Gao 2000: 95). Winfried Fluck identifies such an “emotional and cultural bond between text and reader” as a core ingredient of the sentimental formula (Fluck 1991: 15) which is transported by melodrama. Similarly, Martha Vicinus has contended that “melodrama always sides with the powerless” (1981: 130). These processes of bonding and taking sides are strongly at work in The Good Earth, evoked by O-lan’s powerlessness and voicelessness. In many scenes of the novel, this effect is achieved by a total absence of emotions on the part of O-lan. This is, for instance, the case when she announces to her husband that she is pregnant with the couple’s first child: When the sun had set he straightened his back slowly and looked at the woman. Her face was wet and streaked with the earth. She was brown as the very soil itself. Her wet, dark garments clung to her square body. She smoothed a last furrow slowly. Then in her usual plain way she said, straight out, her voice flat and more than usually plain in the silent evening air, “I am with child.” […] She stooped to pick up a bit of broken brick and threw it out of the furrow. It was as though she had said, “I have brought you tea,” or as though she had said, “We can eat.” (GE 30)

Since O-lan’s lack of emotion in this scene is even more ‘excessive’ than elsewhere in the novel (“her voice flat and more than usually plain”), the short and bare – albeit highly important – announcement that she is pregnant is melodramatically intensified. During her pregnancy, she never stops working in the fields and even during childbirth, she interrupts her labor to prepare food for her husband and her father-in-law and returns to the farm work soon after the birth (see Gao 2000: 95). Buck’s depiction of pregnancy and childbirth can be seen in the context of the overall popularity of these two topics in 1930s women’s fiction, as Elaine Showalter has shown

42 Xiongya Gao and Patricia Raub both make a similar argument regarding O-lan and the theme of (self-) sacrifice. Raub, for example, reads O-lan’s life as a “continual series of sacrifices” (1994: 86). See Raub’s chapter “Sacrificial Heroines” (1994) and Gao’s chapter “Peasant Women” (2000).

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(Showalter 2009: 335).43 In this framework, Buck’s approach was still somewhat unique. She “received particular praise for her straightforward account of O-lan giving birth. This scene, written in detached prose that echoed contemporary anthropological accounts of ‘primitive’ societies, had a realism rendered more acceptable to American readers by its focus on a foreign body in a foreign location” (Leong 2005: 27). Already these scenes revolving around pregnancy and childbirth with their underlying melodramatic style and emphasis on O-lan’s diligence and equanimity allow for the readers’ sympathy with O-lan, and on this basis the readers’ emotional bonds with O-lan become even stronger as the story proceeds. When Wang Lung, eventually wealthy after times of severe economic struggle, takes his second concubine, Lotus, into the house, most relatives are outraged and his uncle’s wife expresses pungent criticism. From his wife, O-lan, by contrast, comes an indefinable, inarticulate “broken sound” (GE 192) as the only sign of disapproval. Instead, she suffers in silence and expresses her grief in subtle gestures and actions such as not brushing her hair for several days (GE 196). Eventually though, there is an emotional reaction that can be described as almost lavish for a character like O-lan: [ …] one morning O-lan burst into tears and wept aloud, as [Wang Lung] had never seen her weep before, even when they starved, or at any other time. He said harshly, therefore, “Now what, woman? Cannot I say comb out your horse’s tail of hair without this trouble over it?” But she answered nothing except to say over and over, moaning, “I have borne you sons – I have borne you sons –” (GE 196)

On the rare occasions that O-lan does display reactions of any kind at all, these appear as heightened or overdrawn and become exemplarily melodramatic. Her tears, then, are effective as regards the readers’ bonding with this character, because they strongly deviate from the female tears in classical sentimental fiction. There, the female heroine’s tears abound and as a result are at a risk of losing their effect on the readership (see Fluck 1991). By contrast, because it is singular, O-lan’s one and only outburst comes as

43 Next to pregnancy and childbirth, Showalter lists “abortion, sexual politics, literary creativity, menstruation, [and] loss of virginity” as further prominent topics in women’s fiction of the day (Showalter 2009: 335).

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a relief to the reader and is proof of her humanity. Yet, even in the passage I have just quoted, O-lan does not come across as particularly articulate, desperately repeating the one phrase “I have borne you sons” without any variation – and in a moaning tone, like a helpless child. This repetitive phrase or the earlier plain announcement “I am with child” can be seen as an “echo of the historically voiceless,” which David Grimsted identified as a prominent component in melodramatic texts (Grimsted 1971: 80). O-lan’s “echo” is simple, bare, or even instinctive rather than a deliberate speech act – and this is exactly what makes it so emphatic and urgent.44 That melodramatic conventions are closely intertwined with O-lan’s iconicity becomes especially apparent in a scene which, at first sight, challenges the reader’s identification with O-lan most strongly: her committing infanticide. During the famine, the family starves and O-lan is pregnant again. Immediately upon giving birth, she chokes her new-born daughter to avoid having to feed another mouth: [Wang Lung] went in, and [O-lan] lay there upon the bed, her body scarcely raising the cover. She lay alone. “Where is the child?” he asked. She made a slight movement of her hand upon the bed and he saw upon the floor the child’s body. “Dead!” he exclaimed. “Dead,” she whispered. He stooped and examined the handful of its body – a wisp of bone and skin – a girl. He was about to say, “But I heard it crying – alive –” and then he looked at the woman’s face. Her eyes were closed and the color of her flesh was the color of ashes and her bones stuck up under the skin – a poor silent face that lay there, having endured to the utmost, and there was nothing he could say. After all, during these months he had had only his own body to drag about. What agony of starvation this woman had endured, with the starved creature gnawing at her from within, desperate for its own life! (GE 82)

This episode strongly works with the tableau effects often found in melodrama and is once again described in a very scenic way, as the readers follow Wang Lung into the room and experience and see with him. “The

44 O-lan’s voicelessness and its rudimentary transcendence is an interesting variation of the trope of women missionaries’ oscillation between voicelessness and powerlessness on the one hand and agency on the other which I discussed in the first two chapters.

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woman’s face,” “the color of her flesh,” “the poor silent face,” “the agony of starvation” – everything appears immediate and simultaneous. The scene is deeply disturbing and unsettling, but importantly, it is not repulsive at all or results in the readers’ turn away from O-lan. On one level, the Chinese infanticide demarcates the text as alien, as it hints to a practice (particularly the infanticide of female children) which is remote from the American readers’ lebenswelt. However, O-lan’s action is still condoned: given the family’s deplorable economic circumstances, her action is not condemned, but presented as a necessity (see Gao 2000: 102; Liao 1997: 69-70). Arguably more than in any other scene, O-lan’s suffering and self-sacrifice on the one hand and her strength and determination on the other hand are expressed here. Again, this figure calls to mind Lange’s migrant mother, whose iconicity works on the same principles. The readers’ bond to and with O-lan, I would venture, not only remains intact, but becomes even more intense as an outcome of this episode. The infanticide scene exemplifies that O-lan is not unconditionally a victim, but that there are rudimentary traces of agency on her part. Mari Yoshihara, for example, has read this peculiar mixture of O-lan’s lack of emotion, her self-sacrifice, inarticulateness, endurance, and strength as a sign of her subtle power (2003: 158). This subdued empowerment portends to what Hayford has called the novel’s “complicated feminism” (Hayford 1994: 25). As a former slave-girl, she is picked to marry the peasant Wang Lung without a choice whatsoever, is affected by the patriarchal structures of her rural village, and suffers for most of the story. However, she is not passive throughout, but in times of crisis develops an agency which further consolidates her iconicity. Significantly, this agency manifests itself in those moments when the Wangs’ household economy is endangered. In characteristically pragmatic fashion, O-lan kills the family’s ox to feed her family during a famine, and it is thanks to her action and tenacity that the family’s belongings can be rescued from looting villagers. Later, O-lan is the one member of the family who best copes with the urban economy.45 When the Wang family is forced to leave their land after

45 In this respect, O-lan can be compared to Mrs. Liang in Kinfolk, a rather weak character who, similar to O-lan, manages to cope with ‘two lives’ – the ‘old’ China and its traditions, as well as American urban modernity. For a discussion of Kinfolk and Mrs. Liang, see chapter 5.

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a drought and its ensuing famine and heads for the big city, they virtually live as beggars in outmost poverty. Wang Lung works as a rickshaw-puller and makes his wife and children beg for money to make ends meet, and he suffers greatly in these times, because he experiences this crisis as a personal loss of autonomy and authority over his family (Yoshihara 2003: 160). O-lan, by contrast, adapts quite easily to the circumstances and displays a great sense of pragmatism and creativity in the situation, as the incident with the ‘recycled’ tract related at the outset of the chapter illustrated. Likewise, she is lenient when her son steals food, and shows how skillful or even cunning she is when, amidst revolutionary lootings in the city, she discovers hidden jewels – pearls – and seizes them in an act which prevents her family’s death by starvation in the city and which, ironically from O-lan’s point of view, will later turn out to be a key factor of the family’s rise to wealth. Importantly, the fact that O-lan takes others’ property, or, to put it bluntly, that she steals, is not problematized in the text but presented as a necessity and thus condoned. This theft does not turn O-lan into a heroine or suggest that she has become a markedly strong figure here, but once again, hers is a sort of power which emerges out of an overall weak position and acute misery. When O-lan takes the pearls in the non-agitated and low-key manner which is typical of her, the scene is depicted in a matter-of-fact tone. At the same time, though, it also has a touching effect, because the objects of O-lan’s theft are pearls – a sign of the female “love for beauty” which O-lan so clearly lacks, as Gao has suggested (2000: 98). The readers’ emotional closeness to O-lan – in this scene as in the entire novel – works on two levels: they can feel pity and sympathy for her, and at the same time, they are encouraged to admire her and see her as a role model who copes with an economic crisis. This twofold function of O-lan reflects Buck’s project in The Good Earth as a whole: it is a project which is very much embedded in middlebrow aesthetics and at the same time centrally positioned in the context of the Great Depression. The unexceptional figure of O-lan is particularly suitable to represent this exceptional time and negotiate Buck’s middlebrow mission. The city life and its revolutionary chaos and threat, which I have touched upon at the end of this chapter, are indicative of Buck’s literary project in the years to come. In a number of her novels, she discussed the (impending) transformation of society – on both sides of the Pacific – and time and again pitted backwardness against innovation, tradition against

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modernity, or rurality against urbanity. The Good Earth addresses change on many levels and clearly opts for the old ways – the “ancient, primitive, and slow,” as Karen Leong has put it (2005: 29). This unreserved nostalgia or celebration of the ‘old’ is no longer possible in Buck’s ensuing fiction. In these texts, in particular those of the 1940s and 50s, the clash between modernity and tradition becomes more complicated, as I will explore in the next two chapters.

5. China/Town Hybridity and (Neo-)Missionary Nostalgia: “His Own Country” and Kinfolk

At first glance, it seems surprising for a novelist and political activist who was widely regarded as a cultural broker between the East and the West to neglect in her fiction the most evident site of East–West contact scenarios: the American Chinatown. By the late 1930s, most of Pearl Buck’s novels had indeed been set either in Asia (especially China) or the United States,1 but had rarely addressed American and Chinese subject matter and locations “within the pages of one book” (Doyle 1965: 134). Thus, the publications of the short story “His Own Country” (1941)2 and, some years later,

1

The Townsman, published in 1945 under the pseudonym ‘John Sedges,’ is an interesting case in point here, as this novel is one of Buck’s first attempts at depicting an all-American setting, presenting small-town life in Kansas from the perspective of a male Western hero. While on the one hand different from the concerns of Kinfolk, as I will analyze them here, The Townsman still shares a similar understanding of village life with the later novel. For a discussion of The Townsman and Buck’s adaptation of the all-American genre of the Western, see Conn (1996: 288-290).

2

The short story was originally published “in the British periodical Argosy in 1939 and was not widely accessible to an American audience until 1941 as part of Today and Forever and the basis of a radio play” as Karen Leong recounts (2005: 39). Leong speculates that the delayed American publication “suggests that Buck, her literary agent, or magazine editors did not believe American readers would be as receptive to this story when it was first written” (2005: 39).

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of the novel Kinfolk (1949) have a special status in Buck’s oeuvre, as both of these texts introduce New York’s Chinatown. In many respects, this turn to Chinatown appears to be a logical move on Buck’s part. In the first place, the hybridity of this setting can be seen as a reflection of the in-betweenness of her figure of the neo-missionary. As I have explained before, Buck’s neo-missionary figures are the descendants of an older generation of missionaries (or rather missionary types, for it is rarely a religious mission which Buck depicts in her texts). They engage in missionary projects which are alternatives to the ‘old’ projects of the parental generation: the neo-missionaries’ focus is on secular, humanitarian work which is geared to bring together cultures and people and thus ‘better the world.’ In their roles as cultural mediators and educators, these figures need to display flexibility and adaptability and to transgress clear-cut boundaries. At the same time, though, they are still deeply informed by the parental projects, and inevitably have to negotiate between the old and the new structures, between tradition and modernization. With this, Buck’s neomissionaries are liminal, in-between figures who often reflect Buck’s own views and agendas. The neo-missionary theme in her fiction enabled Buck to revise the older missionary project and to revisit and reassess her own role as a second-generation missionary, and her position as a secular, a ‘liberal missionary, ’ to evoke Xi Lian’s term once again. The neo-missionary figure and the concept and vision around it became prominent in Buck’s fiction from the 1940s onwards, and thus at a time when both American and Chinese society and politics were undergoing profound changes. It is precisely at the time of the impending Cold War and when China was turning to communism that Buck endowed her fictional characters with a mobility which saw them move back and forth between the United States and China more frequently. Again, the Chinatown setting seems ideal to address this mobility. Given the fact that the Chinatown was a highly popular topic in the fiction of the 1940s and 50s, it is tempting, then, to position Pearl Buck’s Chinatown fiction in the context of Asian American fiction of the time which portrayed Chinatown life. Authors like Pardee Lowe or Jade Snow Wong depicted the success stories of assimilable Asian Americans and employed the theme of mobility to show how the younger generation emancipates itself from their parents, moves out of the Chinatown, and integrates into white urban America. These young pro-

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tagonists are geographically and culturally flexible, and manage to move back and forth between tradition and modernization.3 However, Pearl Buck deviated markedly from the depictions of Wong, Lowe, and others. The characters’ geographical and mental mobility as well as their emancipation from the older generation is, in fact, much more intricate in Buck’s texts. Ironically, both in “His Own Country” and in Kinfolk, this complication is closely intertwined with the characters’ specific functions and roles which defy such a success story and mobility – their understanding of themselves as neo-missionaries. As we will see, Buck’s neomissionaries find themselves in a dilemma: on the one hand, they strive to be adaptive to the changing demands of their project and want to rid themselves of the paternal sphere of influence, but on the other hand, they are still deeply affected by it. In fact, their very upbringing by (quasi-) missionary fathers and the ideals of this older generation constitute severe impediments for the new missionaries’ projects to come into their own: thus, the neo-missionaries become trapped by their legacy. The circumstance that Buck’s neo-missionaries are Chinese American characters in these two texts aggravates this double bind. Through their teachings about China as a traditional and elevated country, the figures of the fathers implant a persistent consciousness of exile and a sense of nostalgia for this ‘place of origin’ into their children. The younger generation fails to dislodge this missionary nostalgia, as I suggest to call it. As a result, they have difficulty in knowing what constitutes ‘home’ in the first place. This is important because, despite their cultural in-betweenness, the second generation in these texts still needs these reference points. In both, “His Own Country” and Kinfolk, these themes are intensified by means of the Chinatown setting. The Chinatown serves as a springboard to introduce the clash between a ‘hybrid,’ Americanized urbanity and an ‘authentic,’ Chinese rurality.

3

For a discussion of the success stories of second-generation Chinese Americans and their oscillation between Chinatown tradition and urban modernity in these and other texts, see, for example, Elaine Kim’s Asian American Literature (1982), Ronald Takaki’s Strangers from a Different Shore (1989), Xiao-huang Yin’s Chinese American Literature since the 1850s (2000), or, more recently, Mary Lui’s “Rehabilitating Chinatown at Mid-Century” (2011).

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Pearl Buck does not discard her neo-missionary figures, but sympathizes with them and their dilemma and seeks to come up with a resolution, a ‘happy ending’ for her characters. Both texts, then, still attest to Buck’s plea for neo-missionary activity. Yet, Buck also expresses her skepticism vis-à-vis an excessive hybridity when she discusses the struggles of her figures in hybrid surroundings, as I will show.

“H IS O WN C OUNTRY ” – T HE R ETURN TO O NE ’ S ‘R OOTS ’? “His Own Country” addresses the trend of American-born Chinese returning to China to work for the betterment of their ‘homeland’,” as Karen Leong has summarized the overall theme of the short story (Leong 2005: 39). With this, the text sketches the theme which the novel Kinfolk should address in a more nuanced and complex way eight years later. In this sense, “His Own Country” can be regarded as a sort of ‘testing ground’ for the later text. At the beginning of the story, we find ourselves right in the middle of New York’s Chinatown: John Dewey Chang had always known that Mott Street, New York, was not his country. People said Chinatown, but it was not the same as his own country. He was perfectly familiar with all these noisy, narrowing streets, he knew the shops whose windows were filled with a mixture of things from across the sea and things American, he knew the men and women and the many children whose skin was yellow like his own, and whose eyes were all black. Many of them, like himself, had been born in these crowded lively streets, and had never seen anything else. But still he knew this was not his country. (“His Own Country” 82)4

The scene is presented to the readers through the eyes of the story’s protagonist, the American-born Chinese “John Dewey Chang.” This name, an American and Asian fusion, already indicates his status as an in-between

4

Subsequent citations of the short story will be indicated as “HOC.”

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character.5 What is more, the naming of the protagonist after an important American philosopher and reformer also serves to introduce the missionary theme of the story. John Dewey, we learn right from the beginning, feels uncomfortable amidst these hybrid surroundings: although he was born in Chinatown and is familiar with its noise and narrowness, the son of a curio shop-owner is acutely aware that this is not his “own” country. Indeed, the word “own” features prominently throughout the text, suggesting the importance of categories of the ‘self’ and the ‘foreign’ for John. His feelings of alienation and unbelonging in American society have two reasons: in the first place, he feels rejected because of his race. As a “Chinaman” student, John is excluded from associating with his classmates at school: “The first time, indeed, that he knew he did not belong here, that none of them belonged here, was when he went to school” and when white American children refuse to sit next to him or “walk beside a Chinaman” (HOC 82-83; 84). Until that point, the father’s “dark inner room [behind the curio shop] smelling of dried herb and ginger and tea” (HOC 82) had provided him shelter and fostered an idea of what constituted his ‘own’ culture. Next to his (very real) rejection by other children, however, John’s sense of alienation and displacement derives from a set of romanticized views of China as ‘home.’ These ascriptions of China as an idyllic, perfect place are instilled within him by his parents, particularly his father: “Do not forget you are a son of Han, and that you do not belong to these wild white tribes among whom we must live until I grow rich. Be polite to your teacher, obey what your elders command, and keep your mind on your books.” (HOC 83)

In keeping with the dominant themes of Chinese American narratives of immigration of the mid-twentieth century, the father advises his child to keep his head down, to assimilate, and to be an industrious and obeying

5

As we have seen, names (or their omission, as in the case of O-lan and Kweilan’s husband) are always important in Buck’s fiction. For American or Chinese characters, Buck – after her fiction of the 1930s – increasingly employed American/Western first names and retained Chinese surnames. In the case of neomissionary figures, these first names are often religious, originating in the Christian bible. In Kinfolk, for example, Buck introduces a Mary to her readers.

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student. All the same, he implies that life in the United States is a temporary necessity (“among whom we must live”) and that there lies a future ahead for them in ‘their’ old China once they have bettered their economic condition. According to John’s father, this old China is decidedly not a place of “wild tribes” and commonness, but it is sophisticated and almost sublime. The father, then, conveys his elitist cultural ideal to John. He is, after all, a “son of Han.” It is with this mindset and stories about a mythical China that John grows up, evoking in him the paradoxical feeling of being “homesick for that which he had never seen” (HOC 87): […] he thought with longing of his own country. There, there were quiet streets and singing country folk and richly tilled fields and courtesy and stillness and certainty. He would be among his own there, his own kind. He had heard his mother tell such tales of the small country town where she grew up, a town in south China where everybody, she said, was happy. (HOC 87)

As a result of the quasi ‘mythical’ stories told to him by his parents, the Chinese ‘home’ and the American abode are clearly played off against each other: China denotes a pastoral idyll, harmony, richness in human and natural resources, and peaceful existence. In turn, life in America, and especially in the chaotic, undecipherable metropolis of New York, is characterized by estrangement and displacement. The juxtaposition of Western modernity and urbanization on the one hand and Chinese tradition, steadiness, and small-town rurality on the other6 is employed here to emphasize the centrality of China as an imagined

6

With the trope of country and city as an oppositional pair, Buck’s text can be placed in a long tradition of especially English literature ranging from the restoration comedy, eighteenth-century authors like Gay, Hogarth, and Fielding, to the late nineteenth-century and texts by Dickens or Hardy, as Raymond Williams traced it in his seminal study The Country and the City (1973). Williams observed a remarkable persistence of these images (for example, “noise” for the city and “backwardness” for the country) in fiction, despite the fact that both the city and the countryside developed and reshaped significantly over time, a circumstance which would actually have called for a reconsideration of this set of oppositions (Williams 1973: 1-2). According to Williams, however, the rhetori-

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sanctuary for John. This place is geographically distant, but very much present on John’s mind; its idea may be abstract to him, but it is tangible nevertheless: the longing for it almost literally makes him homesick at times. John’s initially rather vague longing for his “own” country as a place of origin and rootedness will intensify in the course of the story. In fact, his urge to get to China becomes almost obsessive: “[…] he had one deep secret purpose, one aching ambition. He must find his own country” (HOC 85). To this end, he subordinates everything else. For example, John denies his nascent romantic feelings for Ruth Kin, a neighbor girl. He is clearly fascinated by her, but at the same times tries to persuade himself that she is much too Americanized to become a serious love interest; thus, he finds a further reason to focus all his energy on his envisaged life in China. To prepare for this life, he studies hard to graduate with the best possible degree from school and delves into the Chinese culture and language in private lessons given by a tutor. In the process, John further alienates himself from his American surroundings and – because of his solitary quest – becomes isolated: All during college when the others were playing football or going to movies or making dates, John Chang worked on his plans for his country. Here was the question: Should he delay his return further by taking some sort of special course – say, be an aviator or an architect or a doctor – or should he go straight home as soon as he was through? (HOC 89)

This urge, eagerness, and unconditional focus on the imminent project – as well as the arguable naiveté going along with it – are reminiscent of a missionary’s attitude, as Karen Leong has argued. In the case of John, the urge to do something is supported by his conviction that China would need and welcome him. Because of this exaggerated opinion of himself, Leong has

cal contrast between town/city and country life was upheld in much of this fiction over the centuries in order to “promote superficial comparisons and to prevent real ones” (Williams 1973: 54). By “real” comparisons, Williams means politico-economic differences between the city and the country. Similar to the English examples given by Williams, Buck remains on the level of rhetorical contrast, I would argue.

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compared this character to Buck’s father of the biographies, arguing that both are men “seeking individual recognition – only this time instead of American evangelical Christianity he [John] is bringing American liberal democracy to China” (Leong 2005: 40). When she refers to John’s venture as an alternative to the old evangelical project, Leong implies that this figure ought to be understood as a neomissionary rather than an old missionary. John might share the stubbornness of Buck’s father, as Leong contends, but his project will be of a secular, humanitarian kind. While John still contemplates upon his possible graduate studies in medicine, architecture, or aviation during his college years, he is already busy earning money. In the end, it is this money that helps him to decide if he “should he go straight home,” as he puts it in the above quotation: John will use the money to invest into road-building in China and leave as soon as possible. The motif of road-building engages with the missionary theme in a highly intriguing manner here. On one level, the road-building project can be seen as the ideal expression of neo-missionary activity. It is, as I intimated above, an expansion of the old missionary project and can be read in terms of the social gospel and cultural mediation: through road-building, people are connected – in a literal as well as in a figurative sense. Roadbuilding allows for making contact and can thus also help to overcome the city/country-dichotomy I was referring to above. On another level, however, these Western projects of road-building can also be understood in terms of a takeover: they represent an (industrial) infiltration and imposed modernization of another, and in this sense, imperialist country. This imperialist aspect of the road-building project turns out to be a paradox: John fails to realize that it is people like him, the returnees, who have helped to turn China and its people into what it is: a hybrid, Americanized country. Like others, he is about to transport his Americanized views, political ideologies, mindset, and economic means to China, thus interspersing the place with ‘foreign’ ideas and hybridizing it in a manner that makes it a quasi-American Chinatown. James is blind and ignorant of these dynamics and of his own role in this constellation. Ironically, when he arrives in China, John bemoans the outcome of precisely those projects which he is about to implement himself. And importantly, the romanticization and idealization of China as a ‘pure’ place, as taught by his father, further accentuates this irony. John expects a peaceful,

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quiet, and pastoral China but instead is exposed to a scenario that reminds him of New York when he finally arrives in Shanghai. The shock which he experiences is introduced in a dramatically immediate style. The arrival is focalized through John: Then upon the land appeared tiny low houses, isolated, the colour [sic] of earth, and then the brown of the earth changed to brilliant green. The sun did not shine and the sky was grey. Against the grey the green was deeply vivid. But houses and fields were small and solitary upon the immensity of these ever-broadening arms of land. Here, here was his country. He yearned to it, he gazed upon it, he longed to leap across the yellow waters of the river and feel it beneath his feet, old, sure, unchanged, silent, welcoming him in silence. Then suddenly he lost it all. Suddenly the ship passed between tall buildings, edged ponderously to a dock, and silence was gone, all peace was lost. A horde of small brown blue-coated men leaped across the rails, chattering, shrieking a language he did not even understand. He used upon them the tongue he had learned from his mother, but they stared at him wild-eyed, searching. […] It was nothing to them that he was come home at last. […] It was at that moment that he lost his country completely. For standing among the crowd pouring from the ship, pouring from the streets, he might have been in any country again. He might even have been in New York. He heard no tongue he understood except the English he had left behind him. About him were tall Western buildings; he heard the din of street-cars in his ears. Suddenly the rain poured in a drum of noise upon the tin roof of the dock, and he was walled in by it, and he could do no more than wait, walled in with the crowd of alien motley people […]. (HOC 97-98)

This scene is interesting in its rendering of motion and chaos: together with John, we approach the harbor in slow motion, as if a camera was zooming in. To support this almost cinematographic description and set-up, the color imagery suggests harmony and the color saturation is rich and impressionistic. And then comes the moment of epiphany, reality, when the ship is about to cast anchor in the harbor. The scene closes in on John: everything becomes claustrophobic and traumatic. Between the tall, American styled

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buildings, John is entrapped. This city, Shanghai,7 is another New York. Similar to the “wild tribes” in the New York Chinatown, the “crowd of alien motley people” in Shanghai, too, makes John feel out of place. He has lost ‘his’ country and all sense of orientation and stability: as a result, his feeling of exile becomes omnipresent – home is nowhere. Or is it? John spends the following days desperately contemplating this question, hoping that by intruding further into the land, he will find the China his parents have told him about all these years: “Somewhere beyond these flat horizons was more, miles upon miles of his vast country, for him to discover” (HOC 101). This hope, however, comes across more as a desperate wish than as a firm conviction. Like the neo-missionary James in Kinfolk, John is penetrating further and further into the countryside. Different from the other missionary figure, however, John incessantly bemoans a ‘lost China’ and becomes increasingly unhappy when he is remains unable to reclaim ‘his’ country. Significantly, this misery is grounded in the idea of a China which perhaps never really existed in the first place – for it is the image of a China which John has only heard of; it is the inevitably subjective recollection evoked by his parents, who might have developed an unrealistic nostalgia for ‘their’ country out of their own displacement in America. As their descendant and recipient of these mythical, distorted stories and their missionary nostalgia, John now has to cope with the effects. Having been raised with this idea of an imagined place, he has now fallen into the ‘nostalgia trap,’ as I suggest with reference to the title of a work by Stephanie Coontz (2005).8

7

The image of Shanghai as a modern metropolis of chaos and disorder which unsettles, confuses, and deeply impacts her figures is prominent in Buck’s fiction, especially her short stories, of the time. “Home to Heaven” (in the collection Far and Near; 1949), “Hearts Come Home,” “Shanghai Scene,” or “Mr. Binney’s Afternoon” (all in the collection Today and Forever (1941), which also features “His Own Country”) are exemplary of this trend. I will further elaborate on the significance of the image of Shanghai – especially as opposed to that of Peking – when I turn to Kinfolk in the next part of this chapter.

8

I would like to emphasize that I only refer to the title of Stephanie Coontz’s monograph here. With its focus on images and constructions of American family life in the 1950s, Coontz’s book The Way We Never Were: American Fami-

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The impact of this nostalgia trap on the neo-missionary’s frame of mind and ability to perform is severe: yearning for an imagined China, stunned by modern Chinese reality and the constant questioning of whether he will, in the end, find ‘his’ true country somewhere, anywhere really, John becomes paralyzed and ineffective in his original aim to better the conditions in China to the extent that he seriously contemplates returning to America. “His Own Country” does, however, not end on this bleak note. Fortunately for John – and for Buck’s middlebrow readership, we might add – the resolution in this story comes in the guise of his former love interest Ruth Kin. In a rather implausible plot twist at the end, Ruth, who had always categorically excluded the possibility of ever setting foot on Chinese soil, announces her arrival in China and takes up life with John there. John pulls himself together and is initially eager to keep up the appearance of a comfortable, happy life in China for her and to make the Americanized Ruth feel at home. He rents a place that is meant to represent the ‘best’ of modern China in order to keep Ruth “safe and happy, secure from the knowledge of the dark native city. Really, he thought, she lived almost as she might have in an American city, as safe from sorrowful truth […] shut away from the real world” (HOC 114). But Ruth gradually sees through this staged version of China and – heavily pregnant with the couple’s first child and in the face of the outbreak of the Chinese-Japanese war – insists on living an ‘authentic’ life in China, with all its implications. Where John is ashamed of the dirt, filth, and decay which abounds and where he has become passive and ineffective, Ruth is “electric with vigour [sic]” (HOC 117) and wants to take action: “She did not mind these people. She was not in the least disappointed in them. They were only hungry people and she wanted to feed them. If they were dirty –” (HOC 118). While not conceived as a missionary figure, but as an ‘ordinary’ Chinese American woman of her time, Ruth turns out to be the one character who really ‘considers the people’9 and who is capable of entering into in-

lies and the Nostalgia Trap (1993) is placed in a very different context and does not discuss the dynamics of exilic/missionary nostalgia, as I do here. 9

Throughout her critique of the foreign missionary movement, Buck identified the lack of humanitarian concern as the most severe flaw in the methods and approaches of the ‘old’ generation of missionaries. As I have shown in chapter 2,

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tercultural communication. She is even “able to show John the common humanity of the Chinese” and “[…] eventually brings John into the community as well, enabling him to accept China as it is, and to claim it as its own country,” as Karen Leong has shown (2005: 40). Ruth is adaptable and flexible, I would argue, because she has learned and practiced these ‘skills’ for all her life in the American Chinatown. Free from the missionary nostalgia and legacy which affects John, she is able to focus on the essentials and pursue a humanitarian project. Characteristically, it is a female character whom Buck equips with this hands-on approach here. With this, Buck’s “His Own Country” sets the agenda for Kinfolk, anticipating the novel’s more complex engagement with hybridity.

‘S HOWING WHAT IT IS TO BE C HINESE ’: S TAGING C HINA/T OWN IN K INFOLK The publication of Kinfolk in 1949 is important in Buck’s oeuvre: first, it marks the beginning of the author’s later works, which tend to combine the two settings of China (or, more broadly, Asia) and America more closely. 10

the culmination of this critique was her 1932 speech “Is There a Case for Foreign Missions?,” in which Buck had expressed her concern that the traditional model of American missions with its inept missionaries had neglected people’s actual necessities: “The basic reason for the lack of the success in spreading the spirit of Christianity has been because neither the messenger nor the message has been suited to the needs of the people. The truth is we have never considered the people” (1932: 154). 10 Most of Buck’s fiction of the later phase of her career was written rather hastily and geared to make profit in order to finance her humanitarian projects. The bulk of the novels of this later stage still attracted a wide female readership, but they were virtually ignored by critics. And indeed, some of Buck’s novels such as Death in the Castle (1965), which depicts a murder case in British aristocratic surroundings, are a far cry from the serious aspirations which had marked Buck’s fictional project of the 1930s and they clearly cashed in on Buck’s popularity as a writer. Robert Shaffer contended that Buck in the 1950s and 60s was “more a women’s writer than a broad social critic” (Shaffer 1999: 166). I con-

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Secondly, Kinfolk is the only full-length novel in which Buck introduces Chinatown at all. While the New York Chinatown features only briefly at the beginning of “His Own Country,” it becomes somewhat more prominent in this novel, which constantly oscillates between its American and Chinese settings. As in “His Own Country,” the Chinatown in Kinfolk is unappealing in its liminality, and not a contact zone which brings two cultures together easily. Kinfolk opens with a very particular scene set in New York’s Chinatown: The theater in Chinatown was crowded to the doors. Every night actors brought from Canton played and sang the old Chinese operas. If Billy Pan, the manager, announced a deficit at the end of the lunar year, businessmen contributed money to cover it. The theater was a bulwark of home to them. Their children went to American schools, spoke the American language, acted like American children. The fathers and mothers were not highly educated people, and they could not express to the children what China was, except that it was their own country, which must not be forgotten. But in the theater the children could see for themselves what China was. (Kinfolk 1)

Significantly, Chinatown is first seen through a theater in the novel. It is made out as a stage, as a play attended by Chinese children, who “act like” American children in their diasporic lives, and by their parents, who strive for the authenticity this “bulwark of home” might offer them, for something that evokes the very notion of home and allows for a sense of belonging – a place that is “their own.” They may be aware that they are in a theater and thus at a place which is all about performance and which merely stages ‘life;’ but they fail to realize that there is an overlap between the performative character of the theater play and Chinatown life outside of the theater. Buck’s novel, however, highlights this artificial quality by linking the semantic fields of the stage and of urban ethnicity. Pearl Buck approaches Chinatown with skepticism and discomfort in this scene: where Chinese children speak and act like Americans, where a

sider Kinfolk and God’s Men, which I will discuss in the next chapter, as texts that are on the threshold between these phases in Buck’s oeuvre.

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community has to retreat to a theater in order to memorize ‘home,’ this community seems to be about to disappear. The assessment of Chinatown in this scene introduces Buck’s overall concern in Kinfolk. For the protagonists in this novel, all indications of a modern, metropolitan Chinese American experience as embodied in Chinatown life meet with apprehension. Likewise, Kinfolk is skeptical of displays of modernization in China, as becomes clear in those scenes of the novel that are set in China. Concatenated in a denser and more nuanced way than in the short story, city life and modernity as they registered on both sides of the Pacific are strangely kept at bay in the novel and are often accompanied by confusion and unease. The wariness of modernization and the subsequent quest for rural authenticity in Kinfolk are centrally communicated by means of (neo-) missionary figures. The novel discusses the dynamics of the missionary legacy and the reassessment of the ‘right’ missionary methods in close conjunction with the theme of a dichotomous ‘hybrid’ urbanity and ‘authentic’ rurality. These issues are addressed in the novel by means of an expatriate Chinese professor’s family and its generational conflicts. Regardless of whether they are old-fashioned or neo-missionaries, the characters in Kinfolk share a basic skepticism vis-à-vis urban contact zones and modern hybridity – although they may not share much else in terms of envisioning the future. I argue that the missionary’s exposure to urban, hybrid surroundings unsettles this figure in Buck’s fiction, because it is urbanity with its intercultural confusion – and thus ironically the very setting which might be in greatest need of missionary help11 – that triggers the missionary’s ineffectiveness. This becomes a particular dilemma for the second generation, the neomissionary figures: with their projects of cultural mediation and their oscil-

11 On the American Chinatown and missionary intervention, see, for example, Pascoe 1990, Shah 2001, Robert 2002, or De Rogatis 2003. It was particularly Donaldina Cameron, a Presbyterian missionary (1869-1968), who became a crucial figure in the movement of American women who ‘rescued’ Chinese slave women and children, provided them shelter, educated them, taught them (moral) hygiene and converted them to Christianity. Cameron’s San Francisco missionary shelter and school, “Cameron House,” constituted a major institution of this movement. For a discussion of Cameron’s initiative, see the biographies on her by Wilson 1931/1974, Logan 1976, and Martin 1977; for a critical analysis of Cameron, refer to Twelbeck 2011.

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lation between the old and the new, they can be regarded in terms of liminality, as I explained at the beginning of the chapter. Paradoxically, however, the neo-missionary figures in this novel need to reject modernity and hybridity and instead invest in a notion of (rural) ‘authenticity’ in order for their potential as cultural mediators to come into its own, as we will see.

T HE ‘E LEGANT F AKE ’: E NTER D R L IANG In the Chinatown theater in Buck’s opening scene sits a “tall handsome figure who [is] also Chinese” but who is strangely detached from the rest of the audience and comes across as superior. He has “never accepted an invitation to Chinatown. He made an excuse that he could not speak Cantonese, since his native region in China was the north, near Peking. Yet here he was tonight sitting among the crowd!” (Kinfolk 2). This man, who is at great unease among those in attendance, is one of Buck’s two protagonists in Kinfolk, Dr Liang Wen Hua, the key figure of the novel. Dr Liang, a professor of Chinese philosophy, is the patriarch of a Chinese family which has lived in New York City for more than two decades. Once again, Buck’s choice of her character’s name is interesting, for Dr Liang represents the very opposite of what his name suggests. The name is modeled on the Chinese philosopher, journalist, and educator Liang Qichao (1873-1929), who initiated several reform movements in China, an aspect which gives an ironic dimension to the naming, as Dr Liang is not exactly reform-oriented, as we shall see. What is more, the family name “Liang” literally translates as “bridge” into English.12 Again, one can see an ironic twist, as this man is clearly not a ‘bridge-builder.’ Rather than reconciling

12 See A Chinese-English Dictionary (2002: 752). Peter Conn and Paul Doyle have furthermore argued that Buck fashioned the character of Dr Liang after the Chinese intellectual Kiang Kang-hu and other Chinese scholars who had attacked Buck’s earlier work for its focus on peasant culture (Conn 1996: 315; Doyle 1965: 135). In addition, Conn has supported Nora Stirling’s claim that Dr Liang “was distilled in part of Pearl’s onetime friend Lin Yutang. Pearl was disappointed by Lin Yutang’s behavior during the war, when he ostentatiously returned to China but then left again after three months” (Conn 1996: 440); see also Stirling (1983: 206-7).

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or bringing together two cultures, Liang holds on to an outdated notion of his country and its culture, and shows a stubborn insistence that will prove highly problematic as the story unfolds. In his attempt to preserve a “roseate, fairy-tale view” of his home country, he resorts to “a wispy amalgam of ancient text and stereotype” (Conn 1996: 315). Liang idealizes a China that no longer exists, and by teaching his ideals betrays the people around him: he can be seen as an “elegant fake” (Conn 1996: 315). Part of New York’s intellectual elite, this acclaimed scholar is anxious not to become too entangled with the modernity of Chinatown. He tries to keep himself at a distance from the Chinatown crowd, which is in the first place explained by educational and class differences: Liang insists on staying away from what he sees as the debased, uncultured masses of New York’s Chinatown – from this ethnic enclave13 where gossip “surely penetrates at once” and “where everything was known about everybody” (Kinfolk 342). When asked by the theater’s manager if he could step on the stage to deliver a brief speech after the play, Liang feels flattered, yet also displays his sense of aloofness: He was warmed by their pride in him and he took the opportunity to remark that it was the duty of every Chinese to represent his country in the most favorable light to Americans who were, after all, only foreigners. As for himself, he said, he was careful always to behave as though he were, in his own small way, of course, an ambassador. He closed with a reference to Confucius, and was astonished that this did not seem to please the people. They were ignorant, he supposed – very provincial, certainly. He saw them whole, a mass of rather grimy people, small tradesmen and their wives and children, alien and yet somehow building a small commonplace of China here. Very unfortunate! (Kinfolk 4-5)

What comes across as a mixture of class consciousness and arrogance in Liang’s attitude here is, in fact, also suffused with fear: for Liang considers both Americans and most other Chinese in the United States as alien and consequently takes a distance from both of these groups. His feeling of alienation is most urgent in the Chinatown surroundings, where people of all sorts of backgrounds – provincial Chinese, tradesmen, men and women,

13 On the concept of Chinatown as an “ethnic enclave,” see, for example, Lin 1998, or Christiansen 2011.

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adults and (Americanized) children – gather and mingle. This diversity estranges the Confucian scholar and makes him uncomfortable because this conglomerate of people is too difficult for him to decipher. Chinatown is deeply disturbing and annoying for him: it represents a loss of distinction and he associates it with provincial commonness. Chinatown, then, threatens to undermine his elitist idea of Chineseness and authenticity and thus his elevated position among the community of expatriates. As a response, Liang invests even more strongly in his concept of authenticity by expounding his very own version of China. However, what he presents as ‘authentic’ does not reflect the reality of contemporary China any longer, nor does it have a deeper meaning in the day-to-day experiences of most Chinese in the United States. When he refers to Confucius and China’s glorious past in his speech, Liang, too, stages something that leaves his audience perplexed – at best, the China he evokes for them is meaningless; at worst, his words arouse their anger and rejection. Liang’s quest for authenticity enhances his isolation, where he would instead need to overcome it in order to make his message heard. He cannot build on a supportive community that is receptive to his efforts to create a sophisticated outpost of Confucian civilization as a counterbalance to a confusing, unreadable western urban space. By contrast to himself, those around him do not have the need for such an outpost and defy Liang’s project. As a result, he remains an outsider who lives “in a world as different from this as though it were upon another star,” as his son Peter reminisces at some point (Kinfolk 277-8). In view of this isolation, it would be plausible to regard Liang as a victim of displacement. His attempt to hold on to an outdated notion of China is illustrative of the desire and need of exiles to preserve an “endangered authenticity,” as described by James Clifford in his introduction to The Predicament of Culture: [This process] occurs whenever marginal peoples come into a historical or ethnographic space that has been defined by the Western imagination. “Entering the modern world,” their distinct histories quickly vanish. Swept up in a destiny dominated by the capitalist West and by various technologically advanced socialisms, these suddenly “backward” peoples no longer invent local futures. What is different about them remains tied to traditional pasts, inherited structures that either resist or yield to the new but cannot produce it. (1988: 5)

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Like Clifford’s “marginal peoples” Liang has to cope with the awareness that his country’s history and culture have vanished all too quickly amidst the modern, capitalist Chinatown and that this disappearance affects his own position as a scholar of Chinese tradition. This triggers his eagerness to preserve what he perceives as an “endangered authenticity.” Yet, on the other hand, Liang is not a victim of circumstances throughout. After all, his situation also corresponds to Clifford’s diagnosis in that he chooses deliberately and self-consciously to represent difference: from the other exiles, from the masses, from the consequences of modern Chinatown life. Not only does he want to be “tied to [the] traditional past” – a past which, to him, is inextricably linked with the cultural ideal of Confucianism – himself, but he seeks to impose his views and this quest on others.

“W E MUST SHOW THIS VAST NEW COUNTRY WHAT IT IS TO BE C HINESE ”: D R L IANG AS AN ‘O LD ’ M ISSIONARY At the beginning of Kinfolk, Dr Liang does not coincidentally refer to himself as “in his own small way, of course, an ambassador” (Kinfolk 4). The term ‘ambassador’ points to Liang’s problematic function throughout the story. In a conversation with his teenage daughter Louise, the family’s youngest child, Liang takes up the train of thought of “represent[ing] his country in the most favorable light” (Kinfolk 4) and his self-perception in slight but significant variation again: We should set the example, my child. I often ask Heaven why it is that I am sent here, an exile from my beloved country. Heaven does not answer but my heart makes reply. I have a mission here. My children have a mission, too. We must show this vast new country what it is to be Chinese. (Kinfolk 28-9)

Indeed, Liang is a missionary. As such, he relies on the rhetoric of binary oppositions, taking up a strategy frequently employed by missionaries – especially those of the first generation – as a means to spread their message of the gospel in a foreign environment (and often in a foreign language) as unequivocally as possible (see Fairbank 1974; Lian 1997). In an “inexplicable

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melancholy of exile,” as his eldest son, James, puts it at some point (Kinfolk 95), Liang nostalgically pits East against West, old against new, tradition against innovation, and rurality against urbanity. Again, it is a missionary nostalgia which informs his project. By way of oversimplifying complex realities and concepts and by evoking clear-cut boundaries and binarisms, he seeks to (re)claim authority and to strengthen his sense of identity in his project of upholding ‘authentic’ Chineseness. With this insistence on clear structures and binarisms, Liang can be placed in line with the first-generation missionaries I discussed earlier in this study. Interestingly, he displays traits of both male and female missionaries. On the one hand, his behavior is reminiscent of the individualism, stubbornness, and ruthlessness which characterized the projects of the ‘old’ male missionaries. On the other hand, there is also an overlap to the female missionaries of the first generation. Similar to them, Liang’s behavior and activities are motivated by the experience of exilic isolation and displacement, which renders his missionary project an air of urgency and despair. Comparable to missionary women of the first generation who sought to uphold a constructed idea of Americanness in their Chinese exile, Liang’s mission is to show the ‘true’ character of Chineseness in America. Considering that this character is himself created on a ‘hybrid principle,’ Liang’s determination to oppose and reject Chinatown hybridity is particularly ironic. Importantly, Liang’s mixture of traits of male and female missionaries does not remain abstract in the text, but his hybridity is negotiated with reference to Buck’s biography: he becomes a fictional fusion of her father and mother, a concept or idea which Buck usually reserved for her second-generation missionary figures in her project. By contrast to these other fictional fusions – the neo-missionary figures – however, Buck does not present Liang as a figure of identification. With her portrayal of Dr Liang, Buck, on the one hand, calls upon the stern and stubborn missionary which she created in the biographies of her parents. Liang, this detached “Bookfool,” as his own brother, a peasant back home in China, refers to him (Kinfolk 202), calls to mind Buck’s Andrew of Fighting Angel and The Exile – “God’s fool,” as Buck condescendingly or pitifully dubs her father at some point in Fighting Angel (219). Liang and Buck’s father have several things in common: tall, lean, bespectacled and with a stern look on his face, Andrew is the physical blueprint for the fictional Liang. Similarly, their work ethic and attitude resemble each

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other, and they both are perceived as remote and distanced by their children. While Peter in Kinfolk sees his father as a figure from ‘another star,’ Buck had described her father as “a figure always a little dim, living outside [his children’s] world” (The Exile 188). Where Liang intends to “show this vast new country what it is to be Chinese,” Andrew means to show China what it is to be a Christian, as it were. Yet, contrary to Liang, Buck’s father strategically adapts to the new circumstances when his conservative missionary methods prove ineffective and his preaching is not understood. Andrew finds a point of entry to the new world and its people by dressing up in Chinese costume and by growing a queue. If even Buck’s father manages to assimilate, Liang’s unwillingness to accept change and get involved with Chinatown modernity comes across as even more narrow-minded. In addition to his similarity to Buck’s father, Liang is also partially modeled on Buck’s mother, Carolyn – the Carie we have encountered in the biographies in chapter 2. Liang, in his attempt to create and stage an outdated version of China for his children, resembles Buck’s stylization of her mother as a perennial exile in rural China. Just as Liang insists on the power of the Confucian doctrines and stages his ‘own’ culture for his children, Carie, the “American woman” or “American mother” (The Exile 180; 184), stages a miniature America and creates an outpost of civilization for her children lest they forget about their origin. I have already discussed the relevance of Carie’s home in detail in chapter 2, but I would like to revisit one key scene in which Buck describes the American stylization of the Sydenstrickers’ house. In this scene, Buck also negotiates interior and exterior spaces and the containment of geographical hybridity. “Inside the wall and the gate” of the missionary compound, we encounter peace, order, cleanliness, structure – the familiar. Outside this safe haven, in contrast, […] the noisy street ran east and west through the city and was the great thoroughfare for business, and there was the roar of the city, the shouts of hawkers, the cries of chair coolies wending their way through the crowd, the squeak of wheelbarrows. (The Exile 152)

This nerve-racking abundance of noise calls to mind the big city. Of course, this ‘outside’ described here is not the chaos of an American Chinatown, but a scenario of Chinese small-town life in turn-of-the-century Chinkiang,

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the Sydenstricker family’s missionary home. Still, Buck’s depiction of spaces in this scene corresponds to Liang’s uneasiness with the metropolitan hustle and bustle of New York’s Chinatown and his investment in the notion of a rural idyll, a version of which we already encountered in “His Own Country.” As we have seen, Pearl Buck was critical of her father, but overall sympathetic with her mother’s plight, if not her means of coping. She shared her mother’s sense of alienation in view of the fragmentation and hybridity of the modern city, so that Buck’s sympathies extended – if only in this respect – to her fictional character Liang. Moreover, like Liang and her mother, Buck herself attempted to contain a hybridity which was becoming excessive, as I indicated in the opening paragraphs of this chapter. An early essay by Buck, published 17 years before Kinfolk, anticipates many of the reservations and apprehensions later expressed by Liang. In this essay, titled “China and the Foreign Chinese” (1932), Buck describes her visit to the home of a Chinese friend who has repatriated to Nanking after living in the West: Here in Nanking I go to my friend’s house next door but one. It is a foreign house, filled with foreign furniture, and the children wear foreign clothes usually and the father always wears foreign clothes. I might find a house like this in any small town in any American city. Still, I am ill at ease there. It is, as my old Chinese friend says, “not Chinese.” I never see anyone that Madame Chen would think a real Chinese in that house. True, there are plenty of citizens of China. But they speak of foreign books, play foreign music on a foreign phonograph, talk of how to earn more money at teaching English or some such employment. There are scores of such homes in this new capital. The children in them are reared in a strange, hybrid atmosphere. Neither Confucianism nor Christianity is taught them. They gabble equally well in English or Chinese. (1932: 541-542)

Buck could hardly be any more explicit in her juxtaposition of ‘real’ and ‘fake’ and of ‘familiar’ and ‘foreign.’ Where hybridity is equated with strangeness, it is obvious that the norm to aspire to is purity or authenticity. According to this logic, Buck’s American mother in The Exile creates a ‘normal,’ authentic, and pure atmosphere when she stages Americanness in the Chinese diaspora. In a similar vein, Kinfolk’s Dr Liang is authentic in

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his stylization of Confucian ideals and rurality in New York. Both Carie and Liang, then, remain true to themselves and their culture. As so often with Buck, things are very intricate: her ‘authentic’ Chinese friend described in the 1932 essay moves out to the West, assimilates to the lifestyle there, and upon returning to China, becomes an agent of Americanness – just like the fictional American-born Chinese characters in Buck’s short stories and Kinfolk. In consequence, the very principle of missionary thought and practice – the maintenance and spreading of truth or ‘authenticity’ – is being inverted, as the world is too mixed up for a person (even for a missionary) to take positions which are unambiguous or readily identifiable in ethnic or religious terms. “The world can ill afford to lose the true Chinese culture,” continues Buck in her essay (1932: 542), although she seems to be already suspecting that such a concept of ‘true,’ pure Chinese culture and a refusal to accept hybridity does not reflect the complexity of the modern world and that her fictional pastoral ideal of Chinese rural authenticity does not stand the test of reality. Buck was well aware that processes of modernization were impossible to ignore in the China of the 1930s and 40s.14 Yet she was obviously not too pleased about this and saw a danger inherent this trend toward modernization and nationalism: a modern disintegration of society. The 1932 essay “China and the Foreign Chinese” was part of Buck’s “more extensive discursive engagement with Chinese intellectuals” at the time, as Qian Susquiao reminds us (2005: 155). The debates revolving around these “foreign Chinese” and questions of an ‘in/authentic’ portrayal of modern China, which should culminate in the widely-publicized KiangBuck controversy in The New York Times in January 1933 (see chapter 4), were framed by this 1932 essay and two other pieces, both titled “The New

14 A similar suspicion also comes to the fore in her essay “China Faces the Future” (1942), in which Buck remains strikingly obscure in her contemplations about this future, speculating vaguely that “[t]he idea of a modern state is evolving very fast in China these days” (1942: 74). Buck uses an overall rhetoric of backwardness and takes the past as a point of reference for the future, arguing that “one faces the future with one’s past” (1942: 67) and that “China’s attitude toward the future is the result of her past” (1942: 85). A similar rhetoric can also be found in Buck’s China – Past and Present, a late (autobiographical) reminiscence of Chinese history, culture, and society (published in 1972).

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Patriotism” (published in The China Critic in June 1931 and, as a printed version of a speech, in 1933 respectively). In these essays, Buck exposed modern Chinese intellectuals as exactly these “foreign Chinese” whose nascent nationalism and its discourse set them apart from the ‘real’ Chinese – the common, rural people. According to Buck, this would further divide the nation. Buck attacked the elitist arrogance of those intellectuals who – educated in the West and then returning to China in order to mold the country according to their ways – presented themselves as “agents of change and harbingers of progress” (Qian 2005: 160), but who were, in fact, “blind to the feelings and needs of the common Chinese people” (Zhou 2010: 46). In this sense, the “foreign Chinese” shared traits with a certain type of missionaries and their lack of concern for the people, which Buck was so vehemently opposed to.15 Buck’s exposure of what she considered an “inherently negative weakness in the way modern Chinese nationalism [was] constructed” (Qian 2005: 160) was directly linked to her critique of the missionary enterprise. It is on these grounds that an exilic missionary figure with an outlandish, nostalgic idea of Chineseness like Dr Liang enters the text. Similar to the Chinese friend introduced in Buck’s 1932 essay and as yet another ironic twist in Kinfolk, Dr Liang, this ‘torchbearer’ of Confucian civilization, envisions himself as an agent of Americanness upon his possible return to China: As for himself, Dr. Liang always said, he felt that Heaven had directed his steps, and that he had been useful in explaining to Americans the real China, the great civilization which today was obscured but which would assuredly shine forth again when

15 Supporting Buck’s critique of these elitist Chinese patriots, Lin Yutang remarked about their arrogance even more pointedly: “Because Chinese elite fail to recognize the greatness of honest and diligent common folks, they become weak and hollow inside while putting on a show of force outside, calling for the downfall of imperialism while secretly longing to be born of white parents. […] to be ashamed of wearing Chinese-style clothes in front of foreigners, to pretend to be extremely clean and civilized when talking to foreigners […] these are all signs of slave mentality” (Lin Yutang 1936: 171; 173; quoted in Qian 2005: 160). For a summary of the support Lin Yutang gave to Buck in this matter, see Qian (2005: 160).

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peace was established in the world. It was no small mission to bring East and West together. When times were better again he hoped, he told his American friends, to return to his own country to spend his old age, and there he would expound to his countrymen the glories of the American civilization. (Kinfolk 11; my emphasis)

But it is important that this return never comes about. For Liang’s repatriation would presuppose his abandonment of the concept of a stable past and ‘authenticity.’ If he went back to China, he would have to face reality and admit – to himself and to others – the self-delusion which he has maintained for so long. In the diasporic surroundings of New York he has transformed to the extent that he could teach the Chinese “the glories of American civilization” – at least this is what he declares to “his American friends,” who are, like Liang, part of the intellectual elite. But as a ‘play actor’ of himself he does not and cannot openly acknowledge his admiration of Americanness to his children and the Chinatown community, thus to the people outside of his scholarly circle who need to be ‘converted.’ For them, an endorsement of American civilization would undermine his strategic self-fashioning as an ‘ambassador’ or missionary. As a result, he is happy to use his children’s departure to China as a kind of protection or excuse. Their stay in China provides him with a reason to remain in America: When some of his enemies […] mentioned their surprise that he continued to stay abroad when his country so obviously needed all well-educated citizens, he could smile rather sadly and say, “I am supporting four young citizens now in China. Someone unfortunately has to pay the bills, and with inflation what it is, this is done more easily with American money than Chinese.” (Kinfolk 223)

Paradoxically, as much as Liang despises the American Chinatown, this very surrounding offers this ‘old’ missionary a safe haven: it is exclusively here that his power and authority can come into its own.

‘D ISSOLVING THE B EAUTIFUL C LOUD OF C ONFUCIANISM ’: T HE N EO -M ISSIONARIES

IN

C HINA

Dr Liang’s children put their father’s preaching to the test and return to China – and they are utterly disillusioned upon their arrival. Mary, the old-

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est daughter, a nurse, believes that Liang “should have told us what things here are like, instead of letting us think that our country is one beautiful cloud of Confucianism,” but still excuses his false teachings with the fact that he has “been away so long that [he has] forgotten” (Kinfolk 255). She and her brother James, a physician, choose to move to China in order to help improve the living conditions of the locals. By contrast, their younger siblings, Louise and Peter, who are “more American than any American” (Kinfolk 115), are sent by their father to the country of their ancestors as a punishment for their all-too lax (read: American, urban, modern) attitude regarding love matters and lifestyles. Not surprisingly, then, Peter is much more outspoken in his critique of his father than Mary: “I shall never forgive Pa as long as I live – letting us believe that everything was wonderful, hiding it all under a Confucian mist! No wonder he doesn’t come back!” (Kinfolk 289). The most ambivalent reaction to China is shown by the family’s oldest son, James. The first of the Liang children to arrive, James initially comes to Shanghai, which, more sharply defined than in the story “His Own Country,” is introduced as the epitome of Chinese modernity and as a hybrid space: [James] saw high buildings massed together and he perceived with a pleasurable shock that it was Shanghai and that it was as modern, from this distance, as he had been told it was. […] He felt relief. The homecoming was not to be too strange. He did not step from his father’s comfortable apartment into a mud-walled hut. (Kinfolk 52-53)

At the same time, the city is still genuinely Chinese: It was a reversal of New York where the crowd was white, and the brown faces startling. He had grown up immunizing himself to the stares of the white people as he walked along the streets, but here it would be comforting to belong to the crowd. (Kinfolk 53)

Soon it becomes clear that James can enjoy Shanghai and perceive of its hybridity as a “pleasurable shock” only because he believes it to be the exception. He becomes increasingly “impatient with Shanghai” and aware that “the city [is] crowded, dirty and noisy” (Kinfolk 61), and rejoices in the

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knowledge that his stay there is but a temporary stopover on his journey. After all, he will shortly turn his back on this annoying display of Chinese modernity and head for the venerable city often evoked in his father’s stories: Peking, where he is to take up work in a hospital. Arriving there, he is initially fascinated by the city and finds his image of it affirmed: […] The view from his windows was superb. The city roofs were delicately shaped and old courtyards were rich with ancient trees. […] Peking was the way he had dreamed China looked. The streets were wide and the gates were massive and beautiful. Everything had been built with the outlook of centuries in the past and centuries yet to come. The city seemed indestructible. It made him proud to be a Chinese. (Kinfolk 75)

When James gets to the hospital, however, he is confronted with the opposite of Peking’s ancient sophistication and elegance: “It was like stepping back into New York. The hospital was very fine and luxurious, built by Americans with American money” (Kinfolk 75).16 The hospital is too Americanized, a sign of western institutions and technology – and thus an indication of an impending transformation which might seize the whole of Peking. The emergent modernity of the Chinese city, we learn together with James here, is rooted in western capitalism: in a humanitarian guise, the West is gradually infiltrating the East, and in this process, all purity is getting lost – Peking’s authenticity becomes ‘endangered.’ In the following scenes, this apprehension is step by step confirmed, as James finds his Chinese surroundings increasingly affected by hybridity: where Chinese doctors wear western clothes, where Mendelssohn and Chopin are played, where the wife of a Chinese colleague takes an American

16 James’s reference to the hospital “built by Americans with American money” reflects Buck’s own skepticism of the motives of western missionaries building hospitals in China. Most prominently, she had addressed this aspect in her seminal speech “Is there a Case for Foreign Missions?” (1932), as discussed in chapter 2. To briefly recapitulate, in that speech Buck dismissed even those achievements of missions that were generally praised as humanitarian or secular (such as hospitals, schools, or relief programs), arguing that frequently the underlying purpose of setting up these institutions, too, was to “inveigle people to hear the gospel” (Buck 1932: 146).

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lover, all sense of Chinese ‘authenticity’ and structure is lost. As the son of a missionary who was raised with the image of an outdated China, James – like John Dewey Chang before him – has fallen victim to the nostalgia trap. As a way out of this trap, James seeks to restore order and authenticity. James strives to become a ‘real’ Chinese again and shed his feeling of alienation among the Chinese (Kinfolk 132), and develops a quest which initially is still vague: “‘There is something here that I want,’ he said. ‘I don’t know what it is, but I shall find it […]’” (Kinfolk 166). This initial vagueness, obscurity, or ignorance of that ‘something,’ the lack of a concrete idea what to expect is an aspect we frequently encounter in Buck’s neo-missionaries. By contrast to their (religious) missionary antecedents, this uncertainty makes many of these figures more human, pleasant, and accessible to the reader, and it sets them apart from the first generation’s stubborn missionary quest. But in a second step, they still display true missionary zeal. James fills the vagueness with meaning when he finds that ‘something’ in the very opposite of urbanity: similar to the old religious missionaries, he penetrates further and further into the rural countryside and finally arrives in the village of his ancestors. Together with his sister Mary, who has come to China to join forces with him and work as a nurse, he decides to go native and live in a barren, primitive hut:17 “We are now about to live as our ancestors did,” James said. […] “There is no running water, but the hot-water coolies will pour hot water into the tin tub in the room I have set aside as the bathroom, and Little Dog [his servant] will temper it with cold water drawn from the well. The stove in the kitchen is of brick and it burns twists of grass. […] For light at night I have allowed kerosene lamps instead of the bean-oil lamps or candles which we really should use. And I have bought American beds in the thieves’ market. I thought that there perhaps we could improve upon our ancestors.” (Kinfolk 149, my emphasis)

17 The description of this primitive home and its interior in Kinfolk shares features with the home I have introduced in the previous chapter: the house of Wang Lung in The Good Earth, which Buck introduces by emphasizing its earthen qualities and barrenness. Although set in another context (prerevolutionary China), The Good Earth, as I have shown, still engages in a celebration of rural authenticity which is comparable to the scenes in Kinfolk which are set in China.

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The source of James’s obsession with ‘authenticity,’ which is first indicated in this scene and which intensifies in the course of the narrative, can easily be identified: Dr Liang, who has taught James about the importance of ‘authenticity’ for his whole life. But then, ironically, James’s ‘authenticity’ has turned into a decidedly different version from his father’s: in fact, it is the exact opposite of Dr Liang’s ideal of cultural elitism and Confucianism. When he invests in this simple lifestyle, James – the one child of the family who has listened patiently to his father’s preaching – develops a counter project to his father’s, which is perhaps less a strategic act of liberation but rather emerges out of a necessity to cope with life in China. In any case, it still dissolves his father’s “beautiful cloud of Confucianism.” It has sometimes been argued that Buck unreservedly endorses James’s celebration of primitive life. Reviewer Marjory Stoneman Douglas, for example, contended that by transplanting James to a rural China, Buck tries to uphold an image of “the China whose ancient order within the family [she] learned to love in her youth and misses now. She makes it more fundamentally valuable than the New York way of life, which she despises” (review Kinfolk, April 1949; Stirling Collection, Randolph College, Box 7, folder “K”). I believe that Douglas’s assessment of the novel falls short of the dynamics at work in Kinfolk. Buck may try to retain a pastoral, primitive idyll, but she is aware that this idea is a construct. Clearly, Buck does not ‘despise the New York way of life,’ as Douglas suggests, when she has James furnish his village hut with American beds. Rather, there is irony employed in this scene, for Buck knows that any attempt to recapture China’s rurality cannot but fail: as the former wife of an agricultural missionary who published widely on Chinese agrarian culture, Buck certainly did know that the reality of China was far more complex than she presented it in Kinfolk or her earlier short story. Indeed, by the time of the publication of Kinfolk, China had undergone deep-going processes of deagrarization, due to urbanization, industrialization, commodification, and the modernization of agricultural technology. Even rural China was far more modern(ized) in the mid-century than Buck would have it here (see Klein 2007; Louie 2008; Esherick 2000; Lee 2001; Stapleton 2000; also see my discussion in chapter 2). Buck’s construction of the backward rural society in Kinfolk can thus be read as a strategic and purposeful move. Creating characters like James or John Dewey, who are complicatedly affected by the traditional values with

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which their fathers raised them, but who still cannot fully abandon modernity either, Buck points to the dilemma of neo-missionaries – their inner disunity between tradition and innovation. Exposed to a modern, complex reality, these neo-missionaries have to become aware that Chinese rural society needs to be reformed and improved. Eventually, this is what happens in Kinfolk, when James and his sister Mary realize that the rural paradise is lost and that the ‘Fall of Man’ into modernity has irrevocably taken place. In their professions as a doctor and a nurse, they inevitably also bring about progress and change: “It takes a certain kind of person to live in China now,” says Chen, a fellow doctor, James’s friend and Mary’s future husband, at some point to Mary. He goes on characterizing this “certain kind of person” as [s]omeone who can see true meanings, someone who does not only want the world better but believes it can be made better, and gets angry because it is not done, someone who is not willing to hide himself in one of the few good places left in the world – someone who is tough! (Kinfolk 251)

Clearly, the ones that are eligible to assume these challenges are neomissionaries like James and Mary. With them, Buck sketches a new model of missions that does, by contrast to the project of an older generation of missionaries, “consider the people.” James and Mary embody alternative versions of the old American missionaries and pursue the secular, social gospel. Within this framework of the social gospel, James can be seen as a male, more vigorous missionary version of Buck’s victimized mother, Carie, who at some point had set up a hospital for Chinese women and their infants. He tackles the ‘real’ problems of rural China when he establishes a hospital and decides to start teaching: Under his teaching men and women would go out everywhere to find the sick, to treat them for simple illness, and to bring back to the hospital those who were too gravely ill. And they would not only heal the sick. They would teach the young mothers who were the creators of life, and the children who loved life enough to cling to it, and the young men who took pride in their families. (Kinfolk 274-275)

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Similarly, his sister Mary engages in a form of the social gospel, as she becomes an ‘assistant missionary’ for her brother and thereby carves out a niche of female activity. James and Mary mediate between cultures when they carry out these medical and educational projects and in this secular mission they do their best to adapt to life in China. At the end of the novel, they also find contentment in their private lives, as both get married to locals. However, it would be wrong to consider them as completely unproblematic neo-missionaries. After all, their potential can only unfold in the carefully staged rural China which does not reflect modern reality. James and Mary’s aim to ‘better the world’ requires a setting at a distance from New York’s Chinatown or its Chinese counterpart, Shanghai. And even there, in the ‘authentic’ interior of China, their careers remain qualified, there is something subdued about them, a remnant of melancholy, missionary nostalgia, or displacement, if you will. In this respect, they truly are the children of their missionary father and cannot fully dislodge their upbringing. James and Mary find themselves in a dilemma: it is only when they operate on the principle of binarisms – namely, precisely at the moment when they (partly) fall back onto the old patterns and structures and live in a rural, non-hybrid environment – that they can become fully effective. With this, they call to mind the missionaries of the first generation. And indeed, James and Mary still display traits of their scholar-father, Dr Liang, and of the victimized first-generation missionary Carie Sydenstricker, Buck’s mother, and are made up of a complicated mix of fictional speculation and biographical memories. Like them, they cannot ‘have it all’ and be everything at the same time. Buck’s skepticism vis-à-vis the modernity and urbanity of Chinatown and modern city life in Kinfolk is thus closely projected upon the figure of the missionary – of both generations – who (re)establishes order and orientation in the face of modernization and hybridity. When exposed to such an environment, the missionary feels alienated and urged to decide between ‘here’ and ‘there.’ Dr Liang, as an ‘old’ missionary, opts to be ‘here,’ close to the American Chinatown, and ends up in isolation as an ineffective ‘bookfool.’ Conversely, James and Mary choose to be ‘there,’ in China – they are active and bring about change, but nevertheless, this happens at a distance from the modern, urban reality. The second generation of mission-

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aries, thus, cannot fully escape their parents’ ideology but is caught in its very legacy.

‘B ELONGING TO ALL OF THEM ’: M RS L IANG P ROMISE OF H YBRIDITY ?

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The same can be said for Buck herself, who, despite her critique of missions, was a secular missionary. It is on these grounds that Buck’s struggles with the evidence of cultural hybridity manifest themselves most markedly. But as I have shown in this chapter, Buck was ambivalent about the emergence of modernity on both sides of the Pacific, and while she addresses her fears through figures such as Dr Liang and his children (or John Dewey Chang in “His Own Country”), there is one other – marginal – figure in Kinfolk, which presents a different perspective on the subject matter: the novel’s mother figure, Mrs Liang. Different from the figures of Liang and the children, this character seems to indicate a resolution brought forth by the textual unconscious rather than being strategically conceived by Buck. While Mrs Liang first comes across as a stock character, at times introduced for comic relief, in the course of the novel she turns out to be the one character that deals best with hybridity and modernity, coping flexibly with the old and the new. It is her figure that represents American Chineseness most unproblematically. Mrs Liang entertains a circle of friends from New York’s Chinatown, buys her groceries there, and even keeps a bank account in Chinatown which she hides from her husband. When she visits her children in China, she courageously chases away robbers in the village, advertises her children’s clinic among the locals, and serves as a match-maker for her son James. Rural China is her “true home” (Kinfolk 363) as much as New York gives her a feeling of belonging (Kinfolk 384). Mrs Liang knows what her philosopherhusband does not openly acknowledge, “[…] that [he] could never live in the ancestral village again. Without electricity or running water, he could not live” (Kinfolk 388). She is also aware that her missionary children will not return to the United States, as they found happiness in the primitive Chinese village. It is Mrs Liang – a woman with a peasant background and thus decidedly not a missionary figure – who shall prove capable of transgressing the boundaries that all other characters need to insist on: “She

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would go back and forth between the kinfolk, for she belonged to them all” (Kinfolk 389). Given Mrs Liang’s marginal position and Buck’s strange oscillation between the portrayal of her as a stock figure and a wise figure, I am inclined to conclude that Buck may not have known exactly what to make of Mrs Liang. Yet I hold that it may very well be this character who is Buck’s greatest promise of hybridity in Kinfolk, as she represents a Chineseness that is assimilable yet still ‘authentic,’ urban and simultaneously rural. It is Mrs Liang, then, who really “shows what it is to be Chinese” where the other characters – the missionaries of both generations – struggle. In this sense, she can be compared to the down-to-earth Ruth in the short story “His Own Country.” I suggest that with capable, adaptable, and pragmatic female characters such as Mrs Liang or Ruth in “His Own Country” Buck continues her gendered and humanitarian project of recovery which she had before introduced with her portrayal of the plain but pragmatic O-lan in The Good Earth. In texts like “His Own Country” and Kinfolk, these female characters are still not the protagonists, but they are given niches that enable them to go beyond the positions of more carefully established characters who are fraught with Buck’s own political doubts and ambitions. This way, Buck rectifies what she considered a long standing history of female missionaries’ victimization as embodied by her mother. Thus, with these figures which display a subtle agency, Buck redesigned and ameliorated in a fictional realm her view of a ‘real’ past and fashioned her own vision of a more humanitarian world.

6. Coda: “We haven’t deserted Him exactly, we just haven’t known how to fit Him in.” The Missionary Legacy in Pearl Buck and her Fiction The Liang children in Kinfolk are – as I have discussed in the previous chapter – neo-missionary figures and as such they are conceived as cultural in-betweens: they oscillate between the old and the new, between tradition and modernization; they reject the paternal project and ideology as much as they still rely on it to define and pursue their own goals. In short: they struggle in their efforts to carry out their neo-missionary project. With that, Buck’s 1949 novel sets the tone for a number of novels which she published in the later stages of her career. In these novels neo-missionary themes and figures are closely intertwined with Buck’s discussion of the Cold War. In Kinfolk James and Mary are translocated to a backward, almost timeless China; manifestations of contemporary politics register only vaguely when we learn that the family’s youngest son, Peter, joins the “revolutionary army” upon his return to China – and is eventually killed. Buck does not, however, openly address the political system on either side of the Pacific in this novel. By contrast, in later novels such as God’s Men the Cold War context is discussed with increasing urgency – both on the level of plot and as an important undercurrent of Buck’s self-fashioning as an American and her investment in the notions of Americanness and Chineseness/Asianness at the time. The neo-missionary figure now becomes more extensively used in Buck’s fiction: the embodiments of this figure are variegated and range from newspaper publishers to food relief workers, physicians, philanthro-

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pists and (nuclear) scientists.1 Despite this rather disparate range of occupations and roles, the missionary figures share certain features. Buck crafts them in a highly ambiguous manner: they might have overall good intentions, but they are not unconditionally positive. While this ambiguity is already indicated in Buck’s ‘Chinatown fiction,’ as we have seen in the last chapter, it gains greater prominence now: the neo-missionaries’ struggle with their missionary legacy becomes more acute and is most often negoti-

1

Out of a number of novels in this context, some of the most noteworthy examples are: Come, My Beloved (1953), Command the Morning (1959), and The Three Daughters of Madame Liang (1969). The representation of missionary activity in these novels takes on various forms: Come, My Beloved (1953) depicts the story of the MacArds, an American family of missionaries to India. The novel is interesting in its focus on four generations of the family, allowing Buck a wide scope to elaborate on the development of missionary activity and the learning effects from one generation to the next. The family’s last missionary is a female, Livy. Significantly, the plot overshadows her missionary activity by focusing on her love affair with a local doctor. Even Command the Morning, which has an all-American setting and is based on Buck’s research on the Manhattan Project, could be seen in terms of the neo-missionary theme when approached in the light of Buck’s later writing such as The Three Daughters of Madame Liang. Command the Morning depicts scientists who – because they want the war to end – develop the atomic bomb. The ‘missionary’ figures in this novel are those scientists in the project who are full of remorse and aware of the paradox in their project; it is their ethical dilemma which becomes the focus of the text. Finally, in The Three Daughters of Madame Liang, her last novel about China, Buck revisits her theme of the return of Western educated children to China, which we already saw in Kinfolk. Here, Madame Liang’s adult daughters return to the Communist China of the 1960s after having made successful careers in the United States, the oldest daughter as a medical doctor. When she returns to China, she becomes a neo-missionary, applying her Western knowledge of medicine in order to help her own people. Furthermore, Madame Liang’s sonin-law, John Sung, is cast as another neo-missionary figure in the text: a physicist, he, too, is an American educated returnee who gets entangled in a nuclear weapons project. Buck’s concern with nuclear weapons in these later novels is a further indication of her negotiation of Cold War politics and the intensification of the political agenda of her fiction.

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ated in close conjunction with the figures’ American identities, as can be seen by the example of the protagonists in God’s Men. The neo-missionary figure in Buck’s fiction of these years, I argue, on the one hand served Buck as a vehicle to rebuke American arrogance and chauvinism and to advocate humanitarian values, while on the other hand, it helped her to profess her own Americanness and support American values in the Cold War era. Buck’s struggle to come to terms with her own position in society and her identity as a second-generation missionary is clearly reflected in God’s Men: in this novel Buck conflates and intensifies the various themes of her earlier writing. At the same time, however, the text can be seen as an indication that Buck’s project seems to have gradually disintegrated. With this, I consider God’s Men particularly suitable to figure as a backdrop for this coda chapter. Through the lens of Cold War culture and politics, this novel allows me to revisit the premises, approaches, and strategies of Buck’s entire project, as I have discussed them throughout this book. In God’s Men Buck’s fictional revisit of her own biography, her father’s old age and death, and her reconciliation with the father become perhaps most apparent. Her protagonists in this novel – like Buck herself – cannot fully cast off their past, but need to work through and with it to succeed in the present. In many respects, they express Buck’s views: for instance, Clem Miller in God’s Men, who is the son of a China missionary, comes up with the statement I chose as the title of this chapter – “We haven’t deserted Him exactly, we just haven’t known how to fit Him in” (God’s Men 281).2 With this statement, he becomes exemplary of the neo-missionaries’ and Buck’s quest to ‘fit religion in,’ to accommodate, or reshape their missionary backgrounds for modern and secular purposes. Despite his charity, Clem, as we will see, has to die prematurely in God’s Men – and can thus be placed in line with a number of other secular neo-missionary figures who share similar fates in Buck’s fiction.3 Their deaths can be seen as evi-

2 3

In the following, I will use the abbreviation “GM” when citing from the novel. John Sung in The Three Daughters of Madame Liang eventually dies in an explosion when the nuclear weapon is tested. In a way, this death is the punishment for his liberal views. Throughout the novel, he has theorized about a better future in China and has contemplated upon the vision of a free, emancipated country that could be the ally of the West.

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dence of the neo-missionary project’s failure or collapse, illustrating the incapacity of the neo-missionary figures to succeed in the modern(ized) world. It gives proof of their ultimate powerlessness. With this, Buck also voiced her own dissatisfaction with her waning influence on AmericanAsian relations in the late 1940s, early 50s and afterwards (see Wacker 2003; Conn 1996: esp. 297-333). God’s Men, published in 1951, revolves around two male protagonists, William Lane and Clem Miller, who are both the sons of China missionaries. The novel is primarily set in times of the protagonists’ adult years of the late 1910s to early 50s in the United States, but in flashbacks it takes the readers back into the protagonists’ childhood years in turn-of-the-century China and the Boxer rebellion. With its dual settings of West and East and its expanded time frame God’s Men exemplifies both Buck’s overall fictional project and particularly this project’s transition from the clear-cut ideal of Sinification of the 1930s to the Americanization of the late 1940s and 50s. The novel is furthermore representative of Buck’s oeuvre in its reliance on juxtaposition and its (re)negotiation of her political and missionary project. William and Clem are conceived as diametrical opposites – in terms of their background, upbringing, as well as their behavior and attitudes as adults. These two figures serve Buck’s agenda: through them, she both endorses and criticizes the missionary project and shows the variegated forms which, according to her views, (neo-) missionary enterprise can take on. In the case of William, who is cast as a ruthless publishing tycoon, a capitalist mission supersedes the religious mission of his parents. Clem carries out a humanitarian mission, engaging in food relief. Reviewer Beatrice Washburn aptly summarized the function and status of Buck’s figures in the fiction of these years, asserting that “Buck’s weakness, as well as her strength, is the fact that she is a born crusader. Her people are not really people, but ideas made manifest” (Miami Herald, 01 April, 1951). At first glance, Buck seems to side with her character Clem and to clearly distance herself from William.4 At least, this was the prevalent view

4

Buck also addresses this juxtaposition by discussing the figures’ qualities as lovers. While Clem is depicted as a tender, considerate lover to his wife, William is described as sexually much more reckless and in command.

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of the novel’s contemporary reviewers, many of whom pointed out the novel’s juxtaposition, stressing that Clem was conceived as the “author’s hero,” while William was “the villain of this piece” (North, Buffalo Courier Express, 01 April, 1951).5 Such a reading appears reasonable given the fact that the two figures are based on real-life models. Clem, a missionary who is engaged in food relief, has “some of [his] genesis in [Buck’s] idealistic commitments,” as Peter Conn has argued, referring to Buck’s bustling work in humanitarian projects and her chairing of the India Famine Relief Committee at the time she wrote God’s Men (Conn 1996: 325).6 Clem is drawn on Clifford E. Clinton, himself the son of missionary parents to China and the founder of “Meals for Millions,” an organization which developed and introduced MultiPurpose Food for relief work after World War II.7 If it is surprising that Clem’s real-life model is mentioned in only one contemporary review of God’s Men,8 it is even more striking that the model

5

For other reviews which read Clem as a consistently positive character, see Starkey, Cox, or Haxton Bullock (accessed, like Wahburn’s and North’s reviews, via the Stirling Collection, Randolph College, Box 7, envelope 21).

6

To support his point, Conn refers to the short piece “Food for China,” which Buck wrote for Survey Graphic in July 1947 (vol. 36; pp. 377-79) and in which she outlined a view similar to the one expressed by Clem in God’s Men (see Conn 1996: 443, n 112).

7

As Peter Conn reminds us, Buck and Clinton were friends who shared a conviction “that world peace depended above all on the elimination of world hunger” (1996: 325). Buck supported Clinton’s foundation, which was established in 1946, for example by publishing the article “Mr. Clinton Stops Starvation” (in the December 1949 issue of United Nations World), in which she advertised Clinton’s “efforts to develop a ‘Multipurpose Food’ that would be cheap, nourishing, and universally appealing” (Conn 1996: 443; n 113). For a biographical background of Clifford Clinton and the history of the “Meals for Millions Foundation,” see: William Shurtleff and Akiko Aoyagi, “History of Meals for Millions and Multi-Purpose Food – Soy Pioneers Around the World” (2004: n. p. Web).

8

Fanny Butcher’s review for the Chicago Sunday Times (22 April, 1951) is the only piece which makes a reference to the connection between Clem and Clinton, stating that “the man who believes that food is every man’s right had his

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for the figure of William Lane was yet more consistently ignored by reviewers. John J. Espey9 for The New York Times Book Review was one of the few reviewers at the time who acknowledged William’s resemblance to Henry Luce, the famous publisher of Time, Fortune, and Life magazines, at all. But then, even Espey alluded only very vaguely to this connection, insinuating that “[Miss Buck] draws […] on certain models for her leading characters” (08 April 1951). Reviewers’ widespread reluctance to name Luce as an obvious model for Lane corresponded with Buck’s own refusal to publicly admit such analogies. In an interview with Fanny Butcher for the Chicago Sunday Times, Buck went as far as to deny Luce as a model for William: “When I asked her if her two heroes were drawn from real life she insisted that the one who believes in power [William] was not […],” as Fanny Butcher recalled it in her review of God’s Men (Chicago Sunday Times, 22 April, 1951). I would suggest that reviewers’ silence about the Luce-Lane conflation can (at least partially) be explained by Luce’s powerful monopole in the publishing world at the time, which deterred many reviewers – who wrote for publications which were owned by Luce or which were closely affiliated to him – from laying bare an unfavorable portrayal of the media mogul. Luce’s dominant position in the American industry was closely connected to his power in American Cold War culture and politics in general. It is his attitude toward the ‘China question’ and Chiang Kai-shek, the Nationalists’ leader and antagonist of Mao Tse-tung and the Communists,10 in

origin in a real name – a San Franciscan – Clifton Clinton, owner of a string of cafeterias, who, like the ‘missionary’ in this book, gives a free meal to those who cannot pay” (Butcher, rev. for the Chicago Sunday Times, 22 April, 1951). Interestingly, though, Butcher’s acknowledgment of the Clem-Clinton connection goes back to Buck’s own disclosure given in an interview to the reviewer. 9

Like Buck, Espey (1913-2000) was the child of Presbyterian missionaries to China who grew up in China and returned to the United States as an adult. After his studies at Occidental College in Los Angeles and at Oxford University, Espey became a scholar of English literature as well as a writer of fiction. His novels Minor Heresies (1945), Tales Out of School (1947) and The Other City (1950) are reminiscences of his missionary childhood in Shanghai.

10 For an excellent overview of the political situation in China at the time and American – political as well as cultural – perspectives on it, see Philip Beidler’s

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particular, which is relevant for my argument here: for Buck’s relationship to Luce and her representation of him in God’s Men were strongly influenced by Luce’s stance on these issues. In the novel Buck fictionalizes the relationship between Luce and Chiang Kai-shek: William Lane gets to know Chiang Kai-shek in a meeting which clearly reveals his admiration as well as support for the political leader – an attitude which Buck presents with great skepticism in the text. Following Buck’s lead, her biographer Conn has read Luce in critical terms, stressing that Luce had “enforced a pro-Chiang policy in all his publications, and tolerated little dissent” already by the late 1930s (1996: 324). Other scholars share this view of Luce’s “power as a shaper of American views of China in the 1930s and 1940s” (Klein 2003: 176; see also Beidler 2008; Lian 1997: 126). Especially in the wake of the Sino-Japanese War, World War II, and the eventual ‘loss’ of China in 1949 Luce’s public influence and lobbyism for Chiang Kai-shek became apparent in their problematic dimensions, as Philip Beidler summarized: Indeed, as far as China was concerned, for Luce, the vision of the era he came to call the American Century could at times seem to comprise some grand missionary campaign of cultural counter-colonization, of reengineering history into a set of some of the most contorted claims of relationship ever established between major nationalities. […] Amidst global economic crisis and the gathering of war in Europe and the Mediterranean, and against the claims of vast competing totalitarianisms both occidental and oriental, the Western defenders of freedom needed to embrace in Asia the hopes and aspirations of the Christian democratic capitalist Chinese represented by the brave, embattled, Nationalist regime of Chiang Kai-shek as fervently as they did their own. (Beidler 2008: n. p.; emphasis in original)

article “China Magic: America’s Great Reality Hiatus, 1948-73” (Michigan Quarterly Review, spring 2008; for the URL, see the Works Cited list at the end of the book). Similarly, Christina Klein in the introduction of her Cold War Orientalism describes what she calls “the relationship between the expansion of U.S. power into Asia between 1945 and 1961 and the simultaneous proliferation of popular American representations of Asia” (Klein 2003: 5), that is the interdependence of foreign policy and popular culture.

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What might on the surface appear as a project which Pearl Buck – with all her outspoken love for freedom and the Chinese – should have endorsed, was more intricate in reality: for she took issue with Luce’s neo-imperial attitude and its capitalist concomitants.11 In fact, Buck’s idea of a “special relationship” between the United States and China was very much different from Luce’s. Although they were both born and raised in China as the children of missionaries and had both sought out to “translate […] the missionary impulse into secular terms” (Conn 1996: 324), Buck’s mission was based on an idea of humanitarianism – free from the hierarchies of gender, class, or race/ethnicity – as I have argued throughout this book. With that, her project clashed with that of Henry Luce, who used his newspaper and magazine empire to propel the idea of American political supremacy in the Cold War – the American Century, as he called his notion of an American empire in an editorial of his Life magazine in February 1941.12 As Christina Klein has explained, For two decades [Luce] presented the relationship between the U.S. and China as a parental one: under America’s tutelage and Chiang Kai-shek’s leadership, China would be raised up to become a Christian, democratic, industrial nation that mirrored its American “parent.” Millions of Americans, prompted by stories and images like that of the baby in Shanghai,13 embraced this view of China and developed an

11 On Luce’s notion of empire, see William A. Swanberg’s seminal biography Luce and His Empire (1972) and David Harvey, The New Imperialism (2003). 12 In the “American Century” Luce urged the United States to give up isolationism and take on a missionary’s role in world politics with the aim to spread democracy on American terms. Luce wanted the United States “to exert upon the world the full impact of our influence, for such purposes as we see fit and by such means as we see fit” (editorial in Life; reprinted in Michael J. Hogan’s The Ambiguous Legacy (1999). 13 Both Klein and Beidler discuss the photograph of a Chinese baby which Luce’s Life magazine printed in 1937. The photograph depicted a crying “baby – its body blackened, its clothes torn, its mouth open in wail – sitting alone amidst the rubble of Shanghai after a Japanese attack.” According to Klein, this “classic sentimental image […] captured a profound sense of loss: it represented China as a weak and vulnerable infant, and appealed to an implicitly adult American viewer to extent some kind of parental aid” (Klein 2003: 176; see also Beidler).

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intense emotional bond with the Chinese people. This long-standing sense of a parent-child relationship helps explain the depth of the emotional trauma caused by the “loss” of China in 1949, in which the popular triumph of communism was experienced as a profound rejection of more than a century of parental love. (Klein 2003: 176-77)

This notion clearly did not coincide with what Buck herself had in mind and was preaching throughout her career as a writer: the vision of East and West on an equal footing, divorced from political and cultural hierarchies – and decidedly not the idea of the East merely emulating the West. While Buck, too, should draw on the model of the parent-child relationship with her theme of the adoption of Amerasian children, as I will show at the end of this chapter, her view differed significantly from Luce’s overtly hierarchical version of the relationship between the United States and China. Buck repeatedly advocated her notion of equality between the East and the West – and sometimes even the superiority of the East over the West – by means of comparing women’s situations in both countries: “Buck [...] made it clear that the United States was not capable of providing moral leadership to the world, in large part because of the inferior position of women in American society,” as Robert Schaffer has observed (1999: 160). Buck’s feminist contemplations can most prominently be traced in her wartime essay collections Of Men and Women (1941) and What America Means to Me (1942). By the end of the decade, she further expanded on this argument and “pursued [it] to problematic conclusions” (Shaffer 1999: 161). In The New York Times Magazine in 1949, […] Buck went so far as to declare that the idea “that Chinese women have been much suppressed” was an “American myth.” This last formulation was hardly convincing, even if one only used Buck’s own writings over the years as a source. Nevertheless, this rhetorical depiction of the status of women in Asia as equal to if not higher than that of women in the United States attempted to puncture American smugness and urge Americans to learn from the rest of the world. For example, Buck contrasted what she saw as Chinese women’s efforts to attain independence from men in the late 1940s with American women’s concentration on marriage and domestic life. Her efforts to break from a preconceived Western model of women’s experience in China foreshadowed recent scholarship in Chinese women’s history, much of which has emphasized women’s agency and even power rather than simply

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oppression. By focusing on women’s lives, Buck concluded that the United States was not the center of a ‘free world,’ again challenging Cold War ideology (Shaffer 1999: 161).

If Western ideology were simply imposed on the East without adaptation or modification, Asia would, in fact, become a “new laboratory of Western values and ideas,” as Luce had it in mind (Beidler 2008: n. p.). For Buck, such an approach did not “consider the people,” to recall once again her famous attack on Western missionaries as expressed in her speech “Is there a Case for Foreign Missions?”. Those figures in her fiction who pursue their missionary projects with a blend of stubbornness, egotism, and chauvinism and who do not “consider the people” do not fare well, as we have seen. Although she continuously highlighted China’s plight in the SinoJapanese war herself and established the China Emergency Relief Committee (CERC) in late 1940 (see Conn 1996: 237-38; see also Lian 1997: 126),14 Buck further opposed Luce in his one-sided coverage of Japanese aggression and war atrocities. Luce’s support of China and his view of Japan as an enemy went “so far as to publish in both Time and Life photoessays literally facing off Chinese physiognomies and body types against Japanese, complete with diagrams and pseudo-anthropological notation [when Pearl Harbor was attacked]” (Beidler 2008: n. p.). Again, such an approach collided with Buck’s views of humanitarianism and equality among peoples. For example, during the war, she campaigned against the relocation and internment of Japanese Americans on the West Coast, as David D. Buck explained in his article “Pearl S. Buck in Search of America” (1994: 36-37).15 Moreover, in her novel The Hidden Flower (1952) she depicts the story of the interracial marriage between the Japanese Josui Satai and the American soldier Allen Kennedy during the American post-war

14 At the time, Buck and Luce were still rather close, and worked together on CERC, which was chaired by Buck. Among the other committee members were Buck’s husband, Richard Walsh, a representative of the Chinese government, middlebrow writer and Book-of-the-Month judge Dorothy Canfield Fisher, and First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt (Conn 1996: 237-38). 15 As an aside: David D. Buck is a scholar who is not related to Pearl Buck.

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occupation of Japan, and she clearly sides with the Japanese point of view16 and pleads for a truly interracial understanding and the abolition of racial discrimination, such as anti-miscegenation laws.17 Buck and Luce eventually fell out with each other over their conflicting positions. Where the two had started off as friends – also as an outcome of their similar biographical backgrounds as children of China missionaries –, they increasingly turned into enemies and their conflict particularly centered on the assessment of Chiang Kai-shek, as I intimated above. “The friendship frayed and eventually snapped over the issue of Chiang Kai-shek and the Kuomintang. […] Luce regarded Pearl as his adversary: in his view, she was wrong on Chiang, soft on Communism, sentimental about equality, and unreliable on the use of American power,” as Conn has summarized this aspect (Conn 1996: 324). While Buck’s aim, too, was to ameliorate the standing of China and the Chinese with Americans, she objected to what she considered Luce’s oversimplified stance. As America’s long-term “number one voice on Asia,” Buck may have also become increasingly dissatisfied with the fact that Luce ‘usurped’ the authority that she had previously had. Together with “his allies in the State Department and the Roosevelt circle,” Luce “kept the China fires burning” during World War II, as Philip Beidler has described Luce’s effective and successful strategy. In his endorsement, Luce failed to see the “utterly abysmal military and political performance of the Chiang Kai-shek regime” and its inclination for corruption and self-enrichment (Beidler 2008: n. p.).

16 By 1959, however, “Buck was justifying the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki” and went on to write “a more favorable portrait of Jiang [Chiang Kaishek] in 1961,” as Robert Shaffer asserts (1999: 163). Speculating on Buck’s change of mind, Shaffer explains this by the increasing opposition and accusations Buck had met throughout the decade in the United States and in the PRC press in particular (1999: 163). 17 In The Hidden Flower – like Come, My Beloved, and Letter from Peking – Buck “argued that the failure of Americans to accept white–Asian marriages both symbolized and formed part of America’s problematic moral stance in the Cold War. Buck’s work shows that the United States in the postcolonial period faced some of the same tensions as the unabashedly imperialist Europeans regarding the consequences of sexual activity in Asia,” as Robert Shaffer suggests (1999: 165).

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Comparable to 1932, when her criticism of missions had pushed her to outsiderdom, Buck’s more critical views on the China question now saw her on the opposite end of prevailing political opinion. Where Buck’s attack on the missionary community had helped propel her to fame in the early 1930s, this time, by contrast, the outcome was the reverse; her position was considerably weaker – for she clashed with the male public decisionmakers and the political establishment of the United States. Public opinion was increasingly turning against Buck: “her causes and ideals became suspect,” as David Buck has put it (1994: 38). Buck was being accused of siding with the ‘wrong side,’ that is, of supporting communism – an accusation which threatened to be a coup de grâce for the careers of many artists and intellectuals in the America of the postwar years and in the era of McCarthyism.18 Within this large group of ‘cultural dissenters,’ the effects of these accusations were particularly perceptible for someone who had always been as outspoken and confrontational as Buck. The FBI, which had first opened a file on Buck in 1937, renewed its interest in her at the end of 1951.19 At the same time, the intercultural Asia magazine as well as her East and West Association, through which she had long expressed her political opinions, had ceased to exist (Conn 1996: 261; 326-27). Furthermore, Buck’s acclaim as a writer was dwindling in these years: though still prominent, she was cast as a mediocre women’s writer more than ever before (see, for example, Shaffer 1999: 166; Conn 1996: esp. 297-333). It would be wrong to blame this development solely on politics: after all, her fiction of the 1950s and afterwards was increasingly lack-

18 Middlebrow culture, in particular, was affected by McCarthyism and the political backlash of the 1950s. For example, Jaime Harker, who situates middlebrow culture (and especially its female authors) in the framework of the Progressive movement, writes of middlebrow’s “vilification by McCarthyism” (2007: 152). For the cultural dismissal of the middlebrow in the context of McCarthyism, see also Joan Shelley Rubin’s The Making of Middlebrow Culture (1992: esp. chapter 6). 19 For a discussion of the beginnings of the FBI’s surveillance of Buck in 1937, see Conn, who also lists other writers under scrutiny in the 1930s (1996: 260261). Conn also traces HUAC’s interest in Buck in the 1940s (1996: 270), which culminated in 1946 when Buck attacked Winston Churchill’s famous speech in which he had announced the advent of the Cold War (1996: 298-301).

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ing quality and often written out of economic considerations to secure the funding for her humanitarian projects. Still, if we take seriously Peter Conn’s statement that Buck “stood on the wrong side of virtually every line” in the 1950s and 60s (Conn 1996: xvii), then her political standing becomes a decisive factor that needs to enter into the equation. Significantly, her being pushed to the margins – both in terms of politics and literary achievement (Shaffer 1999: 165) – intensified Buck’s missionary project in these years.20 Buck still relied on middlebrow aesthetics in her fiction, but at the same time, we can observe a gradual thinning out of these aesthetics and modes. As a novel which is representative of this phase in her career, God’s Men reflects precisely this struggle and Buck’s negotiation of Americanism. In line with a long tradition of American political and cultural critique, Buck now fashioned herself as markedly American in order to communicate her mission. More than before, the aim of this mission was to ‘make America better’ and it was grounded in Buck’s deep familiarity with another culture, a reasoning which she had hitherto used to highlight her project of Sinification and which now helped her to establish her American project. God’s Men – like the bulk of her novels and political essays in the 1940s and 50s – reflects Buck’s complicated distanciation from her earlier Sinification and her turn to Americanness. In particular, the multi-faceted discussion of the two leading characters in the novel exemplifies this development. I argue that Buck ultimately distanced herself from both figures and with this exposed the deficiencies of the two neo-missionaries at stake. In the case of William, it is a capitalist world order and business ideology that takes the place of a religious mission. This neo-missionary figure is deeply engrained in the economic system and neo-imperial thought and internalizes these concepts so much that they become his driving force of action. It is little surprising that Buck criticizes such a figure. Yet, to consider his counterpart, Clem, as Buck’s mouthpiece would be wrong, too. To be sure, Clem is charitable, altruistic up to the point of self-sacrifice, and depicted as soft. These traits make him a feminized figure. As such, he is consistent with Buck’s project of ‘making America better.’ By contrast to William’s uncompromising capitalist mission, Clem’s mission is undoubtedly

20 With this, I contradict David Buck who argues that Pearl Buck continued her project in “muted form” (1994: 30).

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more humanitarian and comes across as more tempered. This mitigation or alleviation and the differences between Clem’s and William’s neomissionary endeavors can be explained by referring back to middlebrow aesthetics and modes. The middlebrow, as we have seen in this study, often serves as a marker of moderation and balance. If Clem’s mission appears more accommodating, it is owed to these aspects. However, in general terms, the middlebrow does not figure as a viable solution within the world of this novel. Amidst the entangled web of the Cold War, this option of a ‘middlebrow solution’ is no longer possible for Buck. As the son of a sophisticated – and “liberal”, as the text stresses early on – missionary from New England, William Lane is raised in privileged conditions in China, with the family living on a missionary compound remote from the poverty and filth of Chinese everyday life. His father, while described as the genuinely good and kind “Brother Lane” (GM 37), pursues his missionary activities most of the time, thus frequently leaving his wife and children behind. Not surprisingly given Buck’s assessment of the missionary environment, as I have discussed it throughout this study, the lens through which we perceive China in God’s Men is that of the ‘victimized’ other: the wife and the children. Accordingly, William’s mother, focalized through him, calls to mind the missionary wives addressed earlier in the book: His mother, he knew, often declared that she herself was not a missionary, she was only a missionary’s wife, and she would not pretend. Privately, she had often complained to her son that it was a tragedy that his father had ever chosen to be a missionary in so repulsive a country as China, so distant from New York, where her home was. (GM 11)

The sense of alienation, perpetual foreignness, and loneliness in this text, is, however, not centered on the fate of the mother, who remains a marginal character throughout the text. Instead, the novel discusses these themes through a male figure, as it puts emphasis on William’s growing aversion to life in China, to poverty, and ultimately, to his own upbringing and to the missionary parents who got him into the situation in the first place. The

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Boxer rebellion and the family’s resultant return to the United States21 lay bare these sentiments. On board of the ship which brings the family back to America, William, by now in his teens, gives vent to his feelings: William Lane tried not to think of his father and a good deal of the time he succeeded. He was feeling many things at this age, everything intensely. Above all, he was heartily glad that he would never again see the English boarding school where he had been so often unhappy. He was ashamed and yet proud of being American, ashamed because to be American at the school had kept him second class, proud, because America was bigger than England. The consciousness of an inferiority which he could not believe was real had clouded his school days. He had isolated himself both from the Americans and from the English, living in loneliness. He was altogether ashamed of being the son of a missionary. Even the children of English missionaries were secondary. The son of the American ambassador alone had any sort of equality with the English boys, and seeing this, William had often bitterly wished that his father had been an ambassador. Men ought to consider what they were, he thought gloomily, for the sake of their sons. (GM 51; my emphases)

Buck’s ambiguous conception of this character becomes clear already in this early scene. William defies the readers’ identification: he might have been dragged into the foreign surroundings of China as a child by his par-

21 William’s father stays behind in China and is soon joined again by his wife. William’s and his two sisters’ subsequent stay in the United States and their separation from the parents will further widen the gulf between William and his parents and constitute the principal reason for his rejection of religion and ‘classical’ missionary activity. The separation of missionary parents and their adolescent offspring, which Buck introduces here (and in other novels, such as Come, My Beloved), was in general a common practice among missionary families in China. Frequently, the children were sent back to the United States for their secondary education, in most instances much to the grief of missionary mothers, as I have discussed in chapter 1.

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ents and feel an acute sense of isolation and loneliness – but he does not come across as a victimized second-generation missionary who intends to better the world and carry out his own version of a (secular) mission. William’s loneliness here is closely connected to his sense of shame about his background: as the son of a missionary, he feels deprived of what he considers his rightful position in society and in the world, cheated out of a successful future by his missionary father. These emotions are negotiated in close conjunction with national status and the concept of empire: America and Americanness are stylized in contradistinction to an ‘English’ tradition of empire here – against which the United States still seems to fall short. The circumstances of life in China and his inferiority to the English there have denied William greatness. If only his father had properly “consider[ed] what [he] were,” William would not find himself in this inferior, shameful position but would have been able to truly pursue his own version of the American success story and live up to an English ‘standard.’ Success is almost cast here as a birthright; the dilemma of the second-generation missionary, his loneliness, displacement, and struggles to find his place in society – which we usually encounter with sympathy in Buck’s fiction – becomes tinged with negative overtones. “In his loneliness [William Lane] developed a grandeur of bearing, a haughtiness of look […],” as the narrator warns us and prepares us for William’s behavior to come (GM 51). Importantly, England and its class system are employed here as a foil to the capitalist American success story. William’s nostalgic and idealized notion of the British Empire and its colonial system is in fact a retrospect – it is as little a contemporary reality as his concept of America is. ‘America’ has been an abstract idea to the expatriate missionary child throughout his life, taught to him in missionary surroundings, but not really experienced in person. To invest meaning in the abstraction of ‘America,’ William has learned to transport the British class system onto America. As long as he is in China, his look back on empire and the colonial system is still intact. When – upon his return to the United States – he realizes that his concept does not work in America, we first see him struggle with this projection during his college years. But then, William sets out to strenuously replicate and implement it in his American surroundings. This replication or transplantation of the idea of empire and colonialism – epitomized in the novel by William’s second marriage to an English aristocrat – has repercussions that will lead to an increase in William’s power: he manages to turn (cul-

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tural) imagination into his very own reality. This effect is reminiscent of a process explained by Christina Klein: in her introduction to Cold War Orientalism Klein describes the reciprocities between the sphere of popular culture, representation, and the imaginary on the one hand and the sphere of concrete foreign policy as well as material and social relations on the other hand in the American Cold War relationship with Asia. The one always conditioned the other, and time and again, it was the imaginary and the representational which led to the material, the concrete implementation of policies (Klein 2003: 6). A similar strategy is at work with William when he uses his imagined idea of empire to construct a reality out of it. The reader’s uncomfortable relation to William is all the more reinforced once this figure is assessed against the novel’s second protagonist, Clem Miller. Clem is introduced in a plot line that runs in alternation with the episodes of William’s childhood. Although growing up as the son of missionaries in the same Chinese town as William, Clem’s background could not differ more: where the Lane family comes from an elitist New England background, the Millers are of Pennsylvania farmer stock; rather than living on a secluded missionary compound, they have chosen to live among the Chinese, exposing the family’s children to close contact with the locals from an early age on. With this portrayal, Buck models the Millers on her own family’s story, suggesting a proximity to Clem, I contend, which expands to the reader’s identification with this character from the outset of the novel. Again, this identificatory closeness is consistent with middlebrow principles. In contrast to the Lanes and their privileged lifestyle in China, Clem and his family experience poverty as an essential part of their daily life in the country. As the most visible marker of this poverty, food and its problematic distribution are introduced. Already as a child, Clem contemplates deeply upon the importance of food: At this period of his life he was in a profound confusion he dared not face, even alone. The world was divided into the rich who had food and the poor who had not, and though he had been told often of the camel’s eye through which the rich would find it hard to enter heaven, yet God seemed indulgent to them and strangely careless of the poor. The poor Chinese, for example, the starving ones, God who saw all things must also see them, but if so He kept silent. (GM 15)

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This passage, I suggest, is indicative of Buck’s overall solidarity with this character. In his skeptical assessment of the world’s injustices, its great divide between the rich and the poor, and God’s (read: institutional religion’s) apparent failure to procure a greater balance, Clem can be seen as a fictional mouthpiece of Buck’s own views and humanitarian activities. Indeed, the concern with food and its fair distribution will become the driving force behind Clem’s mission and constitute a major component of William and Clem’s rift as adults. In the episodes of their childhood set in China, however, their paths do not really cross (with the exception of one minor scene). During the Boxer rebellion, William’s father – in the absence of his own family – acts charitably vis-à-vis the poor Miller family, characteristically by providing them with what will become central to Clem’s later mission: food (GM 37). Other than that, there are no points of contact between the two families. In fact, the gulf between Clem and William soon widens even further. In a plot structure that initially oscillates between America and China,22 we learn about William’s return to his home country and the brutal murder of Clem’s family by the Boxers. The story further unfolds as the orphaned Clem is on the run from the revolutionary forces and wanders about the Chinese countryside, feeling the pinch of hunger and seeking shelter with old Chinese friends and converts of his late father. Yet, despite his deplorable condition as a refugee, Clem is still content in some sense, wishes to befriend the Chinese, see the good in everyone, and act charitably. Meanwhile, William becomes intensely ambitious and gets increasingly accustomed to his American surroundings and reinstalled in the New Eng-

22 Even reviewers who dismissed the parts of God’s Men which are set in the protagonists’ adult lives in America as “weak and artificial” (John J. Espey for the New York Times Book Review) tended to praise the novel’s childhood scenes in China and acknowledged Buck’s “intimate knowledge of China” and the ethnographic authenticity of its depiction (North; see also Espey, Washburn, Sherman, Starkey). For instance, reviewer Beatrice Washburn in the Miami Herald made the following appeal to Buck at the end of her review: “We beg Miss Buck to return to China and let her great talent operate in the field where it has been so successful.” Contrary to American critics, Asian critical views had, we need to remember, denied Buck’s skills to depict China. See my discussion of these critical voices in chapter 4.

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land establishment, at some point even enrolling in the same classes as Franklin D. Roosevelt at Harvard University. Yet by contrast to Clem, William – in spite of his social elevation and increasing material success in America – is still characterized by an ultimate lack and sense of discontent. Above all, he is desperate to “get away from everything he had known. When he entered college […] he would not tell anyone who his father was or that he came from China” (GM 67). Once again William’s shame about being a missionary’s son and upbringing in a faraway place and his sense of inadequacy gain the upper hand: He felt at a disadvantage, there was so much he did not know because he had not always lived in his own country. The secret hostility he had always felt toward his father for compelling him to be born the son of a missionary in China was now rising into a profound and helpless anger. In spite of this he loved his father in a strange half-hating fashion, and some of his darkest moods were those in which he brooded upon what his father might have been had he not heard the unfortunate call of God. (GM 113)

Where William was depicted as completely aloof and haughty before, his portrayal subtly changes and becomes more variegated from here on. He might still have the urge to fully dissociate himself from his family (“the sooner he separated himself from them the better,” as he puts it upon his graduation from Harvard; GM 139), but the underlying reasons and motivations become at least partially comprehensible: William’s discontent and anger derive from his helplessness, his lack of orientation among and familiarity with ‘his own’ country and its customs, and his overall sense of displacement and alienation. The missionary father is held responsible as the one who gave in to the “unfortunate call of God,” thus unsettling William. What is more, William’s anger originates in his increasing awareness that no matter how much he tries to take a distance from his missionary upbringing, this legacy will always and inevitably be part of him: At the bottom of everything there was always a permanent complaint against his parents because they had robbed him of his birthright of pride. It had been impossible to explain to them why he was ashamed, and he was the more ashamed because he has the agony of wanting to be proud of his father, and then the humbling realization of knowing that there was something of his father in himself in spite of this ha-

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tred, and that he could not simply enjoy all that he had, his money and his great houses and the freedom that success should have brought him, because he could never be free. God haunted him. (GM 294-95)

Although Buck’s ambivalent relationship to her own father carried different implications, as I have shown in chapter 2, the underlying dynamics of the love-hate-relationship between the missionary father and his offspring as well as the sense of being “haunted” even in adult-life are still comparable. Especially William’s ignorance of American life as a result of being raised in China is a parallel to Buck’s own experiences (see, for example, Conn 1996; Spurling 2010; Stirling 1983; My Several Worlds). For William, the answer to his entrapment by the missionary legacy is a strategy of overcompensation: in a way, he strives to become an American with a surplus. With this end in view, he pursues his own version of a mission. It turns out to be a project that is infiltrated by a twisted understanding of a ‘rags-to-riches’ story. After his graduation from Harvard, he marries into the rich Cameron family, a move which pushes him away even further from his missionary upbringing and which embeds him squarely in the American business world. Thanks to his father-in-law’s financial support, William builds a highly successful career as an editor and publisher. Displeased with the fact that America is a “place full of common people” (GM 73) – an assessment of William’s which once again sees America as a antipode to the British class system – he decides to establish a newspaper. In a letter to his father he writes: “I feel I am needed more here than there [in China]. The truth is, I am not impressed by American civilization. I intend to start some sort of newspaper, something ordinary people will read, or at least look at, and so do what I can to enlighten my people.” (GM 118, my emphasis)

His self-proclaimed mission in the field of journalism, then, is educative. Like religious missionaries, his aim is to enlighten, and it is the ordinary people who are his target group, his missionées. William’s ‘gospel’ will become a photojournalistic magazine – modeled on Henry Luce’s Life magazine – as well as various other middlebrow media. In a conversation with his father-in-law, William sketches the nature and motivation of his project:

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“My paper […] is what’s called tabloid size and it is to have everything in it that can interest the masses. It won’t be for people like you [his well educated, highbrow father in law]. It will have plenty of pictures. I’ve noticed even in college that most of the men don’t really read much but they will always look at pictures.” “I hope you don’t mean yellow journalism,” Mr. Cameron said severely. “No, I don’t,” William said. “I hope I can do something more subtle than that.” (GM 122-23, my emphasis)

The attitude displayed here is ambivalent. While this statement reveals William’s capacity to be flexible, modern, and receptive to new trends and circumstances, his goal to enlighten and educate the ignorant masses is not at all unproblematic. For this mission is constructed around William’s superiority, sense of manipulation, and uncompromising or even ruthless business acumen. He soon monopolizes the American publishing market and succeeds precisely because he does not rely on a charitable principle, but above all always considers his own profit and benefit. With that, he can be regarded as a problematic fictional fusion of the old and the new type of missionary: to an extent, he embodies the continuation of the real life firstgeneration missionaries with their stubborn religious zeal and aim to enlighten people. At the same time, in his adaptability, modernity, and his turn to the secular, William represents a new understanding of the missionary activity and behavior – and can thus be regarded as a neo-missionary. As a result, he finds himself in a dilemma of in-betweenness, characterized by a lack or void, as I have suggested further above. William’s second wife, Emory, aptly sums this dilemma up when she observes that he is “a religious man without a religion” (GM 306). Importantly, William partly rediscovers religion after his father’s death,23 which can be seen as a turning point in the depiction of William. The scenes describing the dying of the older Lane are strikingly reminiscent of Buck’s portrayal of Andrew’s death in Fighting Angel. ‘Brother Lane’ comes back to the United States to die, and, like Buck in the case of her father, William takes him into his house for the final weeks. The usually distanced and controlled William feels moved when seeing his fragile, emaci-

23 On the plot level, his rediscovery of religion is quite literal. To please his second wife, Emory, William converts to Catholicism in the end (GM 314-15; 329).

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ated father, and in the end – in scenes which are rendered in highly melodramatic fashion – reconciles with him: In a daze of love such as he had never felt for any human creature, he lifted his father into his arms and, horrified at the lightness of the frame he held, he mounted the stairs. The old man, feeling his son’s arms about him, gave himself up with a sigh and closed his eyes. What befell William in the weeks that followed he was never able himself to understand. Its effects did not appear fully for many years. He seemed to be alone in the world with his father, and yet the dying saint was someone far beyond being only his father. […] (GM 215)

Like the old missionary here, Buck’s Andrew in Fighting Angel was cast as a “dying saint,” and Buck, like William, had finally overcome her anger and found her peace with her father. After his father’s death, William still represses memories of his unhappy childhood in China, but he is finally capable of admitting his father’s uniqueness: “‘As a matter of fact, my father was rather remarkable. I didn’t discover it, though, until he came home to die in my house’” (GM 278), as William comes to realize. To make amends for his long hatred of his father, the newspaper tycoon now decides to give huge sums to American foreign missions, always in memory of his father. He established a college in China, known as the Lane Memorial University, although he steadfastly refused to meet face to face the missionaries whose salaries he paid. He had set up an organization to do that, the Lane Foundation.24 (GM 255)

24 The “Lane Foundation” is an obvious allusion to the real Henry Luce Foundation, which was established in 1936 by Henry Luce to honor his missionary parents, Elizabeth Root Luce and Henry Winters Luce. From its inception, the Henry Luce Foundation – which exists to the present day – has set out to “bring important ideas to the center of American life, strengthen international understanding, and foster innovation and leadership in academic, policy, religious and art communities” (qtd. from the foundation’s mission statement at http://www.hluce.org/mission.aspx, 10 March, 2012).

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William still takes his distance from the missionary community and refuses to get too deeply involved with it, but he invests money in the missionary enterprise.25 This decision derives from a desire to commemorate his late father, as the passage indicates, but there is more to it. His new support of the foreign mission movement is tinged with chauvinistic considerations, as we learn immediately afterwards: He was still not satisfied. He wanted his country to be the greatest country in the world, not only in words and imagination and national pride, but in hard fact. He saw American ships on all seas, and American newspapers, his papers, in all countries, American names on business streets, and above all American churches and schools everywhere. America was his country, and he would make her great. (GM 255)

What comes to the fore here is personal and national empowerment as the incentive behind William’s missionary involvement. As long as his media, his money, and his country’s institutions and economy do not rule supreme and his vision is not accomplished, William will remain insatiable. This understanding of the missionary enterprise by far exceeds the concept of sentimental imperialism which many missionaries had endorsed: instead, what we get here is an uncompromising if not aggressive version of missionary thought – an outgrowth of the older ideology and a counter project to the humanitarian, secular missions of the second-generation missionaries, as Xi Lian, Grant Wacker and others have described them. William’s self-proclaimed “need to find God anew” (GM 256), then, is suffused with the notion of expansion and aggrandizement – an aspect which Buck had already harshly criticized about missionaries’ attitudes two decades earlier, as epitomized in her 1932 speech “Is there a Case for Foreign Missions?”. Buck thus clearly expresses her rejection of such an approach to the missionary activity and motivation in William. Peter Conn has argued that

25 We come across a similar business interest behind the missionary activity in Come, My Beloved. The missionary of the first generation in this novel, David MacArd, an American millionaire, founds a theological school in India. He does so in order to commemorate his late wife, but it is also the idea of political expansion that governs his decision. With the figure of MacArd, we encounter a ruthlessness, attitude, and language similar to William’s.

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she utilized this figure to “pillor[y]” Henry Luce and to “enact […] revenge” on him because he had played an integral part in Buck’s waning influence (Conn 1996: 325, 326). But I argue that there is more to her portrayal of William (as a fictional proxy for Luce) than mere satire to give her “a moment of satisfaction,” as Conn claimed it (Conn 1996: 326). Underneath all her critique of William’s desire and strategy to expand his power, Buck’s discussion of Americanness here also reveals the centrality this topic had for her in these years. She might criticize William’s concept of Americanness, but at the same time, she, like him, seems to feel the need to work herself through it. An all too hasty dismissal of nationalist considerations is no longer possible given the Cold War context: in this political climate, one needs to find strategies to cope. Although William’s approach is ruthless and unsympathetic – as Buck makes unmistakably clear – his project thrives. The figure might not be likeable, but unlike his counterpart Clem, he is no failure. William’s – ambivalent – success story is contrasted with Clem’s neomissionary project. The example of Clem shows us that ultimately, there is no way to map the missionary activity in a satisfactory way, as Buck had envisioned it earlier, although Clem qualifies more easily than William as a positive neo-missionary figure and role model, as I have indicated above. In many respects, God’s Men does invite its readers to identify with this figure – especially by means of the text’s motif of orphanage, hunger, and food. When – after his flight through the Chinese hinterlands during the Boxer rebellion – he finally arrives back in America, Clem finds himself lonely again. He sets out for his grandfather’s farm in Pennsylvania, only to find that his grandfather has died and no other relatives are left. The orphan finds a precarious ‘shelter’ with the Berger couple, the new tenants of the Millers’ farm. The Bergers accommodate Clem – like several (mentally) impaired children – in order to receive child support from the local authorities. However, they neglect all of their foster children, most visibly by underfeeding them. The novel’s motif of hunger and food gains acute urgency in these episodes, to the effect of the readers’ alignment with Clem and to serve as a further explanation of his later mission: Clem, always until now pallid and small, suddenly began to grow. His bones increased in size and he was obsessed with hunger. He would not steal from these strangers into whose midst he had fallen and therefore he starved. He imagined food,

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heaping bowls of rice and browned fish and green cabbage. In China, God had given them food and he had eaten. His hunger all but drove him back to praying to God again as his father had done. […] [But] it did not occur to him that God would work through such people as the Bergers. […] Clem had no communication with them, for they said nothing to him or to each other except the necessary words of work and food. The silence in the house was that of beasts. Nothing softened the hopeless harshness of the days, there was no change except the change of day and night. (GM 83)

Similar to Dickens’s adolescent heroes,26 Clem overcomes the obstacles and finds a way out of his misery. He escapes from the Bergers’ farmhouse with one of the younger children and moves to a small town in Ohio, where he works in a little convenience store which he eventually takes over as owner. In a turn of the plot which can be seen as contrived even by Buck’s standards Clem approaches Henrietta Lane, William’s despised sister, by letters, they get closer in the course of this letter exchange, and soon marry. Clem and Henrietta pursue their own rags-to-riches story which – contrary to William’s and following the middlebrow agenda instead – is tempered and embedded in the couple’s humanitarian project. Over the years, Clem successfully expands his business: he sets up non-profit food markets, establishes a laboratory which produces synthesized food from inexpensive materials, and he starts charity restaurants programmatically named “Brother Man Restaurants” (GM 290).27 A further project called “People’s

26 The bleak atmosphere, the adults’ emotional coldness, and the overall impression of hopelessness and resignation which Buck employs in this scene call to mind similar scenes of orphans’ fates often inscribed in the fiction of Charles Dickens (for example in Oliver Twist, David Copperfield, or Great Expectations). Dickens, to recall what I addressed earlier in my book (see the first part of chapter 3), was the author whom Buck considered her model as a writer from her childhood on. For an in-depth discussion of children’s victimization in Dickens’s fiction, see, for instance, Richard Locke’s chapter “Charles Dickens’s Heroic Victims: Oliver Twist, David Copperfield, and Pip” in his monograph Critical Children. The Use of Childhood in Ten Great Novels (2011: 13-49). 27 With this, the parallels between the fictional Clem and the real Clifford Clinton register once again. Next to establishing his “Meals for Millions” Foundation,

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Choice” takes him and his wife to places like India and back to China where they engage in food relief, and at some point – and recounted almost as an aside – Clem even meets Sun Yat-sen to advise him to buy food rather than arms with his money. Clem thus becomes a humanitarian neomissionary, one concerned with food and the essential needs of people. In this sense, he, too, continues the paternal project in modified form: […] he was illuminated as his father before him had been, not then by the satisfaction of feeding human bodies, but by the excitement of saving men’s souls. Clem had no interest in saving souls, for he had a high and unshakeable faith in the souls of men as he saw them, good enough as God had made them, except when the evils of earth beset them. And these evils, he was convinced, rose first of all from hunger, for from hunger came illness and poverty and all the misery that forced men into desperation and then into senseless quarrels. […] (GM 151) His heritage from his father was an invincible belief in goodness, not in the goodness of God to which his father had so persistently trusted, but in the goodness of man. Clem believed more profoundly than ever that with his stomach full any man preferred to be good. Therefore the task of the righteous, of whom Clem considered himself one, was to see that everyone had food. (GM 220)

Passages like these illustrate Clem’s “unsinkable goodness” (Conn 1996: 326), but they do not stand uncontested. Clem’s righteousness also has different implications: taking the “whole world as his own responsibility […], starv[ing] with every hungry man, woman, and child, [and] crucif[ying] himself every day” (GM 353), he sacrifices himself for his project – an attitude which causes his downfall. It is precisely his devotion that deprives Clem of human qualities: “[…] in Clem there was something of the seer, if not of the prophet” (GM 285). Clem’s elevation to a prophet- or saint-like status bears some resemblance to Buck’s assessment of her father in Fighting Angel. Where Andrew is intoxicated with “the Work,” Clem displays an overtly moralistic obsession with “the Food” (GM 349) – equally capitalized to show that Clem’s idealism and devotion to his cause is accompanied by excess. To a certain degree, this can be read as a sign of Buck’s admira-

Clinton had also been the owner of cafeterias (“Clifton’s Cafeteria”) which, too, gave out free meals to those who could not pay for it.

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tion for this figure; but then, I have shown throughout this study that analogies to Buck’s father always render her fictional figures problematic. The problematization of Clem as a neo-missionary figure becomes particularly obvious if we look more closely at his motivations behind his fight against poverty and hunger: For this food mission is strongly suffused with political considerations: to Clem, one “evil of earth” that has emerged from hunger, to refer back to the above quote, is communism: “The Communists mustn’t be the ones to get the upper hand, but they would unless people had food to eat” (GM 349), he concludes in the wake of World War II and with that statement explains his project. Statements like this show that Clem is deeply entangled in the logic of Cold War politics and marked by Americanness after all. His project is humanitarian, but it is simultaneously enacted as the project of a ‘good’ American neo-missionary who, at the end of the day, also advances ‘his’ own capitalist system and political ideology against the backdrop of the Cold War. This approach, I suggest, can be regarded as a follow-up version of first-generation missionaries’ sentimental imperialism: it is embedded in the principle of charity, but still suffused with a sense of national superiority. Further, Clem’s reliance on the sentimental mode is in accord with the middlebrow way of facing Cold War politics. I follow Christina Klein here, who has shown that sentimentalism featured prominently in middlebrow depictions and was a mode which many middlebrow intellectuals used to think about questions of the Cold War (Klein 2003: 14-15). Despite her own political convictions and attempts to present herself as a ‘real,’ patriotic American in those years, Buck was wary of such a figure. With his mixture of sentimental imperialism, starry-eyed idealism, strict morality, occasional naivety, and ‘super-humanness’ Clem makes the reader strangely uncomfortable. The reader therefore all along suspects that this neo-missionary will not fare well: and in fact, Clem’s premature death at the end of novel needs to be seen as a logical outcome of his approach to mission. He might have been aware that in the new world order there is the need to ‘fit in God’ in new modes, thus, be adaptive and flexible, but he has not been able to turn this insight into action adequately. Apparently, Clem has not been ‘modern’ – read: self-confident, reckless, egotistical – enough to succeed. His counterpart William comments on Clem’s incapacity to have his finger on the pulse of the time this way: “Clem was uncompetitive in a competitive world” (GM 254).

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What do we make of such a statement? Or, to put it more generally: where and how should we best place Pearl Buck’s criticism of the neomissionary activity in God’s Men in the context of her middlebrow mission? If both William’s and Clem’s renditions of missions prove to be problematic and run counter to the aims that Buck had long envisioned for her neo-missionary project, does this mean, then, that with her later fiction of the 1950s and afterwards Buck conceded that her project had step by step evaporated? That the middlebrow as well as mission as a theme did not offer the solutions she had long believed to offer? It is hard to find definitive answers to these questions, because Buck herself might have been reluctant to come to a clear-cut stance on these issues. Still, I will try and address these final ambivalences in her career by way of concluding this book. I started out my project with the observation that Pearl Buck opposed the male missionary project predominantly because she saw in it the suppression and victimization of women. Rather than completely abandoning ‘mission’ – as a theme and as a style –, she drew upon her missionary legacy and implemented what I have called a neo-missionary project in her own fiction. The neo-, revised, or ‘liberal’ missionary project was that of the second generation, the offspring of ‘old type’ missionaries. With its social gospel and its concern for the people, this project took on an outlook, shape, and character which were clearly different from the parental missionary activities. Embedded in humanitarian concerns, feminism, and interracial understanding, Pearl Buck’s missionary project was negotiated in close conjunction with the phenomenon of the middlebrow, as I have shown. If we follow the logic of Buck’s project (and, for example, recall the pattern of a novel like Kinfolk), it would be plausible to see the true neomissionary potential unfold in a female character. Feminized male characters like Clem in God’s Men, after all, seem to be insufficient as they fail in their mission and die prematurely.28 Conceived as hybrid figures, they are

28 For example, the male protagonist of Buck’s novel Pavilion of Women (1946), Brother André, suffers the same fate as Clem. This figure, an unconventional exCatholic priest, is generous, patient, benevolent, and soft and thus a feminized figure like Clem. Brother André no longer follows a rigidly evangelical approach to missionary work, but pursues a truly humanitarian project: he runs a shelter home for orphaned Chinese children. Similar to Clem’s case, André’s

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positioned in-between what Buck conceives as the male and the female missionary projects; they can be considered as peculiar fusions of the images she gives of her father and her mother; and they oscillate between the poles of male self-assertion and female victimization on which Buck had based her fictional work. In view of this insight, it is interesting to see that God’s Men lacks a clear-cut female counterpart to the figures of William and Clem. Clem’s wife, Henrietta, is as close as we get to find such a figure. She becomes part of Clem’s missionary zeal. The couple’s relationship does no longer rigidly follow the traditional constellation of a missionary marriage, as I have analyzed it in chapters 1 and 2, but theirs is a union based on the principle of equality and love. Henrietta truly is her husband’s partner and very much a woman of the twentieth century, a doctor of chemistry, and a trained pilot who delivers food supplies to the world’s needy places. Thus, she comes across as an independent woman – even at an early age before her marriage. Yet, on the other hand, Henrietta still relapses into the role of the assistant missionary, as scholars like Barbara Welter and Patricia Grimshaw have defined it. She continues her doctoral studies in chemistry only reluctantly after her wedding: “‘Clem, I want to be married now. I don’t want to go on with my doctorate…’” (GM 173). Throughout her marriage, she “loved Clem with the entire force of her nature but she had never shared his sense of mission. […] She was useful to Clem, and as long as he needed her, her life had meaning” (GM 192). This female character in God’s Men, then, does not provide us with a solution: her mission remains contingent on her husband’s. In Buck’s later fiction, there are female figures that – at first glance – seem to offer these solutions and that could be considered successful and positive neomissionaries. For example, fourth-generation missionary Livy MacArd in Come, My Beloved “believed passionately in […] [all people] as human beings” (CMB 271) and is about to start a mission of charity. In The Three Daughters of Madame Liang the oldest daughter, Grace, is a medical doctor who seeks to use her American education to improve medical conditions in

neo-missionary project is, however, not rewarded either. He is beaten to death when he intervenes in a shop robbery. Thus, Pavilion of Women, too, introduces the motif of the neo-missionary’s premature death.

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China. In The New Year (1968) the figure of Laura plays a pivotal role in the adoption of her husband’s Amerasian love child and thus displays her humanitarianism. Similarly, it is the strangely caricatured but good-hearted German expatriate Dr. Steiner, who adopts Josui and Allen’s child in The Hidden Flower, the novel which I have touched upon earlier in this chapter. All of these female figures act on the principles of humanitarianism, charity, and benevolence and might be considered variants of neo-missionaries. However, none of these characters is round and fully fleshed out; they remain ciphers or sketches of certain ideas. With that, they attest to the fact that Buck’s middlebrow project was increasingly tapering off in the last phase of her career. Instead, Buck’s late work was differently accentuated. I suggest that we can read this shift as a sign that she did not altogether abandon the missionary topic, but that she readjusted it: rather than missionary figures in their various contours, it was a theme or a subject matter which became her predominant missionary focus: adoption. The theme of interracial adoption – or, Amerasian adoption, as Buck called it – is represented in The Hidden Flower and The New Year, among other late novels. And even in God’s Men we find a variation on this theme when Clem – although opposed to the idea of having children of his own because he considers the world as too bad and dangerous to procreate (GM 329) – attends to the children of his foster family and effectively adopts one of them. The theme of adoption is, for one thing, consistent with Pearl Buck’s biography, if we recall her lifelong commitment to children’s concerns, her establishment of the interracial adoption agency “Welcome House,” or her various own adoptions of children (see, for instance, Conn 1996; Stirling 1983; Spurling 2010). Most importantly, this ‘mission of adoption’ furthermore follows the logic of the American middlebrow project during the Cold War. Referring to the study by Christina Klein, I have addressed further above that the parent-child relationship was a central trope in American postwar popular culture to depict the relationship between the United States and China (see Klein 2003: 174-179). I would like to revisit this aspect here, because it ties in well with my final considerations. Klein has shown that [t]he white mother that figured so prominently in postwar middlebrow culture, and in the lived experiences of middlebrow intellectuals and other Americans, possessed

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a complex genealogy and carried a contradictory set of meanings. The figure of the white parent to the non-white child had long worked as a trope for representing the ostensibly “natural’ relations of hierarchy and domination. The infantilization of racialized Others and marginalized social groups has been a standard rhetorical means of legitimating unequal power relations. (Klein 2003: 175)

While objecting to the outspokenly hierarchal implications of this trope, Buck still drew on it and appropriated it for her purposes. “Parental emotions and adoption” – as a fundraising device and as a tool for evangelization and education – had been an important backdrop of the missionary activity since the nineteenth century, as Klein has argued (2003: 176). As such, this trope matched Buck’s missionary background to begin with. If interracial adoption was now part of her own project, it had grown out of this background and her “long-standing commitment to racial justice.” What is more, in the Cold War context, it also grew out of the domestic containment policies that silenced her on more explicitly political issues. As McCarthyist pressures pushed Buck out of the public sphere of foreign policy debates, she retreated into the private, traditionally female sphere of the family. Through her adoption work, she was still able to speak out on the issues of racism and U.S.-Asian relations, although in a less direct way. (Klein 2003: 178)

Buck’s retreat into the private sphere of family relations – both on the personal level and as a plot device in her fiction – can be seen as a sign of her compliance with the expectations of ‘appropriate’ American womanhood in the context of the Cold War culture of the 1950s and 60s.29 In this sense, the adoption theme helped Buck in her self-fashioning as an American: with it, she embraced the prevalent maternalist ideology.30

29 On the complex concatenation of American womanhood, citizenship, patriotism, and anti-communism in the 1950s, see, for example, Mary C. Brennan, Wives, Mothers, and the Red Menace: Conservative Women and the Crusade against Communism (2008). 30 In his essay on Buck and the Cold War, Robert Shaffer, however, also touches on the subversive potential of Cold War maternalist ideology. Shaffer points out that “Cold Warriors worried about whether maternalism – derided as ‘momism’

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On the other hand, the ‘adoption mission’ gave Pearl Buck a niche to – partially – remain vocal in the male-dominated Cold War climate and “speak out […] in a less direct way,” as Klein put it. This observation brings my study to an appropriate end and makes it come full circle: Buck’s tactics of speaking indirectly, which manifest themselves in the last stage of her career, resonate with the ideas of the middlebrow project at large: a project which always oscillates between progressivism and the urge to utter social critique on the one hand, and conservatism and the need to keep things at bay on the other hand. Furthermore, the (female) concern with finding one’s voice and achieving self-expression, as I have shown throughout this study, was central to Buck’s entire project. At various stages of her career, Buck used voices – her own voice as well as ‘voice’ as a motif in her feminist theme – to carry out her mission: one such means of expression was her self-fashioning as the most important spokesperson on Asia and the Chinese in particular – the voice of a quasi-Chinese in the phase of her career which reached into the 1940s. Her Americanized voice then became a strategy (as well as a conviction) in the Cold War context. She also employed her voice to criticize what she considered a misogynist male missionary project; she attempted to recover in her fiction the voices of female missionaries – most prominently her mother’s; she introduced her readership to inarticulate female figures like Kwei-lan or O-lan who step by step learn to find their voice. When she lends her voice to children and turns to the theme of interracial adoption in the last phase of career, Pearl Buck perhaps most consistently rounds off her mission.

– would stifle the hardiness men needed to conduct the Cold War.” Referring back to the clash between Luce and Buck, Shaffer contests that “it is not surprising […] to find that Henry Luce’s Time condemned as an example of ‘merciless maternalism’ Buck’s Letter from Peking […]” (Shaffer 1999: 166). For a discussion of motherhood and American Cold War politics, see also Elaine Tyler May, Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era (1995).

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