Authors: Michael Meyer
In Manchuria (26 page)
CHAPTER
11
“July is when the rice sunbathes,” San Jiu said at his paddy. He used the word
dao
(
?
), which meant planted rice, not
mi
(
?
), the processed product we eat. With his finger he drew the characters in the dirt separating the fields. “Now you do it,” he said, and watched patiently until I wrote both correctly. Then he swept the soil away with his rubber boot, plunking the words into water.
Summer brought up to sixteen hours of light each day. “Aside from the bugs, the biggest danger is that the rice will grow too fast and not ripen evenly,” San Jiu explained. “If it’s growing too fast, you remove the water from the paddy and let the rice stand dry for a few days.” Traditionally, draining the fields for a short period mid-growth was said to toughen the roots. Ancient Chinese records called the practice “shelving the rice” or “baking the fields,” since farmers waited until the soil dried enough to crack.
San Jiu pointed at the calf-deep water. “That’s the most important thing, you know. The water quality. It’s more important than the seed or the soil, even. River water is the best, everyone knows that.”
“Not me.”
“Silt!” San Jiu exclaimed. “River water has silt and clay.” Later I learned that it held fertilizing minerals. In the classical Chinese handbook
On Farming
, published in
1149
, the writer advised that rice “likes fresh, moving water and fears cold and stagnant water.”
An eighth-century poet wrote a verse that San Jiu and his fields fit right into, thirteen hundred years later:
North of the Yangtze River
Ten thousand acres lie flat as a table.
By the sixth month the green rice is plentiful,
In a thousand fields the jade waters mingle.
San Jiu surveyed his crop.
“At this time,” he said, “when it’s warm in the daytime and cool at night, the conditions are just right. We haven’t even had any humidity.”
It was perfect weather; highs in the seventies and lows in the fifties, the kind of days made for shorts and a hoodie, though no one beside me wore them. Even the children always had pants on. They spent their summer vacation mostly indoors, watching television, playing video games, or doing homework. The village ran extracurricular English classes each weekday afternoon, where I helped out. During recess, the kids challenged me, one by one, to fifty-meter dashes. Their little legs windmilled across the dirt exercise yard, raising clouds of Roadrunner dust.
One place I never saw children was in the fields, or the seed stores, or at Eastern Fortune’s rice polisher and warehouses. This, San Jiu said, was a concern. Parents wanted their child to go to school, and learn white-collar professions. Some also aspired to studying at the agricultural institute, located halfway between here and Jilin city, but what use was learning farm management or seed biology if you didn’t have practical experience with animals or soil? China had no equivalent of the
4
-H Club. Farming was not a skilled trade in which one apprenticed, then gained professional expertise. It was, San Jiu said, something people were once born into, but seldom would be again.
On television, my students liked to watch sports and the Chinese version of the singing competition
The Voice
. My unscientific sample showed that Wasteland’s adults favored the soap operas about gentry during the Manchu dynasty or about heroism during the Japanese occupation. Outside of the news, I never saw a farm on screen. There was no equivalent to
Little House on the Prairie
; the school’s bookshelves held no corresponding version of John Steinbeck’s stories set on California farms. China’s national novel,
Dream of the Red Chamber
, detailed an aristocratic household. Their tenant farmers appeared only to pay rent and present annual offerings. “Country people are such unsophisticated creatures,” a character sniffed. “They’re just like a piece of yellow cedar made into a mallet for beating the sonorous stones with. The exterior looks well enough; but it’s all bitter inside.”
One of the first works of American literature appeared around the same time. Written by the French-born J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur and published in
1782
,
Letters from an American Farmer
was extolled by Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Paine, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and Samuel Coleridge as exemplifying what would come to be called the American Dream. It reads like a sweatier
Walden
: “The father, thus ploughing with his child, and to feed his family, is inferior only to the emperor of China ploughing as an example to his kingdom.”
In Wasteland I reread Pearl Buck’s
The Good Earth
, wondering if it would interest my students. I also wanted a better reply to Westerners who said my current research was “like
The Good Earth
,” aside from pointing out that Buck’s book was a novel. Set in central China. Ninety years ago.
It begins with a young farmer named Wang Lung waking on his wedding day. He tears the paper from his shack’s window to thrust an arm outside to check the weather, relieved to feel “a wind mild and murmurous and full of rain.” Then comes marriage, children, famine, concubines, floods, war, and locusts before greed conquers all. The book concludes with his dying words to his urbane sons: “Out of the land we came and into it we must go . . . [I]f you sell the land it is the end.” The sons promise they will never sell, “But over the old man’s head they looked at each other and smiled.”
It was a tragic ending, but if Wang Lung had lived to see the Communist revolution, he likely would have been branded a bourgeois landlord, and executed. At the very least, his hard-earned acreage would have been seized and redistributed to people like Frances’s family, in places like Wasteland.
Forty years after her death, Pearl Buck remained stranded between two worlds. In China she was admired but not read; in America she was read but not admired. William Faulkner once dismissed her as “Mrs. Chinahand Buck.” Her most recent Chinese translator, however, told me, “She was a revolutionary. She was the first writer to choose rural China as her subject matter. None of the Chinese writers would have done so; intellectuals wrote about urban intellectuals.” Her childhood home, in the Yangtze River port Zhenjiang, which smelled like its famous vinegar, was recently turned into a museum about her life there before she became the first American woman to win the Nobel Prize in Literature. Though, one thing was notably absent from the gift shop: Buck’s books.
She wrote eighty of them, but her life story is the most compelling to me. Born Pearl Sydenstricker, she was raised by missionary parents who hired tutors to teach her calligraphy and the classical texts of Confucius and other philosophers in Chinese. “I became mentally bifocal,” she wrote in a memoir. “When I was in the Chinese world, I spoke Chinese and behaved as 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.”
She loved the works of Charles Dickens, whose influence was seen in her descriptions of cultural minutiae. Her father had translated the Bible into vernacular Chinese, and her own syntax often echoed its authoritative run-ons: “The children tugged at Wang Lung then, and Wang Lung led them all back to the hut they had made, and there they laid themselves down and they slept until the next morning, for it was the first time since summer they had been filled with food, and sleep overcame them with fullness.”
But that voice, too, sounded familiar to anyone who has spent time listening to Chinese people tell stories, which can come in fits and starts, and then roll, with words spilling fast when freed. Frances got to that point after a few beers, San Jiu when he was angry, Ms. Guan after the stress of a school day. When I would ask my former Beijing courtyard neighbor, an elderly widow, a direct question about a specific date, it could take a few days for her to respond, which she often did while doing something else, such as making dumplings: “The water is almost ready. You must be hungry. My father liked this kind of filling, pork and chives. He said I would have to marry an army officer almost twenty years older, a friend of someone he knew. That’s what I remember most about
1931
.” The voice sounded detached, as if the speaker were telling a tale that happened long ago, to someone else, far away. It was different than an American voice. Frances noticed on arrival to the United States that Americans were their own protagonists, narrating their lives to anyone who would listen, or even when no one was. The Chinese invented many things, Frances said, but only Americans could have come up with blogs, Facebook, and Twitter.
Like John Steinbeck, who wrote a series of newspaper stories on visits to relief camps that inspired him to begin
The Grapes of Wrath
, Buck witnessed firsthand the types of scenes she depicted in
The Good Earth
. As an adolescent, she had worked with her mother in soup kitchens during famine, and taught sewing at a school for the poor. At a church picnic she met a newly arrived agronomist named John Lossing Buck. He spoke halting Chinese; she was fluent. After their divorce eighteen years later, she wrote that all they had in common was “Sunday school teaching and Bible classes.” But they also shared a love for the Chinese farm.
Pearl moved to his agricultural experiment station in a central China hamlet of mud streets and mud houses, surrounded by mud walls. They explored the surrounding countryside—he on a bicycle; she, per custom, in a sedan chair borne by four laborers. He logged details of farm life: housing, fuel, prices, diet, recreation, funerals, and more. Until then—in a country where
80
percent of the people were farmers—no one had systematically gathered this material.
The result, a book titled
Chinese Farm Economy
, would make him the better-known writer, at least for a year. To a casual reader, the
1930
volume and its sequel are achingly dull, filled with statistical tables. Pearl typed her husband’s reports, and his prose could not have helped their marriage. Imagine the woman able to quote Dickens and the great Chinese epics clacking down topic sentences such as “Profitableness of a cropping system depends chiefly upon the yield and price of the crops, the seasonal distribution of labor and the proportion of the most profitable crops in the system.”
However, book-ending many chapters were local adages, rendered in Chinese characters, and translated into English, such as: “To learn to be a farmer one need not study. One needs only to do as his neighbor does,” and: “One should be cautious not to plant sorghum too close, but at least far enough apart for a cow to lie down.”
Some sounded like a fortune cookie that had been parsed into Chinese by Frances: “It is better to let your mother starve to death than to let your crop seed be eaten up.”
Pearl Buck had added the sayings. While her husband Lossing talked to the men in the fields, she stayed inside with the women, asking about their lives and lore. Her sister Grace told a biographer, “She entered very much into that project, and she did a great deal of editing.” Not long after Lossing’s book was finished, Pearl wrote
The Good Earth
in five months’ time.
In the
1930
s eight different Chinese translations of the novel were “cheerfully pirated over and over again,” Buck wrote approvingly. But after the Communist revolution in
1949
, her stories were seen as anachronisms from an era toppled by Mao. She had left China—and Lossing—in
1935
, eventually marrying her publisher and moving to a farm in Bucks County, Pennsylvania. During the Red Scare era, she wrote five novels set in the American West under the name John Sedges.
In
1972
, the year of Nixon’s visit to China, Buck’s application for a Chinese visa was denied, the rejection letter explained, due to “the fact that for a long time you have in your works taken an attitude of distortion, smear and vilification towards the people of new China and their leaders.” She died nine months later and was buried on the grounds of her Bucks County farm in a solitary grave carved with her Chinese name.
I saw many warnings in this tale for a foreigner writing about China, not least of all the possibility of being interred under the characters for Heroic Eastern Plumblossom. Another: a marriage failing because of one partner’s single-mindedness in research. “I was busy, busy, busy going back with all this land utilization data,” Lossing would admit after their divorce, which took him by surprise. And then there was the chance that one’s writing could result in being barred from the country.
But there were other lessons, too, in an age of intensive China watching. The Bucks learned the language. They left big cities. They saw things for themselves, not relying on officials’ explanations or intellectuals’ critiques. They focused on how life was lived by average people, not the headlines generated by extraordinary ones. “Americans,” Pearl Buck wrote in
1970
, “have a genuine interest in the Chinese people,” but the news media underestimated “the general intelligence of their reading public and the range of its interest.” The Bucks focused on the slower story, observing changes to individuals and the land over time.