She Has Her Mother's Laugh: The Powers, Perversions, and Potential of Heredity (16 page)

N
INE YEARS
before she enrolled her daughter at the Vineland Training School,
Pearl Buck woke up out of an ether sleep and saw a bloom of plum blossoms on the table by her bed. She turned her head to see a nurse holding her newborn baby in a pink blanket. Pearl looked into the girl's eyes.

“
Doesn't she look very wise for her age?” she asked the nurse.

It was a warm day in March 1920. Pearl Buck was twenty-eight, an American-born teacher living in northern China. She had grown up in China, her missionary parents having brought her there as a baby. After four years of college in the United States, she returned to care for her ailing mother. Soon afterward, she met an expat agricultural expert named John Lossing Buck, whom she married in 1917. For the first three years of their marriage, they lived in a remote town called Nanhsuchou. From the windows of the house, she could see miles of flat farmland. Over the green wheat, mirages of lakes and mountains flirted with her eyes. She and Lossing named their girl Caroline.

Carol, as she quickly came to be known, was a fair-haired, blue-eyed baby. A few things caught Pearl's attention, but she didn't give them much mind. Carol had eczema that made her scratch. Her skin gave off a peculiar musty smell. Pearl had more important things to worry about. A few weeks after Carol's birth, Pearl's doctor told her that she had a tumor in her uterus.
She took the long journey back to the United States to have it surgically removed. The tumor proved to be benign, but her American doctors informed Pearl she would be unable to have any more children.

The Bucks moved from Nanhsuchou to the city of Nanking, where Lossing got a job teaching agriculture at the university. Pearl taught English, while Carol played in the gardens and bamboo groves surrounding their house. As Carol grew, Pearl began to worry. The babies of her friends were beginning to walk. Carol still crawled. They began to speak. Carol babbled. Her eczema grew so bad that Pearl would sometimes put bandages on her hands so that she wouldn't rake her skin.

Pearl kept her worries to herself, partly out of shame, and partly out of her knowledge that her family would have little sympathy. Pearl's father was a rigid fundamentalist who cared only about tallying up the souls he saved. Her mother, suffering from a lethal digestive disorder called sprue, had abandoned Christianity as she waited to die. And Lossing, Pearl discovered after they got married, was a hollow man. “
He has never seen or understood anything,” she would later say.

Carol eventually learned to walk, but she still wasn't learning to talk. She was big for her age, restless, and demanding, making her desires known with jabbering and grunts. She sniffed at visitors and jumped up on them as a friendly dog would. The things that made other children laugh or cry drew only a blank stare from Carol. Pearl's friends assured her that everything was fine, that children begin speaking at different ages. Years later, they would confess to Pearl that they shrank from speaking the truth. They knew something was wrong.

That summer, Pearl took Carol to the seashore to play on the beach and ride donkeys through the nearby valleys. She even managed to teach Carol to speak a few words. One day that summer, Pearl went to a lecture by a local pediatrician about the health of young children. The pediatrician described some warning signs of psychological disorders, such as incessantly running around, and it sounded to Pearl as if she was talking about Carol. The next day, the pediatrician paid Pearl a visit with some other doctors. Examining Carol, they could tell that something was indeed wrong, but they couldn't say what. For a firm diagnosis, Pearl would need to take Carol to the United States.

The Bucks already had a trip back home in the works so that Lossing could pursue a master's degree at Cornell. He and Pearl settled into a cramped two-room apartment in Ithaca, New York, and from time to time Pearl would take Carol around the country to see doctors—psychologists, pediatricians, gland specialists. They all told her something was wrong, but none could give her a diagnosis. Yet she always left the exams with an unfocused hope that Carol would get better.

Pearl's last trip took her to the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota. There, a young doctor gently broke the news to her: Carol had stopped developing mentally.

“Is it hopeless?” Pearl asked him.

“I think I would not give up trying,” the doctor said.

Pearl and Carol walked out of the doctor's office and made their way down an empty hall. A small, bespectacled doctor with a clipped black mustache emerged from a room, and he asked in a crisp German accent if the other doctor had said Carol could be cured.

Pearl said he didn't rule it out.

“She will never be well—do you hear me?” the second doctor said. “Find a place where she can be happy and leave her there and live your own life.”

Pearl staggered out of the clinic. Carol, happy to be done with the strangers, danced ahead. When she noticed that her mother had started to cry, Carol laughed.

For the rest of her time in the United States, Pearl struggled to make the best of her life. She earned a master's degree of her own in English and wrote a few articles about China. To most Americans in the 1920s, the country was an alien giant, and so editors were happy to publish stories from someone with such deep knowledge of the place. Pearl discovered that she enjoyed writing and that she was good at it. Before returning to China, she and Lossing visited a New York orphanage and adopted a three-month-old girl they named Janice.

Back in China, Pearl became overwhelmed by sadness over Carol. She couldn't even bear to listen to music. When guests came to the house, she would put on a brave face, but as soon as they left, she would let her sorrow have its way. Pearl began writing stories along with her essays, imagining
the lives of Chinese people around her. Carol would become intensely jealous as Pearl became absorbed in her work. She threw porridge at her mother and used handfuls of potting soil to clog the keys of Pearl's typewriter.

While the Bucks had been away, China had grown far more dangerous. The Kuomintang and its enemies had begun battling for control of different pieces of the country. For two years, the fighting remained far from Nanking, but in 1927 it reached the city. As foreigners were shot and raped, the Bucks hid in the hut of a Chinese woman Pearl knew. Pearl kept Carol and Janice quiet so that they wouldn't draw the attention of nearby soldiers. She vowed to herself to kill her girls before letting the soldiers take them away.

The attacks subsided after American and British gunships arrived in Nanking and fired on the city. The Bucks took the opportunity to flee, making their way to Shanghai. Shanghai proved only a brief stopover for them; the fighting drove the Bucks out of China altogether. They ended up in Japan, surviving in a remote forest cabin for months on fish, fruit, and rice.

Once China settled down again into a relative calm, the Bucks returned. Pearl now became painfully aware of how the children of her friends were developing and thriving while Carol, now eight, still acted like a toddler. When she tried to teach Carol to write, her daughter managed to learn only a few words. During one of their lessons, Pearl took the pencil from Carol and was startled to discover that her daughter's hand was drenched in sweat from all her effort. Pearl was ashamed that she had made Carol so miserable and decided to stop forcing her to try to become like other girls. As her mother, Pearl would only try to make Carol happy.

“
I realized I must leave her in some place,” Pearl later recalled, “and my heart is wrenched in two at the thought.”

Aside from the dread of separation, Pearl also recognized that she faced some grim economics. Lossing thought Carol should go to a state institution. The idea terrified Pearl, but she knew they didn't have the money to pay for a private school. Pearl realized she would have to find the funds on her own. “
I had found out enough to know that the sort of place I wanted my child to live in would cost money that I did not have,” she later wrote.

Her income from teaching was meager, and she made even less from
writing articles for American magazines. She wondered if fiction might pay better. By then she had finished her first novel, which she called
East Wind: West Wind.
She got an idea for a second novel that might sell well. Whenever she found a free ten minutes between chores or caring for Carol, she would sit down to her typewriter and write about the adventures of a Chinese farmer she named Wang Lung.

In 1929, the Bucks traveled back to the United States. As Lossing negotiated a new grant for his work on Chinese agriculture, Pearl searched for a place where Carol could live. Many of the visits left her chilled. At one institution, the children were clothed in burlap and herded like dogs. Eventually, Pearl ended up in southern New Jersey, at a farm where the children seemed happy.

“
I saw children playing around the yards behind the cottages, making mud pies and behaving as though they were at home,” she later recalled. “I saw a certain motto repeated again and again on the walls, on the stationery, hanging above the head's own desk. It was this: ‘Happiness first and all else follows.'”

In September 1929, Pearl Buck enrolled her daughter at the Vineland Training School. Emma Wolverton had been taken out of the school fifteen years earlier, and a decade had passed since Henry Goddard had left. The enthusiasm for eugenics had left the place as well. In the 1920s, Vineland psychologists did important research on classifying different forms of feeblemindedness—what are now known as intellectual developmental disorders. They created a test to track the social development of children that's known today as the Vineland Social Maturity Scale.

Pearl stayed with friends for a month while Carol settled in at the school. It was the first time they had been separated in her life, and for Pearl it was torture. She listened for her daughter's calls for help in the night, her steps on the stairs. “
Only the thought of a future with the child grown old and me gone kept me from hurrying to the railway station,” she said.

Pearl went to New York to show the manuscript for
East Wind: West Wind
to a publisher named Richard Walsh. He bought it, along with the new novel she was in midst of writing. When she and Lossing returned to China in 1930, she worked on nothing else, losing herself in the story of Wang
Lung to keep her pain at bay. When she sent the book to Walsh, he gave her a name for it:
The Good Earth.

Pearl's gritty story about a poor Chinese hero was an unfamiliar one to American readers. If they had read any fiction from China, it was classical tales about the country's elite.
The Good Earth
, published in the midst of America's Great Depression, felt like an Asian parallel to
The Grapes of Wrath.
In 1932, it earned Pearl the Pulitzer Prize, and it also proved a smashing commercial success. In just the first eighteen months after publication, Buck earned $100,000
,
and the book would earn hundreds of thousands more during her lifetime.

Pearl had only wanted to pay for a home for Carol. Instead, she became a celebrity. In quick succession, Pearl moved back to the United States, got a Nevada divorce from Lossing, married Walsh, bought a farm in Pennsylvania, and adopted more children. Hollywood turned
The Good Earth
into a box-office hit, while Pearl found herself in fierce demand for lectures around the country.

Pearl made savvy use of her new fame to champion political causes, especially civil rights. Growing up in China, she became keenly aware of the contempt some Chinese had for her simply because she was white. When she returned to the United States, she scoffed at the idea that the country's blacks and whites were biologically distinct in any meaningful way, calling humanity “
a creature hopelessly mongrel.” In 1938, just seven years after publishing
The Good Earth
in the hope of taking care of Carol
,
Pearl S. Buck won the Nobel Prize in Literature. When she got the news, she responded in Chinese: “
Wo pu hsiang hsin
.” (I don't believe it.)

The more stories that Pearl told, the more the world clamored to hear her own. But she refused to reveal Carol's secret. “
It is not a shame at all but something private and sacred, as sorrow must be,” Pearl wrote to a friend. When reporters asked about her family, she would say she had two daughters, one of whom was away at school. An old friend from Nanking was interviewed by an Ohio newspaper and recalled Pearl's suffering over Carol. Pearl got wind of the story and arranged to have it quashed. She wanted to protect Carol, but herself as well. “
I would gladly have written nothing if I could have just an average child in Carol,” she once said.

From the profits on
The Good Earth
, Pearl gave the Vineland School $40,000, guaranteeing Carol a lifetime of care. Pearl later paid for the construction of a new two-story cottage where Carol could live with fifteen other girls, complete with a French provincial bedroom set, a phonograph, and a collection of records. (Carol liked hymns, hated jazz.) Once Pearl returned to the United States, she would visit Carol as often as she could—sometimes as often as once a week—and sometimes brought her back to her farm in Pennsylvania for a few days. Pearl thus got to watch Carol grow up. She began to bathe and dress herself, even to tie her shoelaces. She learned to eat with a fork and spoon, to sew, and to use words to tell others what she needed. She roller-skated. She loved to ride a tricycle around the school grounds. Decades later, people would sometimes see a gray-haired woman pedaling still.

By 1940, Pearl had reached a kind of melancholy peace with Carol's fate. “All sense of flesh, of my flesh, is gone,” she wrote in her journal. “
I feel toward her as tenderly as ever, but I am no longer torn. I am, I suppose, what may be called ‘resigned' at last. Agony has become static—it is true but I will not disturb it or allow it to move in me.”