Good Earth, The - Pearl S. Buck [151]
When she was a child, Pearl spent many afternoons sitting on the hard benches of the local Chinese theater. Wide-eyed, she watched colorful melodramas in which costumed figures of good and evil battled for mastery. Good invariably triumphed, sometimes at the expense of villains who represented Western invaders. Pearl found herself cheering the massacre of red-haired foreign devils. Almost uniquely among white American writers, she spent her childhood as a minority person, an experience that had much to do with her lifelong passion for interracial understanding.
As a girl growing up in a relentlessly patriarchal, Christian household, Pearl was especially attentive to the Chinese girls and women she met. She found that they, too, were trapped in a sexual caste system throughout their lives, a system even more punishing than the one she had seen at home. She was puzzled by the embarrassment that accompanied the birth of girl children: in China, boy babies are called "big happiness" and girls are only a "small happiness."
She grieved when she learned about the practice of female infanticide---an ancient and ruthless method of population control among the poor. On more than one occasion, she found an unmarked, shallow grave in which the nude body of a baby girl had been buried. At least once, she chased away a dog that had dug the body up and she reburied the tiny corpse. She was angry that boys were educated and girls were not. Appalled but fascinated by the bound feet of her amah and other Chinese women, she understood, even as a child, that this barbaric custom symbolized male supremacy.
At the same time, however, Pearl observed how powerful Chinese women often were. The legends of women warriors---in which heroic, mythical female figures triumphed over men, dragons, and demons---were among the most popular stories in the Chinese common culture. Pearl knew those stories, and she also knew that social fact often echoed folktale: among farmers and gentry alike, homes were typically ruled by the senior women in a kind of domestic matriarchy. Beyond that, the Chinese nation itself was governed throughout Pearl's childhood by a woman, the Dowager Empress Tz'u-hsi,[2] whose remarkable career had taken her from imperial concubine to imperial authority in the 1860s. As a child, young Pearl was dazzled-by Tz'u-hsi, and hoped that she might one day grow up to become empress herself.[3]
Chinkiang, where the Sydenstrickers lived during Pearl's childhood, was a small port city in Kiangsu province, a day's ride east of Nanking. Lying at the intersection of the Yangtze River and the ancient Grand Canal that linked the Yangtze with the northern capital city of Peking, Chinkiang was a maze of narrow streets and alleys. The crowded lanes bustled with merchants, scholars, messengers, vagrants, beggars, lepers, soldiers, and children.
Pearl spent hours wandering these streets, overhearing the talk of ordinary people, and watching the barbers, herbal doctors, food vendors, carpenters, and slaves go about their business. Occasionally an aristocratic woman would be carried past in a lavishly decorated sedan chair, borne on the shoulders of four sweating men. Pearl watched New Year's festivals and weddings and funerals; she learned that red was the color of good luck, white the color of death and mourning. She often ate with her family's servants and acquired a taste for the local cuisine.
In 1900, Pearl's unusual but peaceful life was shattered by the Boxer Uprising. The Boxers were Chinese nationalists who wanted to exterminate Western intruders. They attacked several Western settlements, and killed hundreds of men, women, and children, including a number of missionaries.
The Sydenstrickers spent several fearful months during the uprising wondering what their fate might be. The violence was centered mainly north and west of Chinkiang, but Westerners along much of the coast and inland