Good Earth, The - Pearl S. Buck [152]
It was in these days, Buck later wrote, that the two worlds of her eight-year-old childhood finally split apart. Chinese friends now shunned the family, and Western visitors were fewer; the streets were alive with rumors---many, of course, based on fact---of brutality to missionaries and converts. Carie, Pearl, and the new baby, Grace, were evacuated to the relative safety of Shanghai, where they spent nearly a year as refugees, living in a boardinghouse near Bubbling Well Road. Absalom remained at his mission post, prepared to add his name to the list of Christian martyrs.
Carie waited anxiously in Shanghai through the long months of separation; she received only a few letters from her husband and fragmentary reports from other refugees. Each night, his daughters Pearl and baby Grace would pray, "God, please keep our father from the Boxers." When Absalom finally rejoined his family, he was exhausted, dispirited, and prepared to take an extended home leave.
In July 1901, the Sydenstrickers sailed from Shanghai for San Francisco; they would not return to China until September of the following year. When they landed in California, Pearl was shocked to see white men loading cargo and carrying baggage. "Mother," she asked Carie, "are even the coolies over here white people?"
The family spent most of the year's leave at Carie's family home in Hillsboro, West Virginia. Pearl's memories of those months eventually distilled themselves into a sequence of pleasant but rather vague images: cousins to play with, an orchard of fruit trees, cows and horses, an unwalled meadow. The big white house in West Virginia, so much larger than Chinese houses, was surrounded by acres of open fields, in sharp contrast to the crowded streets of Chinkiang and the minutely cultivated plots of rural Kiangsu province. In the summer, red and white grapes hung from the arbor, low enough for a little girl to reach, and the fall brought a radiance to the trees on the hillsides that she had never seen in China. For the first time in her life, she heard English being spoken on the streets and in the shops of the towns she visited.
As the furlough year drew to a close, Carie worried that China's political instability made a return to Chinkiang unwise. Absalom scoffed at his wife's misgivings, and the Sydenstrickers went back to their mission post in the fall of 1902. For the next few years, Absalom continued his missionary work, but Pearl now realized that her family and all Westerners were regarded as unwelcome outsiders.
In 1909, Pearl was enrolled at Miss Jewell's School in Shanghai, once the most highly regarded English school in Asia, now shabby and declining in prestige. From the first day, Pearl heartily despised the place. The school had little to teach her, but to the teenaged Pearl, Shanghai, the largest city in Asia,, was a revelation. As she put it years later, Shanghai was "the most amazing city in the world's last century." It was a gathering place for people from all over the world, a magnet for commerce, culture, and organized crime. The vast international settlement was a symbol of both worldly diversity and foreign oppression; signs in the public parks warned that both dogs and Chinese were forbidden.
Pearl's sojourn at Miss Jewell's introduced her to the best and worst of Shanghai, a sequence of experiences that marked her for life. Most memorably, she did volunteer work at the Door of Hope, a shelter for Chinese slave girls and prostitutes. Because Pearl could speak Chinese, she was also able to talk with the women, who told her stories of incalculable brutality. Pearl's embryonic feminism was undoubtedly nurtured by the squalor and suffering she saw in the Door of Hope, a place that one Western visitor described as "more a sorrowful jail than a bright haven." Here were women