Good Earth, The - Pearl S. Buck [153]
After a few months in Shanghai, Pearl returned to Chinkiang, then traveled with her family to the United States. She had been admitted to Randolph-Macon Woman's College in Lynchburg, Virginia, where she enrolled in September 1910. Her college years were not happy ones. She earned good grades and a measure of acceptance from her classmates---in her junior year she was elected president of her class---but she always felt like an outsider.
Pearl had intended to remain in the U.S. after her graduation, but she was called back to Chinkiang to nurse her mother, whose health was declining. During Pearl's years in America, China had been transformed. In the winter of 1911-1912, the Ch'ing dynasty of the Manchus had been swept away by revolution. On February 12, 1912, the last emperor, five-year-old Pu-Yi, abdicated in favor of a republic.
In spite of its early promise, the major preliminary result of the upheavals was multiplied confusion. The conglomeration of groups and individuals who made the revolution had little in common except their opposition to the Manchus. Once the goal of eradicating the monarchy had been achieved, the coalition began to dissolve into its more radical and conservative elements.
Among the radicals, the most widely known leader was an English-speaking physician and Christian, Sun Yat-sen, the expatriate head of the Revolutionary Alliance. Sun learned about the revolution while traveling through the American West on a fund-raising tour. He returned to China to be inaugurated as China's first president, but he resigned almost immediately to make room for Yuan Shih-k'ai, a powerful general who soon began to exhibit imperial tendencies of his own.
Deposing the emperor proved easier than governing the nation. The history of China for nearly the next forty years, until the Communist victory of 1949, was a turbulent, ceaseless struggle among warring factions for legitimacy and control. Millions of people died in the years of turmoil that followed the Revolution.
Pearl's life also changed dramatically after she returned from Randolph-Macon. At Kuling, a summer retreat for Westerners in the mountains south of Nanking, she met John Lossing Buck, a Cornell graduate and an expert in agricultural economics. In 1917, Pearl and Lossing were married, and spent the next several years in Nanhsuchou, in rural Anhwei province. Nanhsuchou was a barren, dusty village, home to several thousand impoverished farmers who tried to scratch a living from the thin soil. From time to time, the peasants were terrorized by local warlords.
The Anhwei years were pivotal for Pearl Buck. She learned a great deal about the daily lives of China's poorest inhabitants, and she became intimately familiar with the cruelty and hardship that marked existence in a rural society. A decade later, Nanhsuchou provided the primary setting for Buck's first stories of China, including The Good Earth.
In 1920, Pearl and Lossing left the countryside and moved to Nanking, where he had received an offer from the University of Nanking. The couple moved into a faculty house on the university grounds; Pearl helped Lossing with his research, and also taught English and religion at several local high schools and colleges.
Over the next few years, Pearl Buck suffered a succession of tragedies. She had always wanted children, and was delighted when she became pregnant. In 1921, she gave birth to a daughter, a beautiful child whom she named Carol. Her joy was short-lived. After the difficult delivery, Buck's doctor discovered a uterine tumor, which necessitated a hysterectomy: she would have no more children. Shortly afterward, she learned that Carol was retarded. At about the same time, her beloved mother, Carie, died. Her marriage to Lossing began to disintegrate, partly because of deep personal differences, but also because of the strain caused by her sterilization, Carol's condition, and Caries death. These were years of intense sorrow for Pearl Buck.
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