Title: The China I Knew (condensed from My Several Worlds)
Author:
Pearl S. Buck
Date: 1954
Publisher:
John Day Co.
ISBN: none
Quote:
“[T]his is not a complete autobiography. My private life has been uneventfully
happy.”
The
question is whether you can be content with the condensed version of Pearl
Buck’s memoir, or must have the long one. I’ve read both. If you have the
luxury of time to read a long book, get My
Several Worlds; Buck had enough memories to make it worth reading. If you’re
not sure how much time you want to spend with one of the most remarkable women
of her generation, The China I Knew
is a good short read.
Briefly, as
a missionary child Buck was allowed more contact with Chinese people than many
missionary children, remaining in Asia even after the revolution. She studied
Chinese with native teachers; apparently she was the sort of borderline child
prodigy who finds adults more interesting than children until they’re old
enough to tutor or baby-sit, and her friends were mostly Chinese women. She
understood the things people said about “the foreign devils,” and often heard
instances of kindness, as when people not exactly ready to be baptized listened
to her father’s evangelical sermons: “He is making a pilgrimage in our country
so that he may acquire merit in Heaven. Let us help him to save his soul!” a
Chinese elderwoman shushed the restless audience. Among themselves she often
heard Chinese people laughing at foreigners, but “more often than not” someone
would “say tolerantly” that “these Christians...do their best and we must not
blame them for what they do not know. After all, they were not born Chinese.”
She
describes Chinese cooking, child care, footbinding (already on the way out of
fashion) and men’s “pigtails” (ditto), but of the things Buck saw in old China,
perhaps the most relevant to new China is the way “the Manchu invasion of 1644
was successful in a military sense...the philosophical but intensely practical
Chinese persuaded them to move into palaces and begin to enjoy
themselves...Since the Manchus were encouraged to do no work, the actual and
tedious details of government were soon performed by Chinese...The Manchus were
like pet cats.”
I don’t do
foreign policy so I’ll stop there.
Buck knew
children who were sold as slaves, who had no recourse against abuse but, as a
status symbol, were often well treated. (The ones she knew were probably
overworked and underfed, and complained about as much as well-off teenagers
do.) She knew people who didn’t know how to walk up and down stairs. She met a
woman who asked wistfully, “Is it true your husband speaks to you in the
presence of other people? Not shameful?” (It was “shameful” for him to talk to
his wife instead of his parents during family time, rude for her to talk to his
female relatives unless she was spoken to—“This rigorousness of family decorum
was of course not to be found except in the...most conservative Chinese
families.”) As China briefly considered gradual change rather than revolution,
another friend said to Buck, of daughters, “Small feet or education she must
have, one or the other” (in order to marry well and maintain social status).
The longer
version of Buck’s autobiography contains more personal stories, notably the one
about why the second child in The Good
Earth had brain damage: Buck had a brain-damaged child and became an
advocate for those with cognitive impairments. The short one contains most, not
all, the vignettes of Old China.
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