Dragon Seed: The Story of China at War (48 page)

In this dark old room filthy with years and now with ruin, Ling Tan stood and heard these brave words. His heart was hungry as fallow land is hungry, and the words fell into his heart like seeds.

“Who is the man who said this?” he cried out. “I was not here yesterday—tell me today!”

The old cousin did not need to speak. Others were ready to tell what they knew, and one man and another, speaking together, eager to speak, full of hope and doubt because of long delay, they told Ling Tan that now at last there were those two peoples for whom this one man spoke, the Mei people and the Ying people. Ling Tan listened to this one and to that one, and he drank in every word, and those seeds in his heart took root.

“If those peoples are against this enemy,” he said, “are they not with us?”

“Are they not?” others echoed joyfully.

Then out of his long weariness Ling Tan felt the slow tears come up into his eyes. All through the bitter years he had not wept. He had seen ruin in his home and in his village, and he had seen death everywhere, but he had not wept, and he wondered that now at this first good news that any had given him in more than four years, he had to weep.

“Let us go,” he said to his son.

So his son followed him and they went out from the city and Ling Tan said nothing.

Soon they were beyond the desolate city, and the cobbled road grew narrow and wound its old way along the valley’s bed. The hills were dark against the sky. This night there was no moon.

Now Lao Er had all this while been unbelieving, and it was in his heart to say to his father, “It is better for us not to count help sure from anywhere. Are there men who give their help for nothing?” But he had waited for his father to speak.

But when there was only silence he kept silent, too, and at last he thought to himself that he would let his father have his hope.

“I am young,” Lao Er thought. “I do not need a hope. I can live.” And so with his heart cool and bitter within his breast, Lao

Er let his father walk ahead of him and he saw him lift his head to look at the stars and put up his hand to feel the wind. “Is there not promise of rain?” Ling Tan asked suddenly out of the darkness. There had been need of rain for many days. “Only a promise,” Lao Er said.

Pearl S. Buck (1892–1973) was a bestselling and Nobel Prize-winning author of fiction and nonfiction, celebrated by critics and readers alike for her groundbreaking depictions of rural life in China. Her renowned novel
The Good Earth
(1931) received the Pulitzer Prize and the William Dean Howells Medal. For her body of work, Buck was awarded the 1938 Nobel Prize in Literature—the first American woman to have won this honor.

Born in 1892 in Hillsboro, West Virginia, Buck spent much of the first forty years of her life in China. The daughter of Presbyterian missionaries based in Zhenjiang, she grew up speaking both English and the local Chinese dialect, and was sometimes referred to by her Chinese name, Sai Zhenzhju. Though she moved to the United States to attend Randolph-Macon Woman’s College, she returned to China afterwards to care for her ill mother. In 1917 she married her first husband, John Lossing Buck. The couple moved to a small town in Anhui Province, later relocating to Nanking, where they lived for thirteen years.

Buck began writing in the 1920s, and published her first novel,
East Wind: West Wind
in 1930. The next year she published her second book,
The Good Earth
, a multimillion-copy bestseller later made into a feature film. The book was the first of the Good Earth trilogy, followed by
Sons
(1933) and
A House Divided
(1935). These landmark works have been credited with arousing Western sympathies for China—and antagonism toward Japan—on the eve of World War II.

Buck published several other novels in the following years, including many that dealt with the Chinese Cultural Revolution and other aspects of the rapidly changing country. As an American who had been raised in China, and who had been affected by both the Boxer Rebellion and the 1927 Nanking Incident, she was welcomed as a sympathetic and knowledgeable voice of a culture that was much misunderstood in the West at the time. Her works did not treat China alone, however; she also set her stories in Korea (
Living Reed
), Burma (
The Promise
), and Japan (
The Big Wave
). Buck’s fiction explored the many differences between East and West, tradition and modernity, and frequently centered on the hardships of impoverished people during times of social upheaval.

In 1934 Buck left China for the United States in order to escape political instability and also to be near her daughter, Carol, who had been institutionalized in New Jersey with a rare and severe type of mental retardation. Buck divorced in 1935, and then married her publisher at the John Day Company, Richard Walsh. Their relationship is thought to have helped foster Buck’s volume of work, which was prodigious by any standard.

Buck also supported various humanitarian causes throughout her life. These included women’s and civil rights, as well as the treatment of the disabled. In 1950, she published a memoir,
The Child Who Never Grew
, about her life with Carol; this candid account helped break the social taboo on discussing learning disabilities. In response to the practices that rendered mixed-raced children unadoptable—in particular, orphans who had already been victimized by war—she founded Welcome House in 1949, the first international, interracial adoption agency in the United States. Pearl S. Buck International, the overseeing nonprofit organization, addresses children’s issues in Asia.

Buck died of lung cancer in Vermont in 1973. Though
The Good Earth
was a massive success in America, the Chinese government objected to Buck’s stark portrayal of the country’s rural poverty and, in 1972, banned Buck from returning to the country. Despite this, she is still greatly considered to have been “a friend of the Chinese people,” in the words of China’s first premier, Zhou Enlai. Her former house in Zhenjiang is now a museum in honor of her legacy.