Anchee Min - Pearl of China

It was at the dinner table that I witnessed the couple fight. Lossing needed Pearl to be his translator for his new field experiment, but Pearl refused.

“I no longer know who this woman is.” Lossing turned to me, speaking half jokingly. “She certainly doesn’t need a husband. She is having an affair with her imagined characters.”

“Perhaps writing eases her anxiety.” I tried to make peace.

Lossing interrupted me with laughter. “No, you don’t know her, Willow. My world is too small for this woman. Vanity and greed are the true demons here. And yet if Pearl has ambition, she has little skill or training. She wants to be a novelist, but she has no academic training and no material. She is lost as a mother, and she is bound to lose if she tries to make it as a writer.”

Pearl stared at Lossing, disgusted.

Lossing ignored her and continued, “It is destructive when a hobby turns into an obsession.”

“Stop it, Lossing,” Pearl said, trying to control her anger.

“You have a responsibility,” Lossing went on. “You owe this family!”

“Please, stop.”

“I have the right to express myself. And Willow has the right to know the truth.”

“What truth?” Pearl ’s eyes were burning.

“That this marriage is a mistake!” Lossing said loudly.

“As if we even have a marriage!” Pearl responded.

“No, we don’t,” Lossing agreed.

“You have no right to ask me to give up writing,” Pearl said.

“So you have made up your mind.” Lossing looked at her. “You have decided to ignore my needs and abandon this family.”

“How have I abandoned this family?”

“You disappear mentally when you write. We don’t exist. I know I don’t. You refuse to work with me to support this family. You well know that without your help I can’t do my job. You treat your writing as if it is a job, but all I see is an amateur at play. Let me remind you, I am the one who earns the money, who pays for the rent, all the living expenses, and Carol’s doctor fees!”

“Writing helps me stay sane.” Pearl was on the verge of tears.

“It doesn’t seem to be helping on that score.”

Pearl struggled to compose herself.

Lossing carried on.

Pearl looked defeated. She got up and went to the kitchen.

From the living room, I heard Carol’s screaming and the maid’s voice, “Put it down!”

“I am only talking common sense,” Lossing said to me. “I can understand that Pearl wants to write novels to escape her life. But who wants to read her stories? The Chinese don’t need a blonde woman to tell their stories, and the Westerners are not interested in China. What makes Pearl think that she stands a chance of succeeding?”

Taking the Nanking Daily job proved to be the best decision I ever made in my career. I was surrounded by people who were intelligent and open-minded. Our staff competed with the Peking Daily and the Shanghai Daily. I often brought work home that I couldn’t finish in the office. After a year, I had moved to a new place, a little bungalow located outside the ancient city gate. It was close to the woods and mountains. The fresh air, the views, the privacy-all of these did me good. Clearing the weeds, I discovered that I actually had a garden. I planted roses, lilacs, and peonies. It pleased me that I would be able to bring fresh flowers to Carie’s grave site by the time of the Spring Memorial Festival.

Pearl continued her teaching at Nanking University. We celebrated our birthdays together. We had reached our midthirties and we joked and teased each other about our lives. I was still legally married to my former husband, since China didn’t have such a thing as divorce. I had no idea how many new concubines my husband had married and how many children he had. I asked my father if he, as the head of the church, would make an announcement to disassociate me from the man.

Papa didn’t think that it was necessary. “Out of sight, out of mind,” he said. “Your husband has been telling everyone that you are dead. I am getting tired of explaining to people that you are not dead.”

I asked Papa if he would like to come to Nanking so that I could take care of him. He declined. He said that he was God’s foot soldier. The church was his home, its members his family.

Pearl, on the other hand, talked the head dean of Nanking University into offering Absalom a nonpaying position teaching a course on Western religion. Pearl convinced the seventy-three-year-old Absalom to slow down, to move to Nanking and live with her. He finally agreed.

Following Absalom, Carpenter Chan and Lilac also moved to Nanking. They found a modest place a mile from Pearl ’s house. Carpenter Chan believed that Absalom would need him, for he “will never stop expanding God’s kingdom.”

Lilac was convinced that it was her husband’s commitment to Absalom’s causes that brought her happiness. Lilac was one among hundreds of Absalom’s followers.

I said to Pearl, “Absalom feels content enough to quit risking his life going inland.”

“Remember the beginning, when Absalom preached on the streets of Chin-kiang?” Pearl smiled.

“Oh, yes. Everyone thought he was mad.”

Pearl tried to get Carol to say the one word she had been teaching her all week. But Carol would not deliver. It drove both of them crazy. The Chinese servants had been feeding Carol relentlessly, for they believed that the fatter the child, the better the health. Although mentally handicapped, Carol developed a strong body. One day Carol hit Pearl on the forehead with a stone paperweight.

Blood crawled down Pearl ’s face like an earthworm. Carol, unaware of what she had done, went on playing. Pearl sat on the floor, quietly wiping the blood from her forehead.

Lossing, meanwhile, made peace with reality. He avoided Pearl and Carol. He spent long hours working in his office, even on Sundays.

Pearl ’s refusal to give up on Carol aggravated the strain in their already suffering marriage. Pearl called Lossing a coward when he tried to convince her that there was no point in fighting God’s will.

Pearl often expressed her anger in Chinese. Lossing understood but couldn’t respond fast enough. Pearl would say, “Maggots don’t just breed in manure pits, they breed in expensive meat jars too.”

When Pearl yelled, “Only the toes know when the shoe doesn’t fit,” it was unclear whether Lossing understood her meaning.

Fighting with her husband and caring for her daughter consumed Pearl. She no longer paid attention to her appearance. She wore the same wrinkled brown jacket and black cotton skirt every day. More and more, she looked like a local Chinese woman. With her hair tied up in a bun, she walked in a hurry with a stack of books under her arm.

Eventually Pearl quit making demands on Carol. I often found Pearl sitting quietly, watching her daughter. Her expression was infinitely sad.

At the university, Pearl was a beloved teacher. The fact that she was a native Chinese speaker made her the most popular foreign instructor on campus. She was promoted and became an official university staff member. Besides English, Pearl taught American and English literature. Pearl was sincerely interested in her students. She loved it when they compared their lives to those of the characters in Charles Dickens’s novels. Pearl taught older students, too. As they practiced their conversation skills, Pearl learned about their families and their lives outside of school.

Pearl shared with me one of her students’ stories. “This happened only three months ago,” she began. “A massacre took place in the town of Shao-xing. A group of young Communists were beheaded by the nationalist government. Their bodies were chopped up, ground, and made into bread stuffing. The bread was advertised for sale at the local bakery! Can you believe that, Willow? What a way to scare people into submission!”