The Eternal Wonder

and he must rest now. He will sleep for several hours and then he will be all right. He is young. He will take sorrow in his stride.”

“I KNOW WHY STEPHANIE DID what she has done, Mother. There was no accidental overdose of sedative —oh, let it go at that. There was no note—but I know and she knew that I would know. She always felt displaced because of her racial mixture. She even refused to marry me because of it. She did not wish to have children because they, too, would be racially mixed. I’m sure she saw herself in a hopeless situation and simply swallowed a few extra capsules. She was really quite Asian and would attach no particular disgrace to having the courage to do what she considered the only action she could take.

“The point I must reach now is simply that I, alone, can discover for myself a way in which I can go on. My life, as I had seen it before me, has changed irrevocably. It can never be the same again as life is never today as it seemed yesterday. Today there is no future ahead of me as I have seen it, and so I must create one.”

Rann sipped coffee from the cup on the desk in front of him.

In the two weeks since Stephanie and her father had died, he and his mother had come to the study each morning after breakfast for another cup of coffee and had talked each day, often for many hours, of events, and how haphazard events and their effects upon one another shaped one’s life. Mr. Kung and his beloved Stephanie had both been cremated as they wished, since the Communist regime had not yet ended in China and their bodies could not be returned to their homeland. Rann had inherited the entire Kung fortune from Mr. Kung. It was all entailed, of course, so that Stephanie would need nothing for the rest of her life should her husband not be Rann, but now that Stephanie was also gone, so was the entailment.

“I am glad you have been with me these weeks, Mother. I don’t know how I could have gotten through without you. It has helped to have these long talks with you each morning so I could begin to feel my way into the future.”

His mother replaced her cup on its saucer on the desk and rose to gaze out the window.

“I am happy if I have helped you, son. I have felt so utterly useless throughout this tragedy. I scarcely knew Stephanie and I did not know her father and I feel almost as if I have never really known you. If I have been of some use to you by listening to you sort out your own thinking, then I find comfort for my own shortcomings by having done so. Your father felt you were a very special person, Rann, and I suppose I have always been in awe of your remarkable abilities while I’ve waited for you to find yourself. Perhaps, in this sorrow, you have done so.”

“I do not know what it is that I shall eventually accomplish in my life, Mother. I have put all of Mr. Kung’s fortune into a foundation I have created. Its purposes are broad, but simple. It will work to relieve the hopelessness of the situation in which the racially mixed individual finds himself all over the world. Someday, perhaps, in five or six centuries, the problem will not exist, but now it does.

“The world is growing too small for us to continue to judge persons by race or color. In the past century, we have gone from antiquated modes of travel, taking months to cross our country, and we have pared that time and, as a result, the distance, to weeks, days, and now hours. If we continue to speed up our mode of travel, which I’m sure we will, then soon we won’t have to move to get from one place to another. We must give up the luxury of remaining members of small racial groups and all become a part of the whole, the one race, the human race.

“The wars have taken men all over the world and the mixing and molding of this person of the future has already begun. Someone must make the peoples of the Earth ready to accept and even to be grateful for the opportunity to know this person of the future. I have seen them myself in the streets of Korea, and they are in a very pitiful position, indeed. Everyone wishes they did not exist, but nevertheless, they do exist and will continue to do so in ever increasing numbers and we must recognize them for what they are and we must work together for the awesome responsibility they face. I do not yet know what the Kung Foundation can do to help them but we will find out. George Pearce, Rita Benson, and Donald Sharpe have accepted as the beginning board of directors and together we shall find other members equally as important and we shall find this person, wherever he or she may be, and endeavor to help him or her to become a useful citizen in society.

“Perhaps when other peoples see that these important persons all over the world are concerned and interested in the futures of racially mixed persons, they themselves will reconsider and the world will be a better place for it. If so, then we shall have accomplished what I have set out for the foundation to do.”

“And what about you, Rann?” His mother continued to stare out the window, her eyes unseeing, and tears glistened on her cheeks as she spoke. So often now she realized she was learning and growing through this child of hers. “What will you do, Rann?”

“You mean personally? To answer truthfully I must say I do not know. I have this enormous work to think of now. I shall continue to write, of course, I am a writer. I cannot think now of anyone I might ever marry—if I do— or of whether else about the future, other than this work to be done. There are so many decisions yet to be made, but each must be made when the need arises and not in advance of the need. I feel as if life has perhaps taught me too much, so far, and has made me wiser than I ought to be or wish to be. I shall not press wisdom on my own children. It is not well to be too wise. Wisdom cuts one off from everyone, even the wise, for then one is afraid of so much wisdom. To take each day as a separate page, to be read carefully, savoring all of the details, this is best for me, I think. My life is yet in spring. I look forward to the summer and I shall enjoy my autumn years and I’m sure I shall approach the finality of life with the same curiosity that has plagued me in everything so far. Perhaps one day I shall look back on this entire life as but a page out of the whole of my existence, and if I do I am sure it will be with the same thirst to know more—the certain knowledge that there are truths, the reasons for which we cannot know.… Perhaps that is the whole point of it all—the eternal wonder.”

A BIOGRAPHY OF PEARL S. BUCK

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