Caroline Stulting Sydenstricker

    Caroline (Carie) Stulting Sydenstricker was born in Hillsboro, VA, 1857.  Carie’s American heritage symbolized for her luxury, beauty, and happiness.  It became the backbone of her life during her difficult missionary work in China and was a light of hope to her children.  To Carie, America stood for freedom and blessed opportunity while China stood for inequality and desolation.  Carie’s greatest struggle was internalized.  She was torn between her desire to lead the life of freedom and individualism she was reared upon and her sense of duty to sacrifice all for God and continue her missionary work in China. Carie was in exile because she would not allow herself to be happy in either setting, shunning frivolity, love, and pleasure, yet never gaining satisfaction from her hardship and sacrifice in China.

  While in foreign China, Carie would often relate her memories to Pearl as a solace to herself.  Carie would speak of American gardens, open prairies, and the house she grew up in, comforting herself with the pleasantness of the past.

      The hardships brought on by the Civil War caused her to take on burdens not usually associated with a young life.  For four years, until she was eight years old, she worried about losing her homeland to the North and losing her brother to the South.  Both Northern and Southern soldiers ravaged the Stulting house and farmland. It was a life mixed with fear and fascination of the blue and the gray, but Carie only grew stronger in faith and love. When the war ended, Carie began her studies with more seriousness and solemnity than she had possessed before the war. Her primary concern became the state of her soul (Conn, 8).

    After her mother died battling a long sickness, Carie, nineteen, decided to leave Hillsboro and study at Bellewood female seminary for two years.  She became devoted to God and yearned to establish herself as missionary fortified by an ascetic lifestyle. Her answer came in the form of a quiet and studious young man bound for missionary work in China, Absalom (Andrew) Sydenstricker. Theirs was a marriage of convenience and purpose, not of love, and Carie would accompany her new husband to China where she would be homesick for the next forty years of her life (Conn, 3).

     Despite her personal anguish, Carie put others’ needs first.  While her husband was out saving souls, she was in town saving lives. Carie rented out her home and did all the cooking and washing for more than a dozen of the occupants (Buck, The Exile, 141).  She adopted a Chinese woman, Wang Amah, whose lover had killed their newborn baby because the child was a girl. The young Chinese woman was heartbroken and had no one to turn to.  Carie pitied Wang Amah and invited her to be the caretaker of her own children (Buck, The Exile, 136).  Carie also took in a child, Precious Cloud, when the little girl’s mother died, and reared her into healthy adulthood. “She was a woman of infinite patience where a child was concerned,” Pearl recalls. “I never remember a cross word or her voice raised and never, never any physical force. But then she was a lady, well bred by birth and by education (Buck, My Mother’s House, 10).

    Carie spent the rest of her life in China.  Later, when she was close to death, she exclaimed that if she had the chance to live life over again, she would chose the bright and happy things in life, without thinking them to be sinful (Buck, The Exile, 309).  She did so much in the name of God and others that often her own needs were neglected.  She denied herself the happiness that she earned. “Carie instinctively equated personal discomfort with theological perfection” (Conn, 8).  She was torn between wanting the good life for herself and bringing this good life to others in the name of God.  She wouldn’t let herself believe that both worlds could co-exist peaceably.
 
 

Buck, Pearl S. The Exile. New York: P.F. Collier & Son Corporation, 1936.

Buck, Pearl S. My Mother’s House. Richwood: Appalachian Press, 1965.

Conn, Peter. Pearl S. Buck – A Cultural Biography. NewYork:
           Cambridge University Press, 1996.