Auslander Takes Duckling In and Raises Him

Mr Auslander’s decision to take Duckling into his home gives a neglected child the first reliable experience of being treated as a person and a son. Born after his mother sought help from the Rong family, Duckling is regarded as the Killer’s illegitimate child and for a time is not recognized as a member of the family. Mr Auslander’s steady visits to the child, and Duckling’s first attempt to call him Daddy, turn care into a chosen kinship. The Pear Garden becomes the setting in which that bond is made and in which Duckling grows up.

A child without secure family standing

Duckling’s arrival in the Rong household follows a chain of uncertainty. His mother, an unmarried woman from outside the province, claims that the Killer fathered her child. She says she is a devout Buddhist who grew up in a nunnery and became pregnant after returning from a pilgrimage to Putuo Mountain. The family is suspicious of her claim, and Young Lillie persuades his own household to shelter her with a story that makes the pregnancy seem miraculous. When the child is born, his striking resemblance to the Killer exposes the deception and leaves the Rongs facing the child as the son of a man they had reason to reject.

The mother dies after giving birth. Though a resemblance to his grandmother helps keep the baby from being abandoned, survival does not bring acceptance: the Rongs do not recognize him as one of their own. People call him the Grim Reaper, a name that places the burden of the family’s misfortune on a child who has done nothing to cause it. The old servants charged with his care find the name painful and cannot settle on another. His family origin is thus both insistently present and socially denied: he is linked to the Killer by descent, yet treated as though he has no rightful place among the living family.

Mr Auslander’s daily care

Mr Auslander is the sole person in the mansion who treats Duckling as an ordinary child. After finishing his morning tasks and taking his midday rest, he walks the flower-shadowed path to the servants’ dwelling, where the baby plays in a wooden crate. Mr Auslander sits nearby and speaks in his own language about the dream he had the previous night. The child is too young to understand the words, but the visits are regular, and the old man sometimes brings him a rattle or a small pottery toy. Duckling gradually becomes attached to him.

The first time Duckling makes his own way out to Mr Auslander’s office in the Pear Garden, he is not yet walking confidently: the narration describes his movement as crawling. He returns every day, standing beneath the pear trees and watching in silence, timid but persistent. He learns to stand and walk relatively early after practising in his crate, while speech comes much more slowly. Past the age of two, he can make only one repeated sound, and those around him wonder whether he will ever speak. His visits nevertheless establish a form of communication before he can use language: he seeks Mr Auslander out, and Mr Auslander remains there to receive him.

The Pear Garden offers a home apart from the household’s rejection. Its name comes from its old pear trees, and the Rong family’s earlier use of a small wooden building there for opium and medicinal herbs, followed by the discovery of a dead servant, has made the place a subject of ghost stories. Others avoid it; Mr Auslander can live there quietly. He preserves fallen pear blossoms and makes tea from them when his stomach troubles him. For Duckling, the same garden is not a place to fear but the landscape of repeated visits, familiar care, and eventually residence with the man who has become his father.

The adoption and its meaning

One day, while Mr Auslander is resting on a rattan chaise longue, Duckling approaches and tugs at his jacket. He tries to call the old man Daddy, his first attempt to call anyone. The moment gives voice to a relationship already formed through daily attention. Duckling has understood his father as absent or dead; calling Mr Auslander restores the role through the bond between them. Mr Auslander responds by taking him into the Pear Garden to live with him that very day.

The adoption does not erase Duckling’s origins or win him formal recognition from the Rongs. Instead, it changes the conditions of his everyday life. The child who had been left in the care of elderly servants and named for the danger others imagined he represented is welcomed into a home where one adult addresses him through care rather than stigma. The contrast is central to the event: lineage associates him with the Killer, while the relationship that actually sustains him is formed by Mr Auslander’s presence and Duckling’s trust.

Two days after taking Duckling in, Mr Auslander, then eighty, climbs a pear tree to hang a swing as a present for the child’s third birthday. The detail makes the new household tangible: adoption is not only a declaration of fatherhood but a change in where the child lives and a place for him in the routines of another person’s life. Duckling grows up surrounded by pear flowers, with the garden serving both as his home and as the setting of his earliest attachment.

A bond that reaches beyond the garden

Eight years later, as the pear blossoms begin to fall, Mr Auslander writes a letter to Young Lillie. He works over its wording carefully, composing lines each evening, and eventually sends it to the provincial capital. The letter remains in a drawer for more than a year. When Mr Auslander recognizes that he has little time left, he asks Duckling to post it; wartime movement means Young Lillie has no fixed address, and the letter takes months to reach him. This later act shows that Mr Auslander’s concern extends beyond giving the child a home: he also seeks to place Duckling’s future in the hands of the person who can provide a family beyond the Pear Garden.

That connection has consequences. After Duckling becomes Rong Jinzhen, Young Lillie’s family takes him in, prompted in part by his mother’s grief over her daughter’s death and her sense that the boy needs a family. The later welcome does not make the two forms of kinship identical. The Rong household supplies a wider family connection, while Mr Auslander’s adoption is the earlier, intimate fact of Duckling being visited, recognized, and taken home as a child. The event gives the novel’s account of belonging a concrete distinction: ancestry may explain where Duckling came from, but care determines who first acts as his family.