Pearl S. Buck was a baby when her parents relocated to China. What she babbled was Chinese; she experienced Chinese customs and lifestyles. She was so attached to traditional Chinese culture that she had an epic description of the lives of Chinese peasants in her book. A portrait of Confucius and The Book of Rites, the datong article, are still hanging in the house where she lived.
As a world-class cultural celebrity, Pearl S. Buck lived in an ordinary small town — Perkasie, Bucks County, in eastern Pennsylvania. Her residence was Green Hills Farm. Pearl Buck is the only American female writer to win both a Pulitzer Prize and a Nobel Prize. She died in 1973 and was buried near her estate.
According to her wishes, her tombstone was engraved with only Pearl S. Buck and her birth and death dates. Future generations would be left to judge the merits or demerits of her life. This fully exemplifies her personality and her sentimental feelings for China.
On Christmas Eve in 1948, a two-and-a-half-year-old boy with an ethnic mixture of East Indian and American was in an orphanage in the United States. No family would adopt him because of his skin color and background. After several twists and turns, the orphanage found Pearl S. Buck. When she heard of the boy’s situation, she did not hesitate to accept him — the first Asian mestizo child that she adopted.
This boy was David Yoder. He said:
“When Pearl Buck adopted me, she was almost 70 years old. In my eyes, she was a loving grandmother and I lived with her for two years at Green Hills Farm. She told us stories and taught us Chinese culture. Those days of living with her were so wonderful and yet so ordinary that I never have dreamed of being so lucky.
“In college, when other people around me heard that Pearl Buck was my grandmother, their eyes were filled with envy.”
A full young life
Pearl S. Buck was born in West Virginia on June 26, 1892. Her father, Absalom Sydenstricker, was a Southern Presbyterian missionary. Of the seven children in the family, she was the only one born in the United States. Six other children were born in China, but four of them died at a young age. Pearl, an older brother, Edgar, and a younger sister, Grace, survived adulthood.
When Pearl S. Buck was four months old, her parents took her to China’s Huiyin, Anhui (now Qingjiangpu, Anhui). She learned Chinese as her first language, and her mother taught her English later. Therefore, Pearl S. Buck loved reading Chinese classics and studying Confucian teachings. When she resided in the United States, she had a plaque with Confucius’s portrait in her study.
In 1910, 17-year-old Pearl majored in psychology at Randolph-Macon Women’s College in Virginia. After she obtained her bachelor’s degree in 1914, she returned to China. In 1917, she married John Lossing Buck, a missionary, and Pearl joined her husband in missionary work.
John was an agricultural economist and taught agrarian technology and farm management courses. He was also the founder and the head of the Department of Agricultural Economics at the University of Nanking. After publishing his book Farm Economy, John was considered a China expert.
Winning both the Pulitzer Prize and Nobel Prize
After her marriage, the Buck family moved to Su County of Anhui Province. Her life experiences there later became the background of her world-famous book, The Good Earth. In 1921, the Buck family moved to Nanjing, where Pearl taught English literature at many universities. In 1930, she published her first novel, East Wind, West Wind, and began her life as a writer.
At Nanking University, the Buck family lived in a small two-story building provided by the university. Pearl S. Buck’s book The Good Earth was published in 1931 and won the Pulitzer Prize in 1932. The novel is considered to be one of her most outstanding works. Writing about peasant Wang Long’s life story made Pearl S. Buck the first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for fiction writers. She won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1938.
Pearl S. Buck published over 1,000 works, including poetry, plays, and novels. Her books Earth Trilogy, with a Chinese theme, Foreign Guest, and East Wind, West Wind, made significant contributions to the field of literature and won warm praise.
Nobel Literature Prize judges said that she provided an epic-like description of Chinese peasants and made a pioneering contribution in using China as a topic. Pearl also won the William Dean Howells Medal in 1935 and was president of the Writers Guild of America.
Translation of Chinese classical literature — ‘Outlaws of the Marsh’
In the late 1920s, Pearl S. Buck translated the 70 chapters of Outlaws of the Marsh. She was the first to translate this classical literature into English, publish it in the West, and promote it to the world. Her connection to China made her translation of Outlaws of the Marsh the most accurate, exciting, and influential English version.
She believed that the central contradiction of Outlaws of the Marsh was the struggle between the people and corrupt officials. In Pearl S. Buck’s eyes, the 108 outlaws from Liangshan were similar to Robin Hood from medieval England. They did not plan to rebel, but were persecuted by the circumstances.
They were forced to rise and resist. They were resourceful, brave, skilled citizens. They only rebelled against the evil forces and lawless society. It took Pearl five years to finally translate Outlaws of the Marsh into more than 1000 pages of English. She tried Grand Theft and Just Hero as titles, but was not satisfied.
Shortly before the book’s publication, she was inspired by the famous quote in the Analects of Confucius: “Within four seas are brothers.” So her two volumes of translated work were titled All Men Are Brothers. This was a complete English translation of Outlaws of the Marsh, which topped the American monthly book club list then.
Pearl S. Buck was fluent in Chinese and thought highly of classical Chinese novels. She used Chinese classical novels as a theme in her Nobel Prize award ceremony speech. She said:
“The Chinese classical novels are just like novels of any other country in the world; they are irresistibly charming. A well-educated person should know about classical works, such as ‘A Dream of Red Mansions’ and ‘Romance of the Three Kingdoms.’”
Half a lifetime of dedication to children’s charities
Pearl S. Buck’s life was filled with success in her career, but she was rather unfortunate as a mother. In 1921, she gave birth to a baby girl, Carol, who suffered from a mental health issue. This possibly contributed to her devotion to adopting children later in life.
In 1926, she took a short break from work and returned to Cornell University in the United States to earn a master’s degree. Afterward, she immediately returned to Nanjing, China. Her husband, John, insisted on missionary work and teaching in China.
As a result, she and John were divorced in 1934 due to significantly different goals in life. Her first novel, East Wind, West Wind, was published by the John Day Company in 1930. The publisher and chief editor Richard Walsh eventually became Pearl’s second husband in 1935.
After that, she became a full-time writer at the Green Hills Farm in Pennsylvania. Richard Walsh graduated from Harvard University and traveled all over China. He was very helpful to Pearl’s writing career. Pearl S. Buck raised relief funds for refugees from China after the Japanese invasion of China in 1937.
In the early 1940s, she engaged in some relief activities. The first was The Book of Hope group, a U.S. government organization for Chinese medical aid. One hundred American women raised $100 per person, a total of $10,000. Based on this, Pearl decided to set up her organization.
After returning to the United States, Pearl S. Buck also became involved in human rights activities. 1942, Pearl and Richard founded the East and West Association, which was dedicated to cultural exchange and understanding between Asia and the West.
In 1949, Pearl established the Welcome House, an international adoption agency, out of concern for Asian and racially mixed children who were being discriminated against. In its 50 years of operation, the agency has helped American families adopt more than 5,000 children. In 1964, she also established the Pearl S. Buck Foundation to help children who did not meet adoption standards.
A firm anti-communist
Pearl S. Buck had been naturalized in China and had strong feelings for China. After the outbreak of the Sino-Japanese War in 1937, she fought for the Chinese people’s war against aggression. Many Americans had learned about China through her novels.
She was awarded the Order of Brilliant Jade, issued by Chiang Kai-shek from the Government of the Republic of China, for her financial assistance during the Sino-Japanese War. Because of her firm stance against communism, the mainland cultural sector has long suppressed and attacked her literary works.
When President Richard Nixon visited China in 1972, Pearl S. Buck’s deep understanding of Chinese culture made her one of the most qualified individuals to accompany President Nixon to China. However, when she applied for a Chinese visa, she was rejected by the Chinese regime as “an unwelcome guest.”
After that, Pearl did not set foot in China again, a country that had once nurtured her. In her study, there is still a wooden jewelry box with Chinese characteristics — a gift from former President Nixon after he visited China.
Nostalgia for Chinese culture
Pearl S. Buck loved Chinese culture. In her former residence, the Green Hills Farm, there is a statue of Bodhisattva Guanyin in her study and two other rooms. A tour guide states that Guanyin brought Pearl “peace and joy.”
Pearl’s works are filled with sentimentality toward her days in China. She passionately describes Chinese scenery and even recorded her favorite delicious Chinese dishes: Zhengzhou Yellow River carp soup, steamed fish of Hangzhou, Changsha smoked fish and smoked beef, Chaozhou apricot salted fish, Suzhou steamed crabs, Beijing sweet and sour fish, and Dongting Lake dried shrimp.
In the Green Hills Farm is a cookbook by Pearl, published in 1992, with her photo on the front cover wearing traditional Chinese clothing and holding a Chinese porcelain bowl to introduce Chinese recipes in the book.
A bridge between Eastern and Western civilizations
Pearl S. Buck spent nearly 40 years in China; it can be said that she spent half of her life there. Mr. Nixon praised Pearl in his eulogy for her as “a bridge of Eastern and Western civilizations, a great artist, a sensitive and compassionate person.”
Her description of rural China was the most comprehensive and in-depth description of Chinese villages, helping an entire generation of Americans and Westerners to broaden their horizons. In the late 1950s, American sociologists conducted a survey in which two-thirds of Americanssaid their impressions of China from 1931 to the mid-1950s were from Pearl S. Buck.
Pearl S. Buck passed away on March 6, 1973, but her insight into China, the Chinese people, Chinese history, and China’s future has finally been recognized today. After more than 80 years, it still shines its unique light.
Translated by Natashe Yang.
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