Pearl Buck

Pearl Sydenstricker Buck (June 26, 1892 – March 6, 1973), also known by her Chinese name Sai Zhenzhu (Chinese: 賽珍珠; pinyin: Sài Zhēnzhū), was an American writer who spent most of her time until 1934 in Zhenjiang, China. Her novel The Good Earth was the best-selling fiction book in the U.S. in 1931 and 1932, and won the Pulitzer Prize in 1932. In 1938, she was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, "for her rich and truly epic descriptions of peasant life in China and for her biographical masterpieces."

Pearl Sydenstricker was born in Hillsboro, West Virginia, to Caroline Stulting (1857–1921) and Absalom Sydenstricker. Her parents, Southern Presbyterian missionaries, traveled to China soon after their marriage on July 8, 1880, but returned to the United States for Pearl's birth. When Pearl was three months old, the family returned to China, first in Huai'an and then in 1896 moved to Zhenjiang (then often known as Jingjiang or, in the Postal Romanization, Tsingkiang), (this is near Nanking).

Of her siblings who survived into adulthood, Edgar Sydenstricker (1881-1936) had a distinguished career in epidemiology as an official with the Milbank Memorial Fund  and Grace Sydenstricker Yaukey (1899-1994) was a writer who wrote young adult books and books about Asia under the pen-name Cornelia Spencer.

The Boxer Uprising greatly affected Pearl and family; their Chinese friends deserted them, and Western visitors decreased. Pearl was raised in a bilingual environment, tutored in English by her mother and in classical Chinese by a Chinese scholar named Mr. Kung. In 1911, Pearl left China to attend Randolph-Macon Woman's College in Lynchburg, Virginia, US, graduating Phi Beta Kappa in 1914 and a member of Kappa Delta Sorority. From 1914 to 1933, she served as a Presbyterian missionary, but her views later became highly controversial in the Fundamentalist–Modernist Controversy, leading to her resignation.

Career in China

In 1914, Pearl returned to China. She married an agricultural economist missionary John Lossing Buck, on May 13, 1917, and they moved to Suzhou, Anhui Province, a small town on the Huai River (not to be confused with the better-known Suzhou in Jiangsu Province). This region she describes in her books The Good Earth and Sons.

From 1920 to 1933, the Bucks made their home in Nanjing, on the campus of Nanjing University, where both had teaching positions. Buck taught English literature at the private, church-run University of Nanjing, 金陵大學 and at the National Central University, 國立中央大學, (merged with Nanjing University, 南京大學 in 1952 and 1949 respectively). In 1920, the Bucks had a daughter, Carol, afflicted with phenylketonuria. In 1921, Buck's mother died of a tropical disease, sprue, and shortly afterward her father moved in. In 1924, they left China for John Buck's year of sabbatical and returned to the United States for a short time, during which Pearl Buck earned her Masters degree from Cornell University. In 1925, the Bucks adopted Janice (later surnamed Walsh). That autumn, they returned to China.

The tragedies and dislocations that Buck suffered in the 1920s reached a climax in March 1927, during the "Nanking Incident." In a confused battle involving elements of Chiang Kai-shek's Nationalist troops, Communist forces, and assorted warlords, several Westerners were murdered. Since her father Absalom insisted, the family decided to stay in Nanjing until the battle reached the city. When violence broke out, a poor Chinese family invited them to hide in their hut while the family house was looted. The family spent a day terrified and in hiding, after which they were rescued by American gunboats. They traveled to Shanghai and then sailed to Japan, where they stayed for a year, after which they moved back to Nanjing. Pearl later said that this year in Japan showed her that not all Japanese were militarists. When she returned from Japan in late 1927, Pearl devoted herself in earnest to the vocation of writing. She wanted to fulfill the ambitions denied to her mother, but she also needed money to support herself if she left her marriage, which had become increasingly lonely, and since the mission board could not provide it, she also needed money for Carol’s specialized care. Pearl went once more to the States in 1929 to find long-term care for Carol, and while there, Richard Walsh, editor at John Day publishers in New York, accepted the novel East Wind: West Wind. She and Richard began a relationship that would end in marriage and many years of professional teamwork. Back in Nanking, she retreated every morning to the attic of her university bungalow and within the year completed the manuscript for The Good Earth.

When Lossing took the family to Ithaca the next year, Pearl accepted an invitation to address a luncheon of Presbyterian women at the Astor Hotel in New York City. Her talk was titled “Is There a Case for the Foreign Missionary?” and her answer was a barely qualified “no.” She told her American audience that she welcomed Chinese to share her Christian faith, but argued that China did not need an institutional church dominated by missionaries who were too often ignorant of China and arrogant in their attempts to control it. When the talk was published in Harper's magazine, the scandalized reaction led Pearl to resign her position with the Presbyterian Board (she hardly needed the salary). In 1934, Pearl left China, never to return, while John Lossing remained and later remarried.

Career in the United States

In 1935 the Bucks were divorced. Richard Walsh became her second husband. Walsh offered her advice and affection which, her biographer concludes, "helped make Pearl's prodigious activity possible." The couple lived in Pennsylvania until his death in 1960.

During the Cultural Revolution, Buck, as a preeminent American writer of Chinese village life, was denounced as an "American cultural imperialist." Buck was "heartbroken" when she was prevented from visiting China with Richard Nixon in 1972.

Pearl S. Buck died of lung cancer on March 6, 1973, in Danby, Vermont and was interred in Green Hills Farm in Perkasie, Pennsylvania. She designed her own tombstone. The grave marker is inscribed with Chinese characters representing the name Pearl Sydenstricker.

Humanitarian efforts

Buck was highly committed to a range of issues that were largely ignored by her generation. Many of her life experiences and political views are described in her novels, short stories, fiction, children's stories, and the biographies of her parents entitled Fighting Angel (on Absalom) and The Exile (on Carrie). She wrote on a diverse variety of topics including women's rights, Asian cultures, immigration, adoption, missionary work, and war.

In 1949, outraged that existing adoption services considered Asian and mixed-race children unadoptable, Buck established Welcome House, Inc., the first international, interracial adoption agency. In nearly five decades of work, Welcome House has placed over five thousand children. In 1964, to support children who were not eligible for adoption, Buck established the Pearl S. Buck Foundation (now called Pearl S. Buck International) to "address poverty and discrimination faced by children in Asian countries." In 1965, she opened the Opportunity Center and Orphanage in South Korea, and later offices were opened in Thailand, the Philippines, and Vietnam. When establishing Opportunity House, Buck said, "The purpose... is to publicize and eliminate injustices and prejudices suffered by children, who, because of their birth, are not permitted to enjoy the educational, social, economic and civil privileges normally accorded to children."

In the late 1960s, Buck toured West Virginia to raise money to preserve her family farm in Hillsboro, WV. Today The Pearl S. Buck Birthplace is a historic house museum and cultural center. She hoped the house would "belong to everyone who cares to go there," and serve as a "gateway to new thoughts and dreams and ways of life."

Long before it was considered fashionable or politically safe to do so, Buck challenged the American public by gambling on topics such as racism, sex discrimination and the plight of the thousands of babies born to Asian women left behind and unwanted wherever American soldiers were based in Asia. During her life Buck combined the multiple careers of wife, mother, author, editor and political activist.

Legacy

Pearl S. Buck is receiving the Nobel Prize for Literature from King Gustav V of Sweden in the Stockholm Concert Hall in 1938.

Many contemporary reviewers were positive, and praised her "beautiful prose," even though her "style is apt to degenerate into overrepetition and confusion." Robert Benchley wrote a parody of "The Good Earth" that focused on just these qualities, to excellent effect. Peter Conn, in his biography of Buck, argues that despite the accolades awarded to her, Buck's contribution to literature has been mostly forgotten or deliberately ignored by America's cultural gatekeepers. Kang Liao argues that Buck played a "pioneering role in demythologizing China and the Chinese people in the American mind." Phyllis Bentley, in an overview of Buck's work published in 1935, was altogether impressed: "But we may say at least that for the interest of her chosen material, the sustained high level of her technical skill, and the frequent universality of her conceptions, Mrs. Buck is entitled to take rank as a considerable artist. To read her novels is to gain not merely knowledge of China but wisdom about life." These works aroused considerable popular sympathy for China, and helped foment poor relations with Japan.

Anchee Min, author of a fictionalized life of Pearl Buck, broke down upon reading Buck's work, because she had portrayed the Chinese peasants "with such love, affection and humanity".

Buck was honored in 1983 with a 5¢ Great Americans series postage stamp issued by the United States Postal Service In 1999 she was designated a Women's History Month Honoree by the National Women's History Project.

(赛珍珠故居) Buck's former residence at Nanjing University is now the Sai Zhenzhu Memorial House along the West Wall of the university's north campus. U.S. President George H.W. Bush toured the Pearl S. Buck House in October 1998. He expressed that he, like millions of other Americans, had gained an appreciation for the Chinese through Buck's writing.

Pearl Buck contributed a great deal to the rapid expansion of feminism in America as well as China. Because of her position as a white middle-class woman, Pearl Buck was able to shape American perceptions of China more effectively and positively than other feminists, and other missionaries. With Buck’s Christian values and westernized civic roles she worked hard to enlighten and educate women throughout her life. Thanks to her education, fluency in English, Christian background, and her dual-culture experiences in China and the United States, this woman had a dramatic impact on the way many Americans perceived China during the late 1930s.

Buck also embodied the China mystique for the Americans during 1930s and 1940s, which allowed for others to see the cross-cultural experiences providing evidence for acceptance and tolerance for western thinking. Pearl Buck undertook active roles in recasting earlier forms of orientalist attitudes toward Asia and the Asians in the United States. Because Buck had transnational identification with both China and the United States, which gave them all the authority of being China experts and they acted as bridges between the two cultures. Pearl’s novel, “East Wind, West Wind” allotted western feminism to find its way into Chinese culture in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It was her efforts to foster Chinese women's liberation through her writing, and to serve as a translator that both empowered and silenced many women's voices and experiences in the process. Buck urges us to continue our efforts to build and draw on transcultural relations, and our practices and experiences that must be understood as culturally and historically situated.