Pearl of the orient

More than 30 years after the writer's death and 75 since the publication of The Good Earth, the saga of a farming family in pre-Communist China, Buck remains stranded between two worlds. In China she is admired but not read; in America, she is read but not admired. Mike Meyer writes about the author and her booksIt is the highest house in all of Zhenjiang, tucked behind bamboo above the Yangtze mist shrouding Cloud Scaling Hill. The former occupants lie buried on two continents: the parents nearby, their famous daughter beneath Pennsylvania farm soil in a grave marked with her Chinese name. She arrived in China as a child of missionaries. Now, steles resembling tombstones front her grey brick childhood home. In English, the epitaph reads, “Here lived Pearl S Buck, American author, born 1892, died 1973.” The more effusive carving in Chinese cites a Nobel Prize and the praise of a president: “Nixon called her a bridge between the civilizations of East and West.”
The house is now a museum dedicated to Buck, the prodigal daughter of Zhenjiang, a city of more than two million upriver from Shanghai that smells like its famous vinegar. A joint venture between the city government and the United States-based Pearl S Buck International foundation, the museum is filled with Buck memorabilia – calligraphied laurels from government agencies and photos of the writer doing “her utmost to appeal to American society for assistance to Chinese people” in the war against Japan. Souvenirs carry the verdict of a former prime minister, Zhou Enlai: “She is a friend of the Chinese people.” Yet one thing is notably absent from the gift stand: Buck's books.
Ferociously prolific, Buck wrote dozens of novels, as well as eight short story collections; 16 children's books; 25 nonfiction titles, including a translation of a landmark Chinese novel; and biographies of her Presbyterian preacher father (Fighting Angel) and longsuffering mother (The Exile).
Today, Beijing's largest bookstore sells only an English edition of The Good Earth. Back in the 1930s, eight different Chinese translations of the book, which Buck said were “cheerfully pirated over and over again”, competed for attention with her other novels. But after the Communist revolution in 1949, Buck's tales, with their petit bourgeois values and descriptions of feudalism, were seen as anachronisms from an era toppled by Mao. By 1960, she was denounced in China as a proponent of American cultural imperialism.
Buck had left the country long before. She moved back to the United States in 1935; though an outspoken critic of Communism, she hoped to return to China, and even refused all invitations to Taiwan so as not to hamper her chances. In 1972, nine months before she died, a functionary rejected her application for a People's Republic of China visa, citing “the fact that for a long time you have in your works taken an attitude of distortion, smear and vilification towards the people of new China and their leaders”.
Yet in recent years Buck has risen in the estimation of a new generation of Chinese intellectuals. “She was a revolutionary,” said Liu Haiping, Buck's Chinese translator and a professor of English at Nanjing University. “She was the first writer to choose rural China as her subject matter. None of the Chinese writers would have done so; intellectuals wrote about urban intellectuals,” he said. “Many of us feel we should include Buck as part of Chinese literature.” In 1986, Liu organized a literary conference in Nanjing that marked the beginning of Buck's resuscitation in China; the government-financed museum, established last year, represents a kind of official rehabilitation.
Liu first read Buck in the United States, when he was a student at Harvard in the 1980s – though not in class. “When I would go to friends' homes, it was usually a woman in her 60s who would ask me how I viewed Buck's portrayal of China,” he recalled. “I felt embarrassed because I had not read her. She was banned. The more I learned about her life, the more I wanted to do her justice.”
Raised in China by her missionary parents, Buck began writing in her 30s, when she was trapped in a loveless marriage and unable to afford care for a daughter with mental disabilities, as Peter Conn, her most recent biographer, recounts in Pearl S Buck: A Cultural Biography. Around two dozen publishers rejected her first novel, until the publishing house John Day finally said yes. East Wind, West Wind came out in 1930. She'd later marry the director of John Day, which nearly became her personal press.
Fifteen of her books were Book-of-the-Month Club selections. She won a Pulitzer Prize for The Good Earth in 1932, and in 1938 she became the first American woman to win the Nobel Prize for literature. Buck's experiences in China transformed her view of America; on her return, she became a leading advocate for civil and women's rights, and for Amerasian – a term she coined – war orphans.
Still, American critics dismissed Buck as sentimental. William Faulkner sniffily called her “Mrs Chinahand Buck”. John Hersey, author of Hiroshima and himself raised in China by missionary parents, said that of Buck's 80 books, she'd written “probably 70 too many”. Even Conn acknowledged, “I found her odyssey ultimately more engaging than most of her books.”
But Buck's work remained popular, even as she fell from reading lists during the cold war. Maxine Hong Kingston fondly recalled being assigned The Good Earth in ninth grade in the 1950s. “It humanised Chinese people,” she said. “It is written with so much empathy that for the first time, Americans had to see Chinese as equals.”
I first discovered Buck after college. Before departing for a Peace Corps assignment in China a decade ago, I asked an elderly librarian for books on the country. She walked me past the nonfiction shelves and into Buck's world of jade-green rice, sweetmeats, rainbow silks, silver mists, and turquoise and gold flashing on slim ivory hands; a China where red-skinned, milk-scented foreigners are perpetually shocked by the grace and strength of the people they meet. In Buck's novel The Promise, an Englishman encounters a local girl: “One doesn't expect a Chinese – to –,” he stammers, “be wholly human,” she finishes, brimming with rectitude. In 2004, Oprah Winfrey selected The Good Earth for her book club, telling viewers it made her feel lucky to have been born in America. Buck's China books are set in an era of warlords, slaves, opium, bound feet, Japanese invaders, famine, floods and rape. Today, her legacy – and her common theme, individual suffering set against a backdrop of social upheaval – are echoed in the American success of Chinese books set during the Cultural Revolution and other political campaigns, most notably Jung Chang's popular Wild Swans, Anchee Min's memoir Red Azalea and the Nobel laureate Gao Xingjian's novel Soul Mountain.
In the dining car of the train heading to Zhenjiang and Buck's museum last fall, I picked up one of the five novels Buck wrote in the 1940s and 1950s, set in the American West and published under the name John Sedges – a pseudonym she adopted to escape her China persona. A middle-aged man and his teenage companion stared at my beer bottle, then my book. The man asked what I was reading, and I responded with Buck's Chinese name, Sai Zhenzhu.
The man nodded and said to the boy, “The famous Chinese-American writer.” As the train clucked and swayed, the waitress effortlessly exchanged our empty bottles for full ones.π
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