Pearl S. Buck


Pearl Comfort Sydenstricker Buck was an American writer and humanitarian. She is best known for The Good Earth, the best-selling novel in the United States in 1931 and 1932, which won her the Pulitzer Prize in 1932. In 1938, Buck became the first American woman to win the Nobel Prize in Literature "for her rich and truly epic descriptions of peasant life in China" and for her "masterpieces", two memoir-biographies of her missionary parents.
Buck was born in West Virginia, but in October 1892, her parents took their 4-month-old baby to China. As the daughter of missionaries and later as a missionary herself, Buck spent most of her life before 1934 in Zhenjiang, with her parents, and in Nanjing, with her first husband. She and her parents spent their summers in a villa in Kuling, Mount Lu, Jiujiang, and it was during this annual pilgrimage that the young girl decided to become a writer. She graduated from Randolph-Macon Woman's College in Lynchburg, Virginia, then returned to China. From 1914 to 1932, after marrying John Lossing Buck, she served as a Presbyterian missionary, but she came to doubt the need for foreign missions. Her views became controversial during the Fundamentalist–modernist controversy, leading to her resignation.
After returning to the United States in 1935, Buck married the publisher Richard J. Walsh and continued writing prolifically. She became an activist and prominent advocate of the rights of women and racial equality, and wrote widely on Chinese and Asian cultures, becoming particularly well known for her efforts on behalf of Asian and mixed-race adoption.

Early life and education

Originally named Comfort, Pearl Sydenstricker was born in Hillsboro, West Virginia, to Caroline Maude and Absalom Sydenstricker, of Dutch and German descent respectively. Her parents, Southern Presbyterian missionaries, were married on July 8, 1880 and moved to China shortly thereafter, but returned to the United States for Pearl's birth. When Pearl was five months old, the family returned to China, living first in Huai'an and then in 1896 moving to Zhenjiang, which was then known as Chingkiang in the Chinese postal romanization system, near the major city of Nanjing. In summer, she and her family spent time in Kuling. Her father built a stone villa in Kuling in 1897, and lived there until his death in 1931. It was during this annual summer pilgrimage in Kuling that the young girl decided to become a writer.
Of her siblings who survived into adulthood, Edgar Sydenstricker had a distinguished career with the U.S. Public Health Service and later the Milbank Memorial Fund, and Grace Sydenstricker Yaukey wrote young adult books and books about Asia under the pen name Cornelia Spencer.
Pearl recalled in her memoir that she lived in "several worlds", one a "small, white, clean Presbyterian world of my parents", and the other the "big, loving merry not-too-clean Chinese world", and there was no communication between them. The Boxer Uprising greatly affected the family; their Chinese friends deserted them, and Western visitors decreased. Her father, convinced that no Chinese could wish him harm, stayed behind as the rest of the family went to Shanghai for safety. A few years later, Buck was enrolled in Miss Jewell's School in Shanghai, and was dismayed at the racist attitudes there of other students, few of whom could speak any Chinese. Both of her parents felt strongly that Chinese were their equals; they forbade the use of the word heathen, and she was raised in a bilingual environment: tutored in English by her mother, in the local dialect by her Chinese playmates, and in classical Chinese by a Chinese scholar named Mr. Kung. She also read voraciously, especially, in spite of her father's disapproval, the novels of Charles Dickens, which she later said she read through once a year for the rest of her life.
In 1911, Buck left China to attend Randolph-Macon Woman's College in Lynchburg, Virginia, where she graduated Phi Beta Kappa in 1914 and was a member of Kappa Delta sorority.

Career

China

Although Buck had not intended to return to China, much less become a missionary, she quickly applied to the Presbyterian Board when her father wrote that her mother was seriously ill. In 1914, Buck 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. This is the 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 the University of Nanking, where they both had teaching positions. She taught English literature at this private, church-run university, and also at Ginling College and at the National Central University. In 1920, the Bucks had a daughter, Carol, who was afflicted with phenylketonuria that left her severely developmentally disabled. Buck had to have a hysterectomy due to complications of Carol's birth, leaving her unable to have more biological children. 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 a master's degree from Cornell University. In 1925, the Bucks adopted a child named Janice. 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. Her father insisted that the family should stay in Nanjing until the battle reached the city, as he had in 1900 in the face of the Boxers. When violence broke out, a poor Chinese family invited them to hide in their hut while the family's house was looted. The family spent a day terrified and in hiding, after which American gunboats rescued them. They traveled to Shanghai and then sailed to Japan, where they stayed for a year, after which they moved back to Nanjing. Buck later said that this year in Japan showed her that not all Japanese were militarists. When she returned from Japan in late 1927, Buck devoted herself in earnest to the vocation of writing. Friendly relations with prominent Chinese writers of the time, such as Xu Zhimo and Lin Yutang, encouraged her to think of herself as a professional writer. 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. Since the mission board could not provide it, she also needed money for Carol's specialized care.
File:Richard J. Walsh, portrait photograph agc.7a13018.jpg|thumb|left|upright|Buck married her publisher, Richard J. Walsh, the same day she divorced John Lossing Buck.
Buck traveled once more to the United States in 1929 to find long-term care for Carol, eventually placing her in the Vineland Training School in New Jersey. Buck served on the Board of Trustees for the school, where Carol would live until she died in 1992 at age 72. While Buck was in the United States, Richard J. Walsh, editor at John Day publishers in New York, accepted her novel East Wind: West Wind. She and Walsh began a relationship that would eventually lead to marriage and many years of professional collaboration.
Back in Nanking, Buck retreated every morning to the attic of her university house, and within the year, completed the manuscript for The Good Earth. She was involved in the charity relief campaign for the victims of the 1931 China floods, writing a series of short stories describing the plight of refugees, which were broadcast on the radio in the United States and later published in her collected volume The First Wife and Other Stories.
When her husband took the family to Ithaca, New York, the following year, Buck accepted an invitation to address a luncheon of Presbyterian women at the Hotel Astor 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 Buck to resign from the Presbyterian Board. In 1934, Buck left China, believing she would return, while her husband remained.

United States

Buck divorced her husband John in Reno, Nevada, on June 11, 1935, and she married Richard Walsh that same day. He reportedly offered her advice and affection that, her biographer concludes, "helped make Pearl's prodigious activity possible". The couple moved with Janice to Green Hills Farm in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, which they quickly set about filling with adopted children. Two sons were brought home as infants in 1936 and followed by another son and daughter in 1937.
After the Communist Revolution in 1949, Buck was repeatedly refused all attempts to return to her beloved China. Her 1962 novel Satan Never Sleeps is heavily anti-communist and filled with religious themes, and was adapted into a film in the same year. 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, reportedly due to political interference by Jiang Qing, a prominent figure in the denunciation of Buck.

Nobel Prize in Literature

In 1938, the Nobel Prize committee wrote:
In her speech to the Academy, Buck took as her topic "The Chinese Novel". She explained, "I am an American by birth and by ancestry", but "my earliest knowledge of story, of how to tell and write stories, came to me in China." After an extensive discussion of classic Chinese novels, especially Romance of the Three Kingdoms, All Men Are Brothers, and Dream of the Red Chamber, she concluded that in China "the novelist did not have the task of creating art but of speaking to the people." Her own ambition, she continued, had not been trained toward "the beauty of letters or the grace of art." In China, the task of the novelist differed from the Western artist: "To farmers he must talk of their land, and to old men he must speak of peace, and to old women he must tell of their children, and to young men and women he must speak of each other." And like the Chinese novelist, she concluded, "I have been taught to want to write for these people. If they are reading their magazines by the million, then I want my stories there rather than in magazines read only by a few."