Pearl S. Buck

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Pearl Sydenstricker Buck (June 26, 1892–March 6, 1973), also known as Sai Zhenzhu (Chinese: ), was an American writer and novelist. She is best known for her book The Good Earth, which was the best-selling book in the United States between 1931 and 1932 and 1932 and 1932, which also received the Pulitzer Prize in 1932. Buck was awarded 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. She was the first American woman to win the award.

Buck was born in West Virginia, but her parents took their 4-month-old baby to China in October 1892. Buck spent the majority of her life in Zhenjiang, with her parents, and in Nanjing with her first husband. The young girl and her parents spent their summers in Kuling, Mountain Lu, Jiujiang,, and it was during this annual pilgrimage that she became a writer. She graduated from Randolph-Macon Woman's College in Lynchburg, Virginia, and then returned to China. She served as a Presbyterian missionary from 1914 to 1932, after marrying John Lossing Buck, but she came to question the need for foreign missions. During the Fundamentalist–Modernist controversy, her views became polar, resulting in her resignation. She married publisher Richard J. Walsh and continued writing prolifically after returning to the United States in 1935. She became a vocal advocate for women and racial equality, and she wrote extensively on Chinese and Asian cultures, becoming well-known for her calls for Asian and mixed-race adoption.

Early life and education

Pearl Sydenstricker was born in Hillsboro, West Virginia, to Caroline Maude (1857–1921) and Absalom Sydenstricker. The parents, who were born in Southern California, migrated to China right after their marriage on July 8, 1880, but the United States has returned to the United States for Pearl's birth. The family arrived in China when Pearl was five months old, first in Huai'an and then in 1896, moving to Zhenjiang (then often known as Chingkiang in the Chinese postal romanization system) near the Chinese capital of Nanking. Her father built a stone villa in Kuling in 1897 and died there until 1931. The young girl's interest in writing came during her annual summer pilgrimage in Kuling.

Edgar Sydenstricker (1899-1994) wrote young adult books and journals about Asia for her siblings who lived into adulthood.

Pearl recalled in her memoir that she lived in "several worlds," one a "small, white, and vibrant Presbyterian world of my parents," and the other the "large, loving Chinese world" with no contact between them. The Boxer Uprising (1899-1901) greatly affected the family; their Chinese relatives deserted them; and Western visitors were greatly affected. When the rest of the family departed to Shanghai for safety, her father, who was convinced that no Chinese could wish him harm, stayed behind. Pearl was enrolled in Miss Jewell's School a few years ago and was shocked at the other students' racial attitudes, although none of whom knew any Chinese. Both of her parents felt strongly that Chinese were their equals (they banned the use of the word heathen), and she was raised in a bilingual environment: tutored in English by her mother, in the local dialect of her Chinese playmates, and by a Chinese scholar named Mr. Kung in classical Chinese. In spite of her father's disapproval of Charles Dickens' books, she continued to read for the rest of her life once a year.

Pearl left China in 1911 to attend Randolph-Macon Women's College in Lynchburg, Virginia, graduating Phi Beta Kappa in 1914 and a member of Kappa Delta Sorority.

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Career

Despite the fact that Buck did not intend to return to China, much less become a missionary, she applied to the Presbyterian Board quickly after her father reported that her mother was seriously ill. Buck returned to China in 1914. On May 13, 1917, she married John Lossing Buck, an agricultural economist missionary, and they migrated to Suzhou, Anhui Province, a small town on the Huai River (not to be confused with the more recognizable Suzhou in Jiangsu Province). In her book The Good Earth and Sons, she refers to the area.

The Bucks lived in Nanjing, on the University of Nanking's campus, where they both served as teachers from 1920 to 1933. She taught English literature at this private, church-run university, as well as at Ginling College and the National Central University. The Bucks' daughter, Carol, was born with phenylketonuria in 1920. Buck's mother died of a tropical disease, sprue, in 1921, and shortly afterward her father came. Pearl Buck and her family departed China for John Buck's year of sabbatical and returned to the United States for a short time in 1924, when which they earned her master's degree from Cornell University. The Bucks adopted Janice in 1925 (later surnamed Walsh). They returned to China in the fall of this year.

During the "Nanking Incident," Buck's tragedies and disruptions in the 1920s reached their peak in March 1927. Many Westerners were killed in a tumultuous conflict involving elements of Chiang Kai-shek's Nationalist troops, Communist forces, and assorted warlords. Since her father Absalom fought in 1900 in the face of the Boxers, the family decided to remain in Nanjing until the war reaches the city. A poor Chinese family begged them to remain in their hut until the family's house was looted when violence broke out. The family spent a day in fear and in hiding before being rescued by American gunboats. They went from Shanghai to Japan and then sailed to Japan, where they stayed for a year after which they returned to Nanjing. Buck later said that not all Japanese were militarists this year. Buck dedicated herself to writing when she returned from Japan in late 1927. Xu Zhimo and Lin Yutang, two well-known Chinese writers of the time, urged her to think of herself as a professional writer. She wanted to fulfill her mother's dreams, but she also wanted to help herself if she left her marriage, which had become more arduous, and because the mission board did not have the funds, she also needed money for Carol's specialized care. Buck returned to the United States in 1929 to find long-term care for Carol, and while she was there, Richard J. Walsh, editor at John Day publishers in New York, accepted her book East Wind: West Wind. She and Walsh began a relationship that would result in marriage and many years of professional teamwork.

She returned to Nanking every morning to the attic of her university home and completed the manuscript for The Good Earth within a year. She was instrumental in the 1931 China floods' fundraising effort for refugees, writing a collection of short stories about the plight of refugees, which were broadcast on radio in the United States and later released in her collection The First Wife and Other Stories.

Buck accepted an invitation to address a luncheon of Presbyterian women at the Astor Hotel in New York City as her husband and family returned to Ithaca next year. "Is There a Case for the Foreign Missionary?" she began. Her answer was a barely qualified "no." She told her American audience that she encouraged Chinese Christians to share her Christian faith, but she maintained that China does not need an institutional church dominated by missionaries who were too often ignorant of China and arrogant in their attempts to control it. Buck resigned her position with the Presbyterian Board when the interview was published in Harper's Magazine. Buck left China in 1934, hoping she would return, but her husband stayed.

On June 11, 1935, the Bucks married Richard Walsh the same day. Pearl's prodigious behavior was made possible by her mother's counsel and love, which, she says, "helped make Pearl's pro-Protestuality possible." The couple lived in Pennsylvania until his death in 1960.

Buck has consistently denied all attempts to return to her homeland China following the 1949 Communist Revolution. Satan Never Sleeps, a 1962 book by Marilyn Dosi, portrayed China's Communist tyranny. Buck, a leading American writer of Chinese village life, was branded an "American cultural imperialist" during the Cultural Revolution. When Buck was refused from visiting China with Richard Nixon in 1972, she was "heartbroken."

The Nobel Prize committee had been determining the award in 1938: "The Nobel Prize committee gave the award in 1938."

She gave the Academy of Sciences her address "The Chinese Novel." "I am an American by birth and ancestry," she said, but "my earliest memory of history, of how to tell and write stories, came from China." After an extensive review of classic Chinese novels, including the Romance of the Three Kingdoms, All Men Are Brothers, and Dream of the Red Chamber, she concluded that "the novelist did not have the job of designing art, but of speaking to the people." Her own aspiration, she continued, was not cultivated for "the beauty of letters or the grace of art." The novelist's role in China differed from the Western artist: "To farmers he must talk of their land, old men must speak of their children, and old women must warn of their children; and young men and women must speak of each other." "I was taught to write for these people," she said of the Chinese novelist. If they're reading their magazines by the million, then I want my stories there rather than in magazines, which are only read by a few."

Buck was devoting to a variety of topics that were largely ignored by her generation. Several of her life experiences and political views are outlined in her books, short stories, adventure, children's books, and biographies of her parents, Combat Angel (on Absalom) and The Exile (on Carrie). Women's rights, Asian cultures, immigration, integration, missionary service, war, and violence were among the topics covered by Barbara's book. Buck challenged the American public long before it was fashionable or politically safe to do so by raising concerns on topics such as racial discrimination and the plight of Asian war children. Buck combined the careers of wife, mother, author, editor, and international journalist.

Buck, Jr., James A. Michener, Oscar Hammerstein II, and his second wife Dorothy Hammerstein became outraged when existing adoption programs deemed Asian and mixed-race children unadoptable in 1949. Welcome House has welcomed over five thousand children in nearly five decades of operation. Buck established the Pearl S. Buck Foundation in 1964 to help children in Asian countries "address poverty and discrimination faced by children." In 1964, she founded the Opportunity Center and Orphanage in South Korea, and later offices were opened in Thailand, the Philippines, and Vietnam. "The intention... is to publicize and eliminate injustices and prejudices suffered by children, who, because of their birth, are not eligible to enjoy the educational, socioeconomic, and civil rights traditionally reserved to children," Opportunity House founder Tim Keller said.

Richard Gray, who suffered from a long decline in health, died in 1960. She revived a warm connection with William Ernest Hocking, who died in 1966. Buck reconnected with several of her old acquaintances and argued with others. In 1962, Buck begged the Israeli Government for clemency for Adolf Eichmann, the Nazi war criminal who was complicit in the deaths of five million Jews during WWII, as she and others believed that administering capital punishment against Eichmann could have been seen as an act of revenge, particularly after the war had concluded. Buck toured West Virginia in the late 1960s to raise funds to protect her family farm in Hillsboro, West Virginia. The Pearl S. Buck Birthplace is a historic house museum and cultural center. She hoped that the house would "belong to anyone who wants to go there" and that it would act as a "gateway to new thoughts and dreams and ways of life." In October 1998, US President George H.W. Bush toured the Pearl S. Buck House. Through Buck's writing, he, as millions of other Americans, had a new respect for the Chinese people.

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Awards

• Pulitzer Prize for the Novel: The Good Earth (1932)
• William Dean Howells Medal (1935)
• Nobel Prize in Literature (1938)
• Child Study Association of America's Children's Book Award (now Bank Street Children's Book Committee's Josette Frank Award): The Big Wave (1948)