Pearl S. Buck: The Outsider

Of all the Nobel winners in literature, Pearl S. Buck has probably been treated as an outsider for the longest time. Chinese writers resented this American for winning the highest prize in literature by writing about Chinese peasant life, and Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist government expressed its dissatisfaction with her candid writings by withdrawing its officials from the Nobel Prize presentation in Stockholm. Her books were also officially banned for nearly 30 years so that most Chinese people did not know who she was. Even though she changed the image of the Chinese people in the American mind, led the fight to repeal the Chinese Exclusion Act, and supported China in its War of Resistance against the Japanese Invasion, she was denied visa to visit China in 1972. Although she loved the Chinese people, she was not liked by any Chinese government. She was also suspected of being a Communist and was registered “on the list of Red Sympathizers devised by Senator Joseph McCarthy in the 1950s” (La Farge 1988, 88–9). She was a US citizen, but lived in China for the first half of her life, and she wrote in English but mainly about China. Was she an American writer or a Chinese one? Particularly after she won the Nobel Prize, neither side of the Pacific was eager to embrace her. In fact, the literary critics largely ignored her though she was popular among the readers of the world. A UNESCO survey in 1970 reported that her “work had been translated into 145 languages and dialects” and she “was more frequently translated than any other American writer” (Conn 1994, 2). Many of her novels are best sellers, and yet she won Pulitzer Prize in 1932, William Dean Howells Medal in 1935, and the Nobel Prize in 1938. Was she a popular novelist or a serious writer? Pearl S. Buck was hard to be placed.

Following the success of Pearl S. Buck’s second novel The Good Earth in 1931, many of her novels were translated into Chinese. Including different renditions of The Good Earth, at least 36 translations of her books were published in Shanghai, Hong Kong, Nanjing, and Chongqing from 1932 to 1948 (Xu 2022, 228–30). Having no access to any of these books, I cannot judge the quality of the translations, but as Lu Xun puts it, “Mrs. Buck was very popular in Shanghai.” However, Lu Xun, the most important man of letters in China last century also made a rather negative comment on Buck’s achievement. In his letter to Yao Ke on 15 November 1932, he said,

It is always better for Chinese to write about Chinese subject matters, as that is the only way to get close to the truth. It is no exception even with someone like Mrs. Buck, who […] regards China as her own motherland. Her books, after all, reveal no more than the position of an American woman missionary who happens to have grown up in China […] for what she knows about China is but superficial. Only when we Chinese begin to do it, can some truth be revealed. (Yao 1990, 38–42)

As for Lu Xun’s assertion, no reason was given except that Pearl S. Buck was not biologically Chinese. She grew up in China, learned Chinese before English, was brought up by a Chinese amah as well as her American mother, went to Chinese schools, and lived among Chinese peasants for nearly 40 years. On what ground did Lu Xun assert that her knowledge about China was superficial? No evidence or argument, only a nationalist assertion. Actually, it was the Chinese scholars, men of letters, and high brows who did not know much about Chinese peasants, the majority of the Chinese people. They wrote about emperors, kings, aristocrats, scholars, and even bandits, but never did anyone write a novel about Chinese peasants. Not even Lu Xun. He created Ah Q, a village lout, and Xiang Lin’s wife, a servant at a rich man’s house in his short stories. That was as close as he ever got in touch with Chinese people at the bottom of the society. He did not know Chinese peasants who tilled the land and could not write a novel about them, and yet, just because Buck did not have Chinese blood, he took it for granted that she did not know much about China, and his comment represented the opinion and viewpoint of most Chinese scholars and critics at the time. Other important men of letters such as Ba Jin, Mao Dun, and Hu Feng also expressed their dislike of Pearl S. Buck, negative criticism of her portrayal of the Chinese peasants, and assumption that she was ignorant of the economic system in China’s countryside, and she did not know the causes of Chinese peasants’ misery (Xu 2022, 23). Apparently, their judgments were based on Marxist class struggle theory.

The Chinese descendants in the US also attacked The Good Earth out of nationalism. Younghill Kang found Pearl S. Buck’s “picture of excessive childbearing” completely “out of proportion.” He claimed that her characters spoke with too much “frankness, a thing abhorrent to the traditional Oriental.” He asserted that no man in China would have a love affair with his bondmaid and no woman, not even a slave girl, would have premarital sex. He believed if a father did such a disgraceful thing, his son would probably commit suicide. He insisted that Pearl S. Buck’s emphasis on “romantic love” in The Good Earth reduced Confucian society “to a laughable pandemonium” (Kang 1931, 185–86).

A more vehement attack came from Kiang Kang-hu, professor of Chinese Studies at McGill University in Montreal. He published an essay in the New York Times on January 15, 1933 accusing Pearl S. Buck of making errors of fact and distorting certain aspects of Chinese life. He declared that non-Chinese novelists could not possibly write accurately life in China. He maintained that peasants and the low-class about whom she wrote were too few in China to represent the majority of Chinese people or the mainstream of Chinese culture. He also inferred that modern China had no bandits anymore (Kiang 1933, 2, 16).

These criticisms are so absurd and so obviously wrong that no counterattacks are needed, but we understand the critics who lived in the time when China was weak and suffered much under the oppression of Western imperialism. They could not put up with anything negatively said or described about their motherland. They only wanted this American writer to glorify modern China through literature just like Chiang’s Nationalist government, which suggested the peasants should put on new clothes and drive a tractor when Hollywood was filming The Good Earth in China.

However, Pearl S. Buck was not influenced by such criticisms. In Sons, A House Divided, among other writings, she exposed the evils of China under the warlords, criticized the corruption of the Nationalist government, and condemned its cruelty in dealing with patriotic and revolutionary youths. Although most of her representation of China was true and the Chinese translations of her novels were not banned by Chiang’s Nationalist government, that government did express its dissatisfaction with her by withdrawing its officials from the Nobel Prize presentation in Stockholm in 1938. This happened mainly because that in three novels, The Patriot, The Promise, and Kinfolk, she depicts a searing picture of Chiang Kai-shek as an opportunist and details his defective leadership and his government’s apathy toward the sufferings of the poor people. However, the Chinese Communist government did not like her any better for the realistic depiction of its opponent. After all, she was not writing for or against any of the political parties but simply holding a mirror to the reality of China.

In the above-mentioned novels, Pearl S. Buck also expresses her disapproval of radical methods to improve society. She was not trying to declare her political inclination through the film and novels, for her trouble with the McCarthyites was over by then. “It’s just that a writer must be involved in the mainstream of life in order to write, and I cannot endure disorder in any form. When I become involved and find a situation that is not right, then I must try to do something to change it” (Harris 1969, 190). From then on, her books were banned in China until 1982 when popular radical ideology gave way to Deng’s moderatism. That year saw the publication of an anthology of foreign short stories titled Life and Love by Gui Zhou People’s Press. This anthology includes three stories by Pearl S. Buck and uses her story “Life and Love” as the title, signaling quietly the beginning of the revival of this American writer in China.

What a shame it was that Pearl S. Buck did not live to see this day! What a shame it was that she could not go back to China after its door was opened by President Nixon! It was primarily because of two novels and a film that she was denied a visa for visiting China in 1972. As she tells us in her last book China Past and Present, she received a letter from a Second Secretary of China’s embassy in Canada telling her: “In view of 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, I am authorized to inform you that we cannot accept your request for a visit to China” (Buck 1972, 170). She was heartbroken and greatly distressed by the letter, which abrogated her last wish and chance to visit the country she loved as her second homeland, to visit the tombs of her parents and four brothers and sisters who had died in China, and to visit her friends who had survived many political movements. Her heartbreak is fully expressed in the 34-page monologue with which she ends the book. She was in such a deep despair that she was never able to come back to herself and to writing her last novel The Red Earth. She stopped at chapter one and died less than 10 months later on March 6, 1973.

Not only was Pearl S. Buck regarded as an outsider by the Chinese writers, scholars, and governments, but she was also ignored by American critics after she had won the Nobel Prize in literature. However, we must notice that before the prize she was generally praised by the critics, particularly for two novels The Good Earth and The Mother, and two biographies, The Exile and Fighting Angel. It was for these four books, rather than for The Good Earth alone, that the Nobel Prize was given to Pearl S. Buck, as the Nobel Committee citation that accompanies the award reads: “For rich and generous epic description of Chinese peasant life and masterpieces of biography” (Doyle 1965, 76, 91). The Good Earth received “critical hosannas” (Thompson 1968, 85) in Dody W. Thompson’s phrase, and most reviewers did rate it far above the other novels of its kind. Nathaniel Peffer gave it this commendation: “This is China as it has never before been portrayed in fiction, the China that Chinese live in and as Chinese live […] The Good Earth is, however, much more than China. One needs never have lived in China or know anything about the Chinese to understand it or respond to its appeal” (Peffer 1931, 1). Florence Ayscough, who had lived in China for many years, confirmed the outstanding authenticity of The Good Earth: “At last we read, in the pages of a novel, of the real people of China. They seem to spring from their roots, to develop and mature even as their own rice springs from a jade green seed bed and comes to its golden harvest” (Ayscough 1931, 676). Many critics juxtaposed The Good Earth with the masterpieces of the world. Mentioning that Mr. Phelps was the first to call The Good Earth a masterpiece, Malcolm Cowley contended, “If we define a masterpiece as a novel that is living, complete, sustained, but still somewhat limited in its scope as compared with the greatest works of fiction – if we define it as Wuthering Heights rather than War and Peace – then Mr. Phelps has found exactly the word for The Good Earth” (Cowley 1939, 24+). Will Rogers said The Good Earth was “not only the greatest book about a people ever written, but the best book of our generation” (Buck 1977, 311).

Too many positive comments were made on The Good Earth that her other books were often eclipsed, but they should not be. In his speech at the presentation in Stockholm, the permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy, Per Hallström, particularly mentioned The Mother, saying, the nameless mother “is the most finished of Pearl Buck’s Chinese female figures, and the book was one of her best” (Hallström 1981, 7). Comparing this novel with The Good Earth, Fanny Butcher remarked, “It is written in the same biblical style as The Good Earth. It has the same tragic overtones, the same calm melody. It has not the cosmic power that was in the pages of The Good Earth, but it has the same deep and rich and rooted reality” (Butcher 1934, 15). Comparing it with East Wind: West Wind, The Good Earth, and Sons, G. R. B. Richards lauded The Mother as follows:

Simple in theme, it moves along as quietly as a lowland stream, with a restrained emotionalism that the more complex novels lack. Spiritual change, as deeply harmonious as it is tranquil, characterizes the book which, despite its lesser theme, in many ways surpasses its predecessors. It is more finely done. The simplicity of the peasant mind stands out in bolder relief and the conflicts of opposing natures [are] less dramatic and more real. Poetic but not sentimental, distinguished by sympathetic understanding and appreciation of unseen struggle, it is essentially artistic, essentially commonplace, essentially and universally human in its conception and in its execution. (Richards 1934, 1)

Also discussing the execution of the simple theme in The Mother, Mary Ross maintained, “Such a theme in the hands of a lesser writer might have the blurriness of a composite photograph or slur into platitudes and sentimentality. Mrs. Buck’s telling has the authentic simplicity of strength and sureness, the power of an understanding that is whole and deep” (Ross 1934, 3). Emphasizing such simplicity, strength, and understanding, J. D. Adams concluded, “The Mother has an architectural unity and a driving simplicity and strength to a degree more marked than in any of Mrs. Buck’s previous work. That simplicity and strength have almost an elemental quality. And not only that; it has been Mrs. Buck’s achievement that she has rendered the life of a people deeply alien from ourselves in terms of universal human values, and those values are in this book appreciably intensified” (Adams 1934, 1, 18). Talking about the effect of The Mother on the reader, Isidor Schneider said, “It is so direct in its appeal to the emotions that it draws tears to the eyes. And it has a certain quality common to some of the world’s finest books and peculiarly satisfying in whatever book it appears, of presenting its characters safe, in the integrity of their destinies, from envy, scorn and censure” (Schneider 1934, 136).

In his Nobel presentation speech, Per Hallström also included Pearl S. Buck’s biographies of her parents, saying that “in character descriptions and the story-teller’s art she is at her best in […] The Exile (1936) and Fighting Angel (1936). These should be called classics in the fullest sense of the word; they will endure, for they are full of life” (Hallström 1981, 7). Indeed, these two books received favorable reviews in the United States, too. As Katherine Woods commented on The Exile, “Clear, incandescent, gripping in its interest, written in a style of beauty and unerring rightness, this ‘Portrait of an American Mother’ is an epic of our country. It is one of the noblest epics of our day” (Woods 1936, 1). Mary Ross reviewed, “Restrained, temperate, the book of a novelist who not only loves life but looks at it clear-eyed, The Exile is a story of fact as exiting and as moving as any of the fiction in which Pearl Buck has shown life as Carie helped her to see it” (Ross 1936, 3). Discussing the style of the two biographies, Katherine Woods remarked, “In the limpid flowing beauty of Pearl Buck’s writing, in the unerring clarity and directness of every word and image and expression, she has done in Fighting Angel what she did in The Exile – has drawn a portrait with far more than mere personal vividness, touched problems as deep as all humanity. And her incandescent realism lights the very heart of our thought” (Woods 1936, 3). Summarizing the difficulty and achievement of Fighting Angel, G. F. Finnie decided,

To attempt the biography of one’s own father is to court disaster either by allowing sentiment to overcome reality or by offending the tender decencies of life by frankly presenting the truth as one sees it, irrespective of family obligations. If the author has erred in any directions, it is in the realism of this unique book…Needless to say, the book is a piece of high literary craftsmanship. It is good reading, and again attests the fact that Pearl Buck is among our foremost writers of today. (Finnie 1937, 183)

The above-quoted reviews are only a few of many typical commendations of Pearl S. Buck’s books. Despite all such favorable receptions, the highest prize given to a woman writer who had only eight years’ history of publication generated a certain amount of resentment among the white male dominated American academics in 1939. “It was claimed,” as Paul Doyle summarized, “that she was too youthful, that she had written too few important books to be considered of major stature, and that no woman writer deserved the award. She was even charged with not being an American writer since her subject matter and even her places of residence were almost completely Chinese” (Doyle 1980, 80). Robert Frost complained about her winning of the prize, as Warren Sherk recorded: “If she can get it, anybody can” (Sherk 1992, 106). Dr. Sherk also recorded William Faulkner’s discontent with the Swedes’ selection: “I don’t want it. I’d rather be in the company of Sherwood Anderson and Theodore Dreiser than S. Lewis and Mrs. China-hand Buck.” Yet, Faulkner would not hesitate to accept it in 1949 when he was selected to receive the same prize and delivered an excellent speech at the award ceremony.

As D. P. Smith put it, “As much as the Nobel Prize honored her, it also branded her as a writer almost exclusively identified with China – a limiting characterization from which she spent the remainder of her career trying to escape” (Smith 1987, 462). Nevertheless, some reviews of her post-Nobel Prize books are still positive including those on The Patriot (1939) and The Townsman (1945). The latter was first published under the pseudonym John Sedges, for Pearl S. Buck wanted to prove that people were buying her books not just for her fame and that she could write about Americans as well as Chinese. Commending this Kansan pioneer story, the reviewer for Commwealth said, “Only rarely does a novel on immigration have the quality or the sensitiveness of Giants in the Earth. Yet despite its well-worn theme, The Townsman manages to compel and hold attention. John Sedges tells the simple story of an English family well and there are several elements which set off this volume from most of its contemporaries” (“Review of The Townsman by John Sedges” 1945, 143). No one imagined the novel could be written by a non-Kansan, let alone by someone who lived most of her life in China. The Townsman was unanimously acclaimed as a success; the details are authentic, the story is well told, and “the real merit of the book,” J. T. Flanagan maintained, “is the characterization of Jonathan Goodliffe. He is not a sensational figure; he is plodding rather than brilliant, but in his quiet firm way he dominates both the community and the novel” (Flanagan 1945, 1).

The best reviews on Pearl S. Buck’s post-Nobel Prize books are given to her autobiography, My Several Worlds, for most critics found it well comparable to her Nobel Prize biographies, The Exile and Fighting Angel. The New Yorker reviewer considered My Several Worlds a “rambling, discursive, and thoroughly delightful autobiography, which may well be one of the best books Mrs. Buck has written” (“Review of My Several Worlds by Pearl Buck” 1954, 186). The Kirkus reviewer also found it “not only Pearl Buck’s most important book, but, on many counts, her best book” (“Review of My Several Worlds by Pearl Buck” 1954, 603). Margaret Parton assured, “Those who have read all her books may feel that My Several Worlds is her finest achievement. Those who have not can take it as the rich autumnal flowering of a varied and sensitive mind whose roots are in the common soil of all humanity” (Parton 1954, 17). E. D. Canham made this evaluation of the autobiography: “If any book can build a bridge of understanding between Asia and America in these urgent times, this is it. For Pearl Buck shows us with her incomparable vividness and accuracy the growth of modern China, its deeply grounded mistrust for the West, and the opportunity the United States has to escape from present misunderstandings back into the old friendship” (Canham 1954, 5).

However, Pearl S. Buck has not been well studied in American universities; her works are rarely taught at college level; and they are not even included in The Heath Anthology of American Literature, the most multicultural collection published in 1990, though one of the editors was Professor Amy Ling, whose specialty is multi-ethnic literature in the United States and Chinamerican literature. She selected works on Chinese themes by Edith Maud Eaton (1865–1914), Maxine Hong Kingston (b. 1940), Amy Tan (b. 1952), Gish Jen (b. 1955), Cathy Song (b. 1955), and David Henry Hwang (b. 1957) among others. Pearl S. Buck would bridge the chronological gap between Eaton and Kingston nicely, but Buck was not anthologized. In the latest edition published in 2014, Younghill Kang (1903–1972) was inserted, but still no Pearl S. Buck, not because her works have less artistic or cognitive value than the others, but because she had no Chinese blood, and also because her novels are not about American Chinese, but Chinese in China, which, the Soviet Union, was an unimportant Other until recent decades. The American unlike critics did not have much to say about China’s modern literature or the literary works about modern China, and they certainly did not know where to place Pearl S. Buck. Lafcadio Hearn got more academic attention than her not because he wrote better than she did, or he knew Japan, which is the subject of his writings, better than she knew China, but because Japan had been economically more powerful than China until recent decades.

The scholars engaged in the comparative studies of Chinese and American literatures, like Professor Chih-tsing Hsia of Columbia University, grew up in China when it was oppressed by the Western Powers, when there was a park in Shanghai that forbade the admission of dogs and Chinese, and when the Nationalist government and the intellectuals were building up China’s nationalism, which was clearly reflected in the critical responses to The Good Earth as mentioned earlier. Their nationalism was also seen in the request made by the Chinese students at Columbia University that Pearl S. Buck should not publish All Men Are Brothers, the translation of a Chinese classical novel Shui Hu Chuan because it contained cannibalism (Buck 1954, 283). She politely declined their request, but they were not pleased and were afraid that Western readers would think the Chinese uncivilized. It is not surprising that scholars with such strong nationalism would later ignore her works, which often mirror China objectively, good and bad alike.

After 1949, the United States had no diplomatic relationship with mainland China for nearly 30 years. During the Cold War period of Sino-American hostility (1949–1973), China’s criticism of Pearl S. Buck’s books, as Liu Haiping analyzed, was the product of the ideological struggle and one-sided opinion under the influence of the Soviet model. Negative critical articles include Gao Junqian’s translation from Russian to Chinese, “Pearl Buck: An Old China Hand Gone Bankrupt,” Xu Yuxin’s “Pearl Buck: A Vanguard of U.S. Imperialist Cultural Aggression,” Li Wenjun’s “Pearl S. Buck: An Anatomy of the Reactionary American Writer,” and Shi Mo’s “The Curse of an Owl – A Critique of Pearl S. Buck’s Letter from Peking” (Liu 1994, 65). None of them discuss the artistic value of her books. The critical responses to her books in the East as well as the West went from negative to neglectful. As Peter Conn puts it, “In the years after World War II, Buck’s literary reputation shrunk to the vanishing point. She stood on the wrong side of virtually every line drawn by those who constructed the lists of required reading in the 1950s and 1960s. To begin with, her principal subjects were women and China, both of which were regarded as peripheral and even frivolous in the early postwar years” (Conn 1996, preface). The “China Hand” and her works were neglected along with China as a whole. On the gender issue, Conn further asserted that “she undoubtedly suffered because of her gender: more often than not, it was her male rivals and critics who declared that her gigantic success only demonstrated the bad judgment of American readers – especially women readers, who have always made up the majority of Buck’s audience.”

Finally, a few years after 1976, China began to conduct economic reforms and to open up to the West. When a delegation from Indiana University came to Zhenjiang and inquired about Pearl S. Buck in 1980, Mr. Xu Heping, who was working as a translator, began to study her. Realizing what a great woman she was both as a writer and a humanitarian, he made the suggestion that she should be reevaluated and her residence should be renovated, which would be a valuable tourist attraction. Xu’s research led him to Mr. Liu Long, a teacher at Chongshi Girls’ School (Olivet Memorial Girls School) where Pearl S. Buck studied and taught, who was also studying Buck. They worked together along with university professors and scholars including Liu Haiping, Zhang Ziqing, Yao Junwei, Guo Yingjian, and Wang Fengzhen, the translator of The Good Earth trilogy. With Liu Long as the chief editor of A Research of Pearl S. Buck, the first collection of articles about this great American writer was published by Yunnan People’s Publishing House in 1992. Pearl S. Buck was no longer an outsider in China. Her former residents have been renovated in Zhenjiang, Suzhou, and Kuling. Her memorial hall was built in Nanjing University, and her memorial park in Zhenjiang. Many conferences and symposiums were held about Pearl S. Buck’s functions as a writer and a humanitarian. Numerous articles were published on this great American woman who had contributed so much to China’s War of Resistance against Japan’s Invasion, to the repeal of the Chinese Exclusion Act, and to the understanding between China and the United States. Scores of doctoral dissertations and more than a hundred master theses were written on Buck.

In the United States, this outsider’s revival began with Pearl S. Buck Centennial Symposium: Building Bridges between Asia and America held at Randolph-Macon Woman’s College in 1992 and the publication of The Several Worlds of Pearl S. Buck: Essays Presented at a Centennial Symposium, Randolph-Macon Woman’s College, 26-28 March 1992 by Greenwood Press in 1994. Subsequently, Peter Conn’s Pearl S. Buck: A Cultural Biography was published in 1996 and Kang Liao’s Pearl S. Buck: A Cultural Bridge across the Pacific in 1997. Slowly but steadily, the cultural values of Pearl S. Buck’s literary works again drew the attention of American academia, which realized, as China had done, that it does not matter if a writer is Chinese American or American Chinese, if he/she writes about China or America, as long as the writing has aesthetic or cultural value, or it has an impact on our civilization, it is worth studying. We do not have to put him or her into any pigeonhole, or maybe we can create a new one – international writers – into which we put writers like Pearl S. Buck. In 1996, West Virginia University held Pearl S. Buck Living Gateway Conference. Since then, almost every year saw a symposium or conference on her in this country or China or South Korea, and scores of doctoral dissertations were written in English on her and her books. This outsider is coming back into the academic world.