Pearl S. Buck on American Society: Towards a Multi-Racial (Post-Racial?) Future

Pearl S. Buck was best known, of course, from the 1930s to the 1950s for her novels and non-fiction works explaining to Americans the cultures and perspectives of Asians. But she also grappled, in novels, short stories, essays, and organizational involvement, with the nature of American society itself. In a widely-read essay from 1937, “On Discovering America,” in the Survey Graphic magazine, Buck argued both that the United States (which then had an exceedingly restrictive immigration policy) must welcome immigrants to provide the continued diversity which had created the distinctive American society and that, in the (very) long run, a successful post-racial society could emerge from the contributions and mixing of these diverse groups. As immigration and a backlash against immigration, along with associated controversy over assimilation and ethnic diversity, have become major features of contemporary US life and promise to continue to do so for the foreseeable future, an examination of Buck’s observations about inter-group (or inter-cultural) relations can help us both look back and look forward. To be sure, the assimilation of immigrants and foreign visitors into American life would not be smooth or easy, she asserted, in the face of long-held prejudices and laws. And one of the enduring themes in the writing and thinking of this former missionary was that overcoming such prejudices would require a far more consistent application of Christian ideals than most American Christians were willing to accept. Moreover, in the hypothetical transition to a post-racial future, the obstacles were not only from American racism, but from the clinging to homogeneity by others, too.

I want first to describe that 1937 essay in the context of Pearl Buck’s prominence in the literary culture and intellectual life of the US at that time. Then, after a quick glance at Buck’s first novel, East Wind: West Wind (1930), I will look at two of her less-remembered novels – A House Divided (1935) and Kinfolk (1949) – to see how she explored the experiences of Chinese living in the US. After that, I will examine how Buck grappled in a third novel – Come, My Beloved (1953) – with the limitations of American missionaries in their interactions with the people among whom they worked. Finally, I will discuss The Angry Wife (1947), in which Buck (writing under the pseudonym “John Sedges”) took up in fiction the question of Black-white relations in the US. The issues of interracial sexual relations and marriage, and of potential or actual multi-racial offspring, arise in each of these novels, which serve as a literary backdrop, as it were, for Buck’s well-documented concern with and activism on behalf of global racial equality, in general, and of overseas adoptions, especially of multi-racial children, in particular (Conn 1996; Graves 2019; Shaffer 2003).

Buck, of course, became a literary celebrity with the 1931 publication of The Good Earth (Buck 1931), which remained on best-seller lists for months and for which she was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in May 1932 (New York Times 1932, 1). She was living in China at the time, but visited the US later that year before returning to Asia. She then moved to the US permanently in 1934, at age 42. Sequels to The Good Earth, book-length biographies of her parents, and the release of a Hollywood movie version of The Good Earth in early 1937 – which the New York Times critic called “one of the finest things Hollywood has done this season or any other” (Nugent 1937, 27) – kept her in the public eye. Thus, Buck in the mid-1930s was a much-sought-after speaker, and her short stories and essays were easily placed in a wide variety of periodicals, ranging from – to give just a few examples – Saturday Review of Literature, March 1935 (Buck 1935a), Ladies Home Journal, August 1935 (Buck 1935b), Yale Review, March 1936 (Buck 1936), and the National Urban League magazine Opportunity, January 1937 (Buck 1937b). In the months just before the publication of “On Discovering America,” Buck received press coverage as the main luncheon speaker at the annual conference of the National Board of Review of Motion Pictures (where she criticized films as false to life) (New York Times 1937a, 16), as a dinner speaker in Harlem for the National Urban League (New York Times 1937b, 48), as the inaugural lecturer on CBS radio for a series billed as writers talking about books (Buck 1937c, 332), and as one of three keynote speakers at the International P.E.N. Congress which coincided with the New York City World’s Fair (Buck 1937d, 12–13). And it is not coincidental that two of her other published articles in 1937 had titles similar to the one in the Survey Graphic – “Introduction to the United States,” in Saturday Review of Literature in May (Buck 1937d), and “An American Looks at America,” in Opportunity in December (Buck 1937e) – nor that her first novel based almost entirely in the US, This Proud Heart (Buck 1938), would come out the following year. Pearl Buck was using the reputation she had earned from her novels and other writings on China to become part of the intellectual – and particularly literary – conversation about American life and its problems.

So, given her prominence at the time (and this is all before she received the 1938 Nobel Prize for Literature, of course), it is not surprising that the editors of The Survey Graphic (1937c) soon reported that Buck’s lead essay in their June issue, with the largest billing on the cover, elicited “such an enthusiastic response.” It was excerpted in Reader’s Digest and quoted in the daily press, and was recognized by the Library Service Bureau of the Mayfair Agency (affiliated with Harper’s magazine) as one of “10 Outstanding Articles of the Month.” Moreover, one “friend” of the magazine paid for 60,000 reprints of the article for wider distribution – triple The Survey Graphic’s usual circulation, with its 21,000 paid subscribers (Survey Graphic 1937d, 408; Survey Graphic 1938, 314). The Survey Graphic began as a Progressive Era journal geared to social workers; by the mid-1930s under the editorship of noted reformer Paul Kellogg it was an important booster in intellectual and policy circles of Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal, as well as a zealous opponent of racial discrimination and proponent of civil liberties. (That June 1937 issue also included a photo essay on sit-down strikes, a profile of militant labor leader Sidney Hillman, and articles on coal industry troubles, the Civilian Conservation Corps [CCC], and New York City parks constructed with New Deal funds, among others [Survey Graphic 1937a, 311]).

Buck’s essay, as her biographer Peter Conn has pointed out, deviated from the usual empirically-based Survey Graphic article (Conn 1996, 196–97). It was heartfelt and not always consistent, with a fair amount of repetition. But, in the conceit of writing as a kind of immigrant herself, though one returning to her native land, and viewing the US from the standpoint of what she called the homogeneous Chinese culture and society in which she was steeped, Buck writes exuberantly of the strength-through-diversity of Americans, even as she assails the restrictive immigration laws and irrational prejudices against “aliens” that she observed around her. (Unless otherwise noted, quotations in the next several paragraphs are from Buck 1937a, 313–315, 353, 355.) Denying that there is such a thing as a “typical” American, Buck describes differences among Americans by region, religion, race, language and dialect, and background. She recognizes that these differences lead to hatred and division – “The prejudices of all peoples on earth are now American prejudices,” she claims – but she celebrates the “restlessness” that brought so many different peoples to the US, with their optimism and creativity. Adopting the Chinese perspective of viewing society as the product of millennia of development rather than decades or even centuries, Buck writes: “I find it ridiculous to hear a man whose great-grandfather came to this country look down on a man who comes in now, and call him ‘alien.’ For what is a hundred or two hundred years in the life of a nation?” She continues: “We all have a right to be here, for America from the very first has had her beginning in all peoples, and her strength is drawn from all peoples and her future depends on us all.” Buck concludes, in language that is strikingly contemporary in invoking the fluidity of identity: “We must teach our children, native-born and foreign-born alike, that there is no final America yet – that they are making America, too, by what they themselves are…” So, not just “becoming American,” but “America becoming,” we might say (National Research Council 2001), with an eye on today’s (and undoubtedly tomorrow’s) controversies over immigration and multiculturalism.

Buck particularly criticizes the immigration restrictions which characterized US law and society in the 1930s, although she couched some of that critique in generalities. Chinese immigration, of course, had been severely limited since the 1880s, and the 1924 Immigration Act greatly reduced immigration from southern and eastern Europe and cut off immigration entirely from all of Asia (Daniels 1990, chap. 10). Moreover, during the Great Depression many Mexican immigrants faced deportation (for a subsequent scholarly account, see Hoffman 1974), and there were angry demands that other non-citizens be returned to their native lands – especially those who sent money back to their families elsewhere. Buck ridicules such laws and such demands, calling them “stupid,” “prejudiced,” and “irrational,” and linking “unjust treatment of aliens” to “such strange and violent open expressions as lynching” of African Americans. As part of her rhetorical assault on narrow-minded, anti-immigrant Americans, Buck derides as hypocritical those “who are so generous to foreigners in their own lands, who rush relief to Belgium and Czechoslovakia and China and Japan, [but] are so ruthless to the same foreigners who find themselves aliens in our own country.” That particular line of attack had already appeared in her writings about American Christian attitudes toward racial diversity and would continue to do so for years to come.

On a “policy” level – although this was not a sophisticated “policy” essay – Buck proposes jettisoning the national origins quota system for immigration in favor of one based on individual merit, opening the “doors wide to the intelligent and to the good, whatever their race and nation,” while closing them “to the criminal and feeble-minded.” (How to administer such a system, with its idealism mixed with a whiff of eugenics, is left unsaid.) Buck nods toward the empirical when she states (without citing actual statistics or data) that immigrants commit fewer crimes than the native-born, that they are “industrious workers” and “amazingly the stronger in the creative arts,” and that their presence creates jobs. More lyrically: “When we cease to allow people to come in from all over the world, we shall ourselves begin to die, as other nations are dying.” Present-day echoes of such positive generalizations about immigrants are common; indeed, one 2024 report “debunking the myth of the ‘migrant crime wave’” cited a 1931 study by the National Commission on Law and Enforcement making the same point for the decade when Buck was writing (Seid et al. 2024).

Buck’s larger theme is by no means airtight in its argumentation. She proposes, based on China’s long history which produced a culturally unified society, that a similar process could proceed here, as over many centuries – “it can scarcely be less than a thousand years,” she suggests – the descendants of immigrants gradually lose their distinctive characteristics. This development could even lead to a post-racial and post-sectarian society. “There will be no Negro questions then, because there will be no Negroes, there will be no Jews and Christians, no foreign-born – nobody but that person nowhere to be found today, a pure American,” who will embody “the inheritance of all ages, all races, all cultures.” But how would this laboriously produced cultural unity (with its transcendence even of race and religion) square with Buck’s admonition that immigration should continue apace for years and centuries to come, in order to inject new life into society to avoid stagnation? And if Buck’s assertions in the essay are correct that the divisions, even hatreds, which characterize American life arise from our divergent national origins, then immigration is clearly a bane as well as a boon to our national life. (She acknowledges that problem at one point, referring to both “the stimulus and the irritation of immigrants.”)

Moreover, Buck overlooks here (although she is attentive to them in other writings and activism) what today we would call the “structural” or “systemic” roots of these racial divisions, hatreds, and inequalities: the fundamental difference between “immigration” and the African American experience of enslavement; persistent Jim Crow laws; denial of voting rights to most Blacks and of citizenship itself to all first-generation Asian immigrants. Buck was evidently straining to expand her scope beyond the immigration issue with which she was most familiar – Asian exclusion – and so she devotes literally only two words to that topic: “no Orientals,” she writes in one passage, were allowed in the 1930s-era immigration laws. She was somewhat more forthright on issues of racial and religious discrimination in one of her subsequent essays with a similar title – written, not coincidentally, for a publication sponsored by a mainly Black organization – in which she urges readers to “realize that you are as good Americans as anybody else, whether you came from Europe or Africa or Asia” (Buck 1937e, 361).

There were other weaknesses in “On Discovering America,” too. While Buck mentions that Indians (or, in today’s terminology, Indigenous peoples) differed from the rest of Americans who are immigrants or descended from them, she also perpetuates the “virgin land” trope which erased Indian experiences: “We come as races, as nations, as transmitters of the past to a country without a history, whose only past is that of forests and streams and mountains and plains […]” And Buck’s assertions that the US is more divided into hostile, identity-based factions than the supposedly culturally-unified China may not be that convincing, despite her reputation as the China expert. After all, China had endured by 1937, since the fall of the Qing dynasty, over two decades of virtual civil war and wrenching conflicts between modernists and traditionalists, with a tenuous (and ultimately temporary) Chinese political unity only beginning to reassert itself in the face of Japan’s military encroachments. (One reader [Bradley 1937, 408–409], while not challenging her observations about Chinese society, pointed out convincingly in response to Buck’s essay that tensions and hostilities within the US were less severe than in many European nations in that era of rising fascism.)

Extensive comment on Buck’s essay by a prominent and sympathetic American shows both the range and the ambiguity of its impact. First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt devoted her popular syndicated column for July 27, 1937 to a laudatory overview of “On Discovering America,” concluding, appropriately, that “the value of what Pearl Buck has done lies in giving us as a nation an ideal to work for” (Roosevelt 1937). But in her summary and in the two paragraph-long excerpts from the essay in her “My Day” column, Roosevelt ignored entirely the persistent strife based on race and ethnicity which Buck had elaborated, as well as the essay’s critique of harshly restrictive immigration legislation. Instead, she quoted Buck’s optimistic hope that the future American, hundreds of years hence, “will be a true superman, standing on the shoulders of those from all nations and races of the earth.” Thus, the First Lady, in praising Pearl Buck, excised her essay’s critical edge. Survey Graphic editors, one may note by contrast, were not so myopic. They had forthrightly introduced “On Discovering America” by noting that Buck “finds Americans guilty of race prejudices and of alien-baiting and of downright ungratefulness to the men and women from the great wide world who have come here and helped build a nation.” The editors went on to note the particular importance of such an essay “[a]t a time in history when prejudices and intolerance have swept like a plague across the western World” (Survey Graphic 1937b, 311).

So the author best known for her writings on China, in this prominent essay from mid-1937, was making her mark as a commentator on American life, from what she considered to be a supportively critical perspective: extolling American demographic diversity while calling on her compatriots to be more open to immigration and to end the “fearful prejudices of race and creed which possess the feelings of the average American.” We will turn now to how Buck depicted those prejudices – and the potential to eliminate them – in several of her novels. I pay particular attention here to an issue left tantalizingly unresolved in “On Discovering America”: whether the post-racial future Buck envisioned would result from intermarriage or simply from an end to discrimination and an end to the internalization of markers of difference. Indeed, a year before she published this Survey Graphic essay, Buck had provocatively urged novelists to address issues of “miscegenation” despite its seemingly taboo status among the reading “Public” (Buck 1936, 478), and she herself assiduously pursued this theme in many of her novels and short stories.

In the 1930s, however, racial intermarriage was not only a cultural taboo but against the law in three-fourths of US states, with many banning white-Asian marriages as well as white-Black marriages. About half of the states retained such laws into the 1950s, and 16 still had them on the books when the Supreme Court finally ruled them unconstitutional in 1967 (Cruz and Berson 2001; Moral 2004). We should note, too, that Buck personally faced vituperation for her opposition to such laws, including by a member of Congress, Mississippi arch-segregationist John Rankin. Representative Rankin, who believed any weakening of Jim Crow would lead inevitably to interracial sex and the “mongrelization” of the nation, in 1942 attacked poet Carl Sandburg, whom he dubbed a “Communist,” and “a few parlor pink, irresponsible women, such as Pearl Buck,” for demanding that the Red Cross integrate blood supplies used for wounded soldiers. In a speech provocatively titled “Communists Attempt to Pollute the Blood Stream of America” and which he inserted into the Congressional Record, Rankin accused Buck of weakening the war effort against Japan by allowing “our white people [to] intermarry with the japs [sic]” (Rankin 1942). (The editors of a decidedly anti-Communist, though left-leaning magazine defended Buck from these attacks by Rankin, asserting, too, that “Since Pearl Harbor Mrs. Buck, more than any other single individual in America, has become the spokesman for the rights and aspirations of the non-Caucasian majority of this globe”) (Common Sense 1942, 323).

The Good Earth, of course, had taken place entirely within China, and it contained only passing references to Westerners; the same is true of its sequel, Sons (Buck 1932), which continued the story of Wang Lung’s family through his male progeny. But Buck’s first novel, East Wind: West Wind, published in 1930, while taking place within China and unfolding through the first-person narration of a young, traditional, aristocratic Chinese wife, centers initially on the jarring changes brought to her life by the narrator’s “modern” (read “Westernized”) husband. The novel’s second half recounts the even more disrupting consequences of this same narrator’s US-educated brother’s marriage to an American woman – the daughter of one of his professors – with whom he returns to China. Buck, whose exposure to and cognizance of American racism had been rather limited when she wrote this novel in China in the late 1920s, focuses on the resistance of the narrator’s Chinese family to this foreign – and most unwelcome – daughter-in-law, with no specific discussion of the reaction of the woman’s American family. (There is only one heavily veiled reference to the Chinese Exclusion Act [Buck 1930, 230] and none here to American anti-miscegenation laws.)

But Buck previews in East Wind: West Wind one of the key themes of her Survey Graphic essay: the creation of a new path for society through the mixed-race child of the young couple. “He will have his own world to make,” the narrator muses with regard to her new-born nephew. “Being of neither East nor West purely, he will be rejected of each, for none will understand him. But I think, if he has the strength of both his parents, he will understand both worlds, and overcome” (Buck 1930, 271). In the book’s sentimental ending – a paean to love chosen freely, outside of the bounds of arranged marriages, and defying racial conventions – Buck concludes with the narrator (whose own horizons have expanded through exposure to her husband’s new ways of thinking and her brother’s marriage) accepting the American woman as her kin and exclaiming, “See what thou hast done, my sister! Into this tiny knot [the baby] hast thou tied two worlds!” (Buck 1930, 275) Buck, then, envisions a new, better world as arising through racial intermarriage, not simply assimilation of immigrants.

This passage from East Wind: West Wind was not the first in literature to exult in intermarriage tying different races together to create an interconnected new world. Poet Walt Whitman, for example, had used similar imagery – though in general terms, without actual husbands, wives, or babies – in “Passage to India,” written in celebration of the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869. In one stanza, Whitman tied this technological advancement to racial intermarriage, and even to God’s aspirations for the world: “Passage to India! / Lo, soul, seest thou not God’s purpose from the first? / The earth to be spann’d, connected by network, / The races, neighbors, to marry and be given in marriage, /… The lands to be welded together” (Whitman 1871). But the prevailing attitude when Buck was writing was characterized not by the renowned nineteenth-century poet’s lyricism but by Franklin D. Roosevelt, the future president, who had written in a 1925 newspaper column: “Anyone who has traveled in the Far East knows that the mingling of Asiatic blood with European or American blood produces, in nine cases out of ten, the most unfortunate results […]” (quoted in Robinson 2001, 40).

In the third novel of the trilogy which began with The Good Earth, Pearl Buck’s characters, more akin to Franklin Roosevelt in the 1920s than Whitman half a century earlier, evince little enthusiasm for intermarriage and mixed-race children. A House Divided, which appeared in 1935, widens the geographical scope of Wang Lung’s descendants’ experiences, as in the middle 80 pages of this 350-page book the main character, Yuan, the grandson of The Good Earth’s protagonist, lives in the US as a college student. His family sent him out of China both to avoid prison for alleged ties to the radical nationalist movement of the 1920s and to learn modern agronomy in order to help Chinese farmers, and his nation, upon his return. It is Buck’s first sustained attention in a novel to Chinese living in the US (Yuan’s cousin Sheng in A House Divided is also at an American university). Of course, these are not immigrants as such, both because their intention was to return to China and because the Chinese Exclusion Act made it all but impossible for Chinese to stay in the US indefinitely. One reviewer praised Buck for providing “what is probably the first revealing treatment in fiction of the situation faced by the foreign student of a totally different civilization set down on alien soil,” adding that readers “feel [Yuan’s and Sheng’s] reactions to the attitude of those who treat them as members of an inferior race” (New York Times 1935, 3; cf. Times Literary Supplement 1935, 46). (The decade of Yuan’s sojourn to the US is not specified in A House Divided, but events in China related throughout the book hew closely to those occurring in the 1920s. There is a further lack of specificity, beyond dates, to places: some incidents described could only have occurred in Shanghai and Nanjing, but those cities go unnamed, and there is no real description of the university town in the US where Yuan lives. These omissions with regard to context led to negative comments among reviewers, both those who panned the book [Chamberlain 1935, 13] and those who were otherwise quite favorable [New York Times 1935, 3]. Pearl Buck’s first husband, John Lossing Buck, would become a highly-regarded specialist on Chinese agriculture [see, e.g., J.L. Buck 1937], and he and Pearl, when they were at Cornell University for graduate studies in 1924–1925, would likely have known some Chinese students studying agronomy.)

The first account in the novel of the fruits of interracial sexual relations takes place in China, and the opposition is by Yuan’s radical nationalist schoolmate, Meng, who expostulates upon encountering a Eurasian: “If there is a thing I hate above another in this city, it is such men as these who are nothing wholly, but are mixed in blood and untrustworthy and divided in their hearts!…I would kill them all for traitors,” along with any Chinese, “man or woman,” who would “mix his blood with blood of foreigners.” For Meng, such offspring exemplify the power imbalance in China, with the “cruel, unjust treaties” imposed by white men who are beyond the reach of Chinese law. The milder Yuan responds merely that mixed blood cannot make a person “evil”; moreover, “[h]e cannot help what his parents did” (Buck 1935c, 79). Buck also addresses this power imbalance between whites and Chinese when, in this book’s only direct allusion to Chinese Exclusion, she has Sheng say that the whole Wang family cannot decamp to “foreign parts” because such travel is limited to “students or some such special thing,” to which Sheng’s father responds indignantly, assailing Western hypocrisy, “And are they not here upon our shores?” (Buck 1935c, 126–27).

When Yuan arrives in the US, he faces racism when he tries to rent a room – “We don’t take any colored people here,” one landlord says – and is even turned away from some stores. He has to endure stereotypes about China – where they allegedly eat mainly rats and dogs with their rice – from white Americans content with their ignorance of the outside world (Buck 1935c, 146–47, 150–51). But soon he befriends a family in which the parents seek unsuccessfully to convert him into a fundamentalist Christian as he gradually almost falls in love with their free-thinking grown daughter, a librarian and Sinophile who admires Yuan precisely because he does not assimilate quickly to American ways. But the love is not consummated: Yuan recoils from the kiss Mary Wilson initiates as his “distaste of flesh for flesh that was not of its own kind” wins out over his otherwise strong desire to “press on and on, deeper and long” (Buck 1935c, 209). Thereafter, Yuan applies himself single-mindedly to his studies to prepare for his return to serve what he hopes will be a new China. Yuan’s “distaste” for interracial sexual liaisons was less extreme than Meng’s, but through both of them Buck makes clear that such opposition was not limited to white Americans. Of course, Buck was also playing with the conventions of romantic fiction (as in most of her novels after The Good Earth): while the unrequited love in this portion of the book gets close to, but does not cross, the boundary of miscegenation, Yuan does get a worthy Chinese partner and wife in the end.

Moving ahead 14 years – and skipping 12 intervening Pearl Buck novels – we turn to Kinfolk, which toggles back and forth between New York City and China. This book received mixed reviews from critics (Ross 1949, 6 [very favorable]; Stoer 1949, 11 [favorable]; Douglas 1949, 13 [mixed]; New Yorker 1949, 98–99 [mixed]; Lux 1949, 30 [negative]), but it was a commercial success, selling an estimated 210,000 copies in its first months through its selection by the Book-of-the-Month Club (Walsh, Jr. 1949). According to Richard J. Walsh, Sr., Buck’s second husband and the president of her publishing company, Kinfolk saved the John Day Company financially during a period when other sales were down (Walsh, Sr. 1949b). Published in early 1949, as the US-backed Nationalist government was floundering in the Chinese Civil War that followed World War II, the novel on one level provides readers a taste of the problems facing China in this period, with conflict arising on several axes: traditional versus modern, rural versus urban, Communist versus Nationalist. And it includes a brief look at the vibrant, even exuberant, popular culture of New York City’s Chinatown. Especially dramatic is the opening set piece of a Cantonese-language theater performance, which both reinforces community identification for the area’s immigrant generation and provides for their US-born children and grandchildren a compelling picture of “what China was” and why it “must not be forgotten.” Buck, as narrator, calls the theater “the only place in Chinatown which could compete with the movies.” Stunningly, in light of subsequent real-world cultural developments, the play was Mu Lan, depicting, Buck writes, “the heroine of a thousand years ago, who took her father’s place when he fell in battle and so saved her nation from invaders” (Buck 1949, 1). This capsule summary was probably necessary for Buck’s non-Chinese readers in 1949 but would hardly be needed today after the success of the blockbuster 1998 Disney film and its 2020 live-action sequel, both named Mulan. Buck – who had earlier referred to the quasi-historical character of Mulan in a short story on women’s participation in the contemporary Chinese resistance to Japan’s invasion (Buck 1941, 193–94) – thus unwittingly provides for today’s readers a dramatic example of how Chinese and Chinese American culture becomes part of American – even global – culture.

Buck’s narrative, however, centers around the family of a respected Confucian scholar-professor living on tony Riverside Drive – significantly, about as far from the traditional immigrant enclave of Chinatown as one can get in Manhattan. For various reasons the professor’s four children end up returning to China, three permanently and one only temporarily. The upper-middle-class Liangs are atypical Chinese immigrants, and Buck’s depiction of the out-of-touch, snobbishly intellectual Dr. Liang is deeply cutting. Nevertheless, even these children are tugged between assimilation to American life and ties to Chinese culture and their ancestral homeland. We see, too, that talk of interracial sex arises far more freely, and with more nuance, than in A House Divided. However, none of the contemporary reviews I have read discussed Buck’s attention in Kinfolk to interracial sex and interracial marriage.

The youngest daughter, Louise, still a teenager, is most important for the purposes of this study, though not for a full discussion of the novel. Born in the US, and with a fondness for American cultural amenities such as Radio City Music Hall, she has not only kissed a white American boy, but had sex with him, which, she soon reflects, accentuates her difference from her white, upper middle class, private school crowd: “Chastity for a woman, seemingly so lightly considered by her schoolmates, returned to what she had been taught by her Chinese family – the test of all that woman was” (Buck 1949, 106). “We cannot behave like American girls,” Louise’s older sister Mary had admonished (Buck 1949, 97), and Buck, as narrator, at first proposes that neither Louise’s nor the boy’s parents would countenance an interracial marriage. But conditions had changed, Mary reasons, about both pre-marital chastity in general and interracial sex in particular: “Young Chinese women since the war – well, there had been plenty of American G.I. babies with Chinese mothers” (Buck 1949, 107).

So when her father, in an attempt to purge Louise of modern – and supposedly inferior – American values, sends her to China to live with her older brother – a physician – and absorb seemingly timeless Chinese values, events do not at all go according to plan. (One may observe tangentially that some immigrant families today similarly send teenage children back “home” to try to “protect” them from negative influences in American life [Thorne et al. 2003, 255].) Louise meets Alec, an ex-G.I. who has returned to China after learning that he had fathered a child with a Chinese girlfriend who died in childbirth. Louise and Alec fall in love (each having forgiven the other’s past sexual transgression), retrieve the child, get married at the American consulate after overcoming initial resistance from Louise’s brothers who act as in loco parentis, and return to the US as a happy family of three. Louise and Alec are in love, to be sure, but the marriage also resolves the problem of the interracial child born as a result of American troops stationed abroad. Buck – with a cuttingly astute observation of differences in degree of US racial taboos – presents Alec as more prosaic, or even obtuse, than romantic in his feelings: “I’ll be happier with Louise than I would with any regular American girl. Besides, the baby will be easier to explain. And people aren’t as old-fashioned as they used to be. You can’t marry a Negro, but most people don’t mind a Chinese” (Buck 1949, 249–50). Alec’s and Louise’s mothers accept the marriage pretty readily, but the fathers – each ethnocentric in his own way – do not, merely tolerating the arrangement. Louise’s white former schoolmates continue to resent an American boy marrying a Chinese girl.

In this telling, the acceptance of racial intermarriage, begrudging or not, is a result of the American military role in the world, not simply – as one optimistic reading of Buck’s 1937 Survey Graphic essay might have hoped – a smooth, long-term consequence of immigrants and their children mixing with other Americans. Buck returned to this theme of GI sexual relationships with Asian women, and the children who resulted, not only in her philanthropic work with orphanages in Asia and in transnational adoptions, but in short stories such as “Home Girl” (1947a), set in occupied Japan, and in the posthumously-published “Dream Child” (1975), set in South Korea. Such interracial sexual relationships also lay at the heart of two of her other novels, The Hidden Flower (1952) and The New Year (1968), although the American soldiers in these later works acted less honorably and far less decisively than did Alec in Kinfolk.

Several comments on The Hidden Flower, set during the post-World War II American occupation of Japan and then in the US, may be made. First, Buck – in another uncanny (and unwitting) coincidence similar to her invocation of Mu Lan in Kinfolk – had the father, Allen, invoke the anti-miscegenation law of his home state, Virginia, as his reason for abandoning Josui, his Japanese war bride; 15 years later it would be that law which the Supreme Court struck down in its landmark decision, Loving v. Virginia (1967), which legalized racial intermarriage throughout the US. Second, in the book’s final passage, Buck harks back to her Survey Graphic essay on the future post-racial American, as she described Allen and Josui’s baby – left for adoption and (improbably but significantly for Buck’s message) in the care of a Holocaust survivor, another immigrant – as “so sensitive, so wise, [for] in his brain were garnered the gifts of all the world” (Buck 1952, 302, 307). Moreover, this invocation of the “gifts” inherent in this mixed-race child echoes some of the rhetoric which Buck and her second husband utilized in the late 1940s and early 1950s as they sought to demonstrate the merits of Welcome House, their pioneering agency to boost fostering and adoption of mixed-race children, most of whom were born in Asia and fathered by Americans. For example, in one letter sent on behalf of an American-Korean up for adoption, Walsh described the child as “obviously of very high intelligence” – although the baby was only six weeks old (Walsh Sr. 1949a)! In another letter a year later, Walsh invoked “the very intelligent ancestry on both sides” for two different babies at Welcome House – one a twelve-day-old newborn – marking them as “likely to be unusual persons” (Walsh Sr. 1950). Such rhetoric was eugenicist with a twist: as one scholar has observed, it characterized Buck’s effort in her adoption work to demonstrate “hybrid superiority” (Graves 2019).

Reviewers noted – and mostly lauded – Buck’s examination of American racism in The Hidden Flower, and they took seriously her portrayal of interracial sexual relationships. While Time magazine, long hostile to Buck, panned this book as a “preaching” novel (Time 1952, 98, 100), Elizabeth Janeway in the New York Times Book Review (1952, 4) expounded on Buck’s critique of anti-miscegenation laws (and more generally on Buck’s significance as a writer). The New York Herald Tribune Book Review’s Rose Feld (1952, 4) placed the story in the context of US anti-Japanese racism, while the Saturday Review’s Harrison Smith (1952, 18) interpreted Buck’s enthusiasm for the potential of the new baby in religious terms, as a new “Saviour.” In a sense, Buck has progressed in these two decades, from 1930 to 1952, from describing the birth of the mixed-race child in East Wind: West Wind as having “tied two worlds,” to suggesting that the cast-off Amerasian child, in The Hidden Flower, raised by a refugee cast out by European prejudices, could accomplish even more in rectifying the problems of the nation and of the world. Buck reiterates here her aspiration in “On Discovering America” that the ideal future American is multi-racial and even post-racial.

It may seem out of place in an analysis focused on Pearl Buck’s commentary on the United States to take up next a novel set almost entirely in India. However, as Come, My Beloved, published in 1953, follows four generations of an American family devoted to India as philanthropists, educators, missionaries, and/or residents, its inclusion in this study is appropriate. To be sure, there is much else in this novel that deserves scholarly analysis: Buck’s depictions of India’s ethnic and religious diversity, the vibrant street life in its cities, and the charms and sorrows in its villages; her critique of British colonialism (at one point she upends conventions by deriding “the deep caste feelings” not of Hindus but among the English [Buck 1953, 271]); and her evident sympathy for the cause of independence from Britain. Moreover, a major theme in Come, My Beloved worthy of note is Buck’s insistence that similarities among the world’s great religious and philosophical systems outweigh their differences. But for our purposes here it is the gradual integration into Indian life by the MacArd family that is most significant. The soft white supremacism of David, Sr., the American railroad tycoon, for whom philanthropy is as much for his reputation as for Indians, gives way to the earnest missionary endeavors in an Indian city of David, Jr., who nevertheless hews closely to the British colonial rulers. Then Ted, in the third generation, embraces Gandhian nationalism and, against his father’s wishes, moves his religious, educational, and medical work to an Indian village. Ted is far more attuned than his father and grandfather had been to Indian sensibilities, and he rarely returns to the US. (For a concise and perceptive four-paragraph summary of this book, see Conn 1996, 331–32, although Conn mistakenly calls the MacArd family patriarch “Thomas.” Stirling 1983, 238–39 also briefly discusses this novel.)

While the second and third generations of the family move closer to an embrace of Indian life, the greatest leap in that direction comes from Livy, Ted’s daughter, who has grown up entirely in India and has internalized Indian folkways. She falls in love with Jatin, the young Indian village doctor, but that liaison proves to be a bridge too far for her parents, who forbid the marriage. “I can’t go so far as to think it right that a white American girl should marry an Indian,” Livy’s mother wails, adding, “Jatin isn’t even an Anglo-Indian” (Buck 1953, 277). And her father, the supporter of Gandhi, now sees Jatin – whom he had hired as the village doctor – as “alien,” as “too Indian,” as too dark-skinned. Ted “had given his life to India in Vhai [the village], but Livy [his daughter] he would not give” (Buck 1953, 284). Livy’s parents cannot prevent the secret physical consummation of the young couple’s love, but they arrange to exile her to the US, virtually a foreign land for her. Alert readers perhaps recognized when the book came out that this move paralleled Dr. Liang’s dispatch of Louise to China, in Kinfolk. And at least one alert contemporary reader – significantly, a female reviewer – noted that the first two generational turnovers involved sons’ rebellions against fathers, while the third involved a daughter against both parents (Breed 1953, 15).

Buck’s conclusion is not subtle. She, the daughter of missionaries who gave up her own missionary status in the early 1930s, has no fewer than three characters – Jatin, Livy, and Jehar (a Christian convert and confidant of Ted who was effectively a mendicant saint) – rebuke Ted for contradicting his own Christian preaching. Jehar argues politely: “[W]hat I see, in my humility, is that you have lived so fully the life of a Christian in my country that you are now given the final invitation to accept an Indian for your own son, and his children as your grandchildren. It is possible now for you to take the step of complete brotherhood, in flesh as in the spirit” (Buck 1953, 300). Livy is briefer and more biting: if her parents will not accept the marriage, “Then I shan’t believe they are Christian” (Buck 1953, 273).

While Jatin, with what Buck describes as Indian attachment to fate, does not challenge Livy’s parents’ decision, in this book it is clearly residual white American racism, even among supposed advocates of world brotherhood, which prevents intermarriage and thus delays that post-racial society Buck had envisioned 16 years earlier. But, of course, that vision was for long in the future – many centuries, not just a matter of years or decades, she had written – so Come, My Beloved could be seen as chronicling gradual steps on the path toward that future, rather than simply its rejection. Reviewers John Frederick Muehl and Mary Johnson Tweedy, both of whom had lived in India, adopted that approach, with the former (in the Saturday Review of Literature) pointing to further progress by each younger generation as buttressing Buck’s “very plausible optimism” (Muehl 1953, 10). In the New York Times Book Review, Tweedy, quoting Jehar’s words in the novel, characterized the narrative as one of “repeated revolt as successive generations move closer to a realization of ‘complete brotherhood, in flesh as in the spirit’” (Tweedy 1953, 5). Frederic Hyde, in The Philadelphia Inquirer, was not as explicitly optimistic as these two other reviewers, but he in essence repeated the arguments of Jatin and Livy. He stated that Buck “obviously believes that only through such mutual acceptance, going beyond mere tolerance, can the Christian ideal of brotherhood be achieved” (Hyde 1953, 19). Time magazine, meanwhile, while sympathetic to Buck’s endorsement of racial intermarriage, prudishly criticized the novel’s passages – mild as they were by today’s standards – which recounted Livy and Jatin’s non-marital sexual congress (Time 1953, 100–101). (Spoiler alert: No baby resulted, which pleased at least one reader: Margaret Sanger, a longtime friend and associate of Buck’s. The veteran birth control advocate wrote to Buck’s husband and publisher Richard Walsh after finishing Come, My Beloved: “I particularly love the ending. It leaves so much to the imagination, so much better than to have the unhappy event of a baby” [Sanger 1953].)

All of Pearl Buck’s novels and short stories discussed above depict interracial sexual relations between Asians and white Americans. But she also specifically addressed Black-white sexual relations and the resulting mixed-race children within the US in one novel, The Angry Wife, published in 1947 and set mainly in the aftermath of the Civil War in the author’s native West Virginia. This novel was one of five originally published under the pseudonym John Sedges, but still brought out by Buck’s usual publisher, John Day Company. (By 1949, some reviewers and others in the publishing industry surmised that “Sedges” was really Buck, but she and Walsh refused at the time to confirm such reports [North 1949; Dodd 1949; Walsh Sr. 1949c]. It was not until 1958 that Buck publicly acknowledged authorship of The Angry Wife and the other “Sedges” novels [New York Times 1958, 28].)

Behind that pseudonym, Buck in effect shot back defiantly at that racist Rep. Rankin, who five years earlier had attacked the novelist for favoring racial intermarriage and the so-called “mongrelization” of the white race. Thus, in The Angry Wife the most appealing male character – Tom, a West Virginian who sided with the Union and who almost died in a Confederate prisoner-of-war camp – forthrightly declares that he fought in the Civil War in order to be able to marry his formerly enslaved lover (Buck 1947b, 58). As Tom, who had to move to Philadelphia to live and love freely even after the war, explains to his brother: “Don’t you see, Pierce, when I knew I loved Bettina – I had to love her openly? The children are ours, hers and mine, could I be ashamed of that? If so, then what was all the shooting for?” (Buck 1947b, 181). Pierce, meanwhile, who had fought for the Confederacy and takes over the running of the family’s inherited West Virginia plantation, remains wedded to the racism and racial labor relations of the antebellum South, despite a few glimmers here and there of recognition of the humanity of African Americans and of the inhumanity of the old racially-based sexual relations. Tom describes his racially mixed family and the small Philadelphia community of racially mixed families as “the world of tomorrow – the pilot world,” an all but explicit hearkening back to Buck’s Survey Graphic essay. On the other hand, it is clear from comments by several characters and by Pierce’s own interior monologues that the author views that brother as living in the past (Buck 1947b, 184, and cf. 187, 244). In what might well have been a sarcastic invocation of Rankin’s red-baiting attacks, Buck has Pierce at one point accuse his brother of being a Communist: “It would explain a lot of things,” Pierce insinuates. “You mean it would explain my marriage,” Tom replies (Buck 1947b, 183). And similarly, Buck may also have been channeling (and in effect mocking) Rankin’s worldview when she has Pierce say to his daughter: “Tom has done something, which if many men did it, could destroy our whole nation – our civilization […] We are a white nation – and we must stay white” (Buck 1947b, 188). Buck’s own response in the novel to such bigoted thinking comes when this daughter – not too surprisingly, really – crosses the sexual color-line herself, by eloping with a dark-skinned Brazilian. Her new husband was a wealthy diamond merchant, to be sure, so the lines of class are maintained, but for Buck he clearly represents Brazil’s complex racial mixture. (The invocations of “communism” and “socialism” may seem anachronistic in a narrative mainly centered on race relations in the late l800s, and they certainly come across as didactic and even forced in a novel published as the Cold War was unfolding, as at least two contemporary reviewers noted [Reynolds 1947, 14; Kirkus Reviews 1947]. Nevertheless, these references are germane to the plot. Pierce has invested heavily in railroads, and a major subplot in The Angry Wife is the nationwide 1877 railroad strike and corporate efforts – including by Pierce – to beat back the union workers, who are allegedly inspired mainly by foreign ideas, especially by “a fellow called Marx” [Buck 1947b, 145]. Buck was undoubtedly making a point about her own time as well as the 1870s: the post-World War II strike wave, which had crested when she was writing this book, contributed to a heightened fear of socialism and communism by American conservatives and culminated in the late 1940s and early 1950s in a new Red Scare and in McCarthyism. And Buck, who always wanted Americans not only to interact with the rest of the world but to understand viewpoints from abroad, quite deliberately has the conservative male characters in The Angry Wife, who were both racists and capitalist bosses, spew out the word “internationalist” as an epithet [Buck 1947b, 167, 199, 222].)

There is a lot more to say about the racial and sexual politics Buck explores in this historical novel cloaked in the conventions of romantic fiction. For one thing, despite Tom and Bettina’s exceptional union, the author portrays more continuity than change in race relations in the South (and even the North) after the Civil War. Moreover, while the novel clearly argues for racial equality, it is disappointing, to say the least, that Buck describes most African American characters as “ignorant” and obsequious – certainly as one-dimensional – even after the war (Buck 1947b, 216, e.g.). Bettina and her sister Georgia are exceptions in their bearing, learning, and beauty, perhaps because they had a white father who acknowledged them as his children even as they remained legally enslaved. (They were then sold away with no recourse upon his death.) Buck – again, despite writing supposedly as “Sedges” – encapsulates that tragic event for the two sisters in one of several echoes here of her observations elsewhere about Chinese life and society, stating, in a phrase which could have been lifted from The Good Earth: “Great houses always fell” (Buck 1947b, 18). Buck also describes Bettina and Georgia as having partial American Indian ancestry, along with their Black and white heritage, thereby demonstrating the author’s attentiveness to previous racial mixtures in American society which complicate the notion of “race,” in general, and of the “Black-white” racial binary, in particular. Buttressing her belief elsewhere (from East Wind: West Wind to The Survey Graphic essay to The Hidden Flower) in “hybrid superiority,” Buck characterizes Tom’s and Bettina’s children as especially intelligent and accomplished. One daughter, for example, moves to Europe to study to be a singer, giving Buck the opportunity to insert a thinly-veiled contemporary reference: to African American contralto Marian Anderson’s controversial but ultimately celebrated 1939 performance at the Lincoln Memorial (arranged by Eleanor Roosevelt and Interior Secretary Harold Ickes), which took place just eight years before this novel appeared (Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library 2016). Thus, Buck has Tom, the proud parent, explain hopefully (on the novel’s very last page): “She’ll sing, maybe even in Washington. That’s her dream – to sing in Washington, where Lincoln was. Maybe she’ll sing in the White House – some day” (Buck 1947b, 245–46). The contrast of the high promise for Buck’s worldview of mixed-race children with segregationist Rankin’s scare word specifically directed against her – “mongrelization”! – could not be clearer.

Buck also points out in numerous passages that white male slave-owners routinely had children with their female slaves, usually to remain unacknowledged as siblings and cousins of the masters’ legal families. As Pierce’s daughter – the one who eloped to Brazil – taunts her father: “As if Uncle Tom had really done something unusual! He’s only owned up to it, that’s all.” And she adds, laughing, “maybe such honesty does threaten – the nation!” (Buck 1947b, 189; cf., e.g., 101–2, 215). And then there is “the angry wife” of the title. That would be Pierce’s wife, Lucinda, a pampered Southern belle who does not want the hierarchies of antebellum plantation life to change at all, despite war and emancipation, and who is most threatened of all by Tom and Bettina’s interracial family. In a blistering analysis of divisions among women – in this case by race – Buck has Tom accuse Lucinda: “As long as there are women like you, […] there will be no justice on this earth. You will keep your foot on the neck of any woman who threatens your sacred position in the home” (Buck 1947b, 126). And Lucinda admits as much to Pierce later, after years of partially-founded jealousy that he desired Bettina’s sister, Georgia: “I think of all – all of us white women fending off those niggras that men like you love so much – trying to keep them out of our homes – to keep them from robbing us of all we have left” (Buck 1947b, 232). It is such attitudes that lead Buck to conclude this novel, as she had done in her Survey Graphic essay a decade earlier on the possible post-racial American, with the expectation that seeing beyond race would come only in the “far future” (Buck 1947b, 244).

This analysis by no means exhausts the interventions that Pearl Buck made in her novels, short stories, and essays on the topics of immigration, racial and ethnic diversity, and the possible transcendence of such divisions and animosity in the US. Nor does it address the indispensable political work of Buck and Walsh in helping to end the Chinese Exclusion Act and the ban on immigration from India (1943 and 1946, respectively) (see, e.g., Conn 1996, 273–74; Buck 1943, 68–78; Walsh Sr. 1943, 78–87; Singh 1945, 96, 102–3). Moreover, in his capacity as a lead organizer and then treasurer of the Committee for Equality in Naturalization, Walsh attempted, albeit unsuccessfully, in Congressional testimony and other activities in 1947 and 1948 to end the US ban on immigration from Japan and to open up citizenship rights to earlier Japanese immigrants (see, e.g.: Walsh Sr. 1947; Walsh Sr. 1948, 55–56; Ennis 1948, 85). (Victory on that last issue would come through legislation in 1952.)

However, with immigration policy currently generating extraordinary divisions in American life, with one powerful political faction echoing the nativist and restrictionist rhetoric prevalent in the 1930s, Pearl Buck’s commentary on such issues continues to be relevant today. To give the most egregious example of such hateful and false ideas expressed on the campaign trail in the weeks before this paper was presented at the Pearl S. Buck International Symposium in late September 2024, Republican Presidential and Vice Presidential candidates Donald Trump and JD Vance amplified the vile lies which first appeared on social media about Haitian immigrants in Ohio supposedly killing and eating their neighbors’ pets (Astor 2024; Shear 2024). Buck had rightly castigated in her Survey Graphic essay almost nine decades earlier similar widely-held views as “stupid,” “prejudiced,” and “irrational.”

Reflecting more positively on the themes Buck raised in her 1937 essay, more than 33 million Americans characterized themselves as “multiracial” in the 2020 US Census – a three-fold increase from a decade earlier (Jones, Marks, Ramirez, and Rios-Vargas 2021). Moreover, two recent Democratic candidates for President have had multiracial origins and one or two immigrant parents: Barack Obama, whose father was Kenyan and whose mother was born in Kansas (Obama 1995), and Kamala Harris, whose parents – one from Jamaica and one from India – met as students at the University of California at Berkeley (Draper 2024, A1). (It is an intriguing coincidence that both Obama and Harris, while born in the US, lived abroad for several years as young people – he in Indonesia and she in Canada – providing the outsider’s view of their own country that Pearl Buck, having grown up in China, also possessed and celebrated.) And JD Vance – even while spewing the most extreme anti-immigrant rhetoric since he became a Republican politician – has a non-white spouse who is the child of immigrants (Bernstein and Rosman 2024, A1). Thus, Buck’s prescient attention to the origins and potential of multiracial Americans, and to the obstacles they have faced, form part of the backstory to an increasingly important facet of American life. To be sure, the xenophobic attacks on the ancestry and racial self-identification of both Barack Obama and Kamala Harris show that we are still far from the post-racial society which Buck envisioned in 1937. Nevertheless, the prominence and achievements of these two political trailblazers exemplify Buck’s (surely overly-lyrical) formulation almost 90 years ago, in The Survey Graphic, that future Americans will be “standing on the shoulders of those from all nations and races of the earth” (Buck 1937a, 315). Despite its analytical limitations, “On Discovering America” illuminates enduring aspects of this nation’s attitudes toward immigrants and of the complexities of a multi-racial society, even as it also serves as a guide of sorts for Pearl S. Buck’s exploration in her fiction of the challenge which multi-racial sexual relations, marriages, and children has posed, and continues to pose, to racism and ethnocentrism, especially within the United States but also in Asia.