One of the twentieth century's most extraordinary Americans, Pearl
Buck was the first person to make China accessible to the West.
She recreated the lives of ordinary Chinese people in "The Good
Earth," an overnight worldwide bestseller in 1932, later a
blockbuster movie. Buck went on to become the first American woman
to win the Nobel Prize for Literature. Long before anyone else, she
foresaw China's future as a superpower, and she recognized the
crucial importance for both countries of China's building a
relationship with the United States. As a teenager she had
witnessed the first stirrings of Chinese revolution, and as a young
woman she narrowly escaped being killed in the deadly struggle
between Chinese Nationalists and the newly formed Communist Party.
Pearl grew up in an imperial China unchanged for thousands of
years. She was the child of American missionaries, but she spoke
Chinese before she learned English, and her friends were the
children of Chinese farmers. She took it for granted that she was
Chinese herself until she was eight years old, when the terrorist
uprising known as the Boxer Rebellion forced her family to flee for
their lives. It was the first of many desperate flights. Flood,
famine, drought, bandits, and war formed the background of Pearl's
life in China. "Asia was the real, the actual world," she said,
"and my own country became the dreamworld."
Pearl wrote about the realities of the only world she knew in "The
Good Earth. "It was one of the last things she did before being
finally forced out of China to settle for the first time in the
United States. She was unknown and penniless with a failed marriage
behind her, a disabled child to support, no prospects, and no way
of telling that "The Good Earth "would sell tens of millions of
copies. It transfixed a whole generation of readers just as Jung
Chang's "Wild Swans "would do more than half a century later. No
Westerner had ever written anything like this before, and no
Chinese had either.
Buck was the forerunner of a wave of Chinese Americans from Maxine
Hong Kingston to Amy Tan. Until their books began coming out in the
last few decades, her novels were unique in that they spoke for
ordinary Asian people-- "translating my parents to me," said Hong
Kingston, "and giving me our ancestry and our habitation." As a
phenomenally successful writer and civil-rights campaigner, Buck
did more than anyone else in her lifetime to change Western
perceptions of China. In a world with its eyes trained on China
today, she has much to tell us about what lies behind its
astonishing reawakening.
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