Erik Visits an American Grave, Part 1,824
By This is the grave of Pearl Buck.
Born in 1892 in Hillsboro, West Virginia, Pearl Sydenstricker grew up the daughter of Presbyterian missionaries, a fact that defined her life. When she was just four months old, her parents started a mission trip to China and took their daughter. She grew up there. Not really knowing any other world, she became a missionary herself. She did return to the United States for college, attending Randolph-Macon in Virginia, but upon graduation in 1914, went straight back to China. In 1917, she married John Lossing Buck, a missionary and agricultural modernizer. She had a daughter in 1920 and they adopted another daughter in 1925.
Over time, Buck began to question her life and her calling. She began to doubt the efficacy of missionary work. Fundamentally, missionary work is cultural supremacy. If you think you have the truth and you feel the need to travel the world converting others to your way of believe, you do not believe in the equality of others. And there was nothing about the history of missionaries that had suggested any belief in cultural equality anyway. American missionaries were at the forefront of imperialism long before Buck was born. Since most came from well-off or at least middle class backgrounds, they often had family and friends involved in business interests and promoted them going to Hawaii or China or, later, Mexico and investing there.
Buck also began to write about her experiences. This became The Good Earth. This is pretty problematic book, as it is a white woman dramatizing her vision of Chinese village life for imperialist reading audiences. It has all of your touchstones–opium addicts, rickshaw drivers, bound feet, concubines, all the good stereotypical characters. It was certainly sympathetic to the suffering of the Chinese poor. And it probably had a positive impact on supporting China against Japanese imperialism, and we can say that few novels have had that kind of political impact. As such it belongs with Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin and Sinclair’s The Jungle. However, I’d also argue that all three of these novels are terrible, Buck’s by reputation at least since I haven’t read it, but the other two from personal experience.
For a book that basically no one has read in 50 years, it’s hard to overstate just how transformative and popular this was. It was the best selling book in the United States in 1931 and 1932. I mean, my God, she won the Nobel Prize for this in 1938. She is almost unquestionably the least prominent Nobel Prize lit winners among Americans. I’m not sure that people read that much Sinclair Lewis or Isaac Bashevis Singer anymore, but compared to Buck they do. Maybe Joseph Brodsky is less read, though he was a Russian emigre and is in a different category. I am not really counting Louise Gluck here since no one reads poetry of any kind anymore. In any case, she followed it up with Sons in 1932 and A House Divided in 1935, making a trilogy.
There are still defenders of Buck’s work today, though it’s nowhere near fashionable. The Library of America hasn’t touched her work and I doubt ever will. Maybe I will try one of these days and if any commenters want to actively defend them, I’d be interested to hear the arguments. I can say that they are extremely out of fashion in the literary criticism world, for the fairly obvious reason of their Orientalism and the belief today that whites shouldn’t be speaking with such authority for Asian cultures.
All of this alienated her husband and they divorced in 1935. At that point, Buck returned to the United States. She almost immediately married Richard Walsh, a publisher. She continued to write about China but also became more of a political activist, especially for women’s equality and other civil rights issues. She also was a big adoption advocate, especially of white families adopting Asian children or mixed-race children generally. This is a complex issue, since foreign adoption is inherently imperialistic and most nations where it used to be common, such as Guatemala and Cambodia, have cracked down on it after plenty of evidence of adoption machines moving kids out of poor but perfectly acceptable households at home to place on the international adoption market. But then of course the desire of white parents to only raise white adoptees is also deeply problematic and imbued with the racism inherent to whiteness. In any case, Buck’s heart was in the right place on these issues, more or less, especially in the context of her time. She founded the first foster home US born mixed-race children with Asian as part of that mix, a group of kids considered unadoptable at the time. This was next to her own giant farm in rural Pennsylvania, so she made her home their home, at least up to a point.
Buck continued to write China novels and they continued to be pretty popular, often made into movies. Dragon Seed, from 1942, was filmed in 1944 with Katharine Hepburn and Walter Huston, with Hepburn playing a strong Chinese woman standing up to the Japanese invaders. That does not sound good. Pavilion of Women was published in 1946 and much later, in 2001, made into a film starring Willem Dafoe as a priest and then a Chinese-American cast. It’s supposed to be unwatchable, dropping a strong 6% with critics on Rotten Tomatoes.
Buck was a big voice later in her life and people had to at least pretend to listen to her as she made her voice known on foreign policy questions. Among them was urging the government of Israel to not execute Adolf Eichmann in 1962, saying it would be seen as an active vengeance for a long finished war and would accomplish nothing. I mean, I guess, but still….not blaming Israel for ignoring Buck on this one. She also personally lobbied John F. Kennedy to extend more freedom to Taiwan, hoping to negotiate a long-term agreement between it and China that would keep the island free for a number of years and then the U.S. would hold a binding plebiscite about it. Something like the vote to reunify Vietnam in 1956 that the U.S. totally went ahead with and then respected….oh wait. She also wrote her own memoir, My Several Worlds: A Personal Record, published in 1954.
Unfortunately, later in life, an aging Buck, widowed by now, handed total control over her finances to a guy who claimed to be her caretaker and maybe did take care of it physically, but who stole most of the money for himself and his “foundation.”
Buck died in 1973, at the age of 80.
Pearl Buck is buried at Green Hill Farm, Perkasie, Pennsylvania.
If you would like this series to visit other American authors, you can donate to cover the required expenses here. Sinclair Lewis is buried in Sauk Centre, Minnesota and Sarah Orne Jewett is in South Berwick, Maine. Previous posts in this series are archived here and here.