Pearl S. Buck: The Missionary's Daughter Who Broke Ranks
Her gravestone at Green Hills Farm carries no English. It reads 賽珍珠 — Sai Zhenzhu, the name she went by in the country where she spent nearly forty years and which, by the time she died in 1973, had officially denounced her as an American cultural imperialist. That double exile is the shape of her whole life: an American novelist who thought in Chinese, a Presbyterian missionary's child who publicly dismantled the case for foreign missions, a Nobel laureate whose own literary establishment has never quite forgiven her for selling so well.
Raised Between Two Countries
Pearl Comfort Sydenstricker was born on 26 June 1892 in Hillsboro, West Virginia, to Absalom Sydenstricker and Caroline Maude Stulting, Presbyterian missionaries of German and Dutch stock. She was five months old when the family returned to China. She grew up in Zhenjiang and later Nanjing, spending summers in Kuling on Mount Lu, where — by her own account — she settled on becoming a writer. The bilingualism was not an accomplishment she acquired; it was the water she swam in, and it accounts for the peculiar texture of her prose, which reads like translation from a language the reader cannot see.
She was sent to the United States for college and graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Randolph-Macon Woman's College in 1914. She went straight back to China, and on 13 May 1917 married John Lossing Buck, an agricultural economist. From 1914 to 1932 she worked as a Presbyterian missionary while teaching English literature at several Chinese institutions. She took a master's degree from Cornell in the mid-1920s — 1924 by most accounts, 1926 by the Nobel Foundation's own biography of her.
The Private Catastrophe
The Bucks' daughter Carol, born in 1920, had phenylketonuria, then untreatable, and was severely developmentally disabled. Complications from the birth required a hysterectomy; there would be no more biological children. They adopted Janice in 1925. Buck's mother died of tropical sprue in 1921. These facts matter to the work in a direct, traceable way: they pushed her toward writing for money, and decades later produced *The Child Who Never Grew* (1950), a book about a disabled daughter published at a time when American families were counselled to institutionalise such children and never speak of them again.
The Good Earth
Her first novel, *East Wind, West Wind*, appeared in 1930. *The Good Earth* followed in 1931 and became the best-selling American novel of 1931 and 1932. It won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1932 and the William Dean Howells Medal. Drawing on the years she had spent in rural Anhui between 1917 and 1920 and then in Nanjing, it did something no American book had done: it presented Chinese peasants as full moral agents with an interior life, rather than as scenery or threat. She extended it into a trilogy of the Wang family with *Sons* (1932) and *A House Divided* (1935).
In 1933 she published *All Men Are Brothers*, her translation of the classical Chinese novel *Shui Hu Chuan* — an act of cultural transmission at least as consequential as any of her fiction. Then came the two biographies of her parents, *The Exile* (her mother) and *Fighting Angel* (her father), both in 1936, which are the coolest and most unsparing things she wrote.
Breaking with the Mission
In 1932 Harper's published her essay "Is There a Case for the Foreign Missionary?" The answer, from a serving missionary and the daughter of two more, was essentially no — not for the institutional apparatus, at any rate. The scandal was immediate and she resigned from the Presbyterian Board. It set the pattern for the rest of her public life: she picked the fight that cost her the most with the constituency that had made her.
She divorced John Lossing Buck in Reno on 11 June 1935 and married the publisher Richard J. Walsh the same day. They settled at Green Hills Farm in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, and eventually adopted eight children, including mixed-race daughters in 1951 and 1957.
Stockholm, 1938
She became the first American woman to win the Nobel Prize in Literature. The Swedish Academy cited her rich and truly epic descriptions of peasant life in China, and named as masterpieces not *The Good Earth* but the two parental biographies. In her Nobel lecture she spoke about the classical Chinese novel and made an argument that doubles as her own defence: the novelist's task, in that tradition, was not to create art but to speak to the people. Much of the subsequent contempt for her work amounts to disagreeing with that sentence.
Welcome House
By the late 1940s Buck had discovered that American adoption agencies classified Asian and mixed-race children as unadoptable. In 1949 she founded The Welcome Home — the first permanent foster home in the United States for mixed-race American-born children of Asian descent — which grew into Welcome House, the first international interracial adoption agency. In 1967 she gave away more than seven million dollars to the cause. The Pearl S. Buck Foundation, renamed Pearl S. Buck International in 1999, opened an Opportunity Center in South Korea in 1964 and later offices in Thailand, the Philippines and Vietnam. Alongside this she campaigned for women's rights, racial equality and disability rights, and kept writing: *Pavilion of Women*, *Imperial Woman*, *The Living Reed*, and essays on everything from the atomic bomb to American racism.
Why Pearl Is Called a Genius
The word sits awkwardly on her, and it is worth saying why. Buck's gift was not stylistic invention or intellectual system-building; her sentences are plain to the point of flatness, deliberately so, modelled on the Chinese vernacular novel she had read since childhood. What she had was something rarer and harder to name: the capacity to inhabit a culture from the inside and render it to outsiders without either exoticising or flattening it, at a moment when almost no Western writer could manage the first half of that, let alone both. The Swedish Academy's phrase — truly epic descriptions of peasant life — points at the achievement. Peter Conn, her scholarly biographer, has noted that her literary contribution has been mostly forgotten or deliberately ignored, and there is a case that this is a failure of critical nerve rather than a verdict on the books.
The counter-case is substantial and should not be softened. She was enormously prolific and much of the output is thin; her prose has none of the formal ambition of her modernist contemporaries, and the 1938 Nobel was contested at the time and has been ridiculed since as one of the Academy's weakest choices. Her judgement outside literature could be badly wrong — she asked for clemency for Adolf Eichmann in 1962, and she defended her financial adviser Theodore Harris through accusations that he had mismanaged foundation money. The honest summary is that she was a genius of cross-cultural sympathy and institutional courage, not of the sentence.
Legacy
She died of lung cancer on 6 March 1973 in Danby, Vermont, and was buried at Green Hills Farm. Three conflicting wills touched off a six-year legal fight that her seven adopted children eventually won. She entered the National Women's Hall of Fame in 1973 and appeared on a US postage stamp in 1983. Her deepest mark is not on the syllabus but on American opinion: for a generation of readers who had never met a Chinese person, she supplied the human material for sympathy toward China and for alarm at Japanese aggression — and, in Bucks County, an adoption system that had to change its definition of who counts as adoptable.
Achievements
- Pulitzer Prize for the Novel — 1932
- William Dean Howells Medal of the American Academy of Arts and Letters — 1935
- Nobel Prize in Literature — 1938
- Notable work: The Exile
- Notable work: Fighting Angel
- Notable work: East Wind: West Wind
- Notable work: The Good Earth
- Genres: biography
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