Pearl Buck, eternal friend of China

Pearl Buck in China: Journey to the Good Earth, By Hilary Spurling, 320pp, Simon & Schuster, &27

By Charles Zhu

Pearl S. Buck, the Nobel laureate who introduced China to the US through The Good Earth, is explored in the biography Pearl Buck in China: Journey to the Good Earth by Hilary Spurling, biographer of Henri Matisse and Ivy Compton-Burnett.

Spurling writes that Buck had a “magic power – possessed by all truly phenomenal best-selling authors – to tap directly into currents of memory and dream secreted deep within the popular imagination.”

Buck was born Pearl Comfort Sydenstricker to a zealous Christian missionary family in 1892. Her father, Absalom Sydenstricker, was a fanatical man who was “proud of his ability to whip up quarrels with himself at the center.” She was the fifth of his seven children.

As a small child lying awake in bed at night, Pearl grew up listening to the cries of Chinese women on the street outside calling back the spirits of their dead or dying babies. In some ways she herself was more Chinese than American. “I spoke Chinese first, and more easily,” she said.

“If America was for dreaming about, the world in which I lived was Asia. I did not consider myself a white person in those days,” she says. Her friends called her Zhenzhu and treated her as one of their own. She visited their houses, listening to their mothers and aunts talk so frankly and in such detail about the problems of death, sex and quarrels.

She roamed the Chinese countryside, where she would often come upon the remains of abandoned baby girls left for the village dogs, and she would bury them. The young Buck and her family lived at subsistence level in houses that were little more than shacks and managed to survive the Boxer Rebellion and the subsequent nationalist revolution.

When she returned to the US to attend Randolph-Macon Women’s College in Virginia, Buck found herself painfully alienated from her peers. “Girls came in groups to stare at me,” wrote Buck, remembering her first harsh college days some 50 years later. She was deemed different not only for her Chinese clothes and hairstyle, but also for her witnessing of war, infanticide and sexual slavery.

But that alienation gave Buck her strength as a writer, gracing her with the outsider vision needed to interpret China for the outside world.

She learned Chinese life from the history plays she saw performed in temple courtyards by bands of traveling actors, or by the stories she heard from professional storytellers and the family cook who entertained Pearl with episodes from a small private library of books only he knew how to read.

It was her initiation into old Chinese novels – Madam White Snake, The Dream of the Red Chamber, Outlaws of the Marsh – that she would draw from for her own fiction.

In 1917, she married John Lossing Buck, an American agricultural economist stationed in China. With him she had the chance to travel into China’s interior. Much from such trips would, Spurling says, “be absorbed and distilled a decade later in the magical opening sequence of The Good Earth.”

Twelve years later she left her home in China to settle her severely impaired daughter in a New Jersey institution. She did so with borrowed money, as she could not afford the expenses. She recalled that she was “nearly destroyed by grief and fear.”

When she returned to her house in Nanjing, she knew precisely what to do: “This, I decided was the time to begin really to write.” At age 10 she had already set her heart on becoming a novelist, as charmed by Chinese classics as by Charles Dickens.

The end of The Good Earth is not a pretty one. She was accused in the US of being a radical leftist, and TIME magazine banned her from its pages.

Spurling presents here a biography, rich in detail and with an extensive historical background, that tells how a missionary’s daughter turned into a proficient writer and vividly restores the life stories Buck preferred to forget herself.

The biographer unravels the “heavy, cumbersome, potentially toxic baggage” Buck carried with her and shows an American woman who tried to bridge the Chinese and American cultures that seemed mutually incomprehensible, and who was aware as early as 1925 that China would rise.