Pearl Buck told a room of missionary women that China didn't need them
In 1932, the year The Good Earth won her a Pulitzer, Pearl Buck asked a luncheon of Presbyterian women whether China really needed foreign missionaries. Her answer was a barely qualified no. The uproar pushed her off the mission board, yet six years later the Nobel Prize in Literature went to her, a first for an American woman.
Born in West Virginia in 1892 to Southern Presbyterian missionaries, she was taken to China at five months old and grew up mostly in Zhenjiang. She later described living in two worlds that never spoke to each other: her parents' tidy white Presbyterian household and the big, warm, messy Chinese one outside. Her mother taught her English, playmates taught her the local dialect, and a scholar named Mr. Kung taught her classical Chinese. She reread Charles Dickens every year of her life, despite her father's disapproval.
Summers at the family's stone villa in Kuling, on Mount Lu, were where she decided to become a writer. After college in Virginia she returned to China, married the agricultural economist John Lossing Buck and lived in a small Anhui town on the Huai River, the landscape of The Good Earth. Her daughter Carol was born in 1920 with phenylketonuria, which left her severely disabled, and money for Carol's care became one reason Buck turned seriously to writing.
In 1927, during the Nanking Incident, a poor Chinese family hid the Bucks in their hut while their own house was looted; American gunboats rescued them the next day. After a year in Japan she began writing in earnest, climbing each morning to the attic of her university house. The Good Earth, the best-selling American novel of 1931 and 1932, followed.
In 1935 she divorced in Reno and married her publisher, Richard Walsh, the same day, filling their Pennsylvania farm with adopted children and campaigning for mixed-race and Asian adoption. After 1949 she was never allowed back to China, and Cultural Revolution critics denounced her as a cultural imperialist. Her Nobel lecture argued that Chinese novelists wrote not for art but for ordinary people, and that she wanted to do the same.
Source: Pearl S. Buck
