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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.
- Sales Rank: #661814 in Books
- Published on: 2011-06-28
- Released on: 2011-06-28
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 8.44" h x .90" w x 5.50" l, .63 pounds
- Binding: Paperback
- 320 pages
From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. Weaving a colorful tapestry of Pearl Buck's life (1892–1973) with strands of Chinese history and literature, Spurling, winner of the Whitbread Book of the Year Prize for Matisse the Master—vividly correlates Buck's experiences of China's turbulent times to her novels. Growing up in a missionary family in China, Buck lived through the upheavals of the Boxer Rebellion and China's civil war, two marriages, and a daughter with a degenerative disease; her closeup view of the horrors of China's extreme rural poverty made her an American literary celebrity as well as a Pulitzer and a Nobel Prize winner when she enshrined her observations of China in the Good Earth trilogy. Back in the United States, having opened America's eyes to China, Buck worked to repeal America's discriminatory laws against the Chinese and established an adoption agency for minority and mixed race children. For her support of racial equality, Buck was blacklisted as a Communist sympathizer even as her books were banned in Communist China for spreading reactionary, imperialist lies; Spurling's fast-paced and compassionate portrait of a writer who described the truth before her eyes without ideological bias, whose personal life was as tumultuous as the times she lived in, will grip readers who, unlike Spurling, didn't grow up reading Buck's work. (June)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
From Bookmarks Magazine
One of the challenges of writing about a great author, particularly one who has elegantly written about her own life, is deciding when to use one's own words and when to let the writer speak for herself. A similar challenge faces the reviewer, and critics reading Pearl Buck in China mostly used their articles as occasions to celebrate the subject rather than the biography. Still, if reviewers were not effusive in their praise, they had few complaints about Spurling's book and clearly admired her thorough research and elegant prose. But as the New York Times pointed out, "Ms. Spurling's book isn't a full-dress biography"; instead, it focuses mostly on Buck's formative years as a writer. For a more comprehensive biography, readers may wish to turn to Peter Conn's 1996 study, Pearl S. Buck: A Cultural Biography.
From Booklist
*Starred Review* Pearl Buck, the controversial, best-selling author of The Good Earth (1931) and a trailblazing Nobel laureate, was a quasar-bright celebrity, but her fame quickly dimmed after her death in 1973. Now, by some strange force, her radiance is resurgent. Anchee Min fictionalized Buck's dramatic life in Pearl of China (2010), and Spurling, Matisse's splendid biographer, adeptly matches factual rigor with enthralling insights in this brilliantly contextualized and beautifully crafted portrait of a unique cultural interpreter. Born in 1892 to beleaguered American missionaries, intrepid and book-loving Pearl Sydenstricker was shaped by the miseries of Chinese rural life, from floods to disease, famine, and war. Sadly, her marriage to John Lossing Buck, a pioneering agricultural economist, was oppressive; her concern for their mentally disabled daughter wrenching; and her grief over the Chinese people's epic suffering and her own exile was devastating. But, as Spurling chronicles so sensitively, Buck boldly channeled her profound knowledge of China into novels of mass appeal meant to incinerate Western prejudices. Lauded and condemned in America and banned in China, Buck, a pivotal player in U.S.-Chinese relations and a dauntless champion for universal human rights, lived a life of staggering traumas and triumphs. --Donna Seaman
Most helpful customer reviews
86 of 87 people found the following review helpful.
Bright and Bleak
By Eric Wilson
How many average American readers know that Pearl Buck won a Pulitzer Prize, or that she was the first American woman awarded a Nobel Prize for literature? How many realize she was read by Gandhi, Matisse, and Eleanor Roosevelt? In fact, how many even know of her at all? "The Good Earth" remains one of my all-time favorite novels, and Olan stands out as one of my favorite female characters in fiction. My own travels in China only enhanced my enjoyment of the book, and my experience as a child raised in multiple cultures gives me empathy for Ms. Buck's own upbringing as an American-born child raised in China as the daughter of Presbyterian missionaries. Imagine my excitement to see a modern biography of this fascinating woman.
"Pearl Buck in China" gives a detailed and well-researched view into her upbringing, her struggles, and her influence as a novelist. Despite the slow first two chapters, much of which are devoted to her father's missionary zeal at the expense of his family, as well as his misogyny in the name of God, the book dives deeply into the psyche of young Pearl. By the age of ten, she had decided to be a novelist, finding escape in fiction from her parents' unrest, and enjoying connection with the Western world--particularly through Dickens' novels--which was still foreign to her. As we discover, she knew the street vernacular of the average Chinese, and grew to love them as her own. This familiarity caused a strain on her religious beliefs when fellow Westerners treated the Chinese with condescension. Later, she found a husband with a more practical approach to his missionary work, teaching the locals agricultural skills.
Although I appreciated the history of Pearl's stalwart mother and stubborn father, I grew more attentive as the book moved into her years as a young women, as a writer, as a wife and, later, a mother. She fought for the rights of women, of handicapped children, and of all races and cultures. She humanized the Chinese in America's eyes, even at the risk of losing her place with the missionaries she had grown up among. She was not perfect. She had physical, creative, and spiritual struggles. She left her husband after years of frustration. The book never glamorizes her life, and yet it causes me to appreciate her more than ever.
Pearl tells us: "Fiction is a painting, biography is photography. Fiction is creation, biography is arrangement." This book does provide snapshots of her life, arranging those scenes into some sort of sense. It's through her fiction, though, that we find paintings of her, both bright and bleak, creations of character and setting and moral fortitude that allow her to live beyond her earthly years. I hope "Pearl Buck in China" helps bring her to life for new readers, young and old.
27 of 29 people found the following review helpful.
WONDERFUL BOOK ON PEARL BUCK
By Wooley in PSL
Hilary Spurling is a wonderful writer. A Brit that writes about people few of us would follow like Matiisse, Paul Scott, Ivy Compton-Burnett and Therese Humbert. People listen, Spurling is very, very good, read her works. That brings us to her latest, PEARL BUCK IN CHINA: Journey to the Good Earth. This is a marvelous marvelous book. Spurling give us the whole story without editorializing but in great detail. This is an interesting story about a very interesting person, Nobel and Pulitzer prize winner. HIGHLY RECOMMENDED. Read This
19 of 20 people found the following review helpful.
A compelling life story told by a consummately skillful biographer
By Patricia Tryon
Decades from now, the biographer Hillary Spurling will surely rate as one of the best writers of our time. This latest effort adds to an excellent list of achievements and might be her most successful book, yet. Given her much lauded two-volume biography of Henri Matisse, that is saying a lot.
In this book, Spurling brings to life a writer I had not much cared for. In fact, I knew Pearl Buck only for her titles publishes in volumes of the Reader's Digest Condensed Books, which had pride of place on my parents' bookshelves. My mental appraisal of her was simply horrid: drab, old-fashioned, famous mostly for being exotic in her time. How's that for my ignorance? Pretty good. As a result, I have always passed on opportunities to read Buck's writing. It shocked me to see that Spurling had chosen to exert her considerable talents in the direction of Buck's life story -- a surprise that evaporated in the book's first engrossing paragraphs.
One of Spurling's great strengths as a biographer is that she requires characters to speak for themselves; they tell their own story. She quotes liberally from primary sources with the result that Buck and others define themselves and each other. These individuals existed independent of the biographer, as is not always clear when a biographer attempts to "read" lives instead of writing about them. Spurling wraps history in the impressions and responses of the story's characters, and yet the difference between the historicity of events and people's recollections is plain. Recollections and impressions evolve, as she shows in the way Buck recasts autobiographical aspects throughout her works. When a biographer chooses this approach, the result can be a shapeless muddle of quotations and dates: not so here. Documentation is shaped into a cohesive story, where the evidence is unvarnished but assembled into the unmistakable likeness of the subject's life and times.
The narrative also makes a clear, but unobtrusive point that the author thoroughly immersed herself not only in events and even minutiae of Buck's life but also in her prodigious body of work. The unfolding life story connects here seamlessly to autobiographical and biographical elements of the subject's books. This is biography, not literary criticism, but what emerges is more than a reader's guide. Content has context. Spurling shows how writing, itself, is the great revealer of a writer.
Spurling writes with a justly authoritative voice. As is usual in her books, the iteration of sources and notes is impressive. Nevertheless, she avoids a dogmatic tone. It is possible to take away from the book the idea that Buck's story still plays out in current events. At a moment when the United States is still struggling to adjust to the global impact of China's economy, this story offers greater perspective. It is a book that could be read profitably by anyone with an interest in current events, history, or -- not forgetting -- literature.
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