Buck the system: Wilson Quarterly article

[Botnst]

The Resurrection of Pearl Buck
by Sheila Melvin

As Pearl Buck neared her 80th birthday, she became obsessed by the idea of returning to China. It was the early 1970s, and Buck, the American author who had won the Nobel Prize for her books set in China, had not set foot there herself in nearly four decades, as the country was transformed by the Japanese invasion, civil war, and the triumph of communism.

Although she had been born in West Virginia in 1892 while her missionary parents were home on leave, China was the country where she had grown up, first married, and written her most famous novel, The Good Earth (1931). Chinese was her first language, the one in which she mentally composed sentences before putting them to paper in English. China had provided much of the material for many of her 70-odd books, mostly novels but also plays, short fiction, children’s stories, biographies of her parents, essays, and poetry. China had inspired her humanitarian work. And it was in China that her adored mother, her father, two brothers, and two sisters lay buried.

“I grew up in a double world,” Buck recalled in her 1954 memoir, My Several Worlds, in which she described her early years with affection. “The small white clean Presbyterian American world of my parents and the big loving merry not-too-clean Chinese world. . . . When I was in the Chinese world I was Chinese, I spoke Chinese and behaved as a Chinese and ate as the Chinese did, and I shared their thoughts and feelings.”

As a child in this Chinese world, the blonde, blue-eyed Pearl Sydenstricker roamed the countryside visiting peasant neighbors, eating foods forbidden by her mother, and burying the dead babies she found discarded on hillsides (she carried a specially sharpened stick to beat off the dogs that fed on the tiny corpses). The family had to flee the 1900 Boxer Rebellion, in which numerous missionaries were killed, but Buck recalled her childhood as a happy time despite her sternly religious father’s long absences and her mother’s sorrow at living in “exile” so far from home. As an adult, she taught English at Nanjing University from 1920 to 1933 (she had to leave for a year in 1927 when foreigners were again attacked). During these years, she mingled with China’s top intellectuals; the renowned romantic poet Xu Zhimo was a close friend, and some suspect the two were lovers.

Buck journeyed to the United States in 1934 assuming that she would soon return to China, but life turned out differently. She divorced her missionary husband of 17 years, John Lossing Buck, and rather scandalously married her pub lisher, Richard Walsh, in Reno on the same day. Her new marriage and her desire to be close to her severely retarded daughter, Carol, who was in a special-education institution in New Jersey, led Buck to settle on a sprawling farm in Bucks County, Pennsylvania. It became all but impossible for Americans to visit China after the Communist victory in 1949, but the thaw in U.S.–Chinese relations that began with the ping-pong diplomacy of 1971 gave her hope that she not only would be allowed to return but would be welcomed back.

Because the United States and China still did not have formal diplomatic ties, she wrote letters to anyone who might conceivably help her wangle an invitation back, including President Richard Nixon. Finally, in May 1972, she received a response from the Chinese government through the intercession of a former State Department official:
Dear Miss Pearl Buck:
Your letters have been duly received.

In view of the fact that for a long time you have in your works taken an attitude of distortion, smear, and vilification towards the people of new China and its leaders, I am authorized to inform you that we cannot accept your request for a visit to China.

Sincerely yours,

H. L. Yuan
Second Secretary


Buck was stunned.

“The letter—the letter!” she wrote. “It lies there like a living snake on my desk—a poisonous snake. . . . [It] threatens me now and refuses to allow my return to the country where I have lived most of my life . . . [it] is an attack, not a letter. It is violent, it is uninformed, it is untruthful.”

The letter was indeed all those things. Buck had devoted most of her life to writing about China, promoting its culture, and supporting China-related causes, largely because she was “appalled and oppressed by the discovery that American people are almost totally ignorant of China, nor have they any great desire to learn more about this ancient and mighty nation who will and must affect our own nation and people in the future more than any other.”


More at: http://www.wilsoncenter.org/index.cfm?fuseaction=wq.essay&essay_id=178660