Pearl Buck in China

Pearl Buck in China (2010) is a biography of Nobel Prize-winning author Pearl S. Buck by British author Hilary Spurling. The biography focuses primarily on Buck’s childhood and coming-of-age in China, exploring how this early environment shaped her writing and worldview. Using thousands of detailed primary and secondary sources, including letters and Buck’s own work, Spurling builds a comprehensive picture of an author whose background is little known. The biography was praised in North America and Europe as an important step in excavating the life of this deep thinker and the first-ever American woman to win the highest award in literature. Moreover, it recasts her writing, which some have criticized as banal and dreary, as containing deep insights into many topics traditionally monopolized by men in American literature including war, nationalism, and slavery.

Pearl Buck in China opens in 1892 when Pearl Buck was born Pearl Comfort Sydenstricker in a mixed American Chinese township on the outskirts of Shanghai. Even as a very young girl, she was fascinated with the Chinese countryside and attuned to the great suffering of the people who lived there. While wandering the hills and plains, she would frequently discover the bodies of baby girls, abandoned to die by impoverished families who held the predominant social view that only male children could ensure their survival through lives of hard labor. When she found these remains, often half-eaten by wild dogs, she would bury them herself. Her resilience and ability to withstand morbidity became key personality traits that later informed her work.

Though Buck won the Nobel Prize for her English writing, she was not a native English speaker. She first learned vernacular Chinese, facilitated by her observations of the Chinese villagers and their gossip. Similarly, the first books she read were Chinese: The Dream of the Red Chamber, a classic Chinese novel, was one of her favorites growing up. Little did she know that her own novels would one day rival this classic and be just as celebrated by the intellectual literary community. Buck was often lonely, as her parents, both missionaries, would leave her to preach sermons about the wrath of God to random villages in the thousands of square miles surrounding Shanghai. The people they solicited often met them with disdain. The Buck family barely made enough to survive, living in shacks along dirt roads and cramped apartment spaces in red-light districts. Miraculously, they made it through the Boxer Rebellion unscathed, as well as the violent insurrections brought by the Chinese Nationalists in the aftermath.



When Buck was in her mid-teens, she enrolled in Randolph-Macon’s Women College in Virginia and moved from China permanently. Her initial experience in the United States was alienating: her classmates excluded her because of her looks and different cultural upbringing. Her clothes were shabby and tailored haphazardly by a Chinese seamstress. Yet, she understood that her experiences were extraordinary and precious and that she had seen war, death, and slavery in forms that her peers would likely never see or understand. Spurling concludes her biography on this positive note, showing that Buck’s self-consciousness was the source of great strength and ultimately helped her become an iconic figure in American literature.