Pearl Buck

Pearl S. Buck was born in West Virginia to Presbyterian missionaries, who took her to Chinkiang, China when she was only three months old. Throughout her childhood, she was forced to oscillate between the Chinese world outside and the Christian and American world of her home life. Buck and her family also physically moved between China and the United States several times throughout her childhood. This mobility was largely out of necessity—the family’s first return to America came in the wake of the violent, anti-imperialist Boxer Rebellion, which targeted foreigners (especially Christian missionaries) much like Buck and her family. Buck’s transcultural upbringing turned out to be both a help and a hindrance, as it allowed her to develop a unique literary style that blends Chinese storytelling with American literary conventions, but it also led critics to consider her neither authentically Chinese nor wholly American. The same attitude was true of her childhood peers: in China, Buck was marginalized and “pitied for [her] blue eyes and yellow hair,” while in America, she was considered “a freak who could speak Chinese” and wore traditional garments spun from Chinese grass linen. In 1938, Buck received the Nobel Prize for Literature; she was the first American woman (and only the third American writer whatsoever) to receive the honor in the thirty-seven years that the prize had existed. Receiving this honor didn’t earn her much acclaim, though, as the American literary scene was still largely dismissive of American women as serious, influential writers—especially since female writers tended toward sentimentality, which was not considered a respected writing style in American literary circles. After marrying John Lossing Buck in 1917, Pearl S. Buck gave birth to her sole biological child—a severely disabled daughter. Over time, the couple adopted seven children. The family fluctuated between China, Japan, and the United States. Throughout the course of her marriage, Buck felt increasingly stifled in her role as a wife and became estranged from her husband, eventually filing for divorce. She also became fundamentally opposed to the Christian missionary work going on in China, deeming it a type of Western ethnocentrism and “spiritual imperialism.” Buck went on to marry her publisher, Richard Walsh.