Pearl S. Buck - Career in China

Career in China

In 1914, Pearl returned to China. She married an agricultural economist missionary John Lossing Buck, on May 13, 1917, and they moved to Suzhou, Anhui Province, a small town on the Huai River (not to be confused with the better-known Suzhou in Jiangsu Province). This region she describes in her books The Good Earth and Sons.

From 1920 to 1933, the Bucks made their home in Nanking (Nanjing), on the campus of Nanjing University, where both had teaching positions. Buck taught English literature at the private, church-run University of Nanking, 金陵大學 and at the National Central University, 國立中央大學, (merged with Nanjing University, 南京大學 in 1952 and 1949 respectively). In 1920, the Bucks had a daughter, Carol, afflicted with phenylketonuria. In 1921, Buck's mother died of a tropical disease, sprue, and shortly afterward her father moved in. In 1924, they left China for John Buck's year of sabbatical and returned to the United States for a short time, during which Pearl Buck earned her Masters degree from Cornell University. In 1925, the Bucks adopted Janice (later surnamed Walsh). That autumn, they returned to China.

The tragedies and dislocations that Buck suffered in the 1920s reached a climax in March 1927, during the "Nanking Incident." In a confused battle involving elements of Chiang Kai-shek's Nationalist troops, Communist forces, and assorted warlords, several Westerners were murdered. Since her father Absalom insisted, the family decided to stay in Nanjing until the battle reached the city. When violence broke out, a poor Chinese family invited them to hide in their hut while the family house was looted. The family spent a day terrified and in hiding, after which they were rescued by American gunboats. They traveled to Shanghai and then sailed to Japan, where they stayed for a year, after which they moved back to Nanjing. Pearl later said that this year in Japan showed her that not all Japanese were militarists. When she returned from Japan in late 1927, Pearl devoted herself in earnest to the vocation of writing. She wanted to fulfill the ambitions denied to her mother, but she also needed money to support herself if she left her marriage, which had become increasingly lonely, and since the mission board could not provide it, she also needed money for Carol’s specialized care. Pearl went once more to the States in 1929 to find long-term care for Carol, and while there, Richard Walsh, editor at John Day publishers in New York, accepted the novel East Wind: West Wind. She and Richard began a relationship that would end in marriage and many years of professional teamwork. Back in Nanking, she retreated every morning to the attic of her university bungalow and within the year completed the manuscript for The Good Earth.

When Lossing took the family to Ithaca the next year, Pearl accepted an invitation to address a luncheon of Presbyterian women at the Astor Hotel in New York City. Her talk was titled “Is There a Case for the Foreign Missionary?” and her answer was a barely qualified “no.” She told her American audience that she welcomed Chinese to share her Christian faith, but argued that China did not need an institutional church dominated by missionaries who were too often ignorant of China and arrogant in their attempts to control it. When the talk was published in Harper's magazine, the scandalized reaction led Pearl to resign her position with the Presbyterian Board (she hardly needed the salary). In 1934, Pearl left China, never to return, while John Lossing remained and later remarried.

Read more about this topic:  Pearl S. Buck

Famous quotes containing the words career and/or china:

    The 19-year-old Diana ... decided to make her career that of wife. Today that can be a very, very iffy line of work.... And what sometimes happens to the women who pursue it is the best argument imaginable for teaching girls that they should always be able to take care of themselves.
    Anna Quindlen (b. 1952)

    The awakening of the people of China to the possibilities under free government is the most significant, if not the most momentous, event of our generation.
    Woodrow Wilson (1856–1924)