Pearl of the Orient

When she was a little girl, playing in the countryside around her missionary parents’ home in China, Pearl Buck used to come across the scattered body parts of babies abandoned for animals to devour. She would bury them, and tell no one.

When she was a little girl, playing in the countryside around her missionary parents’ home in China, Pearl Buck used to come across the scattered body parts of babies abandoned for animals to devour. She would bury them, and tell no one.

Born in 1892, she buried painful experiences all her life, telling no one, apparently forgetting — but they came out in her stories and novels. Her most famous novel, The Good Earth, has never been out of print and has sold millions of copies in many countries. She was, in the mid-20th century, one of the most prolific and famous authors in the world, a controversial celebrity, blacklisted as pro-Communist in the US and as anti-Communist in China, a campaigner for racial equality, birth control, and an end to discrimination against women and the disabled. ‘For three decades hers was a voice of sanity and balance in US politics.’ Yet she was not taken up by the feminists of the 1970s and 80s, and her writing has generally been ignored by the literati. When she won the Nobel Prize for Literature, they laughed.

She remains problematic. Hilary Spurling, in a subtle and masterly book, does not even attempt to resolve the contradictions in both the work and the woman — who was sometimes fat and sometimes thin, sometimes attractive and sometimes plain, sometimes the dutiful housewife and sometimes the rebel, freakish in rural China because of her fair hair, freakish in college in America because of her ‘wrong’ clothes, constantly dislocated.