Pearl S. Buck seems to be the flavor of the season. A critically-applauded new biography by Hilary Spurling, Burying the Bones: Pearl Buck in China, and Pearl of China, a historical novel by Anchee Min, launched recently in the United States, have rekindled interest in the writer who engaged the West's attention toward understanding Chinese society in the 1930s.
Though sometimes critiqued for taking an overtly romanticized view of rural China, even glorifying its resistance to change from a state of so-called prelapsarian bliss, Buck is, increasingly, being re-instated as a humanitarian who, for the first time, gave the Chinese peasant a face and a voice in the Anglophone world.
A few months ago, the American novelist who spent most of the first 42 years of her life in China, from 1892 to 1934, putting her heartfelt and acute understanding of Chinese grassroots people in her Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, The Good Earth (1931), was voted one of the top "friends of China" in an international event hosted by the Chinese government.
The gesture, perhaps a little late in the day since Buck was branded a "cultural imperialist" who had "denigrated" the Chinese peasant and was denounced systematically in the heyday of the "cultural revolution" (1966-76), has reassured generations of the writer's admirers.
From talk-show host Oprah Winfrey to Chinese-American bestselling author Anchee Min, Buck's fan base is studded with iconic women of the modern era.
As a teenager in early 1970s China, Anchee Min, an actress with the Shanghai Film Studio, was arm-twisted into joining the national campaign to vilify Pearl S. Buck. Years later, when Min's debut work, the autobiographical Red Azalea, was making waves in the United States, a reader presented her a copy of The Good Earth. Min read the book on a flight and wept, moved not just by the sense of tragedy inherent in the protagonist Wang Lung's isolation and the passing away of an old way of life in China, but also for having castigated Buck so many years earlier without reading her.
Pearl of China was Min's way of making amends for what she could not do in real life. In the novel, the character Willow, Buck's Chinese friend for life, and, in a lot of ways, her alter ego, consistently defies the orders to excoriate the writer. Predictably, she is thrown in jail and later sent to a labor camp, to till the rough soil by day and fight "cold, heat and vermin" by night at an advanced age of 80.
Min concedes she has invested much of her own life to shape the character of Willow, who goes from being destitute and a thief to an accomplished writer and editor to a cleaner of community toilets in the tumultuous years following the "cultural revolution".
"As a child I would spend time in a small village town called Tangza outside of the city of Nantong in Jiangsu province, an hour and half's drive from Zhenjiang where Pearl Buck grew up," informs Min. "I lived with my grandmother, who had bound feet. I lived what Pearl Buck described in her novels. For example, during a monsoon water would turn my floor into liquid mud and I slept on straw mats. I drank from the same river as I washed my rice, vegetables, clothes and chamber pot. Hunger drove me and other children to eat out of trash cans, and we were all infected with tape-worms."
How Min moved to the United States at age 27 - a country where she had no friends, no connections, no money and no English - and made a life is a story that's probably a theme for her next book.
