For 10 years, through reading classical texts and practicing calligraphy, She not only became well-versed in traditional Chinese classics and familiar with Chinese history, culture and geography, but also developed a beautiful regular-script style of writing, spoke fluent Mandarin, and even learned to carve seals. In Zhenjiang, she also witnessed the miserable lives of victims of the 1905 Yangtze River flood, which provided firsthand material for The Good Earth.
In 1910, Pearl Buck returned to the United States to attend Randolph-Macon Woman's College and, shortly after graduating in 1914, returned to China. She taught English in middle schools in Zhenjiang for two years and, after marrying John Lossing Buck in 1917, the couple went north to live in the countryside of Suzhou, Anhui province, to research life and agriculture in rural areas.
"During her four to five years in Suzhou, Pearl Buck learned about the rural areas and farmers in China more profoundly," Lu says.
From 1919 to 1934, the Bucks both taught at the University of Nanking. In the house located at No 3 Pingcang Alley, now in the Gulou Campus of Nanjing University, she completed her first novels, including East Wind, West Wind (1930), The Good Earth (1931), Sons (1933), and The Mother (1933), as well as a translation.
In 1933, Buck published the first English translation of The Water Margin, one of Chinese literature's Four Great Classic Novels of the Ming Dynasty (1368-1644), giving it the title All Men Are Brothers, a line she learned from the Confucian classic The Analects.
In 1938, when Buck received the Nobel Prize in literature, she gave a lecture, The Chinese Novel, in which she said, "My earliest knowledge of story, of how to tell and write stories, came to me in China". She also mentioned the "Complete Library of the Four Treasuries" she learned from Mr Kung.
The Good Earth, featuring a poor Chinese farmer's family caught in the tides of history, became an instant best-seller in the US and was translated into more than 30 languages. It won the Pulitzer Prize in 1932. In 1937, a film adaptation was produced and won an Oscar for Best Actress the following year.
In 1934, with much reluctance, Pearl Buck left China, but her connection with the Chinese people was never severed.
Since the 1920s, she had been writing articles for US magazines, including The Atlantic, Asia, The Chinese Recorder, and The Nation, on Chinese farmer's life, culture, the shifting roles of women, and China's social dynamics.
In the United States, Buck fully committed herself to humanitarian and cultural endeavors related to China.
In 1941, she became president of Asia magazine to promote modern Chinese literature, aiming to create vibrant, multidimensional Chinese characters that challenged Western stereotypes.
The same year, the East and West Association was established, and as the president, Buck utilized lectures, publications, broadcasts, and translations to spread Chinese culture and provide crucial international support for wartime China.
In 1943, Buck joined the Citizens Committee to Repeal Chinese Exclusion as a key spokesperson, publicly criticizing the exclusion laws. Her efforts contributed to the repeal of the Chinese Exclusion Act later that year.
During the Chinese People's War of Resistance against Japanese Aggression (1931-45), Buck steadfastly supported China's mission. Since the September 18th Incident in 1931, she had openly condemned Japanese militarism and consistently informed the American public about the realities of the war in China.
To aid China, she initiated the Book of Hope fundraising campaign in 1940 and subsequently led the China Emergency Relief Committee and the United China Relief agency, organizing large-scale fundraising efforts to provide medical supplies, build hospitals, and aid civilians and war orphans.
Throughout the war, she frequently used media platforms to voice her support. In 1938, she reviewed the book Red Star Over China, predicting China's revolutionary victory and in another article published later that year she praised Chinese guerrilla tactics. In 1942, she published the novel Dragon Seed, set against the backdrop of the Nanjing Massacre in 1937, during which 300,000 Chinese soldiers and civilians were killed, making it one of the most horrific atrocities of World War II.
In 1938, in the Banquet Speech of the Nobel Prize, Buck said: "I have never admired China more than I do now, when I see her uniting as she has never before, against the enemy who threatens her freedom. With this determination for freedom, which is in so profound a sense the essential quality in her nature, I know that she is unconquerable."
In 1945, she witnessed Japan's surrender to the Allies, marking the end of the war. In 1973, Buck died in Danby, Vermont, at 80. According to her will, her tombstone at Green Hills Farm in Pennsylvania bears no English name, no birth or death dates, and no epitaph — only three Chinese characters in seal script, handwritten by Buck herself: Sai Zhen Zhu, her Chinese name.
In the Statement on the Death of Pearl S Buck in 1973, former US president Richard Nixon said: "In life, Pearl Buck was a human bridge between the civilization of the East and West."
Today, China is quite different from the one depicted in Buck's works. Characterized with modernity, urbanization, globalization, and digitalization, modern China is a far cry from the one focused on land, villages, and family ethics in The Good Earth, Guo, the professor, says.
"If we still read Buck solely as a way to understand China's reality, we're missing the point," Guo says.
"In today's context of challenging Sino-US relations, her significance is in her reminder that even if relations between countries are tense, the possibility for understanding between individuals should remain," Guo says, adding, "It is an agreement we reached after discussing the significance of Pearl Buck with the Ministry of Education's China Center for International People-to-People Exchange in current cultural exchanges.
"No matter how dominant political narratives become, they cannot completely obscure the reality of ordinary people's lives. While the China she wrote about is in the past, the method she represents — understanding people through their humanity — is still relevant today," he stresses.
