March 2025: Pearl S. Buck

In March, we will spend some time with Pearl S. Buck (1892–1973). Born in USA to missionary parents, she grew up in China and had made her name as a writer with her novels about China and Chinese life.

She won the Pulitzer in 1932 for The Good Earth and became the first American woman to win the Nobel Prize in Literature (in 1938) for "for her rich and truly epic descriptions of peasant life in China and for her biographical masterpieces."

In addition to her novels, she also wrote many stories and quite a lot of non-fiction: a few memoirs/autobiographies, biographies of her parents and other assorted books and articles.

I had been aware of her for decades but I somehow never got around to reading any of her books. What do you plan to read in March?

I've head her Good Earth Trilogy and found it to be among some of the best lit I've read. I would advise to read the trilogy in order. I've also read: Pavilion of Women, Peony and Imperial Woman: The Story of the Last Empress of China and found them all to be good, but not quite as engrossing as The Earth Trilogy. The only book I did not enjoy was The Living Reed: A Novel of Korea. After re-reading my review, I don't know why I didn't enjoy it as much!

All that being said, I think I will The Goddess Abides which is supposed to be a very unlike Buck book set in New England and involves romance.

I'm committed to reading off my shelf in 2025 and I have a copy of Peony that's been waiting patiently for years. I read The Good Earth even more years ago, and enjoyed it.

The only one I have read is Imperial Woman: The Story of the Last Empress of China which was excellent. On the strength of that I have downloaded a few of her others, and will The Good Earth.

I am about half way through The Good Earth and loving it. Simple writing and really good storytelling about ways of life alien to ours, yet also simpler and sometimes quite appealing.

after reading the synopsis I realized that I must read Peony and am surprised I didnt know about this during my pearl buck period

I've been lucky and found "The promise" in our public bookcase 😊
Just started it and was immediatly submerged in the story. I must admit it's my first Buck book and find her style fascinating.

My mother owned many of her novels in translation, and I think those were the first "grown-up" books I read. I distinctly remember reading Peony and a few years ago I found a battered English copy which I have finally taken down from the shelf.
I recognized the style immediately, and the story also. But this time around I found the lack of precise background information frustrating: when exactly is this taking place? I’m not familiar enough with Chinese history to pin it down. Maybe it is intentionally set in some kind of benevolent never-never land.

I also couldn’t quite accept the situation of this Jewish family without any tangible support from a community around them. David’s mother wants him to lead his people in a renewal and revigoration of their traditions, but who exactly and where are these people? She has no social intercourse with anyone beyond the rabbi’s family. There is a vague notion of poor Jewish families who have adopted Chinese habits and married into Chinese families, but she seems to consider them as socially beneath her. Where are the families of her own class, among whom her husband could have chosen a bride, but counted himself lucky to be married to her? The whole project seems unrealistic.
Peony’s story also sits uncomfortably among this. In all, I found it disappointing on re-reading after fifty years.

>8 MissWatson: I'm planning on reading Peony, so I sort of skimmed your review. I own a copy from the original publishing year of 1948 (which I picked up at a library sale) and it has a short intro by Pearl S. Buck that gives some context:

At various times in history colonies of Jews have gone to China and lived there. The city of K'aifeng, in the province of Honan, was a center for them. In China they have never been persecuted, and if they have suffered hardships, these were only the hardships of life in the community where they were.

In its basis, therefore, this novel may be said to be historically true, although the characters, with unimportant exceptions, are the creatures of my imagination. The story takes place at the period, about a century ago, when the Chinese had accepted the Jews, and when, indeed, most Jews had come to think of themselves as Chinese. Today even the memory of their origin is gone. They are Chinese.

(emphasis is mine)

So I'd guess it takes place in the mid-19th century.

I realise I forgot to post my review of The Good Earth on this thread when I finished it a week ago:

This is the first in a trilogy of novels published in the 1930s about the lives of generations of a family of Chinese peasants in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The author was American Pearl S Buck, daughter of Presbyterian missionaries and who spent much of the first 40 years of her life in China. This novel was, rather counter-intuitively, the best-selling novel in the US in 1931 and 1932, in which latter year it won the Pulitzer Prize, while Buck herself was the first American woman to win the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1938.

The beauty of the novel is that the land, the soil, the earth of the title is almost a character in its own right. It belongs to farmer Wang Lung and his family which early on in the novel consists of himself, his young wife O-Lan, and their two young sons, and Wang's father; with a feckless uncle, with his wife and son, lurking in the background. Wang works hard but struggles. Famine comes to the land and desperate times. His family moves to a southern city where, eventually they encounter political turbulence and Wang acquires a small fortune of gold coins. Back home in his village, he wisely buys land and grows his farm, becoming prosperous. There are sad and tragic scenes, humour, pathos and an interesting cast of characters. One shocking aspect is the way daughters are treated as opposed to sons, girls are described as "slaves" who are (though not in Wang's family) sold off (or even killed) during times of hardship to help the family.

Part of the overall allure and mystery of the novel is its seeming to take place outside time and place - we don't find out the names of most of Wang's family members, and the outside world rarely impinges on their lives, with unspecified references to wars and revolutions, which I thought must refer to the Boxer rebellion of 1901 and the revolution that overthrew the Manchus in 1911-12, though the the stretches of time in the family's lives seems longer than these events allow - Wang is about 20 at the novel's start and about 70 at its end. I love Buck's writing style and her deep empathy for her characters and their landscape and culture.

>9 kac522: That was my guess, too: mid 19th century. I think there’s an allusion to the destruction of the Summer Palace in 1860, but I am not sure, it’s very vague.

>10 john257hopper: I think that’s what is most memorable about The Good Earth: dynasties come and go, but the land and the farmer tilling it continue. And endure.

I feel compelled to interrupt a bit with a different take on Buck. For international and interracial adoptees such as myself, Pearl S. Buck represents something of a bête noire. As the child of missionaries, she continued that mission but on behalf of American exceptionalism and imperialism, and her writing became fodder for Americans who saw themselves as enabling foreign policies that destroyed families and displaced thousands of people.

Her support of adoption in this light is a crucible of the culture’s view of humanity, namely, a seen-as infinite population of “wretched refuse” awaiting salvation from an exceptionalist nation. So many of our parents had Buck's books on their bookshelves, thus informing an entire generation's worldview that adoption was a valid response to American predation and a continuation of projected power. This, as opposed to ending the wars (both cold and hot) against East Asia in particular, but also around the globe.

That one might turn to her for an overview of life in China, for example, exalts her imagined superiority of capitalism, an individualistic mindset, and a paternalistic notion of who gets to narrate and why. It ignores all political and economic context as well as history; it denies agency to "nether-world" populations; it presumes Western superiority.

As such her works represent a worldview that many of us who source from the Global South would prefer to have put behind us. When I recently moved back to NYC and was going through books I had inherited from my adoptive parents, throwing her books in the recycling became a cleansing act; a coming to terms with my parents' indoctrination in US-American ways and mores.

I've read quite a few of hers and have loved them all. The Mother was one of her best and I also loved Gods Men. I havent actually read The Good Earth so thats my read for this month.

>12 Illo_lib: I would suggest it was not indoctination, but a interest in reading about another culture. I did not like the missionary organiation that tried to turn them all christian. But I read these books as a child and took it all in as stories of the people in that time or place. but as always YMMV and I understand your pt of view.

Finished peony . The first book I read of hers, way back in Jr Hi was the good earth which I reread frequently; was a while till I got the background history but when I did I understood it so much more. I read several of her other books but picked this one because I had no idea that Jews had entered the country through Persia via the silk road. The book has a map showing how early this took place and where they went. In the back the author has given a history of this migration through WWII I knew that shanghai were taking them in, but didnt realize this was already a part of the culture.

This book was about a Jewish family in China and a young Chinese who is in love with the young master, and their interaction with the native community. Alot in here about the push for Jewish children to marry othe Jewish children; something thats as old as the religion to keep the community together and to keep Judiasm intact. I think its harder to do now.

I loved this book and the changes that happen in their lives and the choices that the characters made also loved the descriptions the author gives of the people and place . I liked what castlelass said in her review:

"It is an evenly paced novel, mostly character-driven through inner dialogues, and includes a memorable journey to Peking. It succeeds where many contemporary historical fiction novels fail: the setting and era are integral to the storyline, and the characters act in accordance with the culture, customs, and ways of life of the era. The sights, sounds, smells, textures, and tastes provide an aura of authenticity. The reader feels immersed into the historical environment".

Rated this a *5 highly recommended

I read The Good Earth as a child, in a Reader's Digest Condensed volume and also in school. I honestly can't remember any details except that I enjoyed it.

However, at some time in my childhood I found a poem of hers printed in one of my mother's magazines (Good Housekeeping or McCall's, I'm sure). I loved it; cut it out, memorized it, and later copied it into a blank book in which I collected such things. Several years ago I bumped into a small book of her poetry, Words of Love, and bought it, just for the thrill of a hard copy (with calligraphy and illustrations by Jeanyee Wong ) and the chance to read several other poems of hers.

Here's Essence, the one I memorized long ago:
I give you the books I've made,
Body and soul, bled and flayed.
Yet the essence they contain
In one poem is made plain,
In one poem is made clear;
On this earth, though far or near,
Without love there's only fear.

My goal in the next month is to find where in my library (or in what box) that book is buried, and put it on its rightful shelf after reading through it again!

>16 LeslieWx: That's a lovely story you share with us! And the poem! 😍 I wish you find that beautiful book soon 🤗