Chinese writer withdraws her denunciation of Pearl S. Buck

Pearl S. Buck was born to Presbyterian missionaries in 1892 in West Virginia, but at three months she relocated to China, where she grew up learning both the local language and the tongue of her parents. Despite two separate periods in the United States where she received her college education and her Masters degree, Buck spent almost all of her young life in China. A progressive-minded, intelligent, and passionate woman, she challenged racism and sexual discrimination, championed adoption and children's rights, and was outspoken on topics of war and immigration, issues which all shined through her writing. In 1930, despite numerous rejections from publishers who considered China a topic in which American writers would be thoroughly uninterested, Buck released The Good Earth, a best-selling epic of the Chinese peasantry which would later win the Pulitzer Prize. In 1938, she became the first American woman to win the Nobel Prize.

Despite having inspired an admiration and respect for the Chinese and their culture in millions of previously ignorant Americans and despite having spent most of her life in China, teaching at a Chinese university and fighting for Chinese rights, Buck was targeted as an American imperialist during the Chinese Cultural Revolution of the sixties. Her books were banned, her character was vilified, and when she attempted to accompany United States President Nixon on his famous diplomatic visit to China in 1972, her access was famously denied by the politically aspirant wife of Chairman Mao. Buck died a year later at her home in Pennsylvania, and she never received a chance to return to her childhood home, a situation which left her heartbroken.

In 1971, fourteen-year-old Anchee Min was required to write an essay denouncing Buck as a detestable cultural imperialist despite knowing nothing about the writer or her work. Only years later, while on a United States book tour promoting her memoir Red Azalea, did the Shanghai writer receive a copy of the once forbidden book from a fan who claimed that the novel was what had first made her love China.

Despite a lifelong prejudice against the American writer, Min was moved by the emotional weight of the novel. According to an article from NPR:

Min read that paperback copy of The Good Earth on the airplane from Chicago to Los Angeles. When she finished, she says, emotion overcame her.

"I couldn't help myself, and I broke down and sobbed because I have never seen anyone, including our Chinese authors, who wrote our peasants the way Pearl Buck did, with such love, affection and humanity. And it was at that very moment Pearl of China was conceived."

Pearl of China, released in the United States by Bloomsbury on March 30, is a fictionalized account of the life of Buck, seen from the eyes of a loyal Chinese friend. Buck committed her life to representing and supporting Chinese women; with this brief novel, Min hopes to return the favor.