Books
Wednesday, 09 June 2010 08:06
Written by Aelred Doyle

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Hilary Spurling’s biography of Pearl Buck is a gem  

Pearl Buck occupies a strange role in literature. To quote The New York Times, “In China she is admired but not read, and in America she is read but not admired.” The critical consensus is that her bestselling novels were overpraised at the time, and her 1938 Nobel Prize now provokes a collective wince from the academy. In this thoughtful and subtle new biography, focusing primarily on Buck’s time in China, Hilary Spurling (winner of the 2006 Whitbread Prize) pushes back against this conventional wisdom.

The fact that Buck shared her experience of China with the world is her real significance. Growing up in Zhenjiang in Jiangsu Province, Chinese was her first language and was always to be her most natural. “When I was in the Chinese world, I was Chinese,” she said, and later in life she was often confused by everyday American expressions. She went back to the US for university, then returned again, this time to Suzhou, then Nanjing.
Throughout her time in China the drumbeat of violence and revolution – and regular periods when she was spat on and threatened for her white skin – was always with her, and she understood what was coming and that it was unavoidable. The Nanjing Incident of 1927, when she and her family barely escaped with their lives, was the start of the end, and in 1934 she left China for good.

It’s worth remembering how groundbreaking her novel The Good Earth, about Chinese village life, was, and not just for Americans. The character Olan seems to be the first Chinese woman in literature to have been portrayed as she actually was rather than idealized as in classical Chinese literature. Hugely successful in America (it was the bestselling book of both 1931 and 1932), it was despised by Chinese intellectuals, who found it shaming of the country they were struggling to change; and post-1949 she was shunned by the country she loved. Buck always found it extraordinary that the literary class in China had no interest at all in their peasant and laborer countrymen, a lacuna in Chinese literature to this day.

Buck was ahead of her time in understanding the importance of seeing things from the point of view of other cultures. She said that she “became mentally bifocal, and so learned early to understand that there is no such condition in human affairs as absolute truth.” The shocking descriptions here of the physical and moral degradation that Buck witnessed at close hands still shock, and are part of what makes this fine biography ultimately encouraging in two ways. Things are better than they once were for hundreds of millions of people; and while we foreigners in China are no Pearl Bucks, we understand more than we used to.

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