Books
Monday, 14 June 2010 07:06
Written by Aelred Doyle

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Biographer Hilary Spurling spends a lot of time "digging, looking for treasure" when researching a subject. "I'm a good ferret," she told the Guardian in a recent interview. Spurling's past work includes biographies of Matisse and George Orwell's second and last wife, Sonia. Now, she has turned her attention to celebrated Chinese writer, Pearl Buck. We caught up with Spurling to discuss her recently released book, Burying The Bones: Pearl Buck in China (reviewed here).

What made you choose to write about Pearl Buck?
I’ve wanted to write about China all my life because for me writing about someone or something is a voyage of discovery, a way of exploring and trying to understand any given subject. So Burying the Bones started out initially as a book about a place and a people rather than about a particular person. It goes back to a story my mother read to me even before I could read myself,  a book called The Chinese Children Next Door that lodged itself deep and early in my imagination. The strange thing is that the author of the story I knew by heart as a small child turned out to be Pearl Buck, something I didn’t find out until long afterwards, when I had already started work on her life.  

Pearl Buck was often threatened and abused for being a foreigner during her time in China. How do you think she maintained her love for the country and people?
It was always strangers who cursed her or threw stones in the street - and Pearl knew enough about the harsh and perilous lives of ordinary Chinese people to understand why they needed to blame foreigners for their own increasingly desperate problems. People who knew her never turned gainst her. On the contrary, it was her Chinese friends who protected her, did their best to warn her of danger, and in the end saved her life at great risk to themselves when she was caught up in one of the first clashes between Communists and Nationalists in Nanjing in 1927.

What do you think Pearl Buck would think of today’s China? What did you make of it yourself when you researched here?
I guess she would have had mixed feelings. Pearl never had any illusions about the Communist party, and what might happen if it gained control of China – but on the other hand, as a very young woman, she foresaw China’s future as a superpower, and the inevitable leader of Asia, long before anyone else. As for me, I was bowled over by China, its immediacy, its actuality, its ancient past, its frenetic present and its inscrutable future – above all by the destructive and creative energy you hear and see as soon as you set foot in the country.

If the post-1949 government had welcomed her back, do you think she would have returned to live? How do you think her life would have developed here?
She never would have left China in the first place if she hadn’t been forced to do so but, given the Communist takeover – and the fact that she was denounced as a public enemy under Chairman Mao – it’s hard to imagine her going back. In fact she firmly resisted overtures from the Chinese government so as to retain her independence as an advocate (and when necessary as a critic) of China.

My impression of Buck from your book is that she was fundamentally sad, in that respect not dissimilar to her mother. Would you agree with this?
I’m not sure. Optimism was always her instinctive defence against problems that threatened to overwhelm her, both private and public – but perhaps you’re right. Maybe in the end she used her forced optimism to mask a profound underlying sorrow.

Buck was strikingly perceptive about her father in later life, saying that he would have found another channel for obsession if not religion. Do you think there is a modern-day equivalent of the missionary obsessed with converting the natives?
Any group of people who take their beliefs to obsessive lengths – whether it’s climate-change zealots, religious fundamentalists, health-food fanatics or, in the UK, the anti-fox-hunting brigade – run the risk of looking absurd in retrospect.

Why do you think Buck’s work is not as well regarded as it used to be?
Because after she returned to America – the point at which my book ends – she wrote a great many trashy, self-indulgent and hugely popular novels. The last book she wrote in China, The Good Earth, remains a powerful, gripping and original work.

While it’s hard to imagine a Pearl Buck equivalent anywhere in the world these days, is there anyone currently writing about China that you particularly admire?
There can’t be a contemporary equivalent because Pearl was unique in that, in her day, she was the first person since Marco Polo to open up the East to the West. Writers today can only continue the work she began, and in this genre, the two I most admire are probably Xinran and Peter Hessler.

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