In fact, Pearl Buck had never vilified or smeared the people of China. In May of 1972, after months of silence, a low-level Chinese bureaucrat stationed in Canada sent this refusal: since "you have in your works taken an attitude of distortion, smear and vilification towards the people of new China and its leaders, I am authorized to inform you that we cannot accept your request for a visit to China." She applied for a visa, sent telegrams to Zhou Enlai and other Chinese leaders, and hectored White House staff for presidential support. The 79-year-old Pearl Buck, who had frequently told friends that she remained "homesick" for China, saw a last opportunity to return to the country in which she had spent more than half her life. Then, in 1972, in one of the most dramatic and consequential reversals in 20th-century diplomacy, Richard Nixon traveled to China and shook hands with Mao, initiating a process of rapprochement that would ultimately lead both countries to normalized relations. For more than two decades, neither Pearl Buck nor any other non-governmental U.S. The Communist victory in October 1949 provoked a bitter response from the United States government, which refused to recognize Mao's regime and banned all travel between the two countries. Instead of bringing peace to China, Japan's defeat in 1945 ignited four years of civil war between Nationalists and Communists. When she sailed from Shanghai in 1934, Buck took it for granted that she would be able to come back to visit the people and places she was leaving behind. Fluent in both spoken and written Chinese, she had developed a deep affection for the country and its people, and had accumulated scores of friends. Japan, which had forcibly annexed Manchuria in 1931, and bombed Shanghai in 1932, would inevitably undertake a full-scale invasion.īuck left China with great reluctance. She also knew that China was becoming increasingly dangerous. Her marriage had disintegrated, and she intended to re-marry in the States. She had made the sorrowful decision to place her daughter in an American institution, and she wanted to live nearby.
Her second book, The Good Earth, the best-selling American novel of both 19, catapulted her overnight from obscurity and semi-poverty into international celebrity and wealth.Ī couple of years later, Buck determined to move permanently to the U.S. In a small third-floor room, stealing hours from teaching, housework, and the care of her mentally disabled daughter, Buck wrote her first published work. Pearl and her first husband, John Lossing Buck, both taught at Nanking University, and lived in a house on the campus. She was 42 years old, and had lived for 34 of those years in China, mostly in cities along the Yangzi River. In the summer of 1934, Pearl Buck boarded a ship in Shanghai that was bound for America.
American writer Pearl Buck at her desk in Philadelphia in 1968.
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