Pearl Buck in China (Spurling)

Pearl Buck in China: Journey to the Good Earth
Hilary Spurling, 2010
Simon & Schuster
320 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781416540434


Summary
She recreated the lives of ordinary Chinese people in The Good Earth, an overnight worldwide bestseller in 1932, later a blockbuster movie. Buck went on to become the first American woman to win the Nobel Prize for Literature. Long before anyone else, she foresaw China’s future as a superpower, and she recognized the crucial importance for both countries of China’s building a relationship with the United States. As a teenager she had witnessed the first stirrings of Chinese revolution, and as a young woman she narrowly escaped being killed in the deadly struggle between Chinese Nationalists and the newly formed Communist Party.

Pearl grew up in an imperial China unchanged for thousands of years. She was the child of American missionaries, but she spoke Chinese before she learned English, and her friends were the children of Chinese farmers. She took it for granted that she was Chinese herself until she was eight years old, when the terrorist uprising known as the Boxer Rebellion forced her family to flee for their lives. It was the first of many desperate flights. Flood, famine, drought, bandits, and war formed the background of Pearl’s life in China. "Asia was the real, the actual world," she said, "and my own country became the dreamworld."

Pearl wrote about the realities of the only world she knew in The Good Earth. It was one of the last things she did before being finally forced out of China to settle for the first time in the United States. She was unknown and penniless with a failed marriage behind her, a disabled child to support, no prospects, and no way of telling that The Good Earth would sell tens of millions of copies. It transfixed a whole generation of readers just as Jung Chang’s Wild Swans would do more than half a century later. No Westerner had ever written anything like this before, and no Chinese had either.

Buck was the forerunner of a wave of Chinese Americans from Maxine Hong Kingston to Amy Tan. Until their books began coming out in the last few decades, her novels were unique in that they spoke for ordinary Asian people— "translating my parents to me," said Hong Kingston, "and giving me our ancestry and our habitation." As a phenomenally successful writer and civil-rights campaigner, Buck did more than anyone else in her lifetime to change Western perceptions of China. In a world with its eyes trained on China today, she has much to tell us about what lies behind its astonishing reawakening. (From the publisher.)

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Author Bio
• Birth—December 25, 1940
• Raised—Clifton, Bristol, UK
• Education—University of Oxford
• Awards—Whitbread Book of the Year; Duff
   Cooper Prize; Rose Mary Crawshay Prize
• Currently—lives in North London, England


Hilary Spurling, CBE, FRSL* is a British writer, known as a journalist and biographer. She won the Whitbread Prize for the second volume of her biography of Henri Matisse in January 2006. Pearl Buck in China was published in March 2010. (From Wikipedia.)

More
Born in 1940, Spurling spent her childhood years in Clifton, Bristol—a port city heavily bombed during World War II. "I loved the bangs and flashes," she says. "Children ran free, in packs and alone, in the streets and in the woods. And bombsites were wonderful playgrounds—ruined houses, façades ripped away."

Later, she attended University of Oxford, and while there married John Spurling (playwright, critic, novelist) in 1961.

After Oxford, the couple moved to Ladbroke Grove, where Hilary became the theater critic for Spectator magazine, a post she held until 1969. She herself claims to have been "the most dreadful, scathing, swingeing, destructive critic, a battleaxe." Her notorious reviews got her banned from various venues, including the Royal Court theater. Other reviewers, however, pledged to stay away in solidarity with Spurling, and the ban was eventually lifted.

In 1974 Spurling published her first biography—on Dame Ivy Compton-Burnett, whose unconventional novels about the Edwardian gentry had been long-time favorites of Spurling. The first volume, Ivy When Young, was considered a stunning debut.

The second Compton-Burnett volume wasn't published till 1984; in the 10 intervening years, Spurling had three children and wrote the well-received A Handbook to Anthony Powell's Mustic of Time (a detailed guide and index to Powell's 12-volume work...see the LitLovers Reading Guide). She was also chosen to write Powell's official biography after his death in 2000, which she is still working on.

Her next big book was published in 1990—Paul Scott, a biography of the author of the Raj Quartet (which includes The Jewel in the Crown; see the LitLovers Reading Guide). Spurling considers Soctt's Quartet an "extraordinarily vivid description of the end of the empire, the cracking apart of India."

It was with her biography of Henri Matisse, however, that Spurling achieved greatest acclaim. The first volume, The Unknown Matisse, came out in 1998; the second volume, Matisse the Master, issued in 2005, won the Whitbread Prize for Book of the Year. (The two volumes took Spurling 15 years to complete.)

In 2010 Spurling published her biography of the first half of Pearl S. Buck's life—Burying the Bones: Pearl Buck in China (the US title is Pearl Buck in China: Journey to the Good Earth).

When not under the pressure of publishing, the Spurlings spend time in the Greek mountain village of Arcadia where they have a house. There's is, according the Hilary's long-time publisher, "a good, generous marriage." (Author bio adapted from The Guardian, April 17, 2010.)

* Commander of the Order of the British Empire; Fellow of the Royal Literary Society

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Book Reviews
Penetrating.... Ms. Spurling’s book isn’t a full-dress biography. (For that, there’s Peter Conn’s sturdy Pearl S. Buck: a Cultural Biography, published in 1996.) It focuses instead on Buck’s first four decades, her formative years as a woman and as a writer. It’s a good story, easily as curious as any Buck herself put to paper. Ms. Spurling writes well, and with real feeling.... The resulting portrait is a complicated one, but it has an absorbing glow.... It's a good story, easily as curious as any Buck herself put to paper.
Dwight Garner - New York Times Book Review


This elegant, richly researched work is at once a portrait of a remarkable woman ahead of her time, an evocation of China between the wars, and a meditation on how the secrets and griefs of childhood can shape a writer…Spurling's biography is a compelling tribute to the woman who first focused American attention on [China].
Leslie T. Chang - Washington Post 


Pearl Buck in China is one of those exceedingly rare biographies where the reader senses the most powerful connection between author and subject, enabling remarkably sensitive understanding and insight.
San Francisco Chronicle


From its wonderful opening sentence to its poignant close, this is a superb biography. Spurling has brought her characters to robust life. Readers will learn what they need to know about China in that tumultuous time and place at the beginning of the 20th century.
Peter Conn - Professor, University of Pennsylvania


(Starred review.) Weaving a colorful tapestry of Pearl Buck's life (1892–1973) with strands of Chinese history and literature, Spurling, winner of the Whitbread Book of the Year Prize for Matisse the Master—vividly correlates Buck's experiences of China's turbulent times to her novels. Growing up in a missionary family in China, Buck lived through the upheavals of the Boxer Rebellion and China's civil war, two marriages, and a daughter with a degenerative disease; her closeup view of the horrors of China's extreme rural poverty made her an American literary celebrity as well as a Pulitzer and a Nobel Prize winner when she enshrined her observations of China in the Good Earth trilogy. Back in the United States, having opened America's eyes to China, Buck worked to repeal America's discriminatory laws against the Chinese and established an adoption agency for minority and mixed race children. For her support of racial equality, Buck was blacklisted as a Communist sympathizer even as her books were banned in Communist China for spreading reactionary, imperialist lies; Spurling'sfast-paced and compassionate portrait of a writer who described the truth before her eyes without ideological bias, whose personal life was as tumultuous as the times she lived in, will grip readers who, unlike Spurling, didn't grow up reading Buck's work.
Publishers Weekly


[C]ritics reading Pearl Buck in Chinamostly used their articles as occasions to celebrate the subject rather than the biography.... Still, if reviewers were not effusive in their praise, they had few complaints about Spurling's book and clearly admired her thorough research and elegant prose. 
Bookmarks Magazine

 

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Discussion Questions
Use our LitLovers Book Club Resources; they can help with discussions for any book:

• How to Discuss a Book (helpful discussion tips)
• Generic Discussion Questions—Fiction and Nonfiction
• Read-Think-Talk (a guided reading chart)

Also consider these LitLovers talking points to help get a discussion started for Pearl Buck in China:

1. What do you think of Pearl Buck's parents? How was it, for instance, that women had no souls, according to his beliefs?

2. Why, emerging from childhood, had Pearl developed such an abiding faith in the power of fiction? How might her childhood experiences have drawn her to read—and re-read—Charles Dickens. What would she have found so appealing in Dickens?

3. Why was Buck critical of the missionary zeal of the Christians who, like her father, worked in China? What did she observe in their treatment of the Chinese?

4. Buck's light-colored hair and gray-green eyes made her a stand-out in China. Her appearance was shocking to Chinese. How would you react to the constant stares—always made to feel different, even freakish? Nonetheless, despite the fact that she was caucasian, she still felt more comfortable in China than in the U.S. Why?

5. Talk about Pearl's marriage to John Lossing Buck. What was the initial attraction and what were the stress points? What were the reasons for its ultimate failure?

6. What do you make of Buck's decision to take her daughter to New Jersey—and leave her there while she returned to Nanjing?

7. In what way do Pearl Buck's experiences of China correlate to her novels?

8. What are the qualities, according to Spurling, that make Pearl Buck such a stirring writer? If you have read works by Buck, how would you describe her qualities as a writer?

9. Talk about the descriptions of Chinese rural poverty. What observations struck you most powerfullly?

10. What was America's racial attitudes toward the Chinese, and how were those attitudes put into practice in the U.S.? What was Buck's role in challenging a discriminatory legal system?

11. Describe China's patriarchal culture, especially how wives were treated, as well as the attitudes regarding female babies. Does that cultural bent exist today?

12. What happened to Buck's career, and life, after she moved back to the U.S., especially her involvement with Theodore Harris? What does Spurling mean when she says that Buck began writing on an "industrial scale"?

13. How was Buck's treated in the U.S. at the height of the anti-communist scare? How did the Chinese also feel about Buck?  What's the irony here?

14. What did you learn from this book about Chinese culture and about Pearl S. Buck? Does this biography inspire you to read any..or more...of her books?

(Questions by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online or off, with attribution. Thanks.)

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