I was ordered to denounce Pearl Buck in China. The year was 1971. I was a teenager attending the Shanghai 51 Middle School. Trying to gain international support for rejecting Buck’s China entry visa (to accompany President Nixon on his visit), Madame Mao organized a national campaign to criticize Buck as an “American cultural imperialist.”
I followed the order and never questioned whether Madame Mao was being truthful. I was brainwashed at that time, although I do remember having difficulty composing the criticisms. I wished that I had been given a chance to read The Good Earth. We were told that the book was so “toxic” that it was dangerous to even translate it. I was told to copy lines from the newspapers: “Pearl Buck insulted Chinese peasants therefore China.” “She hates us therefore is our enemy.” I was proud to be able to defend my country and people.
Pearl Buck’s name didn’t cross my path again until I immigrated to America. It was 1996 and I was giving a reading at a Chicago bookstore for my memoir, Red Azalea. Afterward, a lady came to me and asked if I knew Pearl Buck. Before I could reply, she said-very emotionally and to my surprise-that Buck had taught her to love the Chinese people. She placed a paperback in my hands and said that it was a gift. It was The Good Earth.
I finished reading The Good Earth on the airplane from Chicago to Los Angeles. I broke down and sobbed. I couldn’t stop myself because I remembered how I had denounced the author. I remembered how Madame Mao had convinced the entire nation to hate Pearl Buck. How wrong we had been! I had never encountered any author, including the most respected Chinese authors, who wrote about our peasants with such admiration, affection, and humanity.
It was at that very moment that Pearl of China was conceived.
In setting out to tell Pearl Buck’s story I faced a number of challenges. I wanted to convey the full sweep of Pearl’s life and also tell her story from a Chinese perspective. There are, of course, many sources in English about Pearl’s life, but I wanted to see her as my fellow Chinese saw her. In order to do this, I proposed to tell Pearl’s story through her relationships with her actual Chinese friends. As a novelist, I knew that the story of a single friendship, over many years, would be best. It is even my sense that such a friendship really existed. And yet, as far as I know, though Pearl had many Chinese friends, there was no one lifelong friend that made it into the historical record.
Using my license as a writer of fiction, I combined a number of Pearl’s actual friends from different phases of her life to create the character of Willow. To respect the privacy of the living families of these individuals, and to protect their ongoing reputations in China, where my books are still banned, I withhold their names here. The other two major instances in which I have altered the historical record are the date at which Pearl Buck’s father, Absalom Sydenstricker, dies (1931); and the date of the Nanking Incident, which occurred years earlier than it does in the novel. Both liberties were taken for the sake of the story.
I would also like to clarify that Pearl and Lossing Buck were married for eighteen years, from 1917 to 1935, and the reason for their divorce is not publicly known. Lossing Buck was a missionary agriculturalist who worked in China from 1915 to 1944, and produced the country’s first land utilization study, which is still highly valued in China.