52 Books in 52 Weeks: Book 36: "Pearl Buck in China" by Hilary Spurling

Fiction never lies; it reveals the writer totally.  - V.S. Naipaul

Hilary Spurling's biography of the author of "The Good Earth" tells the engaging story of the life of Pearl S. Buck.   I had not heard of Buck before I learned of this book, and did not realize what an impact she had in her time.

Pearl Buck was the daughter of two American missionaries who served in China from 1880-1931.  Because Pearl spent most of the years of her life in China, she identified more with China and the Chinese people than she did with her American homeland.  As a very young child, she thought she was Chinese, until she realized something was wrong with her.  At the age of 4, her blond hair had grown too long to fit inside her cap.  "Why must we hide it?" she asked her Chinese nurse.  The nurse explained that black was the only normal color for hair and eyes (Pearl's eyes were blue.) "It doesn't look human, this hair", said the nurse.   Though she loved China, she found she didn't quite fit in.  But during the times when her family returned to the United States, Pearl's throughly Chinese mannerisms alienated her from American children.  She found her escape through reading & loved the novels of Charles Dickens.

As an adult, Pearl began to write her own novels.  In 1932, she published "The Good Earth", a novel about family life in a Chinese village.  It was a bestseller that dramatically changed America's popular perceptions of China and the Chinese people, and won the Pulitzer Prize in 1932.

Pearl Buck suffered a tremendous amount of personal tragedy in her life.  Her parents' dysfunctional marriage laid seeds for Pearl's own difficult marriage and her subsequent divorce.  She saw the death of loved ones due to disease and war, at a young age.  And she pours out all of her sorrows in her writing, with many of the characters in her books representing people in her life and events that she lived through.  Spurling includes short overviews of many of Pearl Buck's books throughout the narrative of this biography and shows what they reveal about the events in Buck's life and how they impacted her.

I enjoyed this book, and now I have added "The Good Earth" to my reading list.

Sojourner