Good Earth, The - Pearl S. Buck [149]
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Zinn, Lucille S. "The Works of Pearl S. Buck: A Bibliography." Bulletin of Bibliography, 36 (October-December, 1979).
ENDNOTES
1. Liu Haiping, interview with the present writer (Nanjing, May 25, 1993).
2. Chinese proper names are given in the older system of romanization (known as Wade-Giles) that was used during Pearl Buck's years in China. Since the 1950s, a different system (pinyin) has been established by the Chinese government.
3. Many years later, Pearl twice memorialized Tz'u-hsi: incorporating a long and admiring sketch in her autobiography, My Several Worlds (1954), and then a full-scale historical account in one of her better novels, Imperial Woman (1956).
4. Richard J. Walsh to Pearl S. Buck (n.d. [March 1931]); Princeton University archives.
5. Francis L. K. Hsu is one of many Chinese commentators who have argued that Pearl's view of the relation between Chinese farmers and their land was essentially correct. See Hsu's Americans and Chinese: Purpose and Fulfillment in Great Civilizations (Garden City, NY: Natural History Press, 1970), p. 286.
6. Pearl S. Buck, The Good Earth (New York: Washington Square Press, 1994), p. 83.
7. In the hierarchy of Chinese prostitution, the hsien-sheng, singsong girl, occupied the highest position. See Gail Hershatter's "Prostitution and the Market: Women in Early Twentieth-Century Shanghai," in Rubie S. Watson and Patricia Buckley Ebry, eds., Marriage and Inequality in Chinese Society (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1991), p. 260.
8. Florence Ayscough, wife of American diplomat Harley Farnsworth MacNair, had lived for many years in China. Her own publications included translations of Chinese poetry, and Chinese Women: Yesterday and To-Day (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1937).
9. The Book-of-the-Month Club "News" announcing The Good Earth also emphasized the novel's avoidance of ethnic cliché in its presentation of the Chinese people. "The people in this rather thrilling story are not 'queer' or 'exotic,' " Harry Scherman wrote, "they are as natural as their soil.... This is surely as sympathetic and knowledgeable a picture of the Chinese as is possible for a Westerner." Scherman quoted Dorothy Canfield Fisher's letter nominating the book to her fellow panelists: "Most Oriental novels, you know, are for Americans really only curiosities, travel books of the mind." Fisher believed that The Good Earth was much more substantial.
10. Buck, The Good Earth, p. 126.
11. Younghill Kang, "China is Different," in The New Republic, 67 (July 1, 1931), pp. 185-186. In a somewhat unusual action, the magazine's editors attached a note to the end of Kung's review, separating themselves from what they called his unjust attack on The Good Earth.
12. Kiang Kang-hu's comments were originally published in the Chinese Christian Student and were reprinted in The New York Times (1933).
13. For the best survey of Chinese responses to The Good Earth, and to Pearl Buck's work more generally, see Liu Haiping's "Pearl S. Buck's Reception in China Reconsidered," in Elizabeth J. Lipscomb, Frances E. Webb, and Peter Conn, eds., The Several Worlds of Pearl Buck (Westport, CT: Greenwood Publishing Group, 1994), pp. 72-94.
14. Quoted in Nora Stirling, Pearl Buck: Woman in Conflict (Piscataway, NJ: World Publishing Company, 1983), p. 109. Helen Foster Snow makes essentially the same point in her own autobiography, My China Years: A Memoir (New York: William Morrow and Company, 1984), p. 42. Shortly after she got to China, Foster met Edgar Snow, who would become her husband. Her first question to him was: "Don't you realize you're the most famous American writer on the Far East except fot that missionary, Pearl Buck?" Reported in My China Years, p. 28.
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