Good Earth, The - Pearl S. Buck [158]
Over the next five decades, Pearl Buck would remain a controversial figure in China, alternately attacked and praised as the political winds shifted.
IN THE EARLY 1930s, with China torn by civil war, Japanese invasion, and mounting anti-foreign violence, Pearl Buck moved to the United States, buying a dilapidated eighteenth-century farmhouse in Bucks County, north of Philadelphia. The place was called Green Hills Farm and it served as home and headquarters for several decades of activity. Here she continued to write, to raise the children she adopted, and to manage the various organizations she invented to address the problems of ethnic hatred and to help displaced and disadvantaged children.
In 1932, in the midst of her newfound fame, Pearl delivered a major speech at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel in which she criticized the missionary movement. She said that the work her father and thousands of other Protestant evangelists had done was, on balance, irrelevant to China's welfare and even destructive. She said in a much-quoted line that a century of missionary work had left no more trace than a finger drawn through water. Because of Buck's status, the speech received international publicity, and led to a bitter controversy.
Richard Walsh, her publisher and editor at John Day, soon became her chief literary advisor and close friend. Within a few years, the relationship deepened; Pearl and Richard became lovers. In 1935, Pearl spent six weeks in Reno, along with Richard's first wife; where both women received divorce decrees. Pearl and Richard were married on the same day that the divorces were made official and moved to Green Hills Farm. Over the next three years, they adopted four children in rapid succession, creating through adoption the large family Pearl had always dreamed of having.
Pearl Buck enjoyed a large commercial success throughout the 1930s, but nothing prepared her for the announcement in November 1938 that she had won the Nobel Prize for literature. (Buck was the first American woman to win the prize; Toni Morrison became only the second, in 1993.) Buck's selection aroused opposition among many literary critics---the "deep thinkers," as writer John P. Marquand called them. Her trip to Stockholm was widely covered in the press, in particular her refusal to set foot in Nazi Germany.
In one way or another, the Second World War shaped Buck's life over the next several years. In essays, lectures, and novels, she was an active propagandist for the Chinese in their war against Japan. (Japan had annexed Manchuria in 1931, and invaded China proper in 1937.) She raised millions of dollars that were sent to China for medical relief. She and Richard Walsh led a successful campaign to repeal the notorious Chinese Exclusion Acts, a series of racially inspired laws dating back to 1882 that prohibited Chinese immigration into the United States.
At the same time, Buck's advocacy reached beyond her partisan defense of the Chinese. She also spoke out against Franklin Roosevelt's decision to intern Japanese-Americans for the duration of the war. Among other things, she testified before California and federal legislative committees, arguing that confiscation of Japanese-American property was both immoral and politically disastrous.
She supported independence movements all over the globe, from Asia and Africa to Puerto Rico. She attacked Winston Churchill on numerous occasions, accusing him of using the war as a shield to protect the British Empire. Such a strategy, in Pearl Buck's view, perverted the United Nations' commitment to