China Series : Lushan

Pearl S. Buck's Villa in Lushan.

It was a cold early spring morning in April 2016 that my team mates and I visited Lushan, the  summer retreat of many early missionaries to China. One of the families who owned a summer villa was the family of Pearl S. Buck.

She was born in 1892 in the USA to her Southern Presbyterian missionary parents, Caroline Maude (Stulting) and Absolom Syndenstricker. She was brought to China when she was 5 months old. Unlike many other missionary children, Pearl was brought up bi lingual. She had a Chinese tutor and her own mother taught her English. Nanking was hyer home. However she furthered her studies in the US but she returned to help her parents and in fact was a missionary from1914 to 1932.

She was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1938. Her acceptance speech included these words, I am an American by birth and by ancestry", but "my earliest knowledge of story, of how to tell and write stories, came to me in China."

Pearl S, Buck's house in Zhengjiang.

After she left China in 1934 while her husband John L. Buck  remained in China.  In 1936 they were divorced. She remained in the US and continued her work as a writer. She was not allowed back to China until she died om 1973.

Her tombstone which she designed herself had only Chinese characters.

Her books were widely read by both Asians and Americans and now the Chinese (both in the Chinese and English versions).

"The Good Earth" was a secondary school text in Malaysia when education was still in the English medium.