The wall of injustices between us
‘In fact, I think everything you’ve ever accomplished stems from indignation. You are gently but firmly determined to voice your opinion on a subject or a situation, and not finding a chance to do it otherwise you write it into a story. Long ago you couldn’t get an adoption agency to place a mixed-race child because they couldn’t match parents. You became indignant, saying it was stupid to base parental love on race, creed or colour, in indignation you started your own adoption agency, and judging from the success of Welcome House, you were right to do so. Everything I’ve seen you do, began in much the same way’ (extract from For Spacious Skies: Journey in Dialogue, 1966, Pearl S. Buck and Theodore F. Harris)
Pearl S. Buck was born in 1892 in West Virginia. Her parents were Southern Presbyterian missionaries, stationed in China. Pearl was the fourth of seven children. She was born when her parents were near the end of a furlough in the United States; when she was three months old, she was taken back to China, where she spent most of the first forty years of her life. From childhood, Pearl spoke both English and Chinese. In 1910, Pearl enrolled in college in Virginia, from which she graduated in 1914. Although she had intended to remain in the US, she returned to China shortly after graduation when she received word that her mother was gravely ill.
In 1915, she met a young agricultural economist named John Buck. They married in 1917, and immediately moved to a rural area. In this impoverished community, Pearl Buck gathered the material that she would later use in The Good Earth and other stories of China. The Bucks suffered a lot of tragedies and dislocations in the 1920s. Their first child, Carol, who was born in 1921, was retarded. Furthermore, because of a uterine tumour discovered during the delivery, Pearl underwent a hysterectomy. In 1925, they adopted a baby girl, Janice. From 1920 to 1933, Pearl and her husband made their home on the campus of Nanking University, where both had teaching positions. In 1921, Pearl’s mother died and shortly afterwards her father moved in with the Bucks.
Pearl Buck’s first novel, East Wind, West Wind, was published by the John Day Company in 1930. John Day’s publisher, Richard Walsh, would become Pearl’s second husband. In 1931, Pearl’s second novel, The Good Earth, was published. This became the best-selling book of both 1931 and 1932, won the Pulitzer Prize and would be adapted as a film in 1937. Other novels and books of non-fiction quickly followed. In 1938, less than a decade after her first book had appeared, Pearl was the first American woman to win the Nobel Prize in literature. By the time of her death in 1973, Pearl had published over seventy books: novels, collections of stories, biography and autobiography, poetry, drama, children’s literature, and translations from the Chinese.
In 1934, because of conditions in China, and also to be closer to Richard Walsh and her daughter Carol, whom she had placed in an institution in New Jersey, Pearl moved permanently to the USA. She and Richard adopted six more children over the following years. From the day of her move to the US, Pearl was highly active in American civil rights and women’s rights activities. She wrote extensively for anti-war stances and human rights, women’s rights and trans-racial and trans-national adoption, in a period when these issues were unpopular. In 1942, Pearl and Richard founded the East and West Association, dedicated to cultural exchange and understanding between Asia and the West. Pearl Buck used her celebrity status to raise money for the causes she supported. In 1949, outraged that existing adoption services considered Asian and mixed-race children unadoptable, Pearl established Welcome House, the first international, inter-racial adoption agency. In the nearly five decades of its work, Welcome House has assisted in the placement of over five thousand children. In 1964, to provide support for Amerasian children who were not eligible for adoption, Pearl also established the Pearl S. Buck Foundation, which provides sponsorship funding for thousands of children in half-a-dozen Asian countries. In 1965 she started establishing Opportunity Centres in South Korea and other Asian countries.