One of history's most famous missionary kids, writer Pearl Buck, journeyed from China's remotest provinces to literary fame in New York, and then to an extraordinary home in Bucks County, Pennsylvania. There she adopted several mixed-race children and championed the needs of the underclass around the world.
The blond-haired child (called the "blue-eyed demon" by Chinese school children) became the white-haired grand dame welcomed to the Kennedy White House and feted by John and Jackie alongside Robert Frost. She mined her missionary past often in her seventy-plus books, most famously in The Good Earth, garnering the Pulitzer Prize and Nobel Prize in the process. Through her work, Buck gave Americans a window into that inexplicable distant land of China’especially during the 1930s and 40s.
Buck was the product of America's great missionary impulse that began during the Second Great Awakening in the early nineteenth century. On the classic New England campus of Williams College in Massachusetts stands the Haystack Monument representing the beginning of the American Missionary Movement. The college website still includes the story in its history:
In the early years the religious reputation of the College depended on the essential orthodoxy of its presidents and faculty. It gathered strength from the famous episode of the "haystack meeting" in the summer of 1806. Five Williams undergraduates, seeking to continue their prayers and conversations in spite of a sudden thunderstorm, retired from a grove of trees to the shelter of a nearby haystack, where they were inspired to launch the great adventure of American foreign missions.
Inspired with missionary zeal, Absalom Sydenstricker, Pearl's father, felt called to labor in China’and labor it was. Absalom, along with his wife Carrie, suffered great loss’including the deaths of four children’and many other hardships on the field as Presbyterian missionaries.
Pearl Comfort Sydenstricker, born on June 26, 1892, was the offspring of that "great adventure of American foreign missions." Pearl's middle name "Comfort" signified a hope by her parents that she would prove just that after so much tragedy. Young Pearl showed childlike faith, as well as precocious industry, publishing for the first time in the Christian Observer in 1898.
I am a little girl, six years old. I live in China. I have a big brother in college who is coming to China to help our father tell the Chinese about Jesus. I have two little brothers in heaven. Maudie went first, then Artie, then Edith, and on the tenth of last month my little brother, Clyde, left us to go to our real home in heaven. Clyde said he was a Christian soldier, and that heaven was his bestest home. Clyde was four years old, and we both love the little letters in the Observer. I wrote this all by myself, and my hand is tired, so goodbye.
This poignant passage is included in the extraordinary book Pearl S. Buck, A Cultural Biography by Peter Conn (Cambridge University Press, 1994). Conn, an English professor at the University of Pennsylvania, chronicles how Buck rejected the faith of her youth:
In the end, Pearl was inevitably shaped by both her parents. She rejected her father's religious beliefs and his narrow-mindedness, but she inherited his evangelical zeal, his sense of rectitude, his passion for learning. Though she stopped believing in Christian ideas of salvation, she became, in effect, a secular missionary, bringing the gospels of civil rights and cross-cultural understanding to people on two continents.
Conn writes in a careful and evenhanded fashion about traditional flashpoints’religion, politics, and sex’with which most biographers wrestle. Unfortunately, the same cannot be said for a new biography, Pearl Buck in China by Hilary Spurling. Though The New York Times included Spurling's biography in its "100 Notable Books of 2010," this reader considers the book quite inferior to Conn's. Spurling disappoints because her color palette seems limited to black and white. For instance, Pearl Buck's father is painted as an almost completely reprehensible figure. Pearl, on the other hand, is viewed in an overwhelmingly positive light. "Her father," Spurling writes, "remained physically and emotionally distant, shut up in his study if not actually away prospecting for souls, never seeming particularly at home even when he was living in the same house." Isn't "prospecting for souls" a little biased? Further, according to Spurling, Absalom was a cold and miserly man, who "by his own reckoning" made only ten converts in his first ten years on the field.
Spurling does excel, however, at capturing the influences that turned the young Pearl into an amazingly accomplished woman. The shy and sensitive girl is filled with wonder and creativity. In her childhood, she was exposed to the horrors of war (the family had to move often for fear for their lives). Facing the results of pagan practices, young Pearl buries strangled female babies so they won't be prey for wild dogs. And yet she thinks in the Chinese language and is more at home in the East than the West. When she wasn't repressing some of these gruesome events, she was mining them for her later fiction. It is the early years of Buck's life that drive the biographer, who is determined to excavate the seeds of Buck's creativity as well as her sense of mission. These early years are covered in chapters titled "Family of Ghosts," "Mental Bifocals," "The Spirit and the Flesh," "Inside the Doll's House," and "Thinking in Chinese."
Spurling certainly lacks nuance and subtlety when describing the missions controversy in which Peal Buck became embroiled. Although Buck married another Presbyterian missionary, John Buck, his passion was the economic rather than spiritual health of the country. He, too, excelled and became a leading agricultural economist in China.
In 1930, John D. Rockefeller, Jr. financed a report designed to revisit how missions were executed by seven denominations’including Presbyterians. Two years later, initial findings were published, along with a report by Harvard professor William Ernest Hocking. These two inquiries led to the publication in 1932 of a one-volume summary of the findings called Re-Thinking Missions: A Laymen's Inquiry after One Hundred Years.
Re-Thinking Missions argued that the old view of the missionary as an evangelist seeking to save the world for Christ should be replaced by a new, more accommodating approach. The truth of Christianity lay not in any particular doctrines but in the unique simplicity of its central teachings. Buck praised the findings in a Christian Century book review: "I think this is the only book I have ever read that seems to me literally true in its every observation and right in its every conclusion."
In a November 1932 speech before a large audience at New York's Astor Hotel, Buck dismissed the view that missionary work's success should be gauged by counting new church members. Instead she advocated humanitarian efforts to improve the educational, agricultural, medical, and sanitary conditions of the mission field. In a Harpers magazine article, Buck questioned whether believing in the virgin birth or the divinity of Christ were essential to being a Christian. Even Christ's historical reality or whether Christianity is the one and only divine truth is irrelevant.
Spurling covers these events’and the Presbyterian churches' reactions to them’in her usually nuanced manner. She titled the chapter "The Stink of Condescension." The "public witch hunt," she writes, was "spearheaded by a hard-core fundamentalist, Dr. J. Gresham Machen of Westminster Theological Seminary in Philadelphia, who charged the Mission Board with scandalous laxity, identifying Mrs. J. L. Buck as the prime culprit and demanding her immediate dismissal as an unbeliever."
Conn, on the other hand, leaves open the possibility that Buck may have had mixed motives for some of her statements. He's mindful that the controversy helped her book sales.
The image of Pearl Buck remains that of a creative, driven, conflicted, calculating, and generous woman. Writing in an obituary of Machen in the New Republic, Buck wrote:
We have lost a man whom our times can ill spare….There was a power in him which was positive in its very negations. He was worth a hundred of his fellows who, as princes of the church, occupy easy places and play their church politics and trim their sails to every wind, who…offend all honest and searching spirits. No forthright mind can live among them, neither the honest skeptic nor the honest dogmatist. I wish Dr. Machen had lived to go on fighting them.
I am confident that writer Hilary Spurling would not be as nuanced in her assessment. Thus, for those captivated’or haunted’by Pearl Buck's long and winding life, turn to Peter Conn's older but far richer biography.
