Earth to Earrh

What was so compelling about the story of a Chinese peasant who rose to riches--actually through his wife's shrewd looting of a local rich man's house during a rebellion? Well, it was both uplifting and escapist literature for Americans harassed by tumbling stock prices, declining job opportunities and general disillusionment with a society that had disappointed them. Published in 1931, The Good Earth made Pearl Buck rich, and, at the relatively late age of 39, an instant celebrity.

Every male chauvinist pig of a certain age can remember the movie, where the docile wife (played by Luise Rainer, German accent and all, for an Oscar) labored in the fields alongside her husband until the very day of their first child's birth--and went back to work the following day. The book's view of China was both highly sentimental and earthily detailed. The Good Earth was not a great novel, but it eventually helped win its author the 1938 Nobel Prize for Literature. Said one orator at the ceremonies: "You have taught us to see those qualities of thought and feeling which bind us all together as human beings on this earth."

Pearl Buck, who died last week in Vermont at the age of 80, was well qualified to do just this. She was born Pearl Comfort Sydenstricker in Hillsboro, W. Va., in 1892. But her parents were Presbyterian missionaries, and the family soon went back to China. Her father believed that he had to mingle with the Chinese if he was to influence them toward Christianity; he wore Chinese dress and even grew a queue. Pearl was tutored by a Confucian scholar and spoke Chinese before she spoke English. All her playmates were Chinese, and she realized that she was "different" only in 1900, when the Boxer Rebellion flared and the Empress Dowager Tz'u-hsi decreed that all white people must be killed. The family had to take refuge briefly in Shanghai.

After college in the U.S., Pearl returned to China and marriage with John Lossing Buck, an "agricultural missionary." Said Pearl later: "I married a handsome face, and did you ever try to live just with a handsome face?" She tried for 18 years, during which she and her family withstood more than a troubled marriage. In 1927, revolutionary Chinese troops invaded Nanking in an orgy of looting and the slaughter of foreigners. A Chinese peasant woman Pearl had befriended offered her and her two children a hiding place in her own small hut. Said Pearl later: "I too have had that strange and terrible experience of facing death because of my color. The only reason that I was not killed was because my Chinese friends knew me under my skin and risked their lives for me." Next day they were able to reach the safety of a U.S. Navy vessel and a year's exile in Japan.

Intermediary. Mrs. Buck became aware that her daughter Carol was retarded. Desperately needing money to pay for the child's care, she contracted with the John Day Co. for several books. The second one she sent them was The Good Earth. After that Pearl Buck wrote and wrote and wrote. All together she turned out some 80 volumes of novels, stories and essays, some under the pseudonym of John Sedges.

More and more she felt herself an unofficial intermediary between two worlds. Just before the U.S. entered World War II, she founded the East and West Association for cultural interchanges with Asia. It collapsed. Then she created Welcome House, an adoption agency for the children of American G.I.s and Asian mothers. She herself, along with her second husband, Richard J. Walsh, who was also her publisher, adopted nine children, some of them of mixed blood. Eventually, she also set up the Pearl S. Buck Foundation, which aspires to help such mixed-blooded children in their own lands.

She was anything but a great novelist. Probably her best books, along with The Good Earth, are two humane and perceptive biographies of her parents, The Exile and Fighting Angel. Yet her output and range of subject were extraordinary. "Of course," she once said, "one pays the price for being prolific. Heaven knows the literary establishment can't forgive me for it, nor for the fact that my books sell."

To the end of her days, she retained her faith in the enduring Chinese people. Though she once suggested that Chiang Kai-shek had fascist tendencies, the Communist Chinese regarded her as hostile and, even after the recent Nixon-Mao rapprochement, refused to let her into the country for a last look. Still, among the books she was working on when she died was one called The Red Earth, a novel about the descendants of the peasants in The Good Earth.

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