3. A Brief Introduction of Pearl S. Buck

     Pearl S. Buck was born on June 26th in 1892 in West Virginia, it was quite an accident for her to be born in the United States for her other five siblings were all born in China because of their father’s job as a missionary. However, three of her siblings died young because of the epidemic, and they were buried in China. To reduce the pain of losing their children, her parents returned to the United States in 1891 and gave birth to her in their hometown. Nevertheless, when she was only three months old, her parents took her in a cradle and crossed the Pacific Ocean. After that she spent the former 40 years in China, except her years in college. She lived in Zhenjiang during her childhood and adolescence. After two and a half years’ of village life in Suzhou in Anhui Province, she moved to Nanjing and taught in Nanking University with her husband John Lossing Buck, then she lived in Nanjing for almost 12 years. She completed almost all the works which helped her win the Nobel Prize in a Western-style mansion in Nanjing. But in 1934, she left Nanjing to America because of her relationship with her husband. She porced with Buck and married her publisher Richard Walsh in the next year. From then on, she never returned to China.来!自~751论-文|网www.751com.cn

     Pearl S. Buck not only lived for a long time in China, but also had many unique experiences here. For the convenience of doing missionary work, her parents didn’t live in the isolated concession or protected areas for foreign residents, but live next to common Chinese in some less developed areas. Therefore, Pearl S. Buck can speak both Chinese and English at a very young age and she had a deep understanding to those common people’s life. As she recalled in her autobiography “Thus, I grew up in a double world, the small white clean Presbyterian American world of my parents, and the big loving merry not-too-clean Chinese world, and there was no communication between them .When I was in the Chinese world, I spoke Chinese, and behaved as a Chinese and ate as the Chinese did, and I shared their thoughts and feelings. When I was in the American world, I shut the door between.”(Pearl 8)

     As mentioned before, Peal S. Buck once lived in villages in Suzhou in Anhui Province, she got in touch with illiterate peasants who never encountered a westerner. She saw with her own eyes that they struggled hard with natural and man-made disasters in difficulties and hardships and she found that they afforded the burden of life, they did the most work while earned the least money, but they are the closest one to the earth and they are the truest whether they are alive or dead, crying or laughing.