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    Pearl Buck in China: Journey to The Good Earth
    Pearl Buck in China: Journey to The Good Earth
    Pearl Buck in China: Journey to The Good Earth
    Audiobook9 hours

    Pearl Buck in China: Journey to The Good Earth

    Written by Hilary Spurling

    Narrated by Hilary Spurling

    4.5/5

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    About this audiobook

    One of the twentieth century's most extraordinary Americans, Pearl Buck was the first person to make China accessible to the West. She recreated the lives of ordinary Chinese people in The Good Earth, an overnight worldwide bestseller in 1932, later a blockbuster movie. Buck went on to become the first American woman to win the Nobel Prize for Literature. Long before anyone else, she foresaw China's future as a superpower, and she recognized the crucial importance for both countries of China's building a relationship with the United States. As a teenager she had witnessed the first stirrings of Chinese revolution, and as a young woman she narrowly escaped being killed in the deadly struggle between Chinese Nationalists and the newly formed Communist Party. Pearl wrote about the realities of the only world she knew in The Good Earth. It was one of the last things she did before being finally forced out of China to settle for the first time in the United States. She was unknown and penniless with a failed marriage behind her, a disabled child to support, no prospects, and no way of telling that The Good Earth would sell tens of millions of copies. It transfixed a whole generation of readers just as Jung Chang's Wild Swans would do more than half a century later. No Westerner had ever written anything like this before, and no Chinese had either. Buck was the forerunner of a wave of Chinese Americans from Maxine Hong Kingston to Amy Tan. Until their books began coming out in the last few decades, her novels were unique in that they spoke for ordinary Asian people- "translating my parents to me," said Hong Kingston, "and giving me our ancestry and our habitation." As a phenomenally successful writer and civil-rights campaigner, Buck did more than anyone else in her lifetime to change Western perceptions of China. In a world with its eyes trained on China today, she has much to tell us about what lies behind its astonishing reawakening.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherOasis Audio
    Release dateJun 1, 2010
    ISBN9781608147236
    Author

    Hilary Spurling

    Hilary Spurling won the Whitbread Biography and Book of the Year 2005 for her biography of Henri Matisse, the product of 15 years' work. Her biography of Ivy Compton-Burnett won the Heinemann and Duff Cooper prizes. She has been a theatre and book critic for the Spectator, Observer and Telegraph, and lives in London.

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    Reviews for Pearl Buck in China

    4.5/5

    29 ratings14 reviews

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    • 4/5
      The horrific lives women endured, i.e. Pearl's mother, and Chinese society, anguish of lost children, not to mention the subservient female role, it's a miracle western women have evolved from those conditions.
    • 5/5
      Groundbreaking bio of Pearl Buck, one of the world's most difficult subjects for biographical treatment. Spurling had unparalleled access to Pearl's family as well as several archives. This is the first psychological biography of Pearl Buck, whose self-described "amnesia" about many key elements of her early family life and her tumultuous Chinese upbringing may well have been a necessary survival mechanism in a pre-psychological era.See especially Spurling's bibliographic comments on most of Pearl's writings, which range from her world-famous Chinese novels, 2 biographies of her parents, (those 2 sources being the basis of her Nobel Prize in Literature for 1938, according to the Swedish Nobel Academy), as well as many other novels, and essays, speeches, several unfortunate plays, plus a number of riveting but little-noticed non-fiction works.
    • 4/5
      Other than having read and loved The Good Earth, I didn't know much about Pearl Buck before picking this up. She's intriguing enough that I'd like to read more of her work, although this book is fairly critical of much of that. The most exciting bits of this book by FAR are the descriptions of her childhood and the dysfunction of her family of origin. Sort of a real-life Poisonwood Bible situation. I'd really like to read her translation of Shui Hu Chuan.
    • 4/5
      This is a beautifully written biography, full of haunting images which capture the strange and exotic childhood of Pearl Buck in China. Agains the backdrop of China's tumultuous history in the last century, Buck's strength and resolve shines throughout. She overcomes the loss of her siblings, the pain of placing her disabled daughter in a home, and the stigma of divorce. Spurling takes a hard look at the relationship of Buck's parents and the many ways Buck's own marriage mirrored theirs.
    • 4/5
      Obviously this is a biography of the author Pearl Buck. Emphasis was on the forces that shaped her as a writer.I'd never read a biography of Pearl Buck previously. Of course I knew the basics ... that she had lived in China, and that China had formed her as much or more than the West. I assumed she'd grown up there, and further assumed it likely that she was the daughter of missionaries.The details of her early experiences were fascinating to me.I knew that she was an advocate for Human Rights, etc., but hadn't known that she was quite such a pioneer. Her anti-colonial views about mission work were ahead of their time as well.This was an excellent biography and was so absorbing that I read it in just a couple of days.
    • 4/5
      Scholarly but readable, this book made me want to reread "The Good Earth" and get to all of Buck's other novels. The account of Buck's life in China is fascinating and, at times, horrifying. Hers is not a family who were temporary expats: China was very much their home, for better or worse.
    • 4/5
      I only knew three things about Pearl Buck: * she wrote The Good Earth * she was the only non-alcoholic American to win a Nobel Prize for Lit * she was the only American woman to win a NobelBut a review I heard on NPR piqued my interest. While trying to secure a library copy of this bio, I read one of her books but gave up on a second. (The second wasn't that bad, but I got sidetracked--as I frequently do.)This bio was fascinating. Born to missionary parents and raised in the China of the turn of the 20th Century, her sensibilities were more attuned to the East than the West. While her novels and stories often didn't meet with critical acclaim, readers loved them.In the end, though, hers is a sad story. Barred from returning to China after the Communists took over, she became an unhappy exile in America. The early years were tolerable, until her second husband died. She then withdrew from life, surrounding herself with a coterie who coddled her increasingly bizarre eccentricities.
    • 4/5
      Another audiobook serendipity, riveting and eye-opening. Loses some of its vivid intensity after Buck gets married and the author no longer has the source material of Buck's biographies of her parents, with the emotional truth of Buck's marriage somewhat unclear (perhaps obscured by lack of reliable source material) and her later life just sad and vague. But this book is subtitled "Journey to the Good Earth" not "A Life" and it fully tells the story of that journey. Now that I understand how thoroughly Buck knew the peasant life of which she wrote, I am looking forward to reading The Good Earth, knowing that it will be as authentic as possible, considering the challenges of a literate outsider writing from the point of view of illiterate peasants. Hilary Spurling establishes how Pearl's life experiences gave her both the empathy and the knowledge to write authentically about a culture not her own. I was also very touched by the story of Pearl's devotion to her daughter, but a little disturbed by her need to keep adopting new babies later in life, since it seems she did it just to be surrounded by children, not to actually parent them. (Note: The author reads the audiobook and does a great job.)
    • 5/5
      Really focuses on the events in her life that popped up in the themes and characters of her writing - The Good Earth Trilogy and to a lesser extent her other works. The tragedy, lonliness/bad marriage and the need to earn money to take care of her daughter with PKU was more than enough motivation and fodder. She really put herself into her books. And everyone read her. I had to read The Good Earth in school, but honestly don't remember much of it, except that I never understood why it was a classic or so widely read. Hilary Spurling's book gave me a much greater appreciation for the magnitude of what Buck achieved with the book - and works in general - in terms of introducing Westerners to rural poor China in early 20th century, really helping to bridge the very real East/West divide. Spurling writes that Buck's articulation was clearer and more on target even than contemporary Chinese scholars/literary circles which rarely came in contact with such folk. And Buck's public denounciation of the (Presbyterian) missionary mission in China and the rest of the world and its cultural/religious imperialism, did much to bring that to the world's attention. Her efforts to do the best for her daughter and others with disabilities, and her scandalous affair with her publisher, but more her frankness in writing about sexuality and marital strife/rape/violence also put her in a class of women breaking the mold and pushing the boundaries of contemporary societal acceptance. Buck was a fascinating woman and this is a fascinating account that renews Buck's relevancy to modern times. Based on reading Spurling's work, I am putting many of Buck's books on my to read list right now, including The Good Earth trilogy (The Good Earth, Sons, and A House Divided) but also Imperial Woman: The Story of the Last Empress of China, Pavilion of Women, and Dragon Seed.
    • 4/5
      Pearl Buck's "The Good Earth" is one of those 10 or 12 books that had a really big impact on me in my youth. I read several other books by Buck, and although they were good, they weren't quite as amazing as "The Good Earth". Years ago I read her autobiography (of a sort), "My Several Worlds", and liked it a lot, although it was clearly a selective memoir. When I re-read "The Good Earth" a year or so ago as well as the follow-up "Sons", I was reminded of how good those stories were and of Buck's gifts as a writer.I was rather amazed to see two books on Pearl Buck come out this year, Hilary Spurling's "Pearl Buck in China" and the other being "Pearl of China" by Anchee Min, a fictionalized work that seems to have attracted the greater attention in the United States. However, I picked up Hilary Spurling's "Pearl Buck in China" as fast as I could."Pearl Buck in China" is a rather whirlwind of a book, and Spurling takes a rather aggressive and at times dense approach to presenting Buck's life. Clearly Spurling has done her research and immersed herself in Buck's life and books. I came out of this book knowing much more about Pearl Buck and her times than I would have expected. It is a testament to her strength as a person that she came through life at all. Most of her siblings died very young in China and yet Pearl survived and in an odd way thrived amongst the turmoil. What she saw and lived in her early days would fuel her writings for her lifetime.Spurling's biography of Buck is much more of an academic work than a conventional "slick" biography. The style, honestly, put me off a bit at times, but I could not deny the research and intensity behind this book. I think the depth of this book would be lost on someone who isn't already fairly familiar with Buck's work. This is because Spurling has interwoven so much of the history with Buck's books. I learned a tremendous amount from this book - both about Buck and events in China. Recommended.
    • 5/5
      i loved the good earth when i was a teenager. i don't think i read other books by buck. i wasn't really an organized reader or maybe the library didn't have other books or i was too busy.the author doesn't seem to enjoy narration.
    • 4/5
      Scholarly but readable, this book made me want to reread "The Good Earth" and get to all of Buck's other novels. The account of Buck's life in China is fascinating and, at times, horrifying. Hers is not a family who were temporary expats: China was very much their home, for better or worse.
    • 4/5
      Before reading this book, the only thing I’d really known about Pearl S. Buck was that she went to the same college as I went to. I’d also read The Good Earth many years ago, but didn’t care for it much (or maybe I didn’t understand it as well as I might otherwise have). Pearl Buck in China isn’t just a biography; it focuses mostly on how Pearl Buck’s childhood and adulthood in China influenced her writing and life.It’s a very strong, well-organized book that sticks closely to what the author set out to do. The Good Earth is Pearl Buck’s best-known book, but this biography focuses on all of her fiction that deals with China. There are some sketchy places in the book when the author talks about the family dynamic between the Sydenstrickers, and again at the end when describing Pearl Buck’s later life. So many biographies focus on the facts that they forget about the person they’re dealing with; in this book, I really liked how the author managed to convey a sense of Pearl Buck’s personality while at the same time educating her reader on Pearl’s writing. I think Pearl Buck’s story gets overshadowed by the stories of the lives of authors who had more “interesting” lives, so it’s nice to see her getting some attention again. My one irritant about this book is that the author refers to the former Randolph-Macon Woman’s College as Randolph-Macon, when someone more familiar with the school would probably refer to it as R-MWC, for short, to avoid confusion with the college in Ashland, VA. But this is minor.On a side note that has nothing to do with the author’s theme (but it’s interesting nonetheless): when you take a tour of Randolph-Macon Woman’s College (now Randolph College), virtually one of the first things you’re told is that Pearl Buck went there. They are very proud of having her as an alumna, and rightly so. It’s funny to learn from this book that in reality, because Pearl felt like an outsider there, she didn’t enjoy her college experience, and therefore had selective memory about the whole thing. I found myself sympathizing with her when I read that! Authors often write about what they’re most comfortable with, and that was certainly true for Pearl Buck.
    • 5/5
      Groundbreaking bio of Pearl Buck, one of the world's most difficult subjects for biographical treatment. Spurling had unparalleled access to Pearl's family as well as several archives. This is the first psychological biography of Pearl Buck, whose self-described "amnesia" about many key elements of her early family life and her tumultuous Chinese upbringing may well have been a necessary survival mechanism in a pre-psychological era.See especially Spurling's bibliographic comments on most of Pearl's writings, which range from her world-famous Chinese novels, 2 biographies of her parents, (those 2 sources being the basis of her Nobel Prize in Literature for 1938, according to the Swedish Nobel Academy), as well as many other novels, and essays, speeches, several unfortunate plays, plus a number of riveting but little-noticed non-fiction works.