Cooking With Pearl Buck
In Valerie Stivers’s Eat Your Words series, she cooks up recipes drawn from the works of various writers.
I’m in Vermont for the summer, living in the town of Winhall, where Pearl S. Buck (1892–1973), an American famous for novels about China, lived during one of the strange closing chapters of her long, strange life. Every day, I pass Pearl Buck Drive and the road to Buck’s summer home. Nearby is the old Liftline lodge on Stratton, where she and the 38-years-younger ‘dancing instructor’ who was her companion in her final years liked to have dinner. After Winhall, Buck, the dancing instructor, and his young, male entourage moved a few mountains over, to Danby, Vermont, where she ended her years, “seated at the window in Chinese silk robes, drawing five or six thousand people each summer as the town’s sole tourist attraction,” according to the excellent and riveting Hilary Spurling biography, Pearl Buck in China.
Houses were meaningful in Buck’s life. She had many, but none of them were ever quite home. She was born in China, a bright, bitterly poor missionary child with a skeptical, wide-ranging mind, and she grew up on the streets of its rural towns, playing with the local children and speaking fluent Chinese. Her early education was performed by a Confucian scholar, and by the time anyone tried to make an American young lady of her, it was too late. “By birth and ancestry I am American … but by sympathy and feeling, I am Chinese,” Buck told a reporter near the end of her life.
Her most famous book, , was an attemptis taught in schools to this day. I was concerned when I started investigating her that I’d find out she had a condescending attitude toward the Chinese or that her work would be stereotyped about China in a way that would make her a poor candidate for this column, but despite ongoing academic debate on the matter, I found it to be fascinatingly the opposite. After Buck’s return to America she became an outspoken critic of religious missions as disrespectful, and she was officially sanctioned by the Presbyterian Mission. Spurling’s biography makes the argument that Buck was the first person in the history of Chinese letters to write realistically about the lives of the rural poor. It wasn’t considered the appropriate topic for literature, and the Chinese literary elite weren’t exposed to life in the countryside the way Buck had been. Her books are romanticized in terms of the plot, but the inner lives of her rural farmer protagonists are convincingly and empathically depicted.
