From The New York Times:
She arrived in China as a child of missionaries. Now, steles resembling tombstones front her gray brick childhood home. In English, the epitaph reads, “Here lived Pearl S. Buck, American author, born 1892, died 1973.” More than 30 years after the writer’s death and 75 since the publication of “The Good Earth,” the saga of a farming family in pre-Communist China, Buck remains stranded between two worlds. In China she is admired but not read; in America, she is read but not admired. Yet in recent years Buck has risen in the estimation of a new generation of Chinese intellectuals. “She was a revolutionary,” said Liu Haiping, Buck’s Chinese translator and a professor of English at Nanjing University. “She was the first writer to choose rural China as her subject matter. None of the Chinese writers would have done so; intellectuals wrote about urban intellectuals,” he said.
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