From The Telegraph:
Many years ago, my history tutor at Oxford snapped: “I am Anglo-Indian, by which I do not mean that I am half black.” I have thought of this often in the context of the term “mixed race”, not meaning what he meant, wondering why we have lost the words for cultural rather than racial crosses. Pearl Buck was American by birth but entirely Chinese by upbringing. A mission daughter born in 1892, she graduated to being an unhappily married mission wife and mother. The runaway success of her second novel, The Good Earth (1931), altered her life. She swapped China for the United States and her agrarian economist husband for her New York publisher. Her fiction continued to be set in Asia and to borrow from iconoclastic younger novelists in China producing richly plotted popular fiction in the previously despised vernacular. Buck took this one step further by writing about the agrarian poor. A Pulitzer and Nobel Prize followed.
The New York Times recently wrote that “in China [Buck] is admired but not read and in America she is read but not admired”. “Both views could do with reappraisal,” suggests Hilary Spurling. Her compelling examination of the imaginative sources of Buck’s fiction succeeds triumphantly in this aim.
More here.
