Rann sipped coffee from the cup on the desk in front of him.
In the two weeks since Stephanie and her father had died, he and his mother had come to the study each morning after breakfast for another cup of coffee and had talked each day, often for many hours, of events, and how haphazard events and their effects upon one another shaped one’s life. Mr. Kung and his beloved Stephanie had both been cremated as they wished, since the Communist regime had not yet ended in China and their bodies could not be returned to their homeland. Rann had inherited the entire Kung fortune from Mr. Kung. It was all entailed, of course, so that Stephanie would need nothing for the rest of her life should her husband not be Rann, but now that Stephanie was also gone, so was the entailment.
“I am glad you have been with me these weeks, Mother. I don’t know how I could have gotten through without you. It has helped to have these long talks with you each morning so I could begin to feel my way into the future.”
His mother replaced her cup on its saucer on the desk and rose to gaze out the window.
“I am happy if I have helped you, son. I have felt so utterly useless throughout this tragedy. I scarcely knew Stephanie and I did not know her father and I feel almost as if I have never really known you. If I have been of some use to you by listening to you sort out your own thinking, then I find comfort for my own shortcomings by having done so. Your father felt you were a very special person, Rann, and I suppose I have always been in awe of your remarkable abilities while I’ve waited for you to find yourself. Perhaps, in this sorrow, you have done so.”
“I do not know what it is that I shall eventually accomplish in my life, Mother. I have put all of Mr. Kung’s fortune into a foundation I have created. Its purposes are broad, but simple. It will work to relieve the hopelessness of the situation in which the racially mixed individual finds himself all over the world. Someday, perhaps, in five or six centuries, the problem will not exist, but now it does.
“The world is growing too small for us to continue to judge persons by race or color. In the past century, we have gone from antiquated modes of travel, taking months to cross our country, and we have pared that time and, as a result, the distance, to weeks, days, and now hours. If we continue to speed up our mode of travel, which I’m sure we will, then soon we won’t have to move to get from one place to another. We must give up the luxury of remaining members of small racial groups and all become a part of the whole, the one race, the human race.
“The wars have taken men all over the world and the mixing and molding of this person of the future has already begun. Someone must make the peoples of the Earth ready to accept and even to be grateful for the opportunity to know this person of the future. I have seen them myself in the streets of Korea, and they are in a very pitiful position, indeed. Everyone wishes they did not exist, but nevertheless, they do exist and will continue to do so in ever increasing numbers and we must recognize them for what they are and we must work together for the awesome responsibility they face. I do not yet know what the Kung Foundation can do to help them but we will find out. George Pearce, Rita Benson, and Donald Sharpe have accepted as the beginning board of directors and together we shall find other members equally as important and we shall find this person, wherever he or she may be, and endeavor to help him or her to become a useful citizen in society.
“Perhaps when other peoples see that these important persons all over the world are concerned and interested in the futures of racially mixed persons, they themselves will reconsider and the world will be a better place for it. If so, then we shall have accomplished what I have set out for the foundation to do.”
“And what about you, Rann?” His mother continued to stare out the window, her eyes unseeing, and tears glistened on her cheeks as she spoke. So often now she realized she was learning and growing through this child of hers. “What will you do, Rann?”
“You mean personally? To answer truthfully I must say I do not know. I have this enormous work to think of now. I shall continue to write, of course, I am a writer. I cannot think now of anyone I might ever marry—if I do—or of whether else about the future, other than this work to be done. There are so many decisions yet to be made, but each must be made when the need arises and not in advance of the need. I feel as if life has perhaps taught me too much, so far, and has made me wiser than I ought to be or wish to be. I shall not press wisdom on my own children. It is not well to be too wise. Wisdom cuts one off from everyone, even the wise, for then one is afraid of so much wisdom. To take each day as a separate page, to be read carefully, savoring all of the details, this is best for me, I think. My life is yet in spring. I look forward to the summer and I shall enjoy my autumn years and I’m sure I shall approach the finality of life with the same curiosity that has plagued me in everything so far. Perhaps one day I shall look back on this entire life as but a page out of the whole of my existence, and if I do I am sure it will be with the same thirst to know more—the certain knowledge that there are truths, the reasons for which we cannot know. … Perhaps that is the whole point of it all—the eternal wonder.”
A BIOGRAPHY OF PEARL S. BUCK
Pearl S. Buck (1892–1973) was a bestselling and Nobel Prize-winning author of fiction and nonfiction, celebrated by critics and readers alike for her groundbreaking depictions of rural life in China. Her renowned novel The Good Earth (1931) received the Pulitzer Prize and the William Dean Howells Medal. For her body of work, Buck was awarded the 1938 Nobel Prize in Literature—the first American woman to have won this honor.
Born in 1892 in Hillsboro, West Virginia, Buck spent much of the first forty years of her life in China. The daughter of Presbyterian missionaries based in Zhenjiang, she grew up speaking both English and the local Chinese dialect, and was sometimes referred to by her Chinese name, Sai Zhenzhju. Though she moved to the United States to attend Randolph-Macon Woman’s College, she returned to China afterwards to care for her ill mother. In 1917 she married her first husband, John Lossing Buck. The couple moved to a small town in Anhui Province, later relocating to Nanking, where they lived for thirteen years.
Buck began writing in the 1920s, and published her first novel, East Wind: West Wind in 1930. The next year she published her second book, The Good Earth, a multimillion-copy bestseller later made into a feature film. The book was the first of the Good Earth trilogy, followed by Sons (1933) and A House Divided (1935). These landmark works have been credited with arousing Western sympathies for China—and antagonism toward Japan—on the eve of World War II.
Buck published several other novels in the following years, including many that dealt with the Chinese Cultural Revolution and other aspects of the rapidly changing country. As an American who had been raised in China, and who had been affected by both the Boxer Rebellion and the 1927 Nanking Incident, she was welcomed as a sympathetic and knowledgeable voice of a culture that was much misunderstood in the West at the time. Her works did not treat China alone, however; she also set her stories in Korea (Living Reed), Burma (The Promise), and Japan (The Big Wave). Buck’s fiction explored the many differences between East and West, tradition and modernity, and frequently centered on the hardships of impoverished people during times of social upheaval.
In 1934 Buck left China for the United States in order to escape political instability and also to be near her daughter, Carol, who had been institutionalized in New Jersey with a rare and severe type of mental retardation. Buck divorced in 1935, and then married her publisher at the John Day Company, Richard Walsh. Their relationship is thought to have helped foster Buck’s volume of work, which was prodigious by any standard.
Buck also supported various humanitarian causes throughout her life. These included women’s and civil rights, as well as the treatment of the disabled. In 1950, she published a memoir, The Child Who Never Grew, about her life with Carol; this candid account helped break the social taboo on discussing learning disabilities. In response to the practices tha
t rendered mixed-raced children unadoptable—in particular, orphans who had already been victimized by war—she founded Welcome House in 1949, the first international, interracial adoption agency in the United States. Pearl S. Buck International, the overseeing nonprofit organization, addresses children’s issues in Asia.
Buck died of lung cancer in Vermont in 1973. Though The Good Earth was a massive success in America, the Chinese government objected to Buck’s stark portrayal of the country’s rural poverty and, in 1972, banned Buck from returning to the country. Despite this, she is still greatly considered to have been “a friend of the Chinese people,” in the words of China’s first premier, Zhou Enlai. Her former house in Zhenjiang is now a museum in honor of her legacy.
Buck’s parents, Caroline Stulting and Absalom Sydenstricker, were Southern Presbyterian missionaries.
Buck was born Pearl Comfort Sydenstricker in Hillsboro, West Virginia, on June 26, 1892. This was the family’s home when she was born, though her parents returned to China with the infant Pearl three months after her birth.
Buck lived in Zhenjiang, China, until 1911. This photograph was found in her archives with the following caption typed on the reverse: “One of the favorite locations for the street barber of China is a temple court or the open space just outside the gate. Here the swinging shop strung on a shoulder pole may be set up, and business briskly carried on. A shave costs five cents, and if you wish to have your queue combed and braided you will be out at least a dime. The implements, needless to say, are primitive. No safety razor has yet become popular in China. Old horseshoes and scrap iron form one of China’s significant importations, and these are melted up and made over into scissors and razors, and similar articles. Neither is sanitation a feature of a shave in China. But then, cleanliness is not a feature of anything in the ex-Celestial Empire.”
Buck’s writing was notable for its sensitivity to the rural farming class, which she came to know during her childhood in China. The following caption was found typed on the reverse of this photograph in Buck’s archive: “Chinese beggars are all ages of both sexes. They run after your rickshaw, clog your progress in front of every public place such as a temple or deserted palace or fair, and pester you for coppers with a beggar song—‘Do good, be merciful.’ It is the Chinese rather than the foreigners who support this vast horde of indigent people. The beggars have a guild and make it very unpleasant for the merchants. If a stipulated tax is not paid them by the merchant they infest his place and make business impossible. The only work beggars ever perform is marching in funeral and wedding processions. It is said that every family expects 1 or 2 of its children to contribute to support of family by begging.”
Buck worked continually on behalf of underprivileged children, especially in the country where she grew up. The following caption was found typed on the reverse of this photograph in Buck’s archive: “The children of China seem to thrive in spite of dirt and poverty, and represent nature’s careful selection in the hard race for the right to existence. They are peculiarly sturdy and alert, taken as a whole, and indicate something of the virility of a nation that has continued great for four thousand years.”
Johann Waldemar de Rehling Quistgaard painted Buck in 1933, when the writer was forty-one years old—a year after she won the Pulitzer Prize for The Good Earth. The portrait currently hangs at Green Hills Farm in Pennsylvania, where Buck lived from 1934 and which is today the headquarters for Pearl S. Buck International. (Image courtesy of Pearl S. Buck International, www.pearlsbuck.org.)
Richard J. Walsh—Buck’s publisher and second husband—pictured in China with an unidentified rickshaw man. Walsh’s tweed suit and pipe are typical of his signature daily attire.
Buck receiving her Nobel Prize from the King of Sweden, Gustav V, in 1938. (Image courtesy of Pearl S. Buck International, www.pearlsbuck.org.)
Buck and Walsh with their daughter, Elizabeth.
Buck in the 1930s.
Walsh—with his ever-present pipe—pictured with an unidentified child.
Buck addresses an audience in Korea in 1964, discussing the issues of poverty and discrimination faced by children in Asia. She established the Orphanage and Opportunity Center in Buchon City, Korea, in 1965.
Buck in her fifties.
This family photograph was taken on Buck’s seventieth birthday, June 26, 1962. The gathering included Buck’s children, grandchildren, and some of the children supported by Pearl S. Buck International.
Buck on her seventieth birthday.
Pearl Buck’s legacy lives on through Pearl S. Buck International, a non-profit organization dedicated to humanitarian causes around the world.
All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this book or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2013 by the Pearl S. Buck Family Trust
Cover design by Jason Gabbert
978-1-4804-3966-5
Published in 2013 by Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.
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Pearl S. Buck, The Eternal Wonder
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