With Nanjing as main venue in China for 2020’s International Museum Day held this week, in the city itself the focus was on Nanjing University, where the renovated Memorial House to Nobel Prize winner, Pearl S. Buck, was reopened to the public.
Buck’s “The Good Earth” won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1932. The title was the best-selling novel in the USA in both 1931 and 1932 and went on to be one of the most popular novels of the 20th century. Luise Rainer won an Academy Award for best actress in the film version of the novel, released in 1937 by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer.
In 1938, Buck became the first American woman to win the Nobel Prize for Literature. For more than 30 years following publication, Buck’s novel played a greater role in shaping Western attitudes toward China than any other book. She wrote the book in Nanjing.
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The Good Earth was also a driving force in Nanjing becoming China’s first City of Literature, awarded by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO) last year.
Born in 1892 to missionary parents, Buck arrived in this neck of the woods, Zhenjiang City to be precise, aged just 4 months. Living with local Chinese instead of in a missionary compound, Buck became effectively Chinese from a young age.
Aged 29, Buck and her husband, an American agricultural missionary, moved to Nanjing where they both worked in education, with Buck teaching foreign language and literature at Ginling College that was the first institution in China to grant female students bachelor’s degrees.
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Their former on-campus residence where they lived from 1919 to 1934 was renamed the Pearl Buck Memorial House on 19 May, 2012, one day before Nanjing University’s 110th anniversary.
According to the official WeChat account of John Rabe and the International Safety Zone Memorial Hall in NJU, various groups worked together on the Memorial House renovations, reports China Christian Daily.
In addition to The Good Earth and her other writings, Buck also dedicated herself to translating pieces of classic Chinese literature, again helping to address cultural misunderstandings between China and the West. She had the wish that she could help break the negative stereotypes of China held by many western nations. If only she were still around today.
