PEARL S. BUCK

Pearl Comfort Sydenstricker was born on June 26, 1892 , in Hillsboro , West Virginia . Her parents, Absalom and Caroline Sydenstricker, were Southern Presbyterian missionaries, stationed in China . Pearl was the fourth of seven children (and one of only three  who would survive to adulthood). She was born when her parents were near the end of a furlough in the United States ; when she was three months old, she was taken back to China , where she spent most of the first forty years of her life.

The Sydenstrickers lived in Chinkiang ( Zhenjiang ), in Kiangsu ( Jiangsu ) province, then a small city lying at the junction of the Yangtze River and the Grand Canal . Pearl 's father spent months away from home, itinerating in the Chinese countryside in search of Christian converts; Pearl 's mother ministered to Chinese women in a small dispensary she established.

From childhood, Pearl spoke both English and Chinese. She was taught principally by her mother and by a Chinese tutor, Mr. Kung. In 1900, during the Boxer Uprising, Caroline and the children evacuated to Shanghai , where they spent several anxious months waiting for word of Absalom's fate. Later that year, the family returned to the US for another home leave.

In 1910, Pearl enrolled in Randolph-Macon Woman's College, in Lynchburg , Virginia , from which she graduated in 1914. Although she had intended to remain in the US , she returned to China shortly after graduation when she received word that her mother was gravely ill. In 1915, she met a young Cornell graduate, an agricultural economist named John Lossing Buck. They married in 1917, and immediately moved to Nanhsuchou (Nanxuzhou) in rural Anhwei ( Anhui ) province. In this impoverished community, Pearl Buck gathered the material that she would later use in The Good Earth and other stories of China .

The Bucks' first child, Carol, was born in 1921; a victim of PKU, she proved to be profoundly retarded. Furthermore, because of a uterine tumor discovered during the delivery, Pearl underwent a hysterectomy. In 1925, she and Lossing adopted a baby girl, Janice. The Buck marriage was  unhappy almost from the beginning, but would last for eighteen years.

From 1920 to 1933, Pearl and Lossing made their home in Nanking ( Nanjing ), on the campus of Nanking University , where both had teaching positions. In 1921, Pearl 's mother died and shortly afterwards her father moved in with the Bucks. The tragedies and dislocations which Pearl suffered in the 1920s reached a climax in March, 1927, in the violence known as the "Nanking Incident." In a confused battle involving elements of Chiang Kai-shek's Nationalist troops, Communist forces, and assorted warlords, several Westerners were murdered. The Bucks spent a terrified day in hiding, after which they were rescued by American gunboats. After a trip downriver to Shanghai , the Buck family sailed to Unzen , Japan , where they spent the following year. They then moved back to Nanking , though conditions remained dangerously unsettled.

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