Approximately three months after her birth in 1896, Pearl S. Buck's parents brought her to China from America, moving to Zhenjiang, where Pearl S. Buck spent her childhood and adolescence. She studied in the primary school attached to Chongshi Girls School. Between the ages of 13 and 16, Pearl S. Buck received a Western education from her mother at home, and went two or three times weekly to study the required courses in Chinese culture and language at Chongshi Girls School. Therefore, Pearl S. Buck's early education was an integration of Eastern and Western cultures.

At 16 she moved to Shanghai from Zhenjiang. She studied at a senior middle school and two years later she went to the USA to attend college. In 1914, she returned to Zhenjiang to teach Chinese students in Chongshi Girls School and to look after her mother, who was very ill. In 1917, Pearl S. Buck was married to John Lossing Buck in the small garden in her residence in Zhenjiang. Then the couple went to Shuzhou, and in 1921 they returned to Zhenjiang again for her mother's burial. Afterwards the family moved to Nanjing and Pearl S. Buck left Zhenjiang, the first place she came to understand and appreciate China.

Most of Pearl S. Buck's childhood friends were Chinese children. During traditional Chinese festivals, she was happy just like all Chinese children. During the Chinese Lantern Festival, she would receive many lanterns of various kinds.

Pearl S. Buck liked the Zhenjiang local foods very much, considering them delicious. At the traditional Dragon Boat Festival, she greatly enjoyed salted duck eggs, as well as "zhongzi", a pyramid-shaped dumpling made of rice and wrapped in reed leaves from the Yangtze River. She could eat malt sugar, her favorite candy, all year round. She said in "My Several Worlds", "…the only delicacy we children ate at any time of the year was the barley taffy, covered with sesame seed, which the traveling taffy vendor sold…Whatever I was doing….when I heard the tinkle of his small bronze gong…I gathered a few copper cash from my store and ran to beckon him."

Writer       ：
Writefrom：

共有3152位读者阅读过此文
【告诉好友】