In 1986-1987, in the year of the Rabbit, I left for China as a foreign expert for the US China Peoples Friendship Association, invited to live in Shanghai and to teach at Fudan Daxue or Fudan University. Fudan began as a catholic university for girls in 1905. It grew into one of the major universities in China; Princeton has an exchange program through its Princeton in Asia program for graduates. Professor Zhai translates Hemingway and Robert Frost for publication. I would work with the professors to create a book of teaching in English, which would win a national award, and also teach the first American poetry course. I also cooperated with Dr. Howard Gardner, at Harvard, in his Project Zero, assessing art education in China.
　　In this Year of the Horse, I celebrate that time in China and the understanding it gave me of Pearl S. Buck, and how her home in Peraskie, has subsequently, become a spiritual oasis for me.
　　Upon my return to America, her example, in relating the story of the humanity and in serving the future, through preserving the children, of China, has guided my footsteps globally. I worked actively in Mongolia and most recently, in Georgia, with abandoned children, and with changing policy for adoption. I personally sponsored a child through SAVE THE CHILDREN FOUNDATION in Thailand for ten years. I support the Pearl S. Buck Foundation in its work with children worldwide.
　　Let's imagine Pearl S. Buck, when today, one steps off the plane in China, which is what this delegation has in mind, in celebrating this anniversary, here in China.However, Pearl S.Buck stepped off a boat. Pearl S. Buck, has in common, with contemporary author, Nadine Gordimer, in South Africa, --- the fact that she lived in a country, knew its people, and articulated their stories for the Western world. She tried to bridge the gap between East and West, between rich and poor, between the literate and illiterate. She was rewarded with the Nobel prize for Literature for her magnanimous effort.
　　Pearl S. Buck was a cultural ambassador, through her portraits, her memoirs, her fictive rendering of the life of the Chinese as she came to know them. As Professor Peter Corm so eloquently delimits in his biographical rendering, Pearl S. Buck wrote, as any good writer, about what she knew. She wrote from a distant shore as did Karen Blixen, better known to Western readers as Isak Dinesen. Dinesen wrote about her life in Africa, only after she had returned to Denmark. Pearl Buck wrote about China, while living in pennsylvania, in the stone farmhouse she bought there.
　　What effect does this have on the country of origin of the United States of America? Pearl S. Buck's work is permeated with the sensibility of a woman who lived among the Chinese people. She has adopted their sentiments as her own, and yet, there is always some area which remains apart, is hers alone. She adopted their foods, as her cookbooks reveal. She wore the costume of the people, as her photos illuminate. She read the poetry, and listened to the music and collected the art.
　　Yet, after 40 years, Pearl S. Buck returned to America, due to the political situation in China. She would never return to China. Perhaps, that part of her belonged to her country, where she was educated, where she was born had its claim, after all. She did remain in America, and she did make it her mission, to communicate the life of the China she had known to the American people, to make the far away near. But there is a Chinese saying, which after living a year in China, I feel, sums up the experience, a foreigner can only see the flower from horseback. Jonathan Spence, at Yale University, has Chastised us into remembering the difficulties which foreigners have experienced through the ages, in trying to change some aspect of the face of China. Pearl Buck witnessed this, in her father's efforts as a missionary, and in her first husband's as an agriculture professor.
　　I remember one of my graduate students at Fudan Daxue, who took the English name of “Juliet”. She told me about the cultural revolution, through which her parents had lived, the period through which Pearl Buck lived. She said many people went mad. She tells me Chinese poetry is more about feelings than ideology. Perhaps, the criticism about romanticism and Pearl S. Buck extends from her sympathy with this quality of sentiment in the Chinese people.
　　The wife of a Shell oil executive, Nien Cheng, found asylum first in Canada, and then in America, after being cruelly imprisoned, and in writing her memorable autobiographical account, provides us a testimony to the human spirit to survive with dignity. The Chinese can eat bitter. Her story, a Chinese woman's story speaks to us, many years after Pearl S. Buck has created Chinese characters, and after the first filming of “The Good Earth”which has a Caucasian playing the role of a Chinese. Today, there is a film starring Valerie Harper about Pearl Buck herself, stimulated by Peter Conn's biography, generated by his adoption of a child from Welcome House. In 1986-87, Bertoluicci shot “The Last Emperor” in Beijing, while simultaneously, Stephen Spielberg shot “Empire of the Sun”in Shanghai.
　　Having had a Fulbright, Senator Fulbfight felt that it was necessary to “Work patiently and persistently to build human networks around the giobe”. The Fulbright program is designed to increase nmtual understanding between the peoples of the US and the people of other countries. Pearl S. Buck realized this bridge-building to be a necessity, and chose the sponsorship of children as her path. Children are the future of any nation. She sought inclusion, rather than exclusion, for those born of parents in two worlds.
　　I started my year in China by visiting the home of Confucius. The most important principle which Confucius stressed was human kindness. Pearl Buck certainly incorporated this as an intrinsic virtue, in her life, in her compassion for people facing bias, the Chinese, and then, with NAACP, the Black American. Her foundation has worked for the oppressed embracing humanity and dignity for all. When I returned to begin my years in America, the home of Pearl S. Buck symbolized an oasis in which the culture of China can be found, not only the residence of a Nobel prize winner.
　　When I venture into the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, to contemplate the paintings and decorative arts of China, in their Chinese Galleries, I also take time for reflection in the courtyard of “the Garden of the Master of Nets”. The postdoctoral scholar, working under the auspices of the American Association of University Women, at Princeton who had done the research on the scholar poet of these gardens and who worked with the Met on its re-creation of these gardens in the Chinese wing, enabled me to go to China. She made me believe it was possible, and showed me the way through the US China Peoples Friendship Association.
　　Many women have been solo travelers. I have always been a fan of journal writers and of voyageurs and pilgrims. Pearl Buck was none of these, nor was she a tourist; she was a missionary's daughter and the spouse of a foreign expert in agriculture. She shared the quality of being an expatriate, with these other women writers, but differed in her approach to living in the culture. Her story is not exactly like Gertrude Stein and her circle of artists in Paris, or like the “passionate Nomad” Freya Stark and her political connections in the Middle East. She was not in dlsgoise, like Alexander NeiU in Tibet, famous for her guise as a nun. Pearl Buck was in a more modest role as a teacher; she was in rural China, and then in more sophisticated circles at the University in Nanjing. She was concerned with the common people of China and their everyday lives. She would devote a good portion of her own life through her writing and foundation work to improving the lives of the Chinese nation.
　　Pearl Buck could not have realized her life's work without a staff. Those who served her were loyal to her. They rescued her furniture and saved it until it was safe for her to return. An institutional staff took care of her first born daughter. She sat in the evenings, even in America, in the skin of the culture, her Chinese robes. She returned to America with Chinese carpets, furniture and paintings, which surrounded her with an interior evocative of the China she knew.
　　The birth defects of her daughter was transformed into a lifetime crusade to help children with some deficiency. She chose Amerasian children, and their lack of legal paternity, as her primary concern, in creating consciousness about children born out of wedlock, and formed the moral imperative to take care of children fathered by American soldiers, which was an unpopular position. I met many Amerasian students at Fudan University, and my consciousness was raised about their particular integration into society. The foundation now embraces many children with needs for family.
　　Like Edith Wharton, another expat who worked tremendously in the war effort in France, and who cared about abandoned children and who created hospitals for the infirm, Pearl Buck also had an unhappy marriage that ended in divorce. Pearl Buck found happiness, in her professional and personal relation, to her publisher, and husband, and best friend, John Walsh, for the rest of her life. She found fulfillment in creating a large extended family in Perkasie, Pennsylvania, on a relatively self sufficient farm. She also managed to travel across America and around the world, and commute to New York, while living there.
　　This is a more personal tack to take in celebrating Pearl S.Buck's ll0th anniversary, but it is time to move on, and see her in relation to other women in history, and how she succeeded in finding her destiny. She was not alone, as there were precedents. I interviewed a woman who came with the YWCA, who decided to remain in China, as her memories were there. Talitha Gerlaeh stayed on alone, even through the difficult times, whereas Pearl S. Buck moved on. It was her own particular path. She is more remembered as time passes. Her story is a woman's story and a story of character, Hardly a child goes through schonl without reading The Good Earth. It may be the case that it is read more in the future than in the past millenniun.
　　I returned to Shanghai for the new millennium celebration in 2000. It seemed fitting to celebrate the next century in China. Having lived and taught in the vicinity of Pearl Buck's circumference, in Shanghai. enroute to Nanjing, and through Suzhou and Hangzhou, I can only marvel at how iong it takes for history to redeem her memory and to restore her to grace.
　　I would like to conclude my remarks with a reference to Bette Bao Lord, the wife of tbe ambassador to China, Winston Lord, during my year at Fudan, and the quote she read me from her book, In the Year of the Boar and Jackie Robinson. “Mother would always say, ‘Always be worthy of your good fortune.' ‘By your conduct, show that you deserve to enjoy the best of both worlds'” . Pearl S. Buck made a life in both worlds, and by her conduct provided us an exemplar of transforming obstacles in her course, into building blocks for the future, through her legacy of the home and foundation she left to America.

Writer       ：Janet Roberts
Writefrom：Collected Papers in Memory of Pearl S.Buck

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