In Zhenjiang, in China’s Jiangsu province, a young Pearl Buck spent her childhood under the care of a local woman named Wang, who looked after her for eighteen years. Wang cooked for her, treated her like her own child, and quietly stepped in to help with chores whenever Buck was punished for disobedience. She filled Buck’s early years with stories: tales of famine and hardship, bandits and martial arts, standing up to the powerful and fighting injustice, alongside classics like Romance of the Three Kingdoms and The Water Margin. From that relationship, Buck developed a lifelong respect and admiration for Chinese women, a respect that would surface repeatedly in
her later fiction.
Buck’s connection to China was never that of a visitor. Born to Southern Presbyterian missionary parents, she moved from her hometown in West Virginia to China when she was only about four months old. Her family eventually settled in Zhenjiang, where they lived for eighteen years. Unlike many missionary families of the era, her parents chose to live directly among Chinese communities rather than in isolated Westernized compounds. This upbringing shaped the novel that would make her famous: The Good Earth, published in 1931. The book won the Pulitzer Prize and helped earn her the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1938, making her the only American woman to receive that honor for a body of work centered on China.
Buck is often remembered today in fairly simple terms: the American writer who introduced Chinese peasant life to Western readers. But this undersells both the risk she took and the impact she had. Through her sympathetic and popular novels, American perceptions of Chinese people shifted substantially in the 1930s and ’40s. One scholar noted that, for the first time in American literature, ordinary Chinese people were portrayed as decent, hardworking farmers not so different from their American counterparts. Her empathy, as later scholars would argue, went well beyond pity; it reflected a genuine attempt at understanding.
Yingjian Guo, University Distinguished Professor and Professor of English at Renmin University of China, where he serves as Former Dean of the School of Foreign Languages and Dean of the National Reading and Education Institute, is one of the earliest Chinese scholars since China’s Reform and Opening-up to have taken Buck’s work seriously. He edited and published Pearl S. Buck: A Collection of Chinese Criticisms in 1999. Guo argues that Buck’s true significance lies not in the accuracy of her portraits of Chinese life, but in her approach to cross-cultural understanding—one that begins with people’s lived suffering and dignity rather than labels or ideology. In the conversation that follows, we explore what Buck actually achieved, why her work still matters even as the China she described has all but vanished, and what her example might offer a moment of renewed tension between China and the United States.
Charles Carlini: Pearl Buck was raised for eighteen years by a Chinese woman named Wang, who filled her childhood with stories and treated her like a daughter. How much of the writer Buck became do you think can be traced back to that relationship?
Yingjian Guo: I think the question you raise is actually a larger one. It is not simply about Wang, nor even about Pearl Buck. It is really a question about how a human being comes to understand another civilization. My answer is that no one becomes a truly cross-cultural writer simply by crossing national borders or learning another language. One becomes such a writer when another people’s memories, emotions, and everyday life gradually become part of one’s own.
That, I believe, is exactly what happened to Pearl Buck.
Much has been written about Wang as Buck’s nurse and caregiver. But I think her significance reaches much deeper than that. Wang did not simply look after a child; she introduced that child to an entire civilization—not through formal education, political ideas, or philosophical concepts, but through ordinary life. She cooked, cared, comforted, told stories, and shared memories. Through her, Buck encountered Chinese festivals, family relationships, rural customs, popular legends, and the quiet resilience of ordinary people. Before Pearl Buck learned to study China, she had already learned to live within it.
Over the years, I have increasingly come to describe this experience as encountering a “lived civilization.” Civilizations are often introduced through their great thinkers, classical texts, religions, or political institutions. Yet for most people, civilizations are first encountered elsewhere—in kitchens and courtyards, around family tables, in childhood stories, in shared joys and sorrows, and in the countless details of everyday life. Pearl Buck did not first discover China as an object of knowledge. She experienced it as a way of life.
I believe this explains why The Good Earth has an emotional authenticity that many other Western writings about China never achieved. Buck did not portray Chinese villagers as exotic figures or distant “others.” She portrayed them as human beings whose aspirations, fears, dignity, and suffering were fundamentally recognizable. She understood that beneath cultural differences lies a common human condition. That understanding was not acquired through research alone; it was nurtured through affection, trust, and years of shared experience.
Over more than three decades of studying Pearl Buck, I have gradually become convinced that her greatest contribution was not simply introducing China to the West. Many people attempted to describe China. What made Buck different was that she demonstrated how another civilization can be understood. She began not with ideology, nor with political judgment, nor with cultural stereotypes, but with individual lives. She started from human dignity. In my view, that remains the deepest lesson of both her literature and her life.
This is also why I sometimes think modern discussions about whether Pearl Buck “represented China accurately” miss a larger point. Historical details can always be debated, and literary interpretation will naturally evolve, but literature does something different from history or anthropology. Its highest calling is not simply to record facts; it is to enlarge our capacity for understanding. Pearl Buck succeeded because she invited her readers to enter the emotional world of people who had previously seemed distant or unfamiliar.
Today, relations between China and the United States are often discussed in terms of geopolitics, trade, technology, or strategic competition. These conversations are important. Yet Pearl Buck reminds us of something equally important: genuine understanding between civilizations rarely begins with governments. It almost always begins with people—with the willingness to listen before judging, to live alongside others before speaking for them, and to recognize another person’s humanity before debating their differences.
If I may put it this way, before Pearl Buck became a bridge between China and America, Wang had already become the bridge between China and Pearl Buck. That bridge was built not by diplomacy, but by everyday kindness; not by political agreements, but by shared life. Perhaps that is why Pearl Buck spent the rest of her life building bridges of her own.
CC: Unlike many missionary families of their time, Buck’s parents chose to live among ordinary Chinese communities rather than in separate Western compounds. What difference do you think that choice made to the fiction she eventually wrote?
YG: This question is actually about something even more fundamental: Can we truly understand another society while remaining separated from it? Pearl Buck’s parents made a decision that, in retrospect, proved far more consequential than they could possibly have imagined. By choosing to live among ordinary Chinese families rather than inside an isolated Western missionary enclave, they were not merely selecting a place to live; they were choosing a way of seeing the world.
Physical proximity does not automatically produce cultural understanding, of course. Many foreigners lived in China for decades and still understood remarkably little about Chinese society. But separation almost always limits understanding. Communities enclosed within their own language, customs, and assumptions tend to observe the surrounding culture from the outside. Pearl Buck grew up differently. China was not the object of her observation; it was the environment of her childhood.
That distinction shaped her imagination in profound ways.
She did not simply witness Chinese life; she participated in it. The rhythms of daily existence—the changing seasons, family celebrations, village conversations, harvests, illness, joy, loss, and endurance—became part of her own emotional memory. Consequently, when she later began to write fiction, she was not constructing an unfamiliar world for Western readers. She was recalling a world she herself had inhabited.
This is one reason why The Good Earth possesses such remarkable narrative intimacy. Buck rarely writes as an outsider looking across a cultural divide. Instead, she writes from within the moral and emotional logic of her characters’ lives. She understood that a society’s deepest truths are often revealed not in its political institutions but in its ordinary households—in how families love one another, how they respond to hardship, how they celebrate hope, and how they preserve dignity amid uncertainty.
Over the years, I have come to believe that one of Pearl Buck’s greatest literary achievements was her ability to transform shared experience into shared understanding. Many writers describe another culture by emphasizing its differences. Buck, however, did almost the opposite. Without denying cultural distinctions, she consistently sought out human experiences that readers everywhere could recognize. Her fiction invites us not merely to admire another civilization from a distance, but to imagine ourselves living within it.
This, I think, also explains why her novels reached such a wide readership during the 1930s and 1940s. American readers certainly learned about rural China, but perhaps more importantly, they recognized themselves in people whom they had previously regarded as distant or unfamiliar. Literature, at its best, does not erase differences; it makes them intelligible through shared humanity.
My own research on Pearl Buck has gradually led me to another conclusion. We often speak of “cross-cultural communication,” but communication alone is not enough. Communication may exchange information, but literature can cultivate understanding. Buck’s novels remind us that genuine understanding begins when another person’s everyday life no longer feels foreign. That is why I have increasingly emphasized what I call “lived civilization.” Civilizations are ultimately sustained not only by ideas, but by ordinary lives. Literature lets us enter those lives with sympathy and imagination.
I also believe Buck’s childhood experience offers an important lesson for our own time. Today, we possess unprecedented access to information about other countries. We can instantly read news, watch videos, and communicate across continents. Yet information does not necessarily produce understanding. In some ways, we know more about one another than ever before, while understanding one another less. Pearl Buck’s life suggests that understanding requires something slower and deeper: patience, participation, humility, and the willingness to share everyday life.
Perhaps that is the enduring significance of her parents’ decision. They unknowingly gave their daughter something that no school could teach, and no later research could fully replace: the opportunity to grow up inside another civilization before she ever attempted to write about it.
CC: The Good Earth is credited with reshaping how American readers saw Chinese people in the 1930s and ‘40s. What do you think Buck did differently from other Western writers of her era who wrote about China?
YG: Your question reminds me of an even broader one: What is the responsibility of literature when it represents another people? Pearl Buck’s achievement was not simply writing about China; many Western writers before her had done that. What distinguished Buck was that she fundamentally changed the way another civilization could be imagined in literature.
For centuries, cultures have often described one another through a lens of distance. The unfamiliar easily becomes the exotic; difference is exaggerated, and people are reduced to symbols of a civilization rather than recognized as individuals. Much nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Western writing about China followed this pattern. China appeared as mysterious, ancient, picturesque, or backward—but rarely as a society populated by ordinary men and women whose emotional lives resembled those of readers in Europe or America.
Pearl Buck quietly overturned that tradition.
She did not ask her readers to admire China from a distance, nor did she ask them to pity China. Instead, she invited them to recognize Chinese people as fellow human beings. In The Good Earth, the characters are neither heroes nor victims; they are farmers, parents, husbands, wives, children—people whose lives are shaped by work, family, hope, disappointment, love, ambition, and loss. Their circumstances may be Chinese, but their humanity is universal.
This, in my view, was a remarkable literary achievement.
Over the past three decades of studying Pearl Buck, I have gradually become convinced that her greatest contribution was not explaining China to the West. Rather, she changed the moral relationship between the Western reader and the Chinese subject. Before Buck, many Western readers looked at China. Through Buck’s fiction, they were encouraged to look with Chinese people—to experience the world from within their lives rather than from outside their culture.
That difference may appear subtle, but it changes everything.
This is why I often say that Buck’s deepest literary legacy lies not in cultural description but in moral imagination. Facts may tell us how another society functions. Literature, however, asks something much more demanding: Can we imagine another person’s life as if it were our own? Buck answered that question with extraordinary confidence. She did not erase cultural differences, nor did she romanticize them. Instead, she revealed that beneath those differences lies what I prefer to call our common humanity.
Some critics have debated whether The Good Earth accurately represents every aspect of Chinese society. Such discussions are both legitimate and necessary. Yet I sometimes feel they overlook the novel’s larger significance. Great literature should not be judged solely by the precision of its social documentation. It should also be judged by its capacity to enlarge human understanding. In that sense, The Good Earth succeeded because it transformed strangers into neighbors in the reader’s imagination.
I also believe Buck accomplished something that remains profoundly relevant today: She demonstrated that empathy is not sentimentality. Genuine empathy does not require agreement, nor does it ignore differences. It begins by recognizing another person’s dignity before passing judgment. That is a lesson our contemporary world still struggles to learn.
Today, discussions about China are often framed by economics, technology, competition, or geopolitical rivalry. These issues are undeniably important. Yet literature reminds us that nations are ultimately composed of people, not abstractions. Policies may shape relations between states, but stories shape how people imagine one another. In this respect, Pearl Buck’s work still speaks with surprising freshness.
If I were to summarize her achievement in a single sentence, I would say this:
Pearl Buck did not simply introduce China to America; she transformed the way America was invited to imagine China. And perhaps that is one of the greatest things literature can ever accomplish.
CC: You edited one of the earliest Chinese scholarly collections on Buck back in 1999, well before her reputation had fully recovered in either country. What drew you to her work at a time when relatively few Chinese scholars were paying attention to her?
YG: Looking back, I realize that my interest in Pearl Buck did not begin with Pearl Buck herself. It began with a much broader intellectual curiosity about how cultures understand one another through literature. In that sense, studying Buck was less a destination than the beginning of a much longer academic journey.
When I first started researching her in the early 1990s, Pearl Buck was still a relatively neglected figure in Chinese literary studies. Although she had once enjoyed enormous international recognition in the 1930s and 1940s, she was rarely regarded as a writer whose work could speak meaningfully to contemporary scholarship. Yet I felt there was something unfinished about her story. Behind the debates over whether she represented China “accurately” lay a much deeper question: why had this American writer devoted so much of her life to understanding Chinese society, and why had millions of readers around the world responded so powerfully to her work?
My earliest research naturally focused on literature itself—particularly the image of China in American literature. Pearl Buck occupied a unique place within that tradition. But as my research gradually expanded over the years into Asian American literature, comparative literature, and cross-cultural studies, I found myself returning to Buck again and again. Each time I returned, I was asking a different question. Eventually, I realized these seemingly different research interests were connected by a single concern: how literature enables people from different civilizations to understand one another as human beings.
In many respects, my understanding of Pearl Buck evolved alongside my own academic career. Initially, I was drawn to her writings about China. Today, I am even more interested in what her work reveals about the nature of intercultural understanding itself. This shift has profoundly influenced my scholarship. Instead of asking only, “What does Buck tell us about China?”, I have increasingly asked, “What does Buck teach us about the possibility of understanding another civilization?”
This broader perspective also shaped the direction I later tried to encourage within Pearl Buck studies in China. For many years, scholarship understandably concentrated on “Pearl Buck and China.” Yet I gradually became convinced that this perspective, valuable as it was, remained incomplete. Buck’s intellectual horizon extended well beyond China. She wrote about Japan, Korea, India, and Asia more broadly; she reflected on the relationship between East and West; and throughout her life she sought to build understanding across cultures. That conviction eventually led me to advocate expanding our perspective from “Pearl Buck and China” to “Pearl Buck and Asia,” a direction that has since generated new conversations among scholars.
People sometimes ask whether spending more than three decades studying one writer becomes repetitive. My experience has been exactly the opposite. Truly important writers continue to grow because every generation reads them differently, and because every historical moment raises new questions. Scholarship is not simply about preserving established interpretations; it is about discovering why great works continue to matter.
If I hope to have contributed something to Pearl Buck studies, it is perhaps this: to encourage readers to see her not simply as an American novelist writing about China, but as one of the twentieth century’s most significant thinkers on cultural encounter and human understanding. In today’s world, where misunderstanding often travels faster than understanding, I believe that perspective has become even more relevant than when I first began studying her over thirty years ago.
CC: Modern China—urban, digital, globalized—looks almost nothing like the rural, land-bound world Buck described. Does that gap make her work less relevant today, or does her real value lie somewhere else entirely?
YG: Every generation asks this question in one form or another. The world changes, societies transform, and readers naturally wonder whether literature rooted in a different age can still speak to the present.
My own answer has become increasingly clear over the years: Pearl Buck’s importance has never depended on whether today’s China still looks like the China she described. It depends on whether the human questions she explored continue to matter.
In one sense, of course, contemporary China is dramatically different from the world of The Good Earth. Today’s China is urban, technologically sophisticated, globally connected, and economically transformed. The villages that shaped Buck’s imagination have themselves changed profoundly. If we read her novels simply as sociological descriptions of contemporary China, we will inevitably be disappointed.
But I do not believe great literature should be read that way.
Shakespeare no longer describes modern England. Tolstoy no longer describes contemporary Russia. Yet no one would argue that either writer has therefore become irrelevant. Great literature survives because it reaches beneath historical circumstance to illuminate enduring aspects of human life.
The same is true of Pearl Buck.
When I return to her novels today, I am much less interested in asking, Is this still China? I am much more interested in asking, Is this still humanity? That question, I believe, leads us much closer to the lasting significance of her work.
Beneath the changing landscapes of history, Buck wrote about questions that remain strikingly familiar: How do ordinary people preserve dignity in difficult times? What happens to families when society changes rapidly? How do economic transformations reshape moral values? What is gained, and what is lost, when one generation inherits a world profoundly different from that of its parents?
These are not merely Chinese questions. They are modern questions.
In fact, I sometimes think readers today may discover dimensions of Pearl Buck that earlier generations overlooked. Her novels can now be read not simply as stories about rural China, but as meditations on modernization itself. They remind us that every society, regardless of culture, eventually faces similar tensions between tradition and change, community and individuality, material prosperity and spiritual stability.
This perspective has also influenced my own scholarship. Over the years, I have gradually moved away from reading Pearl Buck primarily as a chronicler of old China. Instead, I increasingly see her as a writer who explored what happens to human beings when civilizations undergo profound transformation. That, I believe, is why her work continues to resonate far beyond the historical setting in which it was written.
Another reason I think Buck remains important today is this.
We live in an age that possesses unprecedented amounts of information about other societies. Artificial intelligence can instantly translate languages. Digital technology allows us to see almost every corner of the world. Yet genuine understanding does not seem to have grown at the same pace. In some respects, misunderstanding has become easier, because information often arrives without experience and opinions form without relationships.
Pearl Buck reminds us of something wonderfully simple but increasingly rare: before we attempt to explain another society, we should first learn to understand the people who live within it.
That lesson may be even more valuable today than it was in the 1930s.
Sometimes people say that Pearl Buck wrote about a China that no longer exists. I understand what they mean. But I would phrase it differently.
The China Pearl Buck described has changed. The humanity she revealed has not.
And perhaps that is precisely why we continue to read her.
CC: You’ve said that Buck’s significance today isn’t about accurately depicting China’s present, but about proving that understanding between individuals can survive even when relations between their countries are strained. How did you arrive at that reading of her work?
YG: I didn’t reach this conclusion all at once. It emerged gradually over many years of reading Pearl Buck alongside history itself.
When I first began studying her, my attention naturally turned to literary questions: her representation of China, her narrative techniques, her place within American literature, and the historical context in which she wrote. Those questions remain important and continue to deserve careful scholarship.
Yet, as time passed, I became increasingly interested in a different question altogether.
Not simply what Pearl Buck wrote, but why her work continues to speak to readers living in a world so different from her own.
The more I reflected on that question, the more I realized that Buck’s greatest achievement was not confined to literature. It lay in the example she offered of how one human being can approach another culture with intellectual honesty, emotional openness, and moral humility.
Throughout my academic career, I have studied many writers—from Shakespeare and John Updike to Asian American authors and contemporary comparative literature. Their historical settings, literary styles, and cultural concerns differ enormously. Yet one lesson keeps returning: lasting literature rarely begins with judgment. It begins with understanding.
That realization gradually became a guiding principle of my own scholarship.
Today, we often encourage people to express opinions quickly. Public debate rewards certainty, speed, and strong conclusions. But literature teaches us something quite different. Literature slows us down. It asks us to inhabit another person’s life before we evaluate it. It encourages us to listen before we speak, to imagine before we categorize, and to understand before we judge.
Perhaps that is why I have increasingly come to believe that understanding precedes judgment.
This does not mean abandoning critical thinking. On the contrary, genuine criticism becomes more responsible only after genuine understanding. Judgment without understanding easily becomes prejudice. Understanding without judgment may become naïveté. The challenge is to preserve both, but always in the proper order.
I believe this is precisely what Pearl Buck accomplished.
She never ignored the problems she observed in Chinese society. She wrote about poverty, inequality, social injustice, and human suffering with remarkable honesty. Yet she refused to reduce people to those conditions. Before asking readers to evaluate Chinese society, she invited them to know the people who lived within it.
That sequence is profoundly important.
It also explains why I have increasingly interpreted Buck’s work as a model of intercultural understanding rather than simply intercultural representation. Representation asks, What does another society look like? Understanding asks, How do people within that society experience their lives? The second question is far more demanding, but it is also far more humane.
As relations between China and the United States have become increasingly complicated in recent years, I have often found myself returning to Pearl Buck with renewed appreciation.
Political relations inevitably rise and fall. Governments change, policies change, and public opinion shifts. Yet literature reminds us that beneath these historical fluctuations, individual human beings with their hopes, fears, families, and aspirations are often much more alike than different.
This is why I have never regarded Pearl Buck primarily as a historical witness to a vanished China. I increasingly see her as a writer who reminds us of a permanent truth: understanding between peoples is not merely a consequence of good international relations; sometimes it is what makes better international relations possible in the first place.
Perhaps this is the lesson that speaks most powerfully to our own century.
In an age shaped by artificial intelligence, instantaneous communication, and overwhelming quantities of information, our greatest shortage may no longer be knowledge.
It may be understanding.
And if Pearl Buck still has something important to teach us today, I believe it is this:
Before civilizations can cooperate, before nations can trust one another, and before people can genuinely disagree with wisdom, they must first learn to understand one another as fellow human beings.
That, to me, is the deepest meaning of Pearl Buck’s life and work.
CC: You’ve worked with the Ministry of Education’s China Center for International People-to-People Exchange on how to frame Buck’s relevance for cultural exchange today. What does that conversation look like in practice—how do you translate a 1930s novel into guidance for exchange today?
YG: One thing I have learned over the years is that cultural exchange is not primarily about introducing another country. It is about learning how to understand other people. That distinction has become increasingly important in my own work.
When people hear the phrase “people-to-people exchange,” they often imagine academic conferences, student mobility, institutional partnerships, or cultural events. All of these are valuable. But they are, in my view, only the visible forms of exchange. The more fundamental question is what kind of understanding those exchanges actually produce.
That is precisely where I believe Pearl Buck remains remarkably relevant.
Many people ask how a novel written nearly a century ago can still contribute to international exchange today. My answer is that we should not think of The Good Earth as a historical document offering information about China. Information becomes outdated. Societies change. Historical circumstances evolve. What endures is the way literature teaches us to approach another culture.
Pearl Buck never asked her readers to admire China uncritically, nor did she ask them to ignore cultural differences. Instead, she invited them to begin with ordinary human experience. She believed that understanding another society starts not with abstract concepts, but with the lives of real people. In today’s language, we might say that she practiced human-centered cultural understanding long before the term itself became common.
This perspective has greatly influenced my own thinking about international exchange.
In my work with organizations dedicated to people-to-people exchange, I have increasingly argued that successful exchange should not be measured solely by the number of visits, agreements, or participants. While these are important indicators, they reveal little about whether genuine understanding has actually occurred.
True exchange begins when people become genuinely curious about one another’s lives, rather than merely informed about one another’s countries.
This is why literature holds such a vital place in cultural dialogue.
Unlike reports or policy documents, literature allows us to enter another person’s emotional world. It prompts us to view history through individual experience, encounter society through family life, and approach civilization through everyday existence. Literature does more than transmit knowledge; it expands imagination. And without imagination, mutual understanding remains limited.
This is also a key reason why I have dedicated so much of my academic career not only to Pearl Buck but, more broadly, to literature, reading, and cross-cultural education. Over the years, I have become increasingly convinced that reading is one of humanity’s most enduring forms of people-to-people exchange. Every great literary work is, in essence, an invitation to enter another person’s life with patience, humility, and empathy.
Today, this conviction matters even more.
Artificial intelligence can translate languages almost instantly. Digital platforms enable communication across continents in seconds. Yet, translation alone does not guarantee understanding. We can translate words perfectly while still misunderstanding the people who speak them.
That is why I often say translation is the beginning of communication, but understanding is the goal.
Pearl Buck understood this instinctively.
She was not merely translating Chinese life into English; she was translating human experience across cultures. That is a far more demanding task, and it remains just as necessary today.
If I were asked to summarize Pearl Buck’s contribution to people-to-people exchange in the twenty-first century, I would answer in one sentence:
She reminds us that the strongest bridge between civilizations is not built by information alone, but by the patient cultivation of understanding.
And I believe that lesson has become even more valuable in our increasingly interconnected—and increasingly divided—world.
CC: Buck’s empathy for her Chinese characters is often described as going beyond simple pity. What’s the distinction you draw between the two, and where do you see it most clearly in her fiction?
YG: To put it simply, pity looks downward, while empathy looks inward.
Pity acknowledges another person’s suffering, but it often preserves a certain distance, saying, “I feel sorry for you.” Empathy begins elsewhere. It asks a much more demanding question: “What would this experience feel like if it were my own?”
That difference is not merely emotional; it is ethical.
Pity can coexist with superiority. Empathy requires humility.
Pity allows us to remain observers. Empathy invites us to become participants in another person’s emotional world.
This distinction, I believe, lies at the heart of Pearl Buck’s literature.
Many Western writers of her generation wrote sympathetically about people living in poverty or under difficult social conditions. Yet sympathy alone does not necessarily overcome cultural distance. Readers may still see those characters as objects of compassion rather than as fellow human beings.
Pearl Buck achieved something much more difficult.
She rarely asks her readers to feel sorry for her Chinese characters. Instead, she encourages them to understand how those characters themselves understand their own lives.
That is an entirely different literary experience.
Take Wang Lung in The Good Earth. Buck never idealizes him. He possesses admirable qualities, but he also has obvious flaws, weaknesses, and moral contradictions. He can be generous and selfish, compassionate and possessive, wise and deeply limited—all at different moments in his life.
Precisely because of those contradictions, he becomes recognizably human. Readers do not admire him because he is morally perfect. They recognize him because he resembles people they already know—and perhaps even themselves.
For me, this is one of Pearl Buck’s greatest literary achievements. She never reduced Chinese people to symbols of suffering. Nor did she romanticize them as embodiments of traditional virtue. She allowed them the full complexity that literature grants to genuine human beings.
During my years of studying Pearl Buck, I have gradually come to believe that empathy is not simply a literary technique. It is a way of knowing. Facts allow us to understand what happened. Empathy allows us to understand what it felt like. Without that second dimension, our knowledge remains incomplete.
Perhaps this also explains why I have always regarded literature as indispensable to cross-cultural understanding. History teaches us events. Politics teaches us interests. Economics teaches us systems. But literature teaches us lives. And civilizations are ultimately experienced through lives rather than through statistics.
Today, I sometimes worry that our world encourages reactions more quickly than understanding. Social media rewards immediate judgment. Artificial intelligence provides instant answers. News cycles move at extraordinary speed.
Yet empathy cannot be accelerated. It requires time. It requires imagination. Above all, it requires the willingness to suspend our own assumptions long enough to enter another person’s world.
That is why I believe Pearl Buck remains such an important writer.
She reminds us that understanding another culture does not begin by mastering its history or memorizing its customs. It begins by recognizing the humanity of the people who live within it.
If I were to summarize the difference in one sentence, I would say this: Pity asks, “How unfortunate are these people?” Empathy asks, “What would it mean to live their lives?”
Pearl Buck consistently chose the second question. Perhaps that is why her novels still move readers nearly a century later.
CC: Your broader research spans American literature, Asian American literature, and comparative literature—writers like John Updike and Joyce Carol Oates alongside Buck. How does Buck’s work fit into that larger picture of cross-cultural storytelling you’ve spent your career studying?
YG: When people look at my research interests—American literature, Asian American literature, comparative literature, Shakespeare, contemporary fiction, reading studies, and cross-cultural communication—they sometimes see a rather wide landscape. At first glance, these fields may appear quite disparate.
Yet, I have never experienced them as separate intellectual pursuits.
Looking back over my academic career, I realize that I have been asking essentially the same question in different literary contexts: How does literature help us understand lives that are not our own?
Every writer I have studied has illuminated one part of that larger question.
Shakespeare revealed the astonishing complexity of human nature, reminding us that, although history changes, the deepest dimensions of human character remain remarkably constant.
John Updike explored the quiet moral anxieties of postwar American middle-class life, showing how ordinary existence can become a profound subject for literature.
Joyce Carol Oates demonstrated the psychological depth hidden beneath contemporary American society, exposing the tensions between violence, identity, family, and memory.
Asian American literature introduced another dimension altogether. It challenged fixed notions of identity and belonging, showing that cultural life is often lived between languages, histories, and traditions. It taught us that identity is rarely singular; it is negotiated, remembered, and continuously reimagined.
Each of these writers and traditions has enriched my understanding of literature.
But Pearl Buck occupies a rather different place. She is the writer who connected all these conversations.
Over the years, I gradually came to realize that Buck is not simply an American novelist writing about China, nor merely a cultural interpreter standing between East and West. She represents something even more fundamental: the possibility that literature itself can become a meeting place between civilizations.
That realization has profoundly influenced my own scholarship.
My work in Asian American literature, for example, has often examined questions of migration, identity, cultural memory, and belonging. Although Pearl Buck belonged to an earlier generation, she was already asking related questions in another form. She understood that cultures do not exist as isolated worlds. They meet, influence one another, misunderstand one another, and sometimes discover unexpected forms of mutual recognition.
In this sense, Buck anticipated many of the questions that have become central to contemporary comparative literature and transnational literary studies.
Perhaps this is also why my own research gradually moved beyond studying individual writers toward exploring broader questions of reading, cultural dialogue, and international understanding.
The more I studied literature, the more I became convinced that its greatest value lies not simply in representing cultures, but in creating relationships between readers and lives that would otherwise remain distant.
Literature does something remarkably simple, yet profoundly important. It expands the boundaries of our moral imagination. It allows us to experience another person’s world without erasing the differences that make that world unique.
To me, that is the highest form of cross-cultural storytelling.
Pearl Buck exemplifies this beautifully. She did not ask East and West to become identical. She asked them to become understandable to one another.
I find that distinction enormously important.
Understanding is not the same as agreement. Mutual respect does not require complete similarity.
Indeed, genuine dialogue often begins precisely because differences remain.
As my academic interests have expanded over the years—from American literature to Asian American literature, from comparative literature to reading studies, and more recently to questions surrounding artificial intelligence and higher education—I have become increasingly aware that they all converge upon a single concern: How do human beings continue to understand one another in a rapidly changing world?
That, I believe, has always been the central question of my research. And that is why Pearl Buck remains at its heart.
If I were to describe her place within my own intellectual journey, I would put it this way:
Many great writers help us understand humanity. Pearl Buck taught me how humanity crosses cultures.
That is why, after more than thirty years, I still return to her work with fresh questions and renewed admiration.
CC: If Pearl Buck could see how she’s read today—in China, in the United States, at a moment of real tension between the two—what do you think would surprise her most, and what do you hope she’d be glad to see?
YG: I sometimes imagine Pearl Buck quietly observing the world today—not as a political commentator, but as a novelist.
I suspect the first thing that would surprise her is not how much China has changed, but how quickly the world itself has changed.
She witnessed revolutions, wars, and extraordinary political upheavals during her lifetime, yet she lived in an age when understanding another culture still required patience. People crossed oceans by ship, learned foreign languages over many years, and encountered other societies largely through books and personal experience.
Today, information travels instantly. Artificial intelligence translates languages within seconds. Images from every corner of the world appear on our phones almost immediately.
Paradoxically, however, greater access to information has not necessarily produced greater understanding.
I think that paradox would genuinely surprise her. Pearl Buck believed deeply that knowledge alone was never enough. She understood that facts, although indispensable, cannot by themselves overcome fear, prejudice, or misunderstanding.
Only human experience can do that. Only stories can do that.
Perhaps she would also be surprised that many of the questions she struggled with remain remarkably familiar. How do different civilizations understand one another without demanding sameness? How do we preserve our own cultural traditions while remaining genuinely open to others? How do we disagree without losing our shared humanity?
These questions have not disappeared. If anything, they have become even more urgent.
At the same time, I hope Pearl Buck would also find reasons to feel encouraged.
I believe she would be deeply moved to see that her works continue to be read in both China and the United States, and that a new generation of scholars, students, and readers continues to engage seriously with her ideas.
She would discover that Chinese scholarship on her work has developed enormously over the past several decades. What was once a relatively limited field has become a vibrant and increasingly international conversation. Researchers today are exploring not only Pearl Buck and China, but also Pearl Buck and Asia, Pearl Buck and world literature, Pearl Buck and intercultural dialogue, and many other new perspectives. I believe that continuing this dialogue would give her genuine satisfaction.
More importantly, I hope she would recognize that the bridge she devoted her life to building has never entirely disappeared. Bridges are sometimes neglected. Sometimes they are questioned. Sometimes political circumstances make crossing them more difficult. But as long as people continue to read one another’s stories, to learn one another’s histories, and to remain curious about one another’s lives, those bridges can always be rebuilt.
This has become one of my deepest convictions after more than thirty years of studying Pearl Buck.
International relations inevitably experience moments of tension. History moves in cycles. Political disagreements are often unavoidable. But literature reminds us of something history sometimes forgets: governments speak to governments, while writers speak to people. And relationships between peoples often outlast relationships between states.
Perhaps that is why I have never regarded Pearl Buck simply as an important American novelist who wrote about China.
I see her as one of the twentieth century’s most remarkable practitioners of what I would call humanistic diplomacy—not diplomacy conducted through governments, but through literature, imagination, and the patient cultivation of mutual understanding.
If she could see our world today, I think she would encourage us to do what she herself tried to do throughout her life. Listen before judging. Understand before concluding. Read before fearing. Meet people before defining them.
Those principles may sound simple. In reality, they are among the most difficult—and most necessary—lessons any civilization can learn.
If I may end with one personal reflection, after spending more than three decades studying Pearl Buck, I have gradually come to believe that her greatest legacy is not simply the books she wrote.
It is the example she left. She showed us that another civilization need not become our own before it becomes understandable. And perhaps that is the beginning of wisdom.
CC: After more than three decades of studying Pearl Buck, if you were asked to summarize her greatest legacy in just a few sentences, what would you say?
YG: After more than three decades of studying Pearl Buck, I have gradually come to believe that her greatest achievement was not simply that she interpreted China for America, but that she demonstrated a fundamentally human way of approaching another civilization—with humility, lived experience, moral imagination, and a willingness to understand before judging.
If I were to summarize Pearl Buck’s legacy in a single sentence, it would be this:
She taught us that another civilization does not have to become our own before it becomes understandable.
That, to me, is her enduring legacy.
CC: Finally, after everything we have discussed—Pearl Buck, literature, China, America, and cross-cultural understanding—what is the one message you hope readers around the world will take away from this conversation?
YG: If there is one thought I hope readers will remember, it is a remarkably simple one:
Understanding another civilization is not an intellectual achievement. It is a moral practice.
We often imagine that understanding is primarily about acquiring knowledge. We study history, learn languages, read books, travel abroad, and analyze cultures. All of these matter. Yet knowledge alone does not necessarily make us more understanding.
True understanding begins elsewhere: with humility, with curiosity, and, above all, with the willingness to recognize that another person’s experience of the world is every bit as real and meaningful as our own.
Every civilization has something to teach the world. Every culture has something to learn from another. The future of humanity will depend not on how quickly we can exchange information, but on how deeply we are willing to understand one another.
For me, that is not only the enduring meaning of Pearl Buck; it is also the enduring purpose of literature itself.
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