China dedicates Pearl Buck Museum

INQUIRER STAFF WRITER

ZHENJIANG, China - This smoggy, industrial city is famous for one thing, which it manufactures by the bottle, jug and gallon: vinegar.

But it wants to be famous for something else: being the place where author Pearl S. Buck grew up, where she experienced the sweat and toil of everyday Chinese life that dominated so many of her books and came to define China for a generation of Americans.

In Zhenjiang, where Buck spent much of her first 18 years, the Chinese are working hard to create a viable, profitable tourist industry based on interest in the writer. They are renovating houses and places tied to her to lure visitors from Europe, the United States and Asia.

Today, officials here dedicated a grand new Pearl Buck Museum. Here to join them was a 70-person delegation from Pearl S. Buck International, known as PSBI, the Bucks County foundation that continues the author's work in international adoption and children's aid.

"She is not just a friend in my city. She is our daughter," said Weijing Zhou, a Buck scholar at Jiangsu University here. "We love her."

In Buck, the Chinese have chosen an unlikely heroine. For decades her books were banned here, and Buck was criticized as someone who vilified the Chinese because she depicted poor, illiterate peasants. Near the end of her life, as she longed to see the land of her childhood, the Communist government harshly rejected her application for a visa.

In the United States, interest in Buck dwindled after her death in 1973. Her best-known book, the 1932 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel

The Good Earth

, continues to resonate, picked as a must-read by Oprah Winfrey. But her other titles struggle to find a modern audience. About 14,500 people a year visit her home in Perkasie, also run by PSBI.

Here, where she arrived as the 3-month-old daughter of Presbyterian missionaries, Buck's reputation is growing. The movement to recognize her started in the late 1980s, during the Reform and Opening period, when a few researchers began to explore the writings of this outspoken Western woman. Today she's celebrated in Chinese TV specials and serials. A documentary coproduced by the Zhenjiang People's Association for Friendship With Foreign Countries describes her as "an American writer who told the Chinese stories in a Chinese way in English" - no small compliment in a culture obsessed with its own longevity and accomplishment.

"When my colleagues introduce our city to other countries, the main thing is Pearl Buck," said C.Y. Zhang, deputy director of the Zhenjiang Foreign Affairs Office. "We think of Zhenjiang as the key city for Pearl S. Buck touring. . . . Lots of tourists come to Zhenjiang to see Pearl Buck's former residence. A lot of scholars, high-level scholars."

Yet she's no easy sell, even in her Chinese hometown.

Buck's books may no longer be forbidden, but they're still hard to find. Workers at the Xinhua Bookstore, the biggest in town, said they didn't carry any of her titles.

One smartly dressed woman, stopped at random on the street, said she had never heard of Pearl Buck. A man didn't recognize her name, seeming to think she was still alive. "I don't know her," he said.

That lack of knowledge is not for lack of effort.

Buck's childhood home in Zhenjiang has been restored and opened to the public. In 2002, the city celebrated the 110th anniversary of her birth, and two years later renamed a park Pearl Square, an honor in a nation where public space is at a premium. Today the square serves as an "English corner," where young Chinese practice their speaking skills. Not far from here, in the mountain resort city of Lushan, leaders in officially atheist China have renovated the church where Buck's father preached.

And many ordinary people here do know her. Cabdriver Ming Xue said he had read several of her books. And Jun Dong, a doorman at the Best Western Zhenjiang International Hotel, said, "We learned a lot about her in school."

Authorities here have joined PSBI to create the Pearl S. Buck Scholars program, which sends motivated poor students to high school at the Zhenjiang No. 2 Middle School, where Buck went to class and later taught.

"It's become more and more of a bonding partnership," said John Long Jr., a PSBI board member and former chairman, who first journeyed here about five years ago.

Today, most photos of Buck show her as gray-haired and matronly. But in Zhenjiang she was a girl, born into one culture and immersed in another. In China's good earth are buried the mother she adored, the father she detested, siblings she barely knew.

Here she grew up as a blue-eyed, blond-haired minority, taunted by other children as a "foreign devil," a discrimination that fueled her later work for racial tolerance. Perhaps most of all, she devoted herself to children, and specifically to the adoption of Asian and Amerasian children, who in the 1940s were believed to be "unadoptable."

Buck's life spanned the Boxer Rebellion, World War I, World War II, the Korean War, and the Vietnam War. She criticized both Mao and U.S. policy toward China. Even now, there are people in the United States who consider her a communist. She spoke out early for civil rights and women's rights - and did lasting damage to her reputation toward the end of her life by taking up with a dancing instructor half her age.

That scandal wasn't mentioned here last week as Chinese officials greeted delegations from Japan and Germany, along with PSBI affiliates from Taiwan, the Philippines and Vietnam, for an international symposium on Buck.

Her former home, atop Dengyun Hill, is a two-story, East India-style brick manse surrounded by modern apartment buildings and traffic noise from the streets below. The grounds are immaculate. And the house is enormous, even by current standards, its bedrooms leading to dens that lead to sitting areas.

Yet this centerpiece of the city's Buck promotion is open only part time. Thursday morning, the house drew precisely one visitor, and by noon the gates were locked.

Maybe that's no surprise. Zhenjiang, like many cities in rapidly changing China, is a place of contradictions, where the songs of rocker Avril Lavigne blast from store speakers, ads trumpet Swiss Tissot watches to people who mostly can't afford them, and elderly cadres in faded Mao suits shuffle across the square.

Zhenjiang is home to nearly three million people, roughly twice the size of Philadelphia, but small compared with Shanghai to the south and Beijing to the north. Once, this city was the capital of Jiangsu Province, and its rich farmland produced rice, wheat and cotton. But after the 1949 Communist victory, the provincial capital moved to Nanjing. Farming now accounts for about 4 percent of the city's gross domestic product. Today, businesses here make appliances, chemicals, paper, and parts for ships. And, of course, brown vinegar, known across China for its excellence.

It is Buck's own contradictions and dualities that fascinate scholars like Zhou, who holds a doctorate in applied linguistics. She teaches her English literature students about Hemingway, Eliot - and Buck, seeing in her so many of the home-family-work struggles that both inspire and frustrate Chinese women today.

"I want to be a good mommy, but I also want to be an excellent professor," Zhou said, using herself as an example. "Pearl Buck's novels about China are not out of date. She has very many insights into China and its people. . . . She's one of us."