Graduate Journal of Asia-Pacific Studies
3:1 (2005), 12-23
The Joy of Fish to Swim Freely: Pearl Buck, Social
Activism, and the Orientalist Imagination
Bruce W. ESPLIN Utah State University AMERICAN PERCEPTIONS of China in the opening decades of the twentieth century were largely based upon the limited experiences of merchants, soldiers and missionaries in highly regulated treaty ports in semi‐colonial China or on the persistently anti‐Chinese propaganda of California and the American West. Little was understood about other regions of China: the arid west, the breadbasket north, or the various minority cultures spread throughout the land. In America, where southern Chinese immigrants outnumbered northerners and westerners, the cultural practices of one region came to be seen as representative of those of all Chinese. During this time of American imperial growth, Pearl S. Buck—author and activist—worked hard to present alternative representations of China. Although not always accurate, Buck’s attempt to portray Chinese people through her large body of works resonated in a far more realistic fashion than salacious works of exoticism. Informing the public through her popular fiction and her fervent social activism, Buck succeeded in debunking more myths about China than she created. Among critical circles, however, many scholars have challenged Buck’s ability and her right to talk about Chinese subjects. Such challenges to her authority as author stem from the notion that cultural outsiders are not privy to certain knowledge and understanding of cultural insiders, a primary premise of the postcolonial critique. This sort of reading has been applied to the way in which Pearl Buck approaches Chinese subjects. Against such a view of Buck’s work, I complicate this reading by suggesting that notions of Self and Other are not quite so distinct as is typically assumed. Further, I argue that the debate over authority and knowledge in Pearl Buck’s work illustrates the pervasiveness of hardened, exclusive conceptions of identity and knowledge, largely characteristic of Western epistemology, a paradigm currently guiding the global intellectual class. Concerned with universals, such a rationalist Western approach discounts alternative epistemologies as non‐intellectual, non‐rational, and overly spiritual. When either Chinese or Western scholars participating in this hegemonic discourse deny Buck’s authority, both are operating under the assumption that knowledge can only be gained by experience and not through observation or interconnectedness. I elucidate this aspect by first exploring a well‐known passage in Chuang Tzu in which the famous Taoist philosopher of the same name claims to understand the happiness of fish. Having examined this story as a potential counter to the dominant epistemology and as a model in which my argument is grounded, I return to Buck’s work to provide more specific analysis. 12
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The story begins as Chuang Tzu chats with his friend Hui Tzu on a bridge overlooking the Hao River. Upon seeing schools of fish swimming in the water below, Chuang Tzu proclaims: ‘See how the minnows come out and dart around where they please! That’s what fish really enjoy.’ Sceptical of how Chuang Tzu attained this knowledge, Hui Tzu asks Chuang Tzu, ‘how do you know what fish enjoy?’ Chuang Tzu replies that Hui Tzu already assumes he understands by asking him how he knew what fish enjoy and not why he knew this. For Chung Tzu, it is the simple; he can understand just by looking down into the water. 1
This classic story from Chuang Tzu has served as a cornerstone of Taoist philosophy for over two thousand years. Rather than accept Hui Tzu’s rigid epistemological conditions, Chuang Tzu suggests that knowledge can be absorbed a priori simply by being in close contact with others and by observing things in nature, a system with which man is intensely interrelated. One need not have first‐hand experience to make a meaningful claim to knowledge. Chuang Tzu’s anti‐rational epistemological approach opposes certain Western conceptions of compartmentalised knowledge, represented in this story by Hui Tzu. Chuang Tzu instead values the deep, interconnected understanding existing among living beings in nature. For those sharing Hui Tzu’s exclusive view, one can only gain knowledge through a rational process. Although such scientific thought does allow for broad generalisations regarding physical and psychological states, it does not account for irrational claims to another’s knowledge through these fundamental connections in nature. Robert Solomon describes this approach as ‘the Cartesian tradition in philosophy, with its schizoid division of mind and body, its lifeless view of the world as a mechanism detached from us and available for our exploitation, and its deductive quest for certainty.’ 2 Meaning is defined by exclusive experience that is not transferable to other beings or situations. If Chuang Tzu was not a fish, how could he really know what fish found pleasurable? No matter how earnestly one swims, one will never attain the understanding of a fish’s pleasure. Conversely, even by leaping out of the water, a fish could never understand a man’s pleasure. Scholars and critics have made similar assertions about Pearl Buck’s work and her position as a popular expert on China. How could Buck—a white, upper‐class American—possibly understand the plight of Chinese peasants, much less speak for them? In The Good Earth (1931) for example, Buck attempts to describe the dependence of the peasant farmer Wang Lung and his family on the land. His wife, O‐lan warns him: ‘“If the children drink and the old man have his hot water the plants must go dry.” Wang Lung answered with anger that broke into a sob. “Well, and they must all starve if the plants starve.” It was true that all their lives depended on the earth. Only the piece of land by the moat bore harvest, and this was because at last when summer wore away without rain, Wang Lung abandoned all his other fields and stayed the day out at this one, dipping water from the moat to pour upon the greedy soil.’ 3
When considered from the dominant rational Western perspective, Buck could not possibly speak with any authority about Chinese subjects. Yet, when examining her work from a truly alternative epistemological framework, such as that presented in Chuang Tzu’s observation, a priori claims to knowledge can be entertained. True, Buck is not a Chinese person, but having spent much of her life observing life in China in a number of cities and villages it may be that she can tell us what life was Esplin/The Joy of Fish to Swim Freely
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like for Chinese people as she saw it, just as Chuang Tzu could determine the happiness of fish. This is not to dismiss certain Orientalist characteristics of her writing. The dynamics of cultural power at play in her observations of another culture are indeed important in understanding her depictions. Instead of viewing her writing as the documentation of objective truths through ethnography, perhaps considering her work as a well‐informed attempt at relating what she claims to know more adequately situates her texts. Because Buck was an American who grew up living alongside Chinese culture, her first‐hand knowledge of China facilitated her rise to prominence as America’s popular expert on the country throughout the 1940s and 1950s, allowing Buck to exercise unchallenged authority in advancing her own, imagined, China. Interpreting her life and work through present critical approaches might suggest that while claiming to examine China from her unique perspective between both cultures, Buck capitalised on the latent cultural power drawn from her upper‐class, European American background and her inescapable Otherness as a foreigner in rural China. Such arguments have been made by scholars Mari Yoshihara and Christina Klein, who view Buck’s work as an influential contribution to an existing body of American Orientalist writing. While Buck sought to humanise Chinese people, her work does contain characteristics that some critics may identify as being Orientalist. Rather than dismissing Buck’s work as entirely exploitative, I argue that her intentions do matter. After considering Buck’s progressive politics and tireless efforts throughout her life to raise awareness about Asian social issues, it is difficult to view her work in such a harsh light. This is not to say that her good intentions justified certain essentialising tendencies, but instead that her life and work illustrate the difficulties of social activism as it is exercised across cultures. An advocate of social progress and cultural understanding, Pearl Buck aggressively tackled popular misconceptions about China while simultaneously solidifying her own appropriative gaze grounded within the American imagination. Achieving such tremendous influence in shaping American perceptions was not an arbitrary development, but was instead the result of her many years spent living and working in China. Pearl S. Buck was born on 26 June 1892, in Hillsboro, West Virginia, to Absalom and Caroline Sydenstricker, missionaries on a respite from duties in China. Shortly after her birth, the Sydenstricker family returned to China, where Buck would spend much of her early years. As a child, Buck witnessed first‐hand the tumult that accompanied the Manchu Qing dynasty’s slide into anarchy and revolution. China was a country in crisis; the once‐powerful Qing dynasty that had ruled the Middle Kingdom since the seventeenth century was crumbling. Corruption, strategic miscalculation and imperial hubris had left Qing China open to both internal division and Western gunboat diplomacy. Powerless to stop these foreign encroachments after its defeat by the British fleet in the Opium War of 1842, China gradually came under the domination of European colonial powers. 4
Anxious about their own interests in semi‐colonial China, American missionaries, traders and adventurers flocked to treaty ports ceded to European powers. Although the United States (US) never fought for its own colonial territory in China, the Open Door policy assured that US interests would share an equal 14
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footing with those colonial powers with Chinese territories. In 1900, Buck witnessed one particularly impassioned resistance to this assault on Chinese sovereignty: the Boxer Rebellion. Fearing for their safety, her family fled to the foreign stronghold of Shanghai. The brief revolt in Beijing, quickly quashed by a foreign allied task‐force, would not be her last brush with revolution in China. When the Qing dynasty finally collapsed in 1911, Buck had already left her parents in China and had returned to the US to attend Randolph‐Macon Women’s College in Lynchburg, Virginia, where she attained a degree and a teaching‐
assistantship. During the time she was away, a weak Republican government was established amongst the ruins of imperial Qing China. Surrounded by wayward regional warlords and an increasing number of Communist agents, the fledgling Republic could do little to thwart the forces of anarchy threatening from all directions. The illness of Buck’s mother, Caroline, brought her abruptly back to China in 1914. Three years later, she married John Lossing Buck, an American agriculturalist, and moved to a remote village in northern China until 1921, when she moved to the southern city of Nanjing. Buck taught English literature at the University of Nanjing until 1925, when she briefly returned to the United States to attend a masters programme at Cornell University. Back in China by 1926, she continued teaching at the University of Nanjing. China’s ongoing civil war finally reached the southern city in 1927, where Buck was threatened by advancing armies and forced to flee to Japan. Buck would return to China later that year, but a tense, xenophobic political climate proved too problematic for permanent residence. In 1934 Buck left China permanently, moving to Green Hills Farm, a rural community north of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, where she pursued her writing full‐time, building on the success of The Good Earth (1931) and other stories that she wrote while in China. 5 Just as she claimed to navigate a gulf between two fundamentally different cultures, Buck also bridged literary and popular worlds in her writing. Extremely prolific, Buck wrote dozens of books and essays throughout her career and was one of the most widely translated American authors. Most famous for her portrayals of the lives of Chinese peasant farmers in The Good Earth, Buck also wrote about the lives of other Chinese characters such as magistrates, revolutionaries and concubines. Well‐
received by the American public, her books enjoyed longstanding commercial success and an enduring popularity that has continued to grow in recent years. If publication, sales and a Nobel Prize were to determine one’s position in the literary godhead, she would have surely reigned as one of the great American authors after rising to fame in the 1930s. Yet as history shows, her books were largely consigned to obscurity by sceptical intellectuals and a highbrow literary establishment. To this day, Buck’s books remain undisturbed in their mid‐rung existence, primarily found on high school reading lists instead of in college literature classes. Even her most popular book, The Good Earth, whose enduring popularity continues to attract new readers and a wide circulation amongst middlebrow book clubs, remains a relatively ignored text that scholars are uneasy about approaching. A number of factors may have contributed to Buck’s lack of acceptance among American literary circles of her day, including her conscious employment of classical Esplin/The Joy of Fish to Swim Freely
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Chinese literary conventions, her continued association with Asia and even her very womanhood in a male‐dominated profession. As Peter Conn points out, Pearl Buck considered herself as an author constrained neither by Chinese nor American literary traditions. With this flexibility, Conn argues, Buck’s writing involved ‘using what she took to be the narrative devices and conventions she had learned from Chinese literature to represent Asian subjects for her English‐speaking audience.’ 6 One of these devices was her use of episodic scenes independent of larger plot structure, a technique that was prominent in classical Chinese sagas such as Luo Guanzhong’s fourteenth century novels The Three Kingdoms and Water Margin, but which may have not been appreciated by the rigid literary establishment at the time. Due to a well‐meaning determination to draw public attention to the greatness of classical Chinese novels, some critics have accused her of ‘going native’, or rejecting Western literary conventions for the classical Chinese, a sentiment that today might be interpreted as a sort of naive appropriation. Buck’s style also emulates the terseness and sparseness of description in novels such as The Three Kingdoms and Water Margin. Paul Doyle characterises this aspect of Buck’s approach by saying: ‘It does not at all rival the color or richness of the biblical imagery, principally because it follows the simplicity of word choice of the Chinese saga rather than the more imaginative and exotic coloring [sic] of the Old and New Testaments.’ 7 Without these cultural cues to draw upon, her English‐speaking audience may have missed the entire point she was attempting; in the narrow vision of the day, literary critics may not have imagined that great literary traditions may have existed outside of Europe and the Near East. Although Buck drew heavily on Chinese literary conventions, she was not constrained by them. Rather than remaining objectively detached from her characters as such conventions would dictate, Buck instead delves into their psychology. In Pavilion of Women (1974), for example, Madame Wu reflects at length on gender expectations imposed on her throughout her childhood and adult life. Coming to understand her own feelings and desires, Madame Wu transcends societal expectations, fashioning her own valued space out of a constraining patriarchal order. In one instance, as she leafs through Plum Flower in a Vase of Gold, Madame Wu contemplates the reasoning of Old Gentleman in forbidding his children to read books. ‘Now that she had put it into its cover again she saw that it was a very evil book. For such was the genius of the writer that the reader could find in this book whatever he wanted. For those who wanted evil, it was all evil. For those who were wise, it was a book of most sorrowful wisdom. But Old Gentleman was right. Such a book ought not to be put into the hands of the young. Even she, had she read it twenty years ago, could she have understood the wisdom?’ 8
In the present context, having paid more recognition to diverse literary traditions across different cultures, critics focus on how Buck appropriated Chinese conventions to construct inferior characters. Buck’s literal translation of Chinese terms for Western objects such as ‘electric shadow’ for movie, for example, may suggest she looked down on her Chinese characters. 9 Instead, I argue that because her translation for the word ‘movie’ as found in Pavilion of Women is literally accurate to the Chinese 电影 (dian ying), Buck credibly illustrates through language, the 16
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complexity of cultural exchange occurring with China’s increasing contact with the West in the 1930s. Heavily influenced by her own facility with the Chinese language, Buck’s unique writing process created further misunderstandings about her depictions. Scholar Mari Yoshihara asserts, for example, that Buck’s use of terse Chinese literary styles creates child‐like characters that reinforce Buck’s own superiority over them. ‘Such a style functions to construct Wang Lung and other Chinese characters as childlike figures who do not think beyond the simple matters of life.’ 10 While elements of this criticism ring true for certain larger narrative aspects of The Good Earth, such notions of childlike characters may stem from Buck’s unique method of mentally composing her stories in Chinese and then translating them into English. 11 Due to its terse and highly contextual nature, direct translations into English from Chinese could easily be mistaken as childish by those unfamiliar with the contextual complexities of the language, a concern of which Buck herself was aware. 12 Most importantly, in this type of criticism, interpretations rather than intentions form the basis for evaluative judgments. Yoshihara’s criticism justifiably illuminates the harmful results of such a style yet fails to account for Buck’s intentions and her writing process, and for the historical context that would motivate her to promote consideration of Chinese literary methods. Buck’s efforts to humanise a previously exoticised people through foregrounding relatable emotional reactions to common life events are rarely considered. This is not to say the harmful effects of such a style are at all defensible, but rather that Buck’s work should be evaluated within a contextualised continuum that accounts for her own motivations with reference to the prevailing notions of her time. In addition, readers should also be aware of how present post‐colonial contexts also influence readings of her work. From my own perspective, informed by current concepts of Western humanism, my reading of Buck’s texts involves a conscious approach to the question of intention, assuming a close relationship between author and text. While I do not intend to suggest that intention should determine each reader’s interpretation, I do argue that significant insight can be gained by considering the art, activism and life of the author in addition to the texts. Details from Pearl Buck’s life and the humanistic themes recurrent in her works provide evidence to suggest that she worked not to consciously further the cause of Western imperialism, but to affect social change in ways that were progressive for her time. Pearl Buck’s interest in Chinese literature and culture, sometimes perceived as a fixation, may have also contributed to her neglected status. As an actor typecast in a specific role, Buck’s name became inextricably linked with China. Her very success in writing about China and her resulting position as a national expert on that country pigeonholed her into a specific ethnographic genre. Only by assuming the penname John Sedges was she able to break out with The Townsman, a novel about American subjects, to moderate literary success. 13 Buck paid dearly for her perpetual association with Asian literature. With the resurgence of nationalism and communism and the emergence of fascism around the world in the 1930s, America’s literary establishment was not very receptive to fiction that portrayed Asians in a more sympathetic light. As Conn suggests: ‘Academics and lay persons alike saw Asia through Orientalizing lenses: the East remained Esplin/The Joy of Fish to Swim Freely
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exotic, inscrutable, irreducibly Other.’ 14 Perhaps also contributing to the literary establishment’s unease regarding Chinese subjects was the growing power of the Chinese Communists, as reported by writers like Agnes Smedley and Edgar Snow, who were living amongst the rebels and their leader Mao Zedong. When literary consensus shifted to embrace postcolonial themes of injustice and oppression, Buck was again left out, this time as an appropriating agent of the dominant culture. With sensibilities reversed, current critics would find it inconceivable that an upper‐class, white American woman could speak on behalf of Chinese peasants and their realities. Even as feminists celebrated similar figures in the 1970s for bringing to light the oppression of other ethnic groups—while admittedly overestimating the commonalities of their experiences—Buck’s contributions were largely ignored. 15 Pearl Buck advocated cultural understanding, not only through her writing, but also in her tireless efforts as a human rights activist. Drawing on her immense popularity and public influence as a Pulitzer (1932) and Nobel Prize (1938) winning author, Buck succeeded in calling attention to issues as varied as women’s rights in China, the struggles of Asian‐American children, and the US civil rights movement emerging in the 1940s. Like other eminent progressive women of her time, she sought to explore new ties with different cultures to gain different perspectives on important social issues of the day. Yet Buck’s scope was even grander; she entertained an almost utopian world‐view that attempted to situate these issues within universal human experience. Human reactions to life events like birth and marriage are areas where she tried to establish commonality between her Third World Chinese subjects and her First World American readers. While such a reductionist view does elide the specific hardships that those living in Third World poverty faced, her humanizing approach challenged prevailing notions of racial superiority and social Darwinism that imagined Asians as an inferior, teeming mass. All Men Are Brothers (1933), the title of her translation of the classical Chinese novel Shuihu Zhuan (Water Margin), reflects Buck’s attempt to illustrate the commonality of the human experience. Curiously, her translation of the novel ends with the one hundred and eight heroes of Mt. Liang gathered in the Hall of Loyalty and Justice, dutifully arranging themselves according to rank, thus omitting the second half of the novel which traces the military exploits of rebel leader Song Jiang and his men. Determined to make a difference, Buck founded the Welcome House in 1949 to help disadvantaged children. In addition to the seven multi‐racial children that she adopted and raised, Buck sought to uplift disabled and abandoned bi‐racial children through charity work. To achieve this goal, she established the Pearl S. Buck Foundation in 1964 with regional branches in Korea, Japan and Southeast Asia. Buck also initiated programs assisting disadvantaged populations of what she termed ‘Amerasian’ children, the half‐American, half‐Asian children that appeared after World War II and the Korean War. 16 Truly trapped between two worlds, these children were invisible to their ethnocentric governments; neither Americans nor Asians wanted to acknowledge their existence. Through her programmes, Buck fought for their access to medical care and education in their home countries. Not content to merely sponsor individuals, Buck also broached larger issues by advocating healthy diplomatic relations between the United States and the countries 18
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of Asia. Through her East and West Association, Buck spoke out against Chinese exclusion and the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II. Buck and her second husband Richard Walsh also published Asia, a magazine dedicated to the serious discussion of East Asia for an American audience. Featuring articles and reviews from international contributors in addition to well‐known American authors, the magazine eschewed exotic representations of the region for more realistic ones. 17 Unafraid to speak her mind, Buck was condemned by both American political extremes. The left resented her for her harsh criticism of the excesses of Chinese Communism under Chairman Mao, while the right feared her voice in calling for equal rights for African Americans, Asian Americans and women. In fact, Buck’s biographer Peter Conn reports that her FBI file, activated by J. Edgar Hoover around 1937,rounds out to a hefty 300 pages. 18 Buck’s East and West Association also folded after coming under scrutiny during the paranoia of McCarthyism in the 1950s. Buck’s refusal to accept the social status quo in American and Chinese affairs may have also contributed to her lukewarm reception among the prestigious literary communities of the day. Still dominated by the criteria of the upper‐class, white, European male, the patriarchal literary establishment may have perceived Buck’s attention to the daily lives of Chinese women as a threat. By meticulously illuminating issues such as foot‐binding and the sexual service of concubine‐hood in China in dry ethnographic terms instead of romanticised, exotic language, Buck
eschewed dominant tropes of the self‐absorbed, brooding, Europeanised male for detailed accounts of the everyday lives of Asian women. 19
A well‐meaning progressive activist, Buck was a trail‐blazer for a number of causes. Even though her contributions to the feminist and civil rights movements were far ahead of her time, they are usually still considered separately from her writing. By the 1950s, for example, Buck was encountering substantial resistance to her social commentaries from a number of quarters including mainstream magazines like The Ladies Home Journal and Look. 20 Although never formally called before Congress, Buck, similar to fellow American Sinologist Owen Lattimore, became a lightning rod for paranoid anti‐Communist witch‐hunts of the Joseph McCarthy years. Her outspoken opinions on American foreign policy and race relations threatened to drive her into obscurity during this time of encouraged outward consensus. Pearl Buck’s life and work presents a valuable opportunity to gain greater insight into the dynamics of cultural power in the Chinese‐American relationship and also into the complicated network of epistemological approaches existing between cultures. Although Buck is often associated with other like‐minded progressive women exploring different cultures at the time, her unique position as author, activist and popular expert in Sino‐American affairs demonstrates that she, indeed, occupied a special juncture between cultures. Further, as current postcolonial criticism is applied to Pearl Buck and her work, it is important to consider not only her own historical context, but also the inherent Western bias of postcolonial theory itself. As China emerges as an assertive power in charge of its own destiny, we American scholars should exercise caution when assuming that we are somehow redefining or distorting Chinese identity based on our own distorted imagination of Esplin/The Joy of Fish to Swim Freely
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the Orient. The implications of such an egotistical conception show the inherent inequality that is still levelled at Asia: ‘our culture is obviously more powerful and could harm yours, so we need to be more careful about the way we talk about you’. Edward Said’s critique of Orientalism forms the theoretical basis for this type of assertion. In Orientalism, Said argues that Western knowledge of Asia is based largely upon romanticised notions of an exoticised Other that the imperial West uses to legitimise its superiority over the subaltern. Although Said acknowledges that he offers no clear alternative to the Orientalist approach, he does argue that the subaltern must find a voice to assert its own identity, discuss its own culture, and make its own claims to knowledge. 21 Mari Yoshihara, in extending this critique and applying it to Pearl Buck, suggests that Buck contributed to ‘institutionalized forms of Orientalist expertise.’ 22 While Buck’s position of cultural power undoubtedly played a role in her work, there are two potentially problematic issues at play in such an assertion. First, cultural power in the Sino‐American context is not quite as easily defined as in the West‐Near East relationship that Said explores. Simply put, China is not as dependent on the West as Said’s example countries. Further, along with increasing economic power abroad, China is gaining more chances to show that its culture is not in crisis or as easily manipulated by outsiders as some might think. At present, the dynamics of the American‐Chinese cultural relationship may not as lopsided as Said argues in his West‐Near East example. Second, the broad application of Said’s Orientalist critique across such disparate cultures seems to reinforce the very pan‐Asian stereotypes that this type of criticism is intended to debunk. Third, his critique seems to say that only cultural insiders should be allowed to discuss the workings of the subaltern, even if outsiders have had significant experience in that culture. For these reasons, Pearl Buck’s exploration of Chinese culture as it pertains to today involves somewhat different dynamics than, for example, those of Mabel Dodge Luhan and her experiences with Native Americans in the American Southwest. Although Buck’s writing does reflect the nostalgic, ethnographic Zeitgeist of American imperial expansion at the turn of the twentieth century, she is writing about a culture that ultimately survives and resists foreign manipulation. Chinese resistance to Japanese and European aggression was something Buck witnessed throughout her years in China and with which she remained closely associated. Far from documenting a disappearing people who couldn’t speak for themselves, Buck remained open to criticism by active Chinese scholars and readers who often challenged her representations. Upon publication of The Good Earth, Chinese scholars like Kiang Kang‐Hu actively questioned the authenticity of her depictions of China. A professor at McGill University, Kiang Kang‐Hu offered one of the most visible critiques in the New York Times, arguing that the peasants and bandits Buck describes in the book no longer exist to the degree to which she describes them. He further challenges minute details of Buck’s descriptions such as the sprinkling of tea leaves on boiling water instead of placing them first in the cup. 23 Buck responded in the Times by arguing that, due to the immense size of the country and cultural variation from place to place, she only portrayed what she knew as accurate to the areas that she had lived in and not to the entire country. A critique by Korean writer Younghill Kang ran in a July 1931 issue of the New Republic, in which he claimed that Buck had created scenarios surrounding 20
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premarital sex and slave characters that would only happen in the West. 24 However, as Buck’s biographer Paul Doyle notes, several Chinese scholars and readers, such as philosopher Lin Yutang, found these representations to be accurate. 25 In fact, as Peter Conn notes, The Good Earth even received ‘admiring’ reviews in several Chinese journals. 26
Buck viewed the criticisms of the largely well‐educated, English‐speaking, upper‐class Chinese literati to be reactions against her potentially threatening depictions of the Chinese underclass. 27 The fact that she responded to Chinese scholars shows that, instead of merely presenting a uniform, exoticised people, she was concerned with the accuracy of her portrayals even down to local customs. After pursuing the Orientalist critique to its root, it becomes apparent that such rigid claims of knowing or not‐knowing are based on culturally situated epistemology, in this case, Cartesian‐influenced Western rationalism. By its very definition, Self is the exclusivity of knowledge, experience, and emotion, the foundation of Descartes’ famous declaration in Meditations: ‘I think therefore I am.’ By accepting the premise that individuals are confined by their birth‐culture—the West with Descartes and the East with Chuang Tzu—as the Orientalist critique suggests, we underestimate the value of cultural understanding and social progress. In fact, such rigid categories seem to reinforce the same exaggerated binaries of East and West that preclude such understanding. Of course, basic distinctions must be made to facilitate discussion, however, rather than accepting a false binary construction as the premise, perhaps a more complicated understanding of cultural exchange and contact would better open up fresh avenues of approach. This is not to say that no real distinctions exist between Self and Other, or that important means of identification should be overlooked. Instead, I argue that a more fluid, flexible conception of these concepts might facilitate greater understanding between peoples. In searching for new ways to approach culture, power and knowledge, some critics might argue that I am ignoring the historical oppression of the East by the West and that this paper itself is an Orientalist essentialisation of Chinese philosophy and culture. Some might claim that, in drawing on the cultural power ascribed to me as a Western, American male, I am overlooking my own biases and trying to define Chineseness for the Chinese. Further, some might suggest that in my attempt to foreground an alternative epistemological approach that is native to China, I am appropriating it from its original context and complexity for my own scholarly gain. While aware of these concerns and the delicacy of the issue, I am attempting to suggest alternative strategies in approaching Buck’s work that resist rationalism’s long‐standing hegemony over human relations. While not attempting to presume complete knowledge of another individual or group as the Chuang Tzu story might suggest, I argue that in order to mobilise substantial interest in activist causes, empathetic understanding that can be gained from similar observation and participation is necessary. As far as Chuang Tzu and its context are concerned, a rigorous examination to properly contextualise his “Joy of Fish” story lies beyond the scope of this essay. Further, Chuang Tzu’s stories actually stand best on their own, as passages often do not relate to each other due to errors in compilation and Chuang Tzu’s own mischievous efforts to befuddle the minds of his readers. 28 Esplin/The Joy of Fish to Swim Freely
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Upon evaluating Pearl S. Buck’s life and work with these considerations in mind, we are once again faced with the question of social activism in terms of well‐
meaning intentions versus appropriative gazing. Through Chuang Tzu’s fish story and his liberating embrace of natural interconnectedness, we can find room for the active pursuit of social justice, while at the same time realizing the practical limits of experiential knowledge that the current, rationally driven postcolonial moment requires. With this knowledge, we can better interrogate the current epoch of Western hegemony with its rigid notions of Self and Other, giving equal consideration to its actively exploitative elements in addition to the latent oppressiveness found in the assumption that Westerners can define the identities of the Chinese. As for Buck, by attempting to subvert racist world‐views that prevailed in her time, she demonstrated the power of the activist‐intellectual in promoting greater cultural understanding. By speaking to common Americans and Chinese, in addition to specialised scholars, Buck reached an incredibly broad audience who found her portrayals compelling and informative. Although it is easy to dismiss such well‐
meaning work as blatant essentialisation when considered outside of its historical context, by examining the balance of cultural power in her own time it becomes apparent that neither the ‘dogged Orientalist’ nor the ‘saintly progressive’ labels accurately categorise Buck’s life and work. Further, by examining the cultural basis of epistemological approaches currently guiding the global intellectual class, the rigid claims to knowledge and identity found in the Orientalist critique become manageable obstacles, not insurmountable divisions between static cultures. 22
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NOTES The Complete Works of Chuang Tzu, translated by Burton Watson., Columbia University Press, New York, 1968, pp.188‐9. 2 Robert Solomon, Continental Philosophy Since 1750: The Rise and Fall of the Self, Oxford University Press, New York, 1988, p.153, as cited in Louise Mills, ‘Riprap of Things: Subject and Object in Gary Snyder’s Early Poetry’, Western American Literature (WAL), 39,3, (2004), pp.313‐33. 3 Pearl S. Buck, The Good Earth, John Day Company, New York, 1931, p.57. 1
4 John King Fairbank, The Great Chinese Revolution:1800-1985, Harper & Row, New York, 1986,
pp.92-3.
5 Peter Conn, Pearl S. Buck: A Cultural Biography, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1996, p.xv.
6 Peter Conn, ‘Pearl S. Buck and American Literary Culture,’ in Elizabeth J. Lipscomb, Frances E. Webb and Peter Conn, eds, The Several Worlds of Pearl S. Buck, Greenwood Press, Westport, 1994, p.112. 7 Paul A. Doyle, Pearl S. Buck, Twayne Publishers Inc, New York, 1965, p.41. 8 Pearl S. Buck, Pavilion of Women, Moyer Bell, Wakefield, 1974, p.62. 9 ibid., p.53. 10 Mari Yoshihara, Embracing the East: White Women and American Orientalism, Oxford University Press, New York, 2003, p.155. 11 Pearl S. Buck, ‘Advice to Unborn Novelists’, Saturday Review of Literature, XI (1935), p.520, as cited in Doyle, p.40. 12 ibid. 13 Conn, ‘Pearl S. Buck and American Literary Culture’, p.113. 14 ibid. 15 Jane M. Rabb, ‘Who’s Afraid of Pearl S. Buck?’, in Elizabeth J. Lipscomb, Frances E. Webb, and Peter Conn, eds., The Several Worlds of Pearl S. Buck, Greenwood Press, Westport, 1994, p.106. 16 Peter Conn, Pearl S. Buck: A Cultural Biography, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1996, p.313.
17 ibid., p.172. 18 ibid., p.xvii. 19 Peter Conn, Pearl S. Buck: A Cultural Biography…, p.xiii.
20 ibid., p.322. 21 Edward W. Said, Orientalism, Vintage Books, New York, 1979, p.325. 22 Yoshihara, p.157. 23 Doyle, p.51. 24 ibid., p.49. 25 ibid., p 54. 26 Conn, Pearl S. Buck: A Cultural Biography…, p.127. 27 ibid. 28 Chuang Tzu: The Inner Chapters, translated by A.C. Graham, Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, Company Inc., 2001, p.27. Esplin/The Joy of Fish to Swim Freely
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