Pearl Buck in China (54 page)

9
Pearl as president of her class, standing surrounded by the other girls at Randolph-Macon Woman’s College in 1913.

10
Pearl and John Lossing Buck on their wedding day, May 30, 1917, in the Sydenstrickers’ garden with her parents (far left), her sister, Grace (center right), and colleagues from the Zhenjiang and Nanxuzhou mission stations.

11
Lu Sadze (with her baby and absconding husband): the village woman who saved the lives of the Buck family by hiding them in this hut in Nanjing in 1927.

12
Xu Zhimo, the Chinese Shelley, a charismatic role model for writers of his generation until his early death in 1930.

13
Xu Zhimo (second from right in front row) when Pearl first met him in May 1924, photographed with a group of young Western-educated intellectuals at Nanjing’s Southeastern University during the visit of Rabindranath Tagore, who sits behind Xu with the distinguished Confucian scholar Gu Hongming.

14
Wang Lung the farmer: this photograph was picked by Pearl for reproduction in
Asia
(vol. 28, no. 9, Sept. 1928), because she said the man in it looked just like the hero of
The Good Earth.

15
Richard Walsh, who published
The Good Earth,
in China in 1934: “there he was, lean, brown, and handsome, and smoking his old briar pipe.”

16
Richard and Pearl with the first two of their six adopted children at home in the garden of Green Hills Farm, Pennsylvania.

17
An MGM film crew shooting
The Good Earth
on location near Shanghai in Pearl’s final weeks in China in 1934 (from the Shanghai magazine
Liangyou,
May 13, 1934). The footage was destroyed by government officials before it left the country, and Pearl herself never saw China again.

18
Pearl in 1938 when she won the Nobel Prize for literature: “Her beautiful gray-green eyes were as clear as jade, frank, and sparkling… her uneven mouth was cut like a gash in her expressive face. She was attractive, friendly, natural, easy to be with, but I had a feeling she had never been young.”

19
Pearl as a widow in her seventies, with her dancing instructor, Ted Harris. She said he had the looks of a Greek god together with the glamour of President Kennedy. She set up a lavishly funded foundation with Harris at its head until public scandal forced his resignation, but he remained at Pearl’s side as her closest companion to the end of her life.