East Finally Understands the West

East Finally Understands the West I can sympathize with Rudyard Kipling’s frustration that "East is East, and West is West, and never the twain shall meet". It’s not because they are dichotic, but because of “Pride and Prejudice”. I thought I understood Pearl Buck, and wish that I could be face to face with her in asking her why she was not supporting the Nationalist government, since she was in the best university the capital, Nanking University, teaching English at the time. She must have believed that the world could provide us a better environment even with Japan’s invasion. Still I discovered something pinpointing to her heart and her heritage and her obligation to be a chosen dissenter to the Chinese Nationalist government by miscomprehension. From the backdrop of West Virginia as described by a very eloquent speaker, I learned that she was born in a lesser kind in America backwoods area like West Virginia, as this was clarified by a writer describing her wounded self-deficiency which prompted her to be sympathetic toward Chinese, and her belief that all of the Nationalist government were rich tycoons and needed to be replaced by Mao, the kind and humble farmers. Color of America America is not just black or white, or red, brown or yellow. America has class consciousness in addition to race issue. From author, Jeff Biggers’ book, “United States of Appalachia”, he tells how Southern Mountaineers Brought Independence, Culture, and Enlightenment to America. Though this region never was a political or economical center, it has another side of American intrinsic character. As he is from Southern Illinois, he understands this alienation that is lashing on the people as hillbilly, racist, in corn fields. But Jeff Biggers in his American eloquent and easy going way, unearths the unknowns and elaborates on the suppressed people by a natural force of an accepted norm of behavior inside the American culture landscape. He is very much like a Henan man in China to ask people to rethink and rediscover a belt of region that has been mislabeled for a long time. For Henan Province witnessed the last glory in the Northern Soong dynasty when it was forced out of the capital Kaifeng to establish the capital in the southern region, Hangzhou as the capital. The Cherokees had newspaper, in 1818, invented their own alphabets, and language. When he was 19 years old, Biggers hitchhiked through Appalachia and learned much of the local history in the process. He blurted out many personalities, such as Betty Smith, from Chattanooga. But one important figure was Pearl Buck (1892 – 1973), who was America’s first woman Nobel Prize winner in Literature. “In 1938 she won the Nobel Prize for Literature, after writing biographies of her parents, The Exile, and The Fighting Angel. She was the first woman from the United States to win the Nobel in Literature.” From United States of Appalachia to China. First of all, there is a deep consciousness in regional Appalachia. As opposed to the Bourgeois urban Americans, the Bostonians, the WASPs, there is an independent regional culture in America. So I finally understand Pearl Buck, in the context of the American author’s fast blurting out a sketch of the Appalachian region. In America, it is considered as a backward land, and not the first in rank. In Chinese minds, as a world underclass, she represents the upper class American. She married Richard J. Walsh, president of the John Day Publishing Company, on June 11, 1935. A life with the West Virginia missionary parents, and though later married into a Publishing Company owner, she always had the identity of West Virginia. The small family then moved to Nanjing, where Pearl taught English literature at University of Nanking. She had a touch of Nanjing and was very humane as she described some of the figures in the novel, though some are just plastic characters out of her imagination. For years, I wondered why as a missionary in China, and being with good families in China, Pearl Buck didn’t help the normal Chinese, but adopted an anti-current leftwing slant. This is because her sympathetic upbringing and her own Appalachia regional suffering gave her an inferiority complex and she needed to revolutionize and change the predicament of her station. She mistakenly thought that it was her calling to rid of the government and to give people a Mao for the farmers. To help the poor to anti-government is not the real way to give to people. Somehow, many people believe that if you help the communists, you are identified as for the underclass. Pearl Buck is a premiere example of many Americans who simply loved to paint their imagined China but let the real force and value be buried in time.