Book Review: The China I Knew and My Several Worlds

Title: The China I Knew (condensed from My Several Worlds)

Author: Pearl S. Buck

Date: 1954

Publisher: John Day Co.

ISBN: none

Quote: “[T]his is not a complete autobiography. My private life has been uneventfully happy.”

The question is whether you can be content with the condensed version of Pearl Buck’s memoir, or must have the long one. I’ve read both. If you have the luxury of time to read a long book, get My Several Worlds; Buck had enough memories to make it worth reading. If you’re not sure how much time you want to spend with one of the most remarkable women of her generation, The China I Knew is a good short read.

Briefly, as a missionary child Buck was allowed more contact with Chinese people than many missionary children, remaining in Asia even after the revolution. She studied Chinese with native teachers; apparently she was the sort of borderline child prodigy who finds adults more interesting than children until they’re old enough to tutor or baby-sit, and her friends were mostly Chinese women. She understood the things people said about “the foreign devils,” and often heard instances of kindness, as when people not exactly ready to be baptized listened to her father’s evangelical sermons: “He is making a pilgrimage in our country so that he may acquire merit in Heaven. Let us help him to save his soul!” a Chinese elderwoman shushed the restless audience. Among themselves she often heard Chinese people laughing at foreigners, but “more often than not” someone would “say tolerantly” that “these Christians...do their best and we must not blame them for what they do not know. After all, they were not born Chinese.”

She describes Chinese cooking, child care, footbinding (already on the way out of fashion) and men’s “pigtails” (ditto), but of the things Buck saw in old China, perhaps the most relevant to new China is the way “the Manchu invasion of 1644 was success­ful in a military sense...the philosophical but intensely practical Chinese per­suaded them to move into palaces and begin to enjoy themselves...Since the Manchus were encouraged to do no work, the actual and tedious details of government were soon performed by Chinese...The Manchus were like pet cats.”

I don’t do foreign policy so I’ll stop there.

Buck knew children who were sold as slaves, who had no recourse against abuse but, as a status symbol, were often well treated. (The ones she knew were probably overworked and underfed, and complained about as much as well-off teenagers do.) She knew people who didn’t know how to walk up and down stairs. She met a woman who asked wistfully, “Is it true your husband speaks to you in the presence of other people? Not shameful?” (It was “shameful” for him to talk to his wife instead of his parents during family time, rude for her to talk to his female relatives unless she was spoken to—“This rigorousness of family decorum was of course not to be found except in the...most conservative Chinese families.”) As China briefly considered gradual change rather than revolution, another friend said to Buck, of daughters, “Small feet or education she must have, one or the other” (in order to marry well and maintain social status).

The longer version of Buck’s autobiography contains more personal stories, notably the one about why the second child in The Good Earth had brain damage: Buck had a brain-damaged child and became an advocate for those with cognitive impairments. The short one contains most, not all, the vignettes of Old China.