| Celebrated for her sparkling idealism and boundless optimism though,American author Pearl S.Buck emerged in reality as one of the most controversial figures in the cross-cultural landscape between China and the United States throughout much of the twentieth century.Pearl Buck embarked on her literary career at a time when China was undergoing an unprecedented wave of social,political,cultural,and intellectual transformation in the wake of the collapse of Confucian orthodoxy.Profoundly involved in the historic movement,she identified with her contemporary Chinese intellectuals in the quest of the reconstruction of China's cultural and national identity.From the socio-historical and cross-cultural perspective,the dissertation,in the context of China's rapidly shifting power dynamics between tradition and modernity,endeavors to examine Pearl Buck's traditional Chinese humanistic ideal and the resulting predicament on the basis of the textual analysis of her Chinese-themed writings.Pearl Buck's traditional Chinese humanistic ideal was largely inspired by her experience with assisting John Lossing Buck in his effort to conduct the fieldwork on China's farm economy in Nansuchou.Through her keen observation of and superior intimacy with the Chinese peasantry,she acquired a wealth of first-hand knowledge of the heartland of rural China,which allowed her to artistically represent an authentic pre-modern rural Chinese community in The Good Earth.In contrast to Westerners either enslaved by modern scienticism or tortured by the guilty conscience resulting from the reverence of God,Wang Lung and his like-minded Chinese peasants,subject to hostile living conditions though,maintain an overwhelming sense of inner freedom and deliver a prevailing tone of optimism,both of which coincide with the quintessence of traditional Chinese aesthetic culture.Pearl Buck in The Good Earth constructed an "agrarian utopia" characterized by a harmonious blend of moral Confucianism and emotional Taoism,creating a cyclical narrative structure compatible with the permanence of the rural lifestyle.Despite her penetrating nostalgia of the primitive simplicity and innocent rusticity,Pearl Buck awakened to the poignant fact that the century-old dynastic cycle,peaceful and powerful though,had encountered an unprecedented crisis from Western civilization.On the one hand,she lamented the alienation from the land that is associated with decadence and corruption.On the other hand,she identified the obsession with the land as the fundamental source of the inward-looking feudalistic ideology that prohibits China from being fully modernized.The agrarian past is irrevocably gone while the modern future remains vague and elusive.In response to the disintergration of her "agrarian utopia," Pearl Buck turned to newly emerging Western-educated Chinese intellectuals grappling with the promise of achieving Chinese modernity.In the two essays written during the early stage of her literary career,she expressed cautious optimism toward the dramatic change occurring in the minds of young Chinese,which inspired them to shake off the cumbersome cultural tradition though,alienated them from the fundamental expression of traditional Chinese humanism.She leveled relentless criticism against self-proclaimed cosmopolitan Chinese intellectuals,who disguised themselves under the cloak of patriotism but were far removed from their ancestral root.Rather than elite governance advocated by her most notorious detractor Kiang Kang-hu,Pearl Buck suggested a populist approach to modernizing China through intellectual stimulation.In Kinfolk,she portrayed a pair of sharply contrasted characters of overseas Chinese intellectuals:Dr.Liang,who indulges himself in fabricating and promoting a flawless image of Chinese civilization in the Chinese community of the United States,and his son James Liang,who instead seeks to awaken the spirit and illuminate the mind of the grassroots Chinese by returning home to apply his medicinal expertise for the benefit of his countrymen.His "enlightenment" journey,however,ultimately evolves into a root-seeking "pilgrimage" as Pearl Buck,in her effort to allow James to fully assimilate himself into his native land,both physically and spiritually,created a conciliatory figure Yumei as the cultural mediator to dilute the irreconcilable tension between the conventional value of rural China and the brand-new mentality from the modern West.The delicate balance in which "Western mind" dissolves into "Chinese consciousness," in the final analysis,unveils Pearl Buck's inner anxiety to struggle with the search of cultural identity as a "Third Culture Kid."Unlike radical Chinese intellectuals seeking to break with Confucian culturalism,Pearl Buck was convinced of the powerful sustainability of its dominant form,Chinese familism.which epitomizes a deep-rooted humanistic spirit essential to the rise of national consciousness.In the novel Dragon Seed,she delivered a distinct tone of idealism by describing how a traditional Chinese rural family awakens to the call of nationalism,implying that China's national identity is largely defined by its cultural ethos rather than political entity,Although she identified the urgency of transforming the conventional Chinese perception of the world,Pearl Buck,to a substantial degree,romanticized cultural universalism in the process of shaping Chinese nationalism.Her cross-cultural imagination of China as a modern nation state,therefore,also demonstrates a predicament of her traditional Chinese humanistic ideal.While most of the Western Sinologists,on the premise of the parochialism of Confucianism,interpreted the rise of modern Chinese consciousness as an effective response to the impact of Western civilization,Pearl Buck in her Chinese-themed writings,through the portrayal of the rural Chinese family tightly associated with the land,perceived the core value of traditional Chinese humanism as the internal driving force to transform the outlook of the "old" China.However,trapped by her deeply entrenched "Chinese consciousness." Pearl Buck demonstrated a consistent tendency of idealism to reconcile Chinese tradition with Western modernity.Her vision of modern China more implicitly points to a distant past rather than a foreseeable future,which in the deeper sense echoes her status of "cultural marginality" to bury her"wandering soul" into the spiritual root. |
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