Living Elsewhere

Pearl S. Buck, the first American woman who won the Nobel Prize for literature, is one of the most world-wide read writers in the 20th century. Pearl acknowledges herself an American as well as a Chinese. Her great success and her inevitable sorrow are all due to her special life experience.Throughout the history of studies on Pearl Buck, most articles , which areconcerned about her cultural identities, actually discuss her nationality-- whethershe is an American or a Chinese culturally. This paper tries to search for her multicultural identities from her short stories and non-fictions, which are not fully studied yet. Here the multicultural identities are not only defined by nationalities. Pearl's multicultural identities are made up of her gender as a woman, her race as a white, her family root as a missionary daughter, and her career as a famous and popular writer, besides the well discussed nationalities. The word "world", quoted from the title of Pearl's autobiography My Several Worlds, is used here to represent different levels of her life. Since she is a combination of these worlds, she lives in no single world, but always elsewhere.This thesis is divided into five parts. Chapter One gives a very brief introduction to Pearl S. Buck and a special definition of culture and cultural identity to the case of Pearl. Chapters Two to Four try to find traces of Pearl's multicultural identities from her short stories and non-fictions, mainly referring to The First Wife and Other Stories, China As I See It and My Several Worlds. Chapter Two is mainly about the Chinese world as she knew. Chapter Three mainly discusses her identity as a white in China and in America respectively. Chapter Four is the world of women, the only common issue in the East and West cultures. Finally Chapter Five is the conclusion. With the analyses of Pearl's multicultural identities embodied in her short stories and non-fictions, we get the conclusion that she is one of the most outstanding and successful intercultural speakers.