Pearl Buck's Final Plea

In the early 1970s, Pearl Buck ( 赛珍珠) – the Nobel Prize-winning author of The Good Earth, who has been called "the most influential Westerner to write about China since thirteenth-century Marco Polo" - was in her late 70s. Her personal life was in disarray and she was ill with terminal lung cancer. She desperately wanted to do one thing before she died: return to China, the nation in which she had grown up and in which her parents were buried.

Buck pulled every string she could, even involving U.S. President Richard Nixon in her effort to get a visa. But, in the end, her application was summarily rejected:
 
Dear Miss Pearl Buck:
 
     Your letters have been duly received.
 
     In view of the fact that for a long time you have in your works taken an attitude of distortion, smear, and vilification towards the people of new China and its leaders, I am authorized to inform you that we cannot accept your request for a visit to China.
 
     Sincerely yours,
 
     H.L. Yuan

    Second Secretary
 
Buck was not a woman given to self-pity – she described her private life as "uneventfully happy, except for a few incidents," which presumably included her three dead siblings, buried in Shanghai; weathering the Boxer Rebellion in Zhejiang; a stern and absent father who left his family to fend for itself while he preached the gospel to uninterested Chinese; beating dogs away from the corpses of dead babies as a child in rural Jiangsu; a loveless first marriage; a brain-damaged daughter "who never grew;" and the inability to become pregnant again, to name a few  – but the barbed denial seems to have rent her heart:
 
     The letter – the letter! It lies there like a living snake on my desk – a poisonous snake…[It] threatens me now and refuses to allow my return to the country where I have lived most of my life…[it] is an attack, not a letter. It is violent, it is uninformed, it is untruthful.
 
The letter was all those things, and more, but there was nothing she could do about it. So, she fell back on her lifelong habit of turning disappointment into productivity and wrote yet another novel: about a young American named Rann Colfax who sets out to visit China, but never makes it there. Buck largely completed the novel, entitled The Eternal Wonder, but it vanished after her death on March 6, 1973. Amazingly, the manuscript was discovered last year by an auction hunter who found it among the contents of an abandoned self-storage unit in Fort Worth, Texas. The manuscript was sold back to Buck's family and published in October 2013 by Open Road Press, with a foreword by Buck's son and literary executor, Edgar Walsh.