Pearl Comfort Sydenstricker Buck is born in Hillsboro, West Virginia, beginning a life that will bridge American and Chinese cultures.
On June 26, 1892, Pearl Comfort Sydenstricker was born in Hillsboro, West Virginia, in the home of her maternal grandparents. This rural Appalachian beginning contrasted sharply with the foreign mission field that would soon shape her life.
Her parents, Presbyterian missionaries Absalom and Carie Sydenstricker, returned to their post in China when Pearl was only a few months old, meaning that although she was born in the United States, her childhood and cultural formation took place largely in late Qing and Republican-era China.[11][1]
This birth in West Virginia positioned Buck at a crossroads of cultures. As an American citizen raised in China, she developed deep fluency in both English and Chinese language and customs, an experience that later enabled her to write with unusual authenticity about rural Chinese life for Western audiences.[12][1]
Her origins in a missionary family also exposed her early to religious debates, cross-cultural misunderstandings, and the social hierarchies of empire and race, themes that would inform her fiction and humanitarian advocacy. In retrospect, Buck’s birth in Hillsboro can be seen as the starting point of a life that would bridge East and West, reshape American perceptions of China, and influence global conversations around race, adoption, and women’s roles in literature.[11][3]
Images
