Writing across the Pacific

Posted on November 21, 2025 by John Mark Ockerbloom

Born to American missionary parents, Pearl S. Buck lived in China for most of her first 42 years. Her first novel, East Wind: West Wind, was one of many she wrote about Chinese people and culture, at a time when Chinese were legally barred from migrating to the US, and widely discriminated against here. Jocelyn Eikenburg wrote in 2008 about how she saw some of her own cross-cultural experiences reflected in Buck’s novel, which joins the public domain in 41 days. #PublicDomainDayCountdown

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About John Mark Ockerbloom

I'm a digital library strategist at the University of Pennsylvania, in Philadelphia.
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5 Responses to Writing across the Pacific

  1. Nomdeb's avatar Nomdeb says:
    November 21, 2025 at 1:54 pm

    @everybodyslibraries.com @rayckeith Interesting & thanks for sharing. My MIL's grandfather wrote a book, published in Shanghai in 1930 – which (while having a Christian POV because he was a missionary at same time and near Buck, so they may have known each other) was a love story re Chinese man marrying a French woman. We recreated book as audio and ebook from PDF we found for my 90 year old MIL's birthday. Turns out she has a copy. We had hunted world wide to no avail!

    • Nomdeb's avatar Nomdeb says:
      November 21, 2025 at 1:56 pm

      @everybodyslibraries.com @rayckeith The publisher was bombed by the Japanese shortly after the book was published, so that might explain why so few copies of the book can be found. It was actually quite well received by the Chinese who said that the author understood Chinese culture and customs well.

    • John Mark Ockerbloom's avatar John Mark Ockerbloom says:
      November 21, 2025 at 2:00 pm

      @nomdeb @everybodyslibraries.com @rayckeith Interesting! Would you like to share the title and author of the book? (II might be able to find it in a resource like Worldcat or Bookfinder.)

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