Pearl S. Buck (1892–1973)

Pearl Buck grew up in China. Her parents were missionaries. She learned Chinese before she learned English. She played in rice paddies and village streets. She watched farmers pull water from wells. She watched children eat and sleep and die.

She became famous for The Good Earth, a novel about a Chinese farmer and his land. Then she left China, and after 1949 she could never go back.

"The Good Deed" is about someone in the same position. Old Mrs. Pan has been carried from her village to New York. She sits all day where she cannot see out of the window. Buck does not tell you that she is homesick. She shows you the ivory chopsticks, the water that tastes of metal, the two taps the old woman cannot tell apart.

Buck understood that an old woman in a back room is not peripheral. She is the centre of her own story — and, by the end, of everyone else's.

She received the Nobel Prize in 1938. She was the first American woman to win it.

Her Nobel Lecture (1938) is called "The Chinese Novel". An American, speaking to the Swedish Academy, said that it was the Chinese novel, not the American one, that had made her a writer. Read it at NobelPrize.org.