“Showing what it is to be Chinese”

At first glance, it seems unusual for a novelist and political activist who was widely regarded as the epitome of intercultural bridge-building between the East and the West to neglect in her fiction the most evident site of East–West contact scenarios: the American Chinatown. By the middle of the twentieth century, Pearl S. Buck, celebrated as America’s “best-known authority on Asia” (Conn 1996: 257) and its “singularly significant spokeswoman for China” (Liao 1997: 15), had already published a large number of novels with the recurrent theme of intercultural understanding and tolerance. However, these texts, like her most famous novel The Good Earth (1931), had been set either in Asia (especially China) or the United States, ¹ but had rarely addressed American and Chinese subject matter and locations “within the pages of one book” (Doyle 1965: 134). Thus, the publication of Kinfolk in 1949 represents an exception in Buck’s oeuvre: first, it marks the beginning of the author’s later works, which tend to combine these two settings more closely. Secondly, and even more importantly, Kinfolk is the only novel in which Buck introduces Chinatown at all. Yet for Buck, this Chinatown is not an ideal setting to communicate her intercultural message, for it is not made out as a contact zone which brings two cultures together easily.