Why There May Never Be Another Pearl S. Buck

Understanding One Another in a World That Never Stops Changing

Human beings have never had easier access to other civilizations than they do today.

International travel has become commonplace. The internet has made information from every corner of the world instantly available. Artificial intelligence is lowering language barriers at an unprecedented pace. By almost every measurable standard, we possess far greater resources for understanding one another than people did a century ago. One might reasonably expect that genuine cross-cultural understanding would therefore be easier than ever.

Yet reality seems to point in the opposite direction.

Information about other countries has grown exponentially. Cross-cultural exchanges have become routine. And yet works that genuinely deepen understanding between different civilizations have not multiplied at the same pace. We know far more about one another than previous generations did, but it is far from clear that we understand one another any better.

Nearly a century ago, Pearl S. Buck received the Nobel Prize in Literature for portraying the lives of ordinary Chinese people with extraordinary humanity. Looking back today, however, she matters for more than what she wrote about China. She invites us to reconsider a question that belongs very much to our own time: in an age of limitless information, accelerating social change, and ever-faster communication, how do we truly understand people whose histories, cultures, and lived experiences differ from our own?

Why Understanding One Another Is Harder Today Than It Was a Century Ago

If we could travel back to the early twentieth century, the greatest obstacle to understanding another civilization would almost certainly have been the lack of information.

International travel was expensive, communication across continents was slow, and for most people foreign societies existed largely as distant names on a map rather than places that could be observed over time. Pearl S. Buck’s years of living in China were therefore not simply a personal experience; they gave her access to a world that remained invisible to most Western readers.

Today, that kind of distance has largely disappeared. Millions of people study, work, and travel across borders. Information circulates globally within seconds, while artificial intelligence is making language itself less of a barrier than ever before. Judged purely by access to knowledge, we enjoy advantages that Buck’s generation could scarcely have imagined. By every practical measure, understanding another society should have become easier.

Yet the challenge has changed.

The difficulty no longer lies in the scarcity of information. It lies in the changing nature of the societies we seek to understand.

China changed during Buck’s lifetime, just as the United States did. But those changes unfolded over decades. A careful observer could spend years living within a society, gradually testing impressions against experience while the society itself remained recognisably continuous.

That continuity can no longer be taken for granted.

Technological revolutions reshape everyday life with remarkable speed. Demographic shifts transform families and communities. Global flows of capital and information redraw social realities, while artificial intelligence is beginning to reshape how knowledge itself is produced and shared. Changes that once unfolded over generations may now occur within only a few years. An observer may carefully build an understanding of a society only to discover that the society itself has already changed.

Cross-cultural understanding therefore faces a fundamentally different challenge today. The object of observation is no longer relatively stable; it is constantly evolving.

Understanding another civilization increasingly resembles an ongoing process rather than a completed achievement. Yet the rapid pace of change alone does not fully explain why genuine understanding remains so difficult.

Something else has changed as well: the environment in which understanding itself is formed.

Why More Information Has Not Produced More Understanding

If the accelerating pace of social change has made other societies harder to understand, the modern information environment has changed something equally important: the way understanding itself is formed.

Over the past century, access to information has been transformed beyond recognition. Today, anyone with an internet connection can read foreign newspapers, browse historical archives, examine economic data, or compare competing political perspectives within minutes. In terms of access alone, humanity possesses resources that Pearl S. Buck’s generation could never have imagined.

Yet the growth of information has not automatically produced a corresponding growth in understanding.

The problem is not that information is false. More often, the problem lies in how information reaches us—and how it shapes the way we interpret the world.

Every society generates an almost limitless number of stories every day. Some people thrive amid change while others struggle. Some welcome new policies while others oppose them. Some gain opportunities while others lose familiar ways of life. Together, these countless experiences constitute the reality of a society. No individual, however, can ever witness them all.

Every act of communication therefore involves selection.

Newspapers decide which stories deserve front-page coverage. Editors determine what merits publication. Digital platforms decide what appears on millions of screens. None of this is inherently problematic. No media system could possibly present everything that happens in a society.

What has changed is the environment in which those selections compete for attention.

Information has become virtually limitless, while human attention remains finite. Every article, every video, every headline must compete within seconds to be noticed. Under these conditions, visibility increasingly becomes a prerequisite for survival. The stories that spread most rapidly are not necessarily the most important ones, but they often become the starting point from which people form impressions of an unfamiliar society.

This does not create a false reality.

It creates a partial one.

Every news report, every documentary, every statistical indicator reflects something genuine. Yet none of them, taken alone, can represent an entire society. As more people come to know other countries primarily through an endless stream of selected information, what they encounter is no longer a continuously unfolding social reality but a sequence of carefully filtered fragments.

For cross-cultural understanding, the consequences are profound.

Understanding is not simply the accumulation of facts. It requires new experiences to be placed alongside earlier ones, old assumptions to be tested against new realities, and apparently contradictory observations to coexist before they can gradually reveal a larger picture. Such understanding demands continuity, patience, and time.

Modern communication excels at something different.

It tells us what happened with extraordinary speed. It is far less capable of helping us understand why events unfolded as they did, how they emerged from longer historical experiences, or what they actually mean to the people living through them.

Perhaps that is why the scarcest resource today is no longer information itself.

It is an environment in which understanding is still allowed to grow slowly.

Read from this perspective, Pearl S. Buck’s significance extends far beyond the China she portrayed. What deserves renewed attention today is not simply what she wrote, but the radically different way in which she observed another society.

What Did Pearl S. Buck Really Leave Behind?

By this point, Pearl S. Buck may deserve to be remembered for something rather different from what she is most commonly praised for.

For decades, she has often been celebrated as the writer who introduced a “real China” to Western readers. That remains an important part of her historical legacy. Yet viewed from today’s perspective, it is no longer sufficient to explain why her work continues to matter.

No book can permanently represent a nation.

The China portrayed in The Good Earth belonged to the first half of the twentieth century. The China of today is profoundly different. Nor can any writer ever capture the entirety of a civilization. Every society exceeds the limits of any single observer, however perceptive that observer may be.

If Pearl S. Buck still deserves to be read today, it is not because she provided definitive answers about China.

It is because she demonstrated a way of arriving at understanding.

That distinction matters.

Buck did not begin with abstract questions about political systems, national character, or civilizational identity. Instead, she began with ordinary lives. Land, harvests, marriage, family, illness, ageing, and death occupy much of The Good Earth. Readers do not first understand China and then come to understand Wang Lung. Rather, through Wang Lung’s life, a particular historical China gradually comes into view.

The sequence is more important than it first appears.

There are, broadly speaking, two ways of approaching another civilization.

One begins with large concepts and attempts to fit individual lives into an already established framework. The other begins with actual people and allows broader patterns to emerge only gradually through accumulated experience.

The first produces generalisations.

The second makes understanding possible.

The difference is not merely literary; it reflects two fundamentally different habits of thought.

Institutions ultimately shape human lives. Culture ultimately reveals itself through relationships, choices, and everyday experience. When observation remains at the level of abstraction, it easily produces elegant explanations that are nevertheless incomplete. Only by returning repeatedly to concrete lives can the full complexity of a society begin to emerge.

Perhaps this explains why people who have spent many years inside another society rarely become more confident in making sweeping claims about it.

Quite the opposite.

The longer they observe, the more conscious they become of regional differences, generational differences, class differences, and the countless contradictions that coexist within every society. Extended observation seldom produces greater certainty. More often, it produces greater humility.

That, perhaps, is Pearl S. Buck’s most enduring lesson.

She did not leave behind a final interpretation of China.

She left behind a discipline of observation.

She refused to let abstract concepts arrive before lived experience. She allowed understanding to grow slowly, patiently, and always through the lives of real people rather than through simplified ideas about an entire civilization.

Viewed from today’s world, that approach may be more valuable than ever.

Modern communication makes it remarkably easy to form impressions of entire countries.

It has become far more difficult to encounter the ordinary people who actually live within them.

If Pearl S. Buck still speaks to us today, it is not because she explains China.

It is because she reminds us where genuine understanding has always begun:

with people.

Can We Still Understand One Another This Way?

The question raised at the beginning of this essay now returns in a different form.

Why does it seem so difficult to imagine another Pearl S. Buck today?

The answer is not that curiosity about other cultures has diminished, nor that opportunities for cross-cultural experience have disappeared. If anything, we possess advantages that earlier generations could scarcely have imagined. We travel more easily, communicate more freely, and gain access to vastly more information than ever before.

What has changed is the environment in which understanding itself takes shape.

Societies now evolve at a pace that earlier generations rarely experienced. New technologies reshape everyday life. New generations introduce different assumptions and values. Ways of living, working, and communicating continue to shift. A society carefully observed today may not be quite the same society a few years later.

At the same time, the conditions of observation have also changed. Modern communication enables us to know more about distant societies than ever before, yet it also encourages knowledge to arrive as a continuous stream of disconnected events. We learn quickly what has happened. It is far more difficult to see how those events relate to one another, how they emerge from longer historical experiences, or how they are lived by ordinary people.

This is the challenge that distinguishes our age from Pearl S. Buck’s.

Her generation struggled to gain access to unfamiliar societies.

Ours struggles to remain attentive to societies that continue changing while we are still trying to understand them.

That difference does not render Buck’s method obsolete.

It changes the way her method must be understood.

For much of the twentieth century, cross-cultural understanding could still be imagined as the gradual accumulation of knowledge about a relatively stable society. Today, such stability can no longer be assumed. Understanding therefore becomes less a destination than an ongoing discipline—one that must remain open to revision because its object is itself constantly evolving.

Seen in this light, Pearl S. Buck’s enduring contribution was never that she explained China once and for all.

It was that she refused to separate a civilization from the people who lived within it.

She did not begin with abstract conclusions and then seek lives that confirmed them. She began with ordinary lives and allowed a society to reveal itself gradually through them.

That distinction may matter even more today than it did a century ago.

Modern societies have become more dynamic. Information has become more abundant. Public debate has become faster. None of these developments makes understanding impossible. They simply make premature certainty easier to achieve.

Perhaps this is why Pearl S. Buck continues to deserve our attention.

Not because she offered a definitive interpretation of China.

But because she demonstrated a discipline that remains difficult in every age: resisting the temptation to believe that a civilization can ever be understood before the lives of its people have first been understood.

The circumstances have changed.

The task has not.

By Voice in Between