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This class is about Chinese cultural anthropology. The essay must be no longer than 3 pages with

double-spaced. Two books are My Several Worlds by Pearl S. Buck 1954 and Chinese Family and

Kinship by Baker, H. D. R. 1979.

About Pearl, she was conscious of self as Chinese and understood Chinese people’s real life and

lingering resentment on a foreign exploitative power. Even though Pearl S. Buck was American, she

had a good grip of pros and cons of Chinese characteristics by observing various point of views. She

wanted that people needed to get away from generalities like weighing Chinese culture in the scales

of Western civilization and focusing on a difference in values.

 Chinese people who went to the west

and coming back with ideas of democracy and western cultures did not understand ethnic roots of the

original Chinese exactly. For pursuing national development, changes were inevitable. However, she

thought Chinese tradition like Confucianism which showed the roots of Chinese consciousness was

the essence of Eastern culture. By restoring and utilizing its true values and tradition, China possibly

sought better ways for the future because Confucian tradition and thinking was a much longer

duration on human understanding than any other western cultures, and it also could apply to western

countries. Thus, Pearl S. Buck was more Chinese than some Chinese.

About Baker, an individual is tied both to dead ancestors and to unborn descendants, in addition to his

or her living children. As Hugh Baker puts it with regard to Chinese kinship, there is a rope

representing the continuum of descent that “stretches from Infinity to Infinity passing over a razor

which is the Present. If the rope is cut, both ends fall away from the middle and the rope is no more. If

the man alive now dies without heir, the whole continuum of ancestors and unborn descendants dies

with him …

 His existence as an individual is necessary but insignificant beside his existence as the

representative of the whole. He believes that there are related connections in Chinese kinship which

are Father & Son relationship, Ideal of family (4-5 generation living together), lineage, and Ancestor

worship (Wufu, genealogy). Father & Son is the conception of time (duration) and Confucian doctrine

of life is new birth came in.

Questions are 1. What would Pearl Buck have to say if she read Chinese Family and Kinship? 2. How

could you imagine her reaction to the writing of Baker? 3. Would Baker’s treatment of the idea of

family, for example, be satisfactory to Pearl?