Rhapsody of Country Roads -6parkbbs.com

Rhapsody of Country Roads 6park.com

Kang Liao

6park.com

When I just moved to Monterey, CA from New York, NY in 1999, I heard that John Denver died when the airplane he was flying alone crashed into Monterey Bay two years earlier. I felt something at the time but could not figure out what it was. That something always remained in the back of my mind, but recently, it popped out when I was on a tour bus to Pearl S. Buck’s birthplace in Hillsborough zigzagging through the green mountains of West Virginia. His song suddenly sounded in my mind, “Country roads, take me home / To the place I belong / West Virginia / Mountain mamma, take me home / Country roads.” 6park.com

It may mean nothing to others, but to a mountaineer from West Virginia University, the connection is more than the alliteration between Monterey and Morgantown. The song has become a musical symbol and the official state anthem of West Virginia. Besides, I am from China. Like most other Chinese college students, the first time I learned something about West Virginia was through this signature song of Denver’s composed at about the same time when I began to learn English. It stirred my desire to see this “Almost heaven” place with “Blue Ridge Mountains” and “Shenandoah River” running through it.

In 1989, I came to West Virginia University thanks to the help of my only American friend at the time, Gaston Caperton, who was just elected the Governor of West Virginia. However, I was not in the Romantic or nostalgic mood that Denver’s song often evokes. I came out of the Tiananmen Square event. My family scattered to three places. I did not know what future laid before me, a scholar of English in the country where most people spoke the language more fluently than I did. In China, English was my forte. In 1989, very few scholars had the master’s degree in English from a British university. I even hosted an English teaching program on CCTV with Katherine Flower from BBC. But in this country, a master’s degree in English meant little. After working as a visiting scholar for two years teaching Chinese and Chinese culture, I decided to study Pearl S. Buck in a Ph.D. program, for I had found out that no doctoral studies had been conducted on this great woman of letters, who had contributed so much to the cultural exchange between China and the United States. Furthermore, West Virginia had the most complete collection of her manual scripts, books, and relevant materials.

Gradually, I buried the pain of my broken family in the studies, and Buck’s insight about cultural confluence shed light on the seemingly gloomy Sino-American relations in the post-Soviet Union era, to which Samuel Huntington referred as the “Clash of Civilizations.” Never was my academic study so closely related to my personal life. In four and half years, I completed the study and dissertation, which was converted to a book and published a year after I earned my Ph.D. degree.

How could I fail to make the connection just four years later? How could I forget Buck and West Virginia? I was too busy trying to make a living in this competitive modern world without much skill or knowledge of any practical use. Although I had a doctorate, who would hire a Chinese to teach Americans English? Although Pearl S. Buck used to be popular and won both Pulitzer and Nobel prize in literature, she was not taught at college level. The only job I could do was to use my language skills to translate legal, medical, financial texts, and to interpret over the phone for these industries and many other types of businesses as well as 911 calls and insurance companies. No literature but industrial literatures. No belles lettres but even swearwords of an angry customer had to be rendered verbatim.

That was why when I was selected to be the training manager by a telephonic interpreting company and relocated to its headquarters in Monterey, I did not think of Morgantown or Pearl S. Buck, the daughter of West Virginia. I was busy developing training programs in those industries and businesses, selecting and training trainers in certain languages, conducting training myself for new hires, as well as editing the company’s monthly newsletters. Only in one or two evenings a week when I was teaching translation to the graduate students at Monterey Institute of International Studies, could I sometimes mention literature and Pearl S. Buck. It was at those moments that I was most excited, discussing not only her contributions in translating a classical Chinese novel to English for the first time, but also her epical portrayal of the Chinese peasant life for the first time, her single-handed endeavor and success in changing the Chinese image in the West, in repealing the Chinese Exclusion Act, and in supporting China during the Second World War. It was at those moments that “all my memories,” as John Denver sang, “gather(ed) round her / Modest lady, … teardrop in my eye.” I know Denver was personifying West Virginia, but for me the state and her daughter blended into one and the same. Thanks to the academic freedom and interest of my students, my digression was well received as the necessary cultural background for translation between English and Chinese.

Those moments were few and far between, but they made me realize where my passion was. In my spare time, I lost no chance to talk about Pearl S. Buck to Chinese as well as American audience, at small gatherings, in the Library of Congress book club, and on a San Francisco Chinese TV station… I also met some scholars who had studied her in depth. I found that there was a myriad of people still interested in her works, and more and more were becoming interested as China’s status was getting higher and higher in the international society. They, both Americans and Chinese, wanted to learn what Chinese peasant life was like in the past so as to know the psyche of the majority of the Chinese people, what historic lessons could be drawn from the missionary movement, the Taiping Rebellion, and the Boxers... They found a repository of cultural treasures in Buck’s novels and essays.

Finally, in 2006, I was lucky to land a full-time teaching position at Defense Language Institute, where I can share my research results on Buck with students and other teachers. Ten years later, I was most fortunate to be invited by my alma mater to give the keynote speech at Pearl S. Buck Living Gateway Conference. This year, I was honored to have the opportunity to talk about the cultural contributions of Buck’s literary works at my Chinese alma mater, Beijing Normal University. And this month I was privileged to be the keynote speaker at Pearl S. Buck Teacher Institute run by West Virginia University. All the teachers are women, and the speech was delivered in the afternoon after a big lunch. I joked with the organizer and audience, "Thank you for such a delicious feast. I'm afraid we all ate too much and feel rather drowsy. Moreover, I am still a bit nervous speaking to beautiful ladies despite my 30 years teaching experiences. So, if I falter in the presentation, or anyone dozes off, blame it on the beauties and feast." They laughed, but the speech itself was a serious discussion of the implications of the Chinese Jews’ assimilation depicted in Buck’s novel Peony.

One of the activities of the institute was to visit Pearl S. Buck’s birthplace museum. On the way there, “I hear her voice in the morning hour she calls me / … Driving down the road I get a feeling / That I should have been home yesterday, yesterday.” It has been a long time since I last visited her birthplace. That was over 20 years ago. Now it is so different with many more exhibits collected and dug out by one woman, Phyllis Lubin-Tyler, who became the head docent five years ago. What a difference she has made! I am so happy to see the realization of Buck’s wish expressed in her book My Mother’s House: “If it ever lives again, and God grant it may for my Mother's memory, I hope it will live a new life, not for myself or for my family but for people. … For me that house was a gateway to America. May itlive again, my Mother's house, and may it prove for others, too, a gateway to new thoughts and dreams and ways of life.” Indeed, it is a gateway to the world that I did not know: the world of my countrymen so strange to the city slickers like me, the world of my ancestors so alien to my generation who grew up in the Communist regime, the world of cultural confluence where religions and ideologies did not matter so much, the literary world that entertains rather than educates and yet one gets educated in the entertainment, and where readers begin with care about the characters in her stories and end with care about similar characters in real life as did the Flying Tigers who went to China with copies of The Good Earth to fight for Wang Lung and O Lan during the Second World War.

Seeing what Phyllis Lubin-Tyler has done, I feel ashamed that I have done so little about Pearl S. Buck. Thinking of what Buck has done for Humanity: changing the Chinese image in the West with her novels about Chinese peasants, promoting the understanding between the East and West, fighting to repeal the Chinese Exclusion Act, supporting China in the War of Resistance Against Japan, adopting seven children of different races, establishing Welcome House for illegitimate children fathered by American soldiers, advocating women’s rights and the rights of ethnic groups, and many more other good deeds that exceed most missionaries’ preaching and theorists’ teaching, I feel obliged to do more for her and for others. Recalling how she was denied visa to visit China, her second home country where her parents and siblings were buried, I am saddened and want to cry out, “We owe her too much! Here a noble soul was born. When will there be another?” I want to let young people know what a heroine she was and how she did what she wrote.

If she could see from above, Pearl S. Buck would weep no more as she did in her last book China Past and Present for the visa denial. She would enjoy her revival in China: her former residence in Zhenjiang has become a tourist attraction; Nanjing University where she used to teach has set up her Memorial House; Pearl S. Buck Cultural Park has just opened in Zhenjiang last year; more than twenty doctoral dissertations and eighty master theses have been written on her literary works by Chinese scholars and students…

On the way back from her birthplace to Morgantown, one of the teachers who used to live in California commented to me, “Look! The curves of these rolling mountains look just like those in Monterey.”

“Yes, they do,” I agreed. “In more ways than one,” I said to myself. John Denver’s song again sounded in my mind: “Country roads, take me home / To the place I belong / West Virginia / Mountain mamma, take me home, / Country roads.” 6park.com

Country Roads by John Denver 6park.com

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oTeUdJky9rY