What do you think?
Rate this book
Tell the People: Talks With James Yen About the Mass Educational Movement
Paperback
First published December 1, 1984
27 people want to read
About the author
Pearl S. Buck
801 books3,125 followersPearl Comfort Sydenstricker Buck was an American writer and novelist. She is best known for The Good Earth, the best-selling novel in the United States in 1931 and 1932 and which won her the Pulitzer Prize in 1932. In 1938, Buck became the first American woman to win the Nobel Prize in Literature "for her rich and truly epic descriptions of peasant life in China" and for her "masterpieces", two memoir-biographies of her missionary parents.
Buck was born in West Virginia, but in October 1892, her parents took their 4-month-old baby to China. As the daughter of missionaries and later as a missionary herself, Buck spent most of her life before 1934 in Zhenjiang, with her parents, and in Nanjing, with her first husband. She and her parents spent their summers in a villa in Kuling, Mount Lu, Jiujiang, and it was during this annual pilgrimage that the young girl decided to become a writer. She graduated from Randolph-Macon Woman's College in Lynchburg, Virginia, then returned to China. From 1914 to 1932, after marrying John Lossing Buck she served as a Presbyterian missionary, but she came to doubt the need for foreign missions. Her views became controversial during the Fundamentalist–Modernist controversy, leading to her resignation. After returning to the United States in 1935, she married the publisher Richard J. Walsh and continued writing prolifically. She became an activist and prominent advocate of the rights of women and racial equality, and wrote widely on Chinese and Asian cultures, becoming particularly well known for her efforts on behalf of Asian and mixed-race adoption.
Buck was born in West Virginia, but in October 1892, her parents took their 4-month-old baby to China. As the daughter of missionaries and later as a missionary herself, Buck spent most of her life before 1934 in Zhenjiang, with her parents, and in Nanjing, with her first husband. She and her parents spent their summers in a villa in Kuling, Mount Lu, Jiujiang, and it was during this annual pilgrimage that the young girl decided to become a writer. She graduated from Randolph-Macon Woman's College in Lynchburg, Virginia, then returned to China. From 1914 to 1932, after marrying John Lossing Buck she served as a Presbyterian missionary, but she came to doubt the need for foreign missions. Her views became controversial during the Fundamentalist–Modernist controversy, leading to her resignation. After returning to the United States in 1935, she married the publisher Richard J. Walsh and continued writing prolifically. She became an activist and prominent advocate of the rights of women and racial equality, and wrote widely on Chinese and Asian cultures, becoming particularly well known for her efforts on behalf of Asian and mixed-race adoption.
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 of 1 review
January 10, 2018
These two interviews of China's great mass education activist and mastermind of rural reconstruction, Dr YC James Yen, by the great China-raised American novelist Pearl Buck, make for a brisk read, and do a great deal to illuminate both the content of Dr Yen's rural reconstruction work, and the background and admirable character of Dr Yen himself.
Buck recounts these interviews with elegance and deep sympathy, and intersperses her dialogue with vignettes from life in the surrounding rural Pennsylvania, drawing deliberate parallels between the Chinese farmer and the American farmer in order to build a sense of camaraderie and fellow-feeling for the former. This goes hand-in-hand with Dr Yen's own mission, as he himself understands it: he may care first and most deeply about the rural China he had lived in and belatedly loved, but his message is one of hope for the poor in other countries, in the world. We read Dr Yen's words and see his conviction that oeconomic cooperatives (credit, consumer, producer), appropriate technologies, basic literacy and basic public health knowledge form the basis for empowering poor communities - not only in Dingxian, not only in China, but throughout Asia, Africa and the Americas.
Dr Yen's personality shines through in these interviews. He is, first off, very much the model of the Chinese intellectual, with both the strengths and the weaknesses pertaining to that station. He has a remarkable sense of noblesse oblige, an overriding conviction that his personal concerns must take a backseat to his work, and that the focus of his work must be the rural poor, their basic needs, their education, their welfare, their aspirations. At the same time, there is a subtle hint of the messianism that infects much of the Chinese intelligentsia. (A much more subtle hint than that in Dr Yen's colleague, Liang Shuming, for example.) Dr Yen may not be egotistical about it - with typical modesty he repeatedly insists that he himself is not as important as the volunteers and local leaders he works with - but he is convinced that their social experiments and the answers they've found are of world-shaping importance.
Pearl Buck presents us with both of these facets of Dr Yen's character, as they are, through their dialogue, punctuated by some commentary of her own but nothing too intrusive or at all presumptuous. Buck has a decided eye for the well-placed aside, for the window wherein she can turn abstractions and theoretical discussion into something real, immediate and concrete. The topics of governmental corruption and the brutal war with Japan are ever present in the background, and she tries not to lay too much stress on either: the projects at Dingxian are, in both her view and Dr Yen's, more important than the external struggles and difficulties that they faced.
Again - this is a quick read. But it's worthwhile: a peek into a troubled time in China's history, and one of the bright spots in what was otherwise quite a dark and tumultuous era.
Buck recounts these interviews with elegance and deep sympathy, and intersperses her dialogue with vignettes from life in the surrounding rural Pennsylvania, drawing deliberate parallels between the Chinese farmer and the American farmer in order to build a sense of camaraderie and fellow-feeling for the former. This goes hand-in-hand with Dr Yen's own mission, as he himself understands it: he may care first and most deeply about the rural China he had lived in and belatedly loved, but his message is one of hope for the poor in other countries, in the world. We read Dr Yen's words and see his conviction that oeconomic cooperatives (credit, consumer, producer), appropriate technologies, basic literacy and basic public health knowledge form the basis for empowering poor communities - not only in Dingxian, not only in China, but throughout Asia, Africa and the Americas.
Dr Yen's personality shines through in these interviews. He is, first off, very much the model of the Chinese intellectual, with both the strengths and the weaknesses pertaining to that station. He has a remarkable sense of noblesse oblige, an overriding conviction that his personal concerns must take a backseat to his work, and that the focus of his work must be the rural poor, their basic needs, their education, their welfare, their aspirations. At the same time, there is a subtle hint of the messianism that infects much of the Chinese intelligentsia. (A much more subtle hint than that in Dr Yen's colleague, Liang Shuming, for example.) Dr Yen may not be egotistical about it - with typical modesty he repeatedly insists that he himself is not as important as the volunteers and local leaders he works with - but he is convinced that their social experiments and the answers they've found are of world-shaping importance.
Pearl Buck presents us with both of these facets of Dr Yen's character, as they are, through their dialogue, punctuated by some commentary of her own but nothing too intrusive or at all presumptuous. Buck has a decided eye for the well-placed aside, for the window wherein she can turn abstractions and theoretical discussion into something real, immediate and concrete. The topics of governmental corruption and the brutal war with Japan are ever present in the background, and she tries not to lay too much stress on either: the projects at Dingxian are, in both her view and Dr Yen's, more important than the external struggles and difficulties that they faced.
Again - this is a quick read. But it's worthwhile: a peek into a troubled time in China's history, and one of the bright spots in what was otherwise quite a dark and tumultuous era.
Displaying 1 of 1 review