Cultural Conflicts And Blending

The past few decades have witnessed the resurgence of interest in the issues concerning culture, when the cultural contact has become an inevitable daily experience, driven by the business transactions in an international context. As everywhere we look, we can see the painful conflicts and bitter experiences created by the ethnic and religious diversities, to find ways to become unified despite diversity has become the world's most urgent problem. The literary and cultural creations by Pearl Buck, therefore, serve as a valuable resource to illuminate the intellectuals in the East and the West who have made, are still making numerous researches and studies of causes of cultural clashes, and done a lot of speculations on the course along which the cultural development goes. In this particular cultural context, the rediscovery of Pearl Buck and her works dealing with the cultural interactions between the East and the West would seem obviously a subject of increasing relevance and even urgency.Pearl Buck was the only recipient of the coveted awards: the Pulitzer Prize and the Nobel Prize except the contemporary African American woman writer, Toni Morrison. The bitterness her ambiguous identity brought to her and the double education she received formed her unique worldview and outlook: "All under heaven are one." Shemaintained a belief in equality of races, in the necessity of human understanding, in the common sense of peace. By dedicating herself to building the cultural bridge between the East and the West, she made known her ultimate goal of helping people of both Eastern and Western countries to transcend the racial and cultural boundaries so as to come to value highly the intrinsic excellence of other cultures and to build an ideal world in which people of different cultures could live together like members of one big family. To make us amazed is the paradox that occurred. She was valued in neither the United States nor China, was put in the marginal position where she belonged to neither before the world-wide discussion of cultural problems has made it essential to research and study her fiction or non-fiction about the cultural interactions. The long-time dismissal of Pearl Buck was in a large part attributed to the irreconciliation of the Eastern and the Western cultures and their cultural anogance triggered by lack of the intimate knowledge of different cultural traditions and practices.The instances of the Chinese people in connection with the outside are chosen for fictional treatment. East Wind: West Wind (1930), as the title suggests, deals with the differences between Chinese traditions and American traditions and their effects to each other and explores the possibility of confluence of heterogeneous cultures informed by the product of interracial marriage. The House of Earth is an epic dealing with ups and downs of three generations of the Wangs, but the clash between old and new in a transitional period of China is one striking issue to which the readers are attracted.Both are set in a transitional period of China when the West wind was sweeping China, the traditional conceptions were still lingering because they had been imprinted in the Chinese mind. When the West met the East, the clashes did happen. But Pearl Buck wanted to reveal us is not the irreconciliation between them, but through conscious understanding and assiduous exchanges they could reciprocally leam from each other, keeping what is best in one's culture and discarding what is not, and meanwhile, absorbing what is good in another's culture. Her cultural idealism is expressed by her characters: the newly-born baby, a product of interracial marriage in East Wind: West Wind, and Wang Yuan and Mei-lin, integrating the nourishments of Eastern and Western cultures in A House Divided, the third novel of The House of Earth.This thesis consists of five chapters:Chapter One serves as introduction in which features of East Wind: West Wind and The House of Earth are analyzed from the aspects of theme, structure and language...