战斗的天使：赛珍珠与传教工作遗产的双重性

Absalom Sydenstricker, Pearl S. Buck's father, tried to write down the story of his life when he was nearly 70 years old, but in his memoir he failed to mention his own family: his children and his wife, who spent their lives at his side in China, where he was stationed as a Presbyterian missionary for over fifty years. This erasure seems to be the premise of Pearl S. Buck's effort to find an embodied answer to complement his father's “bodiless intelligence”. This is in fact the dictionary definition of “angel”, which serves as an epigraph to Fighting Angel, a book published in 1936 by Pearl S. Buck. In the article , I argue that the notion of “embodiment” was crucial to Buck's view of her cultural work as a bridge between Chinese culture and American culture. In the biogra- phies of her parents that she published in the 1930s, her father's bodiless attitude is constantly contrasted to her mother's emphasis on the importance of the body and of human needs. Gender will thus emerge as a crucial category in Buck's reading of American church politics: her awareness of the role of misogyny in the missionary enterprise enabled Pearl S. Buck to distance herself from its legacy, and inspired her to fight against the racist underpinnings of her father's worldview.