Nobel laureate, feminist writer of widely popular books, dedicated mother, crusader for worldwide human rights, adoption advocate--Pearl S. Buck is a difficult woman to characterize. The video East Wind, West Wind: Pearl Buck, The Woman Who Embraced the World, produced for the centennial of Buck's birth in 1892, makes an attempt by interviewing her contemporaries, her sister, her ex-brother-in-law, her children and step-children, missionary children who knew her in China, and scholars just now trying to assess the impact of this woman on America and on East-West relations. Home movies of her children and interviews with Buck are also included.

Taken to China at the age of three months, the East Wind prevailed in her early years and provided much material for her later writing. Her upbringing in the exotic, yet narrow, confines of a mission compound centered on the Chinese servants and her family's books, primarily those by Charles Dickens. Both would have a profound influence on her. Educated at Randolph-Macon College, the Phi Beta Kappa graduate returned to China as a missionary to take care of her ailing mother, not out of any religious conviction. Shortly after, she married John Lossing Buck, the agrarian scholar then researching land use in north China. They settled, not very comfortably for Pearl, into the life of Nanking University, where John taught. Tragedy marked the marriage when their only child, Carol, was born retarded. Told to adopt a companion for Carol, the Bucks did, but as adopted children were not provided allowances by the mission board, Pearl turned to writing to earn the family money. Her closest friend, Mrs. Claude Thomson, critiqued her early writing, including her first novel, East Wind, West Wind, and then The Good Earth, and shared with her the terror of the 1927 attack on Nanking when soldiers invaded the university campus, killing and looting.

When Buck returned to America in the 1930s to publicize her novels, the West Wind took over her life. Her infamous speech to the Presbyterian Mission Board, in which she compared the impact of missionaries on China to a finger drawn through water, marked her split with the church, followed quickly by a split with Buck, whom she divorced so that she might marry her publisher, Richard John Walsh, as soon as he was divorced--scandalous behavior in the 1930s.

The Good Earth, book and film, were extremely popular and many Americans learned what little they knew about China from them. Coming just before the Second World War, they influenced many Americans' ideas about the Asian side of that struggle. Awarded the Nobel Prize in literature in 1938, the first of only two American women so honored, Buck incurred the criticism of the literary elite, who thought it should have gone elsewhere. She made her point of an antifemale bias among critics when, using a masculine pen name, she wrote several very favorably received novels. Termed a "women's writer," most of her readers and many of her subjects were women.

Wisely, she took no sides in the Nationalist-Communist struggle in China, but she did incur the wrath of Henry Luce, another China missionary child, for not agreeing with his viewpoint. The denial of a visa to the aged Buck who wanted to visit China in the 1970s is attributed to her aid in the 1930s to an actress who once got a part Chiang Ch'ing wanted.

East Wind, West Wind is a well-constructed video of a life lived to the fullest. Narrated by Eva Marie Saint, the interviews with John King Fairbank, James Michener, John and James Thomson, Ross Terrill, Jane Rabb, Peter Conn, and many others, move the story along while covering the many facets of Buck's life. Such a diverse life might not be easy to capture, but the video's producers have succeeded remarkably well as Buck's loves and hates blend into a coherent whole that spans three continents and most of the century. The video will be useful for classes in Asian-American relations, women's studies, sociology, and American literature. It is the story of a passionate, liberated woman who proudly lived her own life, made enemies and lasting friends; crusaded for civil rights in the U.S. and against the Chinese Exclusion Act; worked for the understanding of the mentally retarded, for better treatment of women, and for the adoption of multiracial children; and spoke out against nuclear weapons and for better international understanding. In addition to the Nobel Prize, she also earned a great deal of money through her writing talent.