The Exile

Description

A memoir/biography, or creative non-fiction work, about Ms. Buck's mother, Caroline Sydenstricker (1857–1921), describing her life growing up in West Virginia and her life in China as the wife of a Presbyterian missionary. The book is deeply critical of her father and the mission work in China for the church’s treatment of women. Buck then traces the arc of her mother's disillusionment with religion. (The success of the book led Buck to write a parallel memoir of her father, Fighting Angel). Exile while published in 1936, Buck had written a draft in 1920 just after her mother died, and then hid the manuscript in the wall so that her future children might know their grandmother “Carie,”. Her mother went to China in hopes that God would speak to her if she made the sacrifice of becoming a missionary. But soon found she had simply exiled herself from her American home and family. When the deaths of three of her children in China made her sacrifice seem meaningless, she then exiled herself from the traditional patriarchal God of her parents, and eventually from her husband. In Buck's description, Carie built a succession of homes for her children and bestowed charity on neighbors and strangers even as she dispensed inflexible moral judgment on her family. “Carie’s daughter,” as Pearl called herself, determined to never make her mother’s mistake of subordinating herself to either a man or to a zealous creed.