In 1934, the year that Pearl Buck moved back to the United States, Malcolm Cowley published Exile's Return, his anecdotal history of the “lost generation.” Cowley chronicled the private lives and transatlantic travels of a group of writers who had come of literary age in the years after World War I: F. Scott Fitzgerald, E. E. Cummings, John Dos Passos, Ernest Hemingway, and Edmund Wilson, among others. Born in the 1890s, they were white, male, mainly middle-class, and mainly college-educated. Although they differed from each other in all sorts of ways, they were linked by what Cowley called their “common adventures” – in particular the war and the disillusionment that had followed.

They also shared a belief in “salvation by exile,” the idea that Europe was a place more hospitable to their talents and aesthetic commitments than America. Throughout the 1920s, they all spent months and in some cases years overseas, often in Paris or the south of France, taking advantage of a favorable exchange rate and searching for kindred artistic spirits. Though all of them returned to the United States sooner or later, their decision to leave America was a highly premeditated gesture.

By contrast, Pearl Buck had been an involuntary expatriate. She had not chosen China; she had simply found herself growing up there, absorbed in a society radically different from America at almost every point. As a consequence, she had gained a uniquely cosmopolitan perspective, which equipped her to make valuable comparisons between Eastern and Western cultures.