The book’s success led to a dramatic makeover of Buck’s identity. She sold herself as a hybrid—more Chinese than American. She sold the book as a hybrid, too, a melding of American literary realism with tales from a seventeenth-century Chinese classic, The Water Margin. “By birth and ancestry I am American; by choice and belief I am a Christian,” she wrote, “but by the years of my life, by sympathy and feeling, I am Chinese.” Most striking, however, was Buck’s about-face on China. The novel ignores many of the social ills that had disgusted her a few years earlier.
