INQUIRER STAFF WRITER

SHANGHAI, China - The bus plodded north into the night, skirting this city's glittery skyscrapers, grinding on toward a small town, and a big adventure, in the Yangtze River delta.

On board sat members of Pearl S. Buck International, known as PSBI, the Bucks County foundation that promotes the life and work of the author. They were the vanguard of a delegation that has come, 70-strong, halfway around the world on a mission of recognition, friendship and shared interest.

Officially, the foundation members and supporters have come to China to help open a new museum devoted to Buck, situated in her Chinese hometown of Zhenjiang, northwest of here, where she grew up. It's part of China's ongoing rehabilitation of an author who once defined this land for millions of Americans, but whose books were long banned here. The American visitors are doing for Buck what she could not do for herself: reap acclaim and recognition for her work.

"Pearl was here. Her work still goes on here," PSBI board member Carole Watters said as the bus bobbed and weaved. "I'm passionate for Pearl Buck, passionate for continuing her work."

In the United States, interest in Buck has faded since her death in Vermont in 1973. In China, the opposite is true. Scholars here find new meaning in her work, with its spot-on depictions of a vanished Chinese farm life. And in Zhenjiang, officials welcome the role of PSBI in helping poor students complete their high school education - a program Watters helped establish in tribute to her idol.

Buck came to China at the age of 3 months, the daughter of Presbyterian missionaries, and spent most of the next 18 years in and around Zhenjiang. She wrote more than 70 books, many of them best-sellers, but she is best known for one. The Good Earth told the story of Wang Lung and O-lan, Chinese farmers struggling to survive before the communist revolution. It won the Pulitzer Prize in 1932 and helped Buck win the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1938. Interest in the book surged anew last year when the original 400-page, hand-edited manuscript - missing for four decades - mysteriously resurfaced at a Philadelphia auction house.

Otherwise, Buck has largely disappeared from the American consciousness.

"Sometimes I feel like she's more well-known in China," Janet Mintzer, PSBI president and chief executive officer, said shortly before leaving the United States.

This week in Zhenjiang, supporters will gather at a symposium devoted to Buck's writing, meet with Chinese scholars, toast their hosts at welcoming banquets, and, on Sunday, celebrate the museum's grand opening.

PSBI operates three programs to further Buck's goals: Welcome House provides domestic and international adoption services; Opportunity House offers education and health care to children in Asia; and the Historic Site conducts tours and events at the author's home in Perkasie, Bucks County.

Donna Rhodes, curator of the Buck home, has helped start the Chinese museum, sending clothes, photographs and copies of Asia magazine, the journal run by Buck and her second husband, the publisher Richard Walsh.

In Buck, the government here is championing a heroine who was everything it is not: outspoken, frank, eager to shake up the status quo.

In her time, Buck denounced the Chinese Exclusion Act, the only American immigration law to target a specific race. She decried the internment of Japanese citizens during World War II. She supported women's rights and civil rights long before they were popular causes. Perhaps most of all, she devoted herself to the welfare of children, and specifically to the adoption of Asian and Amerasian children, who in the 1940s were thought by experts to be "unadoptable."

Buck herself had one child by birth, seven by adoption, and was a foster mother to many more.

After World War II, Buck's literary reputation "shrank to the vanishing point," University of Pennsylvania professor Peter Conn wrote in his definitive Pearl S. Buck: A Cultural Biography. Partly that was because she wrote about women and China - both of which many Americans of the 1950s wished would just be quiet. During the Red Scare, anyone associated with China was suspect, and Buck was no exception. In her later years, scandal damaged Buck's reputation, as the widowed writer took up with a young dance instructor and bequeathed her belongings to several competing interests.

Here in China, Buck long dwelled in disfavor.

Where American readers saw the peasant farmers of The Good Earth as hardworking and determined, China's leadership saw embarrassing depictions of poverty and illiteracy. Her later critiques of Mao Tse-Tung's leadership won her no friends here.

Few Americans were able to visit China after the communists took power in 1949. Two decades later, changes in diplomatic relations gave an aging Buck hope that she might once more see the land she loved. She wrote letters to anyone who might be able to help her, seeking to join President Richard M. Nixon on what would be his breakthrough trip to China in 1972.

The story, perhaps apocryphal, is that Premier Chou En-lai personally turned down her application for a visa. What's certain is that a low-level diplomat sent the formal rejection, accusing Buck of "an attitude of distortion, smear and vilification toward the people of new China."

She died several months later.

On the bus, PSBI staffers tried to sleep as the trip lengthened. Massive apartment buildings loomed along the highway. A decade ago, this land was rice paddy.

Zhenjiang lay somewhere ahead, hidden in the haze.