Have you noticed any reference to Wang and O-lan's little daughter's physical condition - other than that she was tiny? I may have missed something. I was looking for some information on how John Lossing Buck reacted to the birth of his daughter and her condition, to see if there were any parallel's between Pearl's husband and Wang. I knew that Pearl wrote
The Good Earth in China, after placing Carol in an institution in New Jersey. In attatched article, Pearl's daughter, Janice, tells her mother's story when writing of Carol and John Buck.
Caroline Grace Buck was born to (John) Lossing Buck and Pearl Sydenstricker Buck in 1920. Weighing seven pounds, eight ounces, she appeared to be healthy. Neither parent suspected that she was destined to experience severe mental retardation due to an inability to metabolize the amino acid phenylalanine.
Buck did not see Carol again for three years (after leaving her in NJ), feeling guilty but also confessing in private that, at times, she wished her daughter would just die.
"I left her all alone for three years and that, I know now, was wrong for me to have done. It was wrong for her and for me. After all, she had never been separated from me before and for it to be so sudden and so complete was hard on us both. True I paid a woman friend to go and see her, and she reported to me each month, but it was not the same as visiting her myself. I vowed I would go back and see her at least once a year."
After years of an unhappy marriage, Pearl divorced her husband in 1935 As seen by Pearl S. Buck,
Lossing had withdrawn from her and Carol well before the divorce, effectively making her a single parent. According to Buck,
because her husband thought that sending their retarded daughter to an expensive, private institution was a waste of money, she was compelled to meet all the expenses herself. In his authorized biography of Pearl S. Buck, Theodore F. Harris wrote:
“She was alone in her care for the child. It became entirely her responsibility to provide for the child's future” Buck herself had this to say:
. . I was in the United States with my retarded child, for whose care and future I was solely responsible. For her sake I needed money, for I knew all too well the cost of lifelong care for such a child. . . . I was well paid as teachers go, but now I had to earn much more.
The Good Earth remained on the bestseller list for almost two years, helped in part by the publicity surrounding the 1932 Pulitzer Prize that it received. Grossing over $1,000,000 (Buck hoped it would make $20,000), its proceeds allowed the author to settle debts and establish a substantial (for the time) $40,000 endowment at Vineland for her retarded daughter.
Carol’s plight also influenced Buck’s literature directly. In The Good Earth, which is about a Chinese peasant who amasses a fortune by accumulating land and skillfully farming it, we read that the protagonist, Wang Lung, and his dutiful wife, O-lan, had a retarded baby girl. The child, who is never referred to by name, was a source of great sorrow and heart-felt pain to her compassionate father. Wang Lung had, therefore, at this time no sorrow of any kind, unless it was this sorrow, that his eldest girl child neither spoke nor did those things which were right for her age, but only smiled her baby smile still when she caught her father's glance. Whether it was the desperate first year of her life or the starving or what it was, month after month went past and Wang Lung waited for the first words to come from her lips, even for his name which the children called him, "da-da." But no sound came, only the sweet, empty smile, and when he looked at her he groaned forth, "Little fool --- my poor little fool ---".
"The nameless child, who serves throughout the novel as a symbol of humanity's essential helplessness, is Pearl's anguished, barely disguised memorial to Carol" . At the time, Carol was still hidden from the public eye. Indeed, Buck did not mention Carol by name or reveal her mental deficiencies in any of her early writings, including her more autobiographical pieces.
footnote - (John) Lossing Buck and Pearl Sydenstricker were married in 1917. Although the couple remained married for 18 years, Pearl S. Buck realized early on she should not have married Lossing, who was not addicted to books and, in her mind, was not her intellectual equal. "Did you ever try to live just with a handsome face?" asked Buck. Lossing Buck was noticeably absent from The Child Who Never Grew. According to Janice Walsh (1992), this omission was partly due to the fact that
the couple was already growing apart when the Carol was born. Following the couple’s divorce in 1935, there was almost no communication between Lossing and his ex-wife.
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Janice Buck Walsh on Pearl, Carol and John Buck - and The Good Earth 
