In her childhood Pearl S. Buck started to read Chinese works, the Chinese novel in particular, and those of Western authors, and as she grew up, she read them more extensively and intensively, which helped her become a writerly scholar of novel studies in the end. In her Nanking years (1919-1934), she published a number of articles and monographs on the Chinese novel in such renowned magazine as The Saturday Review of Literature. In these studies, Pearl S. Buck makes her observations on the Chinese novel by placing it in its own historical and cultural contexts so as to justify its own unique, though different, qualities, makes comparative studies between the Chinese novel and its English counterpart in an empathetic way, and demonstrates her intelligence de l’autre in building a cultural bridge between China and the West. Her endeavors and achievements in this field are still illuminating to the intercultural communication and the international comparative literature in its current development.