The two took the same agriculture courses together, until Hu switched to an arts program at Columbia and Buck sailed for China as an agricultural missionary at the end of 1915. Retreating to Kuling in the heat of his first summer, he met “that darling Mrs. Sydenstricker’s daughter, Pearl,” at a Sunday picnic given by another Cornell graduate and embarked on a whirlwind courtship. She was “the nicest girl in all Kuling.” he wrote home to his parents. “She is just one peach of a girl.” In the first week of September he escorted her down the mountain, accompanying her by boat as far as Nanjing, where he took the train to regain his mission station at Nanxuzhou in the northern province of Anhui. They corresponded that winter, and he made the long journey to Zhenjiang to see her again, treating himself to a first-class ticket on the train (“She was worth it”). The couple had been alone together no more than four or five times when, in January 1917, they announced their engagement.Lossing was twenty-six years old, the oldest of four boys reared by frugal, hardworking, God-fearing parents on a small farm in upstate New York.
