"When I look back over the twenty years that I have now lived in my own country, I realize I still don’t see my people plain," said Pearl S. Buck in her later years (Buck, David 30). Buck spent her later years in the United States advocating "freedom, equality and the essential humanity of all people (Buck, David 30.) Works from these later years, My Several Worlds, Letter From Peking, The Time is Noon, The Child Who Never Grew, and Command the Morning, reflect her views about cultural differences, retarded and orphaned children, and military rearmament during the Cold War, as well as her writing style.

In the beginning of chapter three of My Several Worlds, Buck contrasts the Western way of farming with tractors and other machines, with the way she considers real farming, "hands upon stones and earth and wood", she believed "there must be direct touch...in order that life may have stability." She wanted her family to have that stability so she had them help build their home together instead of living in apartments or "little metal boxes" as she called them.

With her only biological daughter, Carol, who was retarded, and her inability to bear anymore children, Buck found another way to expand her family, through adoption. The attitude towards retarded people was not favorable and most families tried to keep them secret or out-of-the-way. No one wanted to have a retarded child; they shunned them when they could. The same was true of children born of mixed races; neither culture wanted the children so they were forced to live in orphanages, where hopes of finding people to love them were nearly non-existent. Then Pearl S. Buck founded Welcome House, an organization created to place these children in real homes. In 1964, the Pearl S. Buck Foundation would be established "as a means to preserve...her earlier message of universal humanism (Buck, David 39).

During the Cold War and Red Scare, public opinion for Buck began to change to one of suspicion. Once seen as a liberal humanist, she was now being seen as procommunist or even communist; the California State Senate Committee on Unamerican Activities even made a report on her and a few people close to her (Buck, David 38-39). The views that got her into trouble were her position against the Cold War, remilitarization, and nuclear weapons; in 1950 she was a member of the National Council against Conscription. "[T]oday it is dangerous even to declare belief in the brotherhood of the peoples, in the equality of the races, in the necessity for human understanding, in the common sense of peace..," Pearl Buck said in My Several Worlds.

Pearl S. Buck believed that when a "writer writes out of his everyday environment...[he becomes] thereby someone else." (Buck, David 36.) As John Sedges, she would write about American values and the United States, but under either name her stories and novels are described as "emphasizing the fundamental emotions and rhythms of life…people's struggles, dreams and disappointments." Though the "plot [in her stories] was often weak…she spoke openly and direct to…readers." (Buck, David 36.)

Buck knew about cultural differences because she lived in two different cultures. She knew how the orphaned and retarded children felt, being outsiders and rejected, because she was essentially a Chinese child born of white parents. She grew up Chinese, but she wouldn’t be totally accepted as one, and even though she was white, the West wouldn’t totally accept her because of her Chinese ways. She was against rearmament because she lived through a revolution as a child in China, twice, and she just couldn’t stand to see anymore senseless violence just because Americans were ignorant and uncaring" (Buck, David 37). The conflict she faced all her life can be summed up in a quote from My Several Worlds; "I grew up in China, in one world and not of it, and belonging to another world and yet not of it."