Pearl Buck had one of the most interesting lives especially in her childhood, spent in the then distant China steeped in another era, another culture.
The quiet missionary who was her father and motivated by ideals to live frugally in another land inculcated his children with his values of learning and living simply, frugally, in a land of poor, and have not only sympathy but understanding and empathy with them.
If my memory is right, this one has the journey they took as a family from China to US, this time through Russia by train - from Siberia to Moscow - and thence futher through Europe, to cross the atlantic. He wanted to see and to have his growing children experience the world, so they took the route through the world known rather than the back and direct, shorter one - crossing the Pacific from Shanghai to California.
The writer describes the journey, and the effect the rail travel through Siberia had on all of them. There was not only dire poverty but a dire lack of hope and spirit, no smile. They were used to poverty of China, and yet they saw the people there smile all the time too, they still had joy, they had not lost everything.
It is interesting to read the almost prophetic remarks her father made, profoundly affected as he was looking at the Russian land and people.
This was not too long before the Russian revolution.