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There are a couple of reasons why most kids hate vegetables: their taste buds aren't yet mature enough to appreciate the flavors, and their parents make them eat them.
That's how it was when I was forced to read Pearl Buck's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, The Good Earth, in high school. Since then, Pearl Buck was to my reading list as Brussels sprouts are to my menu. Off. I was probably too young to really understand the book, and I definitely didn't understand what made Pearl Buck so unique.
This is a shame, really, especially after talking with Bookenders who are knowledgeable about her life and writing. Pearl Buck's parents were Americans, Presbyterian missionaries who were on leave in West Virginia when Pearl was born. When she was about three months old they returned to China, where Pearl grew up bilingual, and spent much of her life.
In her day, she was one of the most popular authors in the world. Her writing career spanned forty years and consisted of over 80 published works of fiction, biography and translation. She was the first American woman to win the Nobel Prize “for her rich and truly epic descriptions of peasant life in China and for her biographical masterpieces.”
Nowadays, Pearl Buck’s work is considered dated. You won’t find her in most collections of important contemporary authors. I’m not sure why that is, especially because she is the only American author whose work is, in part at least, a product of Chinese culture. As such, she provides an almost unique perspective on the complexity of cultural identity. In addition, according to Dr. Peter Conn, author of Pearl S. Buck, A Cultural Biography, “many young Chinese regard Buck’s novels as a valuable historical record…of China’s rural life in the early twentieth century”; that is, before the Communist revolution.
Pearl Buck was also a well-known public figure and activist here in America in the areas of civil rights, immigration, adoption, mental health and equal rights for women. She counted as her friends such social warriors as Margaret Sanger and Eleanor Roosevelt. She also attracted the notice of Joseph McCarthy and J. Edgar Hoover, who amassed a file on her of over 300 pages.
The Three Daughters of Madame Liang, Buck's last major novel, was published five years before her death in 1973. Set in China after the Communist revolution, the book has some surprisingly relevant things to say about the conflicts within oneself, one’s family and one’s country.
Madame Liang’s three daughters have been sent by their mother to be educated in America. Several years have passed since they’ve been gone. Madame Liang has become the owner of the most fashionable restaurant in Shanghai. The highest ranking officials, the most successful merchants and the top officers in the army avail themselves of Madame Liang’s gourmet food and service, in spite of the exhortations to austerity preached to their fellow comrades.
In America, Grace, Madame Liang's eldest daughter, has become a doctor; Mercy, a musician, has married John Sung, a rocket scientist born in China; and Joy, the youngest, is a painter. One morning the Minister visits Madame Liang to tell her that Grace has been summoned back to China to serve the country. Doctors are needed and Madame Liang is encouraged, as a patriot, to see that Grace returns.
The Minister has known Madame Liang for a long time. As students in Paris, they were part of a group of revolutionaries determined to overthrow what they saw as the outworn and corrupt government, and replace it with something entirely new. Now years later, in the aftermath of the “Great Leap Forward” Madame Liang has quietly realized that “no ideology can take the place of the hard disciplines of learning.” In the absence of sensible planning and cautious experts, chaos and evil have filled the vacuum left in the wake of the revolution. (Feel free to substitute “Iraq” for “China” here.)
Grace does return to China and falls in love with a young Communist, to her mother’s alarm. Mercy and John also “escape” to China, with tragic results. The fates of all these people and more make for enjoyable and interesting reading. Bookends gave it a unanimous “thumbs-up.”
Bookends meets in the conference room at the Wilmington Memorial Library on the first Thursday of every month, from 7 to 8:30 p.m.. During the next meeting June 3, 2004, Bookends will discuss The Dive from Clausen's Pier by Ann Packer. All are welcome.
©
Tewksbury/Wilmington Town Crier, 2004
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