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Summary
Summary
It is the end of the nineteenth century and China is riding on the crest of great change, but for nine-year-old Willow, the only child of a destitute family in the small southern town of Chin-kiang, nothing ever seems to change. Until the day she meets Pearl, the eldest daughter of a zealous American missionary.
Pearl is head-strong, independent and fiercely intelligent, and will grow up to be Pearl S Buck, the Pulitzer- and Nobel Prize-winning writer and humanitarian activist, but for now all Willow knows is that she has never met anyone like her in all her life. From the start the two are thick as thieves, but when the Boxer Rebellion rocks the nation, Pearl's family is forced to leave China to flee religious persecution. As the twentieth century unfolds in all its turmoil, through right-wing military coups and Mao's Red Revolution, through bad marriages and broken dreams, the two girls cling to their lifelong friendship across the sea.
In this ambitious and moving new novel, Anchee Min, acclaimed author of Empress Orchid and Red Azalea , brings to life a courageous and passionate woman who loved the country of her childhood and who has been hailed in China as a modern heroine.
Author Notes
Anchee Min was born in Shanghai in 1957. At seventeen she was sent to a labor collective, where after a number of years a talent scout recruited her for Madame Mao's Shanghai Film Studio. Her highly acclaimed memoir, "Red Azalea," was named a New York Times Notable Book and was an international bestseller, with rights sold in twenty countries. Min lives in California with her husband and daughter. She will be featured at the Ubud Writers and Readers Festival 2015 program.
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Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
As a girl in Maoist China, Min (Red Azalea) was ordered to denounce Pearl S. Buck; now she offers a thin sketch of the Nobel laureate's life from the point of view of fictional Willow Yee, a fiercely loyal friend. A lifelong friendship begins in Chin-kiang when Willow meets Pearl, whose missionary father converts Willow's educated but impoverished father. Under threat from hostilities toward foreigners, Pearl departs for the safety of Shanghai, and, later, to America for college, but she returns for her wedding to find that Willow is the satisfied founder of a newspaper and a very unhappy wife. While a changing China swirls around them, their friendship is tested as they both fall in love with the same poet. As the 1949 revolution looms, Pearl flees China, and Willow's husband becomes Mao's right-hand man, leading to a fateful showdown with Madam Mao when Willow refuses to denounce her lifelong friend. Though the setting and revolutionary backdrop are inherently dramatic, Min's account of an epic friendship is curiously low-key, with some sections reading more like a treatment than a narrative. (Apr.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Booklist Review
*Starred Review* Pearl S. Buck, who grew up in China and became the first American woman writer to win the Nobel Prize, wrote that Chinese women are the strongest women in the world. Min, a prime example of an indomitable Chinese woman, has made it her mission to reveal the truth about the lives of women in China, including Madame Mao, Empress Tzu Hsi, and now Buck. Pearl first appears as a bright, inquisitive girl who conceals her blond, curly hair beneath a black knit cap to be less conspicuous in the Chinese town of Chin-kiang, where she lives with her courageous American missionary parents. We get to know Pearl through her best friend, Willow impoverished, smart, plucky, and Chinese as they share mischievous and harrowing adventures, a disastrous mutual love for the famous poet Hsu Chih-mo, and a string of tragedies yoked to the paradoxes and horrors of the Boxer Rebellion, China's civil war, and Mao's catastrophic rule. Exiled and heartbroken, Pearl achieves world renown by writing about China, while journalist Willow is brutally punished for remaining loyal to her imperialist friend. Ardently detailed, dramatic, and encompassing, Min's fresh and penetrating interpretation of Pearl S. Buck's extraordinary life delivers profound psychological, spiritual, and historical insights within an unforgettable cross-cultural story of a quest for veracity, compassion, and justice.--Seaman, Donna Copyright 2010 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
Since the 1994 publication of "Red Azalea," a splashy memoir that recreated her adolescence during the Cultural Revolution, Min has continued to paint historical canvases, casting a series of novels in the primary hues of folk art. In "Pearl of China," she envisions the life of the Nobel Prize-winning American writer Pearl S. Buck through the eyes of an invented longtime friend, an up-from-poverty Chinese journalist named Willow. This tactic works best early on, as a charmingly scrappy 8-year-old Willow recounts her meet-cute first encounter with the young Pearl and describes the vaudevillian give-and-take between Pearl's earnest missionary father, Absalom Sydenstricker, and Willow's own Papa, a wily, go-with-the-flow survivor. Once the Boxer Rebellion ignites, the friendship is threatened both by an incipient Communist movement and by the novel's romantic fiddle-faddle. ("Hsu Chih-mo is a green refuge in the desert of my life," Pearl says of her poet lover to a jealous Willow.) This wide-eyed storytelling trivializes the complexity of the conflicts it seeks to encompass. And Min's penchant for melodramatic reversals of fortune and 11th-hour rescues only adds to an ambience more congenial to "The Perils of Pauline" than the work of a writer whose abiding empathy for China's peasantry begat "The Good Earth."
Kirkus Review
Min (The Last Empress, 2007, etc.) offers an adoring fictional biography of Pearl S. Buck. Narrator Willow Yee grows up in Chin-Kiang at the turn of the century. She lives with her impoverished grandmother and father, a coolie and seasonal farmhand despite his education and literary aspirations. Portrayed with intriguing moral ambiguity, Mr. Yee is a conniver, his motives both self-serving and earnest as he brings converts to zealous missionary Absalom Sydenstricker, Pearl's father. As Pearl jokes, "My father is a nut and your father is a crook." Soon Willow and Pearl become inseparable. The early scenes of their childhood, before history gets in the way, are filled with natural lyricism and engaging drama. But once the Boxer Rebellion rears its head and Pearl moves on to missionary school in Shanghai, the novel loses steam. Min gives Willow the skeleton of a story: She is forced into marriage with an opium addict, escapes and becomes a newspaper editor in Nanking, marries a Communist Party member, is denounced and imprisoned, meets Nixon during his visit to Pearl's childhood home in Chin-Kiang. Willow's character isn't fleshed out; her only purpose seems to be to provide a secondhand, sketchy account of Pearl's life, some of it through dry letters. Pearl attends college in America but longs to return to China. She marries Lossing Buck, who wants to enact Chinese agrarian reform, but the marriage sours by the time their mentally retarded daughter is born. Pearl's love affair with the poet Hsu Chih-mo is depicted as the life-changing event in Pearl's creative life, although historians have only circumstantial proof the two were lovers. After Pearl returns to America in middle age, the novel slogs on bloodlessly. A straightforward biography would have served better than this flat, hagiographic narrative. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
Min opens her latest with guilty sobs recalling her "brainwashed" teenaged self in 1970s China, when she was forced to denounce Pulitzer and Nobel prize-winning writer Pearl S. Buck to Madame Mao. That guilt clearly drove Min (Red Azalea) to write this "based on the life of Pearl S. Buck" novel about a fictional friendship between Buck and her Chinese best friend, Willow. Unfortunately, by book's end readers are left with little more than caricatures of a Chinese Saint Pearl and her long-suffering sidekick, both ultimately victims of the easily vilified Madame Mao. Buck and Willow bond as turn-of-the-century girls, and Min uses their lifelong relationship to chart China's tumultuous history. VERDICT A novel about Buck could have been interesting, but this one is marred by insipid dialog (Buck's husband should be more understanding because of his Cornell degree, her would-be lover wants to know if she "love[s] like a Chinese woman"), jolting gaps (Buck's adopted daughter, Janice, disappears after one mention), and apocryphal pronouncements (Buck apologizes via Voice of America for casting Western actors in Hollywood's whitewashed version of The Good Earth). Buck's story deserves better. With two autobiographies and 80-plus titles to choose from, readers can easily access Buck directly. [See Prepub Alert, LJ 12/09.]-Terry Hong, Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Program, Washington, DC (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
