Pearl of China is actually the story of a woman named Willow growing up in the rural village of Chin-kiang where Pearl Buck’s father, Absalom Sydenstricker, works as a missionary. The two girls become friends after an initial misunderstanding. Pearl’s mother, Carie, becomes especially close to Willow, teaching her music.
As I’ve mentioned before, I dislike stories that use real people as characters. I think it’s an invasion of privacy, and also can’t help but feel the author is being a bit lazy not creating his or her own characters. So, feeling as I do, why did I read this book? For the same reason I read any book: something about it intrigued me. Also, I knew the next book I read would also feature a missionary in Asia and wanted something to get me in the mood. The use of a real person didn’t bother me so much here because Pearl is not only treated respectfully, but is also is not the main character. She’s really more of a foil for Willow.
Although covering the sometimes horrific events of 20th century China, I found the book a pleasant read. Min’s spare prose flows well. Her sentences are short and simple, nearly always employing the same structure: subject-verb-object. I’m surprised this book wasn’t in the Young Adult section. Certainly the simple prose is easy to absorb and the protagonist, at least in the beginning, is herself young.
The character I found most interesting was Willow’s father. Handsome and educated, a bit of a rascal, he prefers reciting poetry to working as a coolie, but everything he turns his hand to seems to end disastrously. Eventually he is reduced to stealing to provide for his family which, as the story opens, consists only of his ailing mother and seven-year-old Willow, but he is too clumsy to be a successful thief. He pretends to convert to Christianity in order to get meals and later employment in Absalom’s church. His attempts to mediate between the church’s conventions and those of the Buddhist villagers are endlessly entertaining, as he increases attendance until Absalom has the largest Christian community in China. However, it is his evolution from scamp to true believer that I found most moving.
Pearl struggles to get her stories published also aroused my interest. The prevailing norm in China at the time was didactic: to publish edifying works that would raise the peasant mind. Pearl’s stories about the world from the peasant’s point of view are repeatedly rejected by Chinese publishers. Her real success as a writer comes only after she returns to America although, as Willow says, “When she talked of home, she meant China.”
Willow’s childhood is the most fully dramatised section of the book. Later sections move rather quickly through her adult life, where Pearl’s influence on Willow becomes minor compared to the effects of the political changes shaking China. Willow’s childhood conversion to Christianity and her memory of her friendship with Pearl are repeatedly challenged, particularly after her husband becomes Mao’s right-hand man. Madame Mao alternates between wanting Willow to woo the Nobel Prize winner’s support for the new regime and castigating her for not denouncing Pearl as an enemy of the revolution.
In a way, I wish Min had done away with Pearl Buck altogether. A note in the bio says that she was ordered as a child to denounce Buck, and I don’t doubt that Min’s interest in the writer, piqued by this event, became the initial impetus for writing this book. Writers are often told to throw out the first paragraphs or pages of their work. It’s true that it sometimes takes a bit of dithering about and scene setting to get to the meat of the matter. It’s also true that sometimes, perhaps more often than not, the original impetus does not really belong in the final version. As Faulkner said, “In writing you must kill all your darlings.” Here I believe Min’s book might have been stronger with a fictional missionary’s daughter. Perhaps putting Pearl’s name in the title sells more books, but in a way it is false advertising since this isn’t her story so much as it is Willow’s. Willow emerges as a brave and believable woman whose life gives us an unusual view of China’s transformations in the 20th century.