by Anchee Min
I touched the cold stone and rested my cheek against it.
* * *
Dear Pearl,
Since you couldn’t go to China, I have brought China to you.
It is not the reunion I wished for for so long, but I feel blessed to have the opportunity. Because my memory is failing, and because I didn’t want to forget a thing, I have written six notes to be burned with the incense at your grave.
The first note regards the end of Madame Mao. When she denied you a visa, she was sure of her power. She believed that she would rule China after her husband. But she didn’t last. After Mao died, she was arrested and sentenced to death. It was less than four years after Nixon’s visit.
The second note regards your mother’s grave. It almost didn’t survive during the Cultural Revolution. Mao’s teenage mobs came to destroy the grave. Lilac removed the stone tablet and fooled them. In other words, what the Red Guard destroyed was not your mother’s grave. Today the town of Chin-kiang has reclaimed Carie’s status. She is officially titled the founder of the Chin-kiang middle school. Her spirit is celebrated and honored at each Spring Memorial.
The third note regards you. The mansion where your mother last lived has been turned into the Pearl Buck Residence. I can hear you say, “But that wasn’t my house!” True, however, it is important that the residence in your name be presentable. You should understand that to a Chinese, the place that houses your spirit has to be a temple. Copies of your photos, letters, and books are on permanent display. I was not happy about the display of your calligraphy, because the strokes were not yours. Your writing was touched up by a professor from Beijing College of Art and Calligraphy. It was part of the act of transforming you into a goddess so that people could worship you. I didn’t bother to fight, because I thought that it was better than calling you an American Cultural Imperialist.
The fourth note regards the people who knew you, who, as long as they lived, wondered how you did in America. I’d like to begin with Dick because he knew you well and had the worst luck. He was too close to Mao and died a horrible death. Please forgive me for being unable to report more about him. Dick knew that Hsu Chih-mo loved you. Dick wanted to congratulate you in person when he learned that you won the Nobel Prize. We were not allowed to send a telegram to America. Dick said that Hsu Chih-mo would have been so proud. He would have danced on his head. You will be pleased to know that today Hsu Chih-mo’s poems are extremely popular. Young people worship him as a poet whose voice speaks to their own generation. Newspapers continue to print stories of his affairs as if they took place yesterday, and, of course, they continue to miss the real target.
Papa kept the church going until he died. He became a fighting angel like Absalom except he fought guerrilla style. I am sure you missed Carpenter Chan and Lilac. You knew that Carpenter Chan became a Christian, converted by Absalom, but you might not have known that he joined the Communists after Mao took power. Later he went back to God and worked for Papa. I don’t think Americans are able to comprehend such a life, but you would. You lived in China and knew how things can be.
Lilac missed you so much that she could never stop talking about you. She is the town’s longevity star and is in her nineties. Her three sons inherited their father’s trade. It was a pity that you couldn’t see how they rebuilt Absalom’s church, which is called the Chin-kiang Christian Church. Lilac still fights with Vanguard, the beggar lady Soo-ching’s son, whose name used to be Confucius. This was the mother and son you found in your garden so long ago. He betrayed everyone to please Madame Mao. Soo-ching wanted to disown her son, but Papa convinced her that she’d better forgive or she wouldn’t go to heaven.
You don’t know my daughter, Rouge, but she knows everything about you. She is currently the mayor of Chin-kiang and is in charge of the Pearl Buck Scholarship and the Hsu Chih-mo Scholarship. She gave birth to one girl and adopted two girls from her husband’s previous marriage. All my granddaughters share the same middle name, Pearl. They are Pearl Delight, Pearl Bright, and Pearl Flight.
Remember Bumpkin Emperor, the warlord? He became an ardent Christian and the pastor of our church. You will be shocked. Who wouldn’t be? Like your father, Bumpkin Emperor was obsessed with converting people. He tried to save them the way your father saved him. Bumpkin Emperor remembered you as the mean, straw-haired girl. He never got tired of telling people the story of how you fooled him with that bucket of ink. The People’s Publishing House approached him with the idea of publishing a children’s comic book based on the story.
My fifth note regards the dirt I brought here. It is from your mother’s grave. I’ll sprinkle it around. In the meantime, if I may, I will dig some soil here, a little, just enough to fill the bag. I’ll carry it to your mother’s grave as soon as I return and mix the soils. It pleases me to join your spirits.
The last note regards my own wish. If you don’t mind, I’ll collect some seeds from your trees here. I have no idea of the names of all the trees except that they are American trees. According to the shapes of the nuts, they are flowering trees. The importance of the trees is that they are from where you are buried. I wouldn’t be surprised if you planted them yourself. I imagine you would have. You understood that spirits gather through nature. I hear your voice speaking through the creek, the pines, maples, bamboo, birds, and bees. I will plant the seeds where I will be buried when my time comes. We should then accompany each other forever. I have brought your favorite Tang dynasty poem, “The Tune of Posaman.” “Yangtze River” ought to be changed to “Pacific Ocean,” but I leave it the way it is. I know you always preferred the original.
I live by the Yangtze River near its source,
While you reside farthest down its course.
You and I drink water out of the same stream,
I haven’t seen you though daily of you I dream.
When will this river water cease to run?
When shall I not love you, the way I do?
I only wish our two hearts would beat as one,
And you wouldn’t disappoint me in my love for you.
Joy, gratitude, and sense of peace are what this moment means to me. I thank God for the fortune of having known you.
The creek is singing a happy song. The wind whispers like our old conversations through trembling leaves. The air is pure and the sun warm. Once again, I see you running toward me with sunshine in your face. You look like a jumping cloud in your indigo floral Chinese dress, your golden hair bouncing.
“Willow,” I hear you call, “hurry up, the popcorn man is here!”
THE END
AUTHOR’S NOTE
I was ordered to denounce Pearl Buck in China. The year was 1971. I was a teenager attending the Shanghai 51 Middle School. Trying to gain international support for rejecting Buck’s China entry visa (to accompany President Nixon on his visit), Madame Mao organized a national campaign to criticize Buck as an “American cultural imperialist.”
I followed the order and never questioned whether Madame Mao was being truthful. I was brainwashed at that time, although I do remember having difficulty composing the criticisms. I wished that I had been given a chance to read The Good Earth. We were told that the book was so “toxic” that it was dangerous to even translate it. I was told to copy lines from the newspapers: “Pearl Buck insulted Chinese peasants therefore China.” “She hates us therefore is our enemy.” I was proud to be able to defend my country and people.
Pearl Buck’s name didn’t cross my path again until I immigrated to America. It was 1996 and I was giving a reading at a Chicago bookstore for my memoir, Red Azalea. Afterward, a lady came to me and asked if I knew Pearl Buck. Before I could reply, she said—very emotionally and to my surprise—that Buck had taught her to love the Chinese people. She placed a paperback in my hands and said that it was a gift. It was The Good Earth.
I finished reading The Good Earth on the airplane from Chicago to Los Angeles. I broke down and sobbed. I couldn’t stop myself because I
remembered how I had denounced the author. I remembered how Madame Mao had convinced the entire nation to hate Pearl Buck. How wrong we had been! I had never encountered any author, including the most respected Chinese authors, who wrote about our peasants with such admiration, affection, and humanity.
It was at that very moment that Pearl of China was conceived.
In setting out to tell Pearl Buck’s story I faced a number of challenges. I wanted to convey the full sweep of Pearl’s life and also tell her story from a Chinese perspective. There are, of course, many sources in English about Pearl’s life, but I wanted to see her as my fellow Chinese saw her. In order to do this, I proposed to tell Pearl’s story through her relationships with her actual Chinese friends. As a novelist, I knew that the story of a single friendship, over many years, would be best. It is even my sense that such a friendship really existed. And yet, as far as I know, though Pearl had many Chinese friends, there was no one lifelong friend that made it into the historical record.
Using my license as a writer of fiction, I combined a number of Pearl’s actual friends from different phases of her life to create the character of Willow. To respect the privacy of the living families of these individuals, and to protect their ongoing reputations in China, where my books are still banned, I withhold their names here. The other two major instances in which I have altered the historical record are the date at which Pearl Buck’s father, Absalom Sydenstricker, dies (1931); and the date of the Nanking Incident, which occurred years earlier than it does in the novel. Both liberties were taken for the sake of the story.
I would also like to clarify that Pearl and Lossing Buck were married for eighteen years, from 1917 to 1935, and the reason for their divorce is not publicly known. Lossing Buck was a missionary agriculturalist who worked in China from 1915 to 1944, and produced the country’s first land utilization study, which is still highly valued in China.
A NOTE ON THE AUTHOR
Anchee Min lived in China for twenty-seven years. Born in Shanghai in 1957, she grew up during Mao’s Cultural Revolution (1964–1976). As a teen, she was taught to denounce Pearl S. Buck as an American cultural imperialist. At age seventeen, Min was sent to a labor collective, where a talent scout for Madame Mao recruited her to work in propaganda films as an actress because of her proletarian look.
Min arrived in Chicago in 1984. She first learned English through American public radio, children’s television programs, and talk shows. To earn a living, she worked as a part-time maid, a waitress, and a fabric painter and in construction and plumbing, while going to school at night. Her memoir, Red Azalea, was published in 1994 and was chosen as a New York Times Notable Book. Min is also the author of bestselling historical fiction, including Becoming Madame Mao, Empress Orchid (nominated for the British Book Awards Best Read of the Year 2006), and The Last Empress. Min’s books have been translated into thirty-two languages.
The legacy of Pearl S. Buck continues at her charity, Pearl S. Buck International: www.pearlsbuck.org.
BY THE SAME AUTHOR
Red Azalea
Katherine
Becoming Madame Mao
Wild Ginger
Empress Orchid
The Last Empress
Copyright © 2010 by Anchee Min
This novel is a work of imagination. Although the main characters and events are based on or inspired by real life, this is a work of fiction, and characterizations and events have at times been fictionalized or altered for literary effect.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For information address Bloomsbury USA, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010.
Published by Bloomsbury USA, New York
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Min, Anchee, 1957–
Pearl of China : a novel / Anchee Min.—1st U.S. ed.
p. cm.
ISBN-13 : 978-1-59691-697-5 (hardcover)
ISBN-10 : 1-59691-697-41 (hardcover)
1. Buck, Pearl S. (Pearl Sydenstricker), 1892–1973—Fiction. 2. Women novelists— Fiction. 3. Americans—China—Fiction. 4. Friendship in children—Fiction. 5. Female friendship—Fiction. 6. China—History—20th century—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3563.I4614P43 2009
813´.54—dc22
2009024264
First published by Bloomsbury USA in 2010
This e-book edition published in 2010
E-book ISBN: 978-1-60819-151-2
www.bloomsburyusa.com
A NOTE ON THE TYPE
The text of this book is set in Adobe Caslon, named after the English punch-cutter and type founder William Caslon I (1692–1766). Caslon’s rather old-fashioned types were modeled on seventeenth-century Dutch designs, but found wide acceptance throughout the English-speaking world for much of the eighteenth century until being replaced by newer types toward the end of the century. Used in 1776 to print the Declaration of Independence, they were revived in the nineteenth century, and have been popular ever since, particularly among fine printers. There are several digital versions, of which Carol Twombly’s Adobe Caslon is one.