The Mother (1934) By Pearl Buck

China has been “discovered” by the West many times, dating from the Travels of Marco Polo in the late 13^th century, to Richard Nixon in 1972.  Yet despite occasional waves of interest, native Chinese have largely remained an unknown to most westerners, though the history of Chinese immigrants in the U.S. is fairly well documented.

A few years ago I read the emotionally jarring Rape of Nanking by Iris Chang, and was surprised at how ignorant I was on this subject.  I asked my mother, who was in her teens at the time, how much of this story hit the American press.  Her answer was none that she could recall explaining that part of the world did not exist to most people [Americans] until Pearl Harbor.  

Once World War II was over, China again mostly disappeared to the American public (with the cinematic exception of The World of Suzy Wong, starring William Holden and Nancy Kwan), hidden behind the “bamboo curtain” drawn closed by Chinese leaders, and by a door slammed shut by American politicians; one of whom, Richard Nixon, made a career out of China-baiting. Ironic then that he is credited with reopening the door 25 years later.

In the years before World War II however, before the civil war was won by Mao Tse Tung resulting in the creation of a two-China policy in the West, there was a flickering of interest in the Chinese people.  That interest was almost single-handedly the result of author Pearl Buck, the daughter of Presbyterian missionaries from West Virginia, who spent most of her childhood and early adult life in China. Ages ago, I think when I was in high school, I read Buck’s novel The Good Earth, which won her a Pulitzer Prize in 1932.  Subsequently she won the Nobel Prize in Literature in recognition of her books set in China.

Recently I revisited Buck, reading her 1934 novel The Mother.  The story tells the story of a peasant woman whose husband has abandoned her, leaving her with the responsibility for not only their 3 children, but also her aging mother-in-law.   Her struggle to survive in a culture where women are decidedly second class citizens, and peasants are no more than feudal serfs, is gripping, and surprisingly universal, even to a westerner. This is feminist literature at its creation.  It is also a primer on the day to day challenges faced by the masses in China which set the stage for the rise of Communism.  The Mother’s second son would become an early Communist insurgent, though politics is something she herself never understood, or even questioned.

In her works Pearl Buck mastered these human stories of the peasantry, making it all the more ironic that she was later banned re-entry to the country, branded as a tool of West.  To her credit, even though she was disavowed by the new power structure in China; her personal philanthropy clearly never abandoned a concern for their people.

The Circus in Winter (2004) By Cathy Day

I enjoy reading, yet routinely I’m ready for a book to end long before I get to the final page; but with The Circus in Winter, I would have been perfectly content for it to go on for another 300 pages.  That may be the strongest recommendation I’ve ever given a book.  A none-too-small part of that gush is the book’s relevance to my childhood -- settle down, I wasn’t a circus kid.

It’s an odd book; a collection of related short stories about people in the quasi-fictional town of Lima, Indiana.  I say “quasi” because Cathy Day, the book’s author, grew up in Peru, Indiana, where history has it a now long defunct circus spent its winter months.  This geography and the town folk are something I’m rather familiar with, being a native of northern Indiana. I particularly relate to the underlying subplot shared by all of the characters: the “comfort” of living in a small Midwestern town, versus the “get me outta here” dynamic. I knew this dilemma personally – one foot in then-small town Portage, the other foot in “the Chicago metropolitan area.” In my case, Chicago won out, though most of my large family remains in Indiana.

The book begins with a short biography of Wallace Porter, one of the "leading citizens" of Lima. On his annual business trip to New York he falls in love and marries.  His new wife however is rapidly stifled by life in a small town. In chapter 2, after it becomes clear she does not have long to live, he decides to buy a circus so that they can travel endlessly ... her dream.  She dies that day.  Afterwards, he keeps the circus, and it becomes his family. Just as it became his family, it also became a part of the fabric of the town.

There are chapters in this book that are just priceless, such as the Gypsies at the KOA camp.  But I’ll let you learn this on your own.  A note of caution: this is not a children’s book.

I found out about this book because it was referenced in the course material for a seminar on Sherwood Anderson (Winesburg, Ohio) at Chicago’s renowned Newberry Library. The materials placed her in Anderson's genre.  Fair enough, though she has a style that stands on its own quite sufficiently.  Further inquiry lead me to discover that a recent class of the Theater Department at Ball State University in Muncie, Indiana (a.k.a. Middletown) turned the book into Circus in Winter, The Musical. I truly would have loved to have seen that!

The World in the Evening (1954) By Christopher Isherwood

I am somewhat at a loss to describe The World in the Evening by Christopher Isherwood.   The word “vast” comes to mind, though that seems vague and somewhat misleading.  By “vast” I don’t mean lengthy or inaccessible, or even epic, it is none of these.  I mean it is vast in the range of life experiences that are explored.

The book follows the early adult life of Stephen Monk, from his postgraduate days through two early marriages.  To tell his story Isherwood merges two established literary genres: the Masterpiece Theater formula of the British gentry aimlessly wandering through Europe, and the formula of American youth “finding themselves” on "the" continent, after graduation, before returning to the States to begin their adult lives.

The first marriage is to a British author named Elizabeth, who dies of a heart ailment -- the title is taken from one of her books.  His second marriage is to Jane, an American party girl. The book begins as Stephen’s marriage to Jane is dissolving, and is primarily told through a series of flashbacks triggered by his reading of Elizabeth’s personal letters as he is convalescing from a serious accident.  

Readers of this book will fall for Stephen as they page through his life story.  He is a likeable, almost charismatic figure, though he is not a particularly admirable human being, which perhaps adds to his attraction. 

While The World in the Evening is a personal story, it plays out mainly in Europe over a momentous period of history – World War II is underway by the book’s end.  This backdrop is rarely the focal point of the story, but its presence grows as the book unfolds.

Isherwood is regarded as an early witness of the rise of Nazism, and notes it frequently in his writings set in the 1930s, including this book.  Yet, what has always left me questioning is whether he recognized the early beginnings of this decline into an abyss as it was occurring, as his books suggest, or if it was with a flawless 20-20 hindsight.  His books were, to my knowledge, written years later, after the full extent of the holocaust became widely known to the rest of the world.  I may have to add an Isherwood biography to my reading list to better address this question (though that’s no guarantee of an answer), and let me point out that the question does not pertain solely to Isherwood.

And finally, this would not be an Isherwood novel were it not to include some gay characters.  One seems particularly worthy of mention because he seems out of context.  Stephen’s doctor has a young lover named Bob, who like Stephen was raised a Quaker.  From a literary standpoint, Bob’s primary purpose in the book is to allow Isherwood to explore the subject of religious pacifism at the advent of a war against an unmistakable evil. But the interesting thing about how Bob is portrayed is that he is philosophically an unapologetic gay man, who clearly would have become a “militant” gay activist if he lived in the 1970s or later, yet the story takes place in the 1930’s and was written in 1952 when this topic was still very much “the love that dare not speak its name.”