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.