Review: Gorgeous story of survival bridges the gap between East and West
Rating: 5 out of 5
Date: 10 11, 2012
This beautiful book tells the story of Pearl S. Buck, a blond, West Virginian-born Presbyterian raised in the far-flung ancient city of Chinkiang.  Born in 1892, the year of dragon, she develops a strong, questioning mind in this port city lost during the Opium Wars, wrested from the Chinese under British control.  Raised by missionary parents, this historic fiction depicts her musings in the twilight of life- from retracing the steps of Marco Polo on Golden Island to holding hands tightly with her friend Jiao.  "The first real friend you try to make is the best. No expectations, everything accepted and understood," she reflects.  Salkind skillfully portrays Pearl's voice and love for China- indeed, kept in solitude "in a grotto forgotten, a good place for a school and a refuge for women," Pearl feels "more Chinese than American."  The innocence of childhood is conveyed through young Pearl's journals- "The palest ink is better than the best memory," her father says- as she grows in a time of revolution and waves of change."Pearl- a name that grows slowly but gains in substance," notes Ms. Hu, whom Pearl meets as she teaches homeless girls.  As regimes changed and war struck Shanghai, Peal learns that "viciousness knows no party, clan or village or international document."  She learns why a victory that costs too much is called Pyrrhic, what it means to be a wife, what it means to be a mother.  She reflects on her travels, describing "the lights, the gold, and silver, the immense cavernous ceilings and in the the eaves, the gilded images and jeweled icons, the smoldering incense and thousands of candles, in terrifying contrast to the ceaseless stream of people who came in to pray, their sad faces brooding and yearning."  Salkind does a marvelous job in recreating a China lost, "its spices, its sourness, the way it could smolder inside you a slow fire in the stomach."  It's a wonderful tribute to a woman who wasn't satisfied with simply being a "dutiful missionary female, a cog in the wheel of the ministry, doing what I was told when I was told to do it, expected to be obedient."  Indeed, Pearl was no "infant girl waiting to be drowned."  The bitter betrayal she felt at the hands of her husband, the truth of her feelings and words boiling from out the pit of her stomach- Salkind's book is a lovely rendering of a woman who was a bridge between the civilizations of the East and West.