Anchee Min
Pearl of China
© 2009
For Pearl S. Buck
I belong to China for I have lived there from childhood to adulthood… Happy for me that for instead of the narrow and conventional life of the white man in Asia, I lived with the Chinese people and spoke their tongue before I spoke my own, and their children were my first friends.
Pearl S. Buck
My Several Worlds
Behind the calm steadfast eyes of a Chinese woman, I feel a powerful warmth. We might have been friends, she and I, unless she had decided first that I was her enemy. She would have decided, not I. I was never deceived by Chinese women, not even by the flower-like lovely girls. They are the strongest women in the world. Seeming always to yield, they never yield. Their men are weak beside them. Whence comes this female strength? It is the strength that centuries have given them, the strength of the unwanted.
Pearl S. Buck
Letter from Peking
PART ONE
CHAPTER 1
Before I was Willow, I was Weed. My grandmother, NaiNai, insisted that naming me Weed was better. She believed that the gods would have a hard time making my life go lower if I was already at the bottom. Papa disagreed. “Men want to marry flowers, not weeds.” They argued and finally settled for Willow, which was considered “gentle enough to weep and tough enough to be made into farming tools.” I always wondered what my mother would have thought if she had lived.
Papa lied to me about my mother’s death. Both he and NaiNai told me that Mother died giving birth. But I had already learned otherwise from neighbors’ gossip. Papa had “rented” his wife to the town’s “Bare-sticks” in order to pay off his debts.