Madame Liang

Following notice at reference 2, I have now got around to reading reference 1. A bit of a change after three months of Clarissa. An interesting change, an easy read story, but in rather dead prose which reminded me of that by Agatha Christie. 

This rather battered copy once the property of the library of St. Thomas' Hospital.

Born at the end of the nineteenth century into a missionary background, Pearl Buck spent most of the first half of life, forty years or so, in China. That is to say during the first waves of revolution which eventually resulted in the Communist takeover, years after she had left. The second half in the US where she produced over 40 novels and 20 works of non-fiction, nearly all about China, past and what was then present. This included backing some good causes and some bad ones. She ended up in the grip of a greedy younger man. I was reminded of Ayn Rand, first noticed at reference 5. With whom Buck presumably shared nicotine, as she died of lung cancer, but Wikipedia does not mention alcohol.

Various thoughts follow.

Buck makes a lot of the racial pride of the Han Chinese, a pride partly based on their long, more or less continuous history, a good bit longer than our own here in England. She hints at the corruption in high places - corruption which the Cultural Revolution was, in part at least, an attempt to root out. She also writes of the attempts, during great leaps forward, to substitute enthusiasm for expertise - attempts which addressed problems addressed in a different way during the early part of Soviet rule in what is once again Russia.

She also makes a lot of their love of fine cooking - which enable the titular Madame Liang to make a good living in Mao's China, only falling at the time of the Cultural Revolution.

Quite a lot of space given to traditional Chinese medicine. Described here as being strong on observation but weak on remedy, despite much knowledge of remedies derived from plants.

All this seen through the eyes of a mother (of the same generation as the author) and her three daughters, a mother who sends her daughters to be brought up in the US - she herself went to university in Paris - but who then draws two of them back to Communist China, back to a difficult adjustment.

Salutary reading for me, as someone drawn to Chinese affairs as an adolescent, in the mid 1960's, at a time when my elders and betters were starting to worry about the turn that things were taking. And interesting, given the turn things have taken now, with the Chinese heading for the top. Back, perhaps, where their ruling classes have always thought they belonged.

We in the west probably knew something of the Chinese famine of 1959-1961 of reference 6, now thought to have cost between 15m and 50m lives, when this book was written in the late 1960's. Buck, with her intimate knowledge of the country probably knew as much as anyone. But only hinted at here. With some of the anger of the young perhaps being channeled into the Cultural Revolution which followed.

Elementary arithmetic suggests that these deaths, relative to population, were between 10 and 50 times greater than the excess deaths we have suffered here in the UK from the coronavirus over the past 18 months. A catastrophe rather than a tragedy.

PS: snap above of the author, I think from about the time she won the Nobel Prize - a literary first for a lady - in 1938.

Reference 1: The three daughters of Madame Liang - Pearl S. Buck - 1969.

Reference 2: http://psmv4.blogspot.com/2021/07/platform-library.html.

Reference 3: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pearl_S._Buck.

Reference 4: https://www.literaryladiesguide.com/book-reviews/the-three-daughters-of-madame-liang-by-pearl-s-buck-1969/. Including a snippet from the review by Louise Zerchling in the Sioux City Journal, seemingly a year before publication.

Reference 5: https://psmv4.blogspot.com/2020/04/ayn-rand.html.

Reference 6: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Chinese_Famine.