Pearl S. Buck: East Wind: West Wind

Fourth book review, and I’m returning to our first author, Pearl S. Buck, for another novel.  Now, I’m sure by this point you can tell that I strongly recommend reading things by this author (I’m still working on finding everything she’s ever written) but I think East Wind: West Wind is really one of those you should try to find.  It’s her first novel (which makes it quite different from Mandala) and the writing style she uses is very floating and vague, which is just perfect for the narrator’s voice.

Because we’ve already discussed the novelist’s life in greater detail, I’m going to only include a shortened version of what I’ve already written so you don’t have to backtrack.  Then it’s on to the plot and character summaries, finishing up with our usual discussion of the international conflicts at play.  Here we go!

Author Summary:

Though born in Virginia in 1892, Pearl S. Buck’s parents were missionaries, so soon enough she was bound for China at the age of three months.  She spent the majority of her time in China, in a town called Jingjiang (outside of Nanjing) and towns around it until 1934, though she did attend college in the United States. 

As far as her literary legacy is concerned, Buck won the Pulitzer Prize in 1932 for her novel The Good Earth, a book still read by many American high-schoolers.  Criticized by some scholars as having a plain-spoken, workaday style, Buck is still praised by most for helping to make Chinese culture understandable to those with no experience in the country. 

However, all her help to China did not make her immune to the forces of the Cultural Revolution.  She was still branded an “imperialist” and not permitted to enter the country when Nixon made his history making trip there in 1972.  She died a year later, at the age of 80.

The Plot:

There is no summary on the dust jacket of this book, so I’ll have to do the best I can without it.  I’ve taken some inspiration from the Wikipedia page for East Wind: West Wind, but am cutting out most of the spoilers that were there.

Kwei-lan is put into an arranged marriage, but her husband is not what she expects. She has been prepared for a marriage to a traditional Chinese man, who would demand her submission and service, but is married instead to a doctor who moves her from her parent’s home to his own.  He shows very little interest in her, and faced with the potential failure of her marriage, Kwei-lan makes sacrifices in the face of his modern interests.

Kwei-lan also has an older brother who has been studying and living in the United States.  He has married an American woman (Mary) without the approval of his parents.  Since they will not approve of her, Kwei-lan’s brother brings Mary to her house, where the two of them can live while waiting for their parents to come around.  So Kwei-lan is surrounded on all sides by those who are opening to the modern world.  Meanwhile, Mary must adapt herself to life in what is still a very traditional society.

…I told you I wasn’t very good at summaries!  But I hope this gives you at least an idea of the forces at play in the book.

The Characters: Mild Spoilers

Since the international conflicts really revolve around three characters, I’m going to limit my character summary to those three.  Kwei-lan’s brother does play a big role in the plot, but he is a very modern Chinese, having married an American.  I believe that since Kwei-lan’s husband is more caught between traditional China and the modern West, he is more important to devote some explanation to.  Then, on the other ends of the spectrum, we have Kwei-lan herself and her new sister-in-law, the American Mary.

Kwei-lan:

I have so much sympathy for Kwei-lan.  From the first pages of the book (which she narrates as a series of letters to a good friend) you can already see that she is in agony over her marriage.  In traditional Chinese society, it was the woman’s responsibility to ensure her husband’s happiness.  Ensuring that happiness used to be a relatively simple thing; a woman had only to be attentive to her husband’s needs and submissive to his whims.

Kwei-lan has taken lessons from her mother her entire life in subsuming her own personality to her husband’s.  She is incredibly selfless—which is proved later on in the story—but this quality is almost entirely overlooked by her husband.  He virtually ignores her for the first quarter of the book, making it impossible for her to fulfill the other requirement of a Chinese wife, which is to bear a son.  Her inner turmoil is described painfully here:

I ask you…with years like this to shape me, how have I been prepared for such a man as my husband?  All my accomplishments are of no avail.  I plan in secret that I will wear the blue silk coat with black buttons cunningly wrought in silver.  I will place jasmine in my hair, and upon my feet the pointed black satin shoes embroidered in blue.  I will greet him when he enters.  But when it has all come to pass, his eyes escape hastily to other things—his letters upon the table, his book.  I am forgotten. (Buck, p. 32)

Her Husband:

Kwei-lan’s husband is a hybrid character.  Raised in China but educated abroad, he is a doctor who enjoys a modern woman.  He enjoys the challenges and intelligence that a modern woman can bring to a relationship.  Though he is never unfaithful to Kwei-lan in their marriage, he is uncertain of her at the start, keeping her at a bewildering polite distance.  He assumes that she cannot understand what he wants from her, so he retreats from the very idea of their marriage.  To his credit, though, once she bends to his desires, he treats her very well.

Mary:

Mary is another sympathetic character.  Unknowing that her fiancé is of an upper-class Chinese family, and unaware that he had already been engaged to an upper-class Chinese woman, she comes to China under the impression that their relationship would be accepted in short order.  But she has no idea how strange she is to a China that has very little understanding of foreigners.  Kwei-lan describes her thus:

She is taller than my brother.  Her head is shorn.  Yet her hair does not lie decorously about her ears; it is as if blown by the four winds, and it is tawny, the color of tiger-bone wine.  Her eyes are like the sea under a stormy sky, and she does not smile easily.

At once I asked myself when I saw her, is she beautiful?  But I answer, she is not beautiful.  (Buck, p. 172)

International Conflicts:

We’re back to conflicts with this book, after two books that seem to show the gentle and non-confrontational merging of multiple cultures.  In this book, though the conflicts do not erupt in violence—as with the border skirmishes between India and China in Mandala—Kwei-lan has a lot of internal suffering as she attempts to compromise her deeply-rooted traditional beliefs with the more modern values at play in her family.

Mary has just as much difficulty adapting her modern sensibilities to traditional China, and finds that crossing borders for love is never as easy as it sounds.  I will focus on these two primarily in my discussion of conflict.

Kwei-lan vs. her Husband:

As already hinted, the major conflict between Kwei-lan and her husband is the fact that she does not understand what he wants from her.  She doesn’t understand why she is failing to live up to her husband’s expectations.  She reviews all the lessons she has ever heard from her mother, and does her best to follow them.  But one night, after the two of them attend a dinner with the new foreign wife of a neighbor, she begins to understand.  It is not what she does that turns her husband off, it is who she is.

So she changes and lets him undo one of the most central aspects to her obedience to Chinese culture; she lets him unbind her feet.

He stared into space.  I thought desperately for a few minutes.  There was only one way for women.  How could I—and yet my mother’s words were, “You must please your husband.”

My husband sat staring thoughtfully across the room.  I did not know what was in his mind.  But I knew this; although I wore peach-colored satin and had pearls in my ears, although my hair was smooth and black and shining in cunningly arranged coils, although I stood at his shoulder so close that a slight motion of his body would have brought his hand to mine, yet he was not thinking of me.

Then I hung my head lower and gave myself into his hands.  I renounced my past.  I said,

“If you will tell me how, I will unbind my feet.”

When I look back now, I realize that my husband’s interest began in me that evening.  It seemed as though before this we had nothing to talk about.  Our thoughts never met.  I could only watch him wondering and not understanding, and he never looked at me at all.  When we spoke it was with the courtesy of strangers to each other, I with shyness towards him, he with careful politeness that overlooked me.  But now that I had need of him he saw me at last, and when he spoke he questioned me and cared to hear my answer.  As for me, the love that had been trembling in my heart for him steadied into adoration then.  I had never dreamed that a man could stoop so tenderly to a woman. (Buck, pp. 81-82)

The good thing about this situation is that though Kwei-lan loses her past by submitting to her husband’s desire for a modern wife, she also gains that modern sense of love that Chinese tradition often ignores.  And she gains the son that she needed to ensure her marriage’s legitimacy in the eyes of her parents and in-laws.

Kwei-lan and Mary:

Mary, unlike anyone else in Kwei-lan’s life, has almost no connection to China.  She speaks only a few phrases of Chinese (with an accent so thick that Kwei-lan can’t understand her easily), she walks alone, exercises for entertainment, doesn’t care about her clothes, and does not do anything that a traditional Chinese woman should.  Kwei-lan can obviously still talk to her husband and brother, who share a traditional base with her, but Mary throws her back into disarray, especially because her parents are adamantly against her. 

There’s a great sequence, one of the first days that the two women are left alone together that really captures this uncertainly, this inability to connect on a similar set of expectations…as well as the relief when they find one thing they can share:

When we sit down to rice all together, she cannot eat with chopsticks…her voice…is not like any woman’s voice that I have heard…Her voice is deep and full…she does not speak to me for we do not understand each other.

Twice she has smiled, a quick, shining smile, springing up out of her eyes like a silver flash of sunshine on a sullen stream.  When she smiles I understand her.  She says, “Shall we be friends?” We look at each other doubtfully.

Then I answer silently, “When you see my son I shall know whether or not we can be friends.

…I brought him to her.  He stood before her on widespread legs and stared at her astonished.  I bade him bow, and he placed his little hands together and bowed, staggering with his effort.

She gazed at him smiling.  When she bowed she laughed aloud, a low laugh like a note struck from a deep bell, and then crying a sweet, unknown word, she seized him and held him against her and placed her lips upon his soft neck.  His hat dropped off and from over his shaven head she looked at me.  Such a look, My Sister!  Her eyes said,

“I desire one exactly like him!”

I smiled saying, “Then we shall be friends!”

I think I begin to see why my brother loves her. (Buck, p. 175-177)

Sources:

Buck, Pearl S. (1997). East Wind: West Wind. Wakefield: Moyer Bell.

Pearl S. Buck. (n.d.). In Wikipedia. Retrieved from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pearl_s_buck

Muriel Barbery: The Elegance of the Hedgehog

In high school, I studied French, learning to speak it quite well.  Unfortunately, it’s been about…seven years since leaving high school, and my talents have gone down the drain.  So, there’s no way I could read the next book I’m reviewing in its native language, but that’s okay; the English translation is very good and I enjoyed the story a lot.

This book is different from the others I’ve reviewed so far because it was not written by an American author.  The original language is French, and the book does not deal with American culture at all.  Well, unless you count some French concerns about the “Americanization” of their culture (which I don’t).  The book deals with the discrepancies between tiers of French society, and then throws in an elegant influence of Japanese culture on top of that.

Besides the interplay of class and culture to make the story interesting, the writing and characters are engaging and charming (with all their rough edges) which makes this week’s book, The Elegance of the Hedgehog, really good and definitely deserving of a read.

You all know the drill by now, so I’ll just jump in!

Author Summary:

Muriel Barbery wasn’t born in mainland France; she was actually born in Morocco (Casablanca, how romantic!) in 1969.  Her original ambition was not to be a novelist; she actually studied philosophy throughout her academic career and she holds a doctorate—or the French equivalent—that she earned in 1993.  Since then, she has been a professor of philosophy at several different universities, high schools, and teacher training colleges.

Though she published one novel before The Elegance of the Hedgehog, it was that book that catapulted her to awareness as a tremendous novelist.  Elegance stayed at the top of the French bestseller list for 30 consecutive weeks, and spent over a year on the New York Times bestseller list (at various levels).  The book has been translated and become a bestseller in many other countries as well, and was made into a movie released in 2009.

Muriel Barbery’s two books take place in the same hotel; characters from each story overlap and interplay.  However, to date she has not released another novel.

The Plot:

Straight from the back cover:

We are in an elegant hotel particulier in the center of Paris.  Renee, the building’s concierge, is short, ugly, and plump.  She has bunions on her feet.  She is cantankerous and addicted to television soaps.  Her only genuine attachment is to her cat, Leo.  In short, she is everything society expects from a concierge at a bourgeois building in a posh Parisian neighborhood.  But Renee has a secret; she is a ferocious autodidact who furtively devours art, philosophy, music, and Japanese culture.  With biting humor she scrutinizes the lives of the building’s tenants—her inferiors in every way except that of material wealth.

Then there’s Paloma, a super-smart twelve-year-old and the youngest daughter of the Josses, who live on the fifth floor.  Talented, precocious, and startlingly lucid, she has come to terms with life’s seeming futility and has decided to end her own on the day of her thirteenth birthday.  Until then she will continue hiding her extraordinary intelligence behind a mask of mediocrity, acting the part of an average pre-teen high on pop subculture, a good but not an outstanding student, an obedient if obstinate daughter.

Paloma and Renee hide both their true talents and their finest qualities from a world they suspect cannot or will not appreciate them.  They discover their kindred souls when a new tenant arrives, a wealthy Japanese man named Ozu.  He befriends Paloma and is able to see through Renee’s timeworn disguise to the mysterious event that has haunted her since childhood.  This is a moving, witty, and redemptive novel that exalts the quiet victories of the inconspicuous among us.

Characters: Slight spoilers

Renee:

Personal disclaimer: I absolutely love Renee.  Yes, she’s kind of a pain and she closes herself off from many other people—although the people in the building are not the kind of people one would want to associate with, by and large—but she’s very much like myself.  Believing herself to be ugly and knowing herself to be more intelligent than many other people in the world, she hides her true self from those who wouldn’t understand her capabilities and shares herself only with similar people.  Which, at the start of the book, only includes a single kindred spirit; a cleaning woman from another hotel.  Together, the two of them eat good food and discuss books and art in the privacy of Renee’s apartment.

To everyone else, however, she is the toad barely capable of speech who is responsible for overseeing their every frivolous need.  She takes messages, stores packages, and coordinates deliveries so that the “more important” residents of the hotel are free to worry about their lives’ minutiae, their therapy, and their spoiled children. 

Certainly, Renee could do more to change other’s perceptions of her, she could attempt to change her circumstances in order not to be so bitter…but I understand her.  It’s quite possible that she thinks that even if she were to show her true self to others that they just wouldn’t understand, or would look at her as though she were a particularly talented dog; just repeating tricks with no comprehension about their meaning.  Especially in a world so focused on appearance like upper-class France, Renee’s face might disqualify her from any consideration from these “superiors”.

Paloma and the Josses:

Paloma I have less sympathy with.  I rarely have sympathy with those characters born with every advantage who just can’t seem to get over their own apathy.  Paloma is smart; every chapter she narrates begins with what she calls a “profound thought”, a haiku-like thought that can be specific or vague as she sums up the silliness of the world around her.  Her world is mostly concerned with her parents and sister—symbols of self-absorbed, highly-educated, cultured French upper-class.  Paloma feels very little in common with them.

As the summary states, Paloma has decided to kill herself, which is partially why we hear her narrating her side of the story; she is journaling her perceptions before her suicide, so her parents have some way of understanding why she does what she does.  Actually, when she isn’t speaking of people and is speaking of life itself, Paloma has some very interesting perceptions.  She speaks on subjects such as culture, intelligence, and character with important insight; it’s just sad that she can’t take this perceptivity and apply it to her own life!

Ozu:

Ozu Kakuro unfortunately does not get the chance to narrate his own story, so we do not get the same view into his mind as we do the other two main characters.  However, his arrival makes for enough of an event in the hotel that all the characters take note of him, especially since he throws his unit into chaos by completely remodeling it to be more traditionally Japanese, with shoji screens and tatami flooring.

Upon arriving at the hotel, Ozu immediately senses the difference in Renee and Paloma.  The entire building does its best to get on his good side—there is actually an impressive amount of cultural admiration between France and Japan—but he ends up drawing closer to those two rather than anyone else.  Ozu seems to be a bit of a Japanese stereotype (after all, remaking the unit with shoji and tatami?) on the part of the author, but he is well acquainted with Western traditions and literature; one of the things that draws the trio together.

It also helps that both Paloma and Renee (Renee especially) are already students of Japanese culture.  This, again, feels like another stereotype; that both of them are drawn to the order, tradition, and culture of Japan that they both feel so superior to their own.  But that’s just me…as a student of Japanese, you see so much worship of Japan as a “superior” culture in the West…and it’s hard to maintain that idea of superiority when you’ve lived their and experienced Japanese flaws up close.  Not that Japan is overly flawed!  It’s just flawed, like anywhere else.

International Conflicts and Agreements (the ending gets totally spoiled!):

One of the points that The Elegance of the Hedgehog makes so well is that people—no matter what culture they may come from—with similar characters and sensibilities will notice each other, despite even outward differences.  Renee is middle-aged and physically unattractive, Ozu is an elderly Japanese man, and Paloma is a cute twelve-year-old upper class girl.  These three people would not normally become friends, but they do, and it’s all due to the fact that they understand each other.  That their differences of country and class mean very little when contrasted to their similarities of mind.

It’s a great point, and a true one. 

Mourning Renee:

I hate, hate, hate how the book ends.  It’s pointless and discouraging and even though it helps Paloma figure out that she wants to live, it does it by killing Renee, whom, as I previously wrote, I love.  And it’s in such a silly way, too!  Renee is hit by a car while crossing the street.  After all the progress she makes in connecting to other people, in realizing the possibility of love with Ozu…she’s sacrificed in a pointless jolt to Paloma’s consciousness.

I despise that, because more than likely Paloma would have come to realize that with people like Renee and Ozu in the world, life is worth living.  Kindred spirits are out there, though they might be hard to find.

Anyway…I thought that this portion of the book was fantastic in the cultural interplay because while all the rest of the building either ignores or barely notices Renee’s death, Ozu and Paloma come together and really understand what it means, that such a person has passed out of life.

At around five I went down to Madame Michel’s loge (I mean Renee’s loge) with Kakuro because he wanted to get some of her clothes to take them to the hospital morgue.  He rang at our door and asked Maman if he could speak to me.  But I had guessed it would be him, I was already there…In any event, Kakuo and I went down to the loge.  But while we were crossing the courtyard we stopped short, both of us at the same time: someone had begun to play the piano and we could hear very clearly what they were playing.  It was Satie, I think, well, I’m not sure (but anyway it was classical).

…how can you have a profound thought when your kindred soul is lying in a hospital refrigerator?  But I know we stopped short, both of us, and took a deep breath and let the sun warm our faces while we listed to the music drifting down from above.  “I think Renee would have liked this moment,” said Kakuro.  And we stayed there a few more minutes, listening to the music.  I agreed with him. (Barbery, p. 324-325)

Sources:

Barbery, Muriel. (2008). The Elegance of the Hedgehog. (Alison Anderson, Trans.). New York, NY: Europa Editions. (Original work published 2006).

Muriel Barbery. (n.d.). In Wikipedia. Retrieved from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muriel_Barbery

Alan Brennert: Honolulu

Since I live in Hawaii, I thought it would be interesting to review a book that deals with Hawaiian culture.  The books of Alan Brennert are some of the most famous novels that bring Hawaiian lifestyle to the majority of Americans: they are Moloka’i and Honolulu.  His stories are not modern, but that just means that the clash of cultures within are even more obvious.

The book I’ve chosen to review this week is Honolulu.

Just like last time, to give my review some historical context, I’m going to start by doing a brief summary of the author then give you the outline of the plot before going on to my discussion of international conflicts.  Unlike last time, I’m also going to give you a little description of Hawaii’s history as well, just so readers who are from a culturally homogenous area can understand just what a strange melting pot Hawaii was and is!

Author Summary:

Alan Brennert doesn’t quite have the same illustrious history as Pearl S. Buck, but he has been a writer for television, film, and the stage.  Since completing graduate work in screenwriting at UCLA, he has been a writer for a large variety of television shows.  From Wonder Woman to Buck Rogers, and The New Twilight Zone to Star Trek: Enterprise, his writing career has spanned a variety of genres and styles.  Concurrently with his endeavors in TV, he has also penned numerous short stories. 

It was only when he published Moloka’i in 2003—after a miniseries on the same subject was turned down for production—that he came to national recognition.  Received with mostly favorable reviews, the book won a Bookies Award, and was named a BookSense Reading Group Pick as well.  His research on the period of the Hawaiian leper colonies then enabled him to write Honolulu, which was published in 2009…again to favorable reviews.

Hawaii:

A book’s setting often plays a very important role, even to the point of becoming a character in its own right.  This is certainly the case with Hawaii.  At the time in which Honolulu is set (early 1900s), Hawaii was going through some particularly interesting times.  In the process of opening up for foreign trade, Hawaii also opened itself up to different styles of farming; most particularly, plantation farming.

Plantation farming required a large labor force.  Native Hawaiians often didn’t care for plantation work; it was harder work than they were used to, and many plantations were in isolated areas around the island, which separated the workers from their families.  So many foreigners—from Korea, Portugal, China, and Japan—were imported to work on the growing sugar cane and pineapple plantations owned by foreign whites. 

The plantation lifestyle was what eventually gave Hawaii its unique multicultural flavor.  Hawaiians interacted with all these other races on the plantations, creating a unique language (what still exists as “pidgin”) and integrated food items, such as saimin, which still persist.  Working together, all these individuals had to find a system of respecting and helping each other.  Quite a bit of the story of Honolulu is set on a plantation just like the ones of old Hawaii.

The Plot:

I’ll borrow from the book’s dust jacket again to give you a summary of the story:

Honolulu is the rich, unforgettable story of a young “picture bride” who journeys to Hawai’i in 1914 in search of a better life.

Instead of the affluent young husband and chance at an education that she has been promised, she is quickly married off to a poor, embittered laborer who takes his frustrations out on his new wife.  Remaking herself Jin, she makes her own way in this strange land, finding both opportunity and prejudice.  With the help of three of her fellow picture brides, Jin prospers along with her adopted city, which is growing from a small territorial capital into the great multicultural city it is today.  But paradise has its dark side, whether it’s the daily struggle for survival in Honolulu’s tenements, or a crime that will become the most infamous in the islands’ history…

With its passionate knowledge of people and places in Hawai’i far off the tourist track, Honolulu is most of all the spellbinding tale of four women in a new world, united by dreams, disappointment, sacrifices, and friendship.

International…Agreements: Warning!  Here there be some spoilers.

As a very nice break from the last book I reviewed, Honolulu actually has more agreements than conflicts when it comes to interacting cultures.  Most of the conflicts are actually internal to Korean culture.  The book deals with male and female contrasts and relationships (especially in a traditional Korea which was a very patriarchal society), and high and low class conflicts (as where the protagonist learns how to read from a prostitute, explicitly against the wishes of her father).

However, once the protagonist comes to Hawaii, though expecting to meet opposition from the locals, she experiences almost nothing but warmth and friendliness from those she meets.  Even Koreans who have lived in Hawaii for a longer time, or those of Korean ancestry who were born in Hawaii, are more friendly and carry fewer of the rigid restrictions that traditional Koreans have.

So I’m going to talk about two major sections where agreement, and not conflict between cultures, makes the most impression on the protagonist.  First, she goes with her husband to the plantation where he works, and finds herself having to learn the rules of her new life from other plantation wives.  Then, I’ll talk about the roles that various Hawaiians play when it comes to helping her and her family settle into their lives in Honolulu itself.

Plantation Life

As mentioned above, plantation life forced people of many different cultures into interacting—sharing food, stories, and hardships—so I would like to quote a great passage in this section from the book.

Jin, the protagonist, has come to Hawaii and is living on a plantation as the picture bride of her abusive and often drunk husband.  After her husband goes on a bender that leaves him unable to work, she takes it upon herself to join some of the other plantation wives in the field to earn her living.  A woman from a high-ranking Korean family, she has never done such back-breaking work and does not know the rules of the plantation, nor the tricks that enable her to bear such a life.

And then, the other women on the plantation help her:

At 11:00 AM the whistle blew and we were given thirty minutes for kaukau—mealtime—gathering in groups to eat and talk.  I ate my rice in the Korean manner, with a spoon, and my kimchi with chopsticks, and I was startled to see that the Japanese women used only chopsticks for all foods but soup, which struck me as somewhat vulgar.  But I was frankly appalled as I watched the Portuguese women scoop fish or beef out of tins with their fingers, as Hawaiians did with fish or this taro paste called poi—in Korea it was strictly forbidden to eat food with one’s hands, and I did my best to conceal my horror.

I must have been staring too long at one of the Portuguese women, who misinterpreted it and asked me cheerfully, “You like try?”  She broke off a piece of some sort of pastry and held it out to me.  I couldn’t gracefully decline, so I smiled a little nervously and used my chopsticks to pluck the offering from her hand (which seemed to amuse her).  But my dismay at her table manners quickly paled next to the sweetness of the pastry.  “This is delicious,” I told her.

“Ono,” she said.

“It’s called ono?”

She laughed.  “No, no, this malassada—what the haoles call a ‘doughnut’.  ‘Ono’ means delicious.”

“It is very ono, then,” I said.  “Thank you.”

As shot as it was, mealtime was the high point of a day in the fields.  In those that followed I would discover such delights as Portuguese bread, Okinawan potato manju, Hawaiian haupia pudding, and a sweet Japanese confection called mochi.  In return I would share the mandu dumplings, honey rice, and kimchi I prepared for my own lunch.  We also exchanged recipes, and now for supper I would occasionally make Chinese eggplant in hot garlic sauce or Spanish paella as a complement to traditional Korean fare. (Brennert, p. 77-78)

Food brings all kinds of people together!  All the foods mentioned above have survived and thrived out here in Hawaii; you can find them anywhere today.  Convenience stores sell dumplings, bakeries have malasadas, and mochi is available at the grocery store.

Hawaiian Hospitality

One of the most touching scenes in the book, I find, happens after Jin has escaped from her abusive husband and managed to establish herself with another family—a loving husband, and several children.  She and her new husband work hard managing a restaurant that features international cuisine…oddly, the two had tried to do a simple Korean restaurant and found that having only one type of food available would not work in international Hawaii! 

They work hard, but their life does allow for some fun.  One day, they go to the beach, and meet some surfers…but one of the surfers is far from your average beach boy.  Jin’s daughter, Grace, is afraid of the ocean and will not go in.  One of the surfers takes it upon himself to make sure she is no longer afraid:

He started her searching on the dry sand and just when she was starting to get bored, I saw him slip a coin out of his pocket and bury it into the sand.  When Grace found it a few minutes later, she cried out, “Look!  A dime!”

“Well, that’s swell,” Duke said with feigned frustration, “but I know there’s a quarter a little further out.”

He showed her how to use the glass box to view the sandy bottom of the shallows, pointing out frightened little puffer fish burying their heads in the sand and tiny sand crabs skittering sideways like tipsy spiders.  Grace began to brave the deeper water without even realizing she was doing it.  Duke turned her toward a school of silvery needlefish, slanting below the surface like a torrent of silver rain.  When the water grew too deep for Grace to wade in, Duke picked her up in his big hands and gently floated her on the surface.  She peered through the glass box and the schools of yellow tangs, blue-green unicorn fish, and black-and-white butterfly fish swarming around the pink coral heads.  Grace was so entranced by this colorful undersea world that it didn’t even occur to her to be afraid.  And Duke didn’t forget, as they came ashore again, to have her look for that quarter in the sand—which, of course, she triumphantly discovered.

Grace was never afraid of the ocean again, and from that day on, Duke Kahanamoku was as much royalty to me as Lili’uokalani had been.

For those who don’t recognize the name, Duke Kahanamoku was a famous athlete, an Olympic swimmer who also helped popularize the sport of surfing throughout the world.  He was called the “Ambassador of Aloha” and to this day there is a statue of him on Waikiki Beach.

This passage—among many others like it—shows the natural hospitality of the Hawaiians, and their habit of treating others, even strangers, as friends.  Sometimes it does take some time to settle into life in the islands, but once you do, you make friends for life.

Sources:

Brennert, Alan. (2009). Honolulu. New York: St. Martin’s Press.

Alan Brennert. (n.d.). In Wikipedia. Retrieved from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Brennert

Pearl S. Buck: Mandala

First actual book review posting, huzzah!  This week I’d like to review Mandala, by Pearl S. Buck, a novel that I ran across in a used bookstore (the best kind) in Virginia and devoured in a single sitting.  Pearl Buck is, of course, most known for her novels of China, and I will be reviewing another of those later on—since they’re very good—but I was struck by Mandala because it’s one of her later works, not among her most famous, and about India, although China does make a significant appearance.

Because I want to give this book a bit of historical context, I’m going to start by doing a brief summary of the author then give you the outline of the plot and major characters before starting in on my review.  Now, you may not be able to find Mandala at your local bookstore or library, but it’s available for under $10 online, and even though my hardcover copy is from 1970, it’s still in very good shape and worth a purchase if you want to read.

Author Summary:

Though born in Virginia in 1892, Pearl S. Buck’s parents were missionaries, so soon enough she was bound for China at the age of three months.  She spent the majority of her time in China, in a town called Jingjiang (outside of Nanjing) and towns around it until 1934, though she did attend college in the United States.  Obviously, she was bilingual. 

Buck lived through some extremely turbulent times in Chinese history.  Modernity was approaching swiftly, and revolutions and civil wars rocked the nation.  Often she and her family were abandoned by Chinese friends and found that their Western compatriot had fled the country to avoid the conflicts.  However, she threw herself into writing, hoping to document the history of rural Chinese life, and humanitarian efforts, saving her Chinese friends from war, or helping to ease child adoption between China and America.

As far as her literary legacy is concerned, Buck won the Pulitzer Prize in 1932 for her novel The Good Earth, a book still read by many American high-schoolers.  Criticized by some scholars as having a plain-spoken, workaday style, Buck is still praised by most for helping to make Chinese culture understandable to those with no experience in the country. 

(For myself, having been to the country and having studied Chinese language, culture and history, I love to read Buck’s novels, even though the situations she described then are now only to be found in rural China.  She describes the emotional state of people from all ranks of society clearly and with great sympathy.)

However, all her help to China did not make her immune to the forces of the Cultural Revolution.  She was still branded an “imperialist” and not permitted to enter the country when Nixon made his history making trip there in 1972.  She died a year later, at the age of 80.

The Plot:

I admit that the following summary is not mine.  I tend to give away a lot of plot secrets when summarizing a book, so I’ve borrowed and edited from the dust-jacket of my copy.  The full citation for the book is at the bottom of this entry, so you can find it and look it up if you want to get the missing pieces:

Mandala is one of Pearl S. Buck’s rare novels about India.  Centering her story around a modern princely family of the New India, she explores the mysticism that pervades everyday life there.  Extrasensory perception, reincarnation, and spirits are very real concerns of the Maharana Prince Jagat and his family.

Prince Jagat is the virile descendent of a warrior people…Political events strip him of his titles and most of his wealth, but not of his sense of responsibility to the local villagers.  As the novel opens, he is embarking upon a scheme to turn an opulent but ghost-ridden lake palace into a luxury hotel for foreign tourists.

When news reaches him that his only son, Jai, has been killed by the Chinese in a border skirmish, his life changes even more.  Convinced that Jai’s spirit lives, Jagat’s wife, Moti, will not rest until he sets off to find their son. 

The Characters: Warning, some mild spoilers in this section.

I’ll break this part down into two sections: the Indians and the Americans.  Since there is not a single Chinese individual, they serve en masse merely to advance the plot and will not be discussed here.  For such a short book, it’s surprising how varied a cast of characters Pearl Buck uses and how she manages to give them all multifaceted, realistic personalities!

These descriptions are entirely mine.

The Indians:

Prince Jagat: Descendant of a line of Maharana, Jagat is an active, enthusiastic man who embraces modernity but maintains sensitivity towards the old Indian ways of thinking. Despite having lost his wealth and most of his property, he is an active tiger hunter, attentive to the needs (both physical and psychological) of the tenants on his property, and participates where possible in projects to improve the lives of his countrymen.

Moti: Wife of Prince Jagat, Moti, is a woman devoted to Hindu ideals of vegetarianism, nonviolence, and detachment.  She believes, after years of being taught so by her parents, that a wife is not to love her husband.  Though she could—and often considers—loving Jagat, her first feeling of love is given to Father Francis Paul (description below).  When her son dies, she refuses to believe it and insists that Jagat go search for him…and this search eventually turns into a hunt for Jai’s reincarnation.

Jai: Jagat and Moti’s son, educated abroad and well-spoken, if somewhat immature.  When China threatens the border of India, he volunteers for duty against the wishes of his parents in order to protect India’s sovereignty.

Veera: Jagat and Moti’s daughter, Veera is a woman on the cusp of New India.  Though she is somewhat educated, her mother’s emotional training has her trying to find a proper path between the romanticism sweeping from America and the West, and the calm serenity emphasized by her mother and her Eastern traditions.  Veera comes very close to having an affair with Bert Osgood (the American contractor), even though she has been promised in an arranged marriage.

The Americans:

Bert Osgood: He begins the novel as a somewhat stereotypical “Ugly American”.  Concerned with profit and modernization, he sometimes rides roughshod over Prince Jagat’s more refined sensibilities.  However, the longer he remains in India, the more aware he becomes of the history of his place and the country.  Though intrigued by the possibility of romance between himself and Veera, he eventually realizes that neither of them will be happy in a relationship.  He desires eventually to return to the same small-town American life he sprang from, and knows Veera well enough to know that she could never adapt to such a life.  He refuses to let his emotions or hers get in the way of their lives ending happily; this clarity of mind allows Veera to let him—and the possibilities he represents—go.

Brooke Westley: Though not mentioned in the plot summary, Brooke is extremely important to the novel.  A lonely, isolated child—raised by a grandmother with some eclectic thoughts on the idea of love—she is an heiress who drifts from place to place without forming any emotional connections to either places or people.  After landing in India and meeting Jagat by chance, she follows him to the lake palace/hotel-in-progress, content to wait in India to sort through her emotions and the instinctive attachment she feels to both Jagat and the country.

The attraction is mutual for Jagat.  After years of not being loved by his wife, he feels the possibility of love and understanding from Brooke and is intrigued.  The two are plainspoken in their decision to begin an affair, but their emotions are not shallow.  Brooke—ignoring the damage to her reputation—accompanies Jagat in his search for Jai, and eventually finds what everyone comes to believe is his reincarnation.

Father Francis Paul: An enthusiastic missionary working among the ethnic Bhil people, Father Francis is hungry for change and modernization.  He attached himself to Jagat and his wife upon entering the country in order to gain their support for his educational and technological endeavors, and became fascinated by Moti, who is deeply spiritual though uninterested in Christianity.  He becomes her tutor and confidante in matters of the soul, despite their differing religious backgrounds, but when she eventually confesses love for him, drifts away from the family.  He is English, but I’m putting him in with the Americans as a force of “Westernization”.  Also because I don’t want to put in a separate section for “British”.

International Conflicts: Do NOT read this if you don’t want the plot spoiled!

The events of the plot, as well as the descriptions of the characters, should already give you a good idea of the variety of conflicts that arise over the course of the novel.  I’m going to limit my review to several of the most important: the Indian past vs. American present as exemplified by Jagat and Brooke, and the Romances (Moti and Father Francis, Veera and Bert).  Each of these conflicts integrates several different concepts and ways to look at the possibilities that two merging cultures can create.

Indian past vs. American present: Jagat and Brooke

“American” in this instance could also read as “Modern”…either way, it is an ideology that leads away from the mysticism and magic of the past, and veers away from spiritual ideas such as reincarnation…a crucial element in the story.  These two ideologies clash frequently, creating sometimes irreconcilable differences between characters, but more often, resulting in a fascinating hybrid between the two.

Jagat, for example, is a modern man.  Even married to a woman like Moti, still devoted to her Indian and Hindu past, he sacrifices the remnants of his princely past almost without regrets.  He admits that his ancestral land should return to the people who worked it, and thinks often about the harems that his father and grandfather amassed with more disgust than longing.  However, all his modernity is challenged on the book’s very last page; he comes across the boy that Brooke believes is his son’s reincarnation:

A strange look came over his face, a look half frightened but half smiling.

“Have you seen my son before, High One?” she asked.

Believing and unbelieving, he gave a great sigh.  “I do not know,” he said and, believing and unbelieving, he went his way. (Buck, p. 376)

On the opposite side of the coin, Brooke is a woman raised modern but emotionally more comfortable with the Eastern traditions.  In part, this is due to her grandmother, who lead a loving life in defiance of tradition, taking lovers both her age and younger without being married to them.  Though Brooke discovers this just before the woman’s death, it throws her into a rootless existence as she crosses the world, searching for a sense of belonging and love.  When she arrives at Jagat’s lake palace, she falls into a kind of stasis, content to wait until what she feels is going to happen (a friendship or love with Jagat, she doesn’t care which) happens.

This lack of clear purpose is far more familiar to Buddhist or Hindu traditions than Protestant Christianity, but Brooke is not uncomfortable with the clash of her traditions.  From the start, she shows more openness to the idea of reincarnation than Jagat:

“About reincarnation,” she began irrelevantly.  Indeed, she had not been thinking of that at all, and the word came out of her mouth of its own accord, so startling that she paused.

“What about reincarnation?” he asked.

“Simply that today somehow I am ready to believe in it totally.  It’s the effect that India has on me.  Here I believe anything!”  (Buck, p. 268)

The Romances:

Moti and Father Francis:

Rather than do a heavy-duty analysis of their relationship, I’d rather let this passage speak for itself.  This takes place towards the end of the novel, after Jagat has brought Brooke to the main house to share a meal with Moti and Father Francis.  The priest and the princess are left in the room alone together when Brooke and the prince go off to admire a view:

“Let me forget that you are a priest.  May I?”

He did not reply.  He looked at her half-startled, and she went on quickly, changing before his very eyes.  Her listlessness was gone, she leaned toward him, her voice urgent.

“I have never loved anyone before—no one, you understand?  Now I know I love you.  It is not my wish to love you.  It is not my wish to love anyone.  I know, from my own mother, that it is a misfortune to love anyone, but especially for a woman to love a man.”

 

He was overwhelmed with horror and pity.

“My dear soul, do you not love your husband?”

“No, and never,” she said.

“He is kind to you.”

“That is not love.”

“Does he love you?”

“How can he love me when I do not love him?”

“Is it not your fault then?”

She threw her fan on the floor in a gesture of impatience.  “Can I help it?”

“You can pray that you will be enabled to love him.”

She laughed bitterly.  “How little you know about love!”

She rose impetuously, this woman whom he had never seem impatient, and crossing the floor swiftly, she knelt at his feet and folded her hands on his knees.

“Help me!”

For the first time in his life he looked into a woman’s eyes and was made helpless by her love…He put his hands over hers, trembling as he did so.  “My dear, my dear,” he murmured.  “I wish I knew how to help you…We are what we are,” he said.  “You are the wife of a great and good man, I am a priest of God.  That is our destiny.” (Buck, p. 335-336)

Though a Westerner, Father Francis is a priest, and is not allowed to understand the passionate emotions that compromise Moti’s hard-won peace of mind.  The only retreat he has is a literal retreat; away from her and the temptations she offers.

Veera and Bert:

This plot arc gave me the most cause for concern, because it could have turned out to be quite a cliché.  You have a young, beautiful Indian princess, “stifled” by her mother’s restrictive ideas on the concept of love, and the young, hearty American, free and restricted by no one’s ideas save his own.  These two could have messed up the story and had the book end in such tragedy, but…thankfully, they didn’t.

This in no way means that their arc is boring.  No.  In fact, theirs is one of the places where a sensible midway point is reached between the divergent ideas of India and America.

Veera provides most of the confusion.  Hanging on the cusp of an arranged marriage with a man she hardly knows, she is tantalized by the forces of modernity that hover around her; from her father’s relationship with an American woman, to the transformation and repurposing of her ancestral home.  She flirts with the idea of a relationship with Bert, who is completely captivated by her beauty, she is the one who digs her heels in and refuses to let him go when the two are seen dancing and kissing on a moonlit verandah. 

But Bert is a practical American.  When confronted by Veera’s husband-to-be, he thinks:

Obviously it was all going to be too difficult.  He’d better go home as soon as possible, his commonsense told him, and yet there was something about this beautiful Indian girl that he would never forget.  Whomever he married, and however long he might be married, he’d know romance was here in this palace.  (Buck, p. 342)

But a day later, he carries out his resolution and asks Jagat to release him from his contract:

“…I see it would be very wrong of me to interfere with his life, for that would be to interfere with your daughter’s life.  The time has not yet come when—certain barriers—can be removed.  She would not be happy in my country, and I would not be entirely happy to remain here.  Ours would be a floating sort of existence and I am a man who likes my roots.  I can make them for myself but I couldn’t make them for her…” (Buck, p. 343-344)

The nuance in this conflict is interesting, and enduring.  To make a cross-cultural love successful, the participants in it need to have a good knowledge of themselves and their partners.  Without knowing both weaknesses and strengths—as Bert did—the relationship will crumble and leave unhappiness on both sides, echoing down to the members of the family who let the romance flourish.

Sources:

Buck, Pearl S. (1970). Mandala. New York: The John Day Company.

Pearl S. Buck. (n.d.). In Wikipedia. Retrieved from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pearl_s_buck

Introduction

Hello and welcome to my brand-new book review blog!  It's called "Crossing Borders" for a very good reason, since rather than reviewing everything I read, I'm going to focus on those books that deal with the interplay of cultures.

First, a little background:

When I was thirteen, my sister brought home a bunch of poor-quality VHS tapes, all full of a new kind of cartoon straight from Japan.  Though the Internet didn't really have a lot of information available on the subject--this was a while ago!--I soon learned that this was called anime, and that it was hugely popular in Japan.  I was absolutely hooked.  Sailor Moon, Fushigi Yugi, Dragonball Z...they were all fascinating, and I spent hours watching them and trying to decipher bits and pieces of the Japanese language.

The language was unintelligible at first, but very soon I started to pick up a word here, and a phrase there, and I knew that I wanted to study Japanese, more than anything.  Four years later, I signed up for Japanese 101.  I also took Chinese 101...for no real reason but that it seemed interesting.  That began my love affair with Asia.

Anyway, I studied the language, history, and culture of both these East Asian nations, but they were so strange and alien to me (a pretty isolated American kid from Connecticut) that I had a hard time understanding why people in Japan and China did what they did.  Then I started reading the literature.

From Japan, I read Natsume Soseki, Tanizaki Junichiro, Oe Kenzaburo, and Yukio Mishima.

From China, I read Li Bai, The Analects, plays, and opera from the wide range of history.

And many, many more.

I really believe that literature can help open our eyes to what we're missing or misunderstanding about the actions of others.  If more people read multicultural books, we might not have the problems we have in the world today.  I want to use this blog to study books that involve a clash of cultures as a major feature in the story.  By reading these works and analyzing the clashes through the different theories of culture, I can see how authors treat these differences and whether they are sensitive to the cultural qualities that drive conflict between individuals.