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