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

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