The Promise Book

Pearl Buck's The Promise is worthy a read. The version of Chinese/English is used to convey that we are hearing the words and speech of a simple largely uneducated people. At times it can sound strained. I had not known it was book two of a series (book one is the Dragon Seed). It can help to read that one first, The Promise, after Chapter I stands on its own. The use of foreshadowing early in the book is heavy handed. Ms Buck was one of the first writers to introduce China to America and The Promise gives a uniquely Chinese point of View to World War II.

The Promise tells a fairly accurate version of the early months in China after Pearl Harbor. The Japanese were everywhere victorious, the Chinese were dependent on their allies and their allies were not making China their priority nor did they always understand the dignity due to a people in their own land. Chinese leadership and Chinese people had been lead to believe that England and America would be rushing huge amounts of the material needed to fight a war. The Chinese , if fully supported had the people and the will to rid themselves of the invading Japanese.

A few general observations.
The Chinese had not done well at stopping the Japanese or defeating them in the years before Pearl Harbor. There are several opinions about how much Chiang Kai-shek (here barely hidden behind the title the Chairman) prioritized the defeat of the Japanese compared with challenges of the competing Chines Warlords and the Chinese Communist Party.

Ms Buck is perhaps naïve about the Chinese soldier's loyalty, discipline and fighting record.

Ms Buck is reasonably accurate about the war in the Burma Thailand area in early 1943.
The specifics of Chinese fighting ability and the details of the China Burma Theater are less important the interactions among the main characters and the many combinations of secondary characters.

The main topic from my point of view is that of racism. The main characters Mayli and Sheng are well developed and believable. They love each other with a mature awareness of the others weaknesses and the dominating fact of the war. However as the plot moves beyond these 2; there are always reasons to distrust or dislike others. China is a land of many variations of spoken Chinese and failure to speak what is to the listener the local version marks the speaker as suspect. Changes in skin color, religion and national home land bring about all manner of judgments. All tend to be based on stereotyping.

For all the casual disparagement of any one strange or any place not China, the essential struggle is over the relative evil of the Japanese and the white people, British and Americans. At times it is uncertain which is the most to be despised. The white characters tend to be well meaning and within limits helpful, but they are casually insensitive, presumptuous and ignorant of local dignity. The Japanese are violent. The one evil is overt and immediate the other in unintentional and insidious in its apparently innocent intention.
Perhaps What Pearl Buck hopes the white world will remember from reading The Promise is that racism exacts high cost on those who are just absent mindedly or innocently racist, or deliberately and violently racist.