Kinfolk Book

Excellent book set in a particular place and time, China in the mid-1940s. The war with Japan seems to have ended and the struggle between the KMT (Nationalist) remnants and communists is ongoing, but largely in the background. Much of China remains peasantry.

The story centers on one extended family and the trials and travails of four of that family who return to China while it is effectively disintegrating. It was a bit of a slow read for me in part because I wanted to savor it and in part because it made me stop to consider how the author had woven strands of Confucianism into the story. The way in which the author did that emphasized a bit of the downside of that way of thought and the effect it had on China. The book has dark moments, but it is not a dark book. Rather it is, in part, a study in the capacity to endure and adapt. It is also a study in what it was and to perhaps some extent still is to be Chinese.

Pearl Buck was a gifted writer. Her prose is tight and poignant: "But what did Peter know of secret police dressed as common men? He nodded, and the next moment he felt a round cold piece of metal at his temple. But this was only for a fraction of a second. Then upon a roar of thunder he felt himself lifted from earth into heaven and he knew no more."

Ultimately though, the author does not attempt to explain as much to elucidate: "You can't change what has been going on so long Mary," he told her, and yet understanding all she felt. He knew very often this catch of the heart, this sense of shame, before the poor here in his own land. Yet what could any of them do? It was all too old. One could not change eternity." In these sentences, she captures something of what it was like to be Chinese then.

Some denizens of political correctness suggest that Pearl Buck might not have been fully credible because she was not ethnically Chinese. For me, that is classic inside the box thinking. From 3 months of age (1892 until 1934) she lived her life in China, except for 1910 to 1914 when she returned to the US to attend college and the year after the Nanjing Incident (1927) which she spent in Japan. She grew up with Chinese children and one could argue that Mandarin was as much her first spoken language as English. She remains one of most authentic chroniclers of Chinese life during the time that saw the end of imperial China.