Pearl of China
China, at the end of the 19th century and in the dying days of the Empire. In the town of Chin-kiang two small girls meet and become lifelong friends. One is Willow, a Chinese girl of a very poor family and the other is Pearl Buck, daughter of zealous Christian missionaries. The book follows the lives of these children as they grow to womanhood and live through the changes brought about by the onset of Communism beginning with Chiang Kai-shek and continuing under Mao Tse-Tung.
This was an amazing story, all the more so because this is not one about imaginary characters. These people really lived and the times they lived through are as much a part of human history as the French and Russian Revolutions. In 1938 Pearl Buck was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature. She died in America in 1973.
Once I had begun to read I could not put the book down. The story was vividly but sensitively told and the author, herself Chinese, very much involved with the events in China in middle years of the 20th century. Highly recommended.