It was 1996 and I was giving a reading at a Chicago bookstore for my memoir, Red Azalea. Pearl Buck’s name didn’t cross my path again until I immigrated to America. I was told to copy lines from the newspapers: “Pearl Buck insulted Chinese peasants therefore China.” “She hates us therefore is our enemy.” I was proud to be able to defend my country and people. We were told that the book was so “toxic” that it was dangerous to even translate. I wished that I had been given a chance to read The Good Earth. And yet I do remember having difficulty composing the criticisms. I was brainwashed at that time and had learned never to question anything. I followed the order to denounce Pearl Buck and never doubted whether or not Madam Mao was being truthful. Trying to gain international support to deny Pearl Buck an entry visa (to accompany President Nixon to China), Madam Mao organized a national campaign to criticize Buck as an “American cultural imperialist.” I couldn’t stop myself because I remembered how I had denounced the author. I finished reading The Good Earth on the airplane from Chicago to Los Angeles. I became a Mao activist and won contests because I was able to recite the Little Red Book. My parents both believed in Mao and the Communist Party, just like everybody else in the neighborhood. My father was an instructor of industrial technique drawing at Shanghai Textile Institute, although his true love was astronomy. My mother had been a teacher-she taught whatever the Party asked, one semester in Chinese and the next in Russian. I became a leader of the Little Red Guards in elementary school. I was raised on the teachings of Mao and the operas of Madam Mao. I was a teenager attending middle school in Shanghai. I was ordered to denounce Pearl Buck in China, where I lived for 27 years. Pearl Buck and I have a long history together, and in some sense that story is at the heart of my novel, Pearl of China.
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