***
Peony, is a deceptively simple story of star-crossed lovers divided by race, religion and class. Written in 1948, it's an historical novel which explores the role of women in mid 19th century China.
Peony is a bondmaid in a Jewish family who lived in Kaifeng in China in the 1850s. In the edition I read there was an Afterword* which confirmed that there had been Jews in Kaifeng for a very long time, and that they were well-accepted by the Chinese as they never were elsewhere. However, according to Buck, it was this assimilation which led to marrying 'out' and the gradual loss of their culture and religion.
*Probably by Wendy R. Abraham, but the book was from the library so I can't now be sure.
Although the novel is dominated by the story of Peony's doomed love for David, the son of the house of ben Ezra, it also explores Jewish beliefs and is critical of some aspects of their religion.
There is extensive dialogue about the incompatibility of the 19th century Chinese view of the world and the fundamentals of the Jewish religion. Through the character of Kao Lien, a Chinese Jew, Buck is quite explicit about the separateness of Jews making them vulnerable to hatreds, and he tells his daughter Kueilin that she will not be happy if she marries into that family because they are a sorrowful people and they worship a cruel god. Kung Chen, seeking to learn more about Judaism, rejects the concept of a Chosen People and tells the Rabbi that if there is a god, he would not select only The Chosen for salvation because under Heaven we are all one family.
***
Wikipedia tells me that Buck was, in the US, a prominent advocate of the rights of women and minority groups, but I am uneasy about anything that suggests any kind of justification for anti-Semitism, or which implies that minorities are in any way responsible for the irrational hatreds of other people. However, though it is now well-established that the German genocide targeted all Jews, whether secular or orthodox, or assimilated for generations or not, I am inclined to think that Buck was, in the immediate aftermath of WW2, searching for some kind of explanation for the Holocaust and the comparative tolerance of the Chinese. To put it another way, her response to the horror of the Holocaust may have been to explore within the society that she knew so well, the costs and benefits of assimilation as protection against it ever happening again.
I think now that Buck in this novel was exploring the vexed question of Jewish assimilation and identity. Hatreds that fuelled pogroms elsewhere did not occur in China because the Jews were absorbed into Chinese society, but this was at the cost of their traditions and identity. David's mother Madame Ezra represents orthodox separatists who feared the loss of a distinctive Jewish identity, and her intransigent refusal to modify her principles even at the cost of her son's happiness, shows the strength of her determination to protect her family's faith.
Buck's interest in this issue may also have been influenced by her own experience of being in a minority faith. She was the daughter of Presbyterian missionaries, so she may also have been critiquing the contrasting worlds of restrictive religions in general, in terms of how they are incompatible with a more light-hearted, humanistic approach to life:
Pearl recalled in her memoir that she lived in "several worlds", one a "small, white, clean Presbyterian world of my parents", and the other the "big, loving merry not-too-clean Chinese world", and there was no communication between them. (Pearl Buck's page at Wikipedia, viewed 4/11/20)
I'd be interested to hear the interpretations of others who have read this book more recently...
Peony, by Pearl S Buck, first published in 1948, borrowed from Kingston Library.
© Lisa Hill
Cross-posted at ANZ LitLovers where you can join in a conversation about the book if you want to.
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