I read a book today. A whole book. It was pretty wonderful, both the experience and the book. I'm not sure what led me to suddenly decide to read some Pearl S. Buck. I've long looked at her book covers and thought, One day, but for some reason the melancholy that I've always mentally associated with her (for no reason I can cite) fit feeling like death today, so in the waiting room at the Urgent Care I started reading Peony and I read until I was finished, through the brewing of tea and my hot bath which I had hoped would clear my sinuses and did not. I want to start it all over again. I feel like I devoured it so quickly that there are things I missed, conversations I want to have with the book and my thoughts that I didn't give myself time to have.
A few thoughts though, before I lose the thread. There are so many dichotomies in this book, so many choices weighed and options considered. David must choose between the old ways of his people represented by marriage to Leah and embracing the life before him in Kaifeng. Peony is presented with choice after choice - who David will marry, will she declare her love for him (to whom, and when, and how), will she be his concubine at the last or go to the convent. The rabbi must choose between the son he has and the son he wants. Kung Chen must decide if he will give his daughter to a foreigner in marriage. Is life happy or sad? How do we struggle with our choices and how do we make peace with them?
As a bondmaid, Peony was purchased as a very young girl and as such as grown up beside her master David ben Ezra, whom she eventually comes to love. Almost at the beginning of the book, Peony asks Wang Ma, an older servant and her mentor of sorts, if life is happy or sad, and it seems to take the characters the entire book to understand this. Their whole lives, in fact.
Was life sad or happy? She did not mean her life or any one life, but life itself— was it sad or happy? If she but had the answer to that first question, Peony thought, then she would have her guide. If life could and should be happy, if to be alive itself was good, then why should she not try for everything that could be hers? But if, when all was won, life itself was sad, then she must content herself with what she had.
“You cannot be happy until you understand that life is sad,” Wang Ma declared. “See me, Little Sister! What dreams I made and how I hoped before I knew that life is sad! After I understood this truth I made no more dreams. I hoped no more. Now I am often happy, because some good things come to me. Expecting nothing, I am glad for anything.”Peony is a realist - she accepts the sadness of life, and in a way, it feels almost tragic. Peony has such crumbs throughout the book, and at times I felt angry with her, with her resignation, with her acceptance, but then there are also moments when it is clear that she is happy in a way that so many of the other characters never manage to be.
She is at a kind of peace at the end - she makes her choice to be in the Buddhist nunnery and she sticks to it. She allows herself to mourn the things she did not choose and she commits to her new life. Even at his end, David seems tormented by the two paths once open to him. There is also an ongoing irony in the joy and lightness that we see of China through the eyes of the Jewish "foreigners" and the realities lived by the poorer Chinese characters. At one point, David's father Ezra is with Kung Chen and they have the following conversation:
"You are meditating deeply," Kung Chen said suddenly. "I feel a fever in you."
"I am meditating upon happiness," Ezra said frankly. "Can it be for all?"
Kung Chen pursed his full smooth lips. "For the poor, happiness is difficult," he replied. "For the one, too, who fastens his happiness wholly upon another being. Poverty is the external hazard and love the internal. But if one can surmount poverty and can love in moderation, there is no obstacle to happiness for anyone."
"When you say 'being,'" Ezra said, "do you mean human or God?"
"Any being," Kung Chen replied. "Some love a human being too well and are made subject by that love; others love their gods too well and are subject to that love. Man should be subject to none. Then we are free."Peony is poor, and she is also in love with David. She binds herself to him repeatedly throughout the book, but she does so knowingly and accepts the sadness that comes with that choice. Later, when she must leave, she accepts the sadness in that choice as well. In a way, the closest character to her own is the rabbi, who, as his maid Rachael says, is not happy unless he is miserable.
The other thing the quote above reminds me of is a moment when David's mother, a strong willed Jewish woman, devout, is wondering about the decrease in the number of Jews worshipping at the synagogue.
Where had the Jews gone? It was a matter to puzzle them all. Without persecution or any sort of unkindness from the Chinese, they had disappeared, each generation fewer in number than the one before. Madame Ezra was angry when she thought of this. It was, of course, easier to sink into becoming a Chinese, easier to take on easygoing godless ways, than it was to remain a Jew. All the more reason, therefore, for her to live strictly, in spite of her wealth - perhaps indeed, because of her wealth. A poor Jew might be constrained to choose between God and money. She had no such compulsion.We are always asking ourselves throughout the book if the choices people make are the right ones. In this case, is the choice really between money and religion? Again, there is that choice between tying oneself to something and not.
Finally, that question of kindness. They talk over and over again about the kindness of the Chinese people, almost as though it were something insidious, like the temptation of it is inherently bad. There is this question of what it would take for the Jews to be happy, can they be happy? It seems as though they always want something just beyond reach, something they cannot have.
Sooooo many questions. I keep thinking back to a particular passage and wishing I could find it. I think that means I have to read it again, and soon.
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