Pavilion of Women by Pearl S. Buck

I had never read this. I've read The Good Earth several times, even taught it once, but I never felt compelled to embark on a course of Pearl Buck novels. I probably wouldn't have read it now if my sister hadn't gotten it - and asked me if I had looked at it. So I did. Once started, I couldn't put it down. And that's a phrase I usually reserve for those extremely tense mystery/suspense novels that I am addicted to, not for a piece about life in an upper class Chinese household published in 1946.

Madame Wu has managed the Wu household since her mother-in-law's "retirement" on her fortieth birthday. On her own 40th birthday, however, although she intends to acquire a concubine for her husband to handle those duties, she has no intention of stepping down as CEO.

She understands that her oldest son's wife is fully engaged in bearing and raising children and has neither the time nor the inclination toward management. She is less aware that another reason is that she simply doesn't want to give up control of her world. As she continues to make the decisions which direct the lives of all sixty or so people in her world, things began to go subtly, then more seriously, wrong.

Then everything changes. She invites into her controlled and tranquil environment a stranger, a foreigner, a priest who comes to tutor her third son in English. Madame Wu is intrigued and joins the study and her entire vision of the world changes. When he is killed by street thugs, she is summoned to his deathbed and he charges her to "Feed my lambs." His lambs turn out to be the fifteen or so girls that he has rescued from certain death after they have been abandoned by their families as undesireable mere females. Madame Wu takes them home and installs them in the Buddhist temple on the grounds of the Wu home. Even so, the story is not about the inclusion of these girls in the household, it is about the changes in Madame Wu herself.

In many respects it is a somewhat transparent Christian metaphor. Brother Andre is the Christ figure and the transformation of Madame Wu is from a view from the perspective of tradition and her own personal judgement to that of individual well-being of each person within her sphere of influence.

Granting that my experience of Buck's work is limited, the two I have read suggest that the condition of women in Chinese society is one of her persistent themes. Although The Good Earth is primarily the story of the rise and fall of Wang Lung and his family, the thread that always fascinated me is the story of his wife, O-Lan, purchased from slavery, the only kind of wife he could afford. This is placed at the far side of the range of society, the Wu family is the wealthiest and most influential family in their region, and in a different period, WWII rather than WWI, but Buck is deeply concerned with the lives of the women in both stories.