A chance to be hungry and desperate

Great literature isn’t supposed to make you consider selling your own children. But when I read “The Good Earth,” Pearl S. Buck made me so poor, so ravenous and so desperate I was stunned to find myself feeling for a man contemplating the sale of his daughter into slavery. When I closed that book, I was amazed how I had just lived a different life. A life that made me think more gently of people who bore the grinding weight of hideous choices.

I was that child with really thick rhinestone-studded glasses who secretly pledged in second grade to read every book in the school library. (I started with books in the “A” section and made it through “H” before I had to move to a new school.) So by the time I read “The Good Earth” in my 20s, I had read scores of books I adored. But “The Good Earth” was the first book that knocked me over in that way -- allowing me to live a life so foreign to my own.

This is why I read and why I write: to crawl inside someone else’s skin and feel what they feel, see what they see. And maybe become a little more compassionate, a little more open-hearted when I crawl back out.

I initially read “The Good Earth” because Pearl S. Buck set my mother on a path. As a day-dreamy girl, she read every book by Buck she could and dreamed of living in China. Which is why, when given the choice, my mother urged my father to move our family to Taipei. Sometimes people stumble upon another culture in which they feel more at home than in their own. My mother was like that – somehow more at ease with her Chinese friends than with most Americans. While Buck showed me how stories could allow me to become other selves, Buck’s writing helped my mother find a place where she could be more herself.

And then there is my second daughter. Whose birth mother faced the very dilemma of whether to give up her child. Not to sell her. Not into slavery. But to lay her 1-day-old baby in a bundle on the concrete steps of Fuzhou orphanage, so 10 months later I could adopt her. I cannot pretend to know what terrible force of circumstances propelled that woman to lay this sweet girl on those hard steps. But once I was poor. Once I was famished. Once I knew the press of terrible choices. And sometimes I think of my daughter’s birth mother. And I wish there was a book in China that could transport her and let her know the joy she gave by placing that baby on those concrete steps.