Mom v. Mao

LETTER FROM PEKING (252 pp.)--Pearl S. Buck--John Day ($3.75).

Pearl S. Buck is still presiding over her China with the air of a lady dispensing oolong from a rare porcelain tea service. In her 43rd book, she subdues the storm over Asia to the dimensions of one of her teacups. The conflict between Communist China and the West is symbolized by the MacLeods of Raleigh, Vt. Gerald MacLeod, although not a Communist, lives in Peking and is president of its Communist-run university. Wife Elizabeth MacLeod lives in Vermont with their son Rennie and her father-in-law. Old Mr. MacLeod, who was once adviser to the Boy Emperor (1909-12) and took a Chinese woman to wife, has gone Confucian in the saddest way. Mrs. MacLeod calls him "Baba" ("It is easier to say than Father") and he is also thoroughly gaga.

What with Baba trying to be Chinese in Vermont, and Rennie struggling to forget his ancestral Chinese quarter, Mrs. MacLeod is having quite a time of it. In a letter from Peking, husband Gerald writes that he loves her and all that, but, since the Communists dislike his non-Sinic connections, he is obliged to take another wife. The new Chinese wife also writes to Vermont ("Dear Elder Sister . . ."). Throughout, Mrs. MacLeod proves to be so quilted in sensibility as to resemble a carnivorous tea cosy.

As a parable of East-West relations, the book is not worth a spill of rice paper. Yet somehow it may be fascinating as an example of the kind of charm which, incomprehensibly, industrious Pearl Buck has exercised over a generation of U.S. women readers--and even over the Nobel Prize committee. Perhaps unintentionally, the book gives a portrait of merciless maternalism. The real crisis comes when young Rennie, forgetting that father Gerald in Peking has forbidden him to use any but the "stately name of Mother," comes out with the awful truth.

"Mom," he says.

In that instant the reader feels a secret sympathy for Gerald's decision to take his chances with the Reds: better Mao than Mom. By story's end, Mom buries Baba (forgetting that Father is quite as stately a name as Mother), and is left palpitating on a significantly empty stage.

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