In this ambitious new novel, Anchee Min brings to life a courageous and passionate woman who is now hailed in China as a modern heroine. And yet, through love and loss, heartbreak and joy, exile and imprisonment, the two women remain intimately entwined. Willow, despite close ties to Maos inner circle, is punished for loyalty to her 'cultural imperialist' friend. But when a civil war erupts between the Nationalists and Communists, Pearl is forced to flee the country just ahead of angry mobs. Their shared upbringing inspires Pearl's novels, which celebrate the life of the Chinese peasant and will eventually earn her both a Pulitzer and a Nobel Prize. Moving out into the world together, the two enter the intellectual fray of the times, share love interests and survive early marriages gone bad. The two embark on a friendship that will sustain both of them through one of the most tumultuous periods in Chinese history. Buck, but for now she is just a girl embarrassed by her blonde hair and enchanted by her new Chinese friend.

She will ultimately become the internationally renowned author Pearl S. Willow is the only child of a destitute family, Pearl the headstrong daughter of zealous Christian missionaries.

In the small southern town of Chin-kiang, in the last days of the nineteenth century, two young girls bump heads and become thick as thieves.

Pearl of china by anchee min