The writer Anchee Min is probably best-known for her memoir Red Azalea. She grew up in Shanghai, and in the book she describes her early life in China. Her latest book, Pearl of China, looks at the life of another famous writer who grew up in China, the Nobel Prize winner, Pearl S. Buck.

Min was born in 1957 in Shanghai and when she was 17, she became part of the Down to the Countryside Movement where urban youth were sent to rural areas to learn from farmers. Later on she was recruited to work as an actress in propaganda films of the time. After the late chairman Mao Zedong's death in 1976, she worked in menial jobs for a few years before moving to the United States in 1984 with the help of her actress friend, Joan Chen (Chen Chong, who later became the earliest acclaimed Chinese star in Hollywood). Chen helped Min to apply to study in the US, and Min was accepted to the Chicago Institute of Arts.

English classes

However, once the institute discovered she couldn't speak any English, they transferred her to the University of Illinois for ESL (English as a Second Language) studies. And it was the written assignments for her English classes, all about her experiences in China, that led to the publication of her first book Red Azalea in 1994.

The book made it onto the New York Times bestseller list, with rights sold for its publication in 20 countries. The movie rights have also been purchased by a Hollywood studio. Other books followed, including Becoming Madame Mao, Katherine, and Empress Orchid. Min told the Global Times that she never dreamed of becoming a writer and that her stories were merely a way of learning English in order to survive as an immigrant in America.

Her latest novel Pearl of China is Min's tribute to Buck, who spent much of her early life in China with her parents who were missionaries, and then later with her first husband, John Lossing Buck.

Series of novels

Pearl of China is a fictionalized account of Buck's life growing up as a white girl in Jiangsu Province, until the time she is forced to leave the increasingly unstable country that she had come to love as her own, in 1934. The story is told through the eyes of Buck's best friend Willow, who is an amalgam of three of Buck's childhood Chinese friends.

"I feel like I have a personal connection with Pearl S. Buck," Min told the Global Times. "I was ordered to denounce her when I was a teenager back in China in 1971, even though I didn't even know who she was," she said.

Min first got her first chance to read Buck's writing when she was promoting Red Azalea in Chicago. "I was doing a reading of my memoir and afterwards a lady came up to me. She asked me if I knew Buck, and before I could answer, she said, 'I just want you to know that Pearl Buck taught me to love Chinese people and here is her book as a gift,'" Min said. "That book was The Good Earth, in which Buck introduced a generation of Westerners to Chinese politics and culture. I read it on the plane from Chicago to Los Angeles. I couldn't stop crying. I had never read any writer, including our own Chinese writers, describe peasants the way Buck did with such admiration, affection and humanity."

Min said that it was at this time that her own book was first conceived. "I admire her. She gave China a voice and I wanted to show her role in Chinese history. I believe she deserves a spot in Chinese literature. That's why I wrote this book," she added.

Childhood memories

While she was researching Pearl of China, Min visited Zhenjiang, Jiangsu Province, where Buck grew up and met with a local pastor who told her stories about Buck's relationship with her mother and father. "He told me that Pearl so much wanted to be like a Chinese girl that her nanny had to make her a hairnet to cover her blonde hair," said Min.

When Buck was unable to return to China in 1972 after her visa application was rejected, she was devastated. She died one year later. "She died heartbroken," said Min, "Her daughter told me that a few days before her death she found Pearl staring at a photograph of the Zhenjiang landscape while wearing a Chinese robe. China was the last thought on her mind."

Min has just finished the manuscript of her new book that is scheduled to be published next year. My American Memoir, discusses her later life in the US. It will be her first book to be translated into Chinese.