The Patriot

The first novel with a Chinese setting in four years by the winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, Pearl S. Buck. Because of her concern with the vast conflict between China and Japan, and with the new forces set loose among the Chinese people of whose previous ways of life she has long written, Pearl Buck temporarily interrupts her series of novels about American women, to issue this swift and timely story. The Patriot covers the events of twelve years. It begins with the revolution sweeping down the Yangtze, when young students, fixed with a new patriotism, wet singing to jail or to the beheading ground. It ends in the mountains of inner China, where driven back again and again by the invader, students and peasants, old war lords and young goerillas alike, stand in a united front and fight on. Wu I-wan has grown up in a rich house, with a slave girl to serve him and to sweet sick smell of opium forever in his nostrils. But the revolution sweeps him in too, and his father sends him off to Japan to be safe and sane. There, like many another young Chinese of his day, he marries a Japanese girl and live a quiet ordered life, almost forgetting the hot dreams of his student days, until the war comes. So for the first time in any of her books the author draws the Japanese scene and its people, among whom she lived during part of that same period, when the revolution drove her from her own home in China. With vivid warmth, she tells that most poignant of all love-stories - the love between man and woman of different races separated by a sea of hatred.