East Wind: West Wind

Kwei-lan has been raised according to the traditions of an old and respected Chinese family. When she enters an arranged marriage, she expects the customs that have governed generations before her to shape her new life. Instead, her husband is a Western-trained physician whose ideas about marriage, medicine, and personal freedom challenge everything she has been taught to accept. As Kwei-lan struggles to understand her husband and the unfamiliar values he represents, her family faces an even greater upheaval. Her brother returns from America with a Western wife, bringing the conflict between old expectations and a changing world directly into the family home. Loyalty, marriage, duty, and love become inseparable from the question of how much of the past can or should survive. The novel centers on Kwei-lan and the transformation experienced by her family as Eastern and Western customs collide. Pearl S. Buck s first novel, East Wind: West Wind, is an intimate story of cultural collision told through the experience of one Chinese woman confronting a rapidly changing society. Published before The Good Earth, it introduced many of the themes family, tradition, social transformation, and the relationship between China and the West that would become central to Buck s fiction.