Pearl of China by Anchee Min

A lifelong bond between two girls survives the fires of revolution and the rise of a literary legend.

In a small town in late 19th-century China, Willow is an impoverished local girl who finds an unlikely sister in Pearl, the headstrong daughter of American missionaries. As the country is swept up in the violence of the Boxer Rebellion and the eventual rise of Communism, their lives take drastically different paths. Pearl eventually returns to America and becomes the Nobel Prize-winning author Pearl S. Buck, while Willow remains to endure the famine and political persecution of the Cultural Revolution. Spanning decades of upheaval, Pearl of China is a reimagined history of a literary icon seen through the eyes of the friend who stayed behind.