Another Pearl

FOR SPACIOUS SKIES by Pearl S. Buck with Theodore F. Harris. 221 pages. John Day. $4.95.

Two years ago, Pearl Sydenstricker Buck hired Theodore F. Harris, a ballroom-dancing instructor, to teach her the rumba. Widow Buck, now 74, took a motherly interest in Harris, now 36, named him president and executive director of her tax-exempt Pearl S. Buck Foundation, which since 1964 has raised $155,000 to help care for about 1,000 of the hundreds of thousands of rejected, mixed-blooded "Amerasian" youths who since 1945 have been fathered by American servicemen from Korea to Viet Nam. Mrs. Buck and Harris swung across the U.S. last year on a fund-raising tour that actually turned into one long interview--with the aide asking the questions and the author chattering away about China, love, art, the foundation, and inexhaustibly about herself. The result is her 70th book and her second memoir, which echoes the earnest and vaguely vatic tone of her first, A Bridge in Passing, published in 1954.

Some of Pearl's pearls:

On Communism in China: "I place blame squarely upon the selfish elite in China who did nothing to make the peasant's life more tolerable."

On the twist: "It is tolerable only when practiced by the very young."

On slums: "People create their habitation in their own image."

On U.S. women: "I think American women do not love their men enough."

On herself: "I charm children. I have a passion for excellence. I am involved with the whole world "

On the Amerasians: "There has been war, there is war, and young American men have impregnated strange women. Of this meeting a new people is being born. Shall this new people, innocent and helpless in childhood, bear the whole burden of our times?"

The book is an undisguised campaign for funds; all the royalties will go to the foundation. In charitable terms, this is a good work. In literary terms, it is anything but.

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