The China I Knew; by Pearl S. Buck.

Pearl S. Buck grew up in China, returned after her marriage and would have lived in China if circumstances and times had allowed; her love and understanding of China is no less than her love and understanding of her own country, US, or perhaps greater. Several such people came to belong to the countries they lived in and loved those countries, those people, far more.

Unfortunately the times were harsher and the China she knew changed mercurially and more than once too. It is rather a touching story of how she came to relive her own mother's fear and placating an offended and ferocious Chinese man in the
incident when her own child, small and playful, did something akin to what she had done when she was a child, in pulling a Chinese man's hair - although when she had to placate the man offended by her own child hair were shorter and I forget what the offence was. These were small incidents but telling of times, of days to come. The China she had known was gone forever and perhaps it was never there in the first place, it was only a facade to fool foreign devils as the Chinese call people of European ancestry - that is, when they are not calling them barbarians.

Pearl Buck wrote and wrote about the country of her heart, and in this perhaps she got over the heartache of separation and relived the love of her country of childhood, her memories, her identity of growing up in a place so far away across the world and across the largest ocean on earth. At any rate, the reader benefits enormously in reading this and other works of hers, and in more than one way too.
For one gets to know her and the China she knew, the world she lived in.