In april, 1899, six-year-old Pearl Sydenstricker wrote a letter from Chinkiang, China, to the editor of the Christian Observer, in Louisville, Kentucky. It was her first published writing, and it appeared under the headline “Our Real Home in Heaven”:

I am a little girl, six years old. I live in China. I have a big brother in college who is coming to China to help our father tell the Chinese about Jesus. I have two little brothers in heaven. Maudie went first, then Artie, then Edith, and on the tenth of last month my little brave brother, Clyde left us to go to our real home in heaven. Clyde said he was a Christian Soldier, and that heaven was his bestest home. Clyde was four years old, and we both love the little letters in the Observer. I wrote this all myself, and my hand is tired, so goodbye.

Clyde, barely out of his infancy, was a brave soldier in Christ's army, gathered into his “bestest” home. This sad little allegory came directly out of six-year-old Pearl's fundamentalist upbringing. She may have written her letter all by herself, as she said, but she used the language she had been hearing every day of her brief life.

As an adult, she would completely reject the religion in which she was raised, but it was the source of everything she learned about values as a child. Living in a small Chinese city, she was separated from her own country and its culture almost from birth.