UI professor shares the adventures behind pearls

Some of University of Iowa Professor Stephen Bloom's experiences in his latest book read like tales out of James Bond.

Bloom traveled by seaplane and visited an armed encampment in the Philippines. He met with a rich pearl baron flanked by bodyguards in Tahiti. He shadowed a pearl broker in Hong Kong who toted $100,000 in a briefcase. He witnessed the $7.1 million auction of the Baroda Pearls - and held them in his hands - at Christie's in New York City.

“It was just a great non-fiction detective story,” Bloom says of his 30,000-mile, four-continent odyssey that resulted in “Tears of Mermaids: The Secret Story of Pearls.” “I could talk for hours about pearls.”

In his latest non-fiction outing, the author of well-received books about Iowa towns Postville and Oxford traveled the world to trace the story of a pearl. Bloom set out to interview every person who touches the gem from the time the oyster is scooped from the ocean floor to the moment it's fastened around a woman's neck.

“My interest is bottom-up journalism,” said Bloom, the Bessie Dutton Murray Professional Scholar in the UI School of Journalism and Mass Communication. “I would much rather interview the butcher, the baker, the barber, the everyday guy.”

Bloom talked to plenty of everyday folks for “Tears of Mermaids,” but met a few outlandish characters as well. The international pearl trade has its share of fast talkers, Bloom said. But he also recalls interviewing two young girls working as pearl sorters in remote China. They are among the unsung players in the global assembly line that is the pearl trade, Bloom said, and it struck him those girls were handling pearls that could end up on the necks of Nancy Pelosi or Michelle Obama.

“They were the first rung of this giant ladder, but they had no concept where the product they helped create would end up,” he said.

The people closest to the creation of the product make the least money, see the least glamour, he said. Bloom saw the glamour and the hard work. He attended invitation-only auctions of gumball-sized pearls in Hong Kong and worked as a deck hand for 10 days on a pearling vessel off the coast of Australia.

He details all of that in the book.

Bloom landed on the subject because he loves pearls, and recalls his mother wearing a pearl necklace on special occasions when he was a boy. Bloom also was interested in going backward in the timeline of pearls to tell a story about globalization.

“They are iconic, the world's first gems,” he said. “They're unlike anything else.”