The Good Earth

“This woman came into our house when she was a child of ten and she has lived until now, when she is twenty years old. I bought her in a year of famine when her parents came south because they had nothing to eat. They were from the north in Shantung and there they returned, and I know nothing further of them. You see she has the strong body and square cheeks of her kind. She will work well for you in the field and drawing water and all else that you wish. She is not beautiful but that you do not need. […] Neither is she clever. But she does well what she is told to do and she has a good temper. So far as I know she is a virgin. She is not beautiful enough to tempt my sons and grandsons even if she had not been in the kitchen.”

This quote comes from Mistress Hwang, the wife of an important landowner. She runs the house, including buying and selling women to serve as servants. Here, Wang Lung meets O-lan, whom he’ll marry that day. As he stands, listening to Mistress Hwang, he doesn’t turn to look at his bride. O-lan has no say in the matter at all. Just as her parents sold her to the household when she was 10, so she must accept the matriarch’s decision to sell her to a stranger.

“There was straw in her hair when he roused her, and when he called her she put up her arm suddenly in her sleep as though to defend herself from a blow. When she opened her eyes at last, she looked at him with her strange speechless gaze, and he felt as though he faced a child. He took her by the hand and led her into the room where that morning he had bathed himself for her, and he lit a red candle upon the table. In this light he was suddenly shy when he found himself alone with the woman and he was compelled to remind himself,

‘There is this woman of mine. The thing is to be done.’”

With his meager resources, Wang Lung throws a wedding party, inviting his relatives and family friends. O-lan prepares excellent food and drink, which Wang Lung humbly tells his guests is insufficient, though he’s secretly delighted. While she has prepared all the food and is the reason for the celebration, Wang Lung makes her wait in the stable with the ox, saying that no one can see her until after they consummate their marriage. Despite Wang Lung’s joy and sense of fulfillment, the author makes O-lan’s fear of this new life obvious, since she must accept without question any treatment, no matter how demeaning.

“When I return to that house it will be with my son in my arms. I shall have a red coat on him and red flower trousers and on his head a hat with a small gilded Buddha sewn on the front and on his feet tiger-faced shoes. I will wear new shoes and a new coat of black sateen and I will go into the kitchen where I spent my days and I will go into the Great Hall where the old one sits with their opium, and I will show myself and my son to all of them.”

Although they’ve been married for about a year, this is the most Wang Lung has ever heard O-lan speak at once. She conceals her emotions from everyone. When she does speak, however, it’s with authority. Buck uses O-lan’s silence to portray her as a mysterious character. Wang Lung wonders about her past, though he decides not to ask her about her life. The narrative instead reveals her story gradually from her surprising statements, like this one, and her direct actions, like when she intuitively knows where to find the bag of gemstones in the great house of the southern city.

“But out of the woman’s great white breast the milk gushed forth for the child, milk as white as snow, and when the child suckled at one breast it flowed like a fountain from the other, and she let it flow. There was more than enough with the child, greedy though he was, life enough for many children, and she let it flow out carelessly, conscious of her abundance. There was always more and more. Sometimes she lifted her breast and let it flow out upon the ground to save her clothing, and it sank into the earth and made a soft, dark, rich spot in the field. The child was fat and good-natured and ate of the inexhaustible life his mother gave him.”

Buck’s depiction of O-lan feeding her firstborn son equates the fertility and abundance of O-lan to that of the earth. Just as many don’t appreciate, revere, and learn from the earth, so men don’t grasp the goodness, vitality, and potential that flows from the women in their lives. Wang Lung gradually comes to appreciate his wife and fully appreciates her only when she grows ill and dies. He then must come to terms with her part in the prosperity and respect he has attained.

“Ah, it is something you do not know—to have an evil destiny! Where the fields of others bear good rice and wheat, ours bear weeds; where the houses of others stand for 100 years, the earth itself shakes under ours so that the walls crack; where others bear men, I, although I conceive a son, will yet give birth to a girl—ah, evil destiny!”

When Wang Lung approaches his uncle’s wife to reproach her for allowing her adolescent daughters to speak publicly to men, his aunt launches into a mournful speech about the curse of an “evil destiny” her husband suffers. Wang Lung, she asserts, is successful because he has a good destiny. Wang Lung, who believes in the power of the local agricultural gods, considers his uncle lazy and immoral. His aunt’s final and greatest “proof” that she and her husband have an evil destiny is her propensity to give birth to girls rather than boys.

“It would be another harvest before he could buy that land now, a piece adjoining the one he had, and there was this new mouth in the house. Across the pale, oyster-colored sky of twilight a flock of crows flew, sharply black, and whirled over him, cawing loudly. He watched them disappear like a cloud into the trees about his house, and he ran at them, shouting and shaking his hoe. They rose again slowly, circling and recycling over his head, mocking him with their cries, and they flew at last into the darkening sky. He groaned aloud. It was an evil omen.”

Building on his aunt’s declaration that having daughters was the result of evil destiny, Wang Lung reflects on how, for the first time, he has a daughter. After years of good fortune, he begins to think that the gods have it in for him: a daughter is born, a drought leads to famine, he exhausts all the family’s funds, and everyone in his house very nearly starves. During this time of misfortune, O-lan repeatedly acts to preserve their lives and property and to restore their livelihoods. The new daughter ends up being the child Wang Lung loves the most. Thus, Buck argues that daughters can bring good luck rather than misfortune.

“He said nothing, but he took the dead child into the other room and laid it upon the earthen floor and searched until he found a bit of broken mat and this he wrapped around it. The round head dropped this way and that and upon the neck he saw two dark, bruised spots, but he finished what he had to do. Then he took the role of matting, and going as far from the house as he had strength, he laid the burden against the hallowed side of an old grave.”

This passage is difficult to read because it describes Wang Lung taking away the tiny body of O-lan’s fourth child. The entire family is near starvation. O-lan is so malnourished that her breasts no longer yield milk. The family has decided to walk 100 miles south to a large city to beg for food. O-lan, assuming that they won’t be able to complete the journey, makes the decision to commit infanticide. To grasp her perspective, it’s useful to remember that her parents sold her into slavery at age 10 when her family was about to starve. She has an older daughter who would still be taking breast milk but whom O-lan can’t feed. She’s convinced that they’ll all die from starvation in hours or days.

“…Wang Lung heard a young man haranguing a crowd at the corner of the Confucian temple, where any man may stand, if he has the courage to speak out, and the young man said that China must have a revolution and must rise against the hated foreigners, Wang Lung was alarmed and slunk away, feeling that he was the foreigner against whom the young man spoke with such passion. And when on another day he heard another young man speaking—for this city was full of young men speaking—and he said at his street corner that the people of China must unite and must educate themselves in these times, it did not occur to Wang Lung that anyone was speaking to him.”

Although his family has only come 100 miles south of Anhwei (now spelled Anhui), the locals around Kiangsu (now the province of Jiangsu and specifically the city of Nanjing) regard Wang Lung as if he weren’t Chinese. Thus, he fears speakers such as these, who seek to rile the Chinese against the authoritarian government and the Western powers who work with them to perpetuate China’s subjugation and biased social order. Confused, Wang Lung thinks that the speakers rail against him and other starving refugees.

“‘Sir, is there any way whereby the rich who oppress us can make it rain so that I can work on the land?’

At this the young man turned on him with scorn and replied,

‘Now how ignorant you are, you who still wear your hair in a long tail! […] If the rich would share with us what they have, rain or not would matter none, because we would all have money and food.’

A great shout went up from those who listened, but Wang Lung turned away unsatisfied. […] Nevertheless, he took willingly the papers the young man gave him because he remembered that O-lan had never enough paper for those shoe soles, and so he gave them to her when he went home…”

Wang Lung’s long braid and his unwillingness to cut it off without his father’s permission is a throwback to the laws of the previous imperial dynasty. It demonstrates his ignorance and literalism that, when he hears the firebrand speaker blame the wealthy for the poverty and hunger of common people, Wang Lung assumes that the rich must somehow control the weather. A concrete rather than abstract thinker, he understands the direct link between the earth, the rain, planting, harvesting, and human welfare. Buck suggests that Wang Lung’s insight is more elemental than the nuanced assertions of the speaker.

“‘This child of ours is a pretty little maid, even now. Tell me, are the pretty slaves beaten also?’ […]

‘Aye, beaten or carried to a man’s bed, as the whim was, and not to one man’s only but to any that might desire her that night, and the young lords bickered and bartered with each other for this slave or that and said, “Then if you tonight, I tomorrow,” and when they were all alike wearied of a slave the men servants bickered and bartered for what the young lords left, and this was before a slave was out of childhood—if she were pretty.’”

When soldiers come through the city arbitrarily conscripting men to serve as civilian servants of the military, Wang Lung realizes that the urban setting is no longer a haven for his family. His only strategy to raise money to head back to his farm is to sell his daughter, a toddler. O-lan, who says she’ll obey Wang Lung’s decision, expresses that she’d rather kill the child than sell her into slavery. Here, O-lan spares nothing in explaining to her husband what their child would face as a pretty enslaved girl. This is an explicit example of Buck’s theme of The Complete Subjugation of Chinese Women.

“…Wang Lung was afraid of his happiness. O-lan grew great with the next child; his children tumbled like brown puppies about his threshold and against the southern wall his old father sat and dozed and smiled as he slept; in his fields the young rice sprouted as green as jade and more beautiful, and the young beans lifted their hooded heads from the soil. And out of the gold there was still enough left to feed them until harvest if they ate sparingly. […]

Wang Lung muttered unwillingly,

‘I must stick a little incense before those two in the small temple. After all, they have power over earth.’”

Once the family has serendipitously made its way back to Wang Lung’s farm, refurbished their home, and planted crops that grow normally, Wang Lung becomes superstitious. Even though he blamed and mocked the two clay images of the local agricultural gods, he burns incense to them. One of Wang Lung’s constant characteristics when facing important seasons or events is his superstitious attempt to placate various religious entities—Buddhist, Taoist, and Confucianist.

“And it seemed to Wang Lung that he looked at O-lan for the first time in his life and he saw for the first time that she was a woman whom no man could call other than she was, a dull and common creature, who plodded in silence without thought of how she appeared to others. He saw for the first time that her hair was rough and brown and unoiled and that her face was large and flat and coarse skinned, and her features too large altogether and without any sort of beauty or light. Her eyebrows were scattered and hairs too few, and her lips were too wide, and her hands and feet were large and spreading.”

While impatiently waiting for floodwaters to recede so that he can lead his work crew in planting his fields, Wang Lung grows restless. He criticizes O-lan’s appearance aloud for the first time, reinforcing her belief that, since she isn’t pretty, she’s unlovable. As Buck describes the inevitable outcome of Wang Lung’s discontent, she allows the characters to comment on what has happened. His uncle’s wife deduces that Wang Lung has found another romantic interest, and his younger daughter tells Wang Lung that O-lan is forcing her to be pretty—binding her feet so that they’ll remain small—so that one day someone may love her.

“At night when she would have no more of him, pushing him out of the door petulantly, with her small hands suddenly strong on his shoulders, his silver thrust into her bosom, he went away hungry as he came. It was though a man, dying of thirst, drank the salt water of the sea which, though it is water, yet dries his blood into thirst and yet greater thirst so that in the end he dies, maddened by his very drinking. He went into her and he had his will of her again and again and he came away unsatisfied.”

Buck’s description of Wang Lung’s inability to find satisfaction, despite daily visits to Lotus, aptly portrays a person wrestling with an addiction. Beyond this, it depicts another stage in Wang Lung’s character arc, even though it relates a negative rather than positive change. In discussing Wang Lung, family members remark only a person of leisure could become obsessed with a sex worker. Wang Lung has at last become a person of means, an unusual feat for someone who has been merely a farmer. Like other wealthy individuals, he falls prey to an obsession that only people with money can afford.

“And it is not to be thought, poor fool, that one woman is enough for any man, and if it is a weary hard-working woman who has worn away her flesh working for him, it is less than enough for him. His fancy runs elsewhere the more quickly, and you, poor fool, have never been fit for a man’s fancy and little better than an ox for his labor. And it is not for you to repine when he has money and buys himself another to bring her to his house, for all men are so, and would my old do-nothing also, except the poor wretch has never had enough silver in his life to feed himself even.”

Wang Lung’s aunt speaks to O-lan in this passage, attempting to console her with the reality that all men are “letches” and she shouldn’t expect her husband to act differently. The aunt expresses pity for her own husband, saying that he’d act the same if only he had discretionary funds. The passage is ironic in that Wang Lung overhears these comments. Rather than recognizing the immorality of his behavior, he wonders if his aunt is correct and becomes enthralled with the possibility that he might bring Lotus to live in his house.

“As he had been healed of his sickness of heart when he came from the southern city and comforted by the bitterness he had endured there, so now again Wang Lung was healed of his sickness of love by the good dark earth of his fields and he felt the moist soil on his feet and he smelled the earthy fragrance rising up out of the furrows he turned for the wheat. […] This he did for the sheer joy he had in it and not for any necessity, and when he was weary he laid down on his land and he slept and the health of the earth spread into his flesh and he was healed of his sickness.”

Buck implies that Wang Lung’s obsession with Lotus, while powerful, was actually his heart’s way of coping with his inability to work the flooded farmland. Although he still finds Lotus attractive and spends time with her, she loses her irresistible hold over him. He begins to see the flaws in her that others have pointed out. As his attentiveness to her diminishes, his relationship to Ching and the other workers deepens, and he focuses on his intentions for his children.

“When it was finished and his son had written his father’s name on the deed of sale of the grain and upon the receipt of the monies, the two walked home together, father and son, and the father said within his heart that now his son was a man and his eldest son, and he must do what was right for his son, and he must see to it that there was a wife chosen and betrothed for his son so that the lad need not go begging into a great house as he had and picked up what was left there and what no one wanted, for his son was the son of a man who was rich and who owned land in his right.

Wang Lung set himself, therefore to the seeking of a maid who might be his son’s wife, and it was no slight task, for he would have no one who was common and ordinary female.”

Filled with pride when his firstborn son saves him from the scorn of the grain merchants, Wang Lung decides that he must provide a wife for his son. He’s determined to find a bride from a highly reputable, wealthy family. Ironically, Wang Lung doesn’t want his son to settle for whoever’s available, as Wang Lung did when he married O-lan. This is another slight against the boy’s mother, who’s not only responsible for saving the family’s lives and property but is a perfectly caring, dutiful wife. When the son finally weds, his prideful wife shirks common duties, even to the point of insisting on a wet nurse for her children so that her breasts don’t become disfigured.

“…he knew that even though he sold his land it was no avail, for it simply that the doctor said, ‘The woman will die.’

He went out with the doctor, therefore, and he paid him the ten pieces of silver, and when he was gone Wang Lung went into the dark kitchen where O-lan had lived her life for the most part, and where, now that she was not there, none would see him, and he turned his face to the blackened wall, and he wept.”

This passage signals that O-lan’s death is imminent. Over several months, she lays out instructions for her husband and children, even as she lapses in and out of awareness. For Wang Lung and his children, this is an awakening time. They face their lives without this constant, faithful servant for the first time. Wang Lung feels remorse for his treatment of her—for bringing Lotus into their home and for his past thoughtless acts, like confiscating the two white pearls she asked to keep on her body. His regret intensifies because, despite the tenderness he wants to feel toward her, her appearance continues to disgust him.

“‘Now I am content and this thing in me may do as it will. My son, look to your father and your grandfather, and my daughter, look to your husband and your husband’s father and his grandfather and the poor fool in the court, there is she. And you have no duty to any other.’

This last she said, meaning Lotus, to whom she had never spoken.”

As she approaches death, O-lan requests that her firstborn son marry while she’s living. Once the wedding day’s festivities conclude—while she lies watching everything from her bed—O-lan summons her son and his bride and gives them a series of charges, concluding with this passage. O-lan’s death presages the troubles in Wang Lung’s burgeoning household when the families of his two older sons live together in his home. Despite their dwelling in a 60-room great house, the sisters-in-law feud with one another. Buck implies that had O-lan lived and been the matriarch, the women would have learned to get along. The “fool” refers to the older daughter of Wang Lung and O-lan who has an intellectual disability.

“…many came to Wang Lung to borrow money, and he loaned it at high interest, seeing how greatly it was in demand, and the security he always said must be land. And with the money they borrowed they planted seed upon the earth that was fat with the richness of the dried water, and when they needed oxen and seed and plows and when they could borrow no more money, some sold their land and part of their fields that they might plant what was left. And of these Wang Lung bought land and much land, and he bought it cheaply, since money men must have.”

This passage reveals the capitalistic tools Wang Lung begins to use to acquire greater wealth and property. When landowners come to him for money, he makes them secure the loans through their land; thus, if crop failure occurs, Wang Lung gets their land. Always ready to purchase agricultural property, he employs sharecropping—an arrangement by which the farmers use his land to grow crops and, in return, granting him half their yield. Without realizing it, Wang Lung has become the wealthy sort of individual that the strident firebrand warned him about in the southern city. Only when his youngest son talks of going away to fight in the revolution does Wang Lung experience confrontation about his financial practices.

“And moved by some strange impulse he went forward and he sat down where she had sat and he put his hand on the table and from the eminence it gave him he looked down on the bleary face of the old hag who blinked at him and waited in silence for what he would do. Then some satisfaction he had longed for all his days without knowing it swelled up in his heart and he smote the table with his hand and he said suddenly,

‘This house I will have!’”

This passage reveals that Wang Lung’s sentiments, though he doesn’t realize it, are much like those of O-lan. When discussing taking her son to visit the great house, she proclaimed that she’d dress herself and her son as royalty. This was O-lan’s way of announcing that she was no longer enslaved but a wife with a son, the ultimate status symbol for a Chinese commoner. Likewise, Wang Lung reacts here against the ill treatment he received for being merely a farmer by declaring his intention to buy the palace where he once felt humiliated.

“When the child was a month old Wang Lung’s son, its father, gave the birth feast, and to it he invited guests from the town and his wife’s father and mother, and all the great of the town. And he had dyed scarlet many hundreds of hens’ eggs, and these he gave to every guest and to any who sent guests, and there was feasting and joy through the house, for the child was a goodly fat boy and he passed his tenth day and lived and this was a fear gone, and they all rejoiced.”

Wang Lung’s older son immediately acquires status with the birth of a male child. The survival of the child past its 10th day reflects back on many comments within the narrative about the precarious nature of childbirth and the survival of newborns. Wang Lung’s father remarks in the early pages that women must continually bear children because out of about 20 pregnancies, Wang Lung was the only survivor. While Wang Lung handed out dozens of red eggs to those who celebrated the birth of his first child, his son hands out hundreds of red eggs. This rejoicing reflects the reality that the baby is a boy. Chinese citizens perceived boy babies as precious blessings and girl babies as burdens.

“There is none other but you to whom I can leave this poor fool of mine when I am gone, and she will live on and on after me, seeing that her mind has no troubles of its own, and she has nothing to kill her and no troubles to worry her. […] Now here is the gate of safety for her in this packet, and when I die, after I am dead, you are to mix it in her rice and let her eat it, so that she may follow me where I am. And so shall I be at ease.”

Recognizing his approaching death, Wang Lung asks his young “concubine,” Pear Blossom, to administer poison to his elder daughter. When Pear Blossom protests, saying that she’ll care for the girl, Wang Lung reminds her that one day she’ll die too, and allowing his daughter, who has an intellectual disability, to wander unattended in the streets would be cruel. This challenge is particularly relevant in that the parents of individuals with disabilities in the narrative’s era faced the same dilemma regarding the survival of their children as today’s parents do. The one distinction, which Buck implies indirectly, is that someone with a disability in today’s developed nations has some social safety nets.

“Spring passed and summer passed into harvest and then the hot autumn sun before winter comes Wang Lung sat where his father had sat against the wall. And he thought no more about anything now except his food and his drink and his land. But of his land he thought no more what harvest it would bring or what seed would be planted or of anything except the land itself, and he stooped sometimes and gathered some of the earth up in his hand and he sat thus and held it in his hand, and it seemed full of life between his fingers. And he was content, holding it thus, and he thought of it fitfully and of his good coffin that was there; and the kind earth waited without haste until he came to it.”

After searching for contentment for the last half of the narrative, Wang Lung at last finds it by returning to the home of his birth on his father’s original farm. No longer concerned about crop rotation, harvests, or income, he finally achieves serenity. Had the novel concluded here, one could term it a “happy ending.” Even though Wang Lung descends into forgetfulness and, like O-lan, Pear Blossom cares for him and his elder daughter, Buck demonstrates that the business world hasn’t stopped for the village or for others in his family. Despite the even greater changes to come, the author shares this one blissful image of the earth patiently waiting for the farmer who loved it more than anything.