The Good Earth

• Author: Pearl S. Buck
• Genre: Historical Fiction
• Publication Date: January 1, 2006
• Publisher: Blackstone Publishing

This tells the poignant tale of a Chinese farmer and his family in old agrarian China. The humble Wang Lung glories in the soil he works, nurturing the land as it nurtures him and his family. Nearby, the nobles of the House of Hwang consider themselves above the land and its workers; but they will soon meet their own downfall.

Hard times come upon Wang Lung and his family when flood and drought force them to seek work in the city. The working people riot, breaking into the homes of the rich and forcing them to flee. When Wang Lung shows mercy to one noble and is rewarded, he begins to rise in the world, even as the House of Hwang falls.

Long, long ago, I had to write a term paper in high school English, and the book I chose was The Good Earth. It wasn’t until much later that I learned this is only the first book in a trilogy, and I wanted to reread it to see how I viewed the story now that I’m several decades older. Plus, it seemed like a good starting point to refresh my familiarity so that I can work through the whole trilogy.

Originally published in 1931, this novel won a Pulitzer Prize. However, reading historical literature almost always means that there is going to be some willingness to overlook cultural factors that we don’t share today. And this novel includes plenty of that—in dealing with agrarian China of yesteryear, there is a lot of misogynistic, ableist, and outdated views. Looking into what was happening in China in the 1920s showed a period of upheaval, with the rise of warlords and the early rise of communism, and this story reflects some of that.

Wang Lung is a poor farmer who lives with his elderly father, and he places a high value on the land they own. Everything they have comes from the land, and all he needs is a wife to provide him with sons to continue their line. He saves up some money and gets a slave from the rich house of Hwang with a dowry payment. O-lan isn’t a pretty woman, and she doesn’t have bound feet, which is both a good and a bad thing. Foot binding involves breaking the bones in the foot at a young age, and forcing the foot into an unnatural position, and making them ideally no larger than 3 inches and referred to as the ‘golden lotus.’ Bound feet improved a woman’s marriage prospects and demonstrate the social standing of the family. However, it forced women to take only tiny steps and live with a lifetime of painful feet and limited mobility. O-lan having unbound feet allows her to work the land right alongside Wang Lung, since lower class families couldn’t afford to bind a girl’s feet and lose her ability to work.

Since O-lan was sold into slavery at a young age, no one bothered to bind her feet. Instead, she worked hard at the house, then worked hard at the house of Wang Lung. Reflecting the views at the time, women inherently had less value than men, since women marry out of the family while men stay with the family and continue to work the family land. Her role in the story is mainly a silent one, with the story focusing more on Wang Lung. 

O-lan brings prosperity to his home, and cares for the family silently with no expectations. The marriage wasn’t for love, but rather one of convenience in line with the times. She bears him two sons in two years, while taking care of the home, the family, his father, and working in the fields, and never complains about her never-ending and thankless role in the family. When she’s pregnant for a third time, a famine hits and the starving family is forced to head south to survive. O-lan and her sons quickly start begging, while Wang Lung tries his hand at the only position available to him—a rickshaw driver, although the family basically stays right on the verge of starvation. The starvation means that O-lan’s next baby experiences some sort of developmental disability and while the girl is happy, she never speaks or has the ability to live independently. The girl is never named and is only referred to as ‘the poor fool,’ but Wang Lung bucks tradition by keeping the girl and not selling her into slavery, which he looks back later and is grateful since she had the mind of a child even into adulthood.

Ableism and misogyny are typically hard passes for me, but Buck wrote the story using the context and expectations about society of the time, when both of those things happened regularly. Bound feet, women who are basically enslaved to their husbands, and selling extra girl children when there are too many mouths to feed and not enough to feed them with were common occurrences at the time, and they are discussed in the book as well.

I listened to the audiobook, narrated by Anthony Heald, and it was fantastic. He did a wonderful job with the ambling pace of the story and the slow pacing of this type of character-driven novel. There were some Chinese words in the story, and they are pronounced confidently and seemingly correctly by Heald. I did find that his narration of family names Wang and Hwang sounded exactly the same at times, which could have been confusing if I wasn’t already familiar with the story. 

It is an intriguing look into a past society in its waning days—that of old agrarian China prior to the adoption of communism and the cultural revolution. It was engrossing despite the slow-moving pace, and the most fascinating part was watching how the family changes over the years and how Wang Lung himself changes. Initially, he is satisfied with his lot as a poor farmer, although he longs for sons. Then he gets the wife and sons and the land is good to him, bringing the family out of poverty and eventually in a place where they can buy land from the house of Hwang, a family whose fortunes are sinking. 

Through the ups and downs of Wang Lung and his family, we see how he changes once he becomes a wealthy man, yet he never loses his appreciation for the land, the good earth that affords all of his prosperity. Over time, we see how his priorities change once he becomes wealthy, and works to ensure that his sons are raised with more opportunities than he had, making sure they are literate. But this ensures that the sons have different values and a different appreciation for the land they never had to sweat over. 

Overall, this was a fantastic peek into an older version of China that we don’t get to see as often. The family dynamics involve not only marriage, but concubines, foot binding, children, infanticide, and slavery, and having more than one woman in the home as either a wife or concubine are heavy topics that are dealt with in a surprisingly sensitive way for a book that was originally written nearly a hundred years ago. I found myself enraptured with following Wang Lung and his family as their fortunes change with progress, prosperity, societal growth, and time. I can see why this novel is considered to be a classic—it is a timeless story that is easy to understand with little effort, although there is a lot more depth to it than it seems initially. However, I was so curious about what happens next that I had to dive into the second book in the series. Stay tuned for that review soon.

Bottom line: A classic that offers insight into a way of life that has disappeared into the past, yet still remains timeless and relevant as well as fascinating. It won a Pulitzer Prize for a reason.

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