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Life, Land, Love

Author: Pearl S. Buck

Wang Lung has never wanted anything more than land. He loves the soil he tills, and his one ambition in life is to get more land. To him, this is wealth, this is status. He starts out a simple man with simple hopes and ambitions, but as his situation improves, his greed grows. As Wang Lung builds his own personal empire, the world around him crumbles, and the China he knows changes. But no famines, wars, outside forces, or distractions, can keep him away from the land for long. When he comes to die, he knows that he will bequeath his sons more than he ever had. In his mind, he will leave them a true dynasty. But do they care? Do these spoiled children who cannot remember want and who never knew what it was to work want to continue what Wang Lung has struggled to give them?

The Good Earth is a classic for a reason. It’s filled with complex characters and set in a volatile moment in history. As Wang Lung has gone about his life, forever in the shadow of the nobles in the nearby House of Hwang, the world is changing. But to him, that’s all unseen. At first, all he wants is a wife. He takes the one available, buying O-Lan, a lowly kitchen slave, from the House of Hwang. At first, he’s happy, then he is mesmerized. This quite woman, this good wife who asks for nothing, who delivers him boy children and then labors in the field, who brings him tea and takes care of his father, is enough. When tragedy strikes and a famine leaves the family starving, begging in a faraway town for enough rice to survive, O-Lan does the begging while Wang Lung holds onto his pride. When fortune turns again, O-Lan supports Wang Lung’s lust for land. She is quiet and unassuming.

As Wang Lung grows his possessions, he becomes both more and less human. Temptation seeds its way into his house. He wants the finer things of life. He wants a beautiful wife with tiny, bound feet, unlike the plain and steady O-Lan. As greed overcomes him, Wang Lung wars between ideas of pride and pleasure and a sense of guilt and fear. The mighty House of Hwang fell. Might he be next? And what of these ungrateful children of his, and his criminal uncle who has forced his way into Wang Lung’s house, who presides over his table, who threatens and steals?

Image by lin2015 from Pixabay

Meanwhile, a bigger force looms on the horizon. Rebellions and revolutions are fomenting. Empires are rising and falling. Things are changing. The entire class dichotomy is shifting. The world Wang Lung grew up knowing, and the rules by which it existed, are over. The middle class is coming into existence. But Wang Lung is to set in his ways, too old to understand and accept that his sons are interested in a new world; the land for which he suffered means nothing to them.

This story then is about a moment and time in history, a cultural shift where regular Chinese people fought against the drastic income disparity that kept them subservient to wealthy and idol nobles. But even more so, it is a story about human desire, about temptation and the ramifications of pride, about love and beauty, about duty and faithlessness. Wang Lung is at times empathetic and at other times self-absorbed and cruel, especially to O-Lan. At times we see gentleness, at other times stupidity, and at other times a conniving wiliness. Wang Lung then is real, is human, and there are striking moments of truth in his struggles, in his search for meaning in social status and in the fact that he is only ever really happy when working the land.

The Good Earth is filled with enigmatic, flawed, relatable people. Sometimes (many times) they’re horrible, but at the last moment, humanity peeks through, and we see, with despondency, that in many ways, we are the same. Wang Lung’s journey is one of the heart, a rise and fall, the story of a farmer, of a husband, of a want-to-be high society noble, and finally of an old man with dreams for his sons. He is a man on a path, often distracted, at times indolent and idol, but always returning, again and again, to the good earth. Highly recommended.

– Frances Carden

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Frances Carden
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