The Good Earth

“Idle hands are the devil’s workshop.” This novel greatly illustrates what can happen when a man gets bored. It’s an amazing tale about Wang Lung (pronounced Wong Lung), a poor farmer in China, and what happens when he goes from poverty to wealth.

He starts out loving his simple but hard life, with his wife O-lan, a former kitchen slave. O-lan works even harder than Wang Lung. She straightens out his modest home, where they live with his aged father. She cooks, cleans, sews, mends, and when all is done in the house, she goes out and helps Wang Lung in the fields. She makes him successful and prosperous, and he is able to buy more and more land from the House of Hwang, who are desperate for money to feed their various addictions; opium, concubines, gambling, etc.

O-lan bears Wang Lung children. When it is time for her to give birth, she leaves the field, goes alone to their room, gives birth, cleans up, and almost immediately, returns to the fields with baby in tow. Their first two children are sons. Their third child is a girl, a “slave.” After her birth, the rains stop and a drought lasts for years, so bad that they are starving, resorting to killing their beloved ox, to feeding the children dirt, and most tragically, resorting to killing their fourth child, another girl. O-lan got pregnant shortly after the birth of the third child and this third child, because O-lan’s milk dried up and the drought came, was permanently damaged from her early years of starvation.

 

There was nothing left in the house to feed his father and his children–nothing to feed this woman of his who besides the nourishment of her own body had this other one to feed into growth, this other one who would, with the cruelty of new and ardent life, steal from the very flesh and blood of its mother.

 

The children’s bellies were swollen out with empty wind, and one never saw in these days a child playing upon the village street. At most the two boys in Wang Lung’s house crept to the door and sat in the sun, the cruel sun that never ceased its endless shining. Their once rounded bodies were angular and bony now, sharp small bones like the bones of birds, except for their ponderous bellies. The girl child never even sat alone, although the time was past for this, but lay uncomplaining hour after hour wrapped in an old quilt. At first the angry insistence of her crying had filled the house, but she had come to be quiet, sucking feebly at whatever was put into her mouth and never lifting up her voice. Her little hollowed face peered out at them all, little sunken blue lips like a toothless old woman’s lips, and hollow black eyes peering.

 

The extreme gnawing in his stomach which he had had at first was now past and he could stir up a little of the earth from a certain spot in one of his fields and give it to the children without desiring any of it for himself. This earth they had been eating in water for some days–goddess of mercy earth, it was called, because it had some slight nutritious quality in it, although in the end it could not sustain life. But made into a gruel it allayed the children’s craving for a time and put something into their distended, empty bellies. He steadfastly would not touch the few beans that O-lan still held in her hand, and it comforted him vaguely to hear her crunching them, one at a time, a long time apart.

Close to death, evil men, led by Wang Lung’s evil uncle, come to buy the land for a pittance but Wang Lung refuses, with much anger and weeping.

And then suddenly O-lan came to the door and spoke to them, her voice flat and commonplace as though every day such things were.

“The land we will not sell, surely,” she said, “else when we return from the south we shall have nothing to feed us. But we will sell the table and the two beds and the bedding and the four benches and even the cauldron from the stove. But the rakes and the hoe and the plow we will not sell, nor the land.”

With the two silver bits, they begin the long walk to the south, not knowing what they would find now if there was even rain or food in the south. They make it as far as the town and suddenly, thankfully since they could not have walked any further, they are swept up with a “multitude” of starving people going to catch the “firewagon” (train) to the south. With fear and trepidation, they take this “firewagon” to the south and begin a life of begging (O-lan and the children) and ricksha-pulling (Wang Lung). But they are alive and eat every day, thanks to the meals provided daily by the rice kitchen for one penny.

No matter how hard Wang Lung works in the southern city, they never have more than what they need for a day’s worth of food and he wants badly to return to his land. He is faced with the difficult choice of staying in the south or selling his daughter in order to return to his land.

He talks with O-lan about the difficult choice:

“There is nothing to sell except the girl,” she answered slowly.

Wang Lung’s breath caught.

“Now, I would not sell a child!” he said loudly.

“I was sold,” she answered very slowly. “I was sold to a great house so that my parents could return to their home.”

“And would you sell the child, therefore?”

“If it were only I, she would be killed before she was sold . . . the slave of slaves was I! But a dead girl brings nothing. I would sell this girl for you–to take you back to the land.”

“Never would I,” said Wang Lung stoutly, “not though I spent my life in this wilderness.”

But when he had gone out again the thought, which never alone would have come to him, tempted him against his will. He looked at the small girl, staggering persistently at the end of the loop her grandfather held. She had grown greatly on the food given her each day, and although she had as yet said no word at all, still she was plump as a child will be on slight care enough, Her lips that had been like an old woman’s were smiling and red, and as of old she grew merry when he looked at her and she smiled.

“I might have done it,” he mused, “if she had not lain in my bosom and smiled like that.”

When war comes to the south, all industry stops and they are once again starving as even the rice kitchen closed. He considers selling his little girl again but when he questions O-lan on what happens to pretty slaves (used cruelly by the young lords of the house), he groans and holds her and says over and over, “Oh, little fool–oh, poor little fool.”

But the enemy breaks down the gates of the city and the poor people rise up and stampede into the houses of the rich and take from their wealth. O-lan knows where the rich hide jewels and she finds a store of jewels behind a loose brick inside one of the houses. Wang Lung is swept along with the horde of people until he finds himself alone with a rich, naked fat man, and the man is terrified and cries out to Wang Lung not to kill him, that he has money. Wang Lung remembers his land and says, “Give me the money then!” The rich fat man gives him so much gold that Wang Lung is able to take his family back to his land in the north which is no longer in drought. With the gold and the jewels, except for two beautiful pearls that O-lan begs him to let her keep, Wang Lung buys all the remaining land of the House of Hwang and sets about farming his many fields and getting richer and richer. When the floods come, however, and he can no longer farm his fields for months and months, he grows bored and visits the tea house in town.

From then on, a downward spiral of lust, greed, and jealousy enters into his life. He stops farming his good earth and cares more and more what other people think of him. He falls in love with Lotus and forces O-lan to give him her two pearls for Lotus. O-lan becomes ill and as she weakens, he realizes finally how much he needs her and how much she has done for him.

But there was no sudden dying of life in O-lan’s body. She was scarcely past the middle of her span of years, and her life would not easily pass from her body, so that she lay dying on her bed for many months. All through the long months of winter she lay dying and upon her bed, and for the first time, Wang Lung and his children knew what she had been in the house, and how she made comfort for them all and they had not known it.

He is tormented by strife in his home. Strife caused by Lotus and her servant, Cuckoo; by his sons, and by his uncle and his uncle’s family. He makes decisions that lead to more strife and unhappiness. The book ends with the two eldest sons visiting Wang Lung and walking upon his fields:

…Wang Lung heard his second son say in his mincing voice,

“This field we will sell and this one, and we will divide the money between us evenly. Your share I will borrow at good interest, for now with the railroad straight through I can ship rice to the sea and I…”

But the old man heard only these words, “sell the land,” and he cried out and he could not keep his voice from breaking and trembling with his anger,

“Now, evil, idle sons–sell the land!”…

“If you sell the land, it is the end.”

And his two sons held him, one on either side, each holding his arm, and he held tight in his hand the warm loose earth. And they soothed him and they said over and over, the elder son and the second son,

“Rest assured, our father, rest assured. The land is not to be sold.”

But over the old man’s head they looked at each other and smiled.

Amazingly good book – transports you to China in the early part of the 1900’s and you live and breathe the culture, traditions, and superstitions of the times. It portrays what can happen when people have too much wealth and nothing to do. God gave us work to do even in the Garden of Eden, so it is good to have work to do. When Wang Lung stopped working on his good earth, his troubles began and his life was never again satisfying. He had lusts and passions that were never quenched and grasped after this and that day after day. 

This book won the Pulitzer Prize in 1932 and Pearl S. Buck won the Nobel Prize in literature in 1938, the first American woman to do so. She was a child of American missionaries in China. She grew up in China from 1893 when she was a few months old until she left permanently in 1934. She was never able to return after 1934, although she wanted to do so. She loved the people and the culture. She started a bi-racial adoption agency along with James Michener and Oscar Hammerstein. She also supported women’s rights and minority rights. She wrote prolifically; at least 42 novels, many short stories, some biographies and memoirs.