The Good Earth by Pearl Buck – Sept 28, 2023

Pearl S. Buck (1892-1973)

Pearl Buck was born as Pearl Comfort Sydenstricker on June 26, 1892, in Hillsboro, West Virginia. She spent most of her young life until the age of forty in China as the daughter of Presbyterian Christian missionaries in Zhenjiang (Jiangsu province), then a small city lying at the junction of the Yangtze River and the Grand Canal.

She was fluent in Chinese and American and got her college education in a women’s college in West Virginia. She had begun to write essays and stories in magazines in the 1920s. The Good Earth was her second novel published in 1931; it became a best-seller in 1931-32, won the Pulitzer Prize, and the Howells Medal in 1935. 

The Good Earth, First Edition 1931, published by John Day

It was adapted as a major MGM film in 1937 featuring Paul Muni as Wang Lung the farmer, and Louise Rainer as O-lan, his wife. 

Wang Lung and O-lan working on the farm

Wang Lung, though born as a poor peasant barely making a living on a farm, has ambitions, derived from a fierce love of the land. Land, he thinks it the only asset that survives famines, bad times, and the depredations of the warlords. Through all the hardships he makes headway, finding in his wife the sort of helpmate who propels him forward while taking care of his domestic needs and their familial obligations to elders.

Indeed it is she who in a moment of luck carts away a bag of jewels and bullion secreted in a cache in the Great House of the local overlord and mistress, when their wastrel family fell on bad times. O-lan asks only to keep two pearls, handing over the bag to Wang Lung. He lets her keep it; O-lan, however, did not want to wear it ostentatiously, but keep it as a store of wealth against future adversity. Sadly, Wang Lung later plucks it away from her to present to his mistress, the beauty of the local whorehouse, Lotus.

Lotus and Wang Lung

Toward the end of the novel when Wang Lung finds himself alone, surrounded by quarrelling members of his family after his wife’s death, he sorely regrets that he had snatched away the small gift O-lan wanted to retain.

O-lan may be seen as the real story Pearl Buck wanted to tell: of women who were the true up-builders of the family and community, toiling without ceasing, barely acknowledged, rarely rewarded, and entirely subservient to men. Bearing children, caring for elders, and husbanding meagre farm resources so that the children would have a better life – this was the life of rural women. 

All this, of course, changed with the revolution. Women are no longer uneducated. Women are no longer tied to serial child-bearing. They do not even have to marry, if they do not want to, and increasingly in modern China it is hard for a man to get a woman to say Yes! But all this advance does not mean patriarchy has disappeared. As this article, Patriarchy in China, notes, men still dominate in the political sphere even today, although women have equal economic power. Foot binding has been eliminated totally and arranged marriages are extremely rare. 

Johann Waldemar de Rehling Quistgaard painted Pearl Buck in 1933, when the writer was forty-one years old, one year after she won the Pulitzer Prize for The Good Earth

A Short Biography of Pearl S. Buck

Pearl S. Buck died in 1973 at the age of 80, having written more than 85 books — novels, collections of short stories, children's books and essays. She is best known as the author of The Good Earth, a novel about peasant life in China that was published in 1931. Pearl Buck was the only American woman up till then to win the Nobel Prize for Literature, which she received in 1938. She left behind many unpublished volumes.

Pearl Buck brought China into the homes of millions of Americans. The daughter of Presbyterian missionaries, Miss Buck spent almost all of the first 40 years of her life in China, not in isolated missionary compounds but among the people of Zhenjiang and Nanjing. Educated in both Eastern and Western cultures (Chinese was her first language), she was in a unique position to understand both, yet felt rooted in neither. She valued and wanted to preserve the China she grew up in – a circumstance that made her persona non grata with both the Nationalists and the Communists. When she was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1931, there were protests in America that she was not an American writer, although an American by citizenship, and that her concerns and her life were exclusively Chinese. She left China for good in 1934, but did not find in America the free country her idealistic parents had promised. Instead, she confronted racial prejudice and injustice, and spent a great deal of time (and money) for the rest of her life fighting it, some say to the detriment of her writing.

The literary community in America never took Pearl Buck seriously, and indeed she was more fascinating as a person than as a writer. Both she and her publisher‐husband Richard Walsh felt she was slighted because she wrote so much, so successfully. Pearl Buck has always been an extremely popular, best‐selling author and her following to this day is enormous.

In America, much of her work was serialized in “ladies’ “ magazines, an outlet. Miss Buck defended this practice because she wanted to reach millions of women who didn't read books. Miss Buck's reasoning may have been populist, but in fact her writing was perfectly suited for a mass readership. Pearl Buck's work has an almost universal appeal because her subject matter consisted of dramatic life situations of birth, death and marriage — and she wrote like a presenter of fables. Her characters are easily identifiable types — virtuous or evil, charming or repugnant. She writes, at her best, with the easy grace of a natural storyteller, free of any trace of modernism. At other times, her work could become didactic and sentimental.

Pearl Buck was quite reticent about her personal life; even her admiring biographer, T. F. Harris, laments this. But the situation presented in a novella of hers called “The Woman Who Was Changed” is remarkably close to the author's own. It is about a writer, Eleanor (Nora) Dane, who leaves her husband because he cannot deal with her growing success and public fame. Nora has changed; she wants to spend her time writing, he wants her to remain a traditional wife. The story is an evocative, convincing portrayal of a determined woman who chooses solitude, freedom and creativity over romance.

Pearl S. Buck married economist John Buck in 1917 and a retarded child Carol (victim of PKU) – their marriage was unhappy

Pearl Buck married twice; the first time in China, to an American agricultural missionary, John Buck, who took little interest in her work. It was an unsatisfactory marriage (she had a half‐Chinese lover) but she stuck it out for 18 years. In 1935, at the height of her literary success, she divorced Buck and married her editor and publisher, Richard Walsh, who had fostered her career and pursued her for years. Apparently this marriage, too, had its problems. In the biography, Miss Buck says that the Nobel Prize “was quite a test of my husband ... it must have taken considerable grace for him to be there in ... a sort of secondary position.”

Pearl Buck had no hesitancy in mining her own experience for her writing, but claimed she would never publish anything that would hurt anyone she knew. Since the parties are long dead, in future we may get a closer look at the life of this extraordinary woman.

[The above short biography is taken from a review in the New York Times in March 1979 by Lore Dickstein, titled The Woman Who Was Changed And Other Stories. By Pearl S. Buck.]

For further light on the author's life one may read The Meteoric Rise, and Decline, of a Talented Young Writer, a review of Hilary Spurling's book, Pearl Buck in China.
Here is Pearl Buck’s Obituary in the New York Times in 1973.

The Reading Session and Discussions

Joe

Joe chose a passage from Ch 2 where Wang Lung is filled with pride that his wife is pregnant and will soon give him an heir. 

Perhaps this passage in the opening paragraph most nearly conveys the meaning of the title ‘The Good Earth.’ For it describes husband and wife going out into the fields and working shoulder to shoulder to cultivate the soil. In the first part of the novel  O-lan, the hard-working wife of Wang Lung occupies the story. Her destiny is to lay the foundation of the future wealth of the family. This aspect of O-lan Joe highlighted in a haiku:

Wang Lung, a kisan,

Was an ordinary man

Till he met O-Lan.

But she is not the orchid her name ‘lan’ means in Mandarin. She is the opposite of exquisitely beautiful or dainty. Her feet are not bound, and she is quite plain. But a sensible man would be happy to have her as wife – dutiful, industrious, and caring for the family and the elders. Wang Lung is aware of this and at first he is elated, which Joe conveyed in another haiku:

A wife like O-Lan

Would pump up a guy’s élan —

He’d feel a real man!

Unfortunately, Wang Lung is led astray by what he feels is expected of a man of substance grown to seniority – he takes a mistress at the brothel, who later becomes a kept woman at home. O-lan has to tolerate this affront, and swallow the humiliation because it was – one hesitates to use the past tense – a man’s world and society accepted the custom. Such realism is a pervasive feature of the novel. Later on when Wang Lung takes up with the almost child, called Pear Blossom, we are told “this love of his age astonished him more than any of his lusts before.” But that is from Priya’s passage and she will tell us.

Devika

The two main protagonists, Wang Lung and O-lan, are part of the passage that Devika chose. Wang Lung gives O-lan money to buy fine clothes to show off their newborn son to the Old One.

O-lan, hardly speaks, but she has deep thoughts and plans everything she does. Here while expecting her first child, she previews how she will go and visit Old One in the grand House of Hwang. The resentment she has been nurturing all her years at the big house and the way she was treated there as a slave, well up in her. So when she goes back with her son she wants to show the Old One that she is prosperous now and has money to buy silk for her son and dress him up with everything that she did not have ... coat, trousers, hat and shoes. She too wants to be well dressed on this visit. When her husband gives her a little extra she wants to make sure that they look their best.

Wang Lung is one who has hoarded his hard-earned money and is surprised at himself when he doles out money without a care to clothe his first born. He is happy to give O-lan whatever she asked.

Kavita

Kavita read from Ch 5 where Wang Lung is bent on buying the good land of the great lord, Hwang, with ready cash. His wife gives in after resisting at first. She agrees it is a good idea to buy land and understands why Wang Lung does not want to buy his uncle's land: it has lost its fertility by being endlessly tilled without double-cropping.

O-lan who had been a slave in the kitchens of the proud family of Hwang, relished the idea that she would now be wife to a man who owned a piece of the land that for generations had made the House of Hwang great. 

The thrift of O-lan is married to the ambition of Wang Lung and it is the combination that leads to the future prosperity of Wang Lung – with its inevitable attendant ills.

Saras

The passage Saras chose is a phase in the life of Wang Lung and his family when famine forces him to emigrate with his family to the southern city of Kiangsu where he employs himself as rickshaw puller to earn for his family. Though he takes customers to luxurious places he dare not step anywhere inside them, and is grateful for an occasional foreigner who tips heavily. He takes a foreign lady on his rickshaw and when she gives him more money than he asked, he's really flabbergasted. He's too scared to look her in the face because of her blue eyes and her blonde hair.

Wang Lung notes that in his northern town of Anhwei “a man, if he had a roll of good wheat bread and a sprig of garlic in it, had a full meal and needed no more. But here the people dabbled with pork balls and bamboo sprouts and chestnuts stewed with chicken and goose giblets and this and that of vegetables, and when an honest man came by smelling of yesterday's garlic ...”

He longs to return but learns that there is a new thing brewing, a revolution against the hated foreigners. Saras said this was the the Boxer Rebellion. A little later we have the Sun Yat-sen Revolution of 1911 with which Mao Zedong and others of the Chinese Communist Party were inclined to cooperate. Though Pearl Buck’s book was written in 1932 it depicts China of a slightly earlier period, two decades earlier.

It was after the Boxer Rebellion that China was made an international colony by western imperial powers. China was to be divided, and this thinly veiled effort to seize the Chinese empire, which is referred to as ‘Cutting of Chinese Melon,’ to create western spheres of influence, still infuriates Mr. Xi Jinping, the general secretary of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). Saras remarked that Britain, France, USA, Germany, and Japan, just split up China and the Boxer rebellion against foreigners was suppressed.

Now the CCP has created an iron wall where they said, no one will enslave China and  they were going to be their own masters henceforth. It was not the Iron Curtain, which was an existing metaphor used by Churchill in a speech he gave in 1946 in USA to designate the closing off of Western Europe from the Soviet Union to the east. Supposedly in the west lay the democratic countries of Western Europe.

As an aside although Wang Lung looks askance at the southerners who eat rich food like pork balls, goose giblets and bamboo sprouts, it is this food we now recognise instantly as Chinese and not the wheat bread with a spring of garlic that Wang Lung longed for. But when prosperity embraced Wang Lung later in the novel, he too takes to the richer food of the southerners!

Thomo

Thomo read from Ch 13 where Wang Lung is faced with the cruel dilemma of the poor when faced with the stark fact that menial labour in the city barely fetches a living. When he learns of the riches on the other side of the wall in rich men’s houses, he considers selling one of his children. O-lan recalls how she was sold as a slave but Wang Lung recovers his love and does not go through with the sale.

It was invariably the girls who were sold, never the boys. But here you notice something that his eldest daughter, though he considers selling her, we know all through the book Wang Lung has a soft corner for that one child. A lot of people, when they have an abnormal child try to dispose of them, even today, perhaps putting them in an institution. The one redeeming facet of Wang Lung, compared to the way he treated his wife, is his attachment to his abnormal child. Right through the book, you see the soft spot he has for her.

Pearl Buck had an abnormal child by her first marriage.

Female infanticide continues, and the selling of children through sirdars in India so that they can be put to work at little or no wages in cities far away from the villages. In the condition of famine described in the novel they mention a little meat in the gruel, but we don't know where it came from. Whether it was cannibalism even, we don't know. 

Many, many, years ago at a bhoj in Bihar they were serving meat, and a baby’s finger was found in the meat. Terrible to think such things happened once. There's the case of the Andes mountains airplane crash in which cannibalism took place. They ate those who had died in the crash in order to survive.

Wang Lung is told by another wise man that silver and gold and pearls lie on the other side of the wall against which their encampment rested, and when the rich get too rich they act in ways that waste their wealth. So Wang Lung thinks about this and can't get the jewels off his mind.

Shoba

Shoba read a passage from Ch 16 where O-lan discovers a cache of jewels hidden in the Old House. She asks to keep just two pearls, handing over the bag to Wang Lung. 

Wang Lung wants to sell them and invest in land, for in his wisdom he believes that the only safe way to store wealth is in buying land. But before he disposes of the jewels O-lan asks plaintively to keep just two pearls, not for flaunting it across her body, but to store in her bodice as a hedge against future misfortune. 

We read that Wang Lung “looked for an instant into the heart of this dull and faithful creature, who had labored all her life at some task at which she won no reward and who in the great house had seen others wearing jewels which she never even felt in her hand once.” He gives her the bag, she chooses two pearls, and hands back the bag, wraps the pearls in a cloth and hides them between her breasts.

Later in the story, Wang Lung asked her to return the pearls to him so that he could gift it to Lotus, his new paramour. Shoba thought it very cruel to snatch away this little thing O-lan valued so much.  After her death this is the one act for which Wang Lung feels huge remorse.

Pamela

Pamela read from Ch 21 where Wang Lung is exasperated that his new-found kept woman, Lotus, though staying in his house, can’t abide the presence of his simple idiot child, the elder daughter whom he loved. Lotus exclaims: “I was not told that I should have accursed idiots to endure and if I had known it I would not have come –– filthy children of yours!"

Wang Lung is indignant: “"I will not hear my children cursed, no and not by anyone and not even my poor fool, and not by you who have no son in your womb ..." He goes out and comforts his children and buys them treats. From that day his affection for Lotus waned.

Pamela chose this passage because Wang Lung was able to exit from his infatuation for Lotus because of his love for his “poor fool.” He couldn't bear the thought of his daughter being abused by Lotus. He was released from the obsession for Lotus. He had been very generous to her, and had even tried to change himself for her. In a snap, that was all gone.

Wang Lung must have felt so broken by the revelation of this aspect of Lotus’ character, that he sought solace in going  back to working on his land. He called out to his neighbour farmer, Ching, and told him to summon the other men to join him as soon as the waters receded. His faith in the potential of the land and his passion as a farmer tied him to the land. This brings out the meaning of the title “The Good Earth.”

KumKum

KumKum read from Ch 22.  We see Wang Lung settling into a home-life with two women, one for his pleasure and another for his sustenance.

The Good Earth begins with the scene of the wedding of the protagonist, Wang Lung, to an ordinary, plain-looking, slave girl by the name of O-lan. The novel follows the life of Wang Lung from his beginnings as a poor peasant to his eventual position as respected farmer with extensive lands and considerable wealth. His wife O-lan played a pivotal role in Wang Lung’s life. She was not just his wife, mother of his children, and caregiver to his old father; she also worked shoulder-to-shoulder with him in the planting of crops and reaping of harvests, and husbanded his household. She was a pillar of strength in Wang Lung’s life.

When Wang Lung  became prosperous, he took the prostitute Lotus as his concubine. Lotus’s role in Wang Lung's life was primarily that of being a status symbol; she could also satisfy the carnality of his senior age with her sophistication and beauty. However, her presence in the family introduced conflict, and upset the living arrangements in his home.

Chapter 22 defines the role of these two women in Wang Lung's household.

Geetha

Geetha's reading concerns the battle with locusts that attack the crops of Wang Lung.  Geetha said The Good Earth was a great read, especially as it is set in China and focused on the protagonist's love of land and his crops. It gives us several glimpses of the traditional life of Chinese peasants at the time; as well as the luxurious and lavish lifestyle of the affluent Chinese gentry. Opium addiction is described and its ill-effects. We see how men of the higher classes almost felt bound to take on paramours to display their status of having ‘arrived.’ Prostitution as a way of life was prevalent and seemed to be okay with Chinese society at the time, and perhaps is so even now.

Geetha selected the particular portion she read in Chapter 23 as it brought to her mind the Biblical accounts of the locust attack brought on the people of Egypt, one of the plagues that afflicted them before the Pharaoh let the Israelites go back:
“And they shall cover the face of the earth, so that no one will be able to see the earth; and they shall eat the residue of what is left, which remains to you from the hail, and they shall eat every tree which grows up for you out of the field” (Exodus 10:4-5).

Compare with what we read in the novel:

“Then the sky grew black and the air was filled with the deep still roar of many wings beating against each other, and upon the land the locusts fell, flying over this field and leaving it whole, and falling upon that field, and eating it as bare as winter. And men sighed and said, "So Heaven wills,"

The passage also brings out Wang Lung's burning zeal to set to work on his land as a panacea for all ills that plagued him. 

Arundhaty

Arundhaty’s selection from Ch 32 gave readers an insight into he internecine hatreds that broke out within the family and destroyed Wang Lung’s domestic peace.

The Good Earth begins as the story of a poor, simple young farmer, Wang Lung, who marries a plain-looking slave woman from a Great House. It ends with the farmer, Wang Lung, having risen to be a wealthy patriarch with money enough to own large tracts of land, and even keep his own concubine. Though he gains a fortune, Wang Lung in the process loses his connection to the earth to which he was bound. Inevitably, he undermines the connections within his family also. 

Arundhaty selected the passage because it truly depicts the self-inflicted torments of the rich, and how wealth leads an honest, hardworking, man away from the path of dharma. Amidst self-created woes, peace becomes a distant dream.

Each time he buys a new piece of land it increases his wealth and raises his stature in the rural society. He remarries, he settles his sons and their wives, and thinks, now he can enjoy some peace! But peace remains elusive. 

Like all wealthy men, his children's wants and his own wants keep growing and the simple pleasures he used to enjoy before seem to have vanished.

Priya

Priya read from the romantic Ch 33 where Wang Lung takes Pear Blossom as the platonic love of his old age.

When Wang Lung is sitting pensively in the darkness he hears footstep and cries out:
"Pear Blossom! ... Come here to me!”

Wang Lung realises he is several times her age:

"Child – I am an old man – a very old man. 

And she said, and her voice came out of the darkness like the very breath of the cassia tree, "I like old men – I like old men--they are so kind –“ 

"A little maid like you should have a tall straight youth

But she said,  "Young men are not kind – they are only fierce." 

Thus is the pact sealed, and “he led her into his own courts.”

We are told, “this love of his age astonished him more than any of his lusts before ... He was satisfied to feel her light youth against his heavy old flesh, and he was satisfied merely with the sight of her in the day and with the touch of her fluttering coat against his hand and with the quiet resting of her body near him in the night.”

One can almost hear the soft panting – for which we have the ever-judicious and discreet Priya to thank.

Zakia

Zakia  read from the last chapter, 34. Wang Lung’s sons make a false promise to him never to sell the land their father had acquired. 

This is the last chapter and intimations of mortality are in the air for Wang Lung. He wants to make sure the legacy of the fertile land he had accumulated – which had brought wealth to him and his family, will not ever be extinguished.

“No–no–we will never sell the land –”, he says to his sons. The old man is tearful as he tells his sons:

“Out of the land we came and into it we must go – and if you will hold your land you can live – no one can rob you of land –”

But the sons, having got themselves an education, did not have farming in their heart. Though they are eager to reassure their father that the land will not be sold, we know they are only waiting for Wang Lung’s exit from the world to sell off what their father had amassed.

The sequel to this novel, Sons, is chiefly the tale of the rise to power of Wang Lung's youngest son, who wanted to be a soldier. This is the one whose fierce black brows and lithe, commanding figure won for him the name of Wang the Tiger.

Reading Passages

Joe – Ch 2: Wang Lung is filled with pride that his wife is pregnant and will soon give him an heir

Wang Lung had his coat off and his back bare, but she worked with her thin garment covering her shoulders and it grew wet and clung to her like skin. Moving together in a perfect rhythm, without a word, hour after hour, he fell into a union with her which took the pain from his labor. He had no articulate thought of anything; there was only this perfect sympathy of movement, of turning this earth of theirs over and over to the sun, this earth which formed their home and fed their bodies and made their gods. The earth lay rich and dark, and fell apart lightly under the points of their hoes. Sometimes they turned up a bit of brick, a splinter of wood. It was nothing. Some time, in some age, bodies of men and women had been buried there, houses had stood there, had fallen, and gone back into the earth. So would also their house, some time, return into the earth, their bodies also. Each had his turn at this earth. They worked on, moving together--together producing the fruit of this earth – speechless in their movement together. 

When the sun had set he straightened his back slowly and looked at the woman. Her face was wet and streaked with the earth. She was as brown as the very soil itself. Her wet, dark garments clung to her square body. She smoothed a last furrow slowly. Then in her usual plain way she said, straight out, her voice flat and more than usually plain in the silent evening air, 

"I am with child." 

Wang Lung stood still. What was there to say to this thing, then! She stooped to pick up a bit of broken brick and threw it out of the furrow. It was as though she had said, "I have brought you tea, or as though she had said, "We can eat." It seemed as ordinary as that to her! But to him – he could not say what it was to him. His heart swelled and stopped as though it met sudden confines. Well, it was their turn at this earth! 

He took the hoe suddenly from her hand and he said, his voice thick in his throat, "Let be for now. It is a day's end. We will tell the old man." 

They walked home, then, she half a dozen paces behind him as befitted a woman. The old man stood at the door, hungry for his evening's food, which, now that the woman was in the house, he would never prepare for himself. He was impatient and he called out, 

"I am too old to wait for my food like this!" 

But Wang Lung, passing him into the room, said, 

"She is with child already." 

He tried to say it easily as one might say, "I have planted the seeds in the western field today," but he could not. Although he spoke in a low voice it was to him as though he had shouted the words out louder than he would. 

The old man blinked for a moment and then comprehended, and cackled with laughter. 

"Heh-heh-heh-" he called out to his daughter-in-law as she came, "so the harvest is in sight!" Her face he could not see in the dusk, but she answered evenly, 

"I shall prepare food now." 

"Yes-yes-food-" said the old man eagerly, following her into the kitchen like a child. Just as the thought of a grandson had made him forget his meal, so now the thought of food freshly before him made him forget the child. 

But Wang Lung sat upon a bench by the table in the darkness and put his head upon his folded arms. Out of this body of his, out of his own loins, life! (650 words)

Devika – Ch 3: Wang Lung gives O-lan money to buy fine clothes to show off their newborn son to the Old One

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-flowered trousers and on his head a hat with a small gilded Buddha sewn on the front and on his feet tiger-faced shoes. And 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 her opium, and I will show myself and my son to all of them. He had never heard so many words from her before. They came forth steadily and without break, albeit slowly, and he realized that she had planned this whole thing out for herself. When she had been working in the fields beside him she had been planning all this out! How astonishing she was! He would have said that she had scarcely thought of the child, so stilly had she gone about her work, day in and day out. And instead she saw this child, born and fully clothed, and herself as his mother, in a new coat! He was for once without words himself, and he pressed the tobacco diligently into a ball be tween his thumb and forefinger, and picking up his pipe he fitted the tobacco into the bowl. 

“I suppose you will need some money," he said at last with apparent gruffness. 

"If you will give me three silver pieces . . "" she said fearfully. "It is a great deal, but I have counted carefully and I will waste no penny of it. I shall make the cloth dealer give me the last inch to the foot." 

Wang Lung fumbled in his girdle. The day before he had sold a load and a half of reeds from the pond in the western field to the town market and he had in his girdle a little more than she wished. He put the three silver pieces upon the table. Then, after a little hesitation, he added a fourth piece which he had long kept by him on the chance of his wanting to gamble a little some morning at the tea house. But he never did more than linger about the tables and look at the dice as they clattered upon the table, fearful lest he lose if he played. He usually ended by spending his spare hours in the town at the story-teller's booth, where one may listen to an old tale and pay no more than a penny into his bowl when it was passed about. 

"You had better take the other piece," he said, lighting his pipe between the words, blowing quickly at the paper spill to set it aflame. "You may as well make his coat of a small remnant of silk. After all, he is the first." 

She did not at once take the money, but she stood looking at it, her face motionless. Then she said in a half-whisper, 

"It is the first time I have silver money in my hand." 

Suddenly she took it and clenched it in her hand and hurried into the bedroom. 

Wang Lung sat smoking, thinking of the silver as it had lain upon the table. It had come out of the earth, this silver, out of his earth that he ploughed and turned and spent himself upon. He took his life from this earth; drop by drop by his sweat he wrung fruit from it and from the fruit, silver. Each time before this that he had taken the silver out to give to anyone, it had been like taking a piece of his life and giving it to someone carelessly. But now for the first time such giving was not pain. He saw, not the silver in the alien hand of a merchant in the town; he saw the silver transmuted into something worth even more than itself – clothes upon the body of his son. And this strange woman of his, who worked about, saying nothing, seeming to see nothing, she had first seen the child thus clothed! (695 words)

Kavita – Ch5: Wang Lung is bent on buying the good land of the great lord, Hwang, with ready cash. His wife gives in after resisting at first

"Sell their land!" repeated Wang Lung, convinced. "Then indeed are they growing poor. Land is one's flesh and blood."

He pondered for a while and suddenly a thought came to him and he struck the side of his head with his palm.

"What have I not thought off" he cried, turning to the woman. "We will buy the land!"

They stared at each other, he in delight, she in stupefaction.

"Buy the land – the land –“ she stammered.

“I will buy it!" he cried in a lordly voice. "I will buy it from the great House of Hwang!"

"It is too far away," she said in consternation. "We would have to walk half the morning to reach it."

"I will buy it," he repeated peevishly as he might repeat a demand to his mother who crossed him.

"It is a good thing to buy land," she said pacifically. "It is better certainly than putting money into a mud wall. But why not a piece of your uncle's land? He is clamoring to sell that strip near to the western field we now have."

"That land of my uncle's," said Wang Lung loudly, "I would not have it. He has been dragging a crop out of it in this way and that for twenty years and not a bit has he put back of manure or bean cake. The soil is like lime. No, I will buy Hwang's land."

He said "Hwang's land" as casually as he might have said "Ching's land," – Ching, who was his farmer neighbor. He would be more than equal to these people in the foolish, great, wasteful house. He would go with the silver in his hand and he would say plainly, 

"I have money. What is the price of the earth you wish to sell?"

Before the Old Lord he heard himself saying and to the Old Lord's agent, "Count me as anyone else. What is the fair price? I have it in my hand."

And his wife, who had been a slave in the kitchens of that proud family, she would be wife to a man who owned a piece of the land that for generations had made the House of Hwang great. It was as though she felt his thought for she suddenly ceased her resistance and she said,

"Let it be bought. After all, rice land is good, and it is near the moat and we can get water every year. It is sure."

And again the slow smile spread over her face, the smile that never lightened the dullness of her narrow black eyes, and after a long time she said,

"Last year this time I was slave in that house."

And they walked on, silent with the fullness of this thought. (458 words)

Saras – Ch 12: Wang Lung as a rickshaw puller takes people all over the city but barely earns living. They lived like foreigners in the southern city of Kiangsu, yearning to return to their northern town of Anhwei

Now after the first sharpness of Wang Lung's hunger was over and he saw that his children daily had something to eat, and he knew there was every morning rice to be had, and of his day's labor and of O-lan's begging there was enough to pay for it, the strangeness of his life passed, and he began to feel what this city was, to whose fringes he clung. Running about the streets every day and all day long he learned to know the city after a fashion, and he saw this and that of its secret parts. He learned that in the morning the people he drew in his vehicle, if they were women, went to the market, and it they were men, they went to the schools and to the houses of business. But what sort of schools these were he had no way of knowing, beyond the fact that they were called such names as "The Great School of Western Learning" or as "The Great School of China," for he never went beyond the gates, and if he had gone in, well he knew someone would have come to ask him what he did out of his place. And what houses of business they were to which he drew men he did not know, since when he was paid it was all he knew. 

And at night he knew that he drew men to big tea houses and to places of pleasure, the pleasure that is open and streams out upon the streets in the sound of music and of gaming with pieces of ivory and bamboo upon a wooden table, and the pleasure that is secret and silent and hidden behind walls. But none of these pleasures did Wang Lung know for himself, since his feet crossed no threshold except that of his own hut, and his road was always ended at a gate. He lived in the rich city as alien as a rat in a rich man's house that is fed on scraps thrown away, and hides here and there and is never a part of the real life of the house. 

So it was that, although a hundred miles are not so far as a thousand, and land road never so far as water road, yet Wang Lung and his wife and children were like foreigners in this southern city. It is true that the people who went about the streets had black hair and eyes as Wang Lung and all his family had, and as all did in the country where Wang Lung was born, and it is true that if one listened to the language of these southerners it could be understood, if with difficulty. 

But Anhwei is not Kiangsu. In Anhwei, where Wang Lung was born, the language is slow and deep and it wells from the throat. But in the Kiangsu city where they now lived the people spoke in syllables which splintered from their lips and from the ends of their tongues. And where Wang Lung's fields spread out in slow and leisurely harvest twice a year of wheat and rice and a bit of com and beans and garlic, here in the farms about the city men urged their land with perpetual stinking fertilizing of human wastes to force the land to a hurried bearing of this vegetable and that besides their rice. 

In Wang Lung's country a man, if he had a roll of good wheat bread and a sprig of garlic in it, had a full meal and needed no more. But here the people dabbled with pork balls and bamboo sprouts and chestnuts stewed with chicken and goose giblets and this and that of vegetables, and when an honest man came by smelling of yesterday's garlic, they lifted their noses and cried out, "Now here is a reeking, pig-tailed northerner!" The smell of the garlic would make the very shopkeepers in the cloth shops raise the price of blue cotton cloth as they might raise the price for a foreigner. 

Once … Wang Lung heard a young man haranguing a crowd at the comer of the Confucian temple… that China must have a revolution and must rise against the hated foreigners, Wang Lung was alarmed and slunk away. (714 words)

Thomo – Ch 13: Wang Lung considers selling a child, finding that labour in the city barely fetches a living. Then he learns of the riches on the other side of the wall in rich men’s houses.

“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."

…

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

And then he thought again of his land and he cried out passionately,

"Shall I never see it again! With all this labor and begging there is never enough to do more than feed us today."

Then out of the dusk there answered him a voice, a deep burly voice,

"You are not the only one. There are a hundred hundred like you in this citv.'

…

"Well, and is it forever?" asked Wang Lung bitterly.

The man puffed at his pipe thrice and then spat upon the ground.

Then he said,

"No, and not forever. When the rich are too rich there are ways, and when the poor are too poor there are ways. Last winter we sold two girls and endured, and this winter, if this one my woman bears is a girl, we will sell again. One slave I have kept--the first. The others it is better to sell than to kill, although there are those who prefer to kill them before they draw breath. This is one of the ways when the poor are too poor. When the rich are too rich there is a way, and if I am not mistaken, that way will come soon." He nodded and pointed with the stem of his pipe to the wall behind them. "Have you seen inside that wall?"

Wang Lung shook his head, staring. The man continued,

"I took one of my slaves in there to sell and I saw it. You would not believe it if I told you how money comes and goes in that house. I will tell you this even the servants eat with chopsticks of ivory bound with silver, and even the slave women hang jade and pearls in their ears and sew pearls upon their shoes, and when the shoes have a bit of mud upon them or a small rent comes such as you and I would not call a rent, they throw them away, pearls and all'"

The man drew hard on his pipe and Wang Lung listened, his mouth ajar. Over this wall, then there were indeed such things!

"There is a way when men are too rich," said the man, and he was silent for a time and then as though he had said nothing he added indifferently,

"Well, work again," and was gone into the night.

But Wang Lung that night could not sleep for thinking of silver and gold and pearls on the other side of this wall against which his body rested, his body clad in what he wore day after day, because there was no quilt to cover him and only a mat upon bricks beneath him. And temptation fell on him again to sell the child, so that he said to himself,

"It would be better perhaps that she be sold into a rich house so that she can eat daintily and wear jewels, if it be that she grow up pretty and please a lord." But against his own wish he answered himself and he thought again, "Well, and if I did, she is not worth her weight in gold and rubies. If she bring enough to take us back to the land, where will come enough to buy an ox and a table and a bed and the benches once more? Shall I sell a child that we may starve there instead of here? We have not even seed to put into the land."

And he saw nothing of the way of which the man spoke when he said, "There is a way, when the rich are too rich.' (707 words)

Shoba – Ch 16: After O-lan discovers a cache of jewels hidden in the Old House, she asks to keep just two pearls; Wang Lung insists the only safe way to store wealth is in buying land

And again they fell silent, staring at the wonder of the stones. Then after a long time Wang Lung drew in his breath and said resolutely,  

"Now treasure like this one cannot keep. It must be sold and put into safety – into land, for nothing else is safe. If any knew of this we should be dead by the next day and a robber would carry the jewels. They must be put into land this very day or I shall not sleep tonight."  

He wrapped the stones in the rag again as he spoke and tied them hard together with the string, and opening his coat to thrust them into his bosom, by chance he saw the woman's face. She was sitting cross-legged upon the bed at its foot and her heavy face that never spoke of anything was moved with a dim yearning of open lips and face thrust forward. 

"Well, and now what?" he asked, wondering at her.  

"Will you sell them all?" she asked in a hoarse whisper.  

"And why not then?" he answered, astonished. "Why should we have jewels like this in an earthen house?"  

"I wish I could keep two for myself," she said with such helpless wistfulness, as of one expecting nothing, that he was moved as he might be by one of his children longing for a toy or for a sweet,  

“Well, now!" he cried in amazement.  

"If I could have two, " she went on humbly, "only two small ones – the two small white pearls even ...  

"Pearls!" he repeated, agape.  

"I would keep them – I would not wear them," she said, "only keep them." And she dropped her eyes and fell to twisting a bit of the bedding where a thread was loosened, and she waited patiently as one who scarcely expects an answer,  

Then Wang Lung, without comprehending it, looked for an instant into the heart of this dull and faithful creature, who had labored all her life at some task at which she won no reward and who in the great house had seen others wearing jewels which she never even felt in her hand once.  

"I could hold them in my hand sometimes," she added, as if she thought to herself.  

And he was moved by something he did not understand and he pulled the jewels from his bosom and unwrapped them and handed them to her in silence, and she searched among the glittering colors, her hard brown hand turning over the stones delicately and lingeringly until she found the two smooth white pearls, and these she took, and tying up the others again, she gave them back to him. Then she took the pearls and she tore a bit of the corner of her coat away and wrapped them and hid them between her breasts and was comforted. (475 words)

Pamela – Ch 21: Wang Lung is chagrined that Lotus can’t abide his simple idiot child whom he loved. One day as the waters receded he took up the hoe, and casting off his fine clothes, went out to plough his fields.

"I will not stay in this house if that one comes near me, and I was not told that I should have accursed idiots to endure and if I had known it I would not have come--filthy children of yours!" and she pushed the little gaping boy who stood nearest her, clasping his twin sister's hand. 

Then the good anger awoke in Wang Lung, for he loved his children, and he said roughly, 

"I will not hear my children cursed, no and not by anyone and not even my poor fool, and not by you who have no son in your womb for any man." And he gathered the children together and said to them, "Now go out, my son and my daughter, and come no more to this woman's court, for she does not love you and if she does not love you she does not love your father, either." And to the elder girl he said with great gentleness, "And you, my poor fool, come back to your place in the sun." And she smiled and he took her by the hand and led her away. 

For he was most angry of all that Lotus dared to curse this child of his and call her idiot, and a load of fresh pain for the girl fell upon his heart, so that for a day and two days he would not go near Lotus, but he played with the children and he went into the town and he bought a circle of barley candy for his poor fool and he comforted himself with her baby pleasure in the sweet sticky stuff. 

And when he went in to Lotus again neither of them said anything that he had not come for two days, but she took special trouble to please him, for when he came his uncle's wife was there drinking tea, and Lotus excused herself and said, 

"Now here is my lord come for me and I must be obedient to him for this is my pleasure," and she stood until the woman went away. 

Then she went up to Wang Lung and took his hand and drew it to her face and she wooed him. But he, although he loved her again, loved her not so wholly as before, and never again so wholly as he had loved her. 

There came a day when summer was ended and the sky in the early morning was clear and cold and blue as sea water and a clean autumn wind blew hard over the land, and Wang Lung woke as from a sleep. He went to the door of his house and he looked over his fields. And he saw that the waters had receded and the land lay shining under the dry cold wind and under the ardent sun. 

Then a voice cried out in him, a voice deeper than love cried out in him for his land. And he heard it above every other voice in his life and he tore off the long robe he wore and he stripped off his velvet shoes and his white stockings and he rolled his trousers to his knees and he stood forth robust and eager and he shouted, 

"Where is the hoe and where the plow? And where is the seed for the wheat planting? Come, Ching, my friend--come – call the men  – I go out to the land!" (568 words)

KumKum – Ch 22: Wang Lung settles into a life with two women, one for his pleasure and another for his sustenance

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. He ordered his laborers hither and thither and they did a mighty day of labor, ploughing here and ploughing there, and Wang Lung stood first behind the oxen and cracked the whip over their backs and saw the deep curl of earth turning as the plow went into the soil, and then he called to Ching and gave him the ropes, and he himself took a hoe and broke up the soil into fine loamy stuff, soft as black sugar, and still dark with the wetness of the land upon it. This he did for the sheer joy he had in it and not for any necessity, and when he was weary he lay down upon his land and he slept and the health of the earth spread into his flesh and he was healed of his sickness. 

When night came and the sun had gone blazing down without a cloud to dim it, he strode into his house, his body aching and weary and triumphant, and he tore aside the curtain that went into the inner court and there Lotus walked in her silken robes. When she saw him she cried out at the earth upon his clothes and shuddered when he came near her. 

But he laughed and he seized her small, curling hands in his soiled ones and he laughed again and said, 

"Now you see that your lord is but a farmer and you are a farmer's wife!" 

Then she cried out with spirit, 

"A farmer's wife am I not, be you what you like!” 

And he laughed again and went out from her easily. 

He ate his evening rice all stained as he was with the earth and unwillingly he washed himself even before he slept. And washing his body he laughed again, for he washed it now for no woman, and he laughed because he was free. 

…

When he came in at noon and at night he ate well of the food which O-lan prepared for him, good rice and cabbage and beancurd, and fresh garlic rolled into wheat bread. When Lotus held her small nose under her hand at his coming and cried out at his reek, he laughed and cared nothing and he breathed out his stout breath at her and she must bear it as she could for he would eat of what he liked. And now that he was full of health again and free of the sick ness of his love he could go to her and be finished with her and turn himself to other things. 

So these two women took their place in his house: Lotus for his toy and his pleasure and to satisfy his delight in beauty and in smallness and in the joy of her pure sex, and O-lan for his woman of work and the mother who had borne his sons and who kept his house and fed him and his father and his children. And it was a pride to Wang Lung in the village that men mentioned with envy the woman in his inner court; it was as though men spoke of a rare jewel or an expensive toy that was useless except that it was sign and symbol of a man who had passed beyond the necessity of caring only to be fed and clothed and could spend his money on joy if he wished. (639 words)

Geetha – Ch 23: The battle with locusts

And the next morning he had not slept but a little through the night, and he tore off his long robes and kicked off his shoes, and as was his wont when the affairs of his house became too deep for him, he took a hoe and he went out to his fields, and he went through the outer court where the elder girl sat smiling and twisting her bit of cloth through her fingers and smoothing it, and he muttered, 

"Well, that poor fool of mine brings me more comfort than all the others put together. 

And he went out to his land day after day for many days. 

Then the good land did again its healing work and the sun shone on him and healed him and the warm winds of summer wrapped him about with peace. And as if to cure him of the root of his cease- less thought of his own troubles, there came out of the south one day a small slight cloud. At first it hung on the horizon small and smooth as a mist, except it did not come hither and thither as clouds blown by the wind do, but it stood steady until it spread fanwise up into the air. 

The men of the village watched it and talked of it and fear hung over them, for what they feared was this, that locusts had come out of the south to devour what was planted in the fields. Wang Lung stood there also, and he watched, and they gazed and at last a wind blew something to their feet, and one stooped hastily and picked it up and it was a dead locust, dead and lighter than the living hosts behind. 

Then Wang Lung forgot everything that troubled him. Women and sons and uncle, he forgot them all, and he rushed among the frightened villagers, and he shouted at them. 

Now for our good land we will fight these enemies from the skies!" (332 words)

…

But still the locusts spread up into the air and on over the land. 

Then Wang Lung called his own laborers and Ching stood silent and ready beside him and there were others of the younger farmers, and with their own hands these set fire to certain fields and they burned the good wheat that stood almost ripe for cutting and they dug wide moats and ran water into them from the wells, and they worked without sleeping. O-lan brought them food and the women brought their men food, and the men ate standing and in the field, gulping it down as beasts do, as they worked night and day. 

Then the sky grew black and the air was filled with the deep still roar of many wings beating against each other, and upon the land the locusts fell, flying over this field and leaving it whole, and falling upon that field, and eating it as bare as winter. And men sighed and said, "So Heaven wills," but Wang Lung was furious and he beat the locusts and trampled on them and his men failed them with fails and the locusts fell into the fires that were kindled and they floated dead upon the waters of the moats that were dug. And many millions of them died, but to those that were left it was nothing. 

Nevertheless, for all his fighting Wang Lung had this as his reward: the best of his fields were spared and when the cloud moved on and they could rest themselves, there was still wheat that he could reap and his young rice beds were spared and he was content. (275 words)

…

Nevertheless, the locusts did this for him. For seven days he thought of nothing but his land, and he was healed of his troubles and his fears, and he said to himself calmly,

“Well, every man has his troubles and I must make shift to live with mine as I can, and my uncle is older than I and he will die, and three years must pass as they can with my son and I shall not kill myself."

And he reaped his wheat and the rains came and the young green rice was set into the flooded fields and again it was summer. (Total 711 words)

Arundhaty – Ch 32: The internecine hatreds within the family destroy Wang Lung’s domestic peace

But there was no peace. It seemed as though the coming of the soldiers had been like the coming of a swarm of wild bees that leave behind them stings wherever they can. The wife of the eldest son and the wife of the second son who had been courteous enough to each other until they lived in one court together, now had learned to hate each other with a great hatred. It was born in a hundred small quarrels, the quarrels of women whose children must live and play together and fight each other like cats and dogs. Each mother few to the defense of her child, and cuffed the other's children heartily but spared her own, and her own had always the right in any quarrel, and so the two women were hostile. 

And then on that day when the cousin had commended the country wife and laughed at the city wife, that had passed which could not be forgiven. The wife of the eldest son lifted her head haughtily when she passed her sister-in-law and she said aloud one day to her husband as she passed, 

“It is a heavy thing to have a woman bold and ill-bred in the family, so that a man may call her red meat and she laugh in his face." 

And the second son's wife did not wait but she answered back loudly, 

"Now my sister-in-law is jealous because a man called her only a piece of cold fish!" 

And so the two fell to angry looks and hatred, although the elder, being proud of her correctness, would deal only in silent scorn, careful to ignore the other's very presence. But when her children would go out of their own court she called out, 

"I would have you stay away from ill-bred children!" This she called out in the presence of her sister-in-law who stood within sight in the next court, and that one would call out to her own children, 

“Do not play with snakes or you will be bitten!" 

So the two women hated each other increasingly, and the thing was the more bitter because the two brothers did not love each other well, … Moreover it was a shame to the elder brother that the second brother knew all the money their father had and what was spent and the money passed through his hands, so that although Wang Lung received and dispensed all the moneys from his lands, still the second brother knew what it was and the elder did not, but must go and ask his father for this and that like a child. …

Wang Lung had also his own secret trouble with Lotus since the day when he had protected her slave from the son of his uncle. Ever since that day the young maid had been in disfavor with Lotus, and although the girl waited on her silently and slavishly, and stood by her side all day filling her pipe and fetching this and that, and rising in the night at her complaint that she was sleepless and rubbing her legs and her body to soothe her, still Lotus was not satisfied. 

And she was jealous of the maid and she sent her from the room when Wang Lung came in and she accused Wang Lung that he looked at the maid. Now Wang Lung had not thought of the girl except as a poor small child who was frightened and he cared as he might care for his poor fool and no more. But when Lotus accused him he took thought to look and he saw it was true that the girl was very pretty and pale as a pear blossom, and seeing this, something stirred in his old blood that had been quiet these ten years and more. (637 words)

Priya – Ch 33: Wang Lung takes Pear Blossom as the love of his old age

And so the day passed very long and lonely for him. 

When night came he was still alone and he sat in his court alone and there was not one in all his house to whom he could go as friend. And the night air was thick and soft and hot with the smell of the flowers of the cassia tree. 

Then as he sat there in the darkness under the tree one passed beside where he was sitting near the gate of his court where the tree stood, and he looked quickly and it was Pear Blossom. 

"Pear Blossom!" he called, and his voice came in a whisper. 

She stopped suddenly, her head bent in listening. 

Then he called again and his voice would scarcely come from his throat, 

"Come here to me!" 

Then hearing him she crept timidly through the gate and stood before him and he could scarcely see her standing there in the black- ness, but he could feel her there and he put out his hand and laid hold of her little coat and he said, half choking, 

"Child–! There he stopped with the word. He said to himself that he was an old man and it was a disgraceful thing for a man with grandsons and granddaughters nearer to this child's age than he was, and he fingered her little coat. 

Then she, waiting, caught from him the heat of his blood and she bent over and slipped, like a flower crumpling upon its stalk, to the ground, and she clasped his feet and lay there. And he said slowly, 

"Child – I am an old man – a very old man- And she said, and her voice came out of the darkness like the very breath of the cassia tree, 

"I like old men – I like old men--they are so kind –“ 

He said again, tenderly, stooping to her a little, 

"A little maid like you should have a tall straight youth--a little maid like you!" And in his heart he added, "Like my son-" but aloud he could not say it, because he might put the thought into her mind, and he could not bear it. 

But she said, 

"Young men are not kind – they are only fierce." 

And hearing her small childish voice quavering up from about his feet his heart welled up in a great wave of love for this maid, and he took her and raised her gently, and them he led her into his own courts. 

When it was done, this love of his age astonished him more than any of his lusts before, for with all his love for Pear Blossom he did not seize upon her as he had seized upon the others whom he had known. 

No, he held her gently and he was satisfied to feel her light youth against his heavy old flesh, and he was satisfed merely with the sight of her in the day and with the touch of her fluttering coat against his hand and with the quiet resting of her body near him in the night. And he wondered at the love of old age, which is so fond and so easily satisfied. 

As for her, she was a passionless maid and she clung to him as to a father, and to him she was indeed more than half child and scarcely woman. 

Now the thing that Wang Lung had done did not quickly come out, for he said nothing at all, and why should he, being master in his own house? (593 words)

Zakia – Ch 34: Wang Lung’s sons make a false promise never to sell the land their father had acquired

“No–no–we will never sell the land –"

"It is the end of a family – when they begin to sell the land," he said brokenly. "Out of the land we came and into it we must go – and if you will hold your land you can live – no one can rob you of land –“

And the old man let his scanty tears dry upon his cheeks and they made salty stains there. And he stooped and took up a handful of the soil and he held it and he muttered,

"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 eldest 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. (170 words)