The Good Earth

Transcript

INTRO

Here is a reflection on reading from Carl Sagan:

"One glance at a book and you hear the voice of another person, perhaps someone dead for 1,000 years. To read is to voyage through time."

Welcome to the WE SHOULD ALL BE BOOKWORMS podcast. I’m your host, Mykella, a budding novelist and a bonafide bookworm. In this episode I will introduce you to The Good Earth by Pearl S. Buck.

The Good Earth is a Pulitzer Prize winning novel about a Chinese family’s rags to riches journey. The quest starts when Wang Lung, a hardworking peasant farmer who prizes “the land” above all else, gets lucky in marriage. He marries O-Lan, a survivor of slavery. She devotes her considerable ambition, resilience, and ingenuity to Wang Lung’s passion for the land. Together they prosper, though their fortunes rise and fall as famine, war, and betrayal threaten their partnership. This is a universally appealing story about marriage and family and the age-old struggle to survive from the fruit of the land.

So join me today as we preview this story. It doesn’t matter if you’ve just finished reading your 33rd book so far this year, or you can’t even remember the last time you read a book — this podcast is for you. In fact, if we can change the world one book at a time, then we should all be bookworms.

I love how even though the main character of The Good Earth, Wang Lung, isn’t the most likable guy, I still wanted him to win. From beginning to end, Wang Lung struggles to be a good person. We see him wrestling with selfishness and greed and lust and pride as he tries to do right by himself, his family and his legacy within a certain culture and time. And when he slips, we’re disappointed in him. But we also empathize with his failings, because his vices are universal. We see the same flaws in ourselves.

I also admire how The Good Earth portrays women. The women in this book don’t have it easy and they have to deal with slavery, foot-binding, prostitution, and betrayal. But these are things that happen to them. These things don’t define them and they remain instrumental in directing the course of their own lives as much as they can. They are ambitious and determined. The only thing they ask of the men is to hold up their end of the bargain and keep their promises. 

Which leads me to my absolute favorite thing about The Good Earth, and that is how it shows that even in a patriarchal culture, the fortunes of men are dependent on the character and the quality of the women in their lives. Men who choose silly women regret it. Men who choose smart women are rewarded - even when they don’t recognize why.

Now, I’m a big fan of #ownvoices and celebrating authentic stories. So I know that it can seem problematic to recommend a book about traditional Chinese life written by a white woman in the 1930s. But Pearl S. Buck is describing a people that she knew and lived among for many years.

Yes, she is still an outsider. But that outsider status helps us as the reader because she spotlights many details about Chinese life that Chinese writers of her time took for granted and didn’t include in their stories, because they weren’t writing for an audience like us. So even though it’s not written by a Chinese person, The Good Earth still gives an empathetic, well-informed snapshot of traditional Chinese culture in the early 20th century. 

But that’s all it is. A snapshot. Do not read this book and think, well, now I know what it was like to live in China. No. No. No. No. No. You’ll have to do much more reading to get a better idea of Chinese culture - which is incredibly diverse. My hope is that this popular, easy to read book will start you on your journey to reading and learning more.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

"I am an American by birth and by ancestry", but "my earliest knowledge of story, of how to tell and write stories, came to me in China.” This is what Pearl S. Buck said in her speech to the 1938 Nobel Prize committee when they were considering her body of work. She went on to win the Nobel Prize for Literature, becoming only the 4th woman and the first American woman to do so. 

Buck was born to christian missionaries and when she was 3 months old her family moved her to China, where she spent most of the first 40 years of her life. Chinese was her first language, she had a traditional Chinese tutor and learned Chinese reading, writing, and confucian principles. And she spent a lot of time with other Chinese children, playing in their homes. 

She married an agricultural missionary in China and they spent a few years living in the poorer, rural areas where she learned a lot about the struggles of farming families. She observed these families closely, and it’s this experience that informed much of her work on The Good Earth. 

Buck was also a feminist and civil rights activist. She was active in both movements through the mid-60s and even served as a trustee for Howard University for 20 years.

Her humanitarian sensibilities are evident in The Good Earth, which is a sympathetic depiction of the challenges any family might face as they fight to escape poverty.

PLOT SUMMARY

Now here’s a quick summary of the plot:

The main character is Wang Lung, a poor peasant farmer barely making ends meet on his small plot of land. But everything starts to change for him when he gets married. He marries a woman named O-Lan, who was enslaved in one of the wealthy houses. She is humble and submissive. But she’s also strong, smart, and resourceful and Wang Lung’s fortunes change for the better because of her contributions to the household. For instance:

• She cleans up the house and makes it more comfortable for Wang Lung and his old father to live in.
• She is a fantastic cook who can make satisfying meals on a budget
• Her strong body enables her to work in the fields for many hours by her husband’s side, and she works right up until the delivery of almost all of her children which she handles on her own, with no help from a midwife. 
• Oh - and then immediately after giving birth (not the next week or the next day - immediately - like within a few hours, she straps the baby to her chest, picks up her hoe, and goes back to the fields to keep working! Even self absorbed Wang Lung notices that she is an uncommon woman when she does this.
• But most importantly, along the way, she offers great advice to Wang Lung -  truly becoming a partner to him in the elevating of their families fortunes.

So even though the story is told through the viewpoint of Wang Lung and focuses on all events as they affect Wang Lung, it’s really O-Lan who becomes the character you root for the most. Because you see how vital she is to Wang Lung’s success.

They face many challenges through the years, including famine, warfare, and familial strife. But they make it. By the end of the book they are one of the wealthiest families in their village.

FAVORITE STORY MOMENT

“If I had anything to sell I would sell it and go back to the land.” This is what Wang Lung says in one of my favorite story moments.

He’s frustrated and feeling angry and helpless. There was a famine due to drought and since nothing was growing and they were on the brink of starvation, they had to leave their land and come live in the city where he could find work. But it’s back breaking labor and between his work and O-Lan’s begging on the streets, they still barely earn enough to keep themselves fed, let alone enough to save up for the return trip home. Wang Lung is at his wits end and doesn’t know what to do.

O-Lan makes a shocking suggestion. We don’t have anything to sell except the girl, she says. 

She’s referring to their daughter. She is the only thing of value they have. Which is weird, right? She is of so little value in the family structure that she’s dispensable… but of such great value in the economic structure that there’s a strong market for the sale of her flesh. But that’s another topic entirely.

Now, how could O-Lan suggest this? 

Because O-Lan is a matter of fact, practical person who is devoted to her husband. However, she really doesn’t want to do this thing and is hoping he will refuse. She says she’d rather kill her daughter than sell her as a slave because of how hard it is to be a slave. She was sold into slavery by her parents when they needed money. And she barely survived it. But O-Lan is the type of woman who will do anything for her husband.

This is really dark. I know. But here’s why I love this scene. 

“Never would I,” says Wang Lung.  He says he would never sell his child even if  it meant spending the rest of his life in this purgatory.

But then he starts thinking about it some more and he’s really, really tempted. It’s an immediate solution to his problem! He glances at his daughter playing with her grandfather and remembers how she smiled at him when she was an infant in his arms. And this memory of his baby girl’s smile shoos away the temptation in his heart.

At the end of the book when Wang Lung is a wealthy old man, he can barely stand to be around his sons. They’re always arguing or asking him for money. But he finds tremendous peace and comfort in the company of his daughter, whom he still adores.

This is why I think the Good Earth is a feminist novel. Not because women demand a revolution - they don’t. Patriarchy isn’t even really described or commented on - it just is. And the main character is a man fighting his way out of poverty. But all of the people closest to him are women. His wife, his concubine, his daughter, his favorite servant. Women are the primary influencers of his biggest decisions and the source of almost all of his comforts, from a peaceful home to good food. Without these women, he wouldn’t be a wealthy man, he wouldn’t be a father, and he wouldn’t have companionship in his old age. And so even though the women in this book go through some pretty terrible things and are barely recognized by Wang Lung  and others for how important they are - these women are the true heroes of The Good Earth. They are the source of the land’s abundance.

OUTRO

The Good Earth will take the average reader about 7 hours to read. That means if you read for at least 30 minutes a day, you should be able to finish this book in about 14 days, which is exactly 2 weeks.