I read "The Good Earth" for the second time while we lived in a remote area of the Zambian bush. I had read it in highschool and found it more boring than Silas Marner. I had by then lived among peasants scratching the soil for a meager living in several countries and it meant more to me on the second reading, especially having just finished Jan Myrdahl's Report from a Chinese Village written in the 50's. No doubt, Buck's Good Earth is a classic work and deserves to be read.

I have always known that I needed to read this book. I believe it is on every list of books to read before you die. It is a beautifully written book and presents a picture of rural China before Mao. I found the first part to be extremely depressing; wondering how and why anyone would choose to continue living under the severe poverty and homeless faced by Wang Lung.

The story begins when Wang buys a slave to be his wife, carries through the birth of their children and their extreme struggle with poverty and the elements to maintain their life and ultimately become wealthy. The book has themes that resonate far beyond China: the connection to the land, the failure to appreciate the struggles of other people, problems with greedy and lecherous relations, etc.
I recommend this book for the story it tells and the manner in which it is told. Ultimately, it is not a story of success in any way other than the accumulation of wealth. Human connections are for the most part, non-existent. It is a picture of the way life is all too often lived.

‘[T]urning this earth of theirs over and over to the sun, this earth which formed their home and fed their bodies and made their gods.’

Humans owe everything to the Earth. It has given us shelter, food, water, informed the creation of our societies and even today our lives are affected by the cycles of the planet. The Good Earth, the Pulitzer Prize winning book from Nobel Prize winning author Pearl S. Buck is an epic family saga that explores the power of the land and humankinds connection to it. Following Wang Lung from his youth on towards his twilight years, we see how ‘It was true that all their lives depended upon the earth.’ As the land provides—or takes away—family fortunes are made and lost as Buck explores class conflict through a fictionalized time of turmoil and revolt in an agrarian China of the early 1900s. A deeply symbolic and lovely work, The Good Earth reminds us of the frailties of life in an ever-changing world and Buck’s fusion of family (and her look at love and sacrifice) and farmland makes for a wonderful critique of society and reverence for the natural world.

Published to great acclaim in 1931, The Good Earth was adapted into a stage play in 1932 and then again as a film in 1937, Buck was then awarded the Nobel Prize in 1938 securing the story in the canon of “classic” literature. The novel feels familial with works like Knut Hamsun’s Growth of the Soil—another multi-generational story of tending the land amidst a society rapidly changing and progressing—or the Dust Bowl drama’s of John Steinbeck for the commentaries on class struggles of the poor and working class and the way his novel share Buck’s statement that ‘ the test of a civilization is the way that it cares for its helpless members.’ While born in West Virginia, Pearl S. Buck moved to China at four month old, growing up and working as a missionary there until 1935. There is always an interesting discourse over this novel as a look at China due to this, though I always feel a work of fiction such as this is more about the emotional and universal insights on humanity than necessarily a historical learning lesson. Juhea Kim, author of Beasts of as Little Land, discusses this rather effectively in an article for Lit Hub, discussion how historical fiction about people of color (especially those written by women of color, though Buck is white) have mistaken expectations from readers who think they should ‘ come away from a historical novel feeling as though they’ve learned something.’ She disagrees, adding ‘the focus is on how their message relates to our lives today or the timeless human experience, not whether they can be instructive about history,’ which I feel is a good idea to keep in mind when reading this book (scroll to Celeste Ng’s review of this book for more commentary on this and her dislike of the book).

‘They must all starve if the plants starve.’

As the novel follows the cycle of seasons and crops, it too follows the cycle of Wang Lung’s life. The Good Earth begins with Wang Lung as a poor farmer working the land, a land that he will later own and grow rich from renting the land to farmers now beneath him. He has children and the story occasionally follows their lives and follies, yet Wang Lung remains the patriarchal center of both the family and novel. And through it all the land is ever present, binding the lives of the rich and poor, controlling their lives like a god.

‘The earth lay rich and dark, and fell apart lightly under the points of their hoes.... 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.’

The House of Hwang is symbolic of the struggle for wealth and the struggle to hold on to it without falling into destruction or despair. ‘To those at the great house it means nothing, this handful of earth,’ he says in his youth, ‘but to me it means how much!’ Throughout the novel, his connection to the land remains a constant and an indicator into his consciousness as well. When the land yields fruitful crops, he is pleased and thanks the gods. When it does not, or is stricken with drought or flood, he is irritable and ignores the gods (such as when moving south he ignores the statues). In between we see him constantly petitioning the gods with prayer, gods that might as well be the land itself.

‘The rich are always afraid.’

I quite enjoyed the moments of the people rising up and storming the rich house, and we witness how fortunes can fail as Wang Lung begins to buy up the land from the House of Hwang. The people he had to approach to buy a wife and felt fearful of suddenly owe him and this change of fortune swings the book into a new dynamic. Despite his class, we always see Wang Lung put great effort into playing a respectable role befitting his social class. Yet with wealth comes problems and we see him struggle, even morally such as ridding himself of his Uncle by getting him addicted to opium so they lay about stoned and out of his way. Which, damn dude. But family struggles also begin to fracture his life, and while he still enjoys working the land and retaining his connection to it, his sons do not. Thus they do not respect the land, and this detachment becomes felt as a sort of spiritual detachment. ‘It is the end of a family- when they begin to sell their land,’ we are told. Much as the Hwang family dynasty came to a close as they sold to Wang Lung, we learn his own sons plan to sell his land and feel little for it without having that connection to the soil. ‘Out of the land we came and into we must go - and if you will hold your land you can live- no one can rob you of land.’ As always, it is connection to the land that gives life, and the growing absence of his land parallels his aging and impending death.

Though it is important to speak about O-Lan, Wang Lung’s wife as she is equally critical to the novel even though she is thrown off from center focus. O-lan is always making sacrifices for the family, and often is the savior of the family. She makes hard decisions and works just as hard, returning to tend the land moments after giving birth or even killing a daughter she knows they cannot feed (interestingly both scenes seem familiar to similar ones in Hamsun’s Growth of the Soil, though that one spends much more time on consequences from the death of the child). Through O-lan we also see a very patriarchal society that is crushing towards women. While she is strong and resourceful, she is most noted for being ugly and has been purchased as a bride. She later sells her daughter into slavery so they can return to their land, which is pretty horrific. Her only prized possession are the small pearls she obtains during the revolt, juxtaposing the beauty of the pearls with Wang Lung’s perception of her as ugly, and his taking them and giving them to Lotus is symbolic of his thoughtlessness for his wife as well as the disintegration of their relationship. Throughout the novel women are viewed as either property or merely sexual satisfaction, and subjected to great hardships they are expected to bear in silence to uphold the family and the legacy of the men.

‘The kind earth waited without haste until he came to it.’

Understandably a classic, The Good Earth is a moving family saga that captures the struggles of family and our connection with the land. It also represents the passage of time and change, the world always moving forward like the seasons as generations grow and wither like the crops. The language isn't the most poetic but it will still certainly sweep you along and the fact that this book feels just as relevant and lovely today is a true testament to its lasting power.

3.5/5

This is a quietly told story of a Chinese farmer's life in the pre-revolution days. My feeling is that I liked it, but did not love it (the rating would be 3.4, rounded down).

It is a heartfelt account of life in the grassroots society of that era, with its own epoch-relevant values, superstitions, class distinction and sexist attitude, not any dissimilar to that depicted in other Chinese literary works relating to that era (Ba Jin's The Family, Autumn, Spring comes to mind). What sets this novel apart from those Chinese works is perhaps the absence of bitterness in the narrator's voice, which comes in a calm, surreal tone. Why could the author write in such a tone? It is because she was a foreign visitor living in China only for a temporary period of time. But as a story, it is superbly structured and told with credibly indigenous parlance.

Though born in West Virginia, Pearl Sydenstricker Buck (1892-1973) was raised in China, where both of her parents were Southern Presbyterian missionaries. She grew up speaking both Chinese and English, and spent most of her first 40 years in China, though she got her undergraduate and master's degrees in the U.S. Her first husband was also a Presbyterian missionary (they would subsequently divorce in 1935). For a number of years, she served as a missionary herself, mostly teaching English-language literature in a church-run college; but her own religious views, though definitely theistic, were not necessarily evangelically Christian. What forced her resignation as a missionary in 1933, however, was the furor over an article published in Harper's, in which she argued that the institutional mission system of that day fostered domination by foreign missionaries over the native Chinese church, which did a disservice to the latter. When she finally returned to the U.S. in 1934 (apparently because of the collapse of her marriage), she fully intended to return to China later; but was prevented, first by the Sino-Chinese War and World War II, and then by the refusal of the Red Chinese regime to let her back into the country, in retaliation for her outspoken opposition to Communist tyranny.

Buck's background shaped her voluminous fiction. The great majority of it is set in China and focuses, not on expatriate Westerners, but on native Chinese people, whom she learned from both her parents to respect and value as equals. The Good Earth was her second novel, and remains the best known of her works. I read it back around 1969, in a period of my reading life when I was consciously trying to read acknowledged classics in order to make myself into a cultured and “educated” person. Even though that project had a certain naivete to it, this particular read wasn't a bad choice; and I still remember it well enough to do it justice in a review. (And I do have a copy before me for reference!) It's still the only one of her novels I've read, but I've also read her short story (one of many!) “The Frill,” also set in China, and highly recommend it as a powerful indictment of Western racism and snobbery.

When I read the book, I assumed the chronological setting was roughly the author's present. At the time, though, I wasn't aware that it's actually the first book of a multi-generational trilogy. The novel itself also spans several decades of protagonist Wang Lung's life, from his marriage day as a young man to his old age. So we should probably view it as beginning at least in the time of Buck's childhood, if not somewhat before. (Of course, the lot of the peasantry and urban poor in China didn't particularly improve between, say, 1881 and 1931.) Basically, the plot is the story of Wang Lung. who starts out as a very small-scale landowner, and his family, in the course of various vicissitudes, which will take them from the country to the city and back again to the country, and through assorted challenges and dangers. (It's never a boring tale.) But, at least as I experienced and perceived the book, it's as much an introduction to an unfamiliar culture, a different worldview and way of life, as it is a story about specific individuals. I've sometimes said of Buck that she was multicultural before multiculturalism was a buzzword.

Precisely because her multiculturalism wasn't just a fashionable buzzword to be affected, but the result of real-life immersive encounter with another culture and people in it whom she cared about and genuinely understood (and wants us, the readers, to understand), it's much more the genuine article than what sometimes passes for it today. In particular, it's a warts-and-all view, not a rosy whitewash job. She depicts a society that's both very stratified, with grinding poverty on the lower end, and highly sexist and patriarchal, with practices like legalized slavery, arranged marriages, female infanticide, and concubinage, and one that devalues the handicapped. We're also given a good look at the ravages that opium addiction inflicts on a human being (though Buck doesn't bring out the role of the British as the instigators and promoters of the opium trade). Since Wang Lung is our viewpoint character, and there are no significant Westerners as characters here, we see all of these things through Chinese eyes that accept them as normal. This doesn't mean that Buck is trying to indoctrinate us with the attitude that this is all “just part of their culture,” and therefore perfectly fine for “those people.” On the contrary, Buck herself was a staunch advocate of gender equality and women's rights across cultures, an opponent of both abortion and infanticide, and a spokesperson for the worth and social value of the handicapped (her own first child was mentally handicapped, which gave her a lifelong sensitivity to the needs of the marginalized and disabled). Rather, I think what she's doing with this novel is enabling us to see and understand how people raised and socialized into this sort of culture see it, not so that we can see it with the same blinkered view, but so that we can recognize that they don't embrace these attitudes and practices because they're malevolent or perverse, and so that, if we have the opportunity for dialogue and interaction with them, we can go into it with an intelligent understanding of where they're coming from.

Being a Christian reader, I'm apt to pick up on religious content in a novel; and religion was also important to Buck, so it's a topic she seriously addresses here. There are scenes here that drive home, very forcefully, a gut-level understanding of the fundamental difference in religious attitudes between traditional Chinese culture and the Judeo-Christian-influenced mindset of most Westerners in 1931 (or of Western theists even today). Religious Westerners are accustomed to thinking of their physical and material blessings as gifts from God, that we should express thanks for. But when Wang Lung and his wife, walking along outdoors at a time when they're prospering, thoughtlessly talk to each other out loud about how pleased they are with their situation, the realization suddenly hits that the heavenly powers might hear them; so, lest they be smitten down in retaliation for being happy, they immediately fall to bemoaning their supposed afflictions and privations, so that any listening spirits will think that they're already appropriately bad off and can be left alone. For them, the ruling spirits of this world are not benevolent and sympathetic to human flourishing, but more apt to be hostile. Their hopes and agenda for their own well-being are their own. The function of religion is not to discern the good and helpful will of a well-intentioned Creator, and to enable people to line up with it, but rather to cajole or bribe reluctant supernatural powers to line up for a moment with human will and do something to further it. “Gods” aren't worshiped for their moral excellence, but propitiated for whatever humans can get out of them. (And if that turns out to be nothing, humans don't owe them anything, except maybe the deference that fear of their vindictive power might suggest. Another instructive scene here is when our protagonist,in a time of drought-induced famine that prayers totally fail to relieve, goes to the local shrine and surreptitiously spits in the face of the clay idol.)

Christian witness, however, doesn't offer an effective alternative in this novel. Our characters' only encounter with it comes when a missionary thrusts a Chinese-language tract with a picture of the crucified Christ into Wang Lung's hand. Since nobody in the family can read, he concludes that the foreigners are looking for the perpetrators of this outrage against one of their own. (The tract winds up sewn into a shoe to bolster the thin sole.) As an object lesson in how NOT to do constructive mission work, this vignette speaks volumes.

Although Buck was the first American woman to win the Nobel Prize for Literature, and won the Pulitzer Prize for this novel, in general the modern critical community and U.S. reading public hasn't paid her the attention her merits deserve. (In American Literature classes in high school and college, for instance, I don't think she was ever mentioned, and I certainly wasn't exposed to any of her work; I'd heard of this book elsewhere, and sought it out on my own.) This isn't necessarily a cheery, feel-good read; it can be grim and depressing in places. But I'd say it's well worthwhile for serious readers –and indeed, in today's ever-shrinking world, perhaps even more so now than when it was first written.

The livelong interest in Asian culture manifests on each page of this unique novel.

Living what one writes
Some authors have the ability to absorb the mentality of cultures they live in and are fascinated by to create works that are simply impossible to copy because they stand unique in their style, language and deep, hidden messages, references and innuendos. Similar to Arthur Goldens' work Memoirs of a Geisha, Buck´s work integrates key elements of Asian mentality, history, and the authentic life of a hard-working farmer and is close to a real historic description, a great alternative to a history book.

Culture forming behaviour
If the setting would be in another culture, the whole behavior of many of the roles of the key characters might the different and the story could develop in a completely different direction. Let´s imagine an author would have lived together with a tribe or studied indigene populations for his whole life or had an interest in an advanced ancient civilization a written a novel about it. There could be more monuments of human history like this one written by historians going the Follett way.

No alternatives
It might be difficult to impossible for an author who has no lifelong interest, ten thousands of hours of thinking and reflecting about the culture and the love to finetune a book until total perfection, to create something like this. And to a certain extent this is great too, because in this way works like this will be very difficult to produce in inflationary, mainstream amounts.

Tropes show how literature is conceived and which mixture of elements makes works and genres unique:
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.ph...

This was my third read of this classic work. I first read it in high school, and I was in awe of the story, the characters, the author and everything about The Good Earth. I knew I had never encountered anything like it before. It was not a novel which was enjoyable to read because of the overwhelming amount of human suffering which weighed me down as a young reader. By the time I returned to it 2004, I was a little more familiar with humanity's inhumanity and better able to deal with the heavy subject matter.

This time I was finally able to appreciate the individual characters, their personalities, motives, strengths and weaknesses, as well as the novel’s purpose.

Unlike many readers I don’t love or hate this book because it is a novel about China and her people. Perhaps it is a true reflection and perhaps it isn’t. I wasn’t there and neither were most of the people reading it today, even modern historians well-versed in Chinese history of that particular era. Ms. Buck was. In the back of my copy of the book are a number of critical responses to the book which the author answered point-by-point to my satisfaction. For that alone, I recommend this particular edition of the book.

My observation on The Good Earth is that it immediately brought to mind other books about lower class people from other times and places and in that respect, rang true. When Wang Lung’s family traveled south in response to the famine, I was reminded of Steinbecks’ Joad family in The Grapes of Wrath moving to California in search of a better life, which of course they did not find. Some of the struggles faced by Wang and O-Lan reminded me of those faced by Rukmani and Nathan, the married couple in Nectar in a Sieve. And there were more I could mention.

Whatever you think about what The Good Earth says about China, it speaks to the universal condition of the poor struggling in countries everywhere, throughout history, which is the all-important truth of this novel. So, while I don’t particularly enjoy reading stories like this, I do recognize its importance and have to give it 5+ stars.

Thank you, Ms. Buck!

G9 LL: I am a Thai-Chinese. Chinese culture has always part of my family because my grandfather was the one who came from China to Thailand. When I read the book, this book showed accurate Chinese culture and how people used to live like in China in my opinion. But on the other hand, the book is very difficult to understand and difficult to read. And it portraits very stereotypical thinking of China. This might portrait China in the wrong way for other cultures to see. Which could cause confusion and how other cultures really view Chinese culture.

G9 LL
It tells the touching story of early 20th century of China and the relationships between a Chinese farmer and his relatives. The humble Wang Lung glorifies in the land he buys, and pursues a dream as it nurtures him and his family. Nevertheless, lords of Hwang House are beyond Wang Lung's property which makes his inner acquisitiveness to grow. But eventually his excessive pride and his self-confidence leads him to a downfall.

A wonderful book. I read this when I was younger and didn't like it. But I loved it this time around.

A moving, engrossing tale of a farmer in China. Written by the child of US missionaries, you can really feel the authenticism. I was even brought to tears at points.

It is hard to hear girls referred to as slaves, but I did love the book.

G9 LL
The book was published by Pearl S. Buck in 1931. Later the book won the Pultzer's prize. Buck won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1938. The Good Earth had a large affect towards Buck's Nobel Prize.

The book shows the truth in China's past. The author lived in China for the most part of her life. She observed Chinese people's daily lives and wrote the book about it. This book shows the culture in Chinese society back in the 20th century.

This is a story about a Chinese farmer. Who dedicated his life to his land. Pearl S. Buck described in detail about his life. The perspective in this book is very interesting and the language used in this book is different from other books.

This is one of the books you should read! :)

This was a wonderful book that I will never forget, well, of course, it has been many years since I have read it, and I have forgotten most, except for the woman in the book giving birth out in the field where she was working and continued to work afterwards. Someday I need to read it again and also check out some of her other books, which I have very old copies of, but they may be too dusty to read.