Good Earth, The - Pearl S. Buck [148]
I know from a thousand experiences this attitude which is manifest again in this article by Professor Kiang. I have seen it manifest in cruel acts against the working man, in contempt for the honest, illiterate farmer, in a total neglect of the interests of the proletariat, so that no common people in the world have suffered more at the hands of their own civil, military and intellectual leaders than the Chinese people. The cleavages between the common people and the intellectuals in China is portentous, a gulf that seems impassable. I have lived with the common people, and for the past fifteen years I have lived among the intellectuals, and I know whereof I speak.
Professor Kiang himself exemplifies this attitude of misunderstanding of his people when he speaks so contemptuously of "coolies" and "amahs."
...The point that some of China's intellectuals cannot seem to grasp is that they ought to be proud of their common people, that the common people are China's strength and glory. The time is past now for thinking the West can be deceived into believing that China's people look like ancestral portraits.
...I write because it is my nature so to do, and I can write only what I know, and I know nothing but China, having always lived there. I have few friends of my own race, almost none intimate, and so I write about the people I do know. They are the people in China I love best to live among, the everyday people, who care nothing for official buttons.
(16) Presentation speech for the Howells Medal,
by Robert Grant, 1935,
printed in Pearl S. Buck: A Biography,
Theodore F. Harris,
The John Day Company, Inc., 1971
This story, made public in 1931 and awarded the Pulitzer Prize for that year, was recognized at once as a veracious picture of agricultural life in China worked out with distinguished skill and fidelity. In terms of human drama it gave the intelligent world a far better understanding of the common man in China than it ever had before. After reading of Wang Lung, the farmer's inveterate devotion to the fruitful soil, of his homely wife O-Lan's pathetic selflessness and of their social evolution, one closes the patient chronicle with the admiring thought: "This is life to the core, it must be true." Except that I abhor the term as used by some in these United States to distort art, it is a proletarian novel in the best sense. The author of The Good Earth takes life as it is instead of standing civilization upon its head and asking us to glorify its dregs or the emotions of those who have just begun to think.
SUGGESTIONS
FOR FURTHER READING
Buck, Pearl S. The Exile [biography of Carie Sydenstricker]. New York: John Day Company, 1936.
Buck, Pearl S. Fighting Angel [biography of Absalom Sydenstricker]. New York: John Day Company, 1936.
Buck, Pearl S. My Several Worlds: A Personal Record [memoirs]. New York: John Day Company, 1954.
Harris, Theodore F., in consultation with Pearl S. Buck. Pearl S. Buck: A Biography. Two volumes. New York: John Day Company, 1969-1971.
Lipscomb, Elizabeth, Frances E. Webb, and Peter Conn, eds. The Several Worlds of Pearl S. Buck: Essays Presented at a Centennial Symposium, Randolph-Macon Woman's College, March 26-28, 1992. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1994.
Rizzon, Beverly. Pearl S. Buck: The Final Chapter. Palm Springs, CA: ETC Publications, 1989.
Sherk, Warren. Pearl S. Buck: Good Earth Mother. Philomath, OR: Drift Creek Press, 1992.
Spencer, Cornelia [Grace Sydenstricker