Good Earth, The - Pearl S. Buck [155]
He has grown up in an isolated, illiterate community, where patriarchal piety is the core value, and survival depends on an endless round of crushing physical labor. Because he is the son of a poor farmer, Wang Lung has few options in choosing a wife. To save money, his father has directed him to buy a slave from the House of Hwang, the leading family in the region. The woman, O-lan, is the novel's most memorable character. She accepts her status and fate without complaint, submerging whatever personal desires she might have in her tasks as wife, daughter-in-law, and mother. At the same time; she is portrayed as the story's moral center, a figure of courage, perseverance, and instinctive common sense.
Wang Lung's identity and motives are shaped above all by his relationship to the land. The property he farms has been in his family for generations; the soil is thin and unforgiving, but it represents the sole security he can imagine in an utterly untrustworthy universe. Victimized in turn by famine, flood, locusts, and bandits, he knows that only the land endures.[5]
Through the first section of the novel, Wang Lung prospers. His first two children are male, a particular sign of good fortune in Chinese society. Working every day from dawn to dusk, with O-lan beside him, Wang Lung accumulates more land through self-discipline and thrift. He buys some of his new acres from the decadent House of Hwang, which is squandering its wealth in pursuit of pleasures, including the purchase of expensive slave girls for the family's patriarch and opium for his first wife.
In the early pages of the novel, the only event that darkens Wang Lung's life is the birth of a daughter who proves to be retarded. This nameless child, who serves throughout the novel as a symbol of humanity's essential helplessness, is Pearl Buck's anguished, barely disguised tribute to her daughter Carol.
Wang Lung's prosperity is short-lived. In the naturalist environment of The Good Earth, as in the subsistence economy of rural China itself, effort and intentions are only vaguely linked to consequences. The novel's most powerful episode tells of a killing famine that slowly annihilates the entire countryside, reducing Wang Lung and his neighbors to poverty and near-starvation. When their food is exhausted, the people begin to eat the roots of plants, then their precious supply of seeds, then a kind of clay called "goddess of mercy earth," which provides the flavor of food but no nourishment.
As the universal hunger increases, men and women sink into brute appetites. There is talk of cannibalism in the village, which Wang Lung's father says he has seen before, during a famine when he was a boy. Women resort to the terrible practice of female infanticide. O-lan gives birth to a daughter, whom she immediately smothers. Wang Lung wraps the body in a piece of broken mat and lays it next to an old grave: "He had scarcely put the burden down before a famished, wolfish dog hovered almost at once behind him."[6] Wang Lung is too exhausted to drive the dog away; after he turns back to the house, the hungry animal will feed on the infant corpse. Again, Buck had been witness to such a scene when she was a child.
Defeated by the drought, Wang Lung and his family join the hordes of peasants fleeing south. They become part of an army of displaced refugees who seek shelter in Nanking, living in makeshift huts under the city's walls. O-lan teaches her children to beg, telling them where to stand and how to cry out to attract pity from the men and women who pass by. Wang Lung finds work pulling a ricksha, becoming a human beast of burden