Good Earth, The - Pearl S. Buck [157]
The single, brief scene in which a missionary appears only underscores the irrelevance of Christianity to Wang Lung and his family. During their sojourn in Nanking, Wang Lung is confronted by a tall, thin, foreign man who hands him a piece of paper. The man has blue eyes, a hairy face and hands, and "a great nose projecting beyond his cheeks like a prow beyond the sides of a ship." The paper he hands Wang Lung includes characters that he cannot read and the picture of a nearly naked dead man hanging on a cross.
Wang Lung is baled and understandably horrified. Later that night, he discusses the bizarre picture with his father, who offers the only plausible explanation: " 'Surely this was a very evil man to be thus hung.' " This is a logical inference for someone who had never before seen a representation of the Crucifixion and could interpret the image only from his own experience. The episode demonstrates Pearl's effort to remain consistently faithful to the novel's Chinese perspective: here is the strange, inscrutable Occident, as it might appear to a skeptical, worldly Asian. A sacred Western icon is merely a gruesome scene of execution.
O-lan, for her part, has a typically utilitarian response to the question. Unlike Wang Lung and his father, she has no interest in the meaning of the characters or symbols. She is a poor woman, who knows that the heavy paper itself is rare and valuable; she uses it to line the soles of a pair of shoes.[10] The Christian message is put to a good purpose.
A few critics were less enthusiastic about Buck's novel. Younghill Kang, an expatriate Korean writer and editor, complained that The Good Earth falsified the reality of Chinese gender relations, first by involving the main characters in a "Western-style" romantic plot, and then by depicting a landlord's sexual use of his slaves, which Kang claimed---erroneously---could not happen.[11] Kiang Kang-hu, in the Chinese Christian Student, insisted that Wang Lung and O-lan were merely "peculiar characters from a special section of the interior," not typical Chinese.[12] Kiang added, with more confidence than accuracy, that Buck's mistaken impressions about the Chinese were based on her inability to read Chinese literature in the original. If she had been able to read the classic Chinese texts, he declared, she would have presented a different China, instead of relying on the testimony of "coolies" and "amahs" for her information.
Buck published a lively rebuttal to Kung Kang-hu in The New York Times Book Review. Charitably, she didn't mention her fluency in the Chinese language. She did argue that Kiang was one of those who "want the Chinese people represented by the little handful of her intellectuals, and they want the vast, rich, somber, joyous Chinese life represented solely by literature that is ancient and classic." But this, she argued, would leave out the mass of common people, men and women she sympathetically called "the proletariat."
In effect, Buck regarded herself as the victim of a class-based attack. The elitist attitude of Kiang and people like him made her genuinely angry. She said in this essay, and often elsewhere, that China was doomed until its academics and intellectuals learned to honor the country's peasants and its urban poor, rather than despising them. Among China's warring factions, only the Communists seemed to understand this.
The Good Earth received a number of admiring reviews in Chinese journals.[13] Nonetheless, Buck's conflict with the Chinese literati became a staple of gossip in both the native and foreign communities in China in the early 1930s. The young journalist Helen Foster, arriving in China for the first time in 1931, was greeted by the debate over Pearl Buck. In Fosters opinion, Pearl was unpopular with the scholars and rich gentry because she told truths about poverty and inequality that they found embarrassing. Foster later recalled her conversations with Chinese scholars and students about Buck's novel:
I was surprised to find how the young intellectuals hated it.... They