Ah, I have heard of a Revolution, but I have been too busy in my life to attend to it. There was always the land.

 The Good Earth by Pearl S. Buck

Spoiler Alert: Plot Summary

The Good Earth chronicles the life of a peasant farmer, Wang Lung, in rural China in the early 1900s. When we first encounter him, he is living with his father on a small plot of land, and has just decided to 'take a wife'. He goes and gets a slave from the House of Hwang, a well-to-do house in town, and takes her home to be his wife. Her name is O-lan. We follow the pair through decades together, with Wang Lung continually focused on getting more land and doing what is necessary to feed his growing family. O-lan bears him several children, and after a stint in the south when they must beg for food for weeks, they get a windfall from looting during an uprising, and return to the north and buy more land. 

Wang Lung continues to expand his land and becomes a wealthy man, and his wealth attracts others to him, including an unwanted uncle and his family. Wang Lung can't get rid of the leeching uncle because it turns out he works with the Redbeards, a clan of looters/raiders, and has been secretly protecting Wang Lung, so Wang Lung decides to turn the uncle and his family onto opium use. Wang Lung becomes dissatisfied with O-lan and buys a concubine, Lotus, from a teahouse in town, and moves her into his estate. O-lan eventually falls ill and Wang Lung feels guilty, caring for her until she dies. His children are continually dissatisfied with what he provides them, and make plans to sell his land when he dies, much to his chagrin. The final scene ends with Wang Lung begging them not to sell the land, and them promising they won't, but smiling behind his back.

Spoiler Over: Continue Here

HOKAY, blobbists, it has been a minute. I will freely admit that in my attempt to make a more inclusive second list, I included more women, but I realize that this did not account for the issue of people writing stories that aren't their own, so I ended up with books like this, which were groundbreaking at the time, but also problematic. 

So. I read the book anyway, because I want to make relationships with all books that are my own, not founded on anyone else's opinion, and I will share some interesting reflections that I came across in the 'reader's excerpt' in the middle. 

In case it was not obvious to you/you did not know, Pearl S. Buck was a white lady from America, born to missionary parents, who was raised largely in China. Some people thought that it was super swell that she told the world all about agrarian life in China, but lots of other people were like, hey, lady - that's not your story! And also, that's not all of China! (This is a DRAMATIC oversimplification, I am aware.) Here are some interesting niblets I found in my copy that I found enlightening (and which I read, true to my form, after reading the book, as I didn't want to be influenced by context). 

From a NY Times Book Review, from Professor Kiang Kang-Hu, of China

Her portrait of China may be quite faithful from her own point of view, but she certainly paints China with a half-black and half-white face, and the official button is missing! Furthermore, she seems to enjoy more depicting certain peculiarities and even defects than presenting ordinary human figures, each in its proper proportions. She capitalizes such points, intensifies them, and sometimes 'dumps' too many and too much of their kind on one person, making that person almost impossible in real life. In this respect Mrs. Buck is more of a caricature cartoonist than a portrait painter. 

As long as a Western cannot himself or herself read Chinese texts and, as long as he or she depends chiefly on Chinese coolies and amahs as the source of information and as first-hand translators, there is little hope left for him or her to really understand and truly interpret China, even though he or she be born and live always in China.

 This felt really apt after reading the story - it was like reading Uncle Tom's Cabin, in that the characters had movement and feeling, but they were also caricatures of human beings, in a way that had deeply harmful potential for stereotyping and ongoing ignorance of a broader range of experience. I also want to point out that he uses some derogatory terms that aren't OK in today's parlance (coolie), so he's got some classism going on there as well. Here's Ms. Buck's response to this way of thinking, from a speech she gave: 

One of the isolating factors of my own experience has been that some of the morbidly sensitive modern Chinese, especially those abroad in foreign countries, have not liked it that I have written of the everyday life of their people. In China itself it was accepted without dislike except that it was a foreigner who wrote it. It was often said there, 'It is a book which a Chinese should have written.' Apparently with the simplest purpose in the world, namely, merely to write novels, surely a harmless necessity for a novelist, and without any sense of wrongdoing, I was able to infuriate an astonishingly large number of people. 

This statement was CRINGEWORTHY for me to read as a white woman in the 21st century. She's basically saying, hey, I was just writing a book, and I had totally good intentions, so that's enough, right? I can understand that living in China for so much of her life made it it a rife subject for her fiction writing, but my main concern (of many concerns, tbqh) is that she is nowhere to be found in this book, and it's a work of fiction that was clearly taken as nonfiction/a study or portrait of life in China. 

Now I don't think you have to base all fiction in yourself because that's nonsense, but I do feel like she sort of sat across the room from her experience in China and wrote about what she saw on the wall in the way that a photographer does, which means that she could only see things through her Westerner, missionary lens. It feels like Buck really failed to capture nuance, and when she should have drawn in pencil, she used a Sharpie. And of course, because of the way our society works and because of racism and imperialism and oppression, she got a Nobel prize for doing it. Because when you feed into the system of oppression you get a cookie. I also just feel like she missed this amazing opportunity to take a risk and really tackle her OWN subject material; what was her experience like straddling these worlds? How did she create her own identity? 

Anyway, I will now respond to the book itself, with the disclaimer that I am responding to the book as a work of fiction, not as a representation of Chinese life. I have also walked away from this experience realizing that I must add Chinese fiction authors to my list, as I am woefully lacking in this area. Understandably I will have to read translations, but there's still a WIDE world to discover.

It starts with a Proust quote...

So Ms. Buck started off with a Proust quote. And you all know I love me some Proust. But I just didn't really understand why it was there, or what it had to do with the novel At. All. It was a quote about the little phrase, for the Proustians out there, and I just couldn't for the life of me see what it had to do with Wang Lung's experience or life. If you're going to use a quote (and especially a Proust quote) make it connect!

Casual misogyny

Again, this is a response to the representation in the novel, not Chinese life writ large. 

It was hard to read this book, as generally in this narrative, woman = slave. O-lan is literally a slave who is sold to Wang Lung, and repeatedly throughout the book, women are property, not people, but they are also expected to be superhuman. I suppose in some way Ms. Buck was trying to highlight this contradiction, but it still ended up reading as cringeworthy to me.

Here are some examples of this misogyny/where woman also = badass. Note, I'm using 'the woman' for effect, not to de-humanize her.

• When the woman (O-lan) stops in the middle of her labor to prepare Wang Lung dinner.

• When the woman (O-lan) works beside her husband in the fields and also keeps the house and home, throughout the duration of her many pregnancies.

• When the woman (O-lan) kills their ox to feed their family because Wang Lung can't bring himself to do it.

• When the woman (O-lan) bears him child after child after child, despite being starving herself.

• When the woman (Wang Lung's daughter) does not weep, though she is in pain from foot binding:

'Now I have not heard you weep,' he said wondering. 

'No,' she said simply, 'and my mother said I was not to weep aloud because you are too kind and weak for pain and you might say to leave me as I am, and then my husband would not love me even as you do not love her.'

When O-lan has been sick for months and he doesn't see it

Poor O-lan, who is the REAL protagonist of this story, gets sick and increasingly sicker and basically no one (including Wang Lung) notices. Here's his response to himself:

'Well, and it is not my fault if I have not loved her as one loves a concubine, since men do not.' And to himself he said for comfort, 'I have not beat her and I have given her silver when she asked for it.'

Oh yes, Wang Lung, that's such a high bar. Not beating her and giving her silver when she asks. This is one of those Sharpie examples - how many foreigners walked away from this novel assuming that most Chinese peasants beat their wives? We're clearly meant to believe that Wang Lung is unique in this regard. 

The land

For Wang Lung, everything comes back to the land, and I have to say that this is a place that really touched me. I know that land ownership is complex given that much of the land currently occupied was taken from other peoples. There is, however, something so pure and affirming about having a plot of land to farm and create the food you need to survive. This part of Wang Lung was something I loved and connected with, but it felt like no amount of land was ever enough, which I guess was his fatal flaw. The book is full of lines like, "We must get back to the land." and "As long as there was the land!" 

When O-lan wants to keep the pearls

O-lan finds a stash of jewels in the looting post-uprising, and while she gives them over to Wang Lung, she asks if she can keep a pair of pearls. When he asks her what she would do with them, she says, simply: 

I could hold them in my hand sometimes. This line killed me. Wang Lung (being the asshole that he is) later takes the pearls from her to spend on his concubine, I think.

No food to eat vs. no food

This was a fascinating realization/heartbreaking understanding to reckon with that came up in this book. Wang Lung and his family have to leave their land and go south to beg for food at one point, because there is simply no food to be had in the country in the north. I guess I don't spend a lot of time thinking about the different ways one can be food insecure, and as a westerner in a very wealthy country who lives in a city, I'm used to the idea that food of some kind exists somewhere. But at several points, Wang Lung and his family are starving, or trying to make dirt or a few beans stretch for days of sustenance, because there is simply no other food to be had. Here's a line that I thought captured this eloquently:

Wang Lung and his family had come from a country where if men starve it is because there is no food, since the land cannot bear under a relentless heaven. Silver in the hand was worth little because it could buy nothing where nothing was. 

The place where a mother used to be

So like I said, O-lan was the real hero of this novel, and it unfortunately takes her being on her deathbed for the rest of the family to realize it. I was also reading 'Crying in H Mart' while I read this book, and it was a beautiful counterpoint, as it deals with a daughter's grief and attempting to fill the space her mother did. I know I would be LOST without my own mother, and I'm so grateful for all the times she has made comfort and continues to make comfort for me and my sisters. Love you, mom!

All through the long months of winter she lay dying and upon her bed, and for the first time Wang Lung and his children knew what she had been in the house, and how she had made comfort for them all and they had not known it.

Words New to Me

geomancer -  a method of divination that interprets markings on the ground or the patterns formed by tossed handfuls of soil, rocks, or sand.

Lines I Liked

• A small soft wind blew gently from the east, a wind mild and murmurous and full of rain. God, I loved this line. This was probably my favorite line in the whole book.

• Hunger makes thief of any man.

• Wang Lung was afraid of his happiness.

• Everything seemed not so good to him as it was before.

Well, blobbists, I'm off to read Vanity Fair, and add more Chinese authors to my ongoing list. Feel free to shoot me recommendations! 

I'll leave you with this tidbit, which is a note from Ms. Buck which I quite liked. 

I am always glad when any of my books can be put into an inexpensive edition, because I like to think that any people who might wish to read them can do so. Surely books ought to be within the reach of everybody.

On this, Pearl, we can agree! Books should be within the reach of everybody! Happy holidays blobbists, whatever you are celebrating, and I'll see you in the new year! Keep safe, and keep faith!