The Good Earth by Pearl S Buck is a great classic that tells the story of a Chinese peasant by the name of Wang Lung who lived in the early 1900s. I read it for the first time in China many years ago. This time I read it on tapes. There are eight of them, each taking one hour to read.

As you read, you cannot help but wonder how an American writer got to know China, its people, particularly its peasants, so intimately. If we consider her personal background, however, that shouldn’t come as a surprise. Her father was a missionary who lived in China for many years, and Pearl was born and brought up in China. She grew up bilingual.

The Good Earth is pretty simple in plot. It centers on the life of Wang Lung from a young peasant all the way to his old age, when he was a land owner and the patriarch of a big family. From his life, however, we can visualize a rural China in the early 1900s. The feudalistic Qing Dynasty had not been overturned for long, and many women still had bound feet – but not Wang’s wife, who had to work as a slave girl – and men like Wang Lung still wore long pigtails. The land they farmed was ravaged alternately by floods and droughts, which were made worse by incessant wars between the warlords. Soldiers were just as bad as bandits, who looted towns and villages wherever they went.

In spite of all that, a farmer of Wang Lung’s caliber was able to rise in economic status through back-breaking labor, begging in times of a famine, and sheer luck. It breaks our hearts to see Wang Lung, his old father, his wife and children all flock to a big city, probably Nanjing to beg for a living. (And that reminds me of my own life experience. Born in a town in Wuxi, Jiangsu Province, which has always been known as a land flowing with fish and rice, I saw when I was a little boy, many beggars roaming the streets. They came mostly from northern Jiangsu in late winter and early spring, when the crop was still in the blade and the old stock was consumed .（青黄不接）On the telephone posts, one could see signs such as “恻隐之心，人皆有之。(Everyone should be compassionate.)” )

In good years, when there was neither famine nor war, Wang’s hard work would be rewarded with bumper harvests and he would be able to buy land – good land – that was dear to the heart of every farmer. Inevitably, the reader will be impressed by the chapter where a summer drought struck leaving nothing growing in the fields. However, Wang and his wife sold everything they had possessed except their land before they left home for begging in Nanjing. Wang got a job as a rickshaw driver while all the others in his family literally howled for alms. When spring came, the family returned to their land and started farming again. Farmers in poverty-stricken Anhui and northern Jiangsu were simply used to doing that.

Thus the Wang labored on and on against all odds till they became the richest in their village. Instead of working the land, Wang Lung hired hands to do it. He even bought part of a very big house that had belonged to the richest man in a nearby town.

Wang Lung had a strong desire for peace, peace in mind and peace in his home. But it didn’t come. With both money and leisure, he developed a lust for sex. At the beginning he visited a prostitute in town and later he married a girl prostitute. But when there were two wives and children, and when disasters could hit anytime, how could he find peace in mind and peace at home? His sons grew up. Two were sent to school – something many rich Chinese farmers did in the hope of bringing up a generation that would do better than themselves.

Wang Lung’s father died of old age and his wife of disease. Wang himself became weak, very weak indeed, as he approached 70. He made a tour of the land where his father and wife had been buried and where he would be buried, too. His two “scholar” sons, who were now married with many sons and daughters of their own, were with him. Wang Lung was happy and satisfied. His sons, however, decided to sell the land once their father died. Wang heard their discussion, and he was disturbed.

The Chinese peasant represented by Wang Lung is honest, work hard, and has a tenacity that makes it possible for him to ensure all manner of hardships. The Chinese today owe a lot to the farmer. The peasants make China, or does China make the peasants? Probably both are right partially. At any rate, 90% Chinese are peasants, and without the peasants, China wouldn’t be what it is today. We see in Wang Lung the Confucian values that dominated China for thousands of years. His benevolence, his kind-heartedness, his humility, his readiness to make concessions, his respect for the elderly and the educated,^[1] are all core ideas taught by Confucius. On the other hand, the Chinese peasant is easily satisfied with the status quo and limited in his vision. He is happy as long as there is enough for him to survive and his family is well cared for.^[2] He is thus conservative, not seeking improvement all the time. An average Chinese peasant doesn’t see far, not even beyond his family or village.

“Painting the peasant is a serious thing,” said the Dutch painter Vincent Van Gough（梵高）. Pearl S. Buck’s novel, in describing a Chinese peasant, presents us with a unique picture of the Chinese peasant in the early 1900s. She did the painting seriously, and it was a success, so much so that she won a Nobel Prize for literature for the novel.

My wife Zhenzhen used to read far more than I do today. She told me that Pearl S. Buck had won the Nobel Prize because she was anti-Communist. Additionally, she said most Nobel prizes for literature were awarded for political reasons. That might be true, but in The Good Earth there is not a mention of the Communist Party of China, which was founded in 1921. If S. Pearl Buck won a Nobel Prize for political reasons, she developed an anti-Communist attitude probably after the novel was written, not before it.