Did Wang Lung Love O Lan Again
- Introduction
- About Pearl S. Buck
- A Summary of The Good World
- Discussion Questions
Introduction
When her 2nd novel, The Good Earth, was published in 1931, Pearl Southward. Buck (1892-1993) became famous throughout the earth for her moving story of the joys and tragedies of the Chinese peasant farmer Wang Lung and his family. The novel was a all-time seller in the United States, and it was presently translated into more than than xxx foreign languages; information technology has appeared in Chinese lonely in at least seven different translations. The Good Earth was made into a Broadway play and a motion picture. For this book, Pearl Buck received the Pulitzer Prize in 1932 and the William Dean Howells Medal for Distinguished Fiction in 1935. Her international reputation was established when she was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1938, primarily in recognition of her masterpiece novel, The Good Earth, and 2 biographies of her parents, The Exile and Fighting Affections, both published in 1936.
Though information technology may seem problematic to choose a book written by an American, rather than a work of accurate Chinese literature, to introduce American students to Chinese community, there are several reasons for using The Practiced Globe. Beginning, it is popular and many students read it anyway, so a critical give-and-take of it is of import. Second, Chinese writers in the twentieth century have been primarily concerned with Communist china's political fate and their works are often more didactic than realistic. Pearl Buck, on the other hand, was mainly committed to describing the Chinese people she knew and to presenting her American audience with the details of Chinese life, customs and attitudes. Pearl Buck's standpoint is finally that of an outsider who is particularly sensitive to aspects of Chinese life that are unlike from what Westerners are accustomed to. Therefore, she takes pains to record many details that a Chinese author might have for granted. The Skilful Globe gives an authentic and well-informed depiction of traditional Chinese civilisation in the early twentieth century.
About Pearl Southward. Cadet
The girl of Absalom and Caroline Sydenstricker, Pearl Buck was born on June 26, 1892, in Hillsboro, W Virginia, while her parents were on go out from their missionary duties in China. But when she was just a few months old, her parents returned to Mainland china with Buck, and she lived in Mainland china until she was seventeen years old. Buck felt that she belonged to both cultures, American and Chinese. She always preferred Chinese food, and her beginning language was Chinese. However, the first language she learned to write was English, and in the mornings her mother tutored her in American subjects while her male parent read to her from the Bible at dark and on Sundays. Still in the afternoons Buck had a traditional Chinese tutor who taught her Chinese reading, writing, and Confucian principles. She also learned from her Chinese nurse, who told her Buddhist and Daoist stories and took Buck to worship in a local temple. Buck played with Chinese children and visited their homes.
When she was seventeen, Pearl Buck returned to the United States to attend Randolph-Macon Women'south College (1910-1914). Soon after her return to Mainland china, she married John Lossing Buck, an American agricultural specialist employed by the Presbyterian Mission Board to teach American farming methods to the Chinese. While living with her married man in North China for several years, Pearl got to know the subcontract families there and carefully observed their lives. She spent the next 10 years (1921-1931) living in Nanjing, a stay interrupted simply for a twelvemonth of study for the M.A. caste in English at Cornell while her girl, who suffered from developmental disabilities due to a genetic disorder, received American medical treatment. The Chinese in Nanjing were much more influenced by Western ideas than the Northern farmers, and Pearl Buck began to write both essays and fiction nearly the young people's conflicts between old and new ways. Her outset book, E Wind: Westward Wind, published in 1930, describes ii marriages: a traditional girl named Kwei-lan is unhappy in her arranged matrimony to a man who believes in modern Western practices; and Kwei-lan's blood brother defiantly marries an American daughter in spite of his parents' objections. The Good World was published in 1931, and in 1935 republished as a one-volume trilogy entitled House of Earth, with its sequels Sons (1933), and A House Divided (1935).
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A Summary of The Good Earth
The story begins on the day of Wang Lung'due south hymeneals. Wang Lung is a poor immature peasant who lives in an earthen brick house with his father, who has arranged for him to marry a slave girl named O-lan from the great family of the House of Hwang. Afterward Wang Lung brings his placidity just diligent new wife home, she works side by side with him in the fields until their first child is born. They are delighted with their son, and at the New Year O-lan dresses him upwards and proudly takes him to the Firm of Hwang to show him off. She discovers that due to ostentatious waste and decadence, the Hwang household has squandered their fortune and is now poor enough to be willing to sell off their land. Since Wang Lung, with the help of O-lan who continues to join him in the fields, has had a relatively good year, he determines to extend his prosperity and improve his position by buying some land from the House of Hwang. Although they must work harder with more state, Wang Lung and O-lan continue to produce good harvests; they also produce a second son and a girl.
But soon Wang Lung encounters difficulties. His selfish and unprincipled uncle is jealous, and demands a portion of Wang Lung'southward new wealth, while Wang Lung, obsessed with his want to learn more land, spends all the family unit savings; a drought causes a poor harvest and the family suffers from lack of food and from their envious, starving neighbors' annexation of the little dried beans and corn they have left. O-lan has to strangle their 4th child as before long as she is built-in because otherwise she would die of starvation. Desperately poor and hungry, Wang Lung sells his furniture for a bit of silver to have his family due south, though he refuses to sell his land. They ride a firewagon to a southern city, where they live in a makeshift hut on the street. They survive by O-lan, the granddaddy, and the children begging for food and Wang Lung pulling a jinrickshaw (or rickshaw) for the rich, or pulling wagonloads of cargo at night.
In the southern city, Wang Lung perceives the extraordinary wealth of westerners and Chinese aristocrats and capitalists, and he is interested in the revolutionaries' protests of the oppression of the poor. He watches soldiers seize innocent men and forcefulness them to carry equipment for their armies. Nonetheless Wang Lung's overriding concern is to go back to his dear state. He gets his take chances when the enemy invades the city and the rich people flee; Wang Lung and O-lan bring together the throng of poor people who loot the nearby rich man'south house and get enough gilded and jewels to enable them to return due north. They repair their firm and turn the fields, having bought seeds, an ox, new article of furniture and farm tools, and finally more country from the bankrupt House of Hwang.
In that location follow vii years of prosperity, during which the sons grow and begin schoolhouse; a third son is born with a twin sis, and the harvest is so plentiful that Wang Lung hires laborers and his loyal neighbor, Ching, every bit a steward. When a flood causes a full general famine in the seventh year, Wang Lung is rich enough not to worry nigh survival all the same, while his lands are under water, he becomes restless in his idleness. Bored with his apparently and fibroid wife, he ventures into a tea store in boondocks operated past a man from the south where the rich and idle spend their time drinking, gambling, and visiting prostitutes. There he begins an thing with Lotus, a delicately cute but manipulatively enervating courtesan whom he desires obsessively. Wang Lung is cruel to his wife and children and spends his fortune on Lotus, finally using up much of his savings to purchase her and build an next courtyard for her to live in as his second wife. Here Lotus indolently lies around in silks, eating expensive delicacies, and gossiping with the deceitful and opportunistic wife of Wang Lung'due south uncle.
Only discord arises immediately. O-lan is deeply injure and aroused, which makes Wang Lung defensively guilty and cold with her; in that location are conflicts betwixt O-lan and Lotus' maid Cuckoo who had mistreated O-lan when she was a concubine of the old master in the House of Hwang. Wang Lung's former father protests the decadence of catering to a "harlot" in the business firm. Finally, Lotus is intolerant of Wang Lung'south children, particularly his favorite daughter who had get mentally disabled due to malnutrition during the famine. Every bit a result, Wang Lung's passion for Lotus eventually cools, and when the overflowing recedes and he returns to his farming work, he is no longer obsessed with love.
In the concluding third of the book, Wang Lung experiences a succession of joys and sorrows in his family relationships and in his farming. Seasons of good harvests are punctuated by occasional bad years, due to a heavy alluvion, a severe winter freeze, and a scourge of locusts. All the same on the whole Wang Lung continues to prosper. His wealth, notwithstanding, too brings a series of discontents. His first son is idle and interested only in women; Wang Lung is furious when he finds the son has visited first a local prostitute and then his own Lotus, and then he arranges a marriage for him. Moreover, Wang Lung'southward good-for-nothing uncle, with his wife and son, force themselves on the family with their demands for money and their morally corrupting influence; Wang Lung must be kind to them considering the uncle is a leader of a band of robbers, from which Wang Lung's prosperous household is protected for every bit long equally he provides for the uncle. He somewhen renders the uncle and his wife harmless by making them addicted to opium.
Family affairs continue to have ups and downs. O-lan's sickness finally overpowers her, and Wang Lung'south tender solicitousness to her on her deathbed cannot fully compensate for the insults she received when Lotus moved into the house. She is content to die simply after her first son's spousal relationship is consummated, then she can expect a grandson. Wang Lung's father dies immediately later on O-lan, and the true-blue steward Ching is buried next. Only these losses are accompanied by new joys: the first son produces grandsons and granddaughters, and the second son — a successful grain merchant — and the second daughter are as well married and have children.
As Wang Lung ages, he rents out his farm land to tenants. His eldest son persuades him to purchase the sometime manor of the House of Hwang in town, both as a means of moving out from the place where the disgraceful uncle and his wife alive, and as a symbol of Wang Lung's elevated social position. Wang Lung is gratified that now he can accept the place of the Old Principal of Hwang who one time intimidated him then much. Just although Wang Lung is head of a three generation extended family who live in luxury with numerous servants, he cannot find peace. The two older brothers and their wives quarrel; the youngest son refuses to become a farmer as Wang Lung had intended and instead joins the army. The uncle'due south malicious son causes more trouble when he brings his military regiment to camp for half dozen weeks in Wang Lung's elegant house. And Wang Lung, long tired of the aging Lotus, finds some condolement in taking the immature slave Pear Blossom as his concubine.
Finally, Wang Lung returns to the earthen house of his land to dice. Textile prosperity has brought him superficial social satisfaction, simply simply his land can provide peace and security. Fifty-fifty his concluding days are troubled, when he overhears his ii older sons planning to sell the land as soon as he dies.
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Discussion Questions
- Which characters represent decadence in the novel? What makes them decadent? Tin can they be reformed? How?
- Who are the good characters in the novel? What is the source of their virtue? Can they exist corrupted? How?
- What does Wang Lung most believe in, and in what order would he rank these values: coin, the gods, the land, the family, social status, the government, etc. How would yous rank these values in your own life?
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Source: http://afe.easia.columbia.edu/special/china_1900_earth.htm
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