A
Summary of The Good Earth
The story begins on the day of Wang Lung's wedding. Wang Lung is a poor
young 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. After Wang Lung brings his quiet but 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 up and proudly takes him to the House 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 better his position by buying some land from
the House of Hwang. Although they must work harder with more land, Wang
Lung and O-lan continue to produce good harvests; they also produce a second
son and a daughter.
But soon Wang Lung encounters difficulties. His selfish and unprincipled
uncle is jealous, and demands a portion of Wang Lung's new wealth, while
Wang Lung, obsessed with his desire to acquire more land, spends all the
family savings; a drought causes a poor harvest and the family suffers
from lack of food and from their envious, starving neighbors' looting of
the little dried beans and corn they have left. O-lan has to strangle their
fourth child as soon as she is born because otherwise she would die of
starvation. Desperately poor and hungry, Wang Lung sells his furniture
for a bit of silver to take his family 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 grandfather,
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 force them to carry equipment for their
armies. Yet Wang Lung's overriding concern is to get back to his beloved
land. He gets his chance when the enemy invades the city and the rich people
flee; Wang Lung and O-lan join the throng of poor people who loot the nearby
rich man's house and get enough gold and jewels to enable them to return
north. They repair their house and plough the fields, having bought seeds,
an ox, new furniture and farm tools, and finally more land from the bankrupt
House of Hwang.
There follow seven years of prosperity, during which the sons grow and
begin school; a third son is born with a twin sister, and the harvest is
so plentiful that Wang Lung hires laborers and his loyal neighbor, Ching,
as a steward. When a flood causes a general famine in the seventh year,
Wang Lung is rich enough not to worry about survival yet, while his lands
are under water, he becomes restless in his idleness. Bored with his plain
and coarse wife, he ventures into a tea shop in town operated by a man
from the south where the rich and idle spend their time drinking, gambling,
and visiting prostitutes. There he begins an affair with Lotus, a delicately
beautiful but manipulatively demanding 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 adjacent
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's uncle.
But discord arises immediately. O-lan is deeply hurt and angry, which
makes Wang Lung defensively guilty and cold with her; there are conflicts
between 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 old
father protests the decadence of catering to a "harlot" in the
house. Finally, Lotus is intolerant of Wang Lung's children, especially
his favorite daughter who had become mentally disabled due to malnutrition
during the famine. As a result, Wang Lung's passion for Lotus eventually
cools, and when the flood recedes and he returns to his farming work, he
is no longer obsessed with love.
In the last 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 flood,
a severe winter freeze, and a scourge of locusts. Yet on the whole Wang
Lung continues to prosper. His wealth, however, also 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, so he arranges a marriage for him. Moreover, Wang Lung's
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 because the uncle is a leader of a band
of robbers, from which Wang Lung's prosperous household is protected for
as long as he provides for the uncle. He eventually 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's 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 only after her first son's marriage is
consummated, so she can expect a grandson. Wang Lung's father dies immediately
after O-lan, and the faithful steward Ching is buried next. But 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 also married and have children.
As Wang Lung ages, he rents out his farm land to tenants. His eldest son
persuades him to buy the old estate of the House of Hwang in town, both
as a means of moving out from the place where the disgraceful uncle and
his wife live, and as a symbol of Wang Lung's elevated social position.
Wang Lung is gratified that now he can take the place of the Old Master
of Hwang who once intimidated him so much. But 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's malicious son causes more trouble
when he brings his military regiment to camp for six weeks in Wang Lung's
elegant house. And Wang Lung, long tired of the aging Lotus, finds some
comfort in taking the young slave Pear Blossom as his concubine.
Finally, Wang Lung returns to the earthen house of his land to die. Material
prosperity has brought him superficial social satisfaction, but only his
land can provide peace and security. Even his final days are troubled,
when he overhears his two older sons planning to sell the land as soon
as he dies.
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