While living in China, Buck had the opportunity to observe all the things around her. She learned how to speak Chinese, and since she had started living there when she was still a baby, she learned to understand the Chinese people's culture, traditions, and thoughts.
So that their daughter would also have a formal understanding of her adopted country, Pearl's parents hired a Confucian scholar named Mr. Kung to tutor her in classics and philosophy. His lessons on the teachings of Confucius proved an intriguing contrast to the Presbyterian religion practiced in Pearl's home and helped to develop her lifelong tolerance for varying points of view. (Rompalske 86)
Since she learned the same types of things the Chinese people there did, these allowed her to understand how they think. These experiences also helped Buck to shape her characters in her book because she could put into words what they were thinking. The actions of the characters are then easier to justify.
As a child, Buck grew up wandering through the streets of Chinkiang crowded with merchants, scholars, messengers, beggars, and children. She listened to the things people talked about, and watched the barbers, herbal doctors, food vendors, and slaves as they went on with their daily lives. By seeing the beggars beg, Buck was able to make O-Lan act as a real beggar in her story. “The woman began to call out and to shake her bowl at every passerby. She had thrust the girl into her naked bosom, and the child slept and its head bobbed this way and that as she moved, running hither and thither with her bowl outstretched before her” (Buck 101).
Buck spent many years in a barren rural village called Nanhsuchou. Thousands of poor farmers lived there and she became familiar with their habits. Years later, the village provided the setting for her book (Conn 17). Buck was able to see the change of weather from spring, to summer, to fall, and to winter year after year. “Mrs. Buck has lived in China so long that she really knows the landscape, and she never once, in all the volumes of her work, forgets it and goes into raptures as over an alien scene” (Bentley 792). Living there helped her to accurately describe the landscape during the different months in the story. She was also able to see when the farmers would go out to plant and harvest their crops. When there were droughts, she watched the farmers constantly keep a look out for rain. “With this dry wind the wheat seed that lay in the ground could not sprout and Wang Lung waited anxiously for the rains” (Buck 43).
From afar, she saw the people celebrate holidays and festivals such as Chinese New Year. By observing them, she learned the types of things they did to celebrate the holiday.
Wang Lung went into the town to the candle maker's shop and he bought squares of red paper on which were brushed in gilt ink the letter for happiness and some with the letter for riches, and these squares he pasted upon his farm utensils to bring him luck in the New Year. (Buck 46)
At baby's one-month birthday, there was a celebration because many babies did not live that long after being born. To celebrate, there was a large feast and eggs dyed red would be given out. Red is supposed to bring good luck. In the novel, Wang Lung has a huge feast in celebration of his son's one-month birthday. “They had had a feast of noodles, which mean long life, on his month birthday, when he was a full moon of age, and Wang Lung had invited those who came to his wedding feast and to each he had given a round ten of the red eggs he had boiled and dyed” (Buck 42). She also witnessed the rituals performed for the death of a relative. Certain garments had to be worn, and when trailing behind the coffin, the relatives would line up in order of their rank within the family. “Then on the appointed day after the priests had finished the night of chanting, Wang Lung dressed himself in a robe of white sackcloth” (Buck 271). White is the color of death and mourning. Buck describes accurately the things that took place at a funeral. During a famine, many starve to death and sometimes babies are killed to lessen the amount of mouths to feed. “He had scarcely put the burden down before a famished, wolfish dog hovered almost at once behind him, so famished that although he took up a small stone and threw it and his its lean flank with a thud, the animal would not stir away more than a few feet” (Buck 83). Soon after Wang Lung left the baby behind, it was eaten by a dog. This particular incident was probably inspired by an actual incident that happened to Buck. Occasionally, she found shallow, unmarked graves and one time, she chased away a dog that had dug the body up and she reburied the tiny corpse (Conn 13).
Her nanny who helped to raise her told her many Chinese folktales. In her book, Buck mentions how in ancient stories, the women are the heroines and O-Lan is truly a heroine in this story. O-Lan may have been quiet and obedient towards Wang Lung, but it was she who ruled their home in a domestic way. Also through her nanny, Pearl learned more about bound feet and the pain it causes, making the person with bound feet more dependant on others and seem more delicate. In the novel, O-Lan did not have bound feet because she used to be a hardworking slave, and if they had been bound, she would not have been able to help Wang Lung out in the fields. Later on in the novel, Wang Lung gets another wife named Lotus who had bound feet. She is the opposite of O-Lan because she is very lazy and sits around in her room all day eating fine cuisines. A wife with bound feet was a status symbol for a man because it showed that he was wealthy enough to have a wife that did not have to work.
Pearl took to spending more time with her affectionate nurse, Wang Amah, a colorful old woman who hobbled about on bound feet and perfected the art of incubating chicken eggs in her undergarments. Wang Amah took the curious girl to the local theater and exposed her to the daily life of the Chinese peasant. (Rompalske 87)
Her nanny often took Buck along with her to the market, and she got to see all sorts of different types of items, such as food and clothes that were sold in the shops. When Wang Lung took his starving family to the city he hoped to earn some money and get food. “...with meat and vegetables in the markets, with fish swimming in the tubs in the fish markets, surely it was not possible for a man and his children to starve” (Buck 100).
Marrying an agricultural economist helped Buck shape her characters because she then had a better understanding of China's agriculture, and how crops were planted, reaped, and sold. “On May 30, 1917, she married John Lossing Buck, an earnest farmer from Poughkeepsie, New York, whose dream was to introduce modern farming techniques to the Chinese” (Rompalske 87). In The Good Earth, Wang Lung used an ox to help him plow through the soil.
Buck's first child Carol was retarded and this influenced what she wrote about the character Wang Lung's first daughter. Carol needed constant care and Buck was unfortunately unable to provide that for her. “Her complete familiarity with her material allows her to present her characters as very human and very real as people who engage our sympathies” (Walton 534). She made Wang Lung love his first daughter unconditionally, and he took the time to always make sure she was warm, clean, happy, and fed. He wished to have her poisoned after his own death because he was afraid no one would take care of her. One day, Wang Lung says to his third wife Pear Blossom, “Now here is a gate of safety for her in this packet, and when I die, after I am dead, you are to mix it in her rice and let her eat it, that she may follow me where I am. And so shall I be at ease” (Buck 352). A retarded daughter is a life-long burden because she does not have a chance at marrying and can not contribute economically to the family. “Conn argues that the emotional stresses that stayed with Buck throughout her life centered around Carol's disability. The subsequent birth of a retarded daughter, Carol, and the worries for her child's future made life only harder for her” (Mathrani 221). It is likely that Buck could not bring herself to portray Wang Lung's feelings in a manner consistent with his cultural and social circumstances because her own child was mentally handicapped.
Buck's father was a missionary, and he tried to spread his religious beliefs. In the book, there are missionaries, and they pass out flyers with Christ on them, but the people do not understand the meaning of it. “But Wang Lung was fearful of the picture and pondered as to why a foreigner had given it to him, whether or not some brother of this foreigner's had not been so treated and the other brethren seeking revenge” (Buck 126). When Buck's father tried to get the Chinese people to convert to his religion, they probably felt the way Wang Lung did. Buck also saw the way her father treated her mother. “A child of evangelical Protestant missionaries in China, she witnessed her father's accepted oppression of her mother via the Chinese caste system that trapped girls and women” (Kelly 186). O-Lan was a slave, and fortunately for her, she married Wang Lung. If that marriage had not happened, she would have probably been a slave for the rest of her life. She was also lucky enough to get a husband who did not beat her and treat her terribly. “[Buck] came to abhor the Chinese culture's mistreatment of women – the basis of many of her early stories and essays – but she rebelled as strongly against her own culture's failure to live up to it's claims of gender equality” (Shaffer 163). At that time, girls had no control over their futures and were married off at an early age or sold off as a slave.
During the Boxer Uprising, Chinese nationalists wanted to get rid of Westerners in China and a number of people ended up getting killed. The Boxers believed foreigners were in China to destroy traditional Chinese culture. Even other Chinese people were killed by soldiers. In Buck's story, there is an incident somewhat similar to this. There is a revolution going on, and all the people must obey the soldiers passing through their town. Wang Lung's second son said to him “There are soldiers everywhere in the house – even in the houses of the poor...and he protested and they ran a knife through him...” (Buck 325). Many of the Chinese people grew to hate the government and lived in fear of the soldiers.
Many critics feel Buck has portrayed the lives of the Chinese very well. “Buck, winner of the Pulitzer Prize, opens a door onto China in the days of the last emperor and reflect ordinary Chinese life by way of the experiences of farmer Wang Lung and his Wife O-Lan, in this timeless novel” (Hooper 1442). Since Buck was able to see what the average farming family had to go through, she easily wrote about them through Wang Lung and O-Lan's hardships. One critic feels that “[h]er novels about China offered Western readers their first accurate picture of everyday life in an almost unknown culture” (Wales 13). Living for forty years in China influenced Buck's writings in her novel. Based on her own life experiences, she included incidents in the story that are similar to things that either happened to her or saw. Her accurate observations of the things she saw in China are reflected in her novel by the wonderfully descriptive scenes. She also illustrates the actions of the people very well making them seem lifelike because she it is based on what she saw.
Works Cited
Bentley, Phyllis. "The Art of Pearl S. Buck." English Journal Dec. 1935: 791-800. Rpt. in Contemporary Literary Criticism. Vol 11. Detroit, Michigan: Gale Research CO., 1973. p 69.
Buck, Pearl S. The Good Earth. Ed. Peter Conn. New York: Pocket Books, 1994.
Conn, Peter J. Pearl S. Buck: A Cultural Biography. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996.
Hooper, Brad. “The Good Earth.” The Booklist 1 Apr. 2000, Vol. 96 Issue 15: 1442.
Kelly, Robert. “Pearl S. Buck: A Cultural Biography.” Library Journal 1 Sept. 1996, Vol. 121 Issue 14: 186.
Mathrani, Mala. “East-West Encounters and the Making of Feminists.” Journal of Women's History Autumn. 1997, Vol. 9 Issue 3: 215-226.
Rompalske, Dorothy. “Pearl S. Buck.” Biography Jun. 1997, Vol. 1 Issue 6: 86-89.
Shaffer, Robert. “Women and International Relations.” Journal of Women's History Autumn. 1999, Vol. 11 Issue 3: 151-175.
Wales, Ruth Johnstone. “Pearl S. Buck Shines in a New Biography.” Christian Science Monitor 9 Jun. 1997, Vol. 8 9 Issue 135: 13.
Walton, Eda Lou. “The Good Earth by Pearl S. Buck.” The Nation 13 May 1931, Vol. 133 Issue 11: 534.