I’m reading The Good Earth for the first time. I’m about 50 pages from the end and I’ve totally lost interest in it.
I was very interested at the start. The writing is so different. I’ve never read anything else by Buck, so I don’t know if it’s her style or if this is the way that she’s choosing to present these characters as a way of presenting Chinese characters to a Western audience.
I got really involved with the story. I imagined a real, deep love between Wang Lung and O-Lan. An unspoken love as neither was the type to say such things. But a real connection based on partnership.
>!So you can imagine my surprise when Lotus was introduced. And it turns out that love was only in my imagination. At least on Wang Lung’s part. (We’re never told from O-Lan’s point of view.) Not only did he not feel any tenderness for her, but he was repulsed by this woman who’d given him everything and to whom he owed so much.!<
>!Even when O-Lan was dying and I thought he’d have an awakening to the fact that he truly loved her, the only thing he had an awakening to was how useful she was around the house. I feel like he stayed with her out of guilt, that everything he did was from guilt and obligation, not love and caring.!<
It was at that point that I really began to lose interest in the book.
Wang Lung has gone from a character that I had a lot of sympathy for to one that I have little to no sympathy for.
He’s a bad father. Disconnected from his children. He barely knows them.
He’s violent. He just goes around beating people who can’t fight back.
He’s obsessed with the land. Wanting more and more.
>!It became clear that the direction and ending of the book is going to be that Wang Lung gets hold of everything the House of Hwang once had. Their lands, their house and their position in the community. And his family is going to turn into them. He’s broken the connection between his sons and the land. They don’t love it. And his sons don’t love Wang Lung and he doesn’t love them. All they have is a cultural sense of duty to one another. I don’t have to read the last 50 pages to know that the sons won’t care about keeping the land. The writing’s on the wall.!<
>!Wang Lung had a chance at real happiness. But he was so insecure about being a farmer that enough was never enough for him!<
Also I find it hard to really care about the end of the book because of the time frame it’s set in. It ends when Japan is about to invade China and World War II is going to change everything. It doesn’t matter what the sons do because their world is about to be upended.
>!As a side note, I’m pretty appalled about the conditions that Lotus lived in. She was being generously treated by having to live her entire life in three rooms and an outdoor area with a 3 foot square fish pond. She had no entertainment — no musicians, no actors, no storytellers. She literally had only three people to talk with and nothing to do all day, day after day, month after month, year after year. No wonder she got fat.!<
by Dana07620