In this blog post, we’ll summarize key passages that show how ‘The Good Earth’ vividly depicts the lives of Chinese farmers and historical upheavals, focusing on the plot, main characters, and generational shifts.

Overview of the Work

There is likely no one who does not know of the famous American novelist Pearl S. Buck. Having made China her second home, she wrote many works set in that country.
‘The Good Earth’ is a grand masterpiece set against the backdrop of China’s majestic history, depicting the life of a farmer who is born of the earth, lives with the earth, and returns to the earth. Here, we summarize key passages following the plot.
Pearl S. Buck wrote ‘The Good Earth’ in 1931, during the prime of her life. The various experiences she witnessed, heard, and lived through during her long stay in China blossomed into the work ‘The Good Earth’. Ms. Buck stated that her sole intention in this work was to portray the kind-hearted Chinese peasant. However, while depicting the life of an ordinary farmer, she vividly portrays humanity’s attachment to life and obsession with wealth.

Plot Summary

The protagonist, Wang Long (王龍), is a typical Chinese farmer. He gradually bought up land with money he had earned through blood, sweat, and tears. After wandering through the southern regions due to a severe famine, he acquired a large amount of land through an unexpected windfall and became a major landowner. Thus, having once been desperately poor, he suddenly found himself on equal footing with the young master of the Huang family.
Meanwhile, his wife, A-lan (阿蘭), is portrayed as a woman of great patience who endures all hardships. Together with her husband Wang Long, she rises before sunrise, eats breakfast, goes out to the fields to plow the land, sow seeds, and irrigate the crops, and returns home when the sun sets. Aside from eating and sleeping, her life consists entirely of work. She senses spring in the scent of the soil and feels life in the crops sprouting from the earth. To those living today amid the dust and smog of the city, this peasant life may seem peaceful and even enviable.
However, the horror that ensues when nature turns its back on humanity is beyond imagination. Famine caused by severe droughts or floods drives people to the very limits of endurance. A mother strangling her newborn baby to death; people subsisting on thick, muddy water; and even those resorting to eating human flesh… It is a scene that feels like a glimpse into hell itself.
Weaving various anecdotes into her narrative, the author presents us with an epic saga of peasant life at a leisurely pace, much like a great river flowing through the heart of China. Behind this peasant life, the pulse of the rugged earth beats strongly. Underlying it all is the author’s firsthand experience, gained over some forty years of living in China and sharing the breath of the peasant masses.
In the final scene of ‘The Earth’, the protagonist Wang Long says, “We are born of the earth and return to it. As long as we have the land, we can survive……” However, Wang Lung’s sons discuss selling the land and dividing the proceeds among themselves from behind their father’s horse.
‘The Sons’, written as a sequel to ‘The Good Earth’, centers on Wang Lung’s third son—who left home to join the revolution—and depicts the lives of Wang Lung’s three sons, focusing on the changing generations.
Wang Lung’s third son becomes the leader he always wanted to be, commanding 8,000 revolutionary soldiers under his command, and roams the continent far and wide. The life of the Chinese revolutionary army, much like the peasant life depicted in ‘The Good Earth’, realistically portrays one aspect of modern Chinese history.
Part 3, “The Divided House,” centers on Wang Long’s grandchildren. Against the backdrop of a newly born China, this work densely portrays the clash between the old and new generations, as well as the conflict between father and son.
Through this trilogy, we can discover the truth of human existence—how people, while struggling within the great currents of history, always manage to break free from the old and embrace the new.

Main Characters

Wang Long (王龍) — A hardworking young man from a poor farming family. The protagonist of this book. As he came of age, he discussed marrying with his father, but since no young woman was willing to marry a desperately poor farmer, he paid a sum of money to Olan, a servant of the Huang family—a large landowner—and married her. The two work diligently together and gradually buy up land.
A-lan (阿蘭) — Wang Long’s wife. She was sold into slavery to the Huang family, a large landowning family, during a year of famine. Though not a beauty, she is a large and sturdy worker. She is a woman of few words and always rescues her husband from trouble.
Eldest Son — Wang Rong’s eldest son. A strapping young man, he wants to go to a city in the south to study, but his father opposes it. However, one day, when he is caught entering the room of Lianhua, Wang Rong’s concubine, his enraged father sends him off to a school in a southern city.
Second Son — Wang Lung’s second son. He initially studied, but Wang Lung made him stop his studies early and got him a job with a grain wholesaler so he could benefit when selling the grain produced on his father’s fields. Though small in stature, he is shrewd and has excellent business acumen, eventually becoming a major merchant.
Third Son — Wang Lung’s third son. He has fair skin and is handsome. Although his father wanted him to succeed him as a farmer, he defied his father’s wishes and became a soldier.
Wang Lung’s father — A simple farmer who chose a hardworking, sturdy young woman as a daughter-in-law rather than a beauty.
Uncle — Wang Lung’s father’s younger brother. He refuses to work himself and takes it for granted that he should extort money from Wang Lung and be supported by him. He becomes the deputy leader of a band of bandits.
Lianhua (蓮華)—A beautiful woman who, while working at a teahouse, received 100 liang of silver from Wang Long and became his concubine.
Tochuan—A vicious female slave from the Huang family, a large landowning family, who tormented Olan. She later works as Lianhua’s maid in Wang Long’s household.
Li Hua (梨花) — A female slave whom Wang Rong took pity on and bought during a year of famine. She grows up as beautiful as a pear blossom. She serves Wang Rong well while receiving his affection, even in his old age. After Wang Rong’s death, she faithfully attends to her master’s mentally disabled daughter.
Qin — A farmer who lives next door to Wang Rong. During the famine, incited by Wang Lung’s uncle, he joins the villagers in raiding Wang Lung’s house. He feels pangs of conscience for having slipped a handful of beans into his pocket.
The Helpful Man — When the Wang Lung family migrates to the southern region due to the famine, he shares a handful of red beans—their last remaining food—with the pregnant O-lan. Eventually, he helps Wang Lung, who has returned from the southern provinces, manage his land.

Commentary and Author Background

Pearl S. Buck became the first American woman to win the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1938. Several of her works, which vividly depict the lives of Chinese farmers, were considered for the award, and among them, ‘The Good Earth’ is regarded as her masterpiece.
Pearl S. Buck published ‘The Good Earth’ in 1931 at the age of 39, during the most productive period of her writing career. It caused a sensation immediately upon its release, becoming a bestseller in the United States and was translated into over 30 languages, establishing itself as a long-standing, globally beloved classic.
Although the novel captured the hearts of so many people, it also faced some criticism at the time of its publication. Chinese Americans were outraged that she had exposed the shortcomings of their homeland; some attacked the work, claiming that its depictions portrayed a China that was already a thing of the past or that the author had misrepresented Chinese customs and social conditions. In response, Ms. Yu did not remain silent but published a firm rebuttal in ‘The New York Times’. This incident actually served to enhance the work’s reputation.
A look at Ms. Pearl Buck’s upbringing reveals that such criticism and attacks were misguided. The author did not merely depict China as an outsider. The Chinese soil where her parents and four siblings were buried was, for her, literally the land of her flesh and blood.
Pearl S. Buck was born in 1892 in Hillsborough, West Virginia, but moved to China with her parents when she was about three or four months old. Her father, Andrew Saydenstucker, was a Protestant missionary who had devoted himself to evangelism in the remote regions of China since his youth, while her mother, Carey, had crossed the ocean from distant America to marry him at the age of 23.
They had four children, but tragically, three of them died in quick succession from illness. Deeply traumatized, her mother returned to her hometown in Virginia on her doctor’s advice to recuperate; she remained in the United States for about two years, leaving behind her daughter, who was born in 1892. Pearl Buck returned to China when she was just a few months old and grew up there for the next 18 years, lulled to sleep morning and night by the bells of Chinese Buddhist temples.

Childhood and Assimilation into Chinese Culture

She played with Chinese children and spoke fluent Chinese; young Pearl grew up letting her imagination run wild as she listened to the folktales her Chinese nanny told her every night.
Because she had grown up so completely immersed in Chinese life, it is said that when she went to study at a university in the United States at the age of 18, she actually felt anxious and lost, as if she were the one from China.
Her father was often away from home due to his missionary work, so her mother, Carrie, took charge of most of the children’s education. Carrie was a descendant of Dutch settlers who had immigrated to the United States before the Civil War, and she often told her children stories of their courageous ancestors, fostering their imaginations.
Her mother personally taught her to read and write and made sure she was exposed to British classics from an early age. Since Pearl reportedly began reading Dickens’ works at the age of seven, her mother’s education stimulated her intellectual curiosity and imagination, laying the foundation for her future career as a writer.

A Turbulent Era in China

However, life in China was not always peaceful. The more than 40 years the Pearl family spent in China coincided with turbulent periods such as the First Sino-Japanese War, the Boxer Rebellion, and the Xinhai Revolution.
It was a painful time of transition from the old China to the new, and as foreigners, the Pearl family also had to endure various hardships.
In particular, the Boxer Rebellion of 1900 left an indelible impression on the young Pearl.
At the time, the Pearl family was living in Zhenjiang on the banks of the Yangtze River. They were attacked simply for being foreigners, but managed to narrowly escape with their lives thanks to the quick thinking of her mother, Carrie, and their Chinese nanny. This experience likely instilled in the young Pearl, for the first time, a deep awareness of their status as outsiders.
It may have been these events that led her—while loving China’s culture and people—to see the reality of peasant life with the clear-eyed perspective of an outsider.

Study Abroad, Marriage, and a Return to China

In 1910, at the age of 18, Pearl traveled to the United States with her parents and enrolled at Randolph-Macon College in Virginia. After graduating, she taught psychology at her alma mater, but returned to China after four years due to her mother’s illness.
In 1917, she married John Rosing Buck, a professor at Nanjing University, and lived with her husband in a small town in North China for five years—a period when the Chinese Revolution was rapidly unfolding. From this remote area, Pearl quietly observed China’s struggles and transformations as it endured one arduous battle after another.
‘The Good Earth’ is a work set against the backdrop of this era. Readers of the novel will recall the words shouted by the protagonist Wang Lung’s third son to his father: “A war is breaking out—one I’ve never heard of before—a revolution is happening. And our land will be free.”
Afterward, Pearl moved to Nanjing, where she devoted herself to missionary work for the Presbyterian Church and taught English literature at Nanjing University.
In 1925, she returned to the United States with her husband, completed her studies at Cornell University and Yale University, and earned her degrees. She began her career as a writer in earnest with the publication of her debut novel, ‘East Wind, West Wind’, which she wrote on the ship journey home.

Writing Career and Major Works

‘The Good Earth’, published in 1931, caused a sensation; she completed the sequel, ‘Sons’, in 1932, followed by ‘The Divided House’ in 1935. These three works are commonly referred to as the “House of the Earth” trilogy and were widely acclaimed.
In 1933, she resigned from her position as a missionary and divorced John; in 1935, she remarried Richard Walsh, president of John Day Publishing, and continued her career as a writer in earnest. In 1936, she published ‘Portrait of My Mother’, a collection of memories of her mother, Carrie, which left a deep impression on readers.
Many of her subsequent works were also set in China, and she published a series of ambitious works, including ‘Other Gods’, ‘Homeland’, ‘People of God’, and ‘The Empress Dowager’.
She published more than 50 books, including essays, short stories, and children’s books, and devoted much of her energy to social work and the peace movement, such as founding “Welcome House,” a facility to help mixed-race children.

The Agony and Resolve of Motherhood

Behind this active literary and social life lay the profound anguish Pearl experienced as a mother. Her beloved daughter was born prematurely, and her intellectual development was permanently stunted.
The daughter, a lovely little girl born to John Rosing Buck, could not speak properly even by the age of three, and a specialist’s examination led to a diagnosis that “her intelligence would not exceed that of a four-year-old, and she would never be able to speak.” Pearl was devastated, but she did not remain stuck in her grief.
After consulting with experts to find the best way to ensure her daughter’s happiness, she concluded that placing her in a facility specialized in caring for such children would be the best course of action. Since such facilities were better established in the United States, she decided to leave China—where she had lived for many years and had grown deeply attached—and emigrate to the United States.
Pearl’s feelings toward her daughter are vividly expressed in her 1950 essay, “Mothers, Do Not Grieve.” Pearl’s love for children deeply moves the reader.
‘The Good Earth’ also depicts the anguish of Wang Lung, who has a daughter with intellectual disabilities. There is a passage where Wang Lung, worried about his daughter’s future after his death, hands medicine to his trusted friend Li Ho and asks him to send his daughter off peacefully when he dies; this may reflect Pearl’s own anguish as a mother.

The Depictions in ‘The Good Earth’ and the Significance of the Trilogy

Pearl states that in ‘The Good Earth’, she merely sought to portray the lives of kind-hearted Chinese farmers. However, in depicting the lives of ordinary farmers, human desires and the obsession with wealth are also laid bare in a harrowing way.
The protagonist, Wang Lung, gradually buys up land with money he has earned through blood, sweat, and tears, eventually coming to own land and houses rivaling those of the region’s most powerful families. His obsession with land comes across as deeply poignant.
His wife, O-ran, is portrayed as a woman of great patience who endures all hardships, but the glimpses of feminine desire and jealousy that occasionally surface make the reader’s heart skip a beat.
In their simple daily lives—rising at dawn to plow the fields, sow seeds, and water the crops, then returning home at sunset—the farmers feel the hope of life as they work the soil. While this way of life may seem peaceful to city dwellers, the harshness and cruelty of nature when it turns its back on them are beyond imagination.
Famine caused by drought and floods drives people to the brink of despair; scenes of mothers abandoning their newborns, rumors of cannibalism, and people mixing soil from the fields with water to drink in order to endure starvation are depicted in matter-of-fact prose, which paradoxically resonates all the more deeply.
By weaving together various episodes at a leisurely pace, Pearl created an epic saga of peasant life that flows like a great river across the Chinese landscape. Behind it, the pulsating heartbeat of China can be heard like the rumbling of the earth, and the weight of her experiences—gained from living in China for over 40 years—is conveyed with profound depth.
“Sons,” the sequel to “The Earth,” highlights generational shifts through the lives of Wang Long’s three sons, focusing on the third son who left home to join the revolution. The third son eventually becomes the leader of a revolutionary army commanding 8,000 soldiers, earning the title General Wang Hu and striking fear into the hearts of his enemies.
The sections depicting the lives of the revolutionary soldiers, much like the portrayal of farmers in ‘The Earth’, vividly convey a cross-section of modern Chinese history.
Part 3, “The Divided Family,” features Wang Lung’s grandsons as the protagonists, movingly depicting the conflicts between the old and new generations—and between fathers and sons—against the backdrop of a rapidly changing China.
Through this trilogy, readers can gain a clearer view of the grand currents of Chinese history and come to understand the truth about human beings who, within those currents, constantly break free from the old to embrace the new.