Contact with "The Good Earth"
Fifty-five years after reading Pearl Buck's THE GOOD EARTH, I have re-read it. I knew it had been very influential as the first encounter I ever had with China when I was just 13 or 14 years old.
I was prepared to be disappointed, but was not. The novel, which received a Pulitzer Prize and was the main factor in Buck's Nobel Prize for Literature, and as a sympathetic look at the traditional peasant/farmer, holds up very well. Buck, a daughter of missionaries who spent much of her first 40 years in China, knew what she was writing about. The other book I read at the time, Lin Yutang's IMPORTANCE OF LIVING, was a kind of anthology of Chinese lit, therefore the reflection of the lives and thoughts of China's elite and privileged class, the male literati or Mandarins as they are called in English. Buck's novel looks at the poor, uneducated and non-privileged class at the bottom of the social order, but whose back-breaking work was the material foundation that made the lives of that tiny elite possible. Even in the 1980s when I went to live in China for the first time, approximately 3/4ths of the population were farmers (a percentage which is now rapidly decreasing) whose lives were played out, as Buck's heroes in her novel, grappling with the hardships of drought and flood, often reduced to eating their seed corn/wheat/rice etc., then eating the bark off of trees, grass and even the earth itself, and sometimes starving to death. Some consider Buck's novel is too "romantic," but she documents all the disastrous possibilities just mentioned as well as the joys of working with the "good earth."
So it is surprising that the Chinese government, sometime during the Great Cultural Revolution period, condemned Buck's writing, although the very mark of Chinese (as opposed to Russian) Communism was the central role of peasant/farmers in the Revolution. Premier Zhou Enlai, it is said, prevented her from getting a visa that would have allowed her to accompany Nixon on his historic visit to China in 1972. Her reputation has gradually improved and in recent years there have been conferences held in China on her work.
Much of the world's "great literature" describes the lives and thoughts of the upper classes. The GOOD EARTH celebrates those at the other end of the social spectrum, perhaps doing for the Chinese what Charles Dickens did for the English in documenting the lives of the underprivileged and penniless of 19th century London.
So I can clearly seen how I was affected by her novel as I wrote my own A CALL TO CHINA, with so much of the focus on life among the underprivileged peasant/farmers of the countryside. I can thank Pearl Buck for creating that interest in me, the feeling that in the rural countryside is the "real China." My next two blogs will describe two other dimensions of her novel which have stayed with me over the many years since I first read it.
I was prepared to be disappointed, but was not. The novel, which received a Pulitzer Prize and was the main factor in Buck's Nobel Prize for Literature, and as a sympathetic look at the traditional peasant/farmer, holds up very well. Buck, a daughter of missionaries who spent much of her first 40 years in China, knew what she was writing about. The other book I read at the time, Lin Yutang's IMPORTANCE OF LIVING, was a kind of anthology of Chinese lit, therefore the reflection of the lives and thoughts of China's elite and privileged class, the male literati or Mandarins as they are called in English. Buck's novel looks at the poor, uneducated and non-privileged class at the bottom of the social order, but whose back-breaking work was the material foundation that made the lives of that tiny elite possible. Even in the 1980s when I went to live in China for the first time, approximately 3/4ths of the population were farmers (a percentage which is now rapidly decreasing) whose lives were played out, as Buck's heroes in her novel, grappling with the hardships of drought and flood, often reduced to eating their seed corn/wheat/rice etc., then eating the bark off of trees, grass and even the earth itself, and sometimes starving to death. Some consider Buck's novel is too "romantic," but she documents all the disastrous possibilities just mentioned as well as the joys of working with the "good earth."
So it is surprising that the Chinese government, sometime during the Great Cultural Revolution period, condemned Buck's writing, although the very mark of Chinese (as opposed to Russian) Communism was the central role of peasant/farmers in the Revolution. Premier Zhou Enlai, it is said, prevented her from getting a visa that would have allowed her to accompany Nixon on his historic visit to China in 1972. Her reputation has gradually improved and in recent years there have been conferences held in China on her work.
Much of the world's "great literature" describes the lives and thoughts of the upper classes. The GOOD EARTH celebrates those at the other end of the social spectrum, perhaps doing for the Chinese what Charles Dickens did for the English in documenting the lives of the underprivileged and penniless of 19th century London.
So I can clearly seen how I was affected by her novel as I wrote my own A CALL TO CHINA, with so much of the focus on life among the underprivileged peasant/farmers of the countryside. I can thank Pearl Buck for creating that interest in me, the feeling that in the rural countryside is the "real China." My next two blogs will describe two other dimensions of her novel which have stayed with me over the many years since I first read it.
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