The Good Earth

Through the novel’s many characters and their circumstances, Buck portrays a world with extreme wealth and extreme poverty. Chapter 1 reveals how Wang Lung counts his coins to determine how much of a celebration he can afford on his wedding day. He stands before Mistress Hwang in a mansion greater than any he has ever entered and listens as she, indulging in her expensive habit of smoking opium, summons the woman she has chosen as his lifelong mate. Perhaps the most iconic symbol of the immense disparity between the obscenely wealthy and the unhoused and impoverished is the row of shelters along the stone wall behind which an indulgent, corpulent rich “master” lives. This theme becomes more complex, however, when Wang Lung, someone in awe of the wealth of the prosperous, himself becomes the region’s richest man. Periodically, Wang Lung gives in to excessive spending—for example, when he buys the permanent affection of the greedy, manipulative Lotus.

In describing the backstory of the House of Hwang, Buck reveals the gradual descent of the Hwang family into a shared detachment from the source and availability of their wealth. Master Hwang and his sons can no longer understand why they have no money. By that time, the loss of their prosperity is inevitable. In describing the sons of Wang Lung, the author depicts the older one as being in touch with what money can do but out of touch with how to acquire it. The second son is less concerned with what money can do than with how to hoard it, an equal misuse from Buck’s perspective. In the narrative’s last scene, Wang Lung warns the two brothers of their blindness when he shouts at them that dividing and selling the land will ruin the family.

No other family in the narrative prospers as does Wang Lung’s. Buck wants to reinforce the likelihood that, once a family is impoverished, it will stay impoverished. Wang Lung recognizes this when he ends up struggling to subsist in the southern city where he moved to survive. He knows that, despite his consistent, difficult, and unrewarding work, he’ll never earn enough money to take his family back to his farm. Buck’s depiction of the plight of the chronically poor is uncannily similar to the circumstances of current-day impoverished workers. Faced with no lucrative opportunities, the impoverished people of Wang Lung’s day often resort to extreme measures, hoping to escape their chronic situations while only temporarily alleviating their problems: They sell a daughter, steal from a rich home, or join a gang of thieves. Today, minimum-wage workers face similar dilemmas. Achieving more than sustenance through entry-level work is impossible, and few honest, risk-free, wise, or moral opportunities exist to readily improve one’s financial state.

Buck portrays the solution to this dilemma through Wang Lung as a return to the earth. His success in farming the land precludes the necessity to exist at the whim and mercy of an employer and allows him to achieve abundance on his own terms. This proved true for Wang Lung, his friend Ching, and perhaps his tenant farmers—who paid Wang Lung nothing if their fields didn’t produce. No one else in the narrative, however, follows this example to prosper. Today in developed nations such as the US, farming is expensive, and large corporate trusts control much of it; the good earth is now in the hands of businesses—and the book’s final paragraph implies a prediction of this dilemma.