The issue of respect in The Good Earth is very different from what we consider normal today. People who do nothing to contribute to society get respect and those who would be undoubtedly respected today are ignored because of the traditions of Chinese filial piety. In The Good Earth we can see many instances where respectable people are seen as nothing and awful people are praised. O-Lan is a good example of someone who is not seen as important but is crucial to Wang Lung's rise to wealth.
When Wang Lung marries O-Lan she achieves a respectable position as the mother of three sons. But as time goes on, Wang Lung becomes rich and he loses his attraction for her and cruelly criticizes her appearance. He becomes obsessed with a prostitute named
Lotus and then he buys her to be his concubine, completely forgetting all that O-Lan has done for him. When O-Lan falls seriously ill, Wang Lung deeply regrets his cruelty and sits by her bedside until she dies. Only when she dies does Wang Lung truly appreciate everything that O-Lan did for him.
Wang Lung’s uncle is just the opposite. Wang Lung doesn’t really respect him, but he must act like he does because he is a relative from the older generation. Wang Lung must show him respect and give him support in difficult times, despite his contemptible nature. After the uncle moves his lazy family into Wang Lung’s house, Wang Lung gets to a point where filial piety isn’t even enough to make him bear his uncle’s freeloading. He demands that his uncle and his family leave his home. This is when his uncle reveals that he is a member of a band of robbers, so Wang Lung cannot make his uncle leave without fear of the robbers. His uncle is the one keeping the home safe from looters.
One day an old man comes to join the family for supper-- he new Poh-Poh from Old China... the man is odd looking and Liang thinks him to be "the Monkey Man" from the ghost stories her grams is always telling. Regardless Liang and this man she comes to call Wong-Suk become great friends. They go to the movies together and get jeered at (I'm not sure if this is beacause 'Beauty and the Beast' or because they are Chinese); he tells her stories; and she dances for him.
almost resents his brother coming home so soon. As the Joad family is forced to
This story follows Wang Lang a poor young farmer in rural China that is forced by his father to marry a slave that belongs to the powerful local Hwang family. The Hwangs sell Wang a 20-year-old slave named O-lan who becomes his wife. O-lan and Wang Lung are pleased with each other, although they exchange few words and although Wang is initially disappointed that O-lan does not have bound feet. Together, Wang Lung and O-lan have a cultivate, beautiful and profitable harvest from their land. O-lan becomes pregnant, and Wang Lung is overjoyed when O-lan’s first child is a son. Meanwhile, the powerful Hwang family lives decadently the husband is obsessed with women, and the wife is an opium addict. Because of their costly habits, the Hwangs fall
I would like to point out that Wang Lung was never the most filial of men. Early in the novel, we saw him slip up once or twice. However, at a younger age, he felt guilty when this happened and was able to hold his tongue in most situations. Wang Lung’s uncle is able to exploit Wang Lung based on his filial piety. When the uncle, a lazy man who blames his struggles on an “evil destiny”, asks his nephew to borrow money, Wang Lung explodes, saying, “‘If I have a handful of silver it is because I work and my wife works, and we do not…[let our] fields grow to weeds and our children go half fed!’” (65). But right after he lets these words slip, he “[stands] sullen and unmovable” (66) because knows that his outburst is wrong. However, later in the novel, Wang Lungs lack of sense for filial piety grows evident as he becomes more arrogant. For example, when he is nearing the end of his life, Wang Lung asks without a second thought to be buried below his father but above his uncle and Ching. Asking to be buried above his uncle makes the statement that Wang Lung believes he is a greater man than his uncle. Before his rise through the ranks of society, Wang Lung would never have even considered being buried above his uncle, even though he always had a disliking for him. However, because of his power, he feels that he has the right to disrespect his
The story began in the day of Wang Lung's marriage. Precisely, the author gives a brief description of the routine obligations of Wang Lung as a son. Waking up early in the morning so as to boil the water and prepare the breakfast for his father and cleaning the house are not just what Wang Lung did in every single morning, but he also went to the field to do farming so that his family, which most of the time included his uncle's as well, would not be starved to death. He did manage the farm very well, and year by year he worked the field, produced the food, and sold to the market. He did these things cleverly. To increase the farm productivity, he practiced crop rotation method. Importantly, although he was not educated and could not even figure out any letter, he was quite a good businessman which was not commonly found. He kept his products and waited until the demand went high and supply went scare before selling for a good price. And this gave him `silver'. Remarkably, not a single piece of silver had he spent carelessly. He did not even go to the tea house where people of his age and the elders usually went to and spent their money as easily as water flows. Indeed, he saved little by little in hope of getting married and improving his life and to care for the old man, who stayed at home but did nothing except demanding food, demanding care, complaining, and so on like a little hungry child.
According to the World Book Encyclopedia, in rural China, persons live in large family units, and it was ideal that five generations live under the same roof. Even so, most peasants live in nuclear families, and the extended family can only be afforded by the wealthy. ("China: family life" 483) This was perhaps one of the reasons why Buck transported Wang Lung from a peasant to a great landlord, so she could establish an extended family structure that was ideal to all Chinese families. When Wang Lung was just married he lived in a somewhat simple nuclear family, except for the presence of his father that would make it like an extended family. Moreover, the Chinese perception of a nuclear family included the father, but when members other than the children are introduced, the family would then be an extended one. Thus, Wang Lung's nuclear family is comprised of himself, O-lan, his wife, and his father. After he had his children, there were three generations under his roof. Wang Lung soon began to prosper, and had an extended family when his uncle and his family moved into Wang Lung's house.
...accepts his wife’s life of royalty, and assimilates into an unfamiliar family, ending his journey.
He uses the money to buy some seeds, a new ox and he is able to return back home. The greed starts to set in when Wang learns that his wife stole some jewels from when there the looting was happening. They talked it over and agreed to buy some more land leaving O-lan with two pearls. The good thing that has come out of Wang looting another person’s home helped him understand why others did so to him and led him to forgive them. He becomes so wealthy that he is able to buy Ching’s land and build enough rooms for him to live in and to also buy laborers. Wang buying laborers shows what wealth does to a once poor peasant man. He is not the one that cares for his land nor is he compassion about his land anymore. Wang hits the biggest turning point when he disrespects his wife and tells her that she is not fit to be a wife of a wealthy man. “Now anyone looking at you would say you were a wife of a common fellow and never of one who has land which he hires men to plow!” (Buck, 168). Wang then starts to “buy” more wives because that is what wealthy men do. In the end Wang ends up like the rest of the wealthy men the he never thought he would become. He got his own uncle’s family addicted to opium, wouldn’t give other refugees seeds without either having high interest or giving up some of their land. This was one of Buck’s main goal, to show the readers what happened to people when they were consumed by wealth and started to become
This novel tells the story of Wang Lung. He is a man who rises from being a poor farmer to a very wealthy man because of his faith in the good earth. In the beginning of the story Wang Lung tries to see as little water as possible because he feels safest with his land under his feet. His family is very poor so he must feed his father corn gruel and tea.
An-Mei and her younger brother live with their grandmother (Popo), uncle, and aunt. There they are not allowed to bring up their mother, who has shamed the family by becoming the fourth wife to Wu Tsing after she was widowed by An-Mei’s father. It is not until An-Mei’s mother returns to tend to Popo that An-Mei is reunited with her mother. After Popo passes, An-Mei and her younger brother are brought to live with their mother at her new husband’s estate. An-Mei is in awe of the estate and its opulence and is excited for her new life with her mother, but that feeling quickly disappears. From her time there, An-Mei learns to be weary of others kindness; the second wife had tried to buy An-Mei’s gratitude with a fake pearl necklace. Then from
In the movie, this low point occurs when Po finally receives the Dragon Scroll, which is supposed to grant him the power to become the Dragon Warrior. When he opens the scroll, he finds that the scroll is blank, and realizes that the scroll would not give him the powers he needs to defeat his adversary. At this point, Po comes to the conclusion that he was indeed picked by mistake and that he has no chance of ever becoming a Kung Fu Master. Master Shifu comes to this conclusion as well and tells Po that, for his safety, he should return
When his wife, O-lan sees this drastic change, she is horrified and rebukes her husband, telling him he “cut off his life”. O-lan’s criticism leaves Wang Lung regretful about his decision to cut his hair. Buck emphasizes the mutation of the symbol of hair in this passage, as Wang Lung’s hair no longer represents his loyalty to tradition, but rather his yearning to be modernized. O-lan emphasizes Wang Lung’s conversion to modernism when she exclaims that he “cut off his life”, which indicates that Wang Lung is ditching his traditional lifestyle by modernizing his hair. While Wang Lung does assimilate more to modern culture, he does experience guilt, realizing that he is being controlled by Lotus. Wang Lung’s regret proves that while his hair represents mostly modernism, it also of a bit of traditionalism. Therefore, Buck utilizes hair to highlight Wang Lung’s shift in
The biologic basis of Clinical Depression originates in the brain. Your brain is made up of a complex network of nerve cells, called neurons and of brain chemicals, called neurotransmitters. Neurotransmitters transmit messages from one neuron to another. Two of these neurotransmitters are not produced in sufficient quantities in a depressed person’s brain. Because of this lack, too few messages get transmitted between neurons and the symptoms of depression occur. In Clinical depression the chemicals in the brain are out-of-balance. New technology allows researchers to take pictures of the brain that show activity levels in the brain. These imaging techniques such as f-MRI and PET scan actually create images of how active different parts of the brain are. Some studies with these kinds of techniques have suggested that the patterns of activation in the brains of depressed people are different than those who are not. These tests can help doctors and researchers learn more about depression and other mental illnesses. Since this research is fairly new, it is not yet used to diagnose clinical depression.
My culture respects the people and the things that deserve it, but with that said, we also don’t give respect to the people who don’t deserve it. We don’t just respect anyone or anything neither, they have to earn that valuable thing that most people don’t have nor give anymore. This is probably one of the biggest differences between my culture and my society because in my society people don’t know the first thing about respect. The way i see it is that it really is a shame of how my society and these people that live in it can’t show even a little bit of respect for someone or something, big or small. Respect is one of the dying characteristics in this world and my culture has the last of it.
O-lan then gives birth to a daughter. Then a terrible famine settles on the land. O-lan gives birth to another daughter during crisis so she strangles the second girl because there is not enough food to feed the baby and the rest of the family. Wang Lung is forced to take his family to a southern city for the winter. There, O-lan and the children beg while Wang Lung earns money by transporting people in a rented rickshaw. They earn just enough money to eat. He and O-lan briefly consider selling their surviving daughter as a slave. Eventually, a group of poor and desperate people ransacks a rich man's home, and Wang Lung and O-lan join them. Wang Lung steals a pile of gold coins. With this new wealth, he moves the family back home and purchases a new ox and some seeds. O-lan had stolen some jewels during the looting.