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The not so good earth
Significance of the title the good earth
The not so good earth
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Objects and Places in The Good Earth
Earth/ Land/ Field: Wang Lung's love for the earth is a chief driving force in his life. The only thing he loves with any constancy is the earth, and this is because the earth is constant as well. Unlike food or silver, the earth is something that can never be taken away from him. Wang Lung always keeps returning to his land, and yearns for it whenever he is away. It serves as a healing element for him whenever he has domestic troubles, and is the foundation upon which he has founded his great family.
Temple to the Earth God: The temple is on the western field, and it was built by Wang Lung's grandfather who was also a farmer. It is made of bricks and tiles. Under the roof of the temple, there are two small earthen figures. It is the Earth God and his mistress. They wear robes of red paper, and on a good New Year, they are given new robes. As a humble farmer, Wang Lung always remembers to pay respects to the god and his lady, but as a wealthy landlord, he becomes careless.
House of Hwang: This is where the great Hwang family dwells, and Wang Lung initially goes into the house to get O-lan who has been a slave in the family. Later, Wang Lung, as a man of fortune and land, rents the house to live there with his own family.
(Un)Bound feet: Wang Lung is disappointed and repulsed when he realizes that O-lan's feet are not bound. O-lan was sold to the great house as a child, and thus, her mother did not have the time to bind her feet. Later, O-lan insists on tightly binding the feet of their second daughter so that she may have small feet. The girl cries every night because of the pain. Lotus has small feet that have been bound.
Shantung: Shantung is the northern city where O-lan's parents came from to sell O-lan to the great house.
Dyed Eggs: Wang Lung dyes eggs in red dye to distribute to other villagers in honor of the birth of his first male child. Later, Wang Lung's son does the same when his first son is born.
Wang Lung's ox: The ox has been Wang Lung's field companion for many years, but must be killed during the famine to provide food for the family.
Liang's main interests consist of movies, stories, tap-dancing, and imitating Shirley Temple. Wong-Suk buys her expensive, beautiful ribbon one day for her second hand tap shoes and Poh-Poh helps her tie them into fancy flowers. -- This is where we learn a bunch about Poh-Poh's childhood. She was born in China and so it was already too bad that she had be born a girl child. But further more she was sort of disfigured. Her forehead was sloppy and mis-shapen and immediately everyone told her mother she was the ugliest baby ever. Her mother sold her to a wealthy family; where she was a servant. The concubine would beat her and their other servants with a rod-- as if they were oxen. Poh-Poh had to learn to do things quickly and flawlessly or she would be beaten. Her fingers would bleed because she was practicing tying these intricet(abc?) patterns. She of course grew out of her 'deformity' and was quite a pretty lady.
family was they had three-rooms which were placed on a hill facing the "Big House". The
Most critiques of The Good Earth are preoccupied with the authentic quality of the novel, and while the Western critiques praise it as a novel based on facts, the Chinese hold a different view. Kang Younghill, a Chinese man, in reference to the image Pearl Buck created of China, stated that "it is discouraging to find that the novel works toward confusion, not clarification" (Kang 368). This statement illuminates Kang's feelings that the details, which Buck had presented as factual in the novel, were contrary to the actual life of the Chinese. Yet researches have shown that Buck was rightly informed and presented her information correctly. One detail that she paid special attention to was the family structure within the rural Chinese family, which she presented in the form of the Wang Lung household. The family structure demonstrated by Buck is not restricted to the Wang Lung family, but was a part of every rural Chinese home in the early 1900s. Every member's experiences within the family structure are determined by the role and expectations placed on them by the society, and Buck was careful to include these experiences in Wang Lung's family.
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
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
Each Mother brought baggage with her across the pacific. They wanted to teach their daughters from all of their pain and suffering, but were never able to communicate the complexities of their life. Suyuan Woo struggles to explain herself to her daughter "'This feather may look worthless, but it comes from afar and carries with it all my good intentions.' And she waited, year after year, for the day she could tell her daughter this in perfect American English"(3). The journey that brought Suyuan to America was long and full of hardship. From the Japanese invasion of Kweilin were she lost her husband and had to leave her daughters, to her assimilation in America. Suyuan wanted to teach her daughter about these hardships so that she could understand the extent of her potential. " My mother believed you could be anything you wanted to be in Ameri...
The beginning of the book starts out with Liang’s typical life, which seems normal, he has a family which consist of three children, two older sisters and him the youngest, his two sister’s reside in Changsha 1 his father has an everyday occupation working as a journalist at a local newspaper. Things start to take a turn early in life for Liang Heng, his families politics were always questioned, the mistake mad...
In the book Joy Luck Club by Amy Tan, Suyuan Woo reluctantly left her twin daughters at the side of the road while fleeing from Kweilin. She had reached her limit which was brought upon by being forced to lighten her load while traveling on foot with two babies. Suyuan realized she did not have a high chance of survival with all the casualties from the war, so she trusted her faith in destiny as she carried her slings with her babies until her “hands began to bleed and became too slippery to hold on to anything” (14). By the time Suyuan arrived in Chungking she “had lost everything except three fancy silk dresses” (14). Her sacrifice showed how much Suyuan wanted what was best for her babies even if it meant she would lose them. When Suyuan
During the early 1900s, it was expected that all women have their feet bound at a young age to be considered marriage material. Ailin’s sister explained to her that, “women all have to go through this ordeal: Mother, Grandmother, Eldest Sister, Mrs. Liu, your amah. Life is hard on women” (Namioka 21). It was acknowledged that life was not what it should have been for women, and Ailin was able to grasp this concept very early on, which gave her an advantage. She understood that generation after generation had to go through the painful process of having their feet bound, even if it was against their own will. Ailin was almost forced to have her feet bound, as described on page 39: “I began tearing at the cloths around my feet… they tried to hold me down, but I just thrashed and screamed more and more loudly” (Nomiokas 39). Ailin had to conquer many obstacles because she was a girl, but she literally had to fight her way out of this one. She never gave up though, and made the commitment of having unbound feet, no matter what the long term consequences ended up
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 Chinese people experienced rapid changes, in government and their own culture in the 20th century. In the book, Wild Swans, by Jung Chang, she depicts the experiences of not only oppression and suffering, but the development of the communist revolution, under Mao. Also, to show how the Chinese people, women in particular, fought against impossible odds by interweaving historical and personal stories from the twentieth century China.
In her article "The body as attire," Dorothy Ko (1997) reviewed the history about foot binding in seventeenth-century China, and expressed a creative viewpoint. Foot binding began in Song Dynasty, and was just popular in upper social society. With the gradually popularization of foot binding, in the end of Song Dynasty, it became generally popular. In Qing Dynasty, foot binding was endowed deeper meaning that was termed into a tool to against Manchu rule. The author, Dorothy Ko, studied from another aspect which was women themselves to understand and explained her shifting meaning of foot binding. Dorothy Ko contends that “Chinese Elite males in the seventeenth century regarded foot binding in three ways: as an expression of Chinese wen civility,
O-lan comes about in the first chapter of the novel. At the age of ten, her parents sell her off to the Great House of Hwang, where the village's wealthiest landowner resides.
In 1899, a Chinese scholar was given a packet of animal bones covered with mysterious ancient writing. Archaeologists were sent to a site along the Huang He. They determined that a kingdom called Shang developed there at around 1700 B.C. A single family ruled the kingdom of a long time, So the government became known as the Shang dynasty. For 600 years the Shang dynasty shaped the lives of people living along the Huang He. The Shang dynasty ruled hundreds of towns along the Huang He. Shang kings also created new towns by giving land to their relatives, who oversaw the construction of the new
Paulshock, MD, Bernadine Z.. "Chinese Footbinding". Journal of the American Medical Association. August 12, 1992.