Pearl S. Buck's The Good Earth

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The novel, The Good Earth, written by Pearl S. Buck, takes place in China, in the 1920s, and tells the story of a Chinese farmer named Wang Lung and his journey from rags to riches. O-lan’s difficult childhood taught her many useful life lessons. O-lan’s personality and these life lessons together, give her immeasurable value to Wang Lung and his family. Simply put, O-lan had a rough childhood. During O-lan’s childhood, her parents sold her as a slave to the House of Hwang. O-lan became a very skilled cook over the course of her childhood because she worked in the kitchen at the House of Hwang. As a child, O-lan also became a skilled beggar, she learned where to beg and who to beg to. When her family fell on tough times during the drought, she taught her children the skills she picked up as a child. These skills that O-lan learns while enslaved, reveals O-lan’s heavy reliance on her past. O-lan’s slavery did not end after she got married, her slavery continues on, into her marriage. “At night he knew the soft firmness of her body. But in the day her clothes, her plain blue cotton coat, …show more content…

After O-lan’s death, everything seems to fall apart. O-lan made Wang Lung rich, but Wang Lung refused to acknowledge this fact until after O-lan died. “All through the long months of winter she lay dying and upon her bed, and for the first time Wang Lung and his children knew what she had been in the house, and how she made comfort for them all and they had not known it” (Buck 254). Although he treated her poorly, O-lan became a ‘good luck charm’ for Wang Lung. After O-lan’s death, Wang Lung soon realizes that O-lan serves almost as much importance in his life as the land. When Wang Lung’s daughter-in-law gave birth to his grandson, his family completely freaked out. Wang Lung remembers how O-lan gave birth, quiet and alone. Wang Lung and his family soon take for granted all of the things O-lan did the went

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