Notes

The Good Earth Book Review
The Good Earth by Pearl S. Buck does a fantastic job of tying all of the events in the book to a common theme: being rich does not solve all problems, and often causes many new problems. In the book, Wang Lung, who was a common farmer, becomes wealthy and ends up moving into a rich man's former great house. However, none of this would be possible without the event of Wang Lung's marriage. The plot of this story revolves around Wang Lung becoming rich with the aid of his wife, O-Lan, who not only does the housework like cooking, cleaning, and raising the children, but also works tirelessly in the fields beside Wang Lung, manages the money, and has the skills necessary to keep the family alive in the famine. The Good Earth has many surprising events that demonstrates the family's mental and physical strength. They are forced to resort to eating the earth in order to survive the starvation; "this earth they had been eating in water for some days-goddess of mercy Earth, it was called, because it had some slight nutritious quality in it, although in the end it could not sustain life."(pg. 84, par. 1). The events of O-Lan's marriage and the famine demonstrate how the early suffering of the family, with O-Lan's help, shape the plot of the story into a clear message