The Good Earth

The author portrays Wang Lung as a dutiful person because of custom. The social rules he follows prohibit his marrying without his father’s permission, cutting his hair braid, contradicting his father, and refusing to help his uncle. Is his adherence to custom a strength or a weakness? Why? What similar social rules do today’s young adults face that they’re tempted to violate?

Based on the descriptions of O-lan, Lotus, Cuckoo, and Pear Blossom, what sort of experiences could a common woman expect to endure in the society Buck writes about?

What evidence, apart from trains and rifles, does the narrative give to suggest that its events occur in the late 19th and early 20th centuries rather than hundreds of years earlier?

In rapid succession from the 18th century to the mid-20th century, Chinese government moved from imperialism, to Western hegemony, to Chinese nationalism, to Japanese occupation, and then to communism. How did these changes impact the lives of rural farm workers, landowners, and grain merchants? To what extent could the story of Wang Lung and O-lan happen in today’s China?

Wang Lung moves from being a timid farmer, who buys a wife that the capricious Mistress Hwang selects for him from the great house, to being the master of the great house himself, owning vast amounts of land and numerous servants. Considering that both Master Hwang and Wang Lung are wealthy and powerful in their later years, how are the two men alike and unalike? How were their sons alike and unalike? Did the servants in the household experience life differently beneath the two “masters?”

One of the most difficult scenes in the book concerns the birth of O-lan’s second daughter, who becomes the immediate victim of infanticide. What motivated a nurturing mother like O-lan to make this decision? Had the child been a boy, what would she have done?

In what way might the first readers of this narrative—Americans in the 1930s—react differently to the stories of starvation, drought, floods, and unemployment than Americans in the 21st century?

Why were the older women, like Lotus, Uncle’s wife, and Cuckoo, so cavalier about the sexual behavior of men and the sexual abuse of young women?