The Good Earth Setting

Since time can be a little weird in The Good Earth, we want to give you a couple of facts about the big picture before we start up this magical mystery ride. The novel takes place in China over the course of about 50 years. It ends around the 1930s, when Wang Lung is around 70 years old. The overriding theme here is that China is changing.

China in Transition

Wang Lung and his family couldn't be living in more exciting times. It seems like every other day, there's a new war, revolution, or rebellion. During this time, China begins its transition from an imperial to a communist system of government.

The End of the Qing Dynasty (The Xinhai Revolution)

Here's what we mean when we say that time is strange in the novel. In the first chapter, Wang Lung goes to get a haircut before meeting O-lan, and the barber says: “This would not be a bad-looking farmer if he would cut off his hair. The new fashion is to take off the braid" (1.64).

Cutting off this braid, called a queue, would have been illegal before the fall of the Qing Dynasty in 1911. You probably noticed that the next header is the Boxer Rebellion, which ended in 1901 but happens several chapters later in the novel. What's going on here? While Buck did live in China for several decades, she's not a China scholar. So we wouldn't be surprised if she arranged these events from memory and made a mistake.

Anyway, if Wang Lung is still wearing his queue after the fall of the Qing Dynasty, he is really behind the times. The pigtail was a mandatory symbol of subservience to Qing rule. Not wearing it was punishable by death. When the Qing dynasty was overthrown, people rushed to cut theirs off. Mao Zedong himself was one of the first to cut his queue off (source). But Wang Lung, a poor farmer out in the country without any way to hear the news, seems to know nothing about this. He's just scared the barber wants to cut off his queue.

Still, why should Wang Lung know about any of this? The revolution didn't change the standard of living or affect Wang Lung's life at all. It is super historically significant, since it marks the end of 2000 years of monarchy, but it didn't do much for your everyday guy in the street.

The Boxer Rebellion

When the family goes to the South, something starts happening during the springtime. People start handing out pamphlets and talking about strange things. Wang Lung hears about what's going on, but he doesn't totally understand the significance: "[…] Wang Lung heard a young man haranguing a crowd at the corner of the Confucian temple, where any man may stand, if he has the courage to speak out, and the young man said that China must have a revolution and must rise against the hated foreigners […]" (12.6).

Wang Lung is hearing the kinds of arguments that would fuel the Boxer Rebellion. The movement took place between 1898 and 1901, and it opposed Christianity and other foreign influence over China. While he is in the South, Wang Lung experiences both Christianity and foreign influence for the first time, but he doesn't totally get what's up with them.

Wang Lung experiences the Boxer Rebellion mainly as an opportunity to take money and jewels from the rich (14.103). He's not the only one who experienced the Boxer Rebellion this way: so many people were engaged in looting that some historians call it an "orgy of looting" (source).

The Boxer Rebellion had some long-term impacts. It weakened the Imperial dynasty (which would lead to the Xinhai Revolution), it marked the beginning of China's modernization, and it led to the closing of areas under foreign control, called Concessions.

The Chinese Civil War

Poor Wang Lung, he's always behind the times.

Near the end of the novel, he asks his grandchildren about their education: "'Do you study the Four Books?' Then they laughed with clear young scorn at a man so old as this and they said, ‘No, grandfather, and no one studies the Four Books since the Revolution'" (34.40).

The Four Books are the core texts of Confucianism. For Wang Lung's whole life, these books were the basis of a traditional education that culminated in the Imperial Examination, which was sort of like the SAT or the ACT. These texts and exams were banned after the establishment of the Republic of China in Taiwan and the People's Republic of China on the mainland.

While it's difficult to explain the impact of the Chinese Civil War overall, it's easy enough to see what it means for Wang Lung. Already, Wang Lung can't understand his sons because they didn't grow up on the land. Now he won't be able to understand his grandchildren, either, because not only did they grow up away from the land, they also don't know the texts that governed behavior and all social interactions for everyone of the older generations.

Talk about a generation gap. It's as if Wang Lung and his grandchildren live in completely different worlds.

The Communist Revolution

This is the last big historical event in the novel. We only learn about through Wang Lung's third son. At one point, he says to Wang Lung: “There is to be a war such as we have not heard of—there is to be a revolution and fighting and war such as never was, and our land is to be free!" (32.40).

This goes totally over Wang Lung's head. Our hero has no idea that his son is talking about communism.

Even though the other historical events have little impact on Wang Lung's life, if the novel were to continue, his life would change dramatically under communism. For one thing, his land would be redistributed to farmers poorer than him. He might even be sentenced to death. Foot binding would be outlawed, Wang Lung wouldn't be able to purchase another wife, and women would start to be more than just slaves.

But Buck ends the novel before any of this happens, so all Wang Lung and his family know about the Revolution is this: “Well, and he does not write a letter, but now and then one comes from the South and it is said he is a military official and great enough in a thing they call a Revolution there, but what it is I do not know—perhaps some sort of business" (34.55). So how much do they actually know? Pretty much nothing.

What's the Big Deal?

All of these important historical events only occur in the margins of the characters' lives. Most of the time they are like a vague rumor, like this one: “It is but another war somewhere. Who knows what all this fighting to and fro is about? But so it has been since I was a lad and so will it be after I am dead and well I know it" (14.41). Even when it's right before their eyes, the characters often don't see the big picture.

Why does Buck choose this time period and then downplay the importance of these events? Maybe she wants to tell us that for average people, these events don't mean much. Things happening on the macro scale in China pale in importance to the micro scale of Wang Lung's little farm and the land. It's hard to worry about big events going on far, far away when you have to worry about where your next meal is coming from.

Wang Lung's Farm

We're not exaggerating when we say that Wang Lung's land is the most important thing in the novel. Everything is about this land. There's land, there's buying more land, there's getting back to the land, there's taking care of the land. Who cares if there's a war going on, when locusts are devouring the crops?

Strangely enough, even though we read so much about Wang Lung's farm, we don't really get to know what it looks like. We don't even know what he plants. The focus of Wang Lung's farm is on the land itself, almost as an abstraction.
Here's an early description of the old farmhouse: “The kitchen was made of earthen bricks as the house was, great squares of earth dug from their own fields, and thatched with straw from their own wheat. Out of their own earth had his grandfather in his youth fashioned also the oven, baked and black with many years of meal preparing. On top of this earthen structure stood a deep, round, iron cauldron" (1.5).

Did you get that? The house is made out of earth, with a roof grown on their own farm; and even the food is prepared in an oven made out of earth.

If that wasn't enough to convince you of the importance of the land over everything else, just flip through the book and pick a page. We bet that you will land on a description of the earth.

Remember how we said that time is weird? That's probably also because time in the novel is measured by seasons and harvests, not calendar years. How do you know it's springtime? Because it's March? No—because there are peaches: “The first peaches of spring—the first peaches! Buy, eat, purge your bowels of the poisons of winter!" (1.50).

How do you know when it's your first son's birthday? He was born after the wheat had been harvested and the rice was ripe, so whenever that happens, you know it's his birthday: “The wheat had borne and been cut and the field flooded and the young rice set, and now the rice bore harvest, and the ears were ripe and full after the summer rains and the warm ripening sun of early autumn" (3.20).

By focusing on the unchanging land in the midst of a changing nation, Buck points out the contrast between everyday life and big events. For most people, everyday life seems much more important than things like revolutions. At the same time, certain things in everyday life—like the land—are more important than historical events could ever be. The land was there before these revolutions, and it will be there after them.