How we cite our quotes: (Chapter. Paragraph)
Quote #7
But Anhwei is not Kiangsu. In Anhwei, where Wang Lung was born, the language is slow and deep and it wells from the throat. But in the Kiangsu city where they now lived the people spoke in syllables which splintered from their lips and from the ends of their tongues. And where Wang Lung's fields spread out in slow and leisurely harvest twice a year of wheat and rice and a bit of corn and beans and garlic, here in the farms about the city men urged their land with perpetual stinking fertilizing of human wastes to force the land to a hurried bearing of this vegetable and that besides their rice. (12.4)
It seems to Wang Lung that the difference between the Northerners and the Southerners is in the different ways they relate to the land. The Southerners "force the land," so their language is "splintered," and they end up using "stinking fertilizing of human waste" to make crops grow more quickly than the land would otherwise allow. Everything seems to be in confusion in the South, and this confusion seems to result from a deeper problem: a lack of understanding about their own land.
Quote #8
Then Wang Lung knew that this was indeed a foreigner and more foreign yet than he in this city, and that after all people of black hair and black eyes are one sort and people of light hair and light eyes of another sort, and he was no longer after that wholly foreign in the city. (12.13)
The only thing that makes Wang Lung feel less like a foreigner in the South is the sight of a white woman. This is interesting in many ways, one of which is that it points to the presence of missionaries (like Buck's father) in China. The culture these missionaries bring is even more foreign than Wang Lung's Northern culture. How does it contribute to the kind of change happening in China at the time?
Quote #9
Now there was in the town a great tea shop but newly opened and by a man from the South, who understood such business, and Wang Lung had before this passed the place by, filled with horror at the thought of how money was spent there in gambling and in play and in evil women. (18.29)
Even though the South and the North seemed totally separate earlier in the novel, little bits of the South like this tea shop have begun to seep into Wang Lung's hometown. That tea shop, by the way, also brings with it gambling and prostitution. Hmm. What does this tell us about the South?