The Good Earth

If I had to pick one book that has influenced my life more than any other, one book that touched my heart more than any other, one book that was the best novel I've ever read...I'd probably pick The Good Earth.

I first read this book when I was twelve. My mom suggested it and found a copy for me to read.

“Then Wang Lung turned to the woman and looked at her for the first time. She had a square, honest face, a short, broad nose with large black nostrils, and her mouth was wide as a gash in her face. Her eyes were small and of a dull black in color, and were filled with some sadness that was not clearly expressed. It was a face that seemed habitually silent and unspeaking, as though it could not speak if it would. She bore patiently Wang Lung's look, without embarrassment or response, simply waiting until he had seen her. He saw that it was true there was not beauty of any kind in her face—a brown, common, patient face. But there were no pock-marks on her dark skin, nor was her lip split. In her ears he saw his rings hanging, the gold-washed rings he had bought, and on her hands were the rings he had given her. He turned away with secret exultation. Well, he had his woman!”

O-lan's story was shocking to me. A woman who is hardworking and self-sacrificing to the extreme, and yet O-lan is always at the bottom, always the last to receive even the smallest of acknowledgments for anything she does. And the suffering O-lan experiences. It's heartbreaking. And it reminds me to appreciate the wonderful things in my own life that O-lan never got to enjoy.

The development of Wang Lung's character is slow but poignant, too.

“And out of his heaviness there stood out strangely but one clear thought and it was a pain to him, and it was this, that he wished he had not taken the two pearls from O-lan that day when she was washing his clothes at the pool, and he would never bear to see Lotus put them in her ears again.”

Watching the sons of O-lan and Wang Lung change as the family acquired wealth...it was a cautionary tale. Inevitable, I think.

Such an amazing book.