Asian Addicts Anonymous

**post by nichan**

I might’ve mentioned before that Pearl S. Buck is probably my favorite author…

Her best known work is “The Good Earth Trilogy” (or “House of Earth Trilogy”), which consists of three books that tell the stories of three generations of the Wang family of China. I read somewhere that she had a fourth book planned, but died before she had a chance to complete it, and this drives me insane, because I’d like to see it up to, say, books five and/or six by now.

But, anyway, I’m yammering. Lemme try to make this make a little more sense.

“The Good Earth Trilogy” starts out with “The Good Earth”, which is a stupidly awesome novel about a peasant farmer from his wedding day into his old age. I say “stupidly awesome”, because you’ll be rendered dumbfounded by how great of a story it is.

The second book is “Sons”, which is the slightly weaker follow-up, and also sets the stage for what these books are really, really about: it’s not just the story of three generations, but the story of a country as it grows into a modern state. “The Good Earth” presents China in the mid- to late-1800s (or maybe even possibly the early 1900s, according to Wikipedia). “Sons” comes along as the Dynasty is collapsing, and shows the rise of the warlords that began to chop up and dominate the country.

The third book is my favorite, though: “A House Divided”. It’s the story of one character – the grandson of the original farmer, the son of the warlord – who is torn between the ancient inland culture of China, and the cutting edge modernity of the 1920s coastal areas.

Wang Yuan grows up in this book, from a teenager who’s feared and misunderstood his warlord father; into a young adult who runs away to what I imagine is Shanghai (Pearl S. Buck doesn’t like specifically identifying dates, years, locations, or names if she can avoid them); and eventually to America, where he attends college with the hopes of bringing his education to good use in his home country.

The bad parts of this book mainly center around the timeline. Like I said, Pearl S. Buck is reluctant to spit out actual dates, so every time I read this, I rack my brain to come up with what years all of this happens in. Perhaps she, too, had the same problem, because there are glaring continuity issues. Wang Yuan seems to take forever and a day to age, and when it feels like he ought to be in his early 20s, he’s still a teen. When logic suggests his sister ought to be the same age as him, there’s an inexplicable three year gap. When he’s away for ages, it’s almost as though no time has passed. It’s distracting as all get out… (Also, Pearl S. Buck skims over mentioning a handful of characters that appeared over the course of the previous two books, and while they’re obviously not necessary for the story, it’s still a bit annoying to have them suddenly cut out of the tale like that.) (And there’s exactly one mention that Wang Yuan has other sisters. One. In three books, this is mentioned only once, and totally offhandedly, as though it’s no big deal.)

But the complexities of the book make up for it. …And when I say “complexities”, I don’t mean the actual writing style. Her narration is very slow and methodical, her dialogue somewhat forced and archaic, her ways of presenting the story rather dry. Yet, through all of this, the background is that of China in massive, major change. The dramatic transition from old to new and back again is mind boggling, and Wang Yuan is a fantastic representative for a culture as a whole: eager to adopt the modern, unable to let go of the past, fascinated by the future, held in check by antiquity. She writes the book so that the story keeps you going, while staying out of the way of what’s really going on. You almost have to go on autopilot to catch it all. …I’d love to see this turned into a movie, if it was done right. (“The Good Earth” was turned into a movie way, way back in the day when white people played Chinese characters because Chinese people weren’t allowed to, and I taped it off the the TV, but I never got around to watching it.)

So what’s the book actually about? Well… Wang Yuan, staring in “Sons”, has always clashed with his father, a fearsome warlord. He wants an education, so his father eventually relents and ships him off to a school of war. When “A House Divided” begins, he returns, only to run away. First he goes to the house from “The Good Earth”, and then eventually works his way to his half-sister’s house in a modern, coastal city.

Here, he’s thrust from an ancient world into an immensely modern one of Western clothes, and movies, and dancing. He spends his days in school (which, because of the lack of a clear timeline, he seems altogether too old to be attending), and his nights tagging along (somewhat reluctantly) with his half-sister to various parties. …And the mention of “somewhat reluctantly” is an understatement: every time I read this book, I’m absolutely convinced that Wang Yuan is gay for the first half or so. If this was an anime, there’d be a lot of yaoi fanfics written about him; if this was a modern book, the closest to straight I think he’d be is bisexual.

Anyway, after getting into some serious trouble with one of his cousins, he’s shipped off to America in a mad rush, and there he lands in the company of a Caucasian family: a college professor, his wife, and their daughter, who’s somewhere around Wang Yuan’s age. Even this trip out of China still reflects the story of China, as the family works to win him over to their way of thinking: the parents (representing the older generation) want to convert him to Christianity, and the daughter (representing his own generation) want him to respect and love both cultures as they are.

Eventually Wang Yuan returns to China, and he starts to see the downfalls of the sudden thrust of modernity into such an ancient culture: his half-sister must marry her playboy boyfriend because he’s gotten her pregnant. This isn’t anything new, because most fiction books you can read about China typically focus on women, and this just seems to fall into some natural place for novels. However, because “A House Divided” is told from a man’s perspective, it gives new light on things. (This is another reason I so dearly love this story: because it doesn’t fall into the typical rut of women being held down by a repressive society – it tells it from an almost equally repressed man’s side, and therefore is different and interesting.)

There’s also the matter of going back to see his father, and the traumatic return to the inland, followed by a mad dash  to the futuristic promises of the new capital being built. He sees all the rough edges of trying to make a new China from scratch, rather than building one based on what the foreigners have already created, or honoring to any degree what’s already been established by history.

I really, really wish there could have been five or six books to this series. The next was, I believe, meant to deal with the creation of the People’s Republic, and probably the Cultural Revolution. After that, the 80s and 90s, I suppose. And right now would be the setting for the sixth book. What would the Wang family be doing in modern China? …To think of it is fascinating and frustrating, all at once.

And while it technically starts with “The Good Earth”, I don’t think the story actually begins until “A House Divided”, because that’s when everything takes the major leap from telling tiny stories of China into a massive display of everything at once.

I totally love this book.