Reading Pearl Buck's Good Earth again--55 years later

I read several of Pearl Buck’s novels when I was in high school, so I probably read the Good Earth (1931) around 1956 or 1957. I don't recall that I ever saw the movie (1937). Although I couldn’t have told you the names of the characters or the plot, as I’m rereading it now for book club next Monday, each page seems familiar. Even after 5 pages, I was in awe of Buck's skill and sensitivity. What a masterful writer. As Hilary Spurling wrote:

“Buck is virtually forgotten today. She has no place in feminist mythology, and her novels have been effectively eliminated from the American literary map. In the People’s Republic of China her fiction remains unique because it accurately depicts the hard lives of an illiterate rural population ignored by the Chinese writers who were Buck’s contemporaries and subsequently obliterated from the record by Communist Party doctrine. “In China she is admired but not read,” ran a recent article in the New York Times, “and in America she is read but not admired.” Both views could do with reappraisal. “ Link

The story begins on Wang Lung's wedding day when he goes to The House of Hwang, a family of wealthy landowners to get his future wife, O-Lan, a slave. She was not pretty so she hadn't been defiled by the sons or male servants. O-Lan turns out to be the best thing that ever happened to him. Ms. Buck in describing Wang Lung as he encounters a revolutionary during the time the family has been wrenched off the beloved land by a famine, describes almost perfectly our own revolutionaries of today--The Occupiers:

“. . . proclaimed the young teacher, “and the murderous one who stabs you when you are dead and do not know it are the rich and the capitalists, who would stab you even after you are dead. You are poor and downtrodden and it is because the rich seize everything.”

Now that he was poor Wang Lung knew full well but he had heretofore blamed it on a heaven that would not rain in its season, or having rained, would continue to rain as though rain were an evil habit. . . Wang Lung grew bold and asked,

“Sir, is there any way whereby the rich who oppress us can make it rain so that I can work on the land?”

At this the young man turned on him with scorn and replied, “Now how ignorant you are, you who still wear your hair in a long tail! No one can make it rain when it will not, but what has this to do with us? If the rich would share with us what they have, rain or not would matter none, because we would all have money and food.”

A great shout went up from those who listened, but Wang Lung turned away unsatisfied.

Still, eventually Wang Lung the peasant through hard work and some stolen jewels becomes wealthy and greedy, buys the estate in which his wife was formerly a slave, and turns away from the wife who had helped him accomplish everything.