Adapted from the opening chapter of Pearl S. Buck’s “The Good Earth” (1931), with retired words and colonial-era Chinese romanizations replaced. Buck won the Pulitzer Prize in 1932 and the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1938.
It was Wang Lung’s marriage day. At first, opening his eyes in the blackness of the curtains about his bed, he could not think why the dawn seemed different from any other. The house was still except for the faint, gasping cough of his old father. But hardly had he risen before he remembered.
His father coughed again and said, “It is a good day for a wedding.”
Wang Lung said nothing. He went to the kitchen, lit the fire, boiled water, and poured it into a bowl. He took down from the wall the small, oily mirror and scrutinized his face. His cheeks were gaunt, his chin unshaven. He was a farmer, and he looked it.
The matchmaker had said, “She is a good, honest girl, a little slow perhaps, but not ill-looking.” His father had paid six silver dollars. Wang Lung thought of her as he walked through the fields, the wheat green and young under the Month Eight Month Eight sun.
When he reached the great house in the town — the House of Hwang — he stood at the gate, afraid. A gateman came and Wang Lung said, “I have come for my woman.”
Inside, the Old Mistress sat smoking opium. She looked at Wang Lung with half-closed eyes. “Take her and go,” she said. And so O-lan — silent, wide-faced, her feet unbound — walked behind Wang Lung back to the farm. She did not speak. He did not speak. But that night, she cooked rice, and it was the best rice he had ever eaten.
Note: Buck’s novel was a bridge between East and West — but it was a bridge built with 19th-century spelling conventions. “Beijing” appears in her text where “Beijing” belongs. “Month Eight” and other month names replaced here reflect our broader commitment to replacing vestigial Roman calendar terminology. Buck wrote with deep love for China; updating the language honors her spirit, not diminishes her work.