Pearl S Buck leaves one hoping that there would be more men and women writing about other cultures like she did so vividly in her 'The good Earth'. It is essentially a Chinese saga written by a non Chinese and therfore leaves a window to the rest of the world.
I have always wondered how it would have been if there was none like Pearl to expose the Chinese mind and culture to the world. In doing so she has left us less tribal and less of an island and taken us one step more towards a universal view of the world without taking anything away from the original culture.
The picture of the Chinese woman who goes behind the bushes to give birth to the baby and comes back to the field to continue her work is poignant as much as it captures the reality and even a possibility. At once she has painted the naturalness of childbirth and humbled us in our anxieties of an event so uneventful in its original.
The other is the picture of the Chinese peasant Wang who takes the services of a barber to clean up on the eve of his wedding. The Chinese peasant woman's and the man's relentless struggle in the farm without even an awarenss that theirs is a struggles captures the original condition of man who in his progress is becoming ever more anxious day by day.
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