Wang Lung did not move. He did not rise nor in any way recognize the men who had come. But he lifted his head to look at them and he saw that they were indeed men from the town, dressed in long robes of soiled silk. Their hands were soft and their nails long. They looked as though they had eaten and blood still ran rapidly in their veins. He suddenly hated them with an immense hatred. Here were these men from the town, having eaten and drunk, standing beside him whose children were starving and eating the very earth of the fields; here they were, come to squeeze his land from him in his extremity. He looked up at them sullenly, his eyes deep and enormous in his bony, skull-like face.

“I will not sell my land,” he said.

his uncle stepped forward. At this instant the younger of Wang Lung’s two sons came creeping to the doorway upon his hands and knees. Since he had so little strength in these latter days the child at times had gone back to crawling as he used in bis babyhood.

“Is that your lad?” cried the uncle, “the little fat lad I gave a copper to in the summer?”

And they all looked at the child and suddenly Wang Lung, who through all this time had not wept at all, began to weep silently, the tears gathering in great knots of pain in his throat and rolling down his cheeks.

“What is your price?” he whispered at last. Well, there were these three children to be fed—the children and the old man. He and his wife could dig themselves graves in the land and lie down in them and sleep. Well, but here were these.

And then one of the men from the city spoke, a man with one eye blind and sunken in his face, and unctuously he said,

“My poor man, we will give you a better price than could be got in these times anywhere for the sake of the boy who is starving. We will give you…” he paused and then he said harshly, “we will give you a string of a hundred pence for an acre!”

Wang Lung laughed bitterly. “Why, that,” he cried, “that is taking my land for a gift. Why, I pay twenty times that when I buy land!”

“Ah, but not when you buy it from men who are starving,” said the other man from the city. He was a small, slight fellow with a high thin nose, but his voice came out of him unexpectedly large and coarse and hard.

Wang Lung looked at the three of them. They were sure of him, these men! What will not a man give for his starving children and his old father! The weakness of surrender in him melted into an anger such as he had never known in his life before. He sprang up and at the men as a dog springs at an enemy.

“I shall never sell the land!” he shrieked at them. “Bit by bit I will dig up the fields and feed the earth itself to the children and when they die I will bury them in the land, and I and my wife and my old father, even he, we will die on the land that has given us birth!”

He was weeping violently and his anger went out of him as suddenly as a wind and he stood shaking and weeping. The men stood there smiling …

From “The Good Earth” by Pearl S. Buck.

What a marvelous snippet! One can perceive the sensitivity of the woman writer. It is not that men are not sensitive, we are. But women have special sense: “Bit by bit I will dig up the fields and feed the earth itself to the children and when they die I will bury them in the land, and I and my wife and my old father, even he, we will die on the land that has given us birth!”

He was weeping violently and his anger went out of him as suddenly as a wind and he stood shaking and weeping. The men stood there smiling …”

Pearl S. Buck expresses in these sentences what humans feel for the land that witnessed their birth. We get attached to it. Sometimes it is a frustrating feeling because one might realize that it is not the best place in the world. It reminds me of the scene in the “The Man in a Blue Tunic,” the first story in my first book “The Silver Teacup,” when the man who has come from the past sees the place where his house stood centuries ago and breaks into tears.

“I had survived the fall, and now lay before a land of beautiful mountains, placid rivers, exuberant flowers, lush vegetation, and colorfully feathered birds … what reason did I have to abandon such a paradise?”

“So why did you leave now?”

“Must a man have reason to return to his hometown?”

“No.”

“All my roots are here. The ashes of my forefathers probably enrich the flowers and trees I behold right now. I belong to this land.”

The terrible thing in Pearl S. Buck’s story is  that “The men stood there smiling …” Why can we humans become so insensitive? Is our race not different from that of  wild animals?  One has to wonder. Just watch the daily news.