From “The good earth” by Pearl S. Buck “Time after time men fled from the land and came back to it, but Wang Lung set himself to build his fortress so securely that through the bad years to come he need never leave his land again but live on the fruits of the good years, and so subsist until another year came forth. He set himself and the gods helped him and for seven years there were harvests, and every year Wang Lung and his men threshed far more than could be eaten. He hired more labourers each year for his fields until he had six men and he built a new house behind his old one, a large room behind a court and two small rooms on each side of the court beside the large room. The house he covered with tiles, but the walls were still made of the hard earth from the fields, only he had them brushed with lime and they were white and clean. Into these rooms he and his family moved, and the labourers with Ching at their head, lived in the old house in front. By this time Wang Lung had thoroughly tried Ching, and he had found the man honest and faithful, and he set Ching to be his steward over the men and over the land and he paid him well, two silver coins a month besides his food. But with all Wang Lung’s urging Ching to eat and eat well, the man still put no flesh on his bones, remaining always a small, spare, lean man of great gravity. Nevertheless he laboured in his feeble pottering silently from dawn until dark, speaking in his feeble voice if there was anything to be said, but happiest and liking it best if there were nothing and he could be silent; and hour after hour he lifted his hoe and let it fall, and at dawn and sunset he would carry to the fields buckets of water to put upon the vegetable rows. And it seemed that the handful of peas and of seed which had passed between these two men made them brothers, except that Wang Lung, who was the younger, took the role of the elder, and Ching never wholly forgot that he was hired and lived in a house which belonged to another.”
