“Dragon Seed”: Two Takeaways

Pearl S. Buck’s “Dragon Seed” was published in 1942, wartime around the globe. Its setting is farm area and villages around Nanking in 1937 during the time of the Japanese invasion of China. Its people are largely simple folk, many of whom cannot read, who have had passed down to them the working farmlands of their forebears. They are being tested by a vicious, rapacious and predatory enemy that is entirely new to their existence.

Buck knows these farmers and villagers well because she spent her childhood in China with her missionary parents, and lived among them for many years on and off. She was homeschooled there, including by her mother, and learned to speak in both in English and Chinese.

She is likely not best known for “Dragon Seed.” Perhaps better known for “The Good Earth” (1931), for which she received the Pulitzer Prize in 1932. In 1938 she was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature. Pearl S. Buck, informed by long living in mainland Chinese society, became a voice for its culture by her writing of magazine pieces first, novels, short stories, and biographies. Interestingly, her first published novel, “East Wind, West Wind” (1930), was written aboard ship on a return to America.

There is something to be said for slowing the pace of travel, such as it was then across oceans, as well as in rural China.

Two takeaways about the novel, at least, make it a wonderfully informing read. The first is the often described brutality of the invaders as they assume suffocating control of the native population, and, then, how in response that population adjusts as best it can and actively resists without the benefit of even remotely comparable arms to those of the invaders. They do not have warplanes to strafe or soldierly guns on the ground. They do have the drive to regain a freedom lost.

To read the book with just an antenna up for this first takeaway is to know something about what is the Mideast today. It is to know the will to be free or just safe. It is to know that there may be no end, ever, to the undercurrent of war created by overt actions.

The second takeaway is about the culture of life as it relates to male primacy and the birthright of sons. There are so many ways in which this issue is expressed. It is integral to the novel. Here is one: ““What now?’ she shouted back, and made herself ready to take her son’s part against the father, as she always did for any son. Only when there was a daughter in the wrong could Ling Tan hope for justice from her.” Even the mother, herself otherwise under primacy of the father, Ling Tan, reasons from the perceived greater value of sons to daughters in this society.

The novel is a great read just to know the various expressions of gender inequities, but yet to also know the family bonding, expectations, dynamics, and warmth that underlie all of it. The reader will be surprised at how tender the relations among the family members and husbands and wives can be. And the feelings and spirit of women, no matter the men, too. Pearl Buck has captured it in the women of China, and more, in English, as perhaps no other writer could.

It is but one aspect of her code of life. Pearl Buck founded the inter-racial adoption agency Welcome House in 1949 as reaction to then existing adoption services that considered Asian and mixed-race children unadoptable. Her legacy, in many ways, is that of equity and fairness for all.