Characters

O-lan is one of the great silent heroines of world literature. Sold as a child to the House of Hwang, she was a kitchen slave who had never been treated as human. She marries Wang Lung without ceremony, without affection, and she gives him everything. She works in the fields until minutes before giving birth — alone, in the hut, without complaint. During the famine, she kills a newborn daughter to spare the family another mouth to feed. When they flee to the city, she begs with the skill of someone who has known hunger all her life. When the mob loots a wealthy house, it is O-lan who finds the pouch of jewels that changes everything. She is the reason Wang Lung succeeds. And he never thanks her. He is ashamed of her ugliness, jealous of her competence, and he takes a concubine while O-lan lies dying. Her death scene — asking, quietly, if she has been a good wife — is devastating. Her silence throughout the novel is not weakness. It is an indictment.

Wang Lung's father is a traditional patriarch who represents the old peasant world — the world before revolution, before railroads, before sons learned to read. He is frail, often hungry, and his demands on Wang Lung are absolute. Confucian filial piety demands that Wang Lung care for him, even when it is costly. During the famine, Wang Lung shares his last food with his father. When he becomes rich, he buys his father a warm coat. The old man never understands the world his son enters — the concubines, the land purchases, the idle sons — and his bewilderment is the bewilderment of a civilization dying.

Lotus Flower is the beautiful courtesan Wang Lung takes when he becomes rich. She paints her face, eats sweets, and spends his money. She is not evil — she is merely the product of a world where beautiful women are luxuries to be purchased. Her presence in the house signals the corruption that comes with wealth: the land is replaced by the teahouse, the wife by the concubine, the honest peasant by the idle rich. She represents everything Wang Lung has become.

Wang Lung's three sons represent the forces that will pull China apart. The eldest becomes a scholar — proud, bookish, useless with money. The second becomes a merchant — practical, ambitious, calculating. The youngest becomes a soldier. All three are educated, all three are disconnected from the land that built their father's fortune, and all three plan to sell it the moment their father dies. Their final words in the novel — the promise to sell the land — are devastating. Wang Lung has produced sons who will destroy everything he built. The cycle of the house has turned.

The House of Hwang is the great family whose decline mirrors Wang Lung's rise. When the novel begins, they are the wealthiest family in the region — the Old Lord Hwang lives in a great courtyard with his wives and concubines, and his slaves (including O-lan) are beneath notice. By the novel's end, the Hwangs are destitute. The Old Lord is addicted to opium, his women are wasteful, his land is sold piece by piece to pay debts. Wang Lung buys the great house itself — the slave now owns the master's courtyard. The Hwangs are what Wang Lung will become: a family undone by its own wealth.