The Good Earth Recovered
2010-06-05
Author：Kongjian Yu
Source："Return of Landscape" Edited by Donata Valentien by Jovis publishers at Berlin 2010(page:225-233)
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A century ago, the German architect and photographer Ernst Boerschmann (1873–1949) was amazed by the poetic and picturesque agricultural landscapes he experienced during his three years traveling in China between 1906 and 1909. These picturesque landscapes were in authentic Chinese vernacular, the “Good Earth,” both productive and beautiful because they were the products of the art of survival. But many of the verdant rural landscapes Ernst Boerschmann saw are gone forever and those that remain are disappearing. The overwhelming speed and extent of urbanization and industrialization have irrevocably altered the landscape of China. In the past twelve years, from 1996 to 2008, China has ceded 7 percent of her agricultural land to urban development. At the same time, nationwide movements of “Modernization” and the “New Socialism Countryside Movement” have made “rural” and “agricultural” synonymous with “backward.” Each year more than ten million peasants across China leave their rural homes searching for a “better” life in the city, leaving millions of hectares of fertile land uncultivated or eagerly selling it off for development and industrial use. Currently, China owns only 10 percent of the world’s arable land but must feed 22 percent of the world’s population. With China’s arable land per capita at approximately 40 percent of the world average, the entire country is on the brink of a land and food crisis, combined with the existing energy and environmental crisis.
The land ethic and aesthetic appreciation for productivity had been highly valued by the agricultural population and was the backbone sustaining the massive Chinese population prior to the twentieth century; however this has been irresistibly challenged by the unprecedented process of urbanization. Throughout the centuries, the values of the common Chinese people were considered simple and ignorant and looked down upon by the higher culture of the urban classes. Anything associated with rural life or agriculture was considered tasteless, rustic, and inferior. Today’s massive immigration movement from the rural to the urban environment has led to the adoption of expensive, “urbane” tastes that have generated overwhelming aesthetic appreciation of ornamental and unproductive landscapes and have ultimately become benchmarks for the newly citified residents, especially the parvenus.
The American writer Pearl Buck vividly portrays the process of urbanizing and effectual denaturing of beauty in her novel about Chinese village life, The Good Earth, written almost eight decades ago in 1931. We meet Wang Lung, a poor peasant farmer who treats the land as his own flesh and blood, more precious than gold and silver, regarding it as the one thing that can never be taken away and that he shall never sell. The Good Earth may not always be generous because droughts and floods will return, but Wang Lung’s reverence, along with his knowledge and skill of working the earth and water, will sustain him. He is humble, honest, and frugal, dedicating his life to his fields. His passion for land and its productivity extends to his appreciation for women with the same strengths, namely the Big Foot slave O-lan from the local aristocrat’s Great House, whom he marries. O-lan is down to earth, hardworking, and an extraordinarily capable woman. She is also very productive, giving birth to three sons and two daughters, and even begging on the streets to save her family from starving. With such strong capabilities and his Big Foot wife supporting and working shoulder to shoulder with him in the beloved fields, Wang Lung prospers.
Wang Lung eventually becomes so wealthy that he no longer labors himself but instead hires farmers; he can even afford to leave his land fallow and buy from others. When he alienates himself from the land, he begins to look down on common people—forgetting he once was one—and to feel superior because of his good fortune. For the first time in his life, Wang Lung looks critically at O-lan and finds fault with her. He realizes that she is “a dull and common creature…her features were too large…and her feet were large and spreading.”These features had been essential for O-lan to work in the field and beg on the street, but it is her healthy and productive natural features that now make the newly rich Wang Lung feel ashamed.
Wang Lung betrays his true self when he desires to become “urbane.” During his first visit to the tea house in town, he is insulted by the waitress who calls him “the farmer!” Ashamed of his rural roots, he vows to show everyone that he is more than a “farmer” and to prove his lordliness and wealth; Wang Lung leaves his farm behind and rents the Great House as his family’s new home in the town. Wang Lung meets the “beautiful” Lotus Flower, marries her as his concubine and brings her to stay in the Great House. In contrast to his rural and hard working wife O-lan, the gentrified Lotus Flower is delicate, with a slender body like bamboo, small hands with long nails, and tiny bound feet. Because of her exquisite beauty she is prevented from working or having children. Wang Lung’s urbanized and unproductive nature becomes the measure of his social “success.” His material tastes have shifted from rural to the gentrified urbane, including in women, from the rustic Big Foot woman to the delicate and Little Foot women he uses as ornaments. Lotus Flower transforms him from a simple farmer to a sophisticated urbanite, and his waning desire for health and productivity becomes his sickness.
But the story does not end. Having suffered and lost her husband’s love for having big natural feet, O-lan—the source of Wang Lung’s health and prosperity—binds the feet of her daughter and the cycle of “from rustic to urbane” begins again.
For almost a thousand years, young Chinese girls were forced to bind their feet in the hope of marrying sophisticated urbanites, since their natural “big” feet were associated with provincial people and rustic life.
At first, foot binding was only the privilege of the upper class. The practice flourished until the collapse of the Qing Dynasty in 1911. Respected intellectuals wrote poems and created paintings to praise these artificially tiny feet, which, by today’s standards, would be considered grotesque and abused. Painters portrayed classic Chinese beauties with small feet, flat breasts, tiny waists, and white skin in stark contrast to strong and healthy peasant girls. Beautiful was defined as ornamental, delicate, and necessarily unproductive, yet was held in higher regard than the “crude” survival-oriented processes of nature.
This definition of beauty and its connection with high-status urbanites is not unique to Chinese culture. Pre-Hispanic Mayan priests and nobles deformed their children’s bodies in a quest for higher social status. Their “beautiful” features—sloping foreheads, almond-shaped eyes, large noses, and drooping lower lips—today seem as grotesque as bound feet.
Throughout history, the urban elite worldwide has maintained the right to define beauty as part of its assertion of superiority and power. Bound feet and deformed heads are among thousands of cultural practices that have rejected nature’s inherent goals of health, survival, and productivity in attempting to elevate city sophisticates above simple rural people.
The evolution of the Chinese idea of beauty has affected ideas of urbanity and refined taste in landscape design. Farmers managed living landscapes using the survival skills passed on by their ancestors through much trial and error. Generations adapted to the threat and consequences of natural disasters—floods, droughts, earthquakes, landslides, and erosion—while honing their abilities in field grading, irrigation, and food production. Efforts to survive were what engendered the skills and artistry of rendering the landscape productive and durable. People found this land beautiful because it had the order and integration with natural processes that resulted from working with the given.
But as China has become more urbanized and “civilized,” the vernacular landscape has been gradually deprived of its productivity, its ability to support and give life, and its natural beauty. Like the peasant girls whose foot-binding crippled them, the vernacular landscape has gradually evolved into artificial decorative gardens and been hailed as exquisite beauty by the elite urban upper class. In an overwhelming urge to appear “urbane” and sophisticated, the aesthetics of uselessness, leisure, and adornment have crippled the land.
One of the first expressions of civilization were designed landscapes and gardens, whose different cultures had roots in agricultural landscapes: Islamic gardens evolved from dry fields that required irrigation; Italian terraced gardens originated as vineyards adapting to steep slopes; picturesque English landscapes began as pastures; and Chinese gardens were influenced by agricultural farms. However, the owners and designers of urban gardens did not appreciate the productivity of vernacular agricultural landscapes because they were associated with the working class; instead what has been imitated and replicated are the forms and patterns deprived of their original function as productive landscape. For over two thousand years, ornamental plants and artificial rocks were used by emperors and nobles to create an illusion of the Good Earth masked in the pursuit of indolent pleasures. Irrigation ditches and ponds were transformed into ornamental water features and fish farms were stocked with aberrant ornamental goldfish. Productive Big Foot green plants were replaced with delicate, ornamental golden-leafed plants; vegetables and herbs were displaced with ostentatious peonies and roses. Healthy trees were pruned, twisted, and dwarfed for bonsai. Only “delicate” Little Foot rocks were displayed and peach trees unable to bear fruit were preferred and planted. Like tiny-foot women, these ornaments produced little and survived only with a constant maintenance regime of watering, pruning, weeding, and artificial reproduction. Most of the “great gardens” in history decayed soon after their owners passed on, and those that survive or have been revived today require endless maintenance.
Wang Lung’s Dream and the Challenge of Survival
The massive movement of the population from rural to urban areas is a recent phenomenon. Prior to the 1950s, China’s urbanization was typically enabled by agriculture surpluses, with the urbanization rate barely approaching 10 percent (13 percent in 1950). By the end of 2007, approximately 43 percent of the 1.3 billion Chinese were urbanites. Each year in the past decade alone, roughly 1 percent of the nation’s 1.3 billion people left their Good Earth behind to live in cities. Armed with their sleeping bags and luggage, each of them carries on Wang Lung’s dream: “I am not a rural bumpkin, I will be urbane and gentrified, and I have fine taste for Little Foot and I am going to own big house in the town.”
The Chinese economic reform has created hundreds and thousands of nouveau riche in the past three decades. Each year, Forbes magazine publishes the list of wealthiest people in China; unfortunately, none earned their wealth by employing Wang Lung’s hardworking ethics in the fields. Ironically, more than 50 percent of the wealthiest people in China are real-estate developers who became wealthy by buying land from the farmers and selling housing to the new urbanites. Similar to the Wang Lung we know, these new “Wang Lung urbanites” are eager to express their social status and exhibit their “gentrified” tastes, setting themselves apart from their rural roots. Dexter Roberts and Frederik Balfour observed:
“Wang Zhongjun is loaded and happy to flaunt it. He wears Prada shoes, Versace jackets, and a Piaget watch. He smokes Cohiba cigars from Cuba. He drives a white Mercedes-Benz SL600, a silver BMW Z8, and a red Ferrari 360. His art collection includes hundreds of sculptures and paintings. Value: $30 million or so. Home sweet home is a 22,000 square-foot mansion north of Beijing with antique British and French furniture, a billiard room with bar, and an indoor pool. When he tires of swimming, Wang can head to his stable (annual upkeep: $500,000) of sixty horses from Ireland, France, and Kentucky…”
The superficial values generated by wealthy and the need for social approval has prevailed. The aestheticized and gentrified landscapes defined by the privileged urban minority prior to the twentieth century are now eagerly sought by the mass population, whose peasant ancestors struggled for generations to become city dwellers. These migrants, just like the peasant Big Foot girls, are eager to “bind their feet,” to gentrify themselves physically and mentally. Contemporary Chinese landscape architecture, architecture, and urban design simply reflect the aspirations of ordinary people to become sophisticates.
Before the recent swarm to cities, ornamental landscape and civic design in China projected a superior identity of the privileged urban class through European Baroque landscape designs and Chinese traditional ornamental gardening. These elite spaces have now developed into new urban settlements and public spaces. Post-vernacular inherited values about urbanity changed not only the city, but also the entire landscape throughout China. Rough and wild Chinese rivers have been channelized and lined with marble. Rustic wetlands have been replaced with ornate fountains and ornamental ponds. “Messy” native shrubs have been uprooted and replaced by exotic horticultural ornaments; native grasses have been replaced by tidy exotic lawns consuming more than one cubic meter of water per square meter each year in Beijing and throughout most of China.
In the current Chinese City Beautiful Movement (or rather City Cosmetic Movement), the arts of urban design, landscape, and architecture, guided by the Little-Foot aesthetic,have lost their way and succumbed to banal and conventional style with meaningless wild forms and exotic grandeur. Excessive use of foreign materials and environmental assets has accelerated degradation of the environment. Two thirds of China’s 662 cities are short of water; 75 percent of the nation’s surface water is polluted, and 64 percent of cities’ aquifers are also polluted. A third of the national population is threatened with drinking polluted water and almost half of wetlands have disappeared in the past 50 years in China.
How will we survive in the future? What values do we hold as designers? Both global and local conditions compel us to embrace an art enmeshed with fostering survival, promoting land stewardship, and making ornament subservient to those goals. We need a new aesthetics of big feet—beautiful big feet, and we need to recover the Good Earth and practice landscape architecture as the Art of Survival.
Back to The Good Earth
In The Good Earth, Pearl Buck reminds us that the land deserves respect and that those who respect the land will prosper, and those who do not, will eventually deteriorate. Buck compares and contrasts Wang Lung’s prosperity to the Hwang family’s decline based on the Hwang family’s disrespect for their land. Wang Lung’s religion is based on worshipping the earth deity. Wang Lung represents millions of hardworking Chinese peasants who respect and believe in the land. I myself remember how my father presented the very first bowl of rice to the earth deity with full respect and thankfulness. But for the rich Hwang family, life is different. They hire laborers and buy slaves to work for them, withdrawing from their land and losing sight of their fortune’s origins. As the Chinese saying goes, fortunes are “too easy to come, and will be too easy to go.” The Hwangs spend their time engaged in idle pleasures, buying luxury items and indulging in opium and alcohol and also destroying the family’s morals by spending money for hedonistic pleasures.
Wang Lung also fell into the trap of corruption because of accumulation of wealth; he became more and more like the Hwang from whom he bought the land and the Great House. But his roots as a farmer eventually bring him back to the land. At the end of the novel, the old and lost Wang Lung leaves his big house. He returns to his land to recover his Good Earth, reconnecting him with the land once again. He has learned his lesson, and this time, he takes a BigFoot girl, Pear Blossom, with him as company.
The Good Earth is a memory and prophecy. After three decades of rapid development, hundreds and thousands of Chinese have sought Wang Lung’s dream of becoming rich and urbanized. They have not followed Wang Lung’s hardworking ethic, but rather they take the opposite path and followed his sons—who wanted to sell and leave the land. Wang Lung feared this and as expressed in his last warning:
This project declares the position that the landscape architect holds and demonstrates the intention of rebuilding the connection between the land and people—especially the younger generation who have been estranged from the land due to the urbanization—and of raising the awareness of the current food crisis and land ethic. This working landscape is a clear example of the new Big Foot aesthetic—unbound and productive but beautiful. It is a call for the return to the Good Earth and a call for the rescue of the wealth-corrupted society that has been alienated from the land.
