The Good Earth by Pearl S. Buck

lying upon his bed and sleeping easily into death, someone came across the fields—men walking toward him. He continued to sit as they drew near and he saw that one was his uncle and with him were three men whom he did not know.
    “I have not seen you these many days,” called his uncle with loud and affected good humor. And as he drew nearer he said in the same loud voice, “And how well you have fared! And your father, my elder brother, he is well?”
    Wang Lung looked at his uncle. The man was thin, it is true, but not starved, as he should be. Wang Lung felt in his own shriveled body the last remaining strength of life gathering into a devastating anger against this man, his uncle.
    “How you have eaten—how you have eaten!” he muttered thickly. He thought nothing of these strangers or of any courtesy. He saw only his uncle with flesh on his bones, still. His uncle opened wide his eyes and threw up his hands to the sky.
    “Eaten!” he cried. “If you could see my house! Not a sparrow even could pick up a crumb there. My wife—do you remember how fat she was? How fair and fat and oily her skin? And now she is like a garment hung on a pole—nothing but the poor bones rattling together in her skin. And of our children only four are left—the three little ones gone—gone—and as for me, you see me!” He took the edge of his sleeve and wiped the corner of each eye carefully.
    “You have eaten,” repeated Wang Lung dully.
    “I have thought of nothing but of you and of your father, who is my brother,” retorted his uncle briskly, “and now I prove it to you. As soon as I could, I borrowed from these good men in the town a little food on the promise that with the strength it gave me I would help them to buy some of the land about our village. And then I thought of your good land first of all, you, the son of my brother. They have come to buy your land and to give you money—food—life!” His uncle, having said these words, stepped back and folded his arms with a flourish of his dirty and ragged robes.
    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 to in his 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