Tao Te Ching
Dragon Seed
By Pearl Buck
Pearl Buck always portrays the dignity and basic goodness inherent in her characters. Dragon Seed portrays these qualities as they arise and adapt to the Japanese invasion of China before and at the beginning of World War II. And although she depicts the Japanese savagery in vivid detail, she doesn't fall into any kind of nationalistic partisanship; but instead, also includes Japanese characters with integrity and Chinese ones without it. Published in 1941 just before the USA became involved in the war, the Chinese situation at the time looked extremely bleak; despair and hopelessness spread throughout the country and a missing hope was needed to encourage the resistance. Buck worked to uncover and grow that confidence. In the words of one of the main characters, she described this goal, "We must give them the conviction that their sufferings and their resistances will not be in vain. The tunnel may be dark and long, but at the end there is light."
Themes
Quotes from Dragon Seed
“a certain woman known all over the world... a rich, beautiful wilful woman, who had married a warlord... That woman had taken a raw strong ignorant man and as his wife she had shaped him into a ruler whose name the whole world now knew.”
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“And do not choose a fool only because she has a pretty face. Some day he might kill a woman like that out of anger at her witlessness.”
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“And so the first moment [he] put his eyes on her she was laughing and the sunlight fell on her and he saw her like this, her hair shining black and her cheeks red and her lips red and her teeth white and her head throw back in laughter, and he was struck as though a sword had fallen across his heart.”
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“Curse all these men who come into the world to upset it with wars! and curse them for spoiling our homes and fouling our women and making our life a thing of fear and emptiness! Curse such childish men that cannot have done with fights and quarrels in childhood... Curse all women who give birth to men who make war, and curse their grandmothers and all who are their kin!”
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“Death they all knew, for each knew his end, but a kind death, a gentle death stealing like a dream upon the old or like healing upon the sick... But this new death was monstrous, a destruction beyond the mind of man.”
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“She knew that he was a man who knew what he did and why he did it, and before such a man a woman may keep silence and know that it will be well with her.”
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“So now when he looked at the woman he wanted, it was no simple lust that he felt. He wanted her in many ways to fill out his own being in its lacks, and he was pleased to think her learned and different from himself, and because he knew his own worth, he was not afraid to let her be in some ways better than himself, and he felt her like him in his deepest parts.”
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“Such men as this puppet are our worst and our true enemies, for they have betrayed themselves and us in them. The enemy from outside is a disease but the puppets are our own weakness”
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“When a man becomes a soldier, he ceases to be a man and goes back to the beast he once was in some other life.”
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“Where the woman is faithful, no evil can befall. The woman is the root and the man the tree. The tree grows only as high as the root is strong.”
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