"The Good Earth," A Great Book and Movie

Many of you may have never heard of Luise Rainer, but she was the first person to win back to back Academy Awards, winning the Oscars for Best Actress in 1936 and 1937. Luise Rainer lived in Germany (born in Düsseldorf, and she was Jewish), Austria, the United States and Britain. She passed away December 30, 2014 at the age of 104. Her second Academy Award came for her performance in "The Good Earth," a black and white film based on the book of the same title by Nobel Prize and Pulitzer Prize winning author Pearl S. Buck, whose family lived in China for decades beginning in the late 1800s, thus giving Ms. Buck a great deal of first hand knowledge about the Chinese people she wrote about. Pearl Buck was born in Hillsboro, a little town in West Virginia.

The book and film have several parallels to China's society at the time, like the tethers of the past and traditions, but the attempts to change to a more modern society. The film is pretty faithful to the book, but there are some differences. The story centers around the lives of Wang Lung (played by one of my favorite actors, Paul Muni) and his wife O-Lan (played by Luise Rainer in her Oscar winning performance). Together the two work very hard to make their small farm successful, all the while raising their children. Success brings greed, and Wang Lung begins to buy more and more land. A drought wipes away the material wealth accumulated by Wang Lung, and the family has to move away to try to find work so they can survive. They eventually return home to successfully work their land and the years pass. The couple's sons grow up and get good educations, but they feel no special connection to the land which has provided for their family. O-Lan, worn out by a life of hard work and child-rearing, is shunned by the again successful Wang Lung, who takes a young dancer as his second wife, but she proceeds to "get involved" with one of the couple's sons, causing great turmoil in the family. A swarm of locusts descends upon the land, threatening to destroy the crops. The family unites to drive the locusts away, but O-Lan is dying. Wang Lung sees how much she has meant to his life.

If you've never read the book, nor seen the movie, please do both. You will not regret it. The movie is available on DVD. A "Word History" is below the picture.

Photo is of the 2006 Warner Brothers Home Video DVD

WORD HISTORY:
Ketchup-This word, also at times rendered as "catsup," ^ comes from one of the Chinese dialects, perhaps Cantonese, where "ke-zhap/ke-jiap," meant "tomato sauce." Whether this word was then picked up by English traders in the early 1700s directly from the Chinese version, is uncertain. Another possibility is, several of the Chinese dialects, all part of the Sino-Tibetan language family, ^^ have similar words, but some mean "fish sauce/brine," which then was borrowed by Malay, a southeast Asian language, but with the fish brine meaning. The leap from fish brine to tomato ketchup is a bit tough for me, so I lean much more toward the borrowing from Cantonese.

^ When I was a kid in the 1950s and 1960s, "catsup" was a fairly common usage, but as the Heinz brand came to dominate the market, their use of "ketchup" also began to prevail. To be quite honest, I'm not sure the last time I heard the word "catsup."

^^ Sino-Tibetan languages are widely spoken in parts of Asia and it is a language family just as is Indo European, the family to which the Germanic languages belong, and to which English belongs.