Once settled back on the land and having grown prosperous, the family faces the struggles of the nouveau riche: a son ashamed of their bumpkin roots, Wang Lung's discontent with his plebeian wife driving him to take a concubine, fears of good fortune being snatched away by jealous spirits (or family members). On the streets, Wang Lung witnesses class tensions that boil over into a riot-during which O-lan manages to multiply their fortune. O-lan’s steady hand helps during high times, when Wang Lung purchases land from the great house, and during low, when famine drives the family south to a big city where they live as beggars and Wang Lung runs a rickshaw. O-lan quickly proves invaluable: cooking fancy cakes like those she served to the local lord and lady, sewing clothes, and working the fields alongside her husband, stopping only to bear children. Illustrator Bertozzi ( Becoming Andy Warhol, 2016, etc.) adapts Buck’s ( The Eternal Wonder, 2013, etc.) Pulitzer Prize–winning novel of a man’s fluctuating fortunes and existential crises in early-20th-century China.įor years, farmer Wang Lung has worked the soil, pulling forth bountiful harvests, and now the sale of his excess crops has funded a fateful purchase: a slave from the great house in town to be his wife.
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