Big Breasts and Wide Hips

Born in 1900, Shangguan Lu grows up amid the violence surrounding the Boxer crisis and later marries into a poor rural family in Northeast Gaomi Township. She gives birth to eight daughters and one son, Shangguan Jintong, whose lifelong dependence on his mother contrasts with the resilience of the women around him. As husbands, lovers and children are drawn into banditry, missionary life, resistance and political struggle, Lu repeatedly risks herself to keep the fragmented household alive.

The family’s fortunes move through Japanese invasion, civil war, Communist victory, the Cultural Revolution and the post-Mao market era. Mo Yan uses Jintong’s unreliable, frequently grotesque perspective to place childbirth, hunger, sexuality and maternal survival against the ideological transformations of twentieth-century China. The result is both a multigenerational family chronicle and a dark satire of systems that demand sacrifice while leaving women to absorb the consequences.