Word: jintong
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Dates: during 2005-2005
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...girl cultivates a succession of other dolts and losers, who give her seven consecutive daughters?named Laidi (Brother Coming), Pandi (Brother Anticipated), Niandi (Brother Wanted), and so on. After a coupling with Pastor Malloy, an ineffectual Swedish missionary, she finally produces a son, yellow-haired Jintong (Golden Boy), who is the book's narrator. Selfish and indulgent, Jintong remains breast-fed until well into his teens. "Do you plan to suck until you reduce me to a piece of dry kindling?" asks his exasperated mother...
...tale gallops through the birth of the Chinese republic, the Japanese occupation, the civil war, the Great Leap Forward, the Cultural Revolution and the money-obsessed Deng Xiaoping era, Jintong's feisty sisters are killed off by war and other masculine misdeeds. And, as in other Mo Yan novels, peasants suffer and bleed while Communist functionaries strut, blunder and suck the country dry as Jintong's mother's breasts. The lad survives, though not without 15 years in prison, three in a mental institution and nearly a lifetime in thrall to his mammary fixation. "Whenever I saw a beautiful breast...
...born Guan Moye?his pen name means "Don't Speak"?isn't afraid to speak his mind, though sometimes to the point of numbness. In case you didn't notice, Big Breasts' women are strong, its men?and the society they run?are, like Jintong, "useless, worse than useless." That would be a subversive message in China if it weren't for a familiar proverb favored by Mao Zedong: "Women hold up half the sky." With Mo Yan and his sprawling, energetic novel pleading their case, they may finally get some credit...
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