In Rice, Su Tong transports the reader back to pre-war China - an already-violent time in China's twentieth-century history - to tell a story of a family destroying itself. Five Dragons is a poor country boy who seeks his fortune in the big city and eventually is taken in by the Fengs - a wealthy family who run a rice emporium; however, the family do not hide their hatred and disdain for Dive Dragons, so his own hatred towards them grows towards them and sets in motion the rest of the novel.

Su Tong creates novel where none of the central characters are even the slightest bit redeemable - all are bitter, hate-filled, and cruel to each other - there is no triumph of good or redemption for anyone. In spite of this, the novel is extremely compelling: it draws the reader in almost voyeuristically to witness the downfall of the self-destructive Feng clan. Su Tong creates chilling and cruel characters that are still realistic, for they inhabit an equally cruel time.

This is a fine debut novel by Su Tong: he portrays the setting and the characters ably and reveals the lack of black and white in history and in life. ( )

Su Tong has written a weird kind of Chinese History/Neorealist/Noir fusion novel with Rice. Sounds interesting, right? Unfortunately, it's not. The characters so unredeemably horrid, the story so consistently depressing, it's a squalid, mean little book and if there's a point hiding out in there, I couldn't find it under the rapes, murders, adultery, and theft.

Five Dragons has fled Maple-Poplar village after a devastating flood. He winds up begging on the doorstep of the Feng clan's rice emporium before Master Feng takes him in. But the Emporium is not a happy one; Feng is a miser, his daughter Cloud Weave sleeping with the local gangster and his other daughter is a shrill harpy. But Five Dragons is no Tiny Tim, himself. Ambitious, resentful and misogynist, the only thing he loves is rice, and he's determined to make the emporium his own, destroying everything else in the process.

What to say about this book? It's an ugly story about ugly people. Tong's prose is short and clean, but to what purpose? The people he's writing about are, if not one dimensional, about as shallow as bed pans. Their miserable travails span about forty years or so, so a lot happens during the course of the novel, it's just not very interesting and it is _unremittingly_ brutal. There isn't a single pleasant person in the whole book, and yet somehow everybody gets an end even worse than what they deserve.

Maybe there's some kind of deft social criticism here that my ignorance of Chinese literature prevents me from seeing. There is some, but it's so very heavy-handed, no light-and-dark, no modulation. "Rice is life, but look at the irony of all this death and depravity! " If there's anything more I couldn't pick it up, and anyway I like my deconstructions to stand as texts by themselves, and this one most assuredly didn't. I struggle to see who this would appeal to. An easy read, but like a high-fat meal, you're gonna feel bad with every bite. ( )

In het China van de jaren dertig wordt een weesjongen opgenomen in het gezin van een rijsthandelaar, waar zijn wrok jegens het bestaan leidt tot een rampzalige cyclus van geweld ( )

Well-written but bleak nest of vipers family saga of the early 20th Century in southern China. ( )

In my World Lit class as a freshman in college, each professor taught the set curriculum plus one book of their choosing. One of my professors chose this.

I can't be sure if I would make more of the writing itself today -- I often find translated prose flat -- but I can say with certainty that the characters are uniformly unappealing, the plot brutal, and many scenes nauseating. I remember the book mainly for its revulsion factor and because I wondered so intensely why it was chosen.

I believe the book was trying to depict the inhumanity that harsh conditions (flood and famine in 1930's China) can foster, but if there were greater goals in mind than cheap shock and visceral disgust, it failed with this reader and in this translation. ( )