Second paragraph of third chapter:

“No woman?” he asked in consternation. He was beginning now to be accustomed to these conversations with her in which her part was little more than a movement of head or hand, or at most an occasional word dropped unwillingly from her wide mouth. He had even come to feel no lack in such conversing. “But it will be odd with only two men in the house!” he continued. “My mother had a woman from the village. I know nothing of these affairs. Is there none in the great house, no old slave with whom you were friends, who could come?”

The best-selling novel of the early 1930s, telling the story of Wang Lung, a Chinese farmer who goes from poverty to wealth, his two wives, his evil uncle, and his various children, one of whom is disabled and requires full-time care (as did one of the author’s own children). I am sure that there are many errors of detail, but its heart is very much in the right place, confronting its American and European readers with a vast and ancient culture where the foreigners are probably the bad guys, and where power is shifting rapidly away from the old rulers. I found it gripping and efficiently written. You can get it here.

It would be interesting to know how it is regarded in China, if at all. Its Chinese Wikipedia entry has just a dry plot summary. (Japanese Wikipedia discusses the possibility that it was written as anti-Japanese propaganda.)

The book itself won the Pulitzer Prize in 1932, and Pearl S. Buck won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1938 on the back of this and its two sequels. It bubbled to the top of three of my lists simultaneously – top book acquired so far this year, top unread book by a woman and top non-sf fiction. Next on those piles are The Mysterious Island, by Jules Verne (though I may not get all the way through it, it sounds rather dull); The Word for World is Forest, by Ursula K. Le Guin; and On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, by Ocean Vuong.