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Quotes From The Road By Heh-Lan

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1. "She is with child already." […] The old man blinked for a moment and then comprehended, and cackled with laughter. "Heh-heh-heh—" he called out to his daughter-in-law as she came, "so the harvest is in sight” (31)! The author reminds us how we all basically came from the earth by comparing a harvest and the pregnancy of O-Lan. This shows how big of an impact the earth had on these characters.
2. “There was never anything hanging from the rafters in his uncle's crumbling old house. But in his own there was even a leg of pork which he had bought from his neighbor Ching when he killed his pig that looked as though it were sickening for a disease […] In the midst of all this plenty they sat in the house, therefore, when the winds of winter …show more content…

"I was sold," she answered very slowly. "I was sold to a great house so that my parents could return to their home. “And would you sell the child, therefore?" "If it were only I, she would be killed before she was sold... the slave of slaves was I! But a dead girl brings nothing. I would sell this girl for you—to take you back to the land” (117). To O-Lan the land is more important than her own daughter’s happiness. However O-Lan’s reasoning is that the happiness of many lives is much more important than the happiness of one person’s life. So she is willing to sell her daughter in return of their land. It is tragic how many people had to put their own children into slavery so they themselves could …show more content…

“Now Wang Lung had chosen a good place in his fields under a date tree upon a hill to set the graves, and Ching had the graves dug and ready and a wall of earth made about the graves, and there was space within the walls for the body of Wang Lung and for each of his sons and their wives, and there was space for sons' sons, also. This land Wang Lung did not begrudge, even though it was high land and good for wheat, because it was a sign of the establishment of his family upon their own land. Dead and alive they would rest upon their own land” (267). Again the novel compares the earth to human life. Very much like the seasons the lives of humans are always cyclical. After the death of O-Lan and Ching there will be another set of people in Wang Lung’s family and this will go on for generations much like the seasons of the

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