How we cite our quotes: (Chapter. Paragraph)
Quote #4
It was the especial pleasure of each driver, seeing how strange Wang Lung and his family were, to crack his whip just as he passed them, and the sharp explosive cut of the air made them leap up, and seeing them leap the drivers guffawed, and Wang Lung was angry when this happened two and three times and he turned away to see where he could put his hut. (11.16)
How do you think all the drivers know that Wang Lung is just a country bumpkin? How do you think these city folk would fare on Wang Lung's farm?
Quote #5
Here with the coming and going of well-fed people upon the streets, with meat and vegetables in the markets, with fish swimming in the tubs in the fish market, surely it was not possible for a man and his children to starve. It was not as it was in their own land, where even silver could not buy food because there was none. (11.38)
Wang Lung thinks it must be impossible to starve in the city, but we're not so sure. There’s a lot of wealth, but it's only for a few people. That, Shmoopers, is called economic inequality, and Wang Lung's about to see what that's all about firsthand. (Why, though, is this inequality so much worse in the city?)
Quote #6
So it was that […] Wang Lung and his wife and children were like foreigners in this Southern city. It is true that the people who went about the streets had black hair and eyes as Wang Lung and all his family had, and as all did in the country where Wang Lung was born, and it is true that if one listened to the language of these Southerners it could be understood, if with difficulty. (12.3)
Wang Lung's life back on the farm is so different from his life in the South that he might as well be in a different country, with people speaking a different language. Are the differences at least partly the result of the fact that Wang Lung and the city people have different relationships with the earth itself?