Read Dragon Seed: The Story of China at War for Free Online

them think it.
    “Ah, my wife’s brother,” he cried when Lao Er came in. “Sit down—sit down!”
    He raised himself a little, but not more than he needed to do for the younger brother of his wife, and he bellowed for her to come.
    “Here is your second brother, mother of my son!” he bawled.
    She came running out, her coat loose at the neck and her round face cheerful as it always was.
    “There you are, brother,” she shouted at Lao Er, though he was only a few feet away, “and how are the old ones and all the others? And why does my sister-in-law never come to see me? Is she with child yet? Why, what a puny man you are!”
    She threw out these words one after the other like bubbles from her full red mouth, laughing between them and with them until words and laughter were all mixed together. Then she ran back and brought out some foreign cakes such as came from the shop and she poured out fresh tea for him.
    Then Lao Er told all the news and toyed with the child and listened to his sister’s husband tell how good business could be if only the students would not preach night and day against the buying and selling of foreign goods, since left to themselves people never asked where goods came from, and what had business to do with such matters as students and love of country. When all had been said then he could put the matter of the book to his brother-in-law.
    Now this brother-in-law, Wu Lien by name, could read because he was a city man and his father and grandfather had been city men before him. But each in his generation had taken for his wife a woman from outside the city walls and this was because women in the city after a generation or two grow soft and sleep long in the day and sit late at night gambling with bamboo pieces, and will not suckle their own children and are too easily willing for their husbands to take concubines. And so Wu Lien had read plenty of books in his youth, and even now he read them often when the day was hot in summer or when in winter it was cold in the shop and the best place to sit was beside a brazier of coals in his own room. He put the child down from his knee and spoke gravely as a man ought when he speaks of letters.
    “There are books for every need,” he said. “It must first be asked why the book is wanted and who is to read it. If a man wishes to read it secretly and for his own private pleasure there are books for that. If he is tied to his house and cannot travel and he longs to travel, there are books for that. If he likes to think of poison and murder and dares not commit such deeds himself there are books for that. For what is your book wanted?”
    Lao Er grinned half in shame and then made up his mind to tell the truth.
    “Why, here it is, brother,” he said. “I married my woman thinking her like any other one, and now I find out she can read and yearns after a book. She cut off her long hair to sell, even, that she might buy a book and without telling me why when she did it. So, instead of a pair of earrings I had promised her, I said I would buy a book for her, and that is why I am here today. But how can I tell one book from another?”
    “You should have asked her what she wanted,” Wu Lien said and Lao Er agreed.
    “But I never thought of such a difference in books,” he said.
    Wu Lien pondered the matter a moment and then he turned to his own wife who sat there listening to all this with her mouth open. “You are only a woman, mother of my son,” he said, “and if you could read what would you like to read?”
    The idea of reading set her to laughing behind the hand she always put in front of her face when she laughed because her teeth were black.
    “I never thought of it,” she said. But when she saw her city husband look at her with impatience on his fat face she took her hand away and made herself grave and considered what he had asked.
    “When I was a child in the village,” she said, “I used to hear the old one-eyed man who told stories