Plot
In Cambodia, where families were torn apart in the communist Khmer Rouge's genocidal bid to transform the country into an agrarian utopia, it is ironic that people have lost touch with the land. For a generation of children, the rice comes not from the ground, but from a sack, offloaded from the back of a United Nations relief truck.
So it is in these uncertain times, that a Cambodian family is attempting to grow rice. The father, Pouev, is concerned that the family's plot of land is shrinking, and he might not be able to grow a big enough crop.
The mother, Om, is worried for her husband, and her worst fears are confirmed when Poeuv steps on a poisonous thorn, and then, after a protracted period of being bedridden, dies of infection.
Om is unable to handle the pressure of being the head of the family, nor does she have the strength to tend to the rice fields. She turns to alcohol and gambling and is eventually locked up for her mental illness.
Responsibility for bringing in the crop and raising her six sisters falls on the oldest girl, Sakha.
Read more about this topic: Rice People
Famous quotes containing the word plot:
“Persons attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted; persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished; persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot.”
—Mark Twain [Samuel Langhorne Clemens] (1835–1910)
“Morality for the novelist is expressed not so much in the choice of subject matter as in the plot of the narrative, which is perhaps why in our morally bewildered time novelists have often been timid about plot.”
—Jane Rule (b. 1931)
““The plot thickens,” he said, as I entered.”
—Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (1859–1930)