Plot
The story spans over 70 years, from the 1930s till the present day.
Huang Juxiang is born into a large Peranakan family where her mother is a mistress. She is gentle, beautiful and a fantastic cook. Due to a serious illness when she was 9 years old, Juxiang becomes a deaf-mute. Because of her handicap, she is ostracized by people. Right before the Japanese Occupation in Singapore, she is forced to marry Charlie Zhang, a rich Peranakan, and become his concubine. Juxiang resists the marriage and runs away from home. She then meets Yamamoto Yousuke, a young Japanese photographer, and after overcoming many obstacles, they finally get married and Juxiang gives birth to a daughter Yueniang. During the World War, Juxiang is injured and both she and her husband die, leaving behind their 8 year-old daughter.
The orphaned Yueniang eventually walks to her grandfather's house on her own. Her grandmother rejoices for her presence. Under the supervision of her grandmother, she learns to cook Peranakan dishes and sewing. She grows up looking exactly like her mother and is exceptionally beautiful. After the war, her maternal relatives who ran away to England to seek refuge there returned home. Yueniang ends up leading the life of her mother – always discriminated against, beaten up, blamed and tortured. She puts up with all this mistreatment to protect her grandmother.
Yueniang's beauty incurs jealousy from her cousins and attracts the attention of many rich Peranakans. However, she only has eyes for the penniless driver Chen Xi, who lies he has 10 younger brothers and sisters to look after. Chen Xi actually comes from an educated and wealthy family. Yueniang's kindness, purity and persistence move Chen Xi and he falls deeply in love with her, and hides his identity to be with Yueniang. Unfortunately, their relationship is filled with many obstacles and difficulties. Under pressure from his family, Chen Xi is forced to marry Yueniang's cousin, Zhenzhu, instead. Yueniang is then married to a butcher, Liu Yidao. Many things happen after this and it is revealed that the Huangs use misunderstandings and mistakes for granted and resort to off-board measures.
Yueniang is unwilling to accept the fact that her life is always manipulated by others and decides to end her own life. Yueniang's strong personality impresses Liu Yidao and they become sworn siblings instead. Yueniang decides to choose her own path in life. She begins learning how to run a business and in the process, she is framed and ousted from her business. Despite the odds, she manages save her declining family business. Soon, she marries the lawyer, Paul. She has no children as she has two miscarriages. So, she adopts Yuzhu's son as her own and names him Zuye. Zuye has two sons and a daughter. The daughter's name is Angela, in the present time. She has her business and sells cosmetics from overseas. However, Yueniang soon succumbs to intestinal cancer.
Read more about this topic: The Little Nyonya
Famous quotes containing the word plot:
“After I discovered the real life of mothers bore little resemblance to the plot outlined in most of the books and articles I’d read, I started relying on the expert advice of other mothers—especially those with sons a few years older than mine. This great body of knowledge is essentially an oral history, because anyone engaged in motherhood on a daily basis has no time to write an advice book about it.”
—Mary Kay Blakely (20th century)
“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)
“James’s great gift, of course, was his ability to tell a plot in shimmering detail with such delicacy of treatment and such fine aloofness—that is, reluctance to engage in any direct grappling with what, in the play or story, had actually “taken place”Mthat his listeners often did not, in the end, know what had, to put it in another way, “gone on.””
—James Thurber (1894–1961)