Rice

About

Five Dragons, a starving wanderer from the provinces, arrives in a city family's home during the famine of 1930s China. The family takes him in. He repays their generosity by consuming everything they have — their food, their women, their dignity, their future. His appetite is not just for survival but for domination, and the novel tracks his rise with the fascinated horror of watching a virus work. Su Tong uses rice — growing it, stealing it, hoarding it, weaponizing it — as the novel's governing metaphor. In a society where hunger defines every relationship, the person who controls the grain controls everything. Five Dragons understands this instinctively, and his exploitation of it is both monstrous and logical. A novel about the most basic human drive — hunger — and the discovery that the appetite for power is the one that never fills.