Big Breasts and Wide Hips

Big Breasts and Wide Hips is a novel (Arcade Classics) written by Mo Yan and Howard Goldblatt.

The novel, narrated by the spoiled and frail Jintong — the ninth child (and first son) of the iron-willed protagonist mother — tells about how the mom endured every bit of hardship to give birth to, bring up and save the lives of her children and grandchildren from the end of the Qing Dynasty (1644-1911), through the Japanese invasion in the 1930s, the civil war, the "cultural revolution" (1966-76) and the post-Mao years. The female body, as the title suggests, recurs as the central image and metaphor of the book, which sheds light on the author's consciousness of maternal instinct.

The Washington Post praises it as "broad and bold … It's fiction in the grand, triple-decker tradition ... If it has flaws, they mostly are those of ambition, of reaching further and higher than the material can bear. There’s nothing wrong with that."