Kwai-lan is a young Chinese woman from an aristocratic family in pre-revolutionary China, who narrates both the adventure of her own marriage and the family "tragedy" of her brother with a foreign woman from the West.

Pearl Buck, who was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1938, describes the customs and traditions of feudal China in the most authentic way. With a pen that is sometimes vivid and sometimes epic, the author culminates her fiction with the triumph of the modern way of life over the prejudices and superstitions that plagued China.