In 1978, as the Cultural Revolution fades into history, Lei is bartered away into marriage for two cartons of cigarettes and a handful of eggs. She finds herself in the unfamiliar village of her new husband where she is met with indifference. When a disaster upends their world, Lei and her husband are forced to join China's vast wave of city-bound, rural migrants, leaving behind children whom they may never see again. Sixteen-year-old LuLu arrives in Shanghai with nothing but ambition. Denied a factory job and determined to keep her family from starving, she turns to sex work, navigating the dangers of the city's underbelly with sharp wit and a fierce will to survive. When a powerful client offers her a chance at security, LuLu faces an impossible choice: seize a future that could lift her family from poverty, or risk everything for a life on her own terms. Immersive, evocative, and impeccably detailed, And The Ancestors Sing is a sweeping, multigenerational story of sacrifice, survival, and the unbreakable pull of home.
