years.  Wang Lung has taken Lotus as his second wife, and his sons are older--the eldest married and his wife is soon expecting a child.  Wang Lung buys the House of Hwang and decides to move his family from the farm to the courts at the big house.  The women continually fight, and Wang Lung wants peace, so he figures that moving them to separate courts in the House will be a good decision. 

After enduring through the Great Famine, Wang Lung returns to his home and purchases land from the house of Hwang with money that a rich man in the city gave him, fearing for his life during a riot there.  After some prosperous years, Wang Lung acquires great wealth; however, his wealth gives rise to his desires for more in his life.  When Wang Lung becomes infatuated with a beautiful young woman in a tea house named Lotus, he builds onto his home and brings her to his house along with the servant of the house of Hwang, Cuckoo, with whom O-lan had conflicts while see lived there as a servant, too.  Of course, with three women in the household, there are conflcts; in addition, Wang Lung's nephew desires the wife of his son--Wang Lung has caught him grabbing his daughter-in-law in the courtyard.  For this reason, and upon the insistence of his eldest son, who has become accustomed to a more sophisticated life, Wang Lung buys the Hwang house in the city, hoping to remove his son and daughter-in-law from the nephew as well as his indolent and meddling uncle.  Buying this house where he once came as a humble farmer to purchase a slave for a wife, represents a tremendous accomplishment to Wang Lung, as well.  He enjoys thinking that now he may sit where once the Old Mistress herself sat.