Cold Nights

Cold Nights strips away everything Ba Jin's earlier, more famous Family had offered as hope. Where that novel gave its trapped young people a revolutionary future to imagine their way toward, this one gives Wang Wenxuan, a gentle, ailing translator coughing blood into a cramped wartime Chongqing apartment, nothing beyond the next quarrel with his mother or his wife Shusheng, the two women whose mutual hatred makes the apartment feel smaller than its actual walls. Ba Jin sets the novel during Japan's occupation of the Chinese coast, with Chongqing swollen by refugees and the family's poverty worsened by wartime inflation, but keeps the war itself almost entirely offstage: the real siege here is domestic, waged nightly across a dinner table too small for three generations' worth of grievance.

Wang's mother and his wife each have a coherent, sympathetic case against the other, which is exactly what makes the household unlivable. His mother sacrificed for a son she still half-infantilizes and resents sharing with a wife she considers beneath him; Shusheng, younger, better educated, and employed at a bank while her tubercular husband can barely work, refuses to accept a domestic role that treats her competence as a threat to be managed rather than a resource to be valued. Wang, too weak with illness and too conflict-averse by temperament to take either side, spends the entire novel apologizing to both women at once, and Ba Jin makes that spinelessness the real weight of the book: idealism curdled, over years of compromise, into a man who can no longer act on behalf of anyone, including himself.

Ba Jin had built his early reputation, especially with Family, on fiction openly sympathetic to revolt against the traditional Chinese household, young people breaking from arranged marriages and suffocating patriarchal control to build something freer. Cold Nights, written in the war's final grinding years and published in 1947, offers no equivalent exit. Wang Wenxuan and Shusheng once shared exactly that earlier generation's hopeful, companionate ideal of marriage, meeting and falling in love as progressive university students rather than through family arrangement, and the novel's bitterness comes from watching poverty, illness, and an overbearing mother-in-law grind that ideal down to something indistinguishable from the arranged unhappiness Ba Jin's earlier fiction had set out to escape.