Family

Old Master Gao presides over the Gao household with an authority the novel treats as a small-scale model of the entire Confucian family order the May Fourth generation was arguing against: arranged marriages decided without consulting the couple, absolute deference demanded from every junior member, and a double standard that excuses the patriarch's own conduct while policing everyone else's. Ba Jin gives that authority three grandsons to test it against rather than one: Juexin, the eldest, who absorbs every injustice out of a sense of filial duty he never questions; Juemin, who resists selectively and carefully; and Juehui, the youngest, who rejects the household's legitimacy outright almost from the novel's first pages.

Mingfeng, a maidservant Juehui loves without ever being able to consider marrying across the household's rigid class line, is informed she is to be given as a concubine to an elderly family friend, and the household's total indifference to what this will cost her, set directly against Juehui's real feeling for her, measures exactly how little a 'progressive' grandson's private conscience is allowed to weigh against the family's economic convenience.

Ruijue, Juexin's wife, is forced during her pregnancy into confinement outside the house under a superstition that a woman in labor might pollute the dying grandfather's spirit, and the resulting unattended birth kills her. Juexin's inability to defy his family even to protect his own wife is Ba Jin's harshest single judgment in the novel: the dutiful son's prized virtue turns out to be one more working part of the machinery that keeps killing the women closest to him.

Ba Jin grew up inside a large, multigenerational gentry household in Chengdu strikingly similar to the Gao family he depicts, and Family, the first novel of his Torrent trilogy, was serialized in the late 1920s and published in 1933 to enormous popularity among young Chinese readers living through identical arrangements of their own. For a generation caught in the same argument between filial obligation and personal autonomy that Ba Jin gives his three brothers, the novel functioned less as fiction to be admired than as a document of permission, evidence that leaving was a thinkable, describable choice.