The Family

About

In the wealthy Gao household of 1920s Chengdu, three brothers come of age under the iron rule of their grandfather — a patriarch who arranges marriages, keeps concubines, and tolerates no dissent. Juexin, the eldest, is obedient to the point of self-destruction: he watches the woman he loves married off to another man and says nothing. Juemin, the middle brother, rebels by fleeing rather than accepting his own arranged match. Juehui, the youngest and most radical, devours the ideas of the May Fourth Movement — science, democracy, individual freedom — and ultimately leaves the family compound for Shanghai, unable to breathe inside it any longer. Ba Jin, whose pen name combines syllables from Bakunin and Kropotkin, drew on his own childhood in a wealthy Sichuan household to write what became a manifesto for a generation of Chinese youth. The feudal family as a system of control, and the terrifying, exhilarating question of what happens when you walk out the door.