Family

Ba Jin's landmark novel of youth in revolt is set in the great feudal Gao household of 1920s Chengdu, where three grandsons chafe against the tyranny of the patriarch and the weight of the old ways, and the young women around them are destroyed by them. The real city frames it: the sprawling family compound with its courtyards and garden lake, the Chengdu streets alive with student demonstrations and new ideas, and the river down which the youngest brother finally escapes.

The patriarch

The Gao family compound

Chapter 1

Behind the high walls of the Gao compound, the old patriarch rules three generations by the iron law of Confucian hierarchy, arranging marriages, crushing dissent and clinging to a dying order. The mansion, with its courtyards, servants and suffocating proprieties, is the whole world the young must either submit to or break out of.

The main narrative

inferred The wealthy Gao family lives in a great multi-courtyard mansion in Chengdu; the compound is invented and sited in the old city of the real capital of Sichuan.

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