Family in 10 Minutes: Three Brothers, Three Women, and a Dead End Inside a Four-Courtyard Compound

Standing beside the three brothers are three young women the house swallows whole. Mei grew up alongside Juexin and loved him first. Torn away from him, she was married off to someone else, widowed, sank into despair, and died coughing blood while still young. Ruijue is the wife Juexin was forced to marry, gentle and capable, and in the end driven out of the mansion by a superstition about a curse of blood, to die in childbirth in a crumbling house outside the city walls. Mingfeng is the Gao family's maid, who had served Juehui since childhood and loved him for years without ever managing to say so. The old patriarch gave her away, with a wave of his hand, to be an old man's concubine, and she drowned herself rather than go. They die in different ways, one of illness, one in childbirth, one in the lake, but behind all three deaths runs the same rope: ritual propriety, superstition, rank, and the family's own idea of what counts as dignity.

How the story runs

The story opens in Chengdu in the 1920s. The Gao mansion is a sprawling compound of courtyard within courtyard, with an ancestral hall at its center, a garden and a lake pavilion behind it, and the maids' quarters crowded next to a modern school. Old Master Gao, the family patriarch, is still alive, and he anchors the whole household; no one dares so much as breathe loudly in front of him. Juexin is already married, and Ruijue has just given him a child. Juemin is still at a standoff with the family over his arranged marriage. Juehui has just come back from the student movement outside, burning with new ideas. Each brother has his own trouble, and the one thing they share is that none of them gets to decide his own life.

Juexin's tragedy is the ugliest kind in this book. He and his cousin Mei grew up together and fell in love, and the elders on both sides were glad to see it. Then a quarrel broke out over a mahjong table, and something Mei's mother said gave lasting offense to the Gao family. The elders, angry, married Mei off elsewhere out of spite. When Juexin found out, he didn't even try to object. He went to his elders' room, kowtowed, and let his marriage be decided for him, to a woman he had never met. He gave this way of living a name of his own: the doctrine of the bow. He went on nodding through his days, comforting Ruijue while still thinking of Mei, and turned himself, by will, into a man who does nothing but bow.

Within a few years of leaving, Mei was widowed, and she never came back to the Gao mansion. Juexin would occasionally send a letter through someone, just to ask if she was well. The replies grew shorter each time. The last word he received was that she had died, coughing blood. Juexin wept, once, and the next day he went to pay his respects to his elders, as always.

Mingfeng's death is the sharpest cut in the whole book. She had been sold into the Gao household as a child and raised to serve the third young master, Juehui. There was feeling between them, the suppressed, unspoiled kind, the kind that never even got as far as holding hands. She never dared raise her voice; he never dared make it public. Then Old Master Gao, without asking her, promised her as a concubine to an old family friend, Feng Leshan, a man who postured as a moral scholar in public and lusted after women in private. Mingfeng begged the old man. She begged his wife. No one spoke up for her. The night before her wedding, she walked alone to the pavilion at the center of the garden lake and let the water take everything: what little hope she had left for the future, for Juehui, for her own life, and herself along with it. Juehui didn't learn what had happened until the next day.

That death burned away the last of Juehui’s goodwill toward his family. When he came back from the student movement, some part of him had still been willing to give the family one more chance. After Mingfeng died, that was over. He wrote articles in the newspapers attacking his own family, joined student petitions, and became, in Old Master Gao's eyes, the worst of the rebellious grandsons. When the old man fell gravely ill, his last words were still a curse aimed at Juehui, and then, having said them, he died.

When the old man died, the senior branch of the family thought daylight had finally come. It hadn't. Aunt Chen and a few other elders dug up an old superstition: with the old man's body barely cold, a birth in the house would offend his spirit and bring calamity down on the family. Ruijue, then heavily pregnant, was forced to move out of the mansion into a drafty, half-built shack outside the city walls. Juexin knew it was nonsense. But the doctrine of the bow took hold of him again; once more, he didn't dare contradict an elder. A few days later, Ruijue went into a difficult labor. There was no proper doctor, not enough medicine, and rain pouring down over the city. By the time Juexin reached her outside the walls, the child had already been born, and Ruijue could no longer speak in full sentences. The last thing she saw was his hands, the hands that had never once dared to hold their ground.

Mei, Ruijue, Mingfeng: three women, three different deaths, one root. Mei was pulled away from the boy she'd grown up loving by ritual propriety, and died of a broken spirit. Ruijue was driven out of the mansion by superstition and died in childbirth. Mingfeng was pushed toward the lake by rank and an arranged marriage. None of them could fight back, and almost none of them was ever truly heard. Ba Jin writes it all with restraint, no wailing passages, no long sentences of accusation. But the few pages of ordinary, warm, everyday writing that come right before each death land harder than any cry of protest.

The man who finally gives way, a little, is Juexin. After Ruijue's death, he stood a long time at Mei's grave. When he went home, he did the one thing in his life least in keeping with the doctrine of the bow: he packed Juehui's bags himself, pressed what savings the family had into his brother's hands, and sent him out through the back door. Juehui boarded a steamer bound for Shanghai and left the Gao mansion, left Chengdu, for a world he had never seen. Juexin didn't go. He stayed behind to carry the family on his own back. The first time I read this far, it stopped me too: he should have left long before this, and yet he couldn't. Being the eldest grandson of the senior line had welded him to that house.

Theme and craft

The theme of Family is simple enough to state: the old feudal family eats its own. What makes Ba Jin's version so effective is that he never turns it into a slogan. His sharpest move is to show the reader how the machine actually runs. Old Master Gao is not a villain. He is a set-in-his-ways, autocratic old man who genuinely believes he is doing right by the family. Aunt Chen is not the enemy either; she's an ordinary elder being pushed along by superstition and self-interest. And Juexin is not a coward. He is what this system trains a person to become, from childhood on. No one in the book does evil, and yet the deaths keep coming, one after another. That is exactly what Ba Jin is writing about: ritual propriety doesn't need a villain to kill. It only needs everyone to give way a little, at the same time.

The three brothers are specimens of three different responses. Juexin submits, and is crushed by degrees. Juemin resists quietly, taking the woman he loves and forcing the family's hand. Juehui rebels outright, burns his bridges, and leaves. Ba Jin never simply declares which path is right. He lets Juehui get away and keeps Juexin trapped, and that restraint carries more weight than any outcry could.