Ba Jin’s novel, Cold Nights, portrays a man’s slow death of tuberculosis in 1944 Chongqing.
The consumptive disease seems to have been caused less by bacteria in his lungs, and more by the debilitative generational tension in Republican China.
A man is torn between his traditional mother and his modern wife.
In the background, air raid alarms blare through the cold winter nights, but in their small apartment, it is the arguments between mother and daughter-in-law that are the most deadly.
The main character, Wang Wenxuan, is a sickly copyeditor in the wartime capital of the Guomindang government.
Good-natured, but noncommittal and malleable, Wang constantly tries to reconcile the irreconcilable: the decadent ways of his brazenly unfaithful wife, and the disapproving conservatism of his mother.
The reader watches as Wang is stretched impossibly between these two women, caring tenderly for both of them, but, ultimately, literally consumed with the attempt to soothe the discord in the household.
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Jeremy Murray (2005)
(Wordpress.com)