51 pages • 1 hour read
Eileen Chang, Transl. Karen S. KingsburyLove in a Fallen City
Fiction | Short Story Collection | Adult | Published in 1943A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
“Sealed Off”Chapter Summaries & Analyses
“Sealed Off” Summary
“Sealed Off” begins with a description of a tramcar in Shanghai. The tramcar drives down the street, carrying people trying to get into shops as the city shuts down. The passengers are fairly calm. On the tram is an accountant for Huamao Bank, Lu Zongzhen. He thinks about the spinach buns he’s carrying that his wife asked him to pick up after work. He reads the newsprint that the buns are wrapped in while other people on the tram read whatever they have in hand.
Across from Zongzhen is a young, unmarried woman, Wu Cuiyuan. She is an English teacher at a college, and she is grading her students’ papers. The paper she is reading is from a male student complaining about the “evils of the big city, full of righteous anger” (240). She gives the student a good grade because of his frankness and the respect he shows her. She doesn’t get much respect at home or work, and her parents wish she would get married.
Next to Cuiyuan is a nanny with a child. There is also a medical student on the tram doing anatomy sketches while the other passengers watch and comment. Zongzhen sees his wife’s cousin's son, Dong Peizhi, in the car. He does not like Peizhi because he has his eye on Zongzhen’s eldest daughter, who is 13. To avoid talking to Peizhi, Zongzhen gets up and sits next to Wu Cuiyuan. While Peizhi approaches, Zongzhen leans in toward Cuiyuan like he is flirting with her so that Peizhi will back off.
Zongzhen complains about the blockade to Cuiyuan. He suggests they chat and compliments her looks. She blushes and complains about his familiar manner. Zongzhen barely listens because he is watching Peizhi go back to the third-class car. Then, Cuiyuan and Zongzhen talk about their lives and backgrounds. Zongzhen says he is unhappy with his wife, and Cuiyuan responds sympathetically.
As they talk, trucks of soldiers go down the street. Zongzhen and Cuiyuan are startled and turn to look at them. Their faces are close together. In this moment, they really see each other and fall in love. Zongzhen tells her intimate details about his life. He tells her he is thinking about taking a concubine and asks her if she is available. She doesn’t respond, but she considers the offer.
More people get on board the tram because the shutdown is about to be over. Zongzhen and Cuiyuan are pushed closer together. He says that he can’t possibly allow her to ruin her life by becoming his concubine. Cuiyuan thinks about how, when she finally marries, “her husband could never be as dear as this stranger met by chance…this man on a tram in the middle of a sealed-off city” (249). She starts to cry. Zongzhen becomes nervous and starts shaking her umbrella and pulling at her hand to try to get her to stop crying. He asks for her phone number but doesn’t have a pen to write it down. She thinks if he can’t remember it, it was never meant to be.
The tram starts up again, and people cheer. Zongzhen gets up and walks away into the crowd. Cuiyuan turns away like she doesn’t care. When she turns back, she sees Zongzhen sitting in his old seat, acting like nothing had happened. She realizes that “everything that [happens] while the city was sealed off [is] a nonoccurrence” (251). The tram driver yells at an old beggar woman who steps in front of the tram.
“Sealed Off” Analysis
The narrative structure and perspective of “Sealed Off” reflect the tension and heightened stakes of its wartime setting. The short story is written in a third-person narration that is largely limited to Zongzhen and Cuiyuan’s points of view but that also includes elements of third-person omniscient point of view used to describe the setting. Unlike the other stories in the collection, “Sealed Off” is a "bottle” narrative: All of the action takes place in a single location in a compressed period of time. It describes a relationship that begins and ends in the space of a few minutes. The story takes place in Shanghai, which was a site of conflict between the Japanese and Chinese armies during World War II. These battles resulted in the city being periodically “sealed off” or shut down. While the riders on the tram take this state of exception in stride, it heightens the tension in the story. This wartime setting where death is so immediate colors the interactions between the protagonists as otherwise mundane occurrences, like a conversation between two people in a tramcar, have high-stakes, meaningful consequences. In this way, the narrative structure, itself “sealed off” from a world beyond the tramcar, mirrors the tenseness of a city amidst war and occupation.
The central theme of the short story “Sealed Off” is the Instability of Sexual Desire, Love, and Marriage, reflected in the protagonists’ fleeting entanglement. The dynamic between Zongzhen and Cuiyuan contrasts with the dynamic between the protagonists of “Love in a Fallen City.” In the latter story, the protagonists are drawn together by the conflict, resulting in marriage and a stable relationship after the battle has ended. In contrast, the protagonists of “Sealed Off” are drawn together by the conflict, but when the threat is lifted, Zongzhen’s interest in Cuiyuan dissipates just as quickly as it began. For Cuiyuan, his rapid dismissal of her is a blow. The narrative notes, “If he telephoned her, she wouldn’t be able to control her voice; it would be filled with emotion for him, a man who had died and come back to life again” (250). However, she comes to terms with it somewhat when she realizes that their brief infatuation with one another was the product of the exceptional circumstances of their meeting: “[E]verything that had happened while the city was sealed off was a nonoccurrence” (251).
Cuiyuan embodies the tension between Tradition and Modernity in a Changing Society as she navigates her relationship with education and traditional gender roles. Cuiyuan is caught up amongst the changing mores of Chinese society in the 1930s. Her family, who seek to be modern by listening to “Beethoven and Wagner” and sending her to university (241), nevertheless maintains traditional expectations and wishes she would get married. It is in part her desire to meet her parents’ expectations that primes her to be open to Zongzhen’s proposition. However, when that proposition is revealed to be to become his concubine—a lower-class position that denies women their agency—she is offended, although not so offended as to garner ill-will toward him. Zongzhen is characterized as a flighty, flawed man. He avoids his wife’s cousin, makes an inappropriate proposition to Cuiyuan, and abandons Cuiyuan without a word as soon as the moment presents itself. Cuiyuan herself notes that he is “not too honest, not too bright, but a real person” (244). Despite his flaws, she is willing to denigrate herself by playing down the importance of education for women to attract his attention. In so doing, she is reinforcing traditional gender roles.
