Cold Nights

Cold Nights is Ba Jin's last novel written before the founding of the People's Republic of China. He began writing it in Chongqing in the autumn and winter of 1944, completed it in Shanghai on December 31, 1946, and it was first published in March 1947 by Shanghai Chenguang Publishing Company, later reprinted many times by People's Literature Publishing House. Set in Chongqing—the "provisional capital" under Nationalist rule in the later years of the War of Resistance—the novel spans from the winter of 1944 to around the end of 1945, when the war was won. The protagonist Wang Wenxuan and his wife Zeng Shusheng both graduated from a university education department; in their youth they cherished the ideal of founding a school that was "rural and family-oriented." Amid the chaos of war, the family moved to Chongqing, where Wang Wenxuan works as a proofreader at a semi-official, semi-commercial book and stationery company, earning a meager salary and suffering from chronic lung disease, while Zeng Shusheng takes a job at a bank, trading social engagements for a higher income and regarded as a "vase." Wang's mother comes from Kunming to keep house, but conflicts repeatedly arise with her daughter-in-law over values and temperament; mother-in-law and daughter-in-law tensions, straitened circumstances, and illness intertwine, placing Wang Wenxuan in the middle and wearing him down day by day. The novel writes everyday details with a calm, restrained touch: coughing, medicine money, quarrels, rainy nights, and empty streets, depicting how a family originally formed through free love gradually disintegrates under the weight of reality. Zeng Shusheng eventually leaves with the bank's young manager for Lanzhou; Wang Wenxuan dies of illness amid the firecrackers celebrating victory in the War of Resistance; Wang's mother returns to Kunming with her grandson Xiaoxuan; two months later Zeng Shusheng comes back to Chongqing, only to find everything changed. The book has thirty chapters, plus an epilogue, a postscript, and appendices including the author's own accounts "On Cold Nights" and "About Cold Nights"; its portrayal of human nature, family ethics, and mother-in-law/daughter-in-law relations remains thought-provoking today.