Sealed Off

Sealed Off

Summary for the Work

The story takes place in Shanghai during the Japanese occupation of the city during World War II. A tramcar stops when an air raid alarm bell sounds. The city comes to a standstill and the people on the tramcar wait. Two passengers, Lu Zongzhen, an accountant with wife and children, and Wu Cuiyuan, an English instructor and single, strike up a semi flirtatious and serious conversation. After receiving Cuiyuan's phone number, Zongzhen suddenly leaves when the tramcar continues its journey.

Some key ideas in selecting a companion story to “Sealed Off” could be: a moment frozen in time, awkwardness in relationships, choices characters make how people appear versus their inward state, war settings and how this affects human relationships, or alienation and isolation of humans in the 20th century.

At first glance it would appear that two strangers could meet anywhere, and sitting next to each other on a tramcar is as possible as any place, any time. However, the uncertainty of the war, the stopping of time and action due to the air raid alarm bell, allows Lu Zongzhen and Wu Cuiyuan to perhaps take greater risks in their exchange. In a practical way, the alarm bell and Zongzhen's avoidance of a potential son in law, throw the two people together. With the stopping of time, each is forced to think briefly but honestly about their family and relationships. Note how the author interjects comments about thinking, “They simply had to fill this terrifying emptiness otherwise, their brains might start to work. Thinking is a painful business.” Also, when two truckloads of Japanese soldiers rumble by, Zongzhen and Cuiyuan come close together when they stick their heads out to see the trucks. The war scene almost pushes them towards each other.

Information about Author

Zhang Ailing was born on 1921 and he died on 1995. Zhang Ailing, born into a privileged family, was influenced by Chinese traditions and Western culture. She attended the University of Hong Kong and returned to Shanghai to begin her literary career during the Japanese occupation. Essays of the war period were published in Gossip (1945) and Romances (1944), a collection of stories capturing bourgeois life in Shanghai and Hong Kong. Her best known work, the novel Rice-Sprout Spring (1954) which is considered a classic of Chinese fiction, captures the land reform movement of the early 1950's and the impact of man-made and natural disasters on a southern Chinese village (Zhang Ailing, 2011).

Novel

It is in an isolated and quiet space that 'Sealed Off' takes place. The city of Shanghai was 'sealed off' because of an air raid. Yet, only the city is sealed off; the sentiments of the two fortuitously met protagonists, on the contrary, are 'unsealed'. 'Sealed Off' opens with the sentence, 'The tramcar driver drove his tram'. It is almost a tautology: a tramcar driver is of course a driver who drives the tram. This obvious and uninformative statement immediately renders a sense of ordinary to the ...