Zhang Ailing’s Sealed Off – Sealed Off from What???

We go back to Zhang Ailing, the author Lee claims to be the best Chinese writer of the 20th Century. Rob and Lee discuss her most anthologized work in English, Sealed Off. It is a psychological story occurring inside the heads of a handful of people stuck on a tram in Shanghai under the control of the Japanese. Zhang Ailing is responding to Shi Zhecun’s One Night in the Rainy Season, but her work universalizes this psychologicalized narrator; now, women can be narrators, something seemingly impossible in Shi Zhecun’s work. The question that hangs over the story is what is sealed off from what? We drift in between the minds of men and women on the tram; we are not sealed off from the most intimate parts of their heads. So what are we sealed off from?