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"In Broad Daylgith" by Ha Jin Essay

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Daan Verhoeff Professor A. Ruh English 250 Essay Assignment #1 03/16/2012 Bringing Two Turning Points Into Broad Daylight. “In Broad Daylight” is about Mu Ying, nicknamed Old Whore. She has affairs with different men and is publicly denounced and paraded before the community by the Red Guards who travel from another city and happen to know her bad name. Her dwarf peddler husband Meng Su tries to rescue her from the public humiliation, only to be humiliated himself by the Red Guards, the spectators and his wife as well. Finally, he is found crushed by a train, and Mu Ying lies alone at bus stop, deranged. Written from the point view of a naïve boy, nicknamed White Cat, Ha Jin intends to portray through untainted and authentic lens a …show more content…

When her husband appealed to the Red Guards, she stared at him without a word, and a faint smile passed the corners of her mouth. In her eyes, the behavior of her impotent husband is pedantic and ridiculous. When the Red Guard asked her why she “seduced men and paralyze heir revolutionary will with your bourgeois poison” (156), she responded rather calmly with a rhetorical question, “I’ve never invited any man to my home, have I?” (Jin 156). When several women hissed in the crowd, she even tried to persuade them by citing her own experience: “Sisters,” she spoke aloud. “All right, it was wrong to sleep with them. But you all know what it feels like when you want a man, don’t you? Don’t you once in a while have that feeling in your bones?” Contemptuously, she looked at the few withered middle-aged women standing in the front row, then closed her eyes. “Oh, you want that real man to have you in his arms and let him touch every part of your body. For that man alone you want to blossom into a woman, a real woman—” (Jin 156). As a group of juveniles, White Cat and his companions know little about the adult life. This limitation makes their participation a journey of discovery. When adults burst out laughing at Mu Ying’s assertion of her husband’s impotence, the teenagers appeared to be puzzled. The dialogue between them shows this point clearly: “What’s that? What’s so funny?” Big Shrimp asked Bare Hips. “You didn’t get

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