The tramcar ground to a halt, but the people on the street ran: those on the left side of the street ran over to the right, and those on the right ran over to the left. All the shops, in a single sweep, rattled down their metal gates. Matrons tugged madly at the metal railings. “Let us in just for a little while,” the cried. “We have children here, and old people.” But the gates stayed tightly shut. Those inside the metal gates and those inside the metal gates stood glaring at each other, fearing one another” (pg 499)

This is when everything gets real, when limbo beings and people are plunged into their uncertainty. Everyone is sealed off from one another and whether people like it or not they have to come to acknowledge that they are ignoring other human beings. They have to confront that are other people in the world beside themselves and most of them, like the shop keepers, continue to ignore others and go through with their lives and looking out for themselves because that is what is in their best interest, or at least that what appears to be the case. On the train, people are also sealing themselves off, trying to find different ways to distract themselves and keep themselves from having to involved with others.  Zongzhen wants to avoid his weird distant relative by marriage and instead he decides to distract himself by opening up another door, talking to a vaguely pretty, but young, girl on the train. But there is still some sort of antagonizing feel amongst everyone in the story. No one wants to let each other in, people are avoiding one another, and there are unappreciative family members. People are frustrated about their place in life but none of it seems about the larger enemy of the war, no one is thinking about that no one cares about it. Instead they are focusing on one another and looking at each other like they are the enemy.

Ray Bradbury’s “August 2026: There Will Come Soft Rains”, a story about a family in a house that was built to protect them in a time of perpetual nuclear threat, has the same eerie setting that “Sealed Off” starts with, having the whole idea of the danger of bombs and never knowing when you’ll be hit, never knowing true safety, never being able to be ready and protect yourself. Living in a time of fear where you have to find a way to at least make yourself feel safe even though you already know you really are not in anyway in control of you situation. The couple in the train and the family in the house both want to be safe and feel secure in a time and place where there is no security. While “Sealed Off” is a very  interesting story because of the characters and the way they view things and interest, it is the setting that really helps drive the story along and makes the characters, especially Cuiyuan, take some sort of action for themselves. The image to the left shows the family that was vaporized in Bradbury’s story by the atomic bomb. The house they built could not save them. Like that house, Cuiyuan envisioned a meeting, some sort of “tryst” to save her from her unfortunate situation of family members and a war torn country but even that was only a false sense of security fabricated for her own temporary peace of mind. Building yourself an escape, whether it be a physical or mental protection can be useful but it isn’t always real and it can’t always protect you.

Both “Sealed Off” and Pu Song-Ling’s “The Wise Neighbor” are Chinese stories but they came out in very different times and the women in them have very different priorities yet they have similar realities to face: that their power and happiness rests on their Husband.  Mrs. Chu is a brilliant and ideal woman. She is described as “an exceptionally charming and pretty woman” (pg 776) and her husband loves her and she is shown to be witty and sharp as well. Yet none of that seems to matter unless she can keep her husband interested in her. Cuiyuan’s life seem’s to add up to the same thing. She is a good daughter, she has a good education, but she doesn’t live up to her family’s expectation because she hasn’t married a rich man yet. All the work she does is seem to be in hopes of finding herself a decent man but she isn’t happy with this. She wants something else from her life. She goes as far as to even try and subvert the roles that Mrs. Chu plays by. When talking to Zongzhen about any potential the two had together as a couple, the only suggestion seemed to be: become a concubine. Cuiyuan loves the idea of it because it is a way to get back at her family, to run away from the perfect life Mrs. Chu leads and throw it away entirely so that she can have her way as a person with her own choices. The life of Pao-tai, the concubine of Mrs. Chu’s husband, may not be as nice, but at least it would be hers.

They were in love… Men in love have always loved to talk; woman in love , on the other hand, don’t want to talk, because they know, without even knowing that they know, that once a man really understands a woman he’ll stop loving her.” (pg 505)

There is some sort of absurd standard that women are held to that is simply just not expected of men. Women have to be beautiful and sexually appealing and they need to be able to cook and clean and take care of the household and coming into the modern era, she also needs to be well educated and maybe even have a job. It is not enough to just be a human being for a woman to be worthy of romantic love. A woman must go above an beyond to seem worth it. A man can make a relationship all about him and his own goals, not being expected to support his wife’s dreams. A woman also has to make sacrifices and have reasonable standards for the men in her life. A man can’t be perfect, you need to expect your husband to be flawed but the woman cannot show any sort of weakness to her husband. She herself needs to keep her flaws hidden or else the man has to move on to the next poor woman who may be worth his time. Cuiyuan is an admirable woman with a respectable job and a good education but that doesn’t mean anything without a husband.  A husband may like a well educated wife because it makes him look good to society but if she gets too big for her boots then she is no longer an asset but more of a liability. A man’s comfort, not having to deal with a woman’s feelings, is seen as more important that woman’s right to have her own thoughts and feelings.

There are some variations in different translations of what they are riding in the story but the best interpretations seems to be these small compact trams that are found in populous cities. The picture here is a tram from around the 1940s, China which should be more or less what the tram in the city. It’s small and it’s compact. When it’s moving, people hustling on and off, there is no need to talk to or communicate with anyone, everyone is in close quarters yet ignoring each other, but when on lock down there is no kind of escape. There aren’t any other compartments to escape to there aren’t any bathrooms for a bit of alone time. It’s a small rickety tram and when it stops, you are suddenly forced to look at the people in your surroundings, people feel more obligated to actually talk to someone, to make a break in the silence. Your stay in the tram becomes more permanent, something more indefinite. You don’t have a clear idea how long you are going to be inside the sad little thing and there is only so much you can do to keep yourself busy. No one wants to talk to other people on public transportation but it’s always an amusing day dream; what are other people thinking about on their commute. Once that train stops, you are put in limbo, just as when the subway decides to stop in the stations, or worse, in between stops and that is when people don’t know what to do with themselves and that is when their minds wander and want human interaction so that they kknow that they are not alone in that weird pocket of time.