Ba Lute Character Analysis

Sparrow, Flying Bear, and Da Shan’s father and Big Mother Knife’s husband. At the beginning of the Communist Revolution, Ba Lute is a proud revolutionary. He returns from the Civil War a hero, full of deeply-held Communist sentiments. Ba Lute and Big Mother Knife are a mismatched couple: Big Mother Knife is cynical where Ba Lute unhesitatingly believes in the Party. However, when the Cultural Revolution starts, Ba Lute is targeted by the Red Guards for his connection to Big Mother Knife’s family—particularly, Swirl and Wen the Dreamer, who are convicted rightists. What’s more, Ba Lute is a musician, which is seen as a bourgeois profession during the Cultural Revolution. Ba Lute is tortured by the Red Guards but he still doesn’t lose faith in the Party. He instructs his sons, Da Shan and Flying Bear, to write denunciations of Zhuli, his niece, once she has committed suicide after being tortured by Red Guards herself. He believes that publicly displaying these denunciations will protect his family, but it doesn’t—Ba Lute himself is sent to a re-education camp, where he goes so far as to write to Chairman Mao, certain that there has been a mistake. When he tells this to his wife, she laughs at him for having so much faith in the Communist Party.