Analysis Of The Six Records Of A Floating Life

The Six Records of a Floating Life by Shen Fu is an autobiography, majorly about Shen Fu’s love life and his marriage to Chen Yun, a smart girl he falls in love with as a child. Throughout the Six Records of a Floating Life, different situations faced by the couple can reflect to the family structure of the peasants at the time. Shen Fu was born in an official family which works for the government. Although his family was not at a very high status, they do care a lot about the reputation of the family, and they also care a lot about manners. Chen Yun, according to Shen Fu, is a very smart and well-mannered woman, she thinks a lot about Shen’s family, and always try to do her best for them. Chen Yun’s father died when she was 4 years old, which

However, not even a woman sounds so ‘ideal’ can survive in Shen’s family. A lot of misfortune were recorded in the chapter “The Sorrows of Misfortune”, and these ‘misfortunes’ made the relationship between Chen Yun and Shen’s family collapse. Some may call those incidents unlucky, but I don’t think those incidents are the results of misfortune, in fact, they are closely related to the family structure and personality of Shen Fu as a person. In some sense, it is majorly Shen Fu’s fault that Chen Yun can’t live happily with his family. But since the Six Records of a Floating Life is an autobiography, it is not surprised Shen Fu name those incidents “misfortune” as he wouldn’t admit that those were his

However, this “ladder of success” was not as simple as it seemed. First of all, the class of both families will be a huge barrier. We are not even talking about freedom to love here, there is no such thing in late imperial China. Although we can’t say that love doesn’t exist even in such systems, such as Shen Fu and Chen Yun, but most marriages are not about love. Rather, it was about exchange of values. For example, when two families want to become business partners, the parents of the family will have their son and daughter married, so the two families will have closer bonding which made the business much easier. In this sense, we can see that the couple is simply a tool. In the same sense, the families which has not much “values” can only have marriages with the same class of families. Meaning for a women to climb up the ladder of success is not quite possible as the class of her family is a huge deciding factor for marriage in the