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…

Bad timing.” “It doesn’t sound like that,” I said (Jin 157). Obviously, Bare Hips does not know any more than Big Shrimp though his impatient tone tries to conceal this ignorance. Ignorant as he is, Bare Hips makes so bold as to cry at Mu Ying, “Shameless Old Whore!” (Jin 154). Impossible to perceive, the innocent children are acting the role of accomplice in the public denunciation against Mu. Their thoughts and behaviors manifest the influence they have taken from their parents. In this sense, the innocent teenagers have degenerated from lovely angels to dreadful demons.
This is a turning point because when the red guards pulled Mu Ying out of her house and started patrolling her through the city streets to get her to the school yard to sentence her, her husband came running from a street corner begging to let Mu Ying go “Please don’t take her away. It’s my fault. I haven’t disciplined her well. Please give her a change to be a new person. I promise, she won’t do it again” (Jin 155). And even though I have a feeling Mu Ying does not take the Red guard’s judging protocol as a serious punishment at that point, once she has confessed everything it all gets to her. That is when she gets the feeling that she really has humiliated and hurt her husband, because she is looking for him after she got hit with an ink bottle, only to find that he suddenly left the scene. That is the point she says she does