Ba Jin was part of the generation formed by the May Fourth movement that Lu Xun's fiction had done most to shape, and Family is the novel that carried its central argument into a bestseller. The argument is the one Lu Xun made in A Madman's Diary and A Small Incident: that the Confucian family order is not merely outdated but actively devouring the young, and that the deference it demands is the mechanism. Ba Jin's three brothers in a Chengdu gentry household are that thesis worked out as a plot, with the eldest destroyed by obedience. Ba Jin wrote about Lu Xun's influence on his generation directly, and edited and promoted his work for decades afterwards.