Young Master Gets His Tonic Summary

Even though the feudal imperial regime has ended years ago, the traditional thoughts and burdens that have ruled Chinese country women for thousands of years remain unchanged. In Young Master Gets His Tonic, Wu Zuxiang presents a first-person narrative story where the young master, guanguan, drinks human milk to get nutrition for making up his previous loss of blood and energy from an accident. Right after the accident, the young master had received shots of blood from a wet nurse’s husband to supplement his loss, and three months later he drinks woman’s milk from the wet nurse. The young master’s description of the wet nurse effectively exhibits the oppressed life of lower class women, that they still lived in poor and unhealthy condition with subordinate status in the society.

Guanguan’s first view of the wet nurse as a typical country woman efficiently helps the audience to infer the normal life of village women based on his description of the nurse. He starts his impression of the wet nurse by naming her as “your standard type of village woman” (148). The idea of the nurse being a common country woman suggests the ordinary of the nurse, the numerous similarities between her and other country women, and also

According to him, the wet nurse has “thin legs”, “dry-looking hair like sparrows’ nest”, “tiny feet with swelling arches”, “grayish crud at the corner of her mouth”, and overall a “dried-up complexion” and a “rancid sweaty smell” (148-149). From head to feet, all these uncommon features reveal that the wet nurse lacks nutrition, and is not strong or even healthy as how women in thirteen supposed to be. Moreover, the messy hair, dirty mouth and sweaty smell show that she has poor personal hygiene and did not clean herself often. The unclean state might account for her unhealthiness, and it also reflects her level of