By yoking herself to another, like her husband did to a rickshaw, despite the fact that her husband did not desire such a bond, his wife sowed the seeds of her own destruction, and was killed by the scope of her own social ambitions. One of the final social ironies of the rickshaw and the character of Tzu and his wife is that book thinks quite highly of themselves, despite their absence of such traditional Confucian markers of status as family, or a truly heaven-arranged marriage, where they wife subsumes herself to her husband's will, as the husband subsumes himself to the will of heaven, his ancestors, and his social betters. Tzu's epitaph, is that he is one who is "handsome, ambitious, dreamer of fine dreams, selfish, individualistic, sturdy, great Hsiang Tzu...[N] o one knew when or where he was able to get himself buried, that degenerate, selfish, unlucky offspring of society's diseased womb, a ghost caught in Individualism's blind alley." (249) No one will honor Tzu, in other words, the man who made a fetish of the rickshaw of money and commerce, rather than real family, the man who refused to accept what heaven doled out for him. A lack of burial and proper mourning and children is the ultimate death in Confucian society, a fate enjoyed by both husband and wife.

This alienation from society, family, and tradition in the pursuit of social mobility, a solitary and lonely life of pulling and striving, of hollow and emotionally and...

Mr. Ts'ao is scholar, teacher, husband and father, who even Tzu respects as "very reasonable in everything"(77). Mr. Ts'ao reveres learning and patronizes the arts, but does not feitishize them, or try to make them into vehicles of social advancement, and when he is buried, all in his family will mourn him, unlike Tzu who strains against Confucian laws of parentage and one's allocated place in the world.
Thus the yoking rickshaw Tzu desires to buy and the unblessed marriage of Tzu desired by his wife are mutually degrading as well because of the individualism they show in the hearts of social strivers. His wife's idealization of the yolk of marriage to an unwilling husband parallels her husband's eager pulling of foreigners that despise him and social advancement as an individual through an object of transaction. It is not commerce or marriage themselves that are 'bad' institutions but what one makes of them as institutions. The rickshaw and the yolk of marriage become corrupt because they exist in a corrupt society that has lost its Confucian compass of morals to commerce, and because they are fetishized and filled by corrupt, weak-willed people.

Works Cited

She, Lao. Rickshaw. Trans. Jean M. James. Honolulu: U. Of Hawaii, 1979.