Stories of Lu Xun. A Glimpse of the Chinese Short Story.

I love short story collections, and aside from the bang-for-your-buck Chekhov volumes, I find that I love a few good ones from Asia as well.

Lu Xun was a writer who lived at the height of China’s quarrel with its thousand-year-old monarchy. It was 1918. The citizenry was crawling in the depths of poverty and abuse. New groups composed of energetic, radical youths were proposing dangerous solutions. Lu Xun, a writer both disenchanted with the monarchy and unimpressed by the apathetic peasantry, penned stories that echoed the hope and melancholy of his soul. They are poignant.

“The Diary of A Madman” is about a man who visits an ill friend in the country. He finds, however, that his friend is no longer there– cured according to his family, now in the pink of health and looking for a job in the city. What is left of him in the house is his diary in which he confesses his anguish and paranoia at being cannibalised by his family and neighbours whom he suspects of eating humans. He thinks they can sense that he is different from them. It is perhaps a reflection of Lu Xun’s times: when a culture used to conformity had to grapple with radical thoughts taking root inside their own homes. There is a lot of rumination in Lu Xun about the perils of being different. One senses his sadness at not being able to reach his people.

Another story, My Old Home, written in 1921, tells of the awkward meeting between two former childhood friends and the gap that opens up irreparably between them through no fault of theirs. It is one of my favourites in the volume. It is a dirge to the death of a friendship, and a look at how one can be estranged from the source of one’s inspiration– indeed from the most pleasurable and innocent dreams of one’s own soul. Estranged childhood friends are not uncommon in literature; the way Lu Xun captures the awkwardness of a friendship that is taking its last breath has an authentic ring and is unforgettable.

I picked up this collection because I wanted to know more about the Chinese culture. My grandfather, to whom I was extremely close when I was a child, was Chinese but shared very little of his world with me. He used the abacus and chewed on Chinese delicacies and listened to Chinese opera every night, but he could not teach me his language. He tried to enrol me into Chinese classes once, but it did not work out. And so while I went with him on visits to friends, I never understood what they were talking about. I was an outsider looking in– still an outsider looking in.

Only a tiny part of Chinese literature has ever been translated into English. One great volume that I truly enjoyed reading years ago was The Anchor Book of Chinese Poetry: The Full 3000 Year Tradition by Tony Barnstone and Chou Ping, which gives a taste of a few of China’s greatest poets. But I really wanted to get my hand at the short stories, to get a pulse of the lives of the common people, their habits, their perspectives. Lu Xun gives a glimpse of that. And what I see beyond the strangeness of habits foreign to me is the vastness of the Chinese cultural landscape, and the differences between and among the Chinese peoples themselves. Humans tend to stereotype things that are foreign to them. Once we have been properly introduced though, then we see all the colours of the spectrum, and we can pick out some that are similar to ours. So yes, Lu Xun made my grandfather’s world a little bit more understandable to me. He was a good introduction to Chinese life and literature. And like all good literature, the stories made me celebrate our common struggles as human beings, even as he wrote from a world and from a language that was foreign to me.

I believe those differences and similarities are still current. Many people travel to foreign lands to learn about its people and culture, and while nothing beats walking into a Chinese temple or down a Shanghai street, reading their literature is a cheaper, more thoughtful, not quite inferior alternative.