Chinese Writer Lao She

Lao She was perhaps the best-known writer in China behind Lin Yutang, and he captured the spirit of the age of revolution and of change in China. His novel Rickshaw is his most enduring legacy, and yet it would also become an annoyance to the angry students of the Cultural Revolution and would lead to attacks on Lao She, both verbal and physical, in the 1960s. Translator Jean M. James says of Lao that he was, like Charles Dickens, a social novelist and a chronicler of Peking as Dickens was of London:

The terrible life of the poor depicted in Rickshaw is hard to believe, but sociological studies conducted in Peking in the twenties describe the same conditions and worse (James vii).

An examination of the novel and the culture that produced it shows how Lao She developed his social commentary and some of the consequences this had for his society and for himself.

Lao She was the pseudonym of Shu Qingchun, born in 1899 and died in 1966, either murdered or driven to suicide by the Red Guard in his native Peking. He was born into an impoverished Manchu family and taught Chinese at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London for five years, beginning in 1924. He was greatly influenced by Charles Dickens and Joseph Conrad, and he set out on his writing career while still in England. He would become one of China's favorite writers. His novel Rickshaw was published in 1938 and traces the degradation and ruin of a Peking rickshaw puller. the novel came to be seen as a gen

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sed and three times been forced to sell his rickshaw, and in the other a rickshaw man had been kidnapped by soldiers and had escaped with several stolen camels. Lao She used the two stories as the germ of the story and the character of "Camel" Xiangzi. He placed Xiangzi at the center of things and then had everyone in the story develop a relationship to the rickshaw through the character of Xiangzi: In the course of the novel Xiangzi pursues his elusive goal of independent rickshaw ownership through a dozen adventures, including being kidnapped by soldiers, a shakedown by a secret police agent, being tricked into a loveless marriage, helplessness in the face of disease, and final degeneration into a paid police informant and claquer in political demonstrations (Strand 22). The character of Xiangzi represented a class in Chinese society. At the time, China had reached a new level of economic growth that should have been of benefit to a much larger portion of the population, yet studies of the era show that conditions and social tensions existed that had prevailed in the late Ming period, suggesting that the new levels of economic growth had not yet reached hundreds of millions of people. Evidence from rural china shows that the

Category: Literature - C