Lu Xun

He was born in Shaoxing, Zhejiang, into a once-respectable family of scholar-officials, and his early childhood wanted for nothing. But when his grandfather was imprisoned over an examination scandal and his father fell into a lingering illness, the family's fortunes plunged in his boyhood. The days of shuttling between pawnshop and pharmacy taught him early the coldness of the world, and planted in his heart his first resentment against quack doctors who ruin lives and against the hypocrisy of the age.

In search of a way out, he left his hometown for a modern school, and then crossed to Japan on a government scholarship. At first he resolved to study medicine, hoping to use Western medicine to treat patients neglected like his father and to improve the physique of the nation. But an experience during a class break, watching newsreel lantern slides of current events, struck him to the core—he realized that if the spirit of the people remained numb, even the healthiest body would be of no use. So he abandoned medicine for literature, taking up the pen as a scalpel.

In the first years after returning home he fell almost silent. The hopes raised by the 1911 Revolution were soon dashed; he held a sinecure at the Ministry of Education and in his spare time buried himself in copying ancient stone inscriptions and collating epigraphy, as if shutting himself into a heap of old papers. This seemingly dispirited period was in fact a long gathering of strength, waiting for an occasion to speak again.

The occasion came from New Youth. Under the pen name “Lu Xun” he published “A Madman's Diary,” regarded as China's first modern vernacular short story; there followed in quick succession “Kong Yiji,” “Medicine,” and “The True Story of Ah Q,” laying bare the ills of the old society, the coldness of the onlooking crowd, and the weaknesses of the national character. Collected as “Call to Arms” and “Wandering,” these works established his standing as a founder of modern Chinese literature.

After being caught up in the campus turmoil in Beijing, he went south to Xiamen and Guangzhou, and after several moves finally settled in Shanghai with Xu Guangping, spending the last decade of his life there. In this period his edge turned more toward the essay—short, incisive, striking straight at reality—which became his main weapon for engaging with the times; at the same time he ardently translated and introduced foreign literature, supported young writers and the new woodcut movement, and became a standard-bearing figure of the left-wing cultural movement.

When he died of lung disease in his mid-fifties, on the day of his funeral the people of Shanghai from all walks of life spontaneously came to see him off, in a vast and solemn procession. What he left to later generations was not merely a few novels, but a spirit of critique that dared to face reality without compromise. “Fierce-browed, I coolly defy a thousand pointing fingers; head bowed, I gladly serve the children like an ox”—both his self-portrait and a footnote by which generations have come to understand this backbone of the nation.