Lu Xun
Lu Xun, pen name of Zhou Shuren, born Zhou Zhangshou, was a Chinese writer. A leading figure of modern Chinese literature, he wrote in both vernacular and literary Chinese as a novelist, literary critic, essayist, poet, translator and political commentator, known for his sharp, satirical style and critical reflections on Chinese history and culture.
Lu Xun was born into a declining family of landlords and scholar-officials in Shaoxing, Zhejiang. Although he initially aspired to take the imperial examinations, his family's limited financial means compelled him to attend government-funded schools that offered a "Western-style education." After graduation, Lu Xun pursued medical studies at Tohoku University in Japan but eventually dropped out, turning his attention to literature. Financial difficulties forced his return to China, where he taught at various secondary schools and colleges before taking a position at the Ministry of Education of the Republic of China.
Lu Xun pioneered the New Culture Movement by publishing the first novel in vernacular Chinese, Diary of a Madman, in 1918. He gained prominence through his political writings in La Jeunesse following the May Fourth Movement in 1919. From the late 1920s onward, Lu Xun became increasingly engaged with Marxist thought and leftist politics. In the 1930s, he served as the nominal leader of the League of Left-Wing Writers in Shanghai. Since 1949, his works have been canonized in the People’s Republic of China.
Biography
Early life
Lu Xun was born in Shaoxing, Zhejiang. As was common before the 20th century, Lu Xun used several names. His birth name was "Zhou Zhangshou". His courtesy name was "Yushan", which he later changed to "Yucai". In 1898, before he went to the Jiangnan Naval Academy, he took the given name "Shuren", which figuratively means "to be an educated man". The name "Lu Xun ", by which he is most well known internationally, was a pen name chosen upon the initial publishing of his story "Diary of a Madman" in 1918.By the time Lu Xun was born, the Zhou family had been prosperous for centuries, and had become wealthy through landowning, pawnbroking, and by having several family members promoted to government positions. His paternal grandfather, Zhou Fuqing, was appointed to the Imperial Hanlin Academy in Beijing, the highest position possible for aspiring civil servants at that time.
Zhou's mother was a member of the same landed gentry class as Lu Xun's father, from a slightly smaller town in the countryside. Because formal education was not considered socially appropriate for girls, she had not received any education, but she still taught herself how to read and write. The surname Lu Xun was the same as his mother's.
Lu Xun's early education was based on the Confucian classics, in which he studied poetry, history, and philosophy—subjects which, he later reflected, were neither useful nor interesting to him. Instead, he enjoyed folk stories and opera, including the mythological narratives of the Classic of Mountains and Seas and the ghost stories told to him by a servant when he was a child.
By the time Lu Xun was born, his family's prosperity had already been declining. His father, Zhou Boyi, had been successful at passing the county-level imperial examinations, the route to wealth and social success in imperial China, but was unsuccessful in writing the more competitive provincial-level examinations. In 1893 Zhou was discovered attempting to bribe an examination official. Lu Xun's grandfather was implicated, and was arrested and sentenced to beheading for his son's crime. The sentence was later commuted, and he was imprisoned in Hangzhou instead.
After the affair, Zhou was stripped of his position in the government and forbidden to ever again write the civil service examinations. The Zhou family only prevented Lu Xun's grandfather from being executed through regular, expensive bribes to authorities, until he was finally released in 1901.
After the family's attempt at bribery was discovered, Zhou engaged in heavy drinking and opium use and his health declined. Local doctors attempted to cure him through a series of expensive quack prescriptions, including monogamous crickets, sugar cane that had survived frost three times, ink, and the skin from a drum. Despite these expensive treatments, Zhou died of an asthma attack in 1896, at the age of 35. He might have suffered from dropsy.
Education
Lu Xun half-heartedly participated in the first, district-level civil service examination in 1898, but then abandoned pursuing a traditional Confucian education or career. He intended to study at a prestigious school, the "Seeking Affirmation Academy", in Hangzhou, but was forced by his family's poverty to instead study at the "Jiangnan Naval Academy", a tuition-free military school in Nanjing.As a consequence of Lu Xun's decision to attend a military school specializing in Western education, his mother wept, he was instructed to change his name to avoid disgracing his family, and some of his relatives began to look down on him. Lu Xun attended the Jiangnan Naval Academy for half a year, and left after it became clear that he would be assigned to work in an engine room, below deck, which he considered degrading. He later wrote that he was dissatisfied with the quality of teaching at the academy.
After leaving the school, Lu Xun sat for the lowest level of the civil service exams, and finished 137th of 500. He intended to sit for the next-highest level, but became upset when one of his younger brothers died, and abandoned his plans.
Lu Xun transferred to another government-funded school, the "School of Mines and Railways", and graduated from that school in 1902. The school was Lu Xun's first exposure to foreign literature, philosophy, history, and science, and he studied English and German intensively. Some of the influential authors that he read during that period include T. H. Huxley, John Stuart Mill, Yan Fu, and Liang Qichao. His later social philosophy may have been influenced by several novels about social conflict that he read during the period, including Ivanhoe and Uncle Tom's Cabin.
Lu Xun did well at the school with relatively little effort, and occasionally experienced racism directed at him from resident Manchu bannermen. The racism he experienced may have influenced his later sense of Han Chinese nationalism. After graduating Lu Xun planned to become a foreign doctor.
In 1902, Lu Xun left for Japan on a Qing government scholarship to pursue an education in foreign medicine. After arriving in Japan he attended the Kobun Institute, a preparatory language school for Chinese students attending Japanese universities. After encouragement from a classmate, he cut off his queue that Han Chinese were obliged to wear at the time, and practiced jujutsu in his free time. He had an ambiguous attitude towards Chinese revolutionary politics during the period, and it is not clear whether he joined any of the revolutionary parties that were popular among Chinese expatriates in Japan at that time, such as the Tongmenghui. He experienced anti-Chinese racism, but was simultaneously disgusted with the behaviour of some Chinese who were living in Japan. His earliest surviving essays, written in Literary Chinese, were published while he was attending this school, and he published his first Chinese translations of famous and influential foreign novels, including Jules Verne's From the Earth to the Moon and Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas.
In 1904, Lu Xun began studying at the Sendai Medical Academy in northern Honshu, but remained there for less than two years. He generally found his studies at the school tedious and difficult, partially due to his imperfect Japanese. While studying in Sendai he befriended one of his professors, Fujino Genkurō, who helped him prepare class notes. Because of their friendship Lu Xun was accused by his classmates of receiving special assistance from Fujino. Lu Xun later recalled his mentor affectionately in the essay "Mr Fujino", published in Dawn Blossoms Plucked at Dusk. The essay has since become one of his most widely renowned works, and is read in the Chinese middle school curriculum. Fujino later reciprocated Lu Xun's respect in an obituary written for Lu Xun after his death in 1937.
While Lu Xun was attending medical school, the Russo-Japanese War broke out. Part of the war was fought on disputed Chinese land. Lantern slides used in the classroom also featured news items. One news slide showed a public execution of a Chinese prisoner being executed by the Japanese military for being an alleged Russian spy. The on-lookers shown in the slide were mainly Chinese, and Lu Xun was shocked by what he viewed as their complete apathy. In his preface to Nahan, the first collection of his short stories, Lu Xun explained how viewing this scene influenced him to quit studying Western medicine, and to become a literary physician to what he perceived to be China's spiritual problems instead:
At the time, I hadn't seen any of my fellow Chinese in a long time, but one day some of them showed up in a slide. One, with his hands tied behind him, was in the middle of the picture; the others were gathered around him. Physically, they were as strong and healthy as anyone could ask, but their expressions revealed all too clearly that spiritually they were calloused and numb. According to the caption, the Chinese whose hands were bound had been spying on the Japanese military for the Russians. He was about to be decapitated as a 'public example.' The other Chinese gathered around him had come to enjoy the spectacle.
In March 1906, Lu Xun abruptly and secretly terminated his pursuit of the degree and left college. At the time he told no one. After arriving in Tokyo he made sure that the Chinese embassy would not cancel his scholarship and registered at the local German Institute, but was not required to take classes there. He began to read Nietzsche, and wrote a number of essays in the period that were influenced by his philosophy.
In June 1906, Lu Xun's mother heard a rumor that he had married a Japanese girl and had a child with her, and feigned illness as a pretext to ask Lu Xun to return home, where she would then force him to take part in an arranged marriage she had agreed to several years before. The girl, Zhu An, had little in common with Lu, was illiterate, and had been subject to foot binding. Lu Xun married her, but they never had a romantic relationship. Despite that fact, Lu Xun took care of her material needs for the rest of his life. Several days after the ceremony Lu Xun sailed back to Japan with his younger brother, Zhou Zuoren, and left behind his new wife.
After returning to Japan he took informal classes in literature and history, published several essays in student-run journals, and in 1907 he briefly took Russian lessons. He attempted to found a literary journal with his brother, New Life, but before its first publication its other writers and its financial backers all abandoned the project, and it failed. In 1909 Lu Xun and his brother published their translations of Western fiction, including Edgar Allan Poe, as Tales from Abroad, but the book sold only 41 copies of the 1,500 copies that were printed. The publication failed for a number of reasons: it was only sold in Tokyo, which did not have a large Chinese population, and in a single silk shop in Shanghai. Additionally, Lu Xun wrote in Literary Chinese, which was difficult for ordinary people to read.