English · Chapter 10
Study notes aligned to the official NEB syllabus.
Lu Xun (1881-1936) is the pen name of Zhou Shuren, a Chinese writer born in Shaoxing, Zhejiang province. He is widely regarded as the founder of modern Chinese literature and a leading voice of the New Culture Movement, which urged writers to abandon classical Chinese for the living vernacular. "My Old Home" (Chinese title "Guxiang") was written in 1921 and collected in his first volume of stories, "Call to Arms" (1923), alongside "A Madman's Diary" and "The True Story of Ah Q". It is a first-person short story with a strong autobiographical basis: Lu Xun himself went back to Shaoxing in 1919 to sell the family house and move his mother north. The story turns that homecoming into a meditation on memory, class and hope.
In the depth of winter the narrator travels more than two thousand li to the old home he left over twenty years earlier. The village looks desolate under a grey sky, and he tells himself that only his own mood has darkened. His errand is a sad one: the old house, long shared by the clan, has been sold and must be handed over by the end of the year, so he has come to bid it farewell and to move his mother to the town where he now earns his living.
His mother welcomes him warmly but hides her sorrow, while his eight-year-old nephew Hong'er watches the stranger from a distance. His mother mentions that Runtu, the narrator's boyhood companion, keeps asking after him and may visit, and the name releases a flood of memory. Nearly thirty years earlier, when the family managed the great ancestral sacrifice, Runtu's father, a part-time labourer for the household, brought his son along to look after the vessels. Runtu, then a little over ten, had a round purple face, wore a felt cap and a silver necklet meant to ward off death, and knew marvellous things: how to trap birds in the snow, gather coloured shells on the seashore, and guard watermelons at night from the badger-like zha. The boys wept when they parted and never met again.
The first caller is Mrs Yang, a thin-lipped woman of about fifty, once known as the "Beancurd Beauty" of the bean-curd shop across the road. Standing with her legs apart like a pair of compasses, she scolds the narrator for not recognizing her, insists he has grown rich and proud, hints that he keeps three concubines and an eight-bearer sedan chair, and walks off with a pair of his mother's gloves.
Days later Runtu arrives with his shy fifth child, Shuisheng. The narrator can hardly recognize him: his face is grey and deeply lined, his eyes red and swollen from the sea wind, his hands coarse and cracked like pine bark, and he wears one thin padded jacket. Joy and sadness struggle in his face, yet the greeting that comes out is a respectful "Master!", and the narrator feels a lamentable thick wall rise between them. Runtu speaks haltingly of what has ground him down: many mouths to feed, bad harvests, heavy taxes, soldiers, bandits, officials and the gentry. Before leaving he asks for two long tables, four chairs, an incense burner and candlesticks, a balance, and all the ashes from the stove for his sandy fields.