Selected Stories of Lu Hsun
http://www.coldbacon.com/writing/luxun-calltoarms.html
KUNG I-CHI
Story of men who drink warmed bowls of wine with anise-flavored peas or bamboo shoots as a snack. The twelve-year old boy who begins his work at the shop as a wine server, yet get demoted to warmer of wine bowls because he is not quick enough to water down the wine before it is poured. Workers of the short-coated class stand at a counter in front near the street, while the long-gowned men with more money sit at tables in the back, ordering meat dishes with their wine. One peculiar customer, Kung, who is called Kung I-Chi as a sort of nickname, wears a long coat but it is tattered and torn, he’s a has-been might have been old scholar, who can quote the classics, makes people laugh, but gets little respect.
The boy narrator enjoys listening to Kung I-Chi…he’s funny, his entertains everyone
more on the coat, the speech, what he would order, drink, what the boy thought, heard, did
how the others reacted to Kung
then the matter of fact telling of how he is beaten, so bady, beaten so that his legs must break - its what they want to do to him - what year is this again? 1920s written, but about what time period in which old men were beaten for stealing food, or books it was.
And how the story is about ones dignity and how one does what one can to protect it. And how others can recognise and help.
About a kind of empathy we can’t understand.
not done yet. But this story sticks with me.
A HAPPY FAMILY 1924
". . . One writes simply as one feels: such a work is like sunlight, radiating from a source of infinite brightness, not like a spark from a flint struck on iron or stone. This alone is true art. And such a writer alone is a true artist. . . . But I . . . what do I rank as?"
Lu Hsun’s “A Happy Family” is a writer writing about writing story, done in a somewhat simple style that is charming and funny. The man of the house sits down to write to make money for his family, while the wife tends to the business of buying needed firewood, figuring the cost, as well as procuring cabbages, likely at another price to be figured out, and at the same time looking after the young daughter who is getting in her way. The man, the writer, busies himself with his dreams of writing simply as one feels, and sets himself the task of constructing scenes of a happy family who everyone with want to read about. They will be a well-educated man and wife who marry for love and converse lovingly in French. They will sit at a lovely table to eat a dish called “Dragon and Tiger,” and maybe not even have children to get in their way as they discuss literature and the finer points of poetic works they both like to read. It will not matter even if the Dragon and Tiger dinner is made of eels and frogs, they can along with that much of common fare in their happy way of life.
The interplay between the writer in his room, almost but not quite behind closed doors, and the commonplace interruptions crowding in on him — why can’t he ignore the crying child and the firewood rolling into the house? He even has to figure the price of the wood on his writing paper, just below his eagerly written title “A Happy Family.” The best part of the story may be when he goes out to pick up his sobbing child and plays “Pussy washing” with her, getting her to laugh as he mimics the cat licking its paws.
Visions of bright orange and green flowers, followed by a stack of cabbages end the story, with its narrator/author/would-be famous writer trying to silence all of his distracting thoughts. I don’t understand the ending, so far, the vision of flowers is mysterious. Need to think this part over, read the whole thing again.
A story to take to heart, and to try to copy.
A MADMAN'S DIARY 1918
A sick man’s perception of how people talk about and actually do sometimes eat the flesh of other humans leads him to believe he himself will be eaten. He comes to believe that even his brother and others who take care of him are fattening him up to eat his flesh. Very strange, and almost to be dismissed as so unrelated to reality as I know it, that here’s one story I can disregard. Not read again. Not expect to get anything out of. Ending of story is:
I can't bear to think of it.
I have only just realized that I have been living all these years in a place where for four thousand years they have been eating human flesh. My brother had just taken over the charge of the house when our sister died, and he may well have used her flesh in our rice and dishes, making us eat it unwittingly.
It is possible that I ate several pieces of my sister's flesh unwittingly, and now it is my turn, . . .
How can a man like myself, after four thousand years of man-caring history—even though I knew nothing about it at first—ever hope to face real men?
Perhaps there are still children who have not eaten men? Save the children. . . .
But there is a hopeful tone at the end. The madman has hope for humanity, hope that this act which he has established as wrong (he asks others, is it right to eat other people, and is told no of course not) will not be perpetuated in future generations.