Lu Xun

Born Zhou Shuren on September 25, 1881, in Shaoxing, Zhejiang province, into a declining family of landlords and scholar-officials, Lu Xun would become the most important figure in modern Chinese literature. His grandfather, a jinshi degree holder who had served as a government official, was imprisoned for attempted bribery when Lu Xun was a boy, plunging the family into poverty and shame, an experience that gave the young man a bitter understanding of social hypocrisy. He initially studied mining and then medicine at Tohoku University in Japan, but a pivotal moment occurred when he saw a lantern slide of a Chinese man about to be executed by the Japanese during the Russo-Japanese War while Chinese onlookers watched with blank indifference. He decided that curing the nation's spiritual sickness mattered more than treating its bodies, and abandoned medicine for literature. Returning to China, he taught and worked at the Ministry of Education before publishing "Diary of a Madman" (1918), the first major work of fiction in vernacular Chinese, whose narrator discovers that Chinese history is nothing but a record of cannibalism. "The True Story of Ah Q" (1921-1922), a devastating satire of national character, and the story collection Call to Arms (1923) cemented his reputation. His essays, mordant, fearless, and prolific, attacked feudalism, Confucian hypocrisy, and political tyranny with equal ferocity. In the 1930s, he became the nominal leader of the League of Left-Wing Writers in Shanghai, though his relationship with the Communist Party remained complicated. He died of tuberculosis on October 19, 1936, in Shanghai, at fifty-five. Mao Zedong later canonized him as a revolutionary saint, an irony Lu Xun, who despised all orthodoxies, would likely have found insufferable.

In 1917, an old friend visited Lu Xun and urged him to write for a new magazine. Lu Xun answered with an image: an iron house with no windows, packed with sleeping people who would suffocate before waking. If even a few woke, his friend said, you could not call the house hopeless. Lu Xun began to write.