Extract

Save the children...

A young man reads the old Confucian texts and discovers, between the lines of virtue and benevolence, a single repeated instruction: eat people. Lu Xun's 1918 short story, published in the journal New Youth, is widely considered the first major work of modern Chinese literature, and its method is as revolutionary as its content. Written in the vernacular rather than classical Chinese, the diary records a paranoid narrator's growing conviction that his neighbours, his brother, and his entire civilization are cannibals. The madness is metaphorical and literal at once, an indictment of a feudal order that consumed its own children. Lu Xun, trained as a doctor, chose literature as surgery. The final cry is for the children yet to be saved.