Cultural Celebrity--Lu Xun

Lu Xun was a great writer, ideologist, revolutionist, and educationist in contemporary China. He was and is admired by Chinese people due to the acute thought revealed in his satirical writings, the braveness shown in his continuous fighting with the dark forces, and his strong patriotism for the homeland: China. He was born on Sep. 25th, 1881 in a downfallen scholar-bureaucrat family in Shaoxing. Initially, he was named Zhou Zhangshou and later he was renamed Zhou Shuren. And Lu Xun was his pen name. His grandfather was an official of the declining Qing Dynasty. Little Lu Xun led a carefree life. When he was 13, his grandfather was imprisoned for some reason. And the family gradually declined. When his father died, the family completely lost its original wealth and social status. And the life burden fell on Lu Xun’s mother and Lu Xun, who was the eldest son of the family. The sudden vicissitude acquainted Lu Xun with the cruelty of society earlier than his peers. He found bitterly those who used to be kind and respectful to him turned ice cold and scornful. The change of the neighbors’ attitude really hurt Lu Xun. He wrote many years later: “Is there any one who comes from a down falling family? I believe it is the best opportunity to see the real nature of people around you.”

Despite the bitterness, the change gave Lu Xun an opportunity to see what a hard life the lower classes led in China at that time, which solidified his determination to save the people from oppression. In his youth, he was greatly influenced by Darwinism and Tolstoy’s philanthropism. In 1902, he went to Japan to study Medicine. He chose Medicine as his major due to the fact that he believed as long as he improved the health condition of Chinese people, China can be strong. But a slide show in the class smashed his immature dream. It displayed that a Chinese was to be killed by the Japanese and a group of Chinese people watched the ongoing killing callously. It was a great shock to Lu Xun. Suddenly, he understood that being mentally ill was worse than being physically weak and the best way to save China was to change Chinese people’s soul. Resolutely, he gave up his medical study, and turned to be engaged in literary writing. He was determined to arouse patriotism and national consciousness with his pen.

Actually, he never stopped writing until he died on Oct. 19th, 1936. Throughout his life, he wrote and translated enormous works. His massive writings include prose, poems, essays, and novels, etc. Most of them are popular among the public for they reveal the strong patriotism of the author. His progressive ideology hidden between the lines, and his ironic, straightforward, and bitter words, which in place of the author call on the nation to conduct self-rescue at the top of their lungs, flesh out the characters in his novels. Ah Q from the Story of Ah Q, Kong Yiji from Kong Yiji, Sister Xianglin from Zhu Fu, and Run Tu from Home Town, etc. are all fairly familiar to Chinese people. Lu Xun has been acknowledged as the Soul of the Nation.