Weining Wang
The Lost Man of the World：
A Review of Rickshaw Boy by Lao She
The novel Rickshaw Boy was originally published in 1937. The most recent English translation was published in 2010 by Harper Perennial. It can be purchased here.
Lao She (1899-1966) was a local Beijinger. Known for the Beijing flavor of his novels, he added some Peking-characteristic expressions in these stories. Because of their use of Beijing dialect, these stories have a strong and immediate appeal to Beijing residents. Since Lao She was born in a declining Manchu banner family, in which family members were barely scraping by on the government dole, he experienced life’s hardships. To quote from website Lao She CCTV-International, “Lao She's original name was Shū Qìngchūn (舒慶春). He was born in Beijing, to a poor family of the Sūmuru clan belonging to the Red Banner. His father, who was a guard soldier, died in a street battle with the Eight-Power Allied Forces in the course of the Boxer Rebellion events in 1901.”
As a representative Beijing writer, Lao She was very interested in the living conditions of urban residents, especially people at the bottom of the old society. He accepted two completely different models of literary creation—Western humor and Chinese traditional art. Many of his novels (such as Under the Red Banner, Teahouse, and Crescent Moon) are based on the real experience of Beijingers who live in small rooms, streets, and hutongs.
On the one hand, in his most famous novel Rickshaw Boy, Lao She describes old Beijing as a big, international city. With its worldwide reputation, Beijing provided many opportunities for commercial practices, opium trading, and world-class economic partnerships. The old city was set with docks, hospitals, wharves, and modern buildings. Since the second opium war, Beijing grew up as the trade center of Asia, which led to it being an eclectic city. For example, in Rickshaw Boy, Lao She mentions fifty-one different dishes in total:
熱燒餅夾爆羊肉，棒子面餅子，餛飩，老豆腐，白梨，醬雞，熏肝醬肚，西瓜皮，粥，糖炒栗子，落花生，白幹，白菜葉托著羊肉餡包子，甜漿粥，馬蹄燒餅，小焦油炸鬼，火鍋，蘋果，八仙人壽桃壽面，炒菜面，饅頭，熬白菜加肉丸子，虎皮凍，醬蘿蔔，元宵，餃子，刮骨肉，凍白菜，生豆汁，驢馬肉，羊頭肉，熏魚，硬面餑餑，鹵煮炸豆腐，肉餅，紅豆粥，燒餅，麥茬白薯，鐵蠶豆，熱芝麻燒餅，醬肘子，白菜包，凍柿子，豆汁兒，鹹菜，雞子兒，炸蛋角兒，豬頭肉，鹵煮豆腐，鹽水豆兒
Hot fried mutton, stick noodles, pancakes, wonton, old tofu, white pears, pickled chicken, smoked liver sauce belly, watermelon peel, porridge, sugar fried chestnuts, peanuts, dried white cabbage, Chinese cabbage leaves with mutton stuffed buns, sweet paste porridge, horseshoe pancakes, small tar fried ghosts, hot pot, apple, eight immortals longevity peach birthday noodles, fried vegetable noodles, steamed bread, boiled cabbage with meat balls, tiger skin jelly, sauce radish, Lantern Festival, Dumplings, scraped bone meat, frozen cabbage, raw soybean juice, donkey and horse meat, mutton, smoked fish, hard pastry, stewed fried tofu, meat cake, red bean porridge, baked cake, wheat stubble sweet potato, iron broad bean, hot sesame baked cake, sauce elbow, cabbage bag, frozen persimmon, bean juice, pickles, chicken, fried egg horn, pig head meat, stewed tofu, salted beans. (My translation)
On the other hand, Lao She repeats the word “poor” a number of times throughout the novel for emphasis. A different impression of instability and decline is revealed by the scattered descriptions of covert opium trading. The novel vividly describes policemen and government officials enjoying delicious meals, while poor farmers don’t know if they will find enough food for themselves and their families to eat dinner that night.
After the revolution of 1911, even though the Qing dynasty had been overthrown and many political thinkers and reformers had shared their money with poor famers, a lot of laborers still could not find jobs. Moreover, the political situation had deteriorated to the point that northern China was dominated by warlords who sought to enrich themselves, often at the expense of the common people. To make a living, some farmers decided to find some jobs in larger towns and cities, and Lao She wrote Rickshaw Boy to record one of these farmers’ lives.
Filled with stories of old Beijing and fascinating details of daily life, this novel allows readers to understand exactly what these farmers’ lives looked like. Almost all the manual workers remember the Xizhimen Gate西直門, which reminds the Peking rickshaw pullers of their heart-wrenching pasts. At the beginning of the last century, a lot of poor farmers wanted to find jobs here, some of them decided to start small businesses, some of them became homeless beggars, and some of them became rickshaw pullers. As Lao She writes of the main character, Xiangzi,
He shuffled along slowly, laboriously, carry his light burden, head hung low, bent at the waist, a cigarette butt he’d picked up off the ground dangling from his lips. When everyone else stopped, he kept walking, and when they were off again, he stopped where he was for a while. He seemed not to hear the signaling gongs and never paid any attention to the distance between him and those in front or back or whether he was aligned in his row. He just plodded along, head bowed, as if in a dream or pondering some arcane truth. Rustic curses from the mouths of the red-clad gong beater or the procession steward, who carried a silk streamer, all seemed directed at him: “You son of a bitch, I’m talking to you, Camel! Stay in line, damn it!” They fell on deaf ears. The gong beater came up and hit him with the gong hammer, but he merely rolled his eyes and looked around through a veil of haze.
In the text, Lao She mentions that Xiangzi used to be a very self-confident man. In order to buy his own rickshaws, he decides to save money and live frugally. Because of the war, he loses his money as well as his individual character. In these several years of working, evildoers resume the role of policemen who abuse Xiangzi. After years of bullying and self-loathing, Xiangzi loses his self-confidence when he loses his rickshaw. By reviewing this chapter through the website Voyant Tools, I found a diagram to view the overall relationships between key works such as aligned, beater, head, and gong. Viewing this diagram, one can clearly understand that Xiangzi has become a total zombie.
In Rickshaw Boy, Lao She employs the humorous and thoughtful writing style for which he is now famous. The novel is not only about a poor laborer—it also records the vicissitudes of age. It is a novel that helps readers to better understand the old Chinese society, and it reminds us that we still need to better understand the reasons why this old society has changed.
Weining Wang is a Senior student at Beloit College, majoring in interdisciplinary studies–East Asian Studies. His Beijing flavor fiction, “The Old Snack Shop,” appears in The Sucarnochee Review, an undergraduate publication at the University of West Alabama. Weining translated eight poems from the Tang dynasty and published them in Equinox, a journal of contemporary literature at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock; two pieces of artwork, “Nose_Paper” and “Star_Canvas,” also appear in Equinox. His Chinese-style artwork, “Fire and Ocean,” “Black and White,” and “Great Wall,” are forthcoming in Long River Review, an annual literary journal of art and literature staffed by undergraduates at the University of Connecticut. Weining’s artwork, translation, and fiction have also appeared in the Madison Review, black moon magazine, Wordgathering, Third Wednesday, Meat for Tea: the Valley Review, and elsewhere.