Rickshaw Boy
낙타샹즈
A novel by Lao She, serialised in the magazine Yuzhou feng from September 1936 to October 1937 and published as a book in 1939. In warlord-era Beijing a young rickshaw puller, Xiangzi, wants only a rickshaw of his own, and loses his money, his health and at last his self-respect.
In depth
What is the story?
Xiangzi is a strong young rickshaw puller from the country, taciturn and stubborn, with one wish: a rickshaw of his own. After years of saving he buys one, and soon afterwards soldiers carry him off, rickshaw and all. Escaping from their camp at night, he leads out three camels and sells them cheap, which earns him the nickname "Camel Xiangzi".
To save again he does what once shamed him, stealing fares from old pullers. Huniu, the fierce daughter of his boss Fourth Master Liu, seduces him, claims to be pregnant and forces a marriage. Just as he is rising again in the household of the kindly Mr Cao, police raid the house and a detective strips him of his savings. Huniu dies in childbirth, and he sells his rickshaw to bury her. Xiao Fuzi, the neighbour he has come to love, is driven into prostitution and hangs herself.
Now Xiangzi stops working. He takes to smoking and drink, catches a venereal disease, steals and sells out his friends. He earns coppers carrying banners in wedding and funeral processions and hands over Ruan Ming, who organised the pullers, to the police. The last line calls him a lost soul of individualism.
Why is it still read?
Beijing itself is a second protagonist. Lao She drew its streets, crowded courtyards and customs in sentences alive with the local dialect. The most famous passage is the heat and cloudburst of chapter 18: at a burning noon lightning breaks, the city turns to flood, and the passenger silently lets his puller struggle through the water. The novel watches to the end as one man who trusts in hard work and thrift is broken. The critic C. T. Hsia ranked it the best modern Chinese novel before the war against Japan, and Lao She called it the work that satisfied him most.
What kind of political novel is it?
A worker who tries to rise alone and fails can be read as a call for collective action. But the book does not side with collective action either. Ruan Ming, the student politician who organises the pullers, is a contemptible informer who denounces Mr Cao, the teacher who failed him, and when he goes to his execution Beijing cheers the show. Hence the reading that it ends trusting neither individualism nor revolutionary politics.
Why did the author cut his own ending?
After 1949 Lao She wrote, in an afterword of 1954, that he regretted the book's lack of hope and had edited it. The 1955 People's Literature edition deleted most of chapter 23 and all of chapter 24, removing Xiangzi's final degradation and betrayal and Ruan Ming's execution, along with the sexual passages. Lao She said chapter 24 did not fit in tone or structure, but the cuts are widely seen as political. Most of the text came back in the 1983 collected works.
Earlier, in 1945, Evan King published an unauthorised American translation that rewrote the novel and invented characters. In his ending Xiangzi returns to Mr Cao and rescues Xiao Fuzi from a brothel, and the book became a bestseller, to Lao She's great displeasure. On 23 August 1966 Red Guards forced Lao She to kneel before a fire of burning opera costumes and beat him. The next day he died in Beijing's Taiping Lake. The usual account is that he drowned himself; another holds that he was beaten to death and thrown in.