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2 Lu Xun: The True Story Lu Xun was born as Zhou Zhangshou, in Shaoxing, in Zhejiang province, in the eastern part of China, just below Shanghai, in 1881.1 It was thirty years before the fall of the Qing dynasty, China’s last. His grandfather, Zhou Fuqing, was an imperial scholar, though his career had not prospered, and his father, Zhou Boyi, was also intended to become a scholar, but failed, and lived on without a post, on the rents from the land the family possessed. His mother’s name was Lu Rui. The father, Zhou Boyi, died in 1896, when Lu Xun was fifteen. A whiff of scandal attached itself to the grandfather, who could have been executed for corruption in the civil service exams in 1893: in the event, he was reprieved after 1901, dying in 1904, after his son. The scandal seems to have left a traumatic effect in Lu Xun’s life, reducing him to what he considered beggary: the humiliation compares interestingly with what happened to the boy Charles Dickens when his father was imprisoned when the boy was twelve, though the class basis was very different: Lu Xun’s family was gentry, not petit-bourgeois.2 During the scandal, the boy, aged thirteen, was sent into the country to his mother’s family, and felt that he was humiliated as a beggar. In the preface to A Call to Arms (1923), the text which presents himself as ‘Lu Xun’, and where he may be seen constructing his history, presenting himself as a particular kind of writer, he writes: ‘it is my belief that those who come down in the world will probably learn in the process what society is really like’ (XY 33, Y v). The statement is Dickensian. It is essential to begin with the point that to narrate the story of Lu Xun’s life means, usually, drawing on his own words in the preface, and in stories, many of which are autobiographical, and then supplementing these from further information. But the preface has also to be treated as fiction, at least in the sense that writing can make no distinction between events and their representation: in all writing, there is a contest for which representation will become the dominant. And while autobiography fictionalises, the function 14 Madmen and Other Survivors of autobiography here is to make the self a text to be read, as here, in the context of a history whose objective details may be known, but about which there is a conflict of representations, including how the May Fourth movement is to be taken, and how that movement represented the China and the Confucianism it vigorously opposed. The history of Lu Xun criticism shows that there is no consensus on how those representations are to be read, and no settled way of representing Lu Xun. In 1898, Lu Xun entered the Nanjing Naval Academy and changed his name to Zhou Shuren, according to David Pollard on the instructions of a great uncle there, who did not want him to “reflect dishonour on his clan by becoming a cadet’ (Pollard 17), and he transferred his study to the School of Mines and Railways. He described the period as the time when he began to confront medical science and evolutionary thought, such as T. H. Huxley’s Evolution and Ethics (read in the Chinese translation of Yan Fu: the book is referred to in one of the later short stories, Regret for the Past). He realised, he said, that ‘the Japanese reformation owed its rise, to a great extent, to the introduction of Western medical science to Japan’ (XY 34,Y vi). Japan had been opened to the West since 1868 (the Meiji period), and had warred with China, taking Taiwan, in 1894–1895. When Lu Xun graduated in 1902, he was selected for further study in Japan, learned Japanese in Tokyo and went on to study medicine at Sendai University, in northeast Honshu. At that time (1903), he cut off his queue, an event narrated in The Story of Hair, the sixth of those stories collected in A Call to Arms. He tells of the controversy this led to and how Zou Rong (1885–1905), one of the ringleaders in cutting the hair of the overseas students’ supervisor, and author of an anti-Manchu paper called The Revolutionary Army had to be sent back to Shanghai, where he died in prison. The preface narrates seeing, in early 1906, a...

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