Tender Lu Xun
——Reading "Lu Xunjia's Collected Books" has a feeling
Text/ Yang Yumei
(Web Photo)
"Horizontal eyebrows are cold to a thousand fingers, and bow down to the cows." Lu Xun's famous words highly summarize his temperament, character, demeanor, and spirit. His works, whether novels, essays, or essays, epitomize his jealousy and vengeance, cynical fighting spirit. Lu Xun's impression of the world is: serious, cold, depressed, and fighting. It seems that as soon as he saw the word "Lu Xun", his thin face, thick beard, locked brows and melancholy eyes immediately appeared in front of his eyes. Mr. Lu Xun used his pen as a gun and spent his whole life fighting against the inferior roots of the nation, the selfishness of human nature, the filth of politics, and the darkness of society. Such a Lu Xun seems to have nothing to do with tenderness. However, recently reading the "Complete Works of Lu Xun" family scrolls, in his letters with his family, I have seen a delicate, humble, warm and tender image of Lu Xun. Feel the true, spontaneous, warm and lovely other side of Mr. Lu Xun in his daily life.
As we all know, Lu Xun had an unhappy old-fashioned marriage. Lu Xun lost his father at the age of 15, and his mother Zhou Lushi, in order to make the Zhou family prosper as soon as possible, but also to have one more helper in the hard life, married Ann, an old-fashioned woman with small feet wrapped around her feet and illiterate Ding. This was psychologically unacceptable to Lu Xun, who had already gone abroad to study in Oriental Japan, opposed feudalism, and advocated freedom. However, Lu Xun is the eldest son in the family, and he does not dare or disobey his mother's orders, and he chooses to use evasion to fight against this loveless arranged marriage. Thus, there was one more miserable woman in the world. For nearly 20 years, Lu Xun himself lived a miserable, dull, loveless and sexless life like a martyr. Until the appearance of xu Guangping, a close lover with like-minded ideals, ignited his fierce flame of love, making Lu Xun's emotional world full of warmth and tenderness.
Xu Guangping is a real lady, and her grandfather used to be an inspector of Zhejiang Province. The letters of Lu Xun and Xu Guangping are roughly divided into three stages: the first stage is the stage of mutual admiration. It was from March 1925 to January 1927. On March 11, 1925, Lu Xun, who was teaching in the Chinese Literature Department of the Beijing Higher Normal School, received the first letter from xu Guangping, a student. Since then, the prelude to this "affectionate" "Family Letter Collection" has been opened, and the letters of this period have been mainly based on the fusion of ideas and the collision of feelings. The content of the letters is mostly about the current situation, life, and society's views, thoughts and suggestions, at this time Lu Xun is more of a teacher to comment on the students' thoughts, lives, and works.
In Lu Xun's first letter to Xu Guangping, he referred to Xu Guangping as "Brother Guangping". The signature at the end of the letter is sometimes: Shi, Lu Xun, and sometimes Lu Xun is written directly.
In his letter of April 14, 1925, Lu Xun replied to Xu Guangping's topic of "everywhere is bitterness and bitterness..." "I think the reason for the little devil's bitterness is that he is anxious. Among the enterprising people, sexual impatience is good, but being born in a place as numb as China is easy to suffer losses, and no matter how much sacrifice is made, it is nothing more than destroying oneself, and has no impact on the country. There is only one way to cure this numb country, that is, 'tenacity,' that is, 'perseverance.'" In a letter dated 13 May of the same year: "Now let me be honest, 'Is the world really nothing more than that?' What I say is often different from what I think, and I do not want to transmit my thoughts to others, and why I do not want to, because my thoughts are too dark, and I cannot be sure whether I am right or not. As for the need to resist to be true, but what I know is that 'this is why the care of resistance' is very different from the little devil. Your rebellion is to hope that the light will come, but my rebellion is nothing more than to make trouble with the darkness..." These ideas and views are very Lu Xun-like tones, to guide and exhort a "little devil" with the same progressive resistance ideas.
The second stage was the letters of Lu Xun and Xu Guangping during their separate work trips to Xiamen and Guangzhou. It was from September 1926 to January 1927. In September 1926, Lu Xun was invited by Lin Yutang, then director of liberal arts at Xiamen University, to teach at Xiamen University. Almost at the same time, Xu Guangping went to guangdong women's normal college after graduation to teach. Thus, there was the "Book of Two Places" between Lu Xun and Xu Guangping from Xiamen to Guangzhou. The letters at this stage already have each other's concerns and thoughts, and there is also a warmth in the tone. The content of the letters is mainly based on mutual introduction to the living and working conditions in Xiamen and Guangzhou, as well as discussions on current politics and academic thought. In his letter, Lu Xun introduced the hot and humid climate of Xiamen, the residence is full of ants, and the snacks he likes to eat are often invaded by ants. Therefore, Lu Xun invented the method of using water to block ants: "I use a plate of water storage, add a cup, put a box on the cup, store food inside, and the ants can't fly." "Full of strong interest in life.
At this stage, Lu Xun's letter was signed as: Xun. From this, we can also see the deepening of mutual relationships and feelings.
The third stage is after the reunion and family. The period was October 1927 - December 1932. In January 1927, Lu Xun went to Guangdong Sun Yat-sen University to teach, and Xu Guangping served as his assistant professor and Guangzhou dialect interpreter, and the two were finally reunited. In October of the same year, the two officially started a family in Shanghai. Because Lu Xun's mother and other family members lived in Beijing, Lu Xun traveled back and forth between Shanghai and Beijing, and the letters during this time were between Beijing and Shanghai, which was a veritable family letter.
During this period, Lu Xun's epistles referred to Xu Guangping as much more interesting. He called Xu Guangping a "little hedgehog", "lotus pony", "harmful horse", "good girl", etc., full of pity. And his own signature at the end of the letter is even more wonderful: your little white elephant. (The term white elephant probably stems from his friend Lin Yutang calling Lu Xun "a worrying white elephant.") What's even more interesting is that Lu Xun would even draw a white elephant symbol when signing his name. The image of the white elephant in his pen is agile and rich in expression: sometimes with his head held high and his nose held high, sometimes with his head bowed and contemplative, sometimes running forward, flying smartly, sometimes lying down to rest, tired and sleepy. I guess I drew it according to the mood I was in when I wrote the letter. This reminds me of the memes used on social platforms today, and Mr. Lu Xun used them so funny and smoothly 100 years ago.
In a letter to Xu Guangping on May 30, 1929, Lu Xun wrote: "Little hedgehogs, we get along for a deep reason, they use their own hearts to spy on each other, where will they understand." When I looked here, I knew with all the more certainty that we were not small. This passage points out that the love between them is great, it is just bright, and there is no need to hide it.
His correspondence with Xu Guangping was almost a day, sometimes with several time periods in one letter. In the letter of December 25, 1926: "The letter of the twenty-first day has been sent, and the thought has arrived." Another brief letter sent on the seventeenth, received on the twenty-second... Letter ending: When the wind is strong on the night of the 25th. Later, a paragraph was written, "It is still the night of the 25th, 12:30." During the day, before it was sent, he wrote another paragraph at the back: "At this moment, at 11:00 a.m., I went to the postal agency to see it once, and there was no letter; and I was going to send this letter, but I suspected that once this letter was sent, I would receive a letter tomorrow. Besides, there's nothing to do, let's talk about it next time. News, November 26. However, the letter has not yet been sent, and another paragraph is written next: "At one o'clock in the afternoon, I passed by the door of the post office, and saw someone else's letter from Dongguan, and I did not, then, today there is no letter, so I will send this." From these times and contents, it can be seen that Lu Xun is thinking about each other all the time, writing down almost every moment of events and missing feelings, mailing them to his beloved, and always looking forward to the other party's reply, what a tender feeling!
Needless to say, their love is great. Just imagine, without Xu Guangping's love, Mr. Lu Xun's life would be miserable and incomplete. Xu Guangping only lived with Mr. Lu Xun for 10 years, and in October 1936, Mr. Lu Xun died of illness in Shanghai. Since then, she has been responsible for sorting out and publishing Lu Xun's works, and has played an important role in the transmission of Mr. Lu Xun's works.
Lu Xun's family letter to his mother is mainly to introduce to the mother the growth of her son Zhou Haiying and the family's life. Lu Xun also often bought romance novels for his mother. When Lu Xun died of illness, his mother was 78 years old, and he lost his son in old age, and the old man was so sad that he could not cry until 7 days later.
Lu Xun and his second brother Zhou Zuoren lost peace due to family affairs, which is also a well-known thing. The letter to Zhou Zuoren was a letter from 1923, before the brothers rebelled. Most of them are the discussion and exchange of academic articles, but they also contain the care and love of their brothers.
Mr. Lu Xun regards time as life. He said: Where in the world are there geniuses, I just spend other people's coffee time at work. From the publication of his first vernacular novel "Diary of a Madman" in 1918 to his death in 1936, in just 18 years, Mr. Lu Xun created, translated, sorted out, and compiled all his works, accumulating as many as 15 million words. It can be described as a great work of emperors. These works have played a tremendous role in promoting the awakening of Chinese national culture, the enlightenment of thought, and the rise and development of new cultural movements. It freed Chinese literature from the shackles of the obscure and strict format rhythms of ancient literature, opened up a vast precedent for vernacular literature, made Chinese civilization stand majestically in the forest of world cultures, and also let Chinese literature rise to a majestic and strange peak in the early twentieth century. Time is undoubtedly precious to Mr. Lu Xun, but he still insists on writing letters to his family every day. Judging from the timing of the letters, sometimes it is before going to bed in the middle of the night, sometimes it is after waking up late at night, and sometimes it is around dawn. Sometimes it's a gap between jobs. From this, we can see how gentle and dense Mr. Lu Xun's emotional world is, thick and long.
I really thank those slow and stagnant mail trucks, precipitate these precious family letters that still have a hot temperature, let us jointly explore mr. Lu Xun's secret and rich inner world, and seal a warm, soft, humble and frank new image of Mr. Lu Xun for future generations.
Yang Yumei
November 22, 2021 at TakemeKaku
【Author's Profile】Yang Yumei, pen name: Qing Yangmei. He is a member of the Shandong Provincial Prose Literature Association and the Binzhou Writers Association. His works have appeared in newspapers and periodicals such as Bohai, Binzhou Daily, Lubei Evening News, and Binzhou Public Culture. A number of works have been published in the magazine "Joy" of Chengdu City Library in Sichuan Province. The short story "Jujube Is Red" and the essay "The Softness of Life" were published in the excellent journals of Qinghai Province, "Jinyintan Literature" and "Selected Literary Works of Binzhou". Many works have been published in micro-media such as Bohai Literature, Binzhou Literature, Writers Daily, and Mountain Pomegranate.