Lu Xun said heavily in the article "For the Remembrance of Forgetting" commemorating the five martyrs of the Left League: "I have lost very good friends, and China has lost very good youths. ”
Among the five young people, Roushi and Lu Xun had the closest contact. For him, Lu Xun is a teacher and a friend. Rou Shi had attended Lu Xun's course on the history of Chinese novels at Peking University, and later came to Shanghai, where he lived close to Lu Xun and ran the "Chaohua Society" with Lu Xun.
Lu Xun said that although Roushi's works are inevitably pessimistic, he always believes that people are good. Whenever Lu Xun talked about the horror of man, he would open his eyes in horror, not daring to believe it, and always felt that people's hearts would not be lost to such a point. But he finally told Mr. Lu Xun that he wanted to "change the content and form of the work", and then wrote "Mother for Slaves".
"Mother of Slaves" is Rou Shi's masterpiece and a famous piece in the history of modern Chinese literature. After the novel was published, it was praised by Mr. Lu Xun, and later translated into foreign languages, which made the French writer Romain Roland deeply moved after reading it.
When it comes to mothers, people feel great. Yes, the mother in this novel is great and touching, but she has suffered endless humiliation and helplessness. She was a mother, but under the bad habits of a pawn wife, she was reduced to a slave wife, a deprived mother.
After all, Roushi still believed what Mr. Lu Xun said that "people's hearts are in danger" and exposed it with objective and calm brushstrokes. After we watched it, we couldn't breathe.
Roushi's novel was born out of his true experience. One year, during the Spring Festival, Roushi returned to his hometown to visit his relatives and saw a blind beggar with ragged clothes and a swollen face. When I inquired, I learned that this person was strong when he was young, very good at work, and could support his family. But when he was in his thirties, he was arrested zhuangding, and although he escaped later, he contracted "yellow fat disease" and could only do some chores and earn some "foot money".
Later, he was blind in both eyes, and for the sake of the family's livelihood, he first sold his daughter as a child bride, and twice pawned his wife as a tool for others to "pass on the generations", and finally became a beggar.
Roushi has not been able to put down this story, "I want to write it out, so that more people know that there is such a thing today..." So there was "Mother for Slaves".
Although the man in the novel planted the seedlings well, he still owed a lot of debt. The bad habits that the poor could contract were also infected, and no one was willing to lend him money anymore, but he was sick again, and he had a five-year-old son to support.
He was a good farmer, but he was still in a bad situation, highly indebted, and a microcosm of the oppressed and exploited bottom at that time.
"There is only one disease in this world, and it is called the disease of poverty." In desperation, this man was pawned by the Shen family's wife to the landlord. The closest to evil is also the poor. Just a year ago, he had also immersed his newborn daughter in boiling water.
Of course, the wife was reluctant to be pawned out, she could not let go of her five-year-old son, but she was like an object, and could only obey the man's mercy.
She was bought by a landlord in his fifties who had no sons, and because he was afraid of his wife, he did not dare to take a concubine, so he bought her to pass on the generations.
To her husband she was something that could be pawned out like a thing; to the landlord she was only a temporary instrument of fertility.
Although the landlord is a talent who has read books and is good to her, he is still purposefully kind after all. Although her life was much better than before, on the one hand, she missed her son in her family very much and suffered a lot, and on the other hand, she had to face the yin and yang strange atmosphere of the landlord's wife.
She gave birth to a son for the landlord, and just when the landlord was worried about taking a name, she remembered her son Chunbao in her family, and said that his name was Qiubao.
Lao Xiucai was very happy to hear this, remembering the "Nai also has autumn" in the "Book of Shang", saying that he has reached the autumn year, autumn is the harvest season, and he is also "nai also has autumn".
He praised her for not reading but being smart, but she just smiled bitterly, she was just thinking about her children. The author writes this way, which makes people feel sad and ironic.
She fantasized about staying at the landlord's house and taking Chunbao over, because she felt that her man might not be a few years away. But this is tantamount to a fool's dream. Xiu Cai intended to keep her, and his wife would not agree.
As a wife, she was a disposable appendage like a slave. After being pawned out, she was just a fertility tool for others. As a mother, she was disqualified from being a mother three times. This is the mother as a slave, the mother who is enslaved and deprived.
When she is pawned, she can no longer be Chunbao's mother. When he gave birth to a child for the landlord, he could only be the son's temporary "aunt" and later forced to leave. But when she returned to her original home, Chunbao no longer recognized her mother.
Through this story, Roushi accused the cruel harm of the bad habits of the pawnbrokers to women, and also criticized the alienation and distortion of human nature by feudal thought, which can be described as bloodshed.