Why Did Lu Xun Quit Medicine for Writing? The Slide in Sendai and the Stories That Followed

From naval academy to Japan

After sitting the district-level civil service exam in 1898, he left the traditional Confucian path. He spent about half a year at the Jiangnan Naval Academy, leaving because he would have been assigned to an engine room, and then transferred to the School of Mines and Railways, graduating in 1902.

That same year he went to Japan on a Qing government scholarship, attended the Kobun Institute and, in his spare time, translated novels by Jules Verne. In 1904 he enrolled at Sendai Medical School, which is where the turning point came.

The lantern slide and the "literary physician"

The slide he saw in 1905 showed an execution during the Russo-Japanese War era. What struck him was not only the killing but the faces of the onlookers. He described the experience in the preface to Call to Arms, and it became the origin of his idea of the writer as a kind of "literary physician". A healthy body, he reasoned, was of little use to people whose minds had gone numb.

The first steps were not glamorous. In June 1906 his mother arranged his marriage to Zhu An, who could not read; he never had a romantic relationship with her but supported her financially for the rest of his life. In 1909 a translation collection he worked on, Tales from Abroad, sold 41 of the 1,500 copies printed. It was hardly the start of a literary revolution.

Diary of a Madman, 1918

In February 1912 he joined the Ministry of Education of the new Republic of China and lived in Beijing until 1926; he even helped design the Twelve Symbols national emblem. The pen name Lu Xun was chosen in 1918, taking the surname Lu from his mother, when Diary of a Madman appeared in the magazine New Youth.

The story opens with a framing note in Classical Chinese, then gives 13 fragments copied from the diary of a man who believes the people around him are cannibals. Reading a history book, he finds the words "eat people" written between the lines, and the final chapter ends with a plea to "save the children". The diary form was inspired by Nikolai Gogol's story of the same name, and critics read the work as an attack on Confucian tradition.

It is often called China's first modern short story, although scholars dispute that title, since Chen Hengzhe's "One Day" used similar elements about six months earlier. What is not in doubt is its role in baihua, the vernacular written language promoted by the New Literature Movement, which became standard written Chinese in the 1940s.

Ah Q and the art of "spiritual victory"

Lu Xun's best-known character arrived in a newspaper serial that ran from 4 December 1921 to 12 February 1922, published under another pen name, Ba Ren, so that few readers knew who wrote it. Ah Q is a poor village labourer who bullies the weak and fears the powerful; during the 1911 revolution he is turned away by the revolutionaries, then arrested as a scapegoat for a robbery and executed.

Even the name is a joke about knowledge. "Ah" is a familiar prefix, and the narrator uses the Latin letter Q because he cannot tell which Chinese character, among many with the same sound, the man's name was written with. Ah Q's habit of turning every defeat into an imaginary win gave Chinese the phrase "Ah Q spirit", meaning a refusal to face reality. The BBC once placed the story at No. 43 in a list of the 100 greatest tales ever told.

Call to Arms and the iron house

The 1923 collection Call to Arms gathered these stories, including "Kong Yiji", "Medicine", "Hometown" and The True Story of Ah Q, its longest work. Its preface recounts a conversation with his friend Qian Xuantong about an "iron house" with no windows, full of sleepers who will die: is it kinder to leave them asleep, or to wake a few? Lu Xun chose to shout. A second collection, Wandering (1926), added stories such as "The New Year's Sacrifice" and "In the Wine Shop".

Beijing, Xiamen, Guangzhou, Shanghai

The 1920s were restless. In 1923 he fell out with his brother Zhou Zuoren and moved out with his mother and wife, and in 1925 he began a relationship with Xu Guangping, one of his students. In 1926 he left Beijing to teach at Xiamen University, where he wrote most of Dawn Blossoms Plucked at Dusk, and in January 1927 he moved to Guangzhou to head the Chinese department at Sun Yat-sen University. After the April 1927 massacre in Shanghai he resigned and moved to the city's International Settlement, where he gave up fiction and poetry for political essays.

His only child, Zhou Haiying, was born on 27 September 1929, and in 1930 Lu Xun co-founded the League of Left-Wing Writers. He also championed the woodcut movement, encouraging young artists to make prints. He died in Shanghai on 19 October 1936, aged 55, after years of tuberculosis and asthma.

How he is remembered

Shortly after his death Mao Zedong called him "the saint of modern China", and Mao's calligraphy stands above his tomb in Lu Xun Park, Shanghai. Outside China the praise came from writers: Kenzaburō Ōe called him "the greatest writer Asia produced in the 20th century". His work was banned in Taiwan until the late 1980s, and today a literary prize, an asteroid and a crater on Mercury carry his name.

For a language learner, Lu Xun is a gift and a challenge. His stories are short, his sentences are sharp, and many of his phrases have entered everyday Chinese. Reading even one story, such as "Kong Yiji", shows how much social criticism he could pack into a few pages.

Learn with Lu Xun: English expressions

Expression	Meaning	Example
a turning point	a moment when everything changes	The lantern slide was a turning point in his life.
to give up (something)	to stop doing it for good	He gave up medicine to write.
to read between the lines	to find a hidden meaning	The madman reads cannibalism between the lines.
a wake-up call	a shock that makes people see the truth	His stories were a wake-up call for readers.
to make excuses	to explain away a failure	Ah Q always makes excuses after he loses.

Try this: Lu Xun asked whether it is better to wake people in the "iron house" or let them sleep. Write three sentences giving your own answer, using a wake-up call and to give up at least once each.