RAS Library 

The Sino-British College, USST

1195 Fuxing Road Middle Road near South Shaanxi Road

上海市复兴中路1195号

上海理工大学中英国际学院

Entrance Fee: RMB 20 (RAS members) and RMB 50 (non-members)

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please request exemption when registering for this event.

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First published in 1937, Rickshaw Boy is the story of Xiangzi, an honest, serious country boy, who works as a rickshaw puller in Beijing. A man of simple needs, Xiangzi’s great ambition is to one day buy his own rickshaw and keep his earnings for himself. After years of grueling work, Xiangzi realizes his dream, only to have it stripped away through a series of tragic events that are beyond his control.

One of the most important and popular works of 20th century Chinese literature, Rickshaw Boy, is an unflinchingly honest, darkly comic look at life on the margins of society and a searing indictment of the philosophy of individualism.

Lao She (Shu Qingchun, 1899-1966) remains one of the most widely read Chinese novelists of the first half of the twentieth century, and probably its most beloved. Born into an impoverished Manchu family- his father, a lowly palace guard for the Qing emperor, was killed during the 1900 Boxer Rebellion. Lao She was particularly sensitive to his link to the hated Manchu Dynasty, which ruled China from the mid-seventeenth century until it was overthrown, 1911.

The view of one of this biographers is difficult to dispute: “the poverty of his childhood and the fact that these were also the years when the dynasty was collapsing and the Manchus were becoming a target of increasingly bitter attacks left a deep shadow on Lao She’s impressionable mind and later kept him from personal participations in political activities. But his alienation strengthened his sense of patriotism and made his need to identify with China even more acute.”

After graduating from Beijing Normal School, Lao She spent six years as a schoolteacher, primary school principal, and school administrator. Then, in 1924, after joining a Christian society and studying English, he accompanied a British missionary, Clermont Egerton, to London, where he taught Chinese at the University of London’s School of Oriental Studies.  Lao She’s literary career began during his five-year stay in England, where he wrote three novels. On his way back to China, he stopped for six months in Singapore and then landed a teaching job at a Shandong university, where he continued to write and publish. By the time that Lao She wrote Rickshaw Boy, he had matured as a writer and was finally able to quit teaching, a job he admitted he did not like and devoted all his time and energies to his craft.

Lao She was invited by the U.S. Department of State to visit America in early 1946; though the initial invitation was for a year, he did not return home until the establishment of the People’s Republic, reportedly at the request of Zhou Enlai. 

A celebrated cultural figure in the People’s Republic for the first seventeen years of its existence, Lao She held a variety of important of symbolic offices after his return in 1949.  

In 1966, shortly after Mao launched his Cultural Revolution, Lao She was interviewed by a foreign couple who subsequently published the exchange. Not long after that, Lao She was visited at the offices of the Chinese Writers Association by Red Guards, who dragged him outside where, they interrogated, humiliated and probably beat him. He was ordered to return the next day, but, according to reports, when he saw his “courtyard strewn with all his possessions, his house looted, his painting and sculpture wrecked, and his manuscripts the work of a lifetime, in shreds he did not enter his house but instead turned and walked to a nearby lake, and there he drowned himself.

“They say translators are frustrated writers,” Howard Goldblatt explained as he waited impatiently in his blue stick-shift BMW behind a silver sedan.  “I’m not a frustrated writer.  I’m a frustrated Formula-1 driver.”

Goldblatt, 73, is the foremost Chinese-English translator in the world.  Over the course of his almost 40-year career, he has translated more than 50 books, edited several anthologies of Chinese writings; received two NEA fellowships, a Guggenheim grant and nearly every other translation award.  In the first four years of the Man Asian Literary Prize, three of the winners were translations by Goldblatt.  John Updike, writing in The New Yorker, said that “American translators of contemporary Chinese fiction appear to be the lonely province of one man, Howard Goldblatt.”

eBook

Book for Sale

RAS Book Club

RAS Library (Wednesdays, 2:00-9:00pm, Saturdays, Sundays, 2:00-5:00pm)

Garden Books, Main Store, 325 Changle Lu, Xuhui District, (21) 5404-0882

Garden Books, Shanghai Center B/F, 1376 Nanjing Xi Lu, (21) 6215-0418

RAS Lectures by prior arrangement (please email bookevents@royalasiaticsociety.org )