Call to Arms and Wandering

Introduction

Call to Arms and Wandering, Lu Xun's two collections of stories, gather the twenty-five stories he wrote between 1918 and 1925 and laid the foundation of modern Chinese fiction. The madman of 'A Madman's Diary' reads between the lines of the old books and finds the words 'eat people' written on every page; Ah Q, in 'The True Story of Ah Q', consoles himself after every beating with his 'spiritual victories'; Kong Yiji is the only customer in a long gown who drinks standing up; in 'Medicine' a steamed bun is soaked in a revolutionary's blood; in 'My Old Home' the narrator's boyhood friend Runtu, once a boy with a silver necklace, greets him as a man with a humble 'Master'; and in 'The New Year's Sacrifice' Xianglin's wife tells again and again how the wolf carried off her son. With a cold, exact pen Lu Xun dissects the soul of his nation, and his characters are still a mirror for the Chinese today.