'"If a single university student cannot find a job, perhaps he is to blame. But unemployment among undergraduates is so high. Can we blame them all for not taking off Kong Yiji's long gown?" asked a user on the Quora-like platform Zhihu.

"A low salary is not the scariest thing. The lack of social welfare protection and opportunities to acquire new skills is," he added.
#ChineseLiterature
#LuXun #students #China https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-china-65425941

“Imagine an iron house, with absolutely no windows, indestructible, with many people asleep inside who will soon die of suffocation…Would you think you are doing them a good turn [by waking them before they perish]?”

“But if a few awake, you can’t say there is no hope.”

Lu Xun, from preface to “Call to Arms,” 1922
#everynightapoem #ofsorts
#china #literature #translation #LuXun
#救救孩子

A late 2022 postscript: an image of the " A Letter to Young People" printed in the first issue of La Jeunesse, 1915 (see top of thread) at Zhejiang University; and quotes from Lu Xun's "A Madman's Diary" and "Preface," spotted taped to benches on Beijing Languages Academy campus this evening.
Shared on weibo, hat tip to @bokane

#China #救救孩子 #LuXun

Lu Xun's Madman pierces through all linguistic and societal obfuscation in a single, plain, vernacular sentence:

“Tonight, the moon is bright.”

It has been over a hundred years since #May4th and since the Madman's final diary entry: "救救孩子" - "Save the children."

I have taught Lu Xun's 1918 story so often, including in these subsequent May Fourths since COVID. And the moonlight from a century ago still pierces, then, as now, with the force of revelation.

#Chinese #literature #LuXun

Lu Xun's Madman pierces through all linguistic and societal obfuscation in a single, plain, vernacular sentence:

“Tonight, the moon is bright.”

It has been over a hundred years since #May4th and since the Madman's final diary entry: "救救孩子" - "Save the children."

I have taught Lu Xun's 1918 story so often, including in these subsequent May Fourths since COVID. And the moonlight from a century ago still pierces, then, as now, with the force of revelation.

#Chinese #literature #LuXun

Yet despite his deep cynicism - the futility of awakening a few souls only to have them perish - he starts to write.

"A Madman's Diary" is framed as a story of rehabilitation: we are told, in fussy classical prose, that the man has recovered and gone back into civil servitude.

The brother laughs off the whole episode, and the narrator seemingly concurs, presenting the diary as a clinical curiousity.

But when the text proper of the story begins -

#Chinese #literature #LuXun

@albinokid #dostoevsky #HarukiMarakami #kurtvonnegut #GabrielGarciaMarquez #LuXun #CanXue #KoboAbe #VirginiaWoolf