He quit medicine after a lantern slide of numb spectators
Lu Xun—pen name of Zhou Shuren—lived from 1881 to 1936 and pioneered modern Chinese literature with the first vernacular novel, Diary of a Madman, in 1918. At Sendai Medical College a wartime slide of Chinese onlookers watching an execution pushed him to heal China's spirit with words instead of scalpels.
Born Zhou Zhangshou in Shaoxing, Zhejiang, into a fading landlord-scholar clan, he was elder brother to Zhou Zuoren. Courtesy names shifted from Yushan to Yucai; in 1898 he took Shuren before Jiangnan Naval Academy, and "Lu Xun" appeared with Diary of a Madman's first printing, the surname Lu drawn from his mother. Grandfather Zhou Fuqing had reached the Imperial Hanlin Academy, but fortunes collapsed after father Zhou Boyi's 1893 exam-bribery scandal: Boyi was barred from further exams, the grandfather sentenced to beheading (later imprisoned in Hangzhou until 1901). Father died of an asthma attack in 1896 at thirty-five after costly quack cures.
Poverty steered him from Qiushi Academy to tuition-free Jiangnan Naval Academy in Nanjing, then the affiliated School of Mines and Railways (1899–1902), where he read Huxley, Mill, Yan Fu, Liang Qichao, Ivanhoe, and Uncle Tom's Cabin. A Qing scholarship took him to Japan in 1902; he cut his queue, studied at Kobun Institute, and translated Jules Verne. At Sendai Medical School from 1904—its only Chinese student—he bonded with anatomy mentor Fujino Genkurō, later recalled in "Mr. Fujino." Russo-Japanese War lantern slides showed a Chinese "spy" about to be beheaded before indifferent Chinese spectators; in the preface to Nahan he explained abandoning medicine to treat spiritual numbness.
In March 1906 he left the degree secretly. That June his mother feigned illness to force an arranged marriage to Zhu An—illiterate, foot-bound—whom he supported financially but never loved as a partner before sailing back to Japan with Zhou Zuoren. Tales from Abroad (1909), translations including Poe, sold only 41 of 1,500 copies. His 1908 essay On the Power of Mara Poetry brought Byronic romanticism to Sinophone readers. From the late 1920s he edged toward Marxism and the League of Left-Wing Writers; Mao Zedong's esteem later canonized him in the People's Republic.
The madman's diary and the silent crowd in the classroom remain two sides of the same diagnosis.
Source: Lu Xun
