Museum Honors Lao She

by Feng Yuan

Behind the door of 19 Fengfu Hutong in Dongcheng District lies one of the most significant sites in Chinese literary history. For 16 years until his tragic death in 1966, this was the home of Lao She, one of the greatest of China's 20th century writers. It has been under restoration since 1997 as a museum dedicated to its former owner, and was scheduled to open to the public this month to mark the 100th anniversary of the author's birth.

Lao She was born into a declining Manchu family in Beijing on 3 February, 1899. His father died in the Boxer Rebellion in 1900, and his family was too poor to send him to school until he was 8 years old. But from the beginning, he showed a strong interests in books, traditional stories and the opera.

He gained such a good reputation that after graduation he was made headmaster of a primary school. He was only 19 years old.

But in 1919, the "May Fourth Movement" changed his whole life, putting him on the road to becoming a writer.

"Experiencing the 'May Fourth Movement', I came to realize that everybody had a responsibility for the prosperity or decline of the country," he later recalled.

"Chinese people had to regain their dignity and not be the servants of the invaders any more. I had to write something to unveil the people's sufferings from feudal society and imperialism."

Most of Lao She's stories are set in Beijing, depicting his own experiences, the anti-Japanese War, ordinary people's sufferings, the liberation, and the construction of New China. He gathered much of his material from the everyday lives of the capital's inhabitants, and the vivid Beijing language of his characters is one of the outstanding features of his work.

Lao She bought the property on Fengfu Hutong in the spring of 1950, not long after he had returned to China at Zhou Enlai's invitation. He was already a world-famous author, thanks to the best-selling "Rickshaw Boy"(luotuo xiangzi) written in 1936. He was made head of the Beijing Federation of Writers and Artists, a member of the National People's Congress and the Standing Committee of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference, and vice-chairman of the Chinese Writers' Association. He was feted by the government, and returned the compliment with wholehearted support.

His courtyard home set Lao She apart from most of the writers in Beijing, who lived in government-allocated housing. He called it the House of Abundance, and within it he planted trees and flowers to remind himself of the Beijing of his youth. The persimmon trees he planted still flourish there today.

But his services to China proved of no avail in 1966. Seized by a group of Red Guards on the morning of August 23, he was taken together with a group of artists, writers and officials from the Beijing Bureau of Culture to the Imperial College, where the Chinese emperors had once lectured on the Confucian classics. He was savagely beaten and forced to wear a placard bearing the words: "Active Counterrevolutionary".

In previous years, it had been his habit to invite friends to his home on the fifth day of the fifth month of the lunar calendar to commemorate the anniversary of the death of the poet Qu Yuan in 278 BC. Qu tied a stone around his neck and leapt into the Miluo River in Hunan to protest against the injustice and terror of what he called "the nation of beasts". Ordered to report to the police the morning after his torture and humiliation -- and to bring his "Active Counterrevolutionary" placard with him -- Lao She chose instead to go to Taiping Pond and drown himself.

Plays

1950 Long Xu Gou (The Dragon Beard Ditch).
1955 Xi Wang Chang'an.
1956 Cha Guan (Tea House).