吶喊 (Call to Arms)

Call to Arms is the founding collection of modern Chinese vernacular fiction: A Madman's Diary was the first short story written in the everyday language rather than in classical Chinese, and The True Story of Ah Q is the most read piece of Chinese fiction of its century. What Lu Xun established, and what Lao She then worked inside, was a form for writing about ordinary urban poverty without either sentimentality or the classical register: the protagonist who is not admirable, whose defeat is social rather than tragic, and whose self-deception is the writer's real subject. Rickshaw Boy is that method applied at novel length to a Beijing puller. Lao She acknowledged the debt to Lu Xun repeatedly, including in the memorial essays he wrote after his death.

Ba Jin was part of the generation formed by the May Fourth movement that Lu Xun's fiction had done most to shape, and Family is the novel that carried its central argument into a bestseller. The argument is the one Lu Xun made in A Madman's Diary and A Small Incident: that the Confucian family order is not merely outdated but actively devouring the young, and that the deference it demands is the mechanism. Ba Jin's three brothers in a Chengdu gentry household are that thesis worked out as a plot, with the eldest destroyed by obedience. Ba Jin wrote about Lu Xun's influence on his generation directly, and edited and promoted his work for decades afterwards.