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.