Rickshaw

by Lao She, translated by Jean M James

It’s a very simple story about all the problems of this very simple man who has nothing, and does the most hard work possible, has a lot of bad fortune, and finally dies on a snowy night all by himself. What is nice in the novel is the description of Peking – of ordinary life and street life there, when it was just a village, a huge village, which it remained until the 1970s. It’s very humorous, and I think it suggests a lot about the way that ordinary Chinese can react to life.