Rickshaw Boy

Xiangzi arrives in Beijing physically magnificent and morally exacting, wanting only to work hard enough, and honestly enough, to buy his own rickshaw and escape the debt-bound rental system that keeps most pullers permanently poor. Lao She sets that ideal up with real sympathy before dismantling it methodically: soldiers requisition his first rickshaw outright, a corrupt secret-police informer extorts the savings meant for his second, and the third eventually has to be sold off to cover a funeral. Each loss is caused by a different, specific failure of the surrounding system rather than by any flaw in Xiangzi's own effort, which is exactly Lao She's point, that individual striving cannot out-earn an economy built to extract more from a laborer than it will ever let him keep.

Huniu, the rickshaw yard owner's unmarried, aging daughter, seduces Xiangzi and then claims a pregnancy to force the marriage neither of them approaches as anything close to a partnership of equals. Lao She refuses to let her stand simply as a villain; her own options, as an unmarried daughter growing older inside her father's business, are narrow enough that entrapping Xiangzi is close to the boldest move available to her, and the marriage becomes less a romance gone wrong than two people with badly mismatched power using each other for the little security either can find.

Xiaofuzi, the neighbor girl Xiangzi genuinely loves rather than merely marries, is repeatedly sold into prostitution by her own father to keep the rest of the family fed, and Lao She sets her fate directly beside Xiangzi's, his body sold by the hour to haul passengers, hers sold by the hour for a different kind of labor, the same economic machinery extracting a different currency from a man's strength and a woman's body but leaving neither of them anything resembling ownership over either.

Xiangzi earns his nickname, Camel, after soldiers kidnap him early in the novel and he escapes by stealing away with three of their camels, selling the animals for a fraction of what his lost months of rickshaw-pulling would have earned him. Lao She places this catastrophe before the marriage plot even begins, establishing the novel's structural pessimism early: chance disaster erasing months of careful effort isn't an isolated misfortune here, it's the pattern the rest of the book will simply keep repeating in new forms.

The 1945 American translation by Evan King, published without Lao She's meaningful involvement, rewrote the novel's conclusion into a rescue plot in which Xiangzi saves Xiaofuzi from the brothel and the two end up together, a change that suited American wartime and postwar appetite for uplift far better than Lao She's actual, considerably bleaker close did. The altered version became a bestseller in the United States on the strength of an ending its own author never wrote. Later translations, working from the original Chinese text, restored Lao She's real conclusion, turning the King edition into a case study cited whenever translators discuss how much license a publisher can take before a book stops being the one its author published.