Chinese playwright and author of humorous, satiric novels and short stories. Lao She is perhaps best known for his story LO-T'O HSIANG-TZU (1936, Rickshaw), a twentieth-century classic. An unauthorized and bowdlerized English translation, Rickshaw Boy, with a happy ending, appeared in 1945 and became a U.S. bestseller.
"The person we want to introduce is Hsing Tzu, not Camel Hsiang Tzu, because "Camel is only a nickname. We'll just say Hsiang Tzu for now, having indicated that there is a connection between Camel and Hsiang Tzu." (from Rickshaw)
Shu Quingchun (Lao She) was born Shu She-yü of Manchu descent in Beijing. His father, who was a guard soldier, died in a street battle during the 1900 Boxer uprising. To support her family and Lao Shê's private tutoring, his mother did laundry. "During my childhood," Lao She has later said, "I didn't need to hear stories about evil ogres eating children and so forth; the foreign devils my mother told me about were more barbaric and cruel than any fairy tale ogre with a huge mouth and great fangs. And fairy tales are only fairy tales, whereas my mother's stories were 100 percent factual, and they directly affected our whole family." (Lao Shê in Modern Chinese Writers, ed. by Helmut Martin and Jeffrey Kinkley, 1992)
Fatherless since early childhood, Lao She worked his way through Peking Teacher's College. After graduation he supported himself and his mother through a series of teaching and administrative posts. He served as a principal of an elementary school at the age of 17, and later he was a district supervisor. Lao She spent the years from 1924 to 1929 in London, where he taught Chinese at the School of Oriental and African Studies. By reading amongst other things the novels of Charles Dickens, Lao She improved his English, and decided to start his first novel.
In 1930 Lao She returned to China and continued to write and teach Chinese at Qilu and Shadong Universities. MAO CH'ENG CHI (1933, Cat Country) was a bitter satire about Chinese society. In NIU T'IEN-TZ'U CHUAN (1934, Heavensent), partly modelled on Fielding's Tom Jones, Lao She turned again to humor. He reversed his early individualist theme and stressed the futility of the individual's struggle against society as a whole. In Rickshaw Boy Lao She traces the degradation and ruin of an industrious Peking rickshaw puller, a peasant drawn to the city. To earn his living, he pulls a rented rickshaw from dawn till dark, enjoys briefly the status of owner-operator, and finally dies on a snowy night. Evan King's translation published in 1945 invented new characters and changed the ending.
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