Rickshaw Boy
Translated by Howard Goldblatt
About
Xiangzi is an orphaned country boy who arrives in 1930s Beijing with one dream: to own his own rickshaw. If he can just save enough money, he'll be free — no longer working another man's vehicle, no longer dependent on anyone. He is young, strong, and convinced that honest labor will be rewarded. Beijing has other plans. Lao She's classic novel chronicles Xiangzi's repeated attempts to achieve independence and the systematic forces — bandits, corrupt officials, scheming women, and the sheer grinding economics of poverty — that defeat him each time. The novel is simultaneously a character study and a social indictment, its power derived from the specific, accumulating detail of one man's losing battle. A novel about the cruelest promise a society makes — that hard work is enough — and the man who believes it longer than anyone should.
