Tomorrow - Lu Xun

The first night we took my daughter home from the hospital following her birth, I remember constantly waking in the night and checking that she was breathing. I listened for her breath, her life, and only felt at ease when I heard it. At times I had to go to her cot to check.

‘Tomorrow,’ which tells the story of a widow losing her 3-year old son to an illness, is a difficult story to read, both in terms of the loss and the response of the characters around the widow. Lu Xun once more takes up arms against the inefficiency and waste of the society in which he lived, presenting the reader with a proposition: is this situation in any way acceptable; if not, what is to be done?

The story is set in the fictional village of Luzhen (as in Lu Xun, or perhaps Lu Zhen), which “back in those days […] was still an old-fashioned back-water of a place: by around seven in the evening, most of the town had locked their doors and taken themselves off to bed.” Only two places “kept their lamps burning into the small hours”: the Universal Prosperity, and the home of the widow Mrs Shan next door who, out of “rude economic necessity”, needed to make a living to support herself and her 3-year old son.

From the outset, Lu Xun prepares the contrasts clearly for us: the back-water and old-fashioned setting, with its dimness and general slumber, as well as the diligent and impoverished widow. The lamp, a familiar image of Lu Xun's fiction, reminds us of the hope and of the aim for progress within such a sorry scene.

As “Red-Nosed Gong” takes a “great, easy slug of his wine” and begins to croon a “popular love song”, Mrs Shan is next door cradling her son, Bao’er. She is described, almost dismissively, as a “simple, uneducated sort of woman”. Bao’er’s breathing is laboured at night, and the “lamplight illuminated the pallor beneath his crimson flesh.” The reader of Lu Xun knows within the opening page that this will not pleasantly run its course.

Mrs Shan takes her boy to the doctor the next morning as he is looking worse than ever. Dr Ho XiaoXian uncurls two fingers, “both nails a generous four inches long” to feel Bao’er’s pulse. We already know Lu Xun’s views on traditional medicine, and here he spares no detail in his description of the ill-informed doctor. Mrs Shan, however, being uneducated, has a different viewpoint: “surely this man can save Bao’er’s life, marvelled Mrs Shan to herself.”

The doctor states that Bao’er’s stomach is blocked, and though Mrs Shan begins to challenge this, noting his laboured breathing, the doctor snaps: “that’s because his Fire is vanquishing his Metal.” With this, he “closed his eyes,” which can be said to be a metaphor for the traditional practitioners in a general sense, choosing not to see what is in front of them. Mrs Shan, though, “felt it would be rude to press him further,” which reminds us that deference to profession and authority should not be an automatic response – everyone, no matter their social status or perceived power, deserves to be challenged (and, by extension, held to account).

She fetches Bao’er’s prescription and makes her way home, meeting Blue-Skinned Ah-wu, who offers to carry the boy.

“His gallant cravings quickly satisfied, Ah-wu soon handed the child back into his mother’s arms.”

This could be read as a simple criticism of a simple drunk, but we might also see this as Lu Xun questioning how deep the social connection was during his time, and a prod at the reader to consider their own feelings of connection to their community. Later on, we learn that Ah-wu is tasked with being a coffin-bearer, but he doesn’t show-up, which calls his character into greater question.

Mrs Shan asks Mrs Wang to take a look at the boy, but she can only offer a “Hmmm.” Mrs Wang, we shall see, takes it upon herself to lead the logistical arrangements when the boy passes.

After having administered the medicine, Bao’er “seemed much more peaceful” even being able to open his eyes and cry out “mama”, but not long afterwards:

“Seedpearls of sweat seeped through onto his forehead and tiny the tip of his nose, sticking to Mrs Shan’s hand like glue. Frantically she felt his chest and burst into uncontrollable sobs.”

These become “full-blown wails”. A crowd gathers, including Ah-wu and Mrs Wang who, “quickly assuming command,” gives a range of orders. We learn by the end of the story that she had done “everything properly” and “ticked everything off on her fingers.” There is some decency here, some communal compassion, but Lu Xun presents this as shallow.

“The first problem was the coffin”, the narrator states, emphasising the lack of warmth in this process of grief. The logistics after the child's death is given more focus and attention by the community than in addressing the child's illness when alive. It could also be argued that the town had become used to death, to the scourge of infant mortality, something that in the modern age, across much of the world, has become a much rarer occurrence.

The town, with Lu Xun reminding us that it is an old-fashioned backwater of a place, head off to bed at seven once again. He is challenging the stagnation and atrophy of society and of communities, asking us to consider if we must persist along this pathway of slumber and monotony. It is only by embracing modernity (speaking that is, of Lu Xun’s specific time), that China could address the human waste and recover from the centuries of decline and the more recent uprisings and civil war, especially in the moment of imperial ambitions from hungry world powers (including Japan).

Mrs Shan is left alone – so much for community, so much for the Confucian principles of Ren (that is, benevolence) and Yi (that is, righteousness).

“How unreal it all was. It must be a dream, she was thinking to herself; just a dream. Tomorrow, she would wake up from a good, long rest, with Bao’er still fast asleep next to her.”

Lu Xun perfectly captures the mental adaptability and response to grief and shock for Mrs Shan who, against all reason, hopes that this is simply a dream and that upon waking everything would be ideal and better again. The title of the story, then, is captured within the framing of an awakening. As we learned in ‘Medicine’, there is no quick cure for the ills of society, no short-cut to the cultivation of a corrupted culture. The sickness must be diagnosed, made clear to the people, and then action must be undertaken by all, with many sacrifices along the way. Lu Xun, as we have learned, saw himself as a physician delivering these diagnoses to his readers, and this has the potential to divide readers - on the one hand there will be plenty who will look for lessons and meaning in literature, but for many the messages may lack finesse and they may prefer literature that does not preach to them.

Mrs Shan is unconsolable with grief the following day upon seeing Bao’er in his coffin, and this goes on for so long that Mrs Wang “mercifully lost patience with her and yanked her away, as a confusion of hands scrabbled to fasten the lid.” The use of the word "mercifully" is said with tongue firmly in cheek.

To be fair to Mrs Wang, we can assume that she had herself seen and perhaps endured great hardship. We often see in life how those who have been through hardship and who have experienced grief can sometimes take a sterner hand when supporting those who are grieving or in pain, perhaps because they feel this may be the best way for them to be helped. In a sense this gives this character an additional layer that hasn’t yet been encountered so far in the minor characters of the other stories we have read to date (‘Nostalgia’ and ‘Medicine’). Lu Xun may display a certain antagonism towards archetypes of characters within society, and at times this can feel overplayed, though we must always leave room for our own interpretation (regardless of the author's intentions).

The most depth and time is allotted, understandably, to Mrs Shan, who “couldn’t shake off a sense of the utter strangeness of it all. Something had happened to her […] that should never have happened.” One reading of this is from the perspective of Mrs Shan in the sense of the very human/maternal idea that we shouldn’t outlive or bury our own children. Another reading of this is that such human waste, and perhaps most notably infant mortality, should not be accepted in a supposedly modern society, and at the very least in terms of the medical malpractice of the doctor.

She lights a lamp (Lu Xun again signalling with the lamp a realisation, as if underlining his point), and she considers the room, “an enormous void enveloping her.” She then blows out the lamp and lies down, recalling a healthy Bao’er, who had sat next to her as she spun, asking about his father:

“Daddy used to sell dumplings, didn’t he? So when I get bigger I’ll sell dumplings, too. I’ll make lots of money and give it all to you.”

This dialogue seems out of place for what we can assume to be a 3-year old child, but the emotional significance of this for Mrs Shan is clear for the reader, and of course we might note the boy’s filial piety as something which remained important for society.

The narrator (we can use this term interchangeably with 'Lu Xun'), continues: “she was a simple, uneducated sort of woman – as I may have already mentioned.” It is at these times, when Lu Xun’s voice is most clear, most didactic, addressing the reader directly, when his stories feel most jarring. Part of the freedom of literature is supposed to be the room for interpretation, rather than feeling like we need to keep the moral lessons at the forefront, as we can say Lu Xun himself criticised concerning Confucian classics. Nevertheless, the message here remains relevant and important: if Mrs Shan can see the flaws in society and yet cannot give it expression, or cannot herself advocate, then the duty to do this turns to those who do have either the power or the skills to advocate for, and demand, change.

“Silence descended on Luzhen. Only the darkness remained, agitating to become tomorrow’s first light, concealing within itself the howls of the village dogs.”

We can certainly say that at times the imagery is forced, but the choice of words remains beautiful in places, such as the darkness concealing within it light (that of Yin and Yang each containing within it a seed of the other, so that neither is ever fully negated), and the darkness itself agitating, representing the members of society that were being moved to create reactions within society (Lu Xun included), and finally the classical sound of the howling of dogs, which could be said to represent the pointless voices within society, of which there are always many, and which even today appear to be monopolised by senseless shamans and snake-oil salespeople.

Finally, we might compare this story to the moral lesson present in Mencius’s tale of the Child in the Well. Mencius, in trying to communicate that all people have an inherent sense of morality and justice, proposes that if child were stuck in a well then no sane person would pass by without trying to help. The would not help in order to gain something, such as getting into the good books of the parents, and they would not help for fear of looking bad – it would be a natural response to the horror of a helpless child stuck in a well.

Of course today we have the instance of countless children being held in an open-air prison and in refugee camps being bombed incessantly from the skies and targeted and murdered by soldiers and snipers for decade upon decade. The shame is on the world, now, and this time the voices of the howling dogs far outweigh those who agitatate for dawn.