Lao She (老舍)

Lao She (Shu Qingchun) was born of Manchu descent in Beijing. His father, who was a soldier, died in a street battle during the Boxer Rebellion. "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 & Jeffrey Kinkley, 1992)

Lao She worked his way through Peking Teacher's College and 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. From 1924 to 1929 Lao She taught Chinese at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London. He became an avid English fiction reader to improve his English and fell in love with the art of writing.

In 1930 Lao She returned to China and continued to write and teach in Shandong Province. He wrote bitter satires about Chinese society. His stories are full of humor and wit. His early works had a strong individualist theme but he later wrote more about the futility of individual struggle against a corrupt society. In Camel Xiangzi (Rickshaw Boy) he traces the degradation and ruin of an industrious Beijing 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.

During the Sino-Japanese War (1937-45) Lao She worked as a propagandist, and headed the All-China Anti-Japanese Writers Federation. After World War II Lao She lived in the United States on a cultural grant at the invitation of the US Government. Lao She's novels are among the first modern Chinese novels to be published in the West and his tour publicized modern China.

When the People's Republic was established in 1949, Lao She returned to China. He held several governmental posts including; deputy to the National People's Congress, a member of the Standing Committee of the Chinese People's Consultative Conference, and vice-chairman of the China Federation of Literature and Art. His art suffered after the founding of the PRC but he did produce the play Teahouse (1957)which is still widely performed around the world to this day.

During the Cultural Revolution, Lao She was publicly denounced and criticized, as were a number of other writers and intellectuals. On October 24, 1966, He was driven to suicide by the Red Guards. He drowned in Taiping Lake after being forced to discredit his wife and friends during an intensive public humiliation.

In 1979, he was posthumously "rehabilitated" by the Communist Party. Several of his stories have been made into films, including This Life of Mine (1950, dir. by Shi Hui), Dragon Beard Ditch (1952), Rickshaw Boy (1982, dir. by Zifeng Ling), The Teahouse (1982, dir. by Xie Tian), The Crescent Moon (1986, dir. by Huo Zhuang), The Drum Singers (1987, dir. by Tian Zhuangzhuang ), and The Divorce.

Read about Lao She's former residence open to the public in Beijing.