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Prologue
Why This Book
My first encounter with the short stories of Lu Xun 鲁迅 (1881–1936), one of twentieth-century China‘s great intellectuals and often claimed as the founder of modern Chinese literature, occurred during my sophomore year at Cornell University in a survey course in modern Chinese literature in translation. We must have read several of his iconic stories, undoubtedly “A Madman’s Diary” (Kuangren riji 狂人日记) and “The True Story of Ah Q” (Ah Q zheng zhuan 阿Q正传). Here my memory is clouded. But one particular story sent me reeling. When I reached the conclusion of “The New Year’s Sacrifice” (Zhu fu 祝福) my whole being recoiled in a physiological grimace. I knew something had happened to make me almost double over in pain, but I did not know what. No short story I had ever read had ever delivered such a visceral punch before.
In the decades that followed, I asked myself multiple times why I, a black woman from Queens, New York, would have found Lu Xun’s stories so compelling, why I would have returned to them repeatedly through the years, why their importance increased to the point of consuming hours of my attention through the hard times of my life, why during my career