Lao She

Born Shu Qingchun in Beijing in 1899 to a Manchu family, Lao She (his pen name) grew up in poverty after his father, a palace guard, was killed defending the city during the Eight-Nation Alliance's assault in 1900. He graduated from Peking Normal School in 1918 and worked as an elementary school principal and local education official in Beijing before teaching at Nankai Middle School in Tianjin.

In 1924 he took a position as a lecturer in Chinese at the School of Oriental Studies, University of London, where he taught for nearly five years while writing his first three novels — The Philosophy of Lao Zhang, Zhao Ziyue, and Mr. Ma and Son — establishing him as a rising literary voice before he returned to China in 1929.

After the outbreak of full-scale war with Japan in 1937, Lao She threw himself into organizing wartime literary resistance work. He became one of twentieth-century China's most widely read novelists, known for depicting the lives of Beijing's working poor in Rickshaw Boy (骆驼祥子, 1937) and Four Generations Under One Roof (四世同堂). In March 1946 he accepted a US State Department invitation to lecture in the United States, where he completed the third part of Four Generations Under One Roof and wrote the novel The Drum Singers (鼓书艺人), translating it chapter by chapter with Helena Kuo as he wrote; the English edition appeared in 1952, but Lao She's original Chinese manuscript was subsequently lost, and the Chinese text now in print is a 1980 back-translation from Kuo's English.

Lao She returned to Beijing in December 1949 at the invitation of Zhou Enlai on behalf of the country's literary community. In 1951 he became the first writer awarded the title "People's Artist" (人民艺术家), and his 1957 play Teahouse (茶馆) became a landmark of modern Chinese theater. He went on to chair the Beijing Federation of Literary and Art Circles and serve as a vice chairman of the China Writers Association.

On the afternoon of August 23, 1966, at the height of the Red Guards' "Destroy the Four Olds" campaign, Red Guards convened a struggle session against twenty-nine people from the Beijing Culture Bureau and the Federation of Literary and Art Circles, branding them "monsters and demons." Hundreds of Red Guards built a bonfire of opera costumes, props, and books at the Confucius Temple, forced the group to kneel around it, and beat them for roughly three hours. Lao She, hung with placards reading "black gang element," "reactionary academic authority," and "monster and demon" and with ink poured over his head, was injured worse than the others — his white shirt soaked in blood, his head wrapped in an opera costume's water-sleeve that likewise turned red. When he removed one placard and it struck a Red Guard as it fell, he was accused of having assaulted the student, turning the beating still more severe.

The following evening, after saying goodbye to his granddaughter, Lao She walked to Taiping Lake on the western edge of the city and drowned himself; he was sixty-seven. Because he had been branded a "counter-revolutionary," crematorium staff told his wife, the painter Hu Jieqing, that his ashes could not be kept under the rules then in force, and none were retained. Hu petitioned party and government bodies for eleven years seeking to clear his name; Deng Xiaoping personally endorsed her request in 1978, and Lao She was formally rehabilitated that year, with his "People's Artist" title restored. On June 3, 1978, a memorial ceremony was held for him at Babaoshan Revolutionary Cemetery in Beijing, and he has since been honored as one of the Cultural Revolution's most prominent literary victims.