Rickshaw Boy in 10 Minutes: How an Honest Puller Was Ground Down, Inch by Inch, Into a Walking Corpse

The first rise — Xiangzi flees into the city, rents a rickshaw from the Harmony Rickshaw Yard, and pulls it day and night, scrimping on everything, until three years of savings let him pull a brand-new rickshaw home as his own. In that moment he belongs to the "rickshaw-owning class," tasting for the first time what it feels like to be his own master: with a rickshaw of his own, he has a self of his own. This is the warmest passage Lao She ever wrote — the first time an ideal is close enough to actually hold in your hand.

The first fall — flush with joy, he pulls the rickshaw out past the city walls to try his strength, runs straight into warlord soldiers in retreat, and is seized along with the rickshaw to be pressed into service as a conscript. In the chaos of the camp at night he fights his way out alive, grabbing three unwanted camels on his way and selling them off for a few dozen dollars. He still has his life; the money is nowhere near enough to buy another rickshaw. But the nickname sticks — Camel Xiangzi. Lao She writes this passage mercilessly: the first fall comes with no warning at all. Xiangzi hasn't done anything wrong. The chaos of the age simply pries his fingers open and takes the rickshaw out of his hand.

The second rise and second fall — back at the rickshaw yard, Xiangzi grits his teeth and starts saving all over again, harder, thriftier, more reckless with his own body than before, and the money is nearly there once more. But around this time he takes on a monthly contract with Mr. Cao's household — a good household, steady income, what should have been good fortune. Then a case of political suspicion drags the household in, and a secret agent named Detective Sun searches Xiangzi's room under the pretext of "hunting revolutionaries," cleaning out every cent of the hard-earned savings he has scrimped together. For the first time, Xiangzi understands: he cannot even hold on to money he earned with his own body. Lao She writes this passage cold to the bone — Xiangzi isn't robbed. He is searched, "lawfully," "by the proper order of things," and stripped bare.

The third rise and third fall — Huniu, daughter of the rickshaw yard owner Fourth Master Liu, sets her sights on Xiangzi, gets him drunk by design, turns the pretense into a real pregnancy, and forces him into marrying into the Liu family as a live-in son-in-law. Huniu buys Xiangzi a secondhand rickshaw with her own private money — this is the third rise, and the most bitterly mixed of the three: he has a rickshaw again, but the price is becoming a man who married into someone else's house, tied down by a woman whose force of will is suffocating. After the marriage, Huniu is idle, extravagant, and given to excess; when she finally becomes pregnant, the labor goes wrong, and neither she nor the child survives. Xiangzi has to sell the rickshaw again just to pay for her funeral. This third fall is the cruelest cut Lao She deals — it isn't a stranger who takes the rickshaw this time. It is ground away from inside the word "family" itself.

Fuzi's death — this is the turning point of the whole novel. The woman Xiangzi truly falls for is not Huniu but Fuzi, the girl from the tenement courtyard. Her father, Er Qiangzi, a drunken rickshaw puller, first sells her to an officer as a concubine, and once she is cast off, forces her into secret prostitution to support her brothers. Xiangzi wants to help her, but he can barely keep himself afloat. By the time he finally makes up his mind to go back for her, she has hanged herself in a grove outside the city walls. Her death snuffs out the last spark of upward hope left in him.

Falling into a ghost of himself — after three rises and three falls, the ideal is finally, completely broken. Xiangzi is no longer the proud, respectable young man he started out as: he learns to cut corners and cheat, to sell people out and inform, to swindle money and dodge debts, to drift through whoring and gambling, until he is hollowed out into what Lao She calls an individualist ghost at the end of his road. Lao She's own verdict on Xiangzi is exactly that: a child born from society's diseased womb, an individualist ghost at the end of his road. He isn't complaining that Xiangzi failed to try hard enough. He is saying that the machinery of the old society will grind down, first and fastest, exactly the one person most desperate to climb and most willing to work for it.

What it is actually saying

On the surface, Camel Xiangzi is about a rickshaw puller buying and losing rickshaws in a loop; underneath, it is answering one question: in a world that devours people, does "hard work can change your fate" still hold? Lao She's answer is a flat no. It isn't that Xiangzi fails to work hard. It's that every direction his effort takes, every result it produces, every shred of dignity it earns, gets taken by warlords, searched away by secret agents, swallowed by family, or driven into the ground by poverty. The gain and loss of one rickshaw is magnified into how an entire underclass lived under the old society — you are not treated well, you are not permitted dignity, you are not even allowed to try to be a good person.

This is not the story of a failure. It is the verdict handed down on a society that would not allow anyone to succeed.

Deeper still, Lao She shows the underclass devouring each other — Huniu's brutality, Er Qiangzi's cruelty, Fuzi's death. Every one of them is both a devourer and the devoured, twisted by poverty into the same shape. Lao She's attitude toward them is not condemnation but compassion. He writes them vividly alive using authentic Beijing street speech — hawkers' cries in the hutongs, rickshaw men's slang, teahouse chatter — and the warmth of the language itself throws the coldness of their fates into sharper relief.

Why read it today

For readers today, Camel Xiangzi is still anti-inspiration cold enough to burn — it tells you that hard work alone is not enough; you also have to ask what kind of world you are working hard inside of. The name Xiangzi has become, in Chinese, shorthand for a hardworking person ground down by fate. Read it and you will see how the gain and loss of one rickshaw gets magnified into the sickness of an entire era, and how Lao She wrote the smoke and clamor of ordinary street life into literary history using plain Beijing speech.

Why go read the text itself