A Study Of Shi Tuo's Native-Land Stories

In May 1937, Shi Tuo's (when he was known as Lu Fen) first short story collection, Gu, won the Dagong News' art prize and made him become famous overnight. Shi Tuo was not complacent of this fame and still-working hard, and then built his "City of Orchard" in his native-land stories, finally established his unique status in modern Chinese literature.Shi Tuo starts his writing career as a young revolutionary man belongs to left-wing. His early native-land stories are pictures full of local colors in his homeland in Central China Plains. With beautiful natural scenery contrasts ugly society, he expresses his own feelings, love and hate, to his homeland. After Anti-Japan War breaking out, in the hard time in Shanghai, Shi Tuo writes some native-land stories, such as City of Orchard and The Master of (he Hopeless Village, etc. The materials of these stories still come from his homeland, but he begins consciously to depict the whole rural land in China through his stories, a lament of country life in China. This lament reaches and reflects the depth of the everyday life in the countryside in China. All Shi Tuo's native-land stpries build a "city" of orchard full of idyllic landscape. In this "city", the author shows us repeatedly the wanderer's departing, returning of native, and departing again. The author is the wanderer, he sees the ruins and death, the ignorant existence and inevitable tragedy in this city through the wanderer's eyes, yet he also shows us the side full of tender feelings. Under his description lies the deep cultural reflection, it pains the author and makes him doesn't criticize firmly and approve absolutely. So there is a dilemma in Shi Tuo's stories: criticizing and having tender feelings for the "city", this is a confusion of two contradictory cultural perspectives. Reasons make Shi Tuo write realistically, yet feelings fulfill the stories with emotions. The confusion of two aesthetic styles, along with two contradictory cultural perspectives, gives expression to the characteristics of Shi Tuo's native-land stories, and this exactly is the echo and improvement of Lu Xun's native-land stories.