10 minutes to Dawn Blossoms Plucked at Dusk — a few petals of the past a middle-aged man stoops to pick up

At the Three-Flavor Study, Old Master Shou Jingwu is one of the rare private-school teachers Lu Xun writes with real respect — upright, plain, learned, keeping a ruler and a rule about kneeling in punishment that he almost never actually used. At Sendai Medical College, Mr. Fujino, a professor of anatomy, was the one teacher who took the Chinese student seriously, correcting the position of blood vessels in his notes stroke by stroke in red ink. Then there is Fan Ainong, an old friend from his Japan years, met again in Shaoxing after they had both returned home, who eventually drowned — the cause never settled.

The world of the book is not complicated: the Zhou family's old house in late-Qing Shaoxing, the Jiangnan School of Mines and Railways in Nanjing, Sendai in Japan, and Shaoxing again around the 1911 Revolution. The ten essays stand apart, and the timeline is not continuous — you have to accept it jumping between childhood, adolescence, and early adulthood, because that is what memory actually looks like.

From the Hundred-Plant Garden to the Three-Flavor Study: The Brightest Stretch of Childhood

The Hundred-Plant Garden was a vegetable patch and also a child's playground. Blister beetles let off a foul smell if you squeezed them between your fingers; fleeceflower roots, pulled up whole, were said to turn into little people; and somewhere in the tall grass, people said, some strange thing called the snake-woman might be hiding. Ah Chang told him that story, and he half believed it, and could not bring himself to disbelieve it either. Later he was sent to the Three-Flavor Study to study under Old Master Shou Jingwu. The school had a ruler and a rule about kneeling in punishment, but the old man almost never used either; when a student got lost in his recitation, his head would tip back and his shoulders would rock — a picture Lu Xun carried with him for the rest of his life.

What to notice in the writing: Lu Xun describes his childhood in a deliberately restrained, nostalgic register, tossing off the most mischievous details as though they were nothing — which only makes the innocence he has lost more visible. The Hundred-Plant Garden essay is almost entirely plain description, without a single grand word, and yet by the end that vegetable patch outweighs any tale of heroism.

Ah Chang and the Classic of Mountains and Seas

Ah Chang had endless rules. On New Year's morning she made young Xun say congratulations before she would let him eat his lucky tangerine; at night she slept sprawled in the shape of the character for big, and he was squeezed into a corner of the bed. She loved telling strange stories from the countryside too — the Long-Haired Rebels, the snake-woman — and he listened half in fright and half hungry for more.

But once, for no particular reason, Lu Xun mentioned to the family that what he wanted most was an illustrated Classic of Mountains and Seas — he had probably not meant it seriously himself. Ah Chang, who could not read, went out and was gone for several days, and came back with the book, its cover printed with beasts that had human faces, nine-headed snakes, three-legged birds. That was the first time the boy felt something new toward her, something more than gratitude — the discovery that someone he had never taken seriously could care about something this much.

One year, the rare chance came to go see the Festival of the Five Fierce Gods. Opera stages, dragon-boat races, candy vendors — the whole street was stacked with everything a child could want. Then his father suddenly called him back and told him to memorize a passage from the Jianlüe, a rhymed history primer schoolboys were made to learn by heart, a dozen-odd lines of tongue-twisting classical Chinese — no leaving the house until he could recite it. By the time he had stammered his way through it and rushed out to the street, the festival's excitement had already peaked and passed.

What cuts deepest in this short essay is not his father's unreasonableness but the fact that the child had no room to object at all. By the time he was finally let go, his excitement had already gone cold. Lu Xun writes the most wounding moment with real restraint — he does not protest, he simply records how his excitement was pulled out of his hands in that instant. That restraint carries more weight than any outburst would.

Mr. Fujino, and the Slide That Went Dark

At Sendai Medical College, Lu Xun met Fujino Genkurō. This professor of anatomy went over Lu Xun's lecture notes with real care, correcting even a slightly misplaced blood vessel in red ink. That the teacher who treated the Chinese student best in the whole school was Japanese — said in 1926, that line alone already stung.

What pushed Lu Xun to give up medicine for writing was an incident with a slide shown during an anatomy class. A newsreel of the Russo-Japanese War was screened, showing Chinese onlookers watching, blank-faced, as one of their own countrymen was beheaded. Lu Xun wrote about that moment again and again afterward: what wounded him was not how the Japanese treated him, but the sheer numbness on his countrymen's faces. Medicine could not cure that kind of numbness — writing might. That moment became the starting point of his entire literary life.

What to notice in the writing: Mr. Fujino's red-ink corrections and the glow of that slide sit inside the same essay as a matched pair — one a specific, personal, warm act of kindness, the other an abstract, collective, despairing numbness. Lu Xun never spells out the contrast; he lets it speak for itself.

Fan Ainong, and a Drowning No One Could Explain

Around the time of the 1911 Revolution, Lu Xun returned to Shaoxing and, among old acquaintances, ran into Fan Ainong again. They had known each other years earlier in Japan, and had once argued bitterly over the killing of Xu Xilin; this time, they became close friends instead. Fan Ainong was proud, difficult, and down on his luck — still frustrated and penniless even after the revolution. The last word of him came after a night of drinking on a boat; afterward, he drowned.