Runtu

In Lu Xun's story "My Old Home", the narrator recalls his childhood friendship to Runtu, the son of a part-time labourer who worked for his family. On meeting Runtu twenty years later, the narrator shakes his head over Runtu's "hard life: many children, famines, taxes, soldiers, bandits, officials, country landlords, all had squeezed him as dry as a mummy." Although he sees no future for Runtu, the narrator hopes that his children will "have a new life, a life we have never experienced." See "My Old Home", Selected Works of of Lu Hsun, pp. 72, 75.