The Story Archive

Kong Yiji

Lu Xun · 1919 CE · Short Story · Chinese · Modernist

The boy who warms wine at a Shaoxing tavern recalls the one customer who drank standing at the counter yet wore a scholar's long gown, filthy and unmended, and who answered mockery in phrases out of the classics. Having failed the examinations and learned no trade, Kong Yiji copies documents when anyone hires him and takes the books home afterwards. Lu Xun's second vernacular story and the one he said he liked best, written as the examination system's last graduates were becoming unemployable.

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