Medicine
Before dawn a teashop keeper carries his savings to a place of execution and buys a steamed bun soaked in fresh blood, which the neighbours have assured him is the certain cure for his son's cough. The blood came from a young man arrested for sedition, whose case the teashop regulars work over the following morning as an incomprehensible waste. Published in New Youth months after the May Fourth demonstrations, and read since as Lu Xun's verdict on what the 1911 revolutionaries died for.
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