Runtu Never Died Once

This is a mythic and religious rereading of “My Old Home,” not Lu Xun’s original intent. The gallery entry still reads Runtu as follows: laboring life trains little abstract written speculation, yet the boy could already tell, and the man is worn down by survival and rank. What follows asks something else: how a person ever gets out of “it can only be this way.”

1. Claim

Runtu is not without life. He never went through a spiritual death, and therefore never received a second birth. The almost mythical boy is already dead; a new “I” that could face the world again was never born. He remains living, without being born a second time.

2. The boy as first life

The story’s shape is unusual. Boy Runtu stands in moonlight, at the shore, in the watermelon field, fork in hand, after the zha. Between him and the world there is almost no thick wall: he knows nature, has bodily knowledge, dares to act, has a language of his own, and does not need “Master / servant” to know who he is. Criticism often sets this healthy, lively, keen, brave child against the numb, tight-lipped man. If the village had left him blank from the start, the boy would not speak so clearly.

3. “Master”: death of the subject

The wound is often not poverty but one word: “Master!” As children it was Xun-ge’er and Runtu-ge, person to person. Twenty years later it is “I” and a servant. Lu Xun calls this “a lamentable thick barrier.”

Death here is not of the body. What dies is subjectivity: the “I” that could still face the world is covered by an abstract social relation. He lives, but ritual law and rank have begun to fix him.

The path is not: death of the old self → darkness or water → a soul born again → a new freedom. It is: boy Runtu → pressure → poverty → ritual → rank → “Master” → the grown man. He is nailed down while still alive.

4. An unfinished death and rebirth

Grown Runtu would have to ask again who he is, why he is poor, why he must call another man Master, and where those rules come from. If the questions were really asked, a spiritual death could happen: “What I took for granted need not be true.” Only then could a new subject appear.

He does not get there. He is pressed from the boy straight into the Runtu of “Master.” The old world has died; no new self arrives. The grief is not only poverty. It is that the second birth never occurs.

He takes what history made for what nature made: “I am a servant,” “life is like this,” “I can only live this way.” In his mind they have become fate.

5. Water: death, washing, the middle

Returning souls to a kind of water is not an idle image. In many religions water is death, washing, and rebirth at once. Christian baptism reads immersion as dying with the old person and rising a new creation. Water is not the end of life. It is the medium in which the old self dissolves, what was imposed is rinsed, and a subject stands up again.

Water therefore has three stages: dissolve (the old name goes), purify (what was forced on the person is washed), rebirth (an “I” stands up again). Water is not the answer. It is only the middle between an old world and a new one.

6. LCL: after dissolving, choose an “I” again

Neon Genesis Evangelion makes the same shape visible as a sea. In Instrumentality, bodies fall into LCL, AT fields vanish, borders between persons go, souls return to a single sea of life. Shinji refuses to remain forever in a painless One, and chooses again a bounded individual who can be hurt and can choose.

Christianity’s direction is roughly: die from sin, receive new life in God. Eva adds a doubt: if everyone becomes LCL, without barrier and without pain, there is also no true “I.” Real rebirth is not fusion back into the One, but becoming a bounded person again out of the One. The LCL sea is only the middle.

7. Reverse comparison

Both begin as a first life, both are wounded, both meet isolation. Runtu’s mask is “Master”; Shinji’s border is the AT field. Runtu never enters that water and never chooses the world again; the old structure still writes him. Shinji enters LCL, refuses full Instrumentality, and chooses to be human once more.

The fisherman-sage stands at the Canglang water and can turn advance and withdrawal into philosophy, because he has leisure and finishes seeing through the old name. The Newhaven fishwife lacks cold chain and order information. Runtu lacks a second birth.

8. Speculation: death of a world-picture

The greatest use of speculation is to turn “it can only be this way” into “it need not be.” It drags historically made rules out of fate and asks: why? who set this? can it change?

That instant is the first spiritual death: the “I” that used to understand the world is already dead. One enters a middle like an abyss, darkness, or water—the old name gone, the new not yet formed. Then one builds again: who I am, how I stand to others, what the world is, how I should live. That is rebirth.

A person must have a moment of knowing that the “I” they used to understand the world by has died. Without that death, they go on living in a world other people have already ruled. Runtu is stuck in “it can only be this way.” Rebirth is the first discovery that it need not be.

To equate Runtu, baptism, and LCL outright would be too coarse. They can be read inside an older structure: death of the subject, dissolve, rebirth. Runtu’s problem is that boyhood died, and no new Runtu was born.