Runtu

Runtu is the peasant figure in Lu Xun’s 1921 story “My Old Home” (Guxiang), not a documented biography. A life of labor, little leisure, and little literacy does little to train the abstract, written speculation one can unfold before strangers. Attention stays on grain, tax, and children; that muscle thins. That is environment, not blood.

But the story is not “village people never grew a mind.” The boy Runtu can already tell how shells are gathered by the sea, how one watches a watermelon field at night and spears a zha. The talk has causes, scenes, and a knowledge of his own. If the place had left him blank from the start, the boy would not speak so clearly. When they meet again as adults, many children, famine, taxes, soldiers, gentry, and winter sit on him. He addresses the old playmate as “Master”; speech thins, courtesy thickens; incense burner and candles take the place of telling. The tragedy is wear: a telling that was there is taken by the way he has to live. Facing a man of letters, the safe tongue is only status.

This gallery includes him to split “country people cannot think” into two layers. Abstract written argument wants spare time, literacy, and room to be wrong; schooling siphons that training into town. Runtu still calculates survival. What no longer enters the narrator’s grammar is the boy’s knowledge of the world.

Historical limits

“Those who labor with their minds govern; those who labor with their strength are governed” names a division of work, not a test of intelligence. Farm work rewards reading weather, soil, and favors, not writing essays. As a specialized skill, abstract speculation often stays thin in such days—that part is true. Those who can take school training often leave first, so village life looks even less like “thought.” In a face-to-face society a wrong word is costly and open argument pays little. What meets Runtu is not a thought-experiment but tax, troops, hunger, and a title that must be spoken. What is missing is that trained abstract genre, plus the surplus energy to keep speaking—not a page that was never written on.

Personal and role limits

These are limits of the type, not of one person’s virtue. Skill is bound to farm work, debt, soldiers, and neighbors; it does not convert on the spot into publishable reason. Grown Runtu is not speechless; the speech still allowed has been drained by rank. One “Master” completes courtesy and self-lowering together. Philosophers in this gallery write opposition as fragments. Runtu writes it as silence.

Contrasts

The fisherman-sage of the Chu ci and Zhuangzi has leisure; he can turn the river into a philosophy of advance and withdrawal—a rustic recluse, not this entry. The Newhaven fishwife stays at same-day haulage and resale; what she lacks is cold chain and order information. Runtu stays where seashore and melon-field knowledge cannot be handed back as public speech: the experience remains; the audience and the genre no longer belong to him. The three are not one kind of “folly.” Each is missing a different piece: leisure, circulation, or the right to be heard.