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Father’s Back and Other Essays

Zhu Ziqing

Father’s Back and Other Essays

Paper book: €15.99

Digital: €3.99

Original publication
1928
Bilingual edition
22 October 2026
Pages
39
Difficulty
Medium
Genres
Poetic, Biography and Autobiography
Moods
Be moved to tears, Savour the writing, Understand myself
Translated from
Chinese

Book summary

This little collection brings together Zhu Ziqing's most famous prose pieces. In “The Sight of Father's Back”, a clumsy father crosses the tracks at a station to buy oranges for his son. Elsewhere, the author walks at night around a lotus pond under the moon, or glides in a boat along the Qinhuai River in Nanjing.

Studied in every school in China, these texts have made this father seen from behind one of the most moving memories in Chinese literature.

Short, tender and very musical, they can be read one by one, at your own pace, in the language you are learning.

The plot

A father sees his son off at the train. A young man is going back to Beijing to study. His father goes with him to the train, at Pukou station, near Nanjing. Then he wants to buy him oranges on the other platform. Slow…

The world of the book

China in the 1920s. The railway links Nanjing and Beijing, but no bridge yet crosses the great Yangtze: to go north, you first take a boat. Literature is changing too: writers are setting aside the old scholars’…

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