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Father’s Back and Other Essays

Zhu Ziqing

Father’s Back and Other Essays

Paper book: €11.99

Digital: €1.99

Original publication
1928
Monolingual
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

父が息子を列車まで見送る。青年が学業のため北京へ戻る。父は南京近くの浦口駅まで見送りに来て、向かいのホームでオレンジを買ってやろうとする。動きが鈍く、少し太った父は、線路に降り、反対側へよじ登らなければならない。

The world of the book

1920年代の中国。列車は南京と北京を結ぶが、大河の長江にはまだ橋がなく、北へ向かうにはまず船に乗る。文学も変わり、書き手たちは古い文人の言葉を離れ、話すように書き始める。中国の生徒は今も学校でこうした平易な文章を読む。

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