Rickshaw Boy: Why One Man’s Strength Cannot Buy Freedom

Geoffrey Chen

100 Works of World Literature · Article 94

# Rickshaw Boy: Why One Man’s Strength Cannot Buy Freedom

Xiangzi comes from the countryside to Beiping, young, powerful, quiet, and convinced that labour can buy a rickshaw of his own. The vehicle means independence: no daily rental, no owner’s command, and the right to organise his legs and time. After three years of extreme saving, he buys a new rickshaw. Warlord soldiers seize both man and vehicle. Escaping, he takes three camels, sells them, receives the nickname Camel Xiangzi, and begins saving again.

Detective Sun extorts his second fund. Hu Niu coerces him towards marriage with a false claim of pregnancy; with her resources he owns another rickshaw, but when she dies in childbirth he sells it for funeral costs. He loves Xiao Fuzi and leaves because he cannot support her father and two brothers. When he is finally willing to build a household, he discovers that she has died by suicide after sexual exploitation in the White House. He abandons labour, trust, and dignity, becoming idle, deceitful, and selfish, eventually informing on Ruan Ming for money.

“The old society turns a good man bad” is not false, but it flattens Lao She’s novel. The book asks how bodily labour without protection is harvested by war, police, employer, sickness, marriage, and market. It also asks how Xiangzi’s individualism isolates him from other pullers and reduces freedom to privately owned equipment. External injustice and internal isolation reinforce each other until his strength changes from capital into the thing most easily consumed.

Begin with the complete serial text

  • Author: Lao She (1899–1966), born Shu Qingchun, a writer celebrated for Beijing speech and urban common life.
  • Composition: written in Qingdao in 1936–37, drawing partly on stories of a puller repeatedly buying and losing rickshaws and another escaping soldiers with camels.
  • Serialisation: Yuzhou Feng, from issue 25 on 16 September 1936 to issue 48 in October 1937; twenty-four chapters.
  • First book: Renjian Shuwu, Shanghai, 1939.
  • Chinese versions: abridged and revised editions after 1949 removed extensive landscape, psychology, sexuality, Ruan Ming’s plot, and Xiangzi’s degradation. Readers should identify a complete edition.
  • English versions: Evan King’s bestselling 1945 Rickshaw Boy cut and rearranged material, invented characters, and supplied an unauthorised happy ending. Jean M. James translated the 1939 edition as Rickshaw in 1979; later translations include Shi Xiaojing’s Camel Xiangzi.

Version is not a bibliographical footnote. Saving Xiao Fuzi and removing Xiangzi’s final degradation turns a critique of individualism and urban insecurity into a promise that hard work will eventually win.

Why the dream is so concrete

Xiangzi does not pursue abstract status. He wants a new, solid, wholly owned rickshaw. He studies shaft, wheel, frame, and price, training his body as a reliable engine.

The goal supplies discipline: spend little, avoid tobacco and alcohol, limit friendship, convert sweat into fractions of a vehicle.

The arithmetic assumes a stable world—no military confiscation, police extortion, illness, or unaffordable household emergency. The novel dismantles each assumption.

Beiping as a labour system

Gates, alleys, depots, compounds, summer roads, storms, teahouses, and the White House form Xiangzi’s economic map. Route determines passenger, fare, risk, and bodily cost.

The city offers opportunity and separates classes. Passenger and puller connect briefly without sharing security. Political danger inside a respectable house can be transferred to the servant outside.

Beiping is not a single villain. It is a network in which nobody accepts responsibility for him.

The first rickshaw as a self

After roughly three years, Xiangzi buys his first new vehicle. Unable to specify his birth date, he treats the purchase as a birthday.

Man and rickshaw form one unit: body supplies power, vehicle preserves its value, income maintains both.

The pride deserves respect and contains danger. He rejects colleagues and organisation, trusting muscle and property. Freedom becomes an object that can be seized.

Warlord soldiers and confiscation

Despite danger outside the city, a high fare tempts Xiangzi onto the road. Soldiers seize and conscript him, taking the rickshaw.

War enters ordinary life as impressment, requisition, blocked roads, and prices rather than battlefield spectacle. Legal ownership disappears before a rifle.

The fare was a mistaken risk, not the cause of theft. Error exposed him; armed power deprived him.

Three camels and a name

Escaping in military confusion, Xiangzi leads away three camels and sells them cheaply. Exaggerated stories told during his illness attach “Camel” to his name.

The animal suggests endurance, burden, and silence, much like his body: because it survives harsh use, everyone assumes it can survive endlessly.

The camels provide a little cash, nowhere near the new rickshaw’s value. Legend cannot replace property.

Returning is not resetting

At Fourth Master Liu’s Harmony Rickshaw Depot, Xiangzi rents again and resumes saving. He looks restored but becomes more urgent, isolated, and willing to exhaust himself.

After deprivation, a person does not return to zero. Loss alters risk and intensifies the compulsion to recover quickly.

Trauma appears less as tears than as hardness, speed, and refusal of trust.

Fourth Master Liu’s mixed institution

Liu has an underworld past and owns the depot. It provides rickshaws and lodging and takes income from pullers. He admires Xiangzi’s power, discipline, and unobtrusiveness.

Without a depot, poor men cannot obtain equipment; through it, they pay rent and follow the owner’s rules. Protection and extraction coexist.

Liu values Xiangzi as labour but will not admit him through marriage to property. Employment approval ends at inheritance.

Hu Niu beyond monstrous temptation

Liu’s daughter Hu Niu is forceful, capable, and central to depot management. She has authority among men and little ordinary path to marriage because of age, appearance, and paternal control.

She initiates sex with Xiangzi and later lies about pregnancy to force marriage. Manipulation should not be romanticised; his reluctance matters.

Reducing her to the ugly destroyer of a pure man erases her work. Her management creates value that legally and patriarchally remains her father’s. Marriage is a narrow route out.

Desire, consent, and dependence

Hu Niu uses drink, experience, and position to drive their encounter. Xiangzi feels controlled, while his desire, employment dependence, and fear of Liu also constrain him.

This is not equal romance. Female initiative does not mean total structural power; male pressure does not cancel his later contempt for her.

The novel entwines desire, consent, class, and gender beyond “who seduced whom”.

Why Mr Cao looks saintly

Working monthly for Mr Cao, Xiangzi receives unusual reason and respect. In his experience, a literate employer who behaves fairly appears almost saintly.

The exaggeration shows how rare basic decency is. Cao’s kindness is real and cannot supply institutional protection.

When political police pursue him, Cao flees first. Xiangzi remains to absorb the threat.

Detective Sun takes the savings

Because Cao is under surveillance, Detective Sun traps Xiangzi and threatens arrest and ruin, taking all his savings.

Sun belongs to the same broad coercive world as the soldiers who first seized him. The first theft uses warfare; the second wears police authority.

Xiangzi has no bank record, lawyer, receipt, or appeal. Money held close seems safe and is defenceless before the state.

Could Gao Ma’s financial advice save him?

Gao Ma, a servant in the Cao household, recommends lending money or making small savings productive rather than hiding cash. She understands poor people’s informal credit.

Xiangzi distrusts everybody and insists upon physical possession. His caution has experiential grounds but provides neither yield nor formal safety.

The point is not that financial literacy cures poverty. Banks are remote and private credit risky; a “correct choice” requires a foundation of trust.

Why the second loss cuts deeper

He can attribute his rickshaw’s loss to war and believe muscle will earn another. Detective Sun deliberately locates and harvests the second fund.

Xiangzi retains strength but loses faith in a relationship between work and result. If discipline cannot preserve tomorrow’s money, discipline begins to resemble self-punishment.

This prepares moral collapse without completing it. He still attempts recovery.

False pregnancy as marriage strategy

Hu Niu claims pregnancy to force Xiangzi to confront marriage and to manoeuvre against her father. The pregnancy is initially a device.

She expects Liu eventually to accept the son-in-law and perhaps make him part of the depot. Xiangzi fears her and half-imagines that marriage might bring stability.

Neither chooses under freedom—she fights paternal rule, he depends upon her resources. Constraint does not make deception harmless.

Why Liu refuses

Fourth Master Liu cannot accept a puller as his daughter’s husband. He wants Xiangzi’s labour, not his accession to property, and denies Hu Niu authority over her own life.

The conflict exposes family economics. Years of her management create value that remains the father’s.

Liu disposes of the depot and leaves. Hu Niu wins the marriage and loses the inheritance structure she imagined.

Owning again without freedom

With Hu Niu’s money sustaining the household, Xiangzi owns another vehicle. It cannot repeat the first rickshaw’s pure rebirth because it is not solely the result of his saving.

He hates dependence; she would prefer that he not exhaust himself pulling. Their definitions conflict: labour autonomy for him, a more comfortable settled household for her.

Equipment ownership cannot guarantee control over market, body, or family.

Heat, rain, and the consumption of bodies

Lao She devotes extraordinary prose to glare, sweat, thirst, rain, mud, chill, and fever. Labour power is flesh with temperature and pain.

A passenger pays for one journey and assumes none of the subsequent illness. A depot can rent to another man; a sick puller consumes his own reserve.

The body is Xiangzi’s only capital, concentrating every risk in one asset. Harder use can destroy future capacity.

Hu Niu’s death in childbirth

Hu Niu eventually becomes genuinely pregnant. Inadequate care, harmful habits, poor knowledge, and inability to secure effective treatment contribute to fatal obstructed labour.

The narration sometimes carries period disgust towards her body. Modern readers should resist treating death as punishment for a scheming woman.

She dies within reproductive and medical risk. Character influences circumstance but should not bear structural blame.

The third sale

Xiangzi sells the rickshaw to bury Hu Niu. Soldiers seized the first; police took the second fund; now household death liquidates productive equipment.

Without insurance, public medicine, funeral support, or family reserve, a life event consumes future income.

These are not identical strokes of bad luck. Military, policing, and care systems each reach the same worker’s pocket.

Xiao Fuzi is not a reward

Xiao Fuzi, daughter of Er Qiangzi, is sold by her father to a soldier and abandoned. She returns with two younger brothers and sells sex to feed them.

She and Xiangzi love one another and imagine tenderness. She is not a pure object waiting for male rescue but a worker made responsible for paternal failure, hungry children, and a gendered market.

Treating her death solely as the trigger for Xiangzi’s decline repeats the conversion of her life into male development.

Why he does not take her immediately

Xiangzi wants her and refuses the burden of father and brothers. Recently bereaved and without a rickshaw, he knows one income cannot sustain the household.

This is not motiveless cruelty. Poverty makes love into arithmetic over mouths and meals.

He nevertheless delegates the decision to future prosperity. For the person who can leave, waiting is a plan. For a woman trapped in sexual exploitation, it may be time she cannot survive.

Mr Cao’s opening comes too late

Xiangzi later reconnects with Cao, who offers employment and a possible arrangement for Xiao Fuzi. Hope returns and he searches for her.

Private goodness opens a door and reveals its contingency. Without the accidental decent employer, there is no public agency to help.

Opportunities also have timing. By the time help exists, Xiao Fuzi has disappeared.

The White House and suicide

Xiangzi traces her to the low brothel called the White House and learns that, after brutal exploitation, she hanged herself.

White signifies no purity; the place consumes bodies until they cannot be sold. She does not die from deficient love but from family abandonment, poverty, and sexual violence.

Xiangzi has lost equipment and savings. He now loses a reason to believe he might still change for another person.

Is the degradation sudden?

It accelerates after Xiao Fuzi but has earlier seeds. Xiangzi despises old and weak pullers, rejects collective relation, equates strength and saving with personal worth, and views women as danger or burden.

Repeated punishment by institutions turns defensive tendencies into principle. He becomes lazy, deceitful, opportunistic, selling body and morality for immediate return.

Victim and responsible actor are not exclusive categories. A gravely harmed person can go on to harm others.

Individualism as the central problem

Xiangzi believes personal strength can solve the whole question. He refuses common interest with pullers and reads their weakness as insufficient discipline.

A private rickshaw reduces rental. It cannot defeat an army, detective, medical emergency, or labour market. The more complete the isolation, the more fully one body bears every loss.

Lao She does not reject effort. He rejects treating effort as an entire social system and misfortune as proof of laziness.

Why this does not mean blaming him

Acknowledging prejudice and error does not mean better budgeting, refusing one fare, or avoiding Hu Niu would guarantee success.

A reasonable society does not permit impressment, extortion, fatal childbirth for lack of care, or survival through prostitution. Individual error should not produce permanent collapse.

“He had flaws” becomes another judgement of the poor when it is used to erase institutional responsibility.

The other pullers as Xiangzi’s future

Old pullers and the Old Ma household show the end of bodily labour: age, hunger, sickness, and expulsion from the market. Their suffering punctures the promise that diligence alone sustains life.

Xiangzi thinks youth, power, and abstinence make him different. The distinction is often only the date on which risk arrives.

They are not background types but the shared fate he refuses to recognise.

Ruan Ming and informing

Ruan Ming is Mr Cao’s former student, a speaker of revolution and social principle who is also opportunistic and self-serving.

Near the end, Xiangzi gives information to the authorities for money, contributing to Ruan Ming’s arrest and execution. The man once extorted by Detective Sun learns to profit from the same economy of surveillance.

Degradation now exceeds self-neglect. He turns another person’s life into income and becomes a minor agent of the machine that crushed him.

Why the ending must hurt

The final Xiangzi is no longer the clean, powerful, quiet youth. Survival means delaying death by any available device, the terminal ghost of an individualist route.

This does not say poor people inevitably become corrupt or merely label him evil. It shows repeated deprivation reorganising desire and refuses to beautify later harm as innocence.

The tragedy works because we remember how carefully he once inspected his new rickshaw.

Hu Niu and Xiao Fuzi beyond moral opposites

Common readings assign appetite, control, and ugliness to Hu Niu and purity, tenderness, and beauty to Xiao Fuzi. The division continues Xiangzi’s gaze.

Hu Niu has money and managerial skill but no authority over inheritance or marriage. Xiao Fuzi has no reserve, is sold by her father, and carries her brothers. Both survive within patriarchal household economies from different positions.

Their choices can be criticised; their suffering is not moral punishment. Female bodies are priced by family need in both stories.

Pride and tragedy in the body

Xiangzi knows how to start, accelerate, stop, and carry a passenger smoothly. He is a skilled worker, not merely brute force.

The city buys immediate use of skill without protecting its long-term preservation. Strength makes him attractive to customers, catchable to soldiers, and convinced that he can endure again.

Physical excellence hides the protection society owes. When it fails, failure is called personal weakness.

Beijing speech and narrative distance

Lao She shapes colloquial vocabulary, occupational language, rhythm, and humour into narration. Pullers are not merely described by an educated outsider; their comparisons enter the novel’s voice.

Accessibility does not mean simplicity. The narrative approaches Xiangzi’s view and then withdraws to identify selfishness or mechanisms he cannot see.

Translation is difficult because locality, class marking, and humour do not survive word-for-word transfer. A complete and reliable version matters.

How to read the heat and rain

Do not label it environment and move on. Mark how weather changes fare, passenger behaviour, judgement, bodily response, and later medical cost.

For a passenger, rain is inconvenience. For a puller, it may mean several days without income. The same weather distributes unequal time.

Nature enters labour economics. Willpower cannot command temperature, lungs, or muscle.

The three losses as a risk map

The first rickshaw goes to soldiers: military risk. The second savings go to Detective Sun: policing and political risk. The later vehicle is sold for Hu Niu’s burial: medical and household risk.

Xiangzi carries one hundred per cent of each loss. There is no insurance, enforceable contract, or public relief.

What he lacks is not a fourth burst of will but institutions and relationships that distribute risk.

How far private goodness reaches

Mr Cao treats Xiangzi respectfully, offers work, and tries to help Xiao Fuzi. His decency matters.

It cannot substitute for rights. Xiangzi’s safety depends upon finding a good master; when the master leaves, protection disappears.

A just system would not require each poor worker to locate a personal Cao.

How the 1945 translation changed the ethics

Evan King’s Rickshaw Boy cut and rearranged the original, invented characters, and allowed Xiangzi to rescue Xiao Fuzi and move towards freedom.

The version became a US bestseller and transformed a critique of unfair society and isolated striving into a reassurance that endurance wins.

Translator and source text are not decorative metadata. Change the ending and the reader encounters a different ethical work.

Why the novel remains current

Gig workers may still own tools, receive payment per task, and carry weather, sickness, accident, and downtime. Platform and customer buy a service without necessarily sustaining capacity.

“Being your own boss” can be freedom and the transfer of every risk to one person. Without health care, secure savings, contract enforcement, and collective bargaining, one accident can erase a powerful body’s gains.

Poverty is not a personality test. Whether someone rises depends upon the presence of steps as well as will.

A practical reading method: two ledgers

Keep an economic ledger: each purchase, saving fund, confiscation, marriage, sickness, and funeral. Do not write only “he fails again”.

Keep a relational ledger: when he rejects fellow pullers, accepts Cao’s aid, sees Hu Niu or Xiao Fuzi as burden, and turns a person into a tool.

Read the ledgers together. Blaming society alone erases choice; blaming character alone erases army, police, market, and poverty.

Conclusion: he owns the vehicle and carries every risk

Xiangzi’s first wish is not greedy. He wants productive property to preserve the product of work, to avoid charity, and to deceive nobody. The first rickshaw is a birthday gift he has made for himself. Such a wish should be the foundation of dignity.

His city recognises the vehicle’s price without protecting its owner; needs his body without protecting health; tells households to absorb birth, death, and hunger without resources. After every erasure, the duty to begin again is returned whole to him.

Xiangzi also commits increasingly grave wrongs. He mistakes independence for needing nobody, reads colleagues’ suffering as weakness, and finally exchanges information about another man for money. The novel’s force lies in making structural oppression and moral collapse true together. One man’s strength can buy a rickshaw. It cannot buy the right not to be robbed. When freedom consists only of property without shared security, even the strongest worker can be ground into a shadow concerned only with remaining alive.

Further reading and sources

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