Wandering (Panghuang)

Lu Xun's 1926 second short-story collection

Tradition: Modern Chinese literature

Lu Xun's 1926 second short-story collection

Wandering (Panghuang, 彷徨, 1926) is Lu Xun's (Zhou Shuren, 1881-1936) second major short-story collection, comprising eleven stories written 1924-1925 and published in Beijing. Where Call to Arms (1923) was charged with May-Fourth energy directed against Chinese feudal-traditional torpor — 'iron house' awakening, 'man-eating' Confucian ritual, the pathos of the marginalised — Wandering registers what came after: the failure of awakening, the persistence of the old society, the alienation of would-be reformers from both their traditional milieu and their revolutionary aspirations. The collection's centrepiece, 'The New-Year Sacrifice' (Zhufu), follows Xianglin's-wife — twice-widowed, declared inauspicious, refused participation in the ancestral-sacrifice rite, dying as a beggar — to anatomise how patriarchal-Confucian ritual destroys the women it claims to honour. 'In the Tavern' and 'The Misanthrope' (Guduzhe) depict failed-reformer intellectuals retreating into bitterness, drink, or moral compromise. 'Soap' satirises Confucian-modernist hypocrisy. The collection's title is its programme — wandering, panghuang, the condition of having neither traditional ground nor revolutionary destination. Lu Xun's prose, formed in the Japanese-translated-Russian-realist matrix (Gogol, Chekhov, Andreyev), shows interior psychology — character self-deception, false consciousness — with a cold clinical precision that prefigures Chinese modernist fiction (Shen Congwen, Eileen Chang, Zhang Ailing). The collection became canonical immediately, was incorporated into the Lu-Xun-Quanji (Complete Works), and remained a fixed point in Chinese-language-pedagogy curricula across the Mainland, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and overseas-Chinese schooling — though differently politically inflected in each context. Mid-Lu-Xun signature work alongside Call to Arms and Wild Grass.