Lu Xun's "Native Place," where the writer is seen with a probing look and a cigarette with smoke trails swirl like the inscriptions of a pen [Photo/Baidu Commons]

It might be said that the great writers of each generation have not only succeeded in evoking a place or people, but also found a distinctive, previously unheard voice through which to do so. From Dostoevsky to F. Scott Fitzgerald, the universally recognized writers of each nation have cultivated a style that is precisely their own, while seemingly representative of the national tenor.

Chinese essayist and translator Lu Xun (1881-1936), and a leading figure in the New Culture Movement of the 1920s and conversations on reform in China, surely sits amidst that tradition of voice-creators. His essays, including Medicine and Kong Yiji, and the various literary journals he helped edit and publish, illumined Chinese society through characters that everyone could recognize but no one had before confronted on the page. Kong Yiji tells the story of an aging, ridiculed scholar who fails the xiucai examination and is mocked in the local bar, and implicitly criticizes the futility of an exam-based education system and human indifference. In An Incident, we confront a passenger whose rickshaw collides with a pedestrian. The passenger must ask, "When do my social obligations to others begin?"

Lu Xun's style is defined by intricate symbolism and philosophical questions as they arose in quotidian life—"how should one act as a friend, a citizen, a partner"—which themselves are interwoven with often melancholic existential realities and historical commentary on China as it moved away from an imperial system and into years of reform and revolution.

These were facets of Lu Xun's voice, but perhaps the most important was that he often wrote in vernacular Chinese. For centuries, literary writing was composed in the Classical style, or wenyanwen, which followed a different syntactical structure from spoken speech and held myriad references to ancient tropes and stories, making it illegible for someone without formal training.

With the rise of Lu Xun and several contemporaries, prose became a reality, and a new generation of fiction writers emerged. Lu Xun was not just writing in a new voice, but daring to record the voices and speech he heard around him.

Lu Xun is thus recognized as one of China's first "modern" writers, and his focus on dissonance and alienation, and questions of existence as they overlapped with politics, were radically new.

But in order to see the world out of which Lu Xun was writing, and the traditions which he was negotiating, it seemed important to experience the very space in which he grew up. In what domestic world did Lu Xun live, and did his career in part come as a reaction to that? Could one sense the very same world Xun talked about in his prose, or had it morphed into something unrecognizable?

I headed last week with a few fellow researchers to Lu Xun Guli, or the ancient roads and houses where Lu Xun grew up and studied, located in the center of Shaoxing. Lu Xun's own family home was built in the Qing Dynasty, and it's surrounded by canals where tourists can hire gondolas, and chou dofu vendors call out their best prices. We arrived an hour before a thunderstorm rolled through Shaoxing, which created a dense fog and frenzy to move through the house, as many hustled to avoid the coming rain.

Yet even amidst the tourist rush, one has the visceral sense that this was a writer who not only existed on a hinge between two radically different worlds, but also had to work tirelessly to create such a "modern" literary space.