My favourite story is The Rickshaw Boy. I read this story about five years ago, and I liked it so much that I read it perhaps three more times. The author of this story is the famous Lao She, and this book is so famous that it has been translated into many languages, including English.
Basically, the story is about the living conditions of rickshaw drivers in Beijing. It"s kind of a social critique of the way people were during that time. The story is a bit complex, so I won"t go through the plot but you do get a sense of the injustice and hardships suffered by people before liberation. The main character. is a man who had many dreams and ambitions as a youth, but lost them along the way. His life is thus a kind of struggle for survival and a challenge to reconcile his lost ambitions.
I like this story best because it"s full of sympathy for ordinarily folk. Sometimes I feel we need to take a closer look at the conditions of people in our lives. You know, I guess you could say I came from a wealthier side of society, and it"s so easy to ignore the conditions of people who are not so lucky as yourself. Also, this book reminds us how far our society has progressed. We still have rickshaw drivers and poor folk, but not nearly as many as during the time Lao She was writing. People"s lives are better now, but we haven"t yet reached the ideal state yet, so we had better look after each other and treat each other as brothers and sisters.
