Color Version 60 Short Stories That Will Affect Middle School Students' Lives

Author: Lao She, Guy de Maupassant
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2005-09-01
Features: This book selects 60 short stories, all written by literary masters such as Lao She, Mao Dun, Ba Jin, Charles Dickens, Guy de Maupassant, and Mark Twain. It also includes auxiliary sections such as reasons for selection, author biographies, and works appreciation, offering multi-angle analyses of classic works to guide readers deeper into the world of literature. With over 300 exquisite images that vividly depict the stories, the book combines text and visuals to create a truly immersive experience. Let us wander through the colorful gallery of literature, savoring the gripping plots, richly drawn characters, and diverse social landscapes described by the masters. Reading beautiful and thought-provoking short stories during one's youth can not only enhance writing skills and personal cultivation but also inspire the mind, refine one's character, and provide insights into life, leaving a profound impact on one's entire life. For this reason, this book selects 60 short stories suitable for middle school students and beneficial to their growth, accompanied by images and appreciation texts that align with the content, guiding readers to appreciate the themes, settings, and deeper meanings of the works from different perspectives. While offering visual pleasure, the book also opens up vast spaces for imagination. By organically combining various visual elements, the book aims to elevate the literary literacy, aesthetic standards, and life tastes of middle school students, building a bridge of knowledge for them to a bright and fulfilling future.
The Ox Cart
Reason for Selection: One of the representative short stories by Xiao Hong, it uses poetic prose to depict the tragic scenes of ordinary people losing their homes and families due to the war-torn chaos of old China. It has been included in numerous short story anthologies in China.
Author Biography:
Xiao Hong (1911–1942), originally named Zhang Naiying, was a native of Hulan, Heilongjiang, and a modern Chinese female writer. Orphaned in childhood, she entered Harbin Women's High School in 1929 and became exposed to the New Literature Movement of the May Fourth Era. In 1950, she rebelled against an arranged marriage and left home, enduring hardships. In 1932, she lived with Xiao Jun. In 1936, she went to Japan. In 1940, she arrived in Hong Kong with Du Muoliang. In 1942, she passed away in Hong Kong. Her major works include the novels Field of Life and Death and The Story of Hulan River, as well as essays such as Remembrance of Mr. Lu and Recalling Mr. Lu.
Gold-flower vegetables bloomed by the stream at the end of March. Our cart rumbled over the red and green grass at the foot of the mountain, leaving the village of our maternal grandfather behind. The driver was an uncle from a distant branch of the family. He cracked the whip, but it wasn’t on the ox’s back; instead, the whip tip swirled in the air.
“Do you want to sleep? The cart has just left the village! Have some plum juice! We’ll rest after crossing the stream ahead.” The maid from Grandfather’s house was going to the city to visit her son.
“What stream? Didn’t we just cross it?”
The yellow cat brought back from Grandfather’s house seemed to want to sleep on my lap.
“The Post Creek.” she said.
“What Post Creek?” I wasn’t paying attention to her because Grandfather’s house was already behind us, and I couldn’t see anything except the two golden-topped flagpoles at the temple in the village.
“Have a bowl of plum juice to wake yourself up.” She held a cup of deep-yellow plum juice in her hand, covering the bottle’s mouth again.
“I don’t need it. What’s the point of waking up? You wake yourself up!” They all laughed, and the driver cracked the whip immediately.
“You’re a mischievous girl with a clever tongue.” He turned around from the cart’s axle and reached out to grab my hair. I hunched my shoulders and ran to the back of the cart.
No child in the village feared him—not because he had been a soldier, but because he would pinch their ears painfully.
Wuyun’s wife got off the cart to pick flowers like this and flowers like that. The wind in the open fields blew stronger, so her headscarf seemed to be fluttering like a bird’s wing. Because I still had memories of the countryside, I often saw her headscarf as a crow or a magpie. She moved almost like a child, dancing with joy.
When she got back on the cart, she sang the names of various flowers. I had never seen her so carefree and happy.
The driver hummed a low, rough tune in front, but the words were indistinct. The short pipe sent smoke into the wind from time to time. Our journey had just begun, and hope and anticipation were still far away.
I finally fell asleep. I don’t know if I passed Post Creek or not—I woke up once, vaguely seeing the boy with the duck call still greeting me and the scene of the little boy on the ox’s back saying goodbye. It also seemed like Grandfather was holding my hand, saying, “Go tell your grandfather that when the autumn chill comes, he should come to the countryside. Tell him that your grandmother has pickled quail and the best sorghum wine are waiting for him. Tell him I can’t move, or else I’ve been unable to go these past two years.”
What woke me wasn’t anyone but the hollow sound of the cart’s wheels. When I woke up, I saw the yellow ox walking alone on the highway, and the driver wasn’t sitting on the cart’s axle. While searching for him, I found him at the back of the cart, with his pipe replacing the whip in his hand. His left hand kept wiping his chin, and his eyes looked far into the distance along the horizon.
When I searched for the yellow cat, it had climbed onto Wuyun’s wife’s lap, and she was stroking its tail. I noticed her blue cloth headscarf had covered her forehead, and the wrinkles on her nose were even more pronounced because of the dust.
They hadn’t noticed that I had woken up.
“By the third year, he stopped writing!” she said to them. “You soldiers are like that.”
I asked her, “Was your husband also a soldier?”
The driver, her uncle, grabbed my and pulled me back.
“So he never wrote again after that?” he asked her.
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Work Appreciation:
This short story was published in 1956 and is one of Xiao Hong’s representative works, marking the maturation of her literary artistry. Through the perspective of “I,” the story depicts a slowly moving ox cart in the countryside. It portrays the tragic fate of Wuyun’s wife and other villagers whose families were slaughtered by warlords, painting a vivid picture of the chaos and suffering caused by war in northern China, where ordinary people lost their homes and families. The story indicts the warlords’ reckless disregard for human life and subtly points to the root causes of the tragedy faced by the working class. While condemning the darkness, the story also reveals the inner beauty of the laboring masses, as embodied by Wuyun’s wife, showcasing their profound compassion and mutual support.
The story is ingeniously crafted and full of dramatic tension. Both Wuyun’s wife and the driver are victims of warlords, and the ox cart becomes a focal point of their intertwined fates—a coincidence that reflects the inevitability of their shared suffering. The story is filled with a lyrical atmosphere and tone, told in a prose-like, effortless style, narrating a heart-wrenching tale that is bleak and vast. Additionally, the work is highly visual, resembling a series of beautiful landscape paintings.
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