A live-streamed Chinese language lesson under the sky—the ancients were taken aback.

Shen Moyan flipped through his lesson plan and asked the students questions.

"This semester we studied three texts by modern writers: 'The New Year's Sacrifice,' 'Kong Yiji,' and 'Thunderstorm.' What do you think they have in common?"

There was a moment of silence in the classroom.

A boy in the back row raised his hand: "None of the main characters have a good ending."

Shen Moyan nodded.

"That's right. Lu Xun wrote about Xianglin's wife freezing to death on the streets of Luzhen during the year-end celebrations. Kong Yiji broke his leg and slowly walked away, supporting himself with his hands amidst the laughter of others. He never appeared again. Cao Yu wrote about how the Zhou Mansion destroyed three lives and drove two living people insane in a thunderstorm one night. There was also Xiangzi, who went from a respectable and strong-willed young man to a walking corpse waiting to die at the entrance of the alley."

She paused for a moment.

"Why must it be written like this? Why can't Xianglin's wife be given a way to survive? Why can't Kong Yiji share his fennel beans with the children and grow old peacefully? Why can't Sifeng and Zhou Chong have a window to escape through? Why can't Xiangzi have a rickshaw that truly belongs to him?"

"This cruelty is not because the writers are heartless."

Shen Moyan turned around and wrote the names of several writers on the blackboard.

"They lived in an era that did not allow for peace and gentleness."

She put down the chalk and turned around.

"The Xinhai Revolution overthrew the Qing Dynasty and established the Republic of China. The Republic of China had a good purpose: democracy, republic, equality, and civil rights. These words were written in the Provisional Constitution, in newspaper editorials, and in the hearts of every young person who cut off their queue."

But if the idea doesn't come down to reality, it's just a castle in the air.

The old order did not automatically disappear just because a plaque was changed; the farmers' lives became even harder. The land rent remained the same, but several more exorbitant taxes and levies were imposed.

Life became even harder for the workers. They still worked twelve-hour shifts, but their wages were still not enough to cover their food expenses.

Life became even harder for scholars. With the imperial examination system abolished, where could they find a new way to make a living?

Those women confined to their grand mansions endured their lives just the same. Even in the Republic of China era, no one would have taken away Fanyi's bitter medicine. Sifeng's fate in the Republic of China was no different from that in the Qing Dynasty.

"We've all learned about these things in history textbooks, but it's still hard for us to imagine what it was like for an ordinary person to live in that era."

"The old order still exists, but its legitimacy has begun to waver. A patriarch like Zhou Puyuan still holds absolute power in the ancestral hall, but once he steps out of the ancestral hall, he will find that the outside world no longer listens to him."

There was a strike in his coal mine, his son was full of new ideas about equality and freedom, and his wife began to question why he had to drink that bowl of medicine.

The outer shell of order remains, but what lies within has begun to rot. The more it rots, the harder those who maintain order must exert themselves, because without effort, the shell will crumble.

"This rotting has a smell," Shen Moyan paused, "Everyone can smell it."

"In the stage directions for Thunderstorm, Cao Yu repeatedly wrote about 'suffocation,' 'heat,' and 'suffocation,' which are not rhetoric but reality."

The air in that era was stifling; the old social norms were like a moldy quilt, covering everyone's mouths and noses.

You want to lift it, but you can't, because it has already drained all your strength.

"Lu Xun once used an analogy, saying that China is an iron house, and the people inside are all asleep and about to suffocate. If you wake them up, they may not be grateful to you, because waking up and finding that they can't get out is more painful than sleeping and waiting to die."

"This was the dilemma faced by writers of that era. It wasn't that they didn't want to write about beautiful things, but rather that the first thing they saw when they opened their eyes was a stuffy, airtight iron room. How could they write about romance and beauty? How could they write about talented scholars and beautiful women?"

Shen Moyan remembered something and added the details.

"However, in that era, many people also wrote about romance and nature. The novelists of the Mandarin Duck and Butterfly School wrote about talented men and beautiful women. Their magazine, 'Saturday,' was advertised with the slogan 'With a book in hand, all worries are forgotten.' There were also many people writing moralistic articles that advocated 'studying to save the country' and 'good people are rewarded.'"

"A significant portion of these writers are not unaware that society is sick, but they choose to whitewash the sick and tell the sick: You look great."

"But Lu Xun said no, Cao Yu said no, Lao She said no, Ba Jin said no, and many other writers said no."

"They chose a writing style that seemed very 'cruel' at the time, presenting the bloody truth to the readers."

They're not there to comfort you; they're only there to make you open your eyes.

Shen Moyan walked to the blackboard and wrote another word below the list of names: Enlightenment.

"You're all familiar with this term, 'enlightenment,' which isn't about inviting someone to dinner or gently explaining things to them."

True enlightenment is what Lu Xun called "facing the bleak reality of life and confronting the dripping blood."

It makes you uncomfortable, keeps you awake at night, and makes you realize you're living in a suffocating, iron-clad room.

She paused for a moment and turned to the next page of the lesson plan.

"Thunderstorm is a product of days without sunshine."

"These are Cao Yu's exact words. In 1933, when he was twenty-three years old, he finished writing this play in the library of Tsinghua University."

Later, someone asked him, "What did you write *Thunderstorm* to criticize? What did you satirize? What did you attack?"

Shen Moyan shook his head.

He said none of that. He said he wrote this play not to "correct, satirize, or attack anything," but because he was driven by a "surging current of emotions," "venting his suppressed resentment and slandering Chinese families and society."

She looked up at the students.

"Note these two words, 'venting' and 'slander.' A young man in his early twenties used such heavy words to describe his creation. He didn't calmly conceive the plot in his study; he poured all the anger, repression, and bitterness that had been building up for more than twenty years into this play."

He said that the universe is like a cruel well; once you fall into it, no matter how much you cry out, you can't escape this dark pit.

The classroom was quiet, and everyone listened attentively.

"Take a look at this image: a well."

It's not a river you can swim to the shore, it's not a mountain you can climb out of.

It's like a well. Once you fall in, there are walls on all sides, and only a small patch of light above your head. No matter how much you scream, it's useless. Your voice bounces off the well walls, and only you can hear it.

"This is the China of that era in Cao Yu's eyes. He was not someone who stood at the mouth of the well and looked down; he was at the bottom of the well."

Every character he wrote about—Sifeng, Zhou Chong, Zhou Ping, Shiping, Fanyi—was a person at the bottom of a well. He experienced and felt all their struggles, cries, and attempts to grab onto anything to climb out.

"You see, he is not calmly analyzing social problems. Analyzing is something that comes later, something for critics, something for us language teachers."

When Cao Yu wrote *Thunderstorm*, he was simply doing the only thing a repressed young man could do: shout it out.

"But it is precisely because he is not 'analyzing' but 'venting' that this play is so powerful."

Those plots weren't designed; they grew out of his bones.

Fanyi embodies the women he knows; Zhou Ping embodies the youths he knows who are crushed by patriarchy; and Zhou Chong perhaps even embodies himself—that young man who believed in equality, freedom, and love, yet was battered and bruised by reality.

She stopped and glanced at the whole class.

"So why don't these writers write something peaceful and gentle? It's not that they chose this approach; it's that this was the only approach that era offered them. When a young person feels that the universe is a cruel well, all he can do is draw the bloodstains on the well's walls for you to see."

"He's not the only one using this writing style."

Why did Ba Jin portray Juexin as so weak and cowardly in "Family"? Because Juexin is not just one person; he is an epitome of an entire generation of young people whose backbones were castrated by the old family system.

Why did Lao She write "Crescent Moon" and have the girl watch helplessly as she and her mother embark on the same path of prostitution? Because he wanted to show you that poverty is not a punishment for laziness, but a product of social order.

Why did Shen Congwen write "The Husband" and have a husband sit at the bow of a boat watching his wife entertain guests in the cabin? Because he wanted you to see that when people can't survive, they will sell off their dignity piece by piece.

"These writers are not heartless; on the contrary, they chose this way of writing precisely because they are too heartfelt and passionate. Their hands even tremble when they write."

When Cao Yu finished writing *Thunderstorm* and was writing the final scene in the Tsinghua University library—the scenes of Zhou Chong being electrocuted, Si Feng being electrocuted, and Zhou Ping being shot—he said he cried as he wrote, unable to continue, but he didn't change a single word of the ending.

"Because he knows that it can't be changed; if it is, it won't be real anymore."

"This 'cruel' writing tradition is not unique to China."

Dickens wrote about children starving to death in London slums, Hugo wrote about people rejected by society in the sewers of Paris, and Dostoevsky wrote about a poor student going mad in a St. Petersburg attic—they all shared the same motive: to peel back the veil of whitewashed truth and show it to you.

Shen Moyan sighed softly.

"But the predicament faced by modern Chinese writers was more unique."

The West criticizes capitalism and class exploitation, while China criticizes something else entirely: a civilization with thousands of years of history suddenly finds itself unable to survive.

It's not that one person can't survive; it's that the entire civilization is about to die.

Etiquette, family, ethics, and morality—these were once the foundation of Chinese people's lives, but in that era, they became weapons of murder.

"Therefore, the image of 'home' is full of modern Chinese literature."

Thunderstorm is home, Home is home, Peking Man is home.

These writers, almost coincidentally, all wrote about the same theme: home is no longer a haven, but a cage.

"When the structure upon which a civilization depends for survival becomes a tool for oppression, you can't blame the writers for being too ruthless."

It's not that they want to demolish the house; the house has already collapsed. They're just drawing the ruins.

"The greatest act of kindness they could do was not to fabricate a lie about good deeds being rewarded, but to carve the names of those who disappeared silently under the rubble onto paper: Xianglin's Wife, Kong Yiji, Sifeng, Zhou Chong, Zhou Ping, Shiping, Fanyi. They could not save these people, but they refused to cover up their existence."

Shen Moyan placed the chalk on the podium and patted the dust off his hands.

"Why does everyone have to end up badly? Why can't we give them a way to survive?"

"Because that era itself did not give them a way to survive. To say that they would give them a way to survive is a lie; the truth is that they were not given a way to survive."