A haunted, tender masterpiece from China's greatest modern writer. In this collection of ten autobiographical essays, Lu Xun looks backward to his childhood in rural Zhejiang, excavating memories of summer gardens, strict tutors, beloved nurses, and the small cruelties of family life with a precision that feels almost archaeological. The title itself - 'morning flowers, evening thoughts' - captures the book's essential ache: the way childhood joy, seen from the distance of adulthood, becomes saturated with loss and knowing. Here is the 'savage critic' revealed as a man haunted by his past, capable of writing about a pet mouse or a beloved grandmother's death with an emotion that cuts straight through the page. The famous essay about his nurse Ah Chang, who brought him picture books at enormous sacrifice, achieves a poignancy that transcends cultural translation. This is not nostalgia as sentiment; it is memory as reckoning, the great writer examining the people and places that made him, and finding there both tenderness and trouble in equal measure.
