A Pair of Tweezers 一把镊子 (1981) #

A Pair of Tweezers 一把镊子 (1981), adaptation and woodcut illustration by Wu Weide 邬维德, translated by Lena Henningsen, published in Fuchunjiang huabao 富春江画报, no. 343, 1981, pp. 14.¹

translation and introduction: 9 March 2026

Introductory Note #

Lena Henningsen

This brief woodcut lianhuanhua was published in the lianhuanhua journal Fuchunjiang Huabao commemorating the centennary of the author in 1981, the last in a stretch of 14 pages containing different Lu Xun related lianhuanhua, including biographical ones and adaptations of literary texts, such as a very expressionistic version of the Diary of a Madman.

The real-life anecdote of how Lu Xun helped an injured ricksha puller, picked up in the lianhuanhua translated here, was recorded in an essay by Zhou Ye², the niece of Lu Xun. In the lianhuanhua, it is retold starting from a material object: a pair of tweezers radiating in panel 1 and, as the readers learn, exhibited at the Shaoxing Lu Xun Memorial. It is not revealed in the lianhuanhua whether the pair of tweezers is the authentic one used by Lu Xun, but the material object stands for the story to follow and – as the reader learns at the end – “[t]his ordinary pair of tweezers thus is resplendent with the glory of Lu Xun’s ‘like a willing ox I serve the children’.” This is, as the informed reader immediately recognizes, a clear reference to Mao Zedong’s 1942 Yan’an Talks. These Talks also end with the quotation by Lu Xun which Mao reads as a parable on how authors and artists have to serve the people. The double quote and the material object (tweezers) thus both stand for the proper revolutionary attitude of Lu Xun, pointing to the transmedial connections in which lianhuanhua are embedded, with the museum object referencing the memorial cult(ure) surrounding Lu Xun.

Notes on the translation #

For this translation, in addition to the usual side-by-side transcription and translation texts, we have prepared a scanlated version for easy browsing as well; this was done in partial inspiration by John A. Crespi’s work on scanlating manhua.

Read the translated lianhuanhua #

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