Rickshaw Boy by Lao She
Published 1937 · 100,000 words · about 8 hours at an average pace · Literary Fiction, Classic Literature
How hard is Rickshaw Boy to read?
Rickshaw Boy scores 49 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it moderately challenging. The score is a weighted composite of nine measures: four of how hard the prose is to parse, five of how hard the meaning is to extract.
- Vocabulary: 48 out of 100
- Beijing vernacular with the trade vocabulary of rickshaw pulling and street life, all of it plain and physical.
- Sentence structure: 40 out of 100
- Direct sentences in a clean narrative voice, with dialogue in colloquial Beijing speech and no formal difficulty.
- Abstraction: 44 out of 100
- The argument about individualism is delivered through wages, weather and physical damage rather than through statement, though the narrator does sum it up near the end.
- Information density: 50 out of 100
- Sustained economic detail — fares, rents, savings, prices — packed into scenes that also carry the plot.
- Narrative indirection: 40 out of 100
- Third-person narration close to Xiangzi, with occasional authorial commentary that tells the reader what to conclude.
- Symbolic density: 56 out of 100
- The rickshaw itself carries everything — ownership, independence, the body as an engine — and the camels give Xiangzi a name that follows him down.
- Ironic distance: 64 out of 100
- Lao She was famous for comedy and writes this without a single joke that lands safely; every one of Xiangzi's small victories is set up to be taken back.
- Resolution withholding: 58 out of 100
- The ending offers no redemption and no explanation, leaving a man in a funeral procession and stopping.
- Structural complexity: 38 out of 100
- Straightforward chronological narrative following one man, with no shifts in time or perspective.
How Rickshaw Boy is regarded
Rickshaw Boy holds a literary regard score of 81 out of 100, weighing its place in the canon, its critical reception, its influence on other writers, and the standing of its author. Regard is measured separately from difficulty: a demanding book is not necessarily an admired one.