My Old Home: NEB Class 12 English Guide

Return

A cold landscape unsettles nostalgia

The narrator travels hundreds of miles in late winter under a sombre sky and sees desolate villages. He asks whether this can be the home preserved in memory. The question establishes that “home” is not simply a building. It is a relationship between remembered childhood, present social conditions and the narrator’s own longing. He has returned for a practical ending—to sell or leave the old property and move the household—not for a permanent reunion.

Memory

Childhood Runtu opens a vivid world

The young Runtu arrives during New Year preparations and tells the narrator about trapping birds in snow, gathering shells, watching watermelons and confronting creatures such as the zha. In the most memorable image, the boy stands beneath a blue-black sky and bright moon with a pitchfork near the melon field. Runtu seems energetic, knowledgeable and free because he knows natural worlds the sheltered narrator has never seen.

Meeting

Adult Runtu embodies social distance

Years of poverty and labour have altered Runtu’s face, hands, speech and confidence. Instead of greeting the narrator as an equal childhood friend, he respectfully calls him “Master.” That single form of address makes class hierarchy audible. The narrator feels that a thick wall has risen between them. Personal affection survives as memory, but social convention determines the present encounter.

Comparison

Then and now

Causes

Why has Runtu’s life become so hard?

The story points beyond individual weakness to large families, poor harvests or famine, taxes, soldiers, bandits, officials and landed power. The list matters because it refuses to blame Runtu for his condition. His exhaustion is produced by overlapping pressures. Lu Xun turns reunion into social diagnosis: a political change that leaves rural people trapped by poverty and hierarchy cannot be called full renewal.

Yang Ersao

“Tofu Beauty” as another damaged memory

The narrator remembers Yang Ersao as the attractive woman associated with a tofu shop. In the present she is sharp, accusatory and eager to claim household objects. Her behaviour can be comic, but reducing her to comic greed misses the social context. Like Runtu, she has changed within scarcity. She responds differently—through aggression and opportunism rather than deferential silence—so the story shows more than one survival strategy.

Narrator

Nostalgia is questioned, not simply celebrated

The narrator’s remembered home becomes beautiful largely through Runtu and childhood wonder. Present disappointment therefore reveals both social decline and the selectiveness of memory. He recognizes the class barrier yet cannot remove it during the visit. This self-awareness keeps him from appearing as a rescuer. His strongest contribution is a hope that the next generation will not reproduce the same distance.

Children

Hong’er and Shuisheng create a parallel with a difference

Hong’er, connected to the narrator’s family, and Shuisheng, Runtu’s child, approach one another more easily than their fathers now can. Their friendship recalls the narrator and young Runtu, but it also raises a warning: childhood closeness alone did not prevent the older relationship from hardening into hierarchy. Hope requires social change and repeated action, not a sentimental belief that children are automatically free.

Ending

Hope is like a path people make by walking

As the narrator leaves, he rejects both empty idols and passive despair. Hope is compared to a path across the earth: originally there is no path, but one appears when many people walk. The image avoids guaranteed optimism. A path is possible, collective and practical, yet it exists only through movement. The children suggest direction; human action must create the route.

Symbols

Home, wall, moonlit field and path

• Old home: memory tested by historical and social change.
• Invisible wall: class hierarchy separating former friends.
• Moonlit melon field: childhood vitality, knowledge and imaginative freedom.
• Household objects: scarcity, departure and competing claims.
• Path: hope created through repeated collective action.

Style

Frame narrative, contrast and social realism

The return journey frames long memories of childhood, allowing past and present to answer each other. Visual contrast moves from the brilliant moonlit field to the cold grey village. Dialogue makes hierarchy audible in “Master,” while character contrast shows poverty producing different responses in Runtu and Yang Ersao. The first-person voice combines emotion with uncertainty, so the social argument grows from a reunion rather than an abstract lecture.

Evidence grid

Detail → interpretation

Critical thinking

Is the ending optimistic?

It is cautiously hopeful rather than simply happy. The narrator does not believe social barriers will disappear by themselves. He also refuses to accept that the future must repeat the past. The path metaphor holds possibility and responsibility together: people must keep walking in a new direction until an alternative becomes real. A balanced exam answer should include both conditions.

Exam check

Common mistakes

• Treating the old home only as a physical house.
• Describing adult Runtu as naturally weak or ignorant.
• Calling “Master” simple politeness without class meaning.
• Using Yang Ersao only for comedy.
• Assuming the children guarantee change.
• Quoting the path metaphor without explaining collective action.

Review the Class 12 English roadmap, compare separation in the Migration and Diaspora guide, and compare cross-class community in the Neighbours guide.