My Old Home: Analysis and Exam Questions (NEB 12)

Structure

Return → memory → reunion → departure

The story begins and ends with travel. On the way in, a cold late-winter landscape fails to match the narrator’s cherished home. Inside the house, familiar people trigger long childhood memories. The reunion with Runtu then exposes the class wall produced by poverty and convention. On the journey away, the narrator turns from nostalgia toward the future, but his hope is conditional rather than guaranteed.

Runtu

Why the two portraits must be compared

Social causes

Runtu is not blamed for his suffering

The narrative names overlapping pressures: a large family, famine or poor harvests, taxes, soldiers, bandits, officials and landed power. This accumulation prevents a lazy character judgement. Adult Runtu’s silence does not prove a lack of intelligence or courage; it shows how repeated material burdens and social hierarchy can make a once-vivid person guarded and deferential.

Yang Ersao

“Tofu Beauty” complicates the social portrait

The narrator remembers Yang Ersao through beauty and the tofu shop. In the present she speaks sharply, accuses him of being rich and tries to claim household objects. Her behaviour supplies uncomfortable comedy, yet the story places it within scarcity. Runtu responds to hardship through submission, whereas Yang Ersao responds through accusation and opportunism. Both reveal damage, not simple moral types.

Narrator

He recognizes the wall but cannot remove it

The first-person narrator is emotionally affected by Runtu’s formal address. He understands that something “thick” separates the former friends, yet he does not dissolve their inequality during the visit. That limitation matters. Lu Xun avoids turning him into a heroic rescuer. His strongest insight comes later: the children need a life unlike both Runtu’s submissive worship and his own empty or passive hope.

Children

Hong’er and Shuisheng repeat the past with an opening

The children approach each other more naturally than their fathers now can. Their friendship recalls the narrator and young Runtu, but the parallel contains a warning because the earlier friendship also began without distance. Childhood innocence alone did not prevent the class wall. The new generation represents possibility only if people change the social path on which the older relationship hardened.

Symbols

Home, wall, moonlit field and path

• Old home: memory tested against historical reality.
• Invisible wall: class hierarchy made emotionally tangible.
• Moonlit melon field: childhood energy, discovery and freedom.
• Household objects: departure, scarcity and competing claims.
• Path: hope created through repeated collective action.

Ending

Hope does not exist before people make it

The path metaphor is cautiously hopeful. A path across the earth is not naturally waiting for travellers; it appears when many people walk the same way. The image rejects despair because alternatives can be made, and it rejects passive optimism because nothing changes without movement. A strong exam answer should hold both parts together: possibility and responsibility.

Style

Frame narrative, contrast and social realism

The return journey frames embedded childhood memory. Colour and weather shift from the luminous field of memory to a sombre village, while dialogue makes rank audible through “Master.” First-person uncertainty also questions the narrator’s own nostalgia. The result is not a private reunion detached from history; remembered affection becomes the method through which social inequality is felt.

Answer method

Then → now → cause → future

1. Name a vivid childhood detail.
2. Contrast the corresponding present detail.
3. Explain the social cause rather than blaming a person.
4. Connect the children or path metaphor to qualified hope.

Likely questions

Six evidence-ready plans

Worked paragraph

Analyse “Master” as a turning point

Runtu’s use of “Master” turns a private reunion into evidence of class division. The narrator expects the lively companion who once taught him about birds, shells and the melon field, but the adult Runtu chooses a deferential form of address. The word does not merely show politeness: it recognizes unequal rank and makes spontaneous friendship impossible. Because Runtu still remembers their childhood, the barrier is social rather than emotional. Lu Xun therefore shows inequality entering everyday language and reshaping how two people are permitted to meet.

Timed response

8-minute path-metaphor plan

Mistake repair

Weak claim → stronger analysis

• Weak: Runtu became foolish. Stronger: poverty and hierarchy constrain his voice and choices.
• Weak: Yang Ersao is only comic. Stronger: her opportunism is another social effect of scarcity.
• Weak: The ending promises success. Stronger: it makes hope depend on repeated collective action.

Revise with the My Old Home concept guide, compare community in the Neighbours analysis, and plan from the English revision roadmap.