Quote by Lu Xun: “Hope cannot be said to exist, nor can it be said not to exist.”

This is a profound statement about uncertainty. Hope is not a fact you can prove or disprove — it is something that depends entirely on whether you act on it. Neither naïve optimism nor defeated resignation captures truth; hope lives exactly in the undecided middle.

Lu Xun wrote Hometown in the aftermath of the May Fourth Movement, at a moment when Chinese intellectuals were debating whether their country's future could be different from its past. China was politically fragmented between warlords, colonial powers held treaty port concessions, and the question of whether meaningful change was possible was deeply urgent.

Chinese writer, essayist, and cultural critic of the early twentieth century, widely regarded as the father of modern Chinese literature. His short story collection Call to Arms, including the landmark story A Madman's Diary, broke from classical Chinese literary forms and confronted Chinese society's deeply embedded hierarchies with brutal clarity. He was a major influence on Chinese intellectual life from the 1920s until his death in 1936.