(故鄉, (CTA), dated January 1921) On a visit to his old hometown, a man finds that a "lamentably thick wall"...[1]:60 "an invisible high wall"[1]:63 has grown up between himself and his old acquaintances.
Themes in the story include: artificial divisions among people due to class differences, the persistence of memory, the way people as well as places constitute the sense of a place, the painfulness of disconnection from the past, and the dilemma of intellectuals who must turn their attention away from the past and face present reality.
A theme in the story is the Chinese concept of ancestral home.