Far more interesting attempts at proletarian fiction came from nonleftist writers outside the League. The leading representative of the Shanghai “Neoimpressionists” (Hsin kan-chüeh p’ai), Mu Shih-ying (1912–1940), contrasts a formidable and intimidating lumpen-proletarian narrator with a weak and timid intellectual listener in the story “Tsan-men te shih-chieh” (Our World; 1930). Although Lu Hsün scolded Mu Shih-ying for having written such an ideologically incorrect story, the famous essayist and scholar Chu Tzu-ch’ing (1898– 1948) recognized Mu’s skill at writing a type of natural vernacular that avoids the common May Fourth problem of sounding like a translated foreign novel. Mu Shih-ying returned to the proletarian theme in his satirical story “Pierrot” (1934), which features a naïve short story writer who decides to abandon literature for full-time labor agitation and other assorted assignments from “the Organization,” a secretive underground revolutionary party. The erstwhile writer is jailed for leading a giant strike and refuses to divulge any information about the Organization even when the police interrogators apply sadistic torture, leaving him with a permanent limp. Yet after the writer finally reports back to the higher-ups in the Organization upon his release from prison, they suspiciously keep demanding that he admit what he divulged to the enemy interrogators and dismiss his protestations of innocence as a stubborn fabrication. In the story’s comic finale, the disillusioned writer and would-be proletarian indignantly walks out on the Organization to resume his career as a fiction writer, which does not seem so bad after all.