Historically, the image comes from Lu Xun’s story My Old Home (1921): “Hope cannot be said to exist, nor can it be said not to exist. It is just like roads across the earth; for actually there were no roads to begin with—only many people walking made them into roads.” Written amid the disillusionment of post-imperial China and the May Fourth ferment, the line resists both fatalism and naïveté. It argues that in bleak conditions, hope is not a mood but a method: persistent steps that carve a route where none seems available. [...]
