The Real Story of Ah-Q (13 page)

Six years of my life have slipped by since I arrived in Beijing from the countryside. In that time, I’ve come to see and hear a good deal of what might be termed matters of national importance, yet none has made much impact on me. If you were to force me to declare their influence, I would suggest they succeeded only in further blackening my already black mood – in increasing my contempt for the people around me.

But there was one minor incident: a tiny thing that began to drag me out of my bad temper, the memory of which remains with me today.

It was the winter of 1917 – the sixth year of our new Republic – the north wind scouring the city in great, fierce gusts. Early each morning, in the interests of making a living, I would take myself on to the almost deserted streets of Beijing, flag down a rickshaw (no easy task, at that time of day) and direct it to S—Gate. That morning, not long after we got moving, the wind eased, leaving before us a wide, pale road blasted clean of loose dust, and my runner picked up speed. Just as we were nearing my destination, someone caught on the handlebar of the rickshaw, and toppled slowly to the ground.

A grey-haired old woman, in ragged clothes, had suddenly cut across our path from the side of the road. Though my man had swerved to avoid her, the tattered, unbuttoned waistcoat she was wearing had flapped open in the breeze, hooking itself around the rickshaw. It was lucky the puller began slowing down the moment he saw her, or she would have somersaulted over the bar and cracked her head open.

There she lay face down on the ground, the rickshaw-puller parked by her. Certain both that the old woman was unhurt, and that no one else had seen it happen, I felt only irritation at my runner for getting needlessly involved. He would make trouble for himself, and hold me up – quite unnecessarily.

‘She’s fine,’ I told him. ‘Let’s get on!’

Taking no notice – or perhaps he didn’t even hear me – the man laid down his rickshaw and helped the old woman slowly up, holding her arm as she found her feet.

‘How d’you feel?’

‘I think I’m hurt.’

You phoney, I thought. I saw you fall, no one ever came to any harm going down as slowly as that. But since the rickshaw-puller had got us into this mess, let him think of a way out of it.

Without a moment of hesitation, the man now began to inch her forward, keeping hold of her arm. Startled, I noticed a police station – its exterior deserted after the morning’s ferocious wind – a little way ahead. He was helping her on towards its main door.

In that brief moment, a curious sensation overtook me: his back, filthy with dust, suddenly seemed to loom taller, broader with every step he took, until I had to crick my neck back to view him in his entirety. It seemed to bear down on me, pressing out the petty selfishness concealed beneath my fur coat.

There I sat, as if physically and mentally paralysed, until a policeman emerged from the station. I now stepped out of the carriage.

‘You’d better find yourself another rickshaw,’ he walked over to tell me. ‘This one’s out of commission.’

As if without thinking, I pulled a great handful of coins out of my coat pocket. ‘Make sure the driver gets these, will you?’ I asked, thrusting them at the policeman.

Now the wind had completely died away, the street was sunk in quiet. As I walked along, I was thinking – almost afraid I would turn my thoughts on myself. None of it had anything to do with me; so what had I meant by that handful of coins? Was it a reward? Did I have the right to pass such judgement? I could not answer my own questions.

Even now, I often think back to that morning. It fills me with discomfort – it forces me to look hard at myself. None of our country’s recent political or military achievements has any more meaning for me than the Confucian primers that tormented my boyhood. The only thing that has stayed with me is this minor incident, clearer in my memory than it was even in reality, shaming me, urging me to change, bolstering my sense of courage and hope.

July 1920

Early one Sunday morning, I tore the previous day’s page off the calendar.

‘October Tenth – Double Tenth,’ I exclaimed, glancing at the new page. ‘Revolution Day.
¹
It’s not marked!’

And promptly succeeded in irritating one Mr N, an acquaintance a generation older than me, who happened to have stopped by for a chat.

‘Good for them!’ he snapped. ‘Why should you care, anyway?’

Now, this Mr N of mine was famed for the eccentricities of his mood: for his habit of flying into inexplicable tempers, or coming out with views some way out of step with conventional wisdom. Whenever this happened, I was careful not to offer any encouragement, leaving him to mutter it out of his system.

‘Oh, they know how to celebrate Double Tenth in Beijing. First thing, a policeman turns up and orders you to Fly the Flag! Yes, yes, officer, mumbles your model citizen, sleepwalking out to stick a faded old rag up. Then comes back out when it gets dark, takes it down and shuts up shop. Unless he forgets, of course, and leaves it up overnight. What does the Revolution mean to him? What does he mean to the Revolution? Not a thing.

‘I never celebrate October Tenth either. If I did, I’d start thinking back over everything that actually happened in 1911. I can’t bear it. All those old friends – young men, quietly finished off by bullets, after years of sacrifice. Or tortured in prison for weeks. Or just disappeared off the face of the earth, along with their hopes and ambitions, their corpses thrown who knows where… Mocked, abused, persecuted, their graves forgotten. No – I don’t want to remember any of that. Let’s try and dredge up some happy memories instead – things we can feel proud of.

‘You know what I’m proudest of?’ he now announced, suddenly smiling and rubbing his head. ‘Since the first Double Tenth, I haven’t once been laughed at or insulted in public.

‘Remember that for us Chinese, our hair is our pride and fall. How many pointless victims has it claimed over the millennia, I wonder? Let’s start with the ancients: now, they didn’t seem to concern themselves much about hair. Look at their penal codes: decapitation saved for the most hideous crimes; removal of sexual organs next. Shaving the head was right at the bottom of the list of punishments. Though I suppose we’ll never know how many lives have been ruined over the centuries by the stigma of baldness.

‘Before 1911, whenever we talked about revolution, we’d always go back over the massacres of the Manchu conquest in the middle of the seventeenth century, at Yangzhou and Jiading. But it was just rhetoric. Back then, the Chinese weren’t really fighting for the nation. They were fighting for the right not to scrape their hair back into queues and shave the fronts of their heads.

‘But once resistance had been stamped out, and the old guard had died, the queue became a great immovable. Until the Taiping Rebels came along, letting their pigtails loose. I remember my grandmother telling me about those times – about how bad they were. If you let your hair grow, the government soldiers killed you; if you didn’t, the Taipings did. What is hair? Dead protein. But how many Chinese have suffered, or even died because of it?’

N stared reflectively up at a beam across the ceiling.

‘And I’m one of them,’ he went on. ‘When I went abroad to study, I cut off my queue – just because I couldn’t be bothered with it. But the diehards among my classmates were furious – and the supervisor the government had sent to keep an eye on us. He told me he was going to stop my grant and send me back home. A few days later, of course, he’d had his own queue hacked off and fled back to China. I seem to remember Zou Rong (remember Zou Rong – author of
The Revolutionary Army
?
²
Probably not) was one of the hairdressers involved. He was sent back to Shanghai for his pains, where he died in prison.

‘Within a few years, though, the family fortunes had gone to the wall. If I didn’t find myself a job, I was going to starve, so I came back. First thing I did when I got to Shanghai was buy myself a false queue – two dollars was the going rate at the time – then went on home. My mother somehow managed to keep her mouth shut about it, but the first thing anyone else I met did was to examine this new appendage of mine. And the minute they worked out it was false, they’d smirk and start plotting to turn me in to the authorities for immediate decapitation. A relative of mine would have informed on me, if he hadn’t been more afraid the Revolution might actually succeed.

‘Then I decided to come out into the open: to get rid of the thing and start going about in Western clothes. But I got insults wherever I went – idiot, fake foreign devil, etcetera, etcetera. I tried swapping my foreign clothes for a long gown, but it only made things worse. When I couldn’t stand it any longer, I added a walking stick to the ensemble. My persecutors gradually gave up after I began paying back their sartorial advice with a few sharp raps. Now, I only had problems whenever I went somewhere new – where my reputation didn’t precede me.

‘But the whole thing made me miserable – still does, when I think back over it. When I was a student in Japan, I once read a newspaper article about the travels of a Dr Honda around the Malay states and China. As he couldn’t understand either Chinese or Malay, he was often asked how he got about. “This is the only language they understand!” he replied, picking up his stick. The whole thing put me in a fury for days – and then, years later, here I was speaking the same Esperanto. And being understood.

‘The year the last emperor came to the throne – 1909, that would be – I was in charge of student affairs at my local middle school. The other teachers treated me like a leper, while the local officials watched me like hawks. Every day I felt like I was stuck in an ice house, or waiting for my own execution. And just because I had no queue. One day, though, a handful of students suddenly turned up at my room and told me they wanted to cut their queues off. “You can’t!” I said. “Would you rather have a queue, then?” they asked. “Of course not.” “So why can’t we have ours off?” “It’s not worth the trouble, right now. Just wait a bit.” They flounced out, scowling, then went and cut them off, anyway.

‘What a nightmare that was. Everyone was talking about it, but I had to pretend I didn’t know a thing, just let them sit through my classes – the only crew-cuts in a sea of pigtails. But soon it began spreading like the plague: three days later, six students in the local teacher-training college cut theirs off, too, and were expelled that same evening. They had nowhere to go – couldn’t stay at school, couldn’t go home. Somehow, they got by until a month or so after the Revolution, when everyone finally stopped treating them like criminals.

‘And my problems weren’t over either. Even in Beijing, in the first year of the Republic, I still got heckled. Until the police cut the queues off of the people who’d given me grief. Finally, things got better – though I didn’t risk leaving the city.’

For a brief moment, he actually looked pleased with himself.

‘And now you idealists are making all this fuss about women cutting their hair.’ His face darkened again. ‘Just asking for trouble! No school will take a girl who’s cut her hair; or if she’s already in school, she’s expelled for it. You want them to be revolutionaries – but what are you going to arm them with? You give them an education, but where are the jobs for them afterwards? Keep your hair and find a husband, is what I say – count yourself lucky if you can forget all that guff about freedom and equality. Because your life won’t be worth living if you can’t. What is it that Artzybashev says in
Sheviriof
?
³
You promise their children and grandchildren paradise on earth, but what can you give
them
in the here and now? A good question.

‘China will never change – never has done. Even Creation didn’t change a hair on its head. You’ve no real poison in you, so why do you insist on making enemies for yourselves?’

Realizing, from the expression on my face, that I wasn’t particularly appreciating his increasingly untrammelled harangue, he immediately fell silent, got to his feet and picked up his hat.

‘Going so soon?’ I asked.

‘Yes,’ he replied. ‘I think it’s about to rain.’

I silently escorted him to the door.

‘Goodbye!’ he said, as he put his hat on. ‘My apologies for having disturbed you. Luckily, tomorrow is October eleventh, and we can put the whole thing behind us.’

October 1920

Translator’s note: The immediate historical background to this story is the short-lived attempt in June 1917 by General Zhang Xun, a fanatical supporter of the defunct Qing dynasty, to overturn the Republic by leading his army into Beijing and returning the abdicated emperor, Puyi, to the throne. By July, the restoration was brought to an end when rival generals stormed the capital, defeated Zhang Xun and deposed Puyi.

Over the mudflats down by the river, the sun was slowly gathering in its golden rays. The parched leaves of the tallow trees on the bank seemed to gasp with relief, a smattering of mosquitoes dancing and droning below. As the clouds of cooking smoke spiralling from chimneys along the river faded, women and children splashed water on to the ground beyond their own doors, and set out small tables and stools. It was time for dinner.

The elderly and the men took their seats, wielding large plantain-leaf fans and idly chatting, while the children skittered about or squatted beneath the tallow trees, tossing pebbles. The women brought out dishes of tar-black, steamed dried vegetables and bright yellow rice, the heat billowing out of them. ‘What a pastoral idyll!’ gushed a pleasure-boatful of amateur poets and professional drinkers as it sailed past. ‘Not a care in the world!’

If only they could have heard Mrs Nine-Pounds.

‘Seventy-eight years I’ve lived – that’s enough for anyone,’ she was declaiming, batting a tattered plantain-leaf fan furiously against the leg of her stool. ‘Staring down the road to ruin, we are. Fried beans before dinner!’

Charging towards the table, clutching a handful of said beans, the venerable dame’s great-granddaughter Six-Pounds took in the situation at a glance and smartly diverted to the river bank. ‘Old bat!’ she observed at volume, diving behind a canopy of tallow leaves, her short pigtails making a Y in the air.

Mrs Nine-Pounds’s hearing was little impaired for all her seventy-eight years – but happily the girl’s verdict escaped her ears. ‘The youth of today,’ she went on. ‘It wasn’t like this in my day…’

A footnote about the idiosyncrasies of this particular village: when a woman had a baby, the custom was to nickname it by birthweight. Since she had celebrated the great milestone of her fiftieth birthday, Mrs Nine-Pounds’s general sense of grievance against the world had been steadily growing: the weather was much hotter than it had been when she’d been young, she became fond of saying; the beans much harder. Everything, in sum, was wrong with the here and now. And Six-Pounds – three pounds lighter at birth than her esteemed great-grandmother, and a pound lighter than her father, Seven-Pounds – offered living proof of this irrefutable process of decline. ‘The youth of today…’

Her granddaughter-in-law, wife to Seven-Pounds, slammed a basket of rice down on the table. ‘There you go again,’ she responded angrily. ‘Six-Pounds actually weighed in at six pounds five ounces – remember? And your scales always weighed eighteen ounces to a pound. If we’d put her on proper scales, sixteen to the pound, she’d have been well over seven. And I bet Father and Grandfather weren’t eight or nine pounds – their scales probably came up heavy.’

‘The youth of today!’

Before she had time for a second riposte, Mrs Seven-Pounds spotted her husband emerge from a bend in the lane. ‘What kind of time d’you call this?’ she yelled, spinning round to face him. ‘Where the hell’ve you been? We’ve none of us had dinner!’

Although Seven-Pounds still lived in the old family village, he was a man going places. For three generations, from his grandfather downwards, no male in the family had touched a hoe. Like his forebears, Seven-Pounds poled a daily boat-service between the local town of Luzhen and the city – setting out in the morning, returning in the evening. All this coming and going left him frightfully up on current affairs. No one knew better than he did where the god of thunder had struck a magic centipede dead, or where a virgin had given birth to a demon – etcetera, etcetera. Quite the celebrity, he was, among his fellow villagers. Even so, village custom held that in summer, lamps were not to be lit for dinner, and a late return home was grounds for a scolding.

Head bowed, Seven-Pounds made his way slowly over to a stool and sat down, still holding his six-foot speckled bamboo pipe with its ivory mouth and pewter bowl. ‘Daddy,’ Six-Pounds called out, slipping out from her hiding place to sit next to him. No reply.

‘The youth of today!’ said Mrs Nine-Pounds again.

Seven-Pounds slowly looked up at them all. ‘The emperor’s back,’ he sighed.

‘Well, that’s all for the good,’ his wife broke the brief, stunned silence. ‘There’ll be an amnesty, won’t there?’

Seven-Pounds sighed again. ‘I haven’t got a queue.’

‘Will he want queues again?’

‘Oh, yes.’

‘How d’you know?’ his wife asked anxiously.

‘Everyone at the Universal Prosperity said so.’

This was a blow: for the Universal Prosperity Tavern was the town’s nerve centre, the repository of all news worth hearing. She glanced across at Seven-Pounds’s shaved head, feeling hatred and resentment surging up inside. Just as quickly, however, despair took over: ‘Eat up!’ She filled a bowl with rice and pushed it over to him. ‘Long faces don’t grow queues, do they?’

The sun gathered up the last of its rays, the surface of the river stealthily greeting their departure with fresh, cool air. All along the mudbank, spines beaded with sweat as chopsticks clattered on bowls. Looking up after her third bowl of rice, Mrs Seven-Pounds’s heart began to pound violently. Through a screen of tallow leaves, she spotted the squat form of Mr Zhao, draped in a long gown of sapphire-blue glazed cotton, picking his way across a single-log bridge and towards them.

Proprietor of the Splendid, the tavern in the neighbouring village, Mr Zhao was the only man of any distinction or education within ten miles. A celebrated fogey, he was often to be found poring over his multivolume set of
The Romance of the Three Kingdoms
, annotated by the great seventeenth-century scholar Jin Shengtan. Give him the chance, and he would reel off not only the names of the five Tiger Generals of Shu
¹
but also at least two of their honorifics. After the 1911 Revolution, he had coiled his queue up on to his head, like a Daoist priest. If there was just a bit more of
The Romance of the Three Kingdoms
spirit about today, he would often sigh to himself, things would not be in the pickle they were. Mrs Seven-Pounds had a pair of eyes in her head: even from that distance, she could see the gleam of his clean-shaven forehead, and the black jet of his liberated queue. She now knew for sure that the emperor was back on the throne, that queues were an essential requirement once more, and that Seven-Pounds was in mortal danger. This cotton gown was not everyday attire for Mr Zhao. Only twice had he worn it in the past three years: once when his sworn enemy, the pock-marked Ah-si, took ill; and once on the death of one Mr Lu, who had vandalized his tavern at some point in the past. And here it was again: joy for him, sorrow for his enemies.

Two years ago, Mrs Seven-Pounds now remembered, her husband had – under some undue alcoholic influence – called Mr Zhao ‘a bastard’. Now she saw the danger he was in; now her heart began pounding.

Every diner stood up as Mr Zhao rippled past, touching their chopsticks to their rice bowls, inviting him to sit down and share their meal. ‘Carry on, carry on,’ he nodded as he glided swiftly on to Seven-Pounds’s establishment, which wasted no time in offering him fulsome greeting. ‘Carry on, carry on,’ their visitor smiled, taking careful note of that evening’s menu.

‘Delicious, delicious, I’m sure.’ Mr Zhao took up position behind Seven-Pounds and opposite his wife. ‘Heard the rumours?’

‘The emperor’s back,’ replied Seven-Pounds.

Mrs Seven-Pounds beamed obsequiously, keeping close watch on their guest. ‘So when will we hear about the amnesty?’

‘All in due course, all in due course.’ A new note of severity entered Mr Zhao’s voice. ‘But where, might I ask, is your queue, Mr Seven-Pounds? This is no laughing matter. Remember the Taiping Rebellion! If you kept your hair, you lost your head; lose your hair, and the head stayed on…’
²

As neither Seven-Pounds nor his wife had been to school, the profundity of this historical allusion floated some way over their heads. But they could see that if a man of Mr Zhao’s wisdom was talking like this, then the situation was serious indeed; beyond salvation, in fact. They fell silent, listening to their death knells clanging in their ears.

‘The youth of today,’ grumbled Mrs Nine-Pounds, seizing the opportunity to get a word in with Mr Zhao. ‘Always interfering with people’s hair, cutting off their queues. Not like in my day. Seventy-eight years I’ve lived – that’s enough for anyone. Those Taipings wrapped satin round their heads, red satin, all the way down to the floor it went. The princes wore yellow satin, all the way down to the floor… yellow and red… Seventy-eight – enough for anyone.’

‘What are we going to do?’ Mrs Seven-Pounds stood up and muttered, as if to herself. ‘He’s got a family to support. How will we manage without him…’

‘Hopeless, quite hopeless,’ Mr Zhao shook his head. ‘Any book’ll tell you what you get for cutting off your queue. The law can’t make allowances for families.’

As soon as she heard it was written in books, complete despair seized hold of Mrs Seven-Pounds, transforming an instant later into loathing for her husband. ‘Serves you right!’ she screeched, threatening her husband’s nose with her chopsticks. ‘Didn’t I say, don’t take the boat in today, don’t go into town, there’s a revolution going on? But no, off he would go – and now look at him! His lovely, lovely black, shiny queue – off the moment he got into town. Now look at him! Let him dig his own grave – but what about the rest of us?’

Having witnessed Mr Zhao’s grand entrance, everyone else in the village hastily finished their meals, then gathered around the Seven-Pounds’s table. Conscious that he had a reputation to maintain around the village – a reputation that was somewhat tarnished by submitting to such a public dressing down – Seven-Pounds forced himself to look up.

‘With hindsight – ’ he ponderously began.

‘Just keep digging!’

Until this point, Mrs Ba Yi – a widow, and a fairly decent sort – had stood by next to Mrs Seven-Pounds, holding her two-year-old posthumous son in her arms, enjoying the performance. Now, however, she decided that things had gone too far. ‘Calm down, Mrs Seven-Pounds,’ she soothed. ‘No one can read the future. I remember you saying you didn’t think he looked too bad without a queue. Anyway, we haven’t heard anything from the magistrate yet – ’

‘What are you trying to say?’ Mrs Seven-Pounds now pointed her chopsticks at Mrs Ba Yi’s nose, flushing red to her ears. ‘Rubbish! The woman’s mad! I cried for three whole days, you all saw me. Even that little wretch Six-Pounds cried…’ Which last individual had just dispatched one large bowl of rice, and was clamouring for a second helping. ‘Who asked you, anyway?’ screamed Mrs Seven-Pounds at the unfortunate Mrs Ba Yi, while jabbing at her daughter between her pigtails. ‘Slut!’

The empty bowl in Six-Pounds’s hand fell to the ground. By bad luck, it struck against a brick, cracking a great hole in it. Springing to his feet, Seven-Pounds gathered up the pieces and fitted them together. Swearing as he inspected the damage, he dealt his daughter a slap that knocked her to the ground. And there she lay bawling, until her great-grandmother pulled her up by the hand. ‘The youth of today,’ she could still be heard muttering, as they went off together.

‘Now, you’re not being fair, Mrs Seven-Pounds,’ Mrs Ba Yi angrily countered.

Up to now an amused observer of this little fracas, Mr Zhao was eventually prickled to anger by Mrs Ba Yi’s allegation about the magistrate. ‘Let her hit who she likes,’ he intervened, winding his way around the table. ‘But the army’s still coming – and it’ll be Zhang Xun, the emperor’s own general, Zhang Fei’s own descendant,
³
at their head, taking on ten thousand men at a time with his eighteen-foot lance. No one can stop him!’ He bore down on Mrs Ba Yi, clenching his fists in the air, as if wielding an invisible spear: ‘No one!’

Trembling with emotion as she clutched at her child, Mrs Ba Yi turned and fled without another word at the sight of Mr Zhao charging at her, his eyes bulging, his face running with sweat. Busily blaming her for sticking her nose in where it wasn’t wanted, the assembled company fanned out to let Mr Zhao make his own exit; those who had cut off their queues then left them to grow back concentrated on ducking out of sight. Without stopping to investigate anyone else’s coiffure, Mr Zhao cut through the lot of them and vanished back below the tallow canopy. ‘No one!’ he repeated, before striding out, head high, along the log bridge.

The villagers stood there, in stunned realization that none of them – and least of all the miserable Seven-Pounds – would stand a chance against Zhang Fei. But there was also a certain pleasure in contemplating that the village bigwig was now a fugitive from the law, as they thought back to all those times he’d smugly lectured them, pipe in mouth, on doings in the city. A village council, they felt, was in order; and yet they could think of nothing to say. After a swarm of mosquitoes whined past bare arms and chests to reconvene beneath the tallow trees, the assembled company dispersed back to their respective dwellings, shut their doors and went to sleep. Still muttering to herself, Mrs Seven-Pounds tidied away the dinner things, the table and stools, then did the same.