The Real Story of Ah-Q (30 page)

Almost immediately, however, he felt guilty, watching her leave the room forlornly alone. He turned back to his desk, the sound of wood grating endlessly in his ears, and closed his eyes, struggling to collect his disturbed thoughts, until a dispassionate calm returned. An oval flower – black petals around orange stamens – drifted east in front of his left eye, then disappeared, followed by a bright green flower, with a dark centre; then by a six-cabbage pyramid looming in towards him.

18 February 1924

Siming’s wife sat beneath the sun’s slanting rays, her back to the north-facing window, her seven-year-old daughter, Xiu’er, next to her, pasting paper funeral money.
¹
Though the sudden tread – slow, heavy – of cloth-soled shoes told her Siming had arrived home, she went on with her task, refusing to acknowledge his existence until she guessed the footsteps had at last halted next to her chair. She glanced reluctantly up, to discover him hunched over, groping inside his jacket for something lurking at the bottom of his long gown’s breast pocket.

This tortuous search produced a small, rectangular, palm-green package, which he immediately handed to his wife. As she took it from him, she smelt a scent she couldn’t quite put her finger on – that might or might not have been olive – and noticed the packet was emblazoned with a bright gold insignia, thronged by an elaborate network of finely wrought patterns. Xiu’er charged over to have a look, but was deftly pushed out of the way by her mother.

‘Have you been shopping?’ she asked, looking across at her husband.

He mumbled a yes, eyes still fixed on the package she was holding.

The green wrapper was opened to reveal another, thinner layer of paper, again palm-green in colour. The removal of this second wrapper exposed the object itself: palm-green again, smooth, glossy and hard to the touch, its upper surface covered in finely wrought patterns. The thin, second layer of paper, it was now realized, was of a translucent cream; the indeterminate scent – that might or might not have been olive – intensified.

‘Now, this is good soap,’ she observed as she lifted it – as carefully as one might a baby – up to her nose.

‘I bought it for you.’

His eyes fell, as he spoke, on to the back of her neck, and an uncomfortable warmth spread through her face. From time to time, she would notice a certain roughness to the back of her neck, especially just behind her ears. She’d never minded it much – it was just dirt, long-accumulated dirt. But his inquisitorial scrutiny, in the company of this green imported soap, forced a hot flush out to the tips of her ears. After dinner, she resolved, she would give herself a thorough scrubbing.

‘Acacia pods don’t always get you as clean as they might,’ she muttered to herself.

‘Give it here, Mother!’ As Xiu’er reached out to grab at the green paper, her younger sister, Zhao’er, ran in from outside. Pushing them both away, their mother wrapped the soap carefully back up in the translucent and then the green paper, until it looked just as it had done when it arrived. She then placed it on the highest shelf of the washstand, took one last, lingering look, and returned to her gluing.

‘Xuecheng!’ Siming bawled out, as if he’d just remembered something, then sat down on the high-backed chair opposite her.

‘Xuecheng!’ she joined in.

Pausing at her work, she listened for footsteps – nothing. Embarrassed by her husband’s obvious impatience, she tried screeching his family nickname instead:

‘Shuan’er!’

The second summons took immediate effect: after an approach of leather shoes, their son appeared before them stripped down to his vest, his plump, round face glistening with sweat.

‘What were you doing?’ she scolded him. ‘Why didn’t you hear your father calling you?’

‘I was just practising my Eight-Trigram Boxing.’
²
He now turned to face Siming, expectantly straight-backed.

‘Xuecheng, I’ve a question for you: what does
e-du-fu
mean?’

‘Well,
e-du
means “poisonous”, and
fu
is “woman”, so I make that a… “poisonous woman”?’

‘Balderdash!’ Siming suddenly raged. ‘Do I look like a woman?’

The alarmed Xuecheng took two steps back and tried standing even straighter. Although, in his considered opinion, his father walked a little like one of the funny old men in a Beijing opera, he’d never found him particularly womanly. He had, he now realized, committed a serious error.

‘D’you think I don’t understand Chinese? D’you think I need you to translate my own language for me?…
E-du-fu
’s foreign-devil talk – not Chinese. What does it mean?’

‘I… I don’t know.’ The exchange was becoming more uncomfortable for Xuecheng by the minute.

‘Well! All that money I’ve wasted on your education, and you don’t know anything. Aren’t I glad I took all that trouble to send you to a school that makes all that hoo-ha about teaching spoken English. They haven’t taught you a thing. I heard this from a boy who couldn’t have been fourteen, younger than you – prattling away in foreign gobbledegook, he was. You’ve got a nerve, standing in front of me, telling me you don’t know… Go and look it up, right now!’

Xuecheng respectfully withdrew, mangling a ‘yes’ in his throat.

‘Damn poor show,’ Siming fulminated on, after a brief pause. ‘The youth of today. You know, before the Revolution, I was one of the most enthusiastic supporters of the new academies, with their newfangled learning. Now look at the mess we’re in. All they do is preach about freedom and liberty – they don’t teach them anything solid. What a waste of money. All that trouble I took getting him into one of those schools with a split curriculum, half-Chinese, half-Western. They’re meant to teach spoken English! He’s been there a year, and look at him: clueless. I bet they just stuff the classics down their throats the whole time. A big fat waste of time, that’s what these schools are. Shut the lot of them down – that’s what they should do.’

‘Quite right, shut the lot of them down,’ his wife echoed sympathetically, as she glued.

‘No need to send Xiu’er and her sister. “Why bother educating girls?” Great-uncle used to say. I used to disagree when he was having his go at girls’ schools, but I’m not so sure the old man was wrong now. Those women you see, parading along the street – they’ve no class at all. They even want to cut their hair off. Schoolgirls with bobs – now they are the limit.
³
It’s not the warlords and bandits that’re the problem – it’s the women who’ve brought the country to its knees. They need to be taught a lesson they won’t forget.’

‘Quite right. It was bad enough when the men were all cutting off their queues – now look at the women, wanting to shave their heads like nuns.’

‘Xuecheng!’

Xuecheng hurried in, carrying in his arms a small, thick book with gilt-edged pages.

‘Look,’ he showed it to Siming, pointing out a place in the text. ‘This sounds a bit like it…’

When he’d taken the book from his son, Siming realized it was a dictionary with tiny, horizontal print. Frowning, he held it up to the light and read out the line, squinting, that Xuecheng had indicated.

‘ “A mutual aid society formed in the eighteenth century.” Hmm, that doesn’t sound right… How d’you pronounce it?’ he asked, pointing to the devilishly foreign word printed before the explanation.

‘
E-te-fo-luo-si
.’ Xuecheng made a diligent attempt at ‘Oddfellows’.

‘No, no, it wasn’t that.’ Siming’s anger made a brusque comeback. ‘It was an insult – an insult used on someone like me. Understand? Keep looking!’

Xuecheng stood before him, eyeing him in bafflement.

‘You can’t expect him to solve your riddles for you,’ the boy’s mother intervened, beginning to feel exasperated, as well as sorry for the persecuted Xuecheng. ‘You need to give him a bit more to go on, before you send him off on a wild-goose chase.’

‘It was when I was buying soap at the Universal Profit,’ Siming sighed, turning towards her. ‘There were three students in there with me. I suppose I might have seemed a bit fussy to them. I looked at six, maybe seven kinds that were all about forty cents a bar, but I didn’t buy any of them. Then I saw another sort that was ten cents, but it was very poor quality and had no scent. So I thought I’d go for something in the middle, and settled on that green stuff, at twenty-four cents a bar. The shop assistant was one of those snotty imps with eyes in the top of their heads – he’d been sneering at me all the while. Then those damned students got in on the joke, winking at each other and talking to each other in foreign-devil talk. I wanted to open it and have a look before I paid: when things are wrapped up in foreign paper, how d’you know what you’re getting? Then, of course, the poisonous imp behind the counter wasn’t having any of it, and started spouting a whole load of rubbish at me, with those rotten students sniggering away from the sidelines. Then the youngest of them came out with
e-du-fu
, looking straight at me. They all burst out laughing – I know they were being rude.’ He turned back to Xuecheng: ‘Just look under “Insults”!’

Mangling another ‘yes’ deep in his throat, Xuecheng respectfully withdrew.

‘A fine advertisement they are for that New Culture of ours!’ Siming exploded, staring straight up at the beam across the ceiling. ‘No sense of right or wrong, these students. What kind of society do we live in? The country’s going to the dogs – we’ll all be finished unless someone does something fast… It brought tears to your eyes – ’

‘What did?’ his wife stolidly cut in.

‘That girl – the filial granddaughter,’ he solemnly explained, looking back at her. ‘There were two beggars on the main street. A girl, about seventeen or eighteen – what she thought she was doing, begging at that age, I’ve no idea, but there you have it – with a blind old woman, white hair, sixty or seventy years old, sitting under the eaves of a fabric shop. Everyone was saying the old woman was her grandmother. Whenever she got given anything, she’d give it to her grandmother straightaway and go hungry herself. But was anybody giving to such a good cause?’ he glared at her inquisitorially.

She stared impassively back at him, waiting for the inevitable explanation.

‘Hmph! Not a bit of it,’ he answered his own question. ‘I watched for ages, and only saw one person give them anything – a single copper. There were plenty of people gathered around – a full circle of spectators making fun of them. “Hey, Ah-fa,” I heard one lowlife say to another, “Don’t worry about all that dirt. Reckon she’d scrub up lovely with a couple of bars of soap.” Now what kind of talk is that?’

‘Hmph,’ she looked down at her lap. ‘Did you give her anything?’ she eventually asked, after a long pause.

‘Me?… No. I only had a couple of coppers on me, I’d have been embarrassed to give her so little. She wasn’t your ordinary sort of beggar, and…’

‘Hmm.’ She slowly rose to her feet and wandered off towards the kitchen without waiting for the sentence to conclude. The dusk was thickening; it was almost time for dinner.

Siming rose also and walked out into the courtyard. It was brighter outside than in, and in one corner Xuecheng was still practising his shadow-boxing – his esteemed father’s educational legacy to him – making full use of the twilight hours, just as he had done every evening for the past half year. After granting his son a slight nod of approval, Siming took to pacing up and down the empty courtyard, his hands behind his back. Soon, the fat leaves of the yard’s one evergreen bonsai merged into the dusk, the stars glimmered out from among the white clouds – like broken tufts of wadding scattered over the sky – and darkness began. At this point in the day, Siming found himself filled with inspiring presentiments: of the great things that he would accomplish, of the war that he was about to declare on the evils of society – most notably, rotten students. His strides lengthened as his mood grew hawkish, the tramp of his cloth soles waking the hen and her chicks in their coop into frightened cheeps.

Lamplight filled the hall to summon everyone to dinner; the family responded by crowding round the table in the centre of the room. The lamp was set at the foot of the table, while Siming sat alone at the head, his plump, round face – the face Xuecheng had inherited – annotated by two fine, falling strokes of moustache, like that of the God of Wealth presiding over steaming bowls of offerings. His wife and Zhao’er sat along the left-hand flank of the table, while Xuecheng and Xiu’er lined up to the right. Five pairs of chopsticks clattered busily on bowls. Although to begin with no one spoke, there was no shortage of incident.

Zhao’er knocked over her rice bowl, spilling its soupy contents over the table. Siming glared at her until she was about to cry, then turned his attention instead to a cabbage heart that he had identified a few seconds previously. But it had already disappeared. Peering to left and right, he observed that Xuecheng’s mouth had just made room for it.

‘Found that phrase for me yet, Xuecheng?’ He looked over at his son, tucking an unrewarding bunch of yellowing leaves into his mouth.

‘Um… not yet.’

‘Hmph. Look at you: you don’t study, you don’t listen to your parents. Eating’s the only thing you’re good for! That girl I saw today could teach you a thing or two. She might be a beggar, but she’ll go hungry for her grandmother. Students these days, you’ve no self-control, you don’t care a fig for anyone or anything. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if you turn out like – ’

‘I did have one idea, though I don’t know whether it’s right or not… Maybe… maybe they said “
A-er-te fu-er
”,’ Xuecheng made a rather sinicized attempt at ‘old fool’.

‘Yes, yes! That’s exactly what it was, exactly what it sounded like: “
Uddur fule
”. But what does it mean? You should know, you’re one of them.’