The Real Story of Ah-Q (56 page)

2
Cheng Fangwu
: (1897–1984). Member of the Creation Society, one of the key literary groupings of the May Fourth period. By the mid-1920s, his politics had turned radically leftward, and he began to espouse a proletarian, revolutionary stance in literature. (For details of Lu Xun’s clashes with the literary left of the late 1920s, see Introduction.) Lu Xun is referring here to a 1924 review of
Outcry
in which Cheng criticized the entire collection as vulgarly naturalistic, except for ‘Mending Heaven’, which he proclaimed a ‘masterpiece’ demonstrating that its author could still enter ‘the palace of pure literature’.

1
our king dashed his brains out… smashing the Pillar of Heaven between earth and sky
: A reference to the legendary battle between Zhuan Xu, descended from the Yellow Emperor (China’s mythical founding ancestor), and the giant Kang Hui. After Zhuan Xu’s victory, the furious giant knocked his head against the mountain that held up heaven, cracking the sky.

2
‘The Entrails of Nüwa’
: This refers to a curious legend in the mythological text
The Classic of Mountains and Seas
(
c.
third century
BC
?), which describes how ten genies declared themselves the metamorphosed entrails of the goddess. See Ann Birrell’s translation of the above (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1999), p. 173, for further details.

1
Yi
: A mythical archer, Yi was banished from heaven for killing nine of the sun-birds, whose mischief was bringing terrible drought to the earth. In the conventional telling of his legend, he heroically rids the mortal world of terrifying monsters and scourges. In the course of this, however, his wife, Chang’e (another fallen immortal), is left so long alone at home that, in boredom, she takes the elixirs of eternal life that Yi has begged from the Queen Mother of the West, and ascends to heaven alone.

2
Feng Meng
: Here, the reference to Feng Meng (an archer pupil of the legendary Yi) is a veiled stab at Gao Changhong, a former disciple of Lu Xun who began to criticize his conduct in the 1920s. For details of this conflict, see Saiyin Sun’s Ph.D. dissertation, ‘Beyond the Iron House: Lu Xun and the Chinese Literary Field in the 1920s’ (Cambridge University, 2009).

1
Emperor Shun… His son, Yu
: Shun and Yu (both
c.
twenty-first century
BC
) were two of the great sage rulers of Chinese antiquity, the latter famed particularly for taming the flood waters and as the founder of China’s first dynasty, the Xia (c. 2070–1600
BC
).

2
Land of Clever Tricks
: Lu Xun is satirizing here the 1932 proposal by a number of Beijing scholars to have the city declared a neutral ‘cultural zone’, to protect it from the imminent Japanese invasion of north China. The ‘Land of Clever Tricks’ is presumably a reference to Japan, projecting how the city’s likely occupiers would generously sponsor complaisant intellectuals.

3
Chi You… army of demons
: A legendary general, Chi You gathered an army of demons about him to battle the Yellow Emperor; the latter prevailed only with the help of his weather-controlling daughter, who overwhelmed Chi You and his army with scorching weather.

4
Youmiao
: An ancient rebellious tribe of southern China.

1
Boyi… Shuqi
: Princes of the late second millennium
BC
, famously commemorated in Sima Qian’s (
c.
145–86
BC
) canonical history of China,
The Historical Records
, for their loyalty to the Shang dynasty, destroyed around 1025
BC
by King Wu of the Western Zhou, a former vassal of Shang. After the Zhou victory, the brothers Boyi and Shuqi – who had been given refuge in Zhou in their old age by King Wu’s father, Wen – refused to eat the grain of Zhou, and retreated to Mount Shouyang, where they died of starvation. For more details, see Stephen W. Durrant,
The Cloudy Mirror: Tension and Conflict in the Writings of Sima Qian
(New York: State University of New York Press, 1995), esp. pp. 20–26.

2
poetic moderation… poetic tolerance
: In the canonical
Book of Rites
, Confucius (551–479
BC
) identified moderation and tolerance as key principles of poetic composition.

1
Laozi
: The mythical founding philosopher of Daoism,
c.
604– 531
BC
.

2
The Way that can be spoken… mother of all creatures
: Laozi’s lecture here is taken from the start of his classic statement of Daoist philosophy,
The Book of the Way
(
Dao de jing
); the translation is my own.

3
Having said his goodbyes… highway to the West
: According to legend, Laozi is supposed to have disappeared off to the West on the back of his ox after being asked by the warden of the pass to set down his teachings in writing.

1
Zixia’s… Mozi
: Zixia was a disciple of Confucius. Mozi (
c.
480–390) was a philosopher-craftsman about sixty years after Confucius who preached a puritanical, egalitarian philosophy of anti-aggression, to counter the violence prevalent during the Warring States period (
c.
481–221
BC
), in which the Chinese empire was divided into individual states battling for hegemony.

2
Chu
: One of the largest kingdoms of Warring States China, Chu occupied what is currently Hubei and northern Hunan, in the southern half of the country.

3
Gongshu Ban
: A master craftsman from the state of Lu (see note 6 below), also known as Lu Ban, mentioned in ‘Leaving the Pass’.

4
Yue
: Also a kingdom of the Warring States period, Yue was located in south-east China, in present-day Zhejiang Province.

5
Song
: Another kingdom of the Warring States period, Song was located in present-day Henan, in central-eastern China.

6
Lu
: Another Warring States kingdom, situated in north-east China, in contemporary Shandong.

7
fifty piculs
: Approximately eight thousand pounds.

1
ZHUANGZI
: (
c.
370–300
BC
). The second main philosopher of Daoism.

2
when the last king of the Shang was on the throne
:
c.
1025
BC
.

A few years ago, I gave a reading at a local library in California, and afterwards an older Chinese gentleman in the audience asked me if I considered myself a disciple of Lu Xun. No, I replied, and before I could explain further I saw that the gentleman was disappointed. ‘You should go back and read his stories,’ he mumbled and shook his head. ‘I thought I’d seen connections in your book.’

Curious about the gentleman’s verdict, I later sought him out and learned his story. In the summer of 1949, he, a supporter though not outright follower of the Communist Party – ‘a patriotic youth’ in his own words – boarded a ship for America. After weeks of crossing the ocean he landed in San Francisco, where he learned that a few days earlier Mao Zedong had announced the birth of the People’s Republic of China in Tiananmen Square. Later, on the train ride from San Francisco to Massachusetts, where he would attend medical school, news from his relatives in America caught up with him at Springfield, Illinois: some members of his family had fled to Taiwan, and the rest of them, as part of the landlord class, had been executed by the new government. The dilemma of his life, the gentleman concluded, was that the China he loved had chosen not to return his affection. ‘I know you were pursuing medical science before you wrote,’ he then said. ‘Chekhov was a doctor before he became a writer. Lu Xun was to become a doctor before he turned to writing. It’s a great tradition for someone to go from medicine to writing. One could help the world as much with his scalpels as with his words, and I hope you won’t disappoint your predecessors.’

I was moved and humbled by the gentleman’s words; I was uneasy, too, though out of politeness I did not say that, in my opinion, Lu Xun’s ambition to become a spiritual doctor, and his intention for his fiction to become cultural medicine for the nation’s diseased minds, in the end, limited him as a storyteller; the long shadow he cast in Chinese history has allowed the proliferation of many mediocre works while ending the careers of some of the most brilliant writers.

I was first exposed to Lu Xun’s work when I was six, before I could read. My mother, a primary schoolteacher, had me memorize part of Lu Xun’s story ‘My Old Home’, which was excerpted in the year-five textbook she was teaching.

Thirty years later I still remember the shiver I felt when I was taught these words. It must be the first time I was under the spell of a great writer; the image of Runtu was engraved in my mind in such a beautiful way that I often forgot that neither the narrator nor I had seen Runtu on that seashore. It was devastating, when I read the full version of ‘My Old Home’ at twelve, to see the sad and reticent man Runtu had become. The glimpse of a bleakness lurking in every man’s life, which I did not understand at the time, kept me listless for weeks and months afterwards. In our secondary-school literature class, however, fate was not talked about. Rather, it was the conflict between the landlord class and the peasant class, the suffering of the peasants and their pitiable submissiveness, as well as the awkward final paragraphs of the story, where the author seemed eager to instil significance in the story – ‘I prayed they would turn out differently to us: I didn’t want them to drift like me, or to suffer numbly like Runtu… I wanted new, different lives for them, lives that we had not lived… Hope, I thought to myself, is an intangible presence… a path that exists only where others have already passed’ – that were discussed at length. The author was lauded for pointing out the path to hope, and more so for being one of the pilgrims to make that path available for us.

While reading this great volume of translations of Lu Xun’s stories and rereading the original texts, I found myself falling once again under his spell, relishing some of the most memorable characters: Ah-Q’s knuckles falling on the shaved head of the young nun; Kong Yiji’s overextended fingernails tapping on the bar; the Bean-Curd Beauty with her bound feet and sharp tongue; Mrs Nine-Pounds with her perpetual grudge. It would not be a stretch to say that these characters have taken permanent residence in the collective memory of my generation, and perhaps one or two generations before us. I was equally awed by how Lu Xun could bring to life a group of nameless onlookers – at an execution site, at a village tavern, or in the small town where the twice-widowed Xianglin’s wife was mocked for her ill fortune – with precise and dispassionate strokes.

It is, however, frustrating to reread Lu Xun, too. In an essay that detailed his literary theories, he created a phrase – one of the most famous creations in modern Chinese – to describe his feelings towards his characters: ‘[he is] as saddened by the miseries of those people as [he is] infuriated by their reconciliation with their fate’. This fury, coupled with his goal to cure the nation’s diseased minds with his writing, granted him a position of superiority; in many of his stories, this spiritual doctor with his authorial voice took over the stories, which, in my opinion, was more than mere technical missteps: in ‘My Old Home’, the author could not refrain from preaching at the end; in ‘Village Opera’ (my favourite story by Lu Xun, a beautiful vignette of village life where characters seem to exist out of free will, rather than to live up to the author’s sadness and fury), the opening passages with the sarcastic comments on the nation’s citizens are rather unnecessary and pointless; ‘Diary of a Madman’, despite its historical significance, relies on a few pithy phrases fed to the narrator by the author to carry the story; and in ‘A Minor Incident’, an epiphany occurs towards the end, where a rickshaw-puller ‘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’ – in retrospect, I think that moment of epiphany was repeatedly copied out in our own essays in secondary schools and, more damagingly, it became a successful mode of storytelling for a generation of mediocre writers after Communism took over China.

After Lu Xun’s death, in many different situations Mao Zedong hailed him as ‘a great revolutionary’, ‘the commander of China’s Cultural Revolution’ and ‘the saint of China’. It was out of ideological necessity that Lu Xun was canonized, his work overshadowing some of the other writers of his era – Shen Congwen and Lin Yutang, for instance – whose work, if not banned, was rarely seen in print for decades. I wonder, though, whether this posthumous fame would have pleased Lu Xun. Indeed, when he set his mind to cure the nation’s spiritual disease with his writing, he had chosen an impossible role as a superhero and a god.

When I was five, my daycare companions and I were escorted to watch a group of prisoners being denounced publicly before their execution. Afterwards, a teacher, who disliked me for my disobedience, put a hand in the shape of a handgun to my head. ‘If you don’t follow my words, you will end up as one of those criminals. Bang!’ she said, triggering her handgun and making her fellow teachers laugh. When I reread Lu Xun’s stories, a resonant moment occurs in ‘Medicine’ – Mr Kang, the executioner, recounts to an audience the last moments of a young revolutionary before his beheading. In retrospect, my teacher’s words had the same sense of contentedness and good humour as Mr Kang’s; in fact, they were both rather good at making a joke out of someone else’s grim life.

And they will continue doing so. The one who has the power over a fellow human being would not reform and become more honourable for Lu Xun, just as the onlookers would not become less fascinated by other people’s misfortune. Recently I read in a Chinese newspaper that a young woman was about to jump from the roof of a seventeen-storey building, and as she was hesitating and perhaps gathering her courage to commit the act, a large crowd gathered. Old people from the neighbourhood brought folding chairs so they could sit down and watch; a pedlar arrived in time to hawk binoculars; many raised their camera phones to record. What makes this crowd different from the crowd that witnessed the beheading of Ah-Q, I wonder. Perhaps literature, unlike what Lu Xun, or the older Chinese gentleman, hoped, will not change the world in any grand way; rather, it is what remains unchanged that will make literature live on, and it is perhaps for this reason that Lu Xun’s stories will still be read fifty or a hundred years from now.

Yiyun Li