Dawn Blossoms Plucked at Dusk

by Lu Xun

  Then why not go somewhere else?

  So I went to the Medical College in Sendai. Soon after leaving Tokyo I came to a station called Nippori; somehow or other, even now I remember the name. The next place I remember was Mito, where Zhu Shunshui who was loyal to the Ming Dynasty after its downfall died in exile. Sendai was a small market town, very cold in the winter, with as yet no Chinese students studying there.

  No doubt the rarer a thing the higher its value. When Peking cabbage is shipped to Zhejiang, it is hung upside-down in the greengrocer's by a red string tied to its root, and given the grand title “Shandong Vegetable.” When the aloe which grows wild in Fujian comes to Peking, it is ushered into a hothouse and given the beautiful name “Dragon-Tongue Orchid.” In Sendai I too enjoyed such preferential treatment; not only did the school not ask for fees, but several members of the staff even showed great concern over my board and lodging. At first I stayed in an inn next to the gaol, where although the early winter was already quite cold, there were still a good many mosquitoes, so I learned to cover myself completely with the quilt and wrap my clothes round my head, leaving only two nostrils exposed through which to breathe. In this area, shaken by my continuous breathing, mosquitoes could find no place to bite; thus I slept soundly. The food was not bad either. But one of our staff thought that since this inn also catered for the convicts, it was not fitting for me to stay there; and he pleaded with me earnestly time and again. Though I considered the fact that this inn also catered for the convicts had nothing to do with me, I could not ignore his kindness, so I had to look for a more fitting place. Thus I moved to another house a long way from the gaol, where unfortunately I had to drink taro tuber soup every day, which I found rather hard to swallow.

  After this I met many new teachers and attended many new lectures. The anatomy course was taught by two professors. First came osteology. There entered a dark, lean instructor with a moustache, who was wearing glasses and carrying under his arm a pile of books, large and small. Having set the books on the table, in slow and most measured tones he introduced himself to the class:

  “My name is Fujino Genkuro....”

  Some students at the back started laughing. He went on to outline the history of the development of anatomical science in Japan, those books, large and small, being works published on this subject from the earliest time till then. There were first a few books in old-fashioned binding, then some Chinese translations reprinted in Japan. So they had not started translating and studying new medical science any earlier than in China.

  Those sitting at the back and laughing were students who had failed the previous term and been kept down, who after one year in the college knew a great many stories. They proceeded to regale the freshmen with the history of every professor. This Mr. Fujino, they said, dressed so carelessly that he sometimes even forgot to put on a tie. Because he shivered all winter in an old overcoat, once when he travelled by train the conductor suspected him of being a pickpocket and warned all the passengers to be on their guard.

  What they said was probably true: I myself saw him come to class once without a tie.

  A week later, on a Saturday I think, he sent his assistant for me. I found him sitting in his laboratory among skeletons and a number of separate skulls—he was studying skulls at the time and later published a monograph on the subject in the college journal.

  “Can you take notes of my lectures?” he asked.

  “After a fashion.”

  “Let me see them.”

  I gave him the notes I had taken, and he kept them, to return them a day or two later with the instruction that henceforth I should hand them in every week. When I took them back and looked at them, I received a great surprise, and felt at the same time both embarrassed and grateful. From beginning to end my notes had been supplemented and corrected in red ink. Not only had he added a great deal I had missed, he had even corrected every single grammatical mistake. And so it went on till he had taught all the courses for which he was responsible: osteology, angiology, neurology.

  Unfortunately, I was not in the least hardworking, and was sometimes most self-willed. I remember once Mr. Fujino called me to his laboratory and showed me a diagram in my notes of the blood vessels of the forearm. Pointing at this, he said kindly:

  “Look, you have moved this blood vessel a little out of place. Of course, when moved like this it does look better; but anatomical charts are not works of art, and we have no way of altering real things. I have corrected it for you, and in future you should copy exactly from the blackboard.”

  I was very stubborn, however. Though I assented, I was thinking:

  “My diagram was a good drawing. As for the true facts, of course I can remember them.”

  After the annual examination I spent the summer enjoying myself in Tokyo. By early autumn, when I went back to the college, the results had long since been published. I came halfway down the list of more than a hundred students, but I had not failed. This term Mr. Fujino's courses were practical anatomy and topographic anatomy.

  After roughly a week of practical anatomy he sent for me again and, looking very gratified, said, still in the most measured tones:

  “Having heard what respect the Chinese show to spirits, I was afraid you might be unwilling to dissect corpses. Now my mind is at rest, since this is not the case.”

  Yet sometimes too, inadvertently, he embarrassed me very much. He had heard that Chinese women had bound feet, but did not know the details; so he wanted to learn from me how it was done, how the bones in the feet were deformed. And he said with a sigh, “I should have to see it to understand. What can it really be like?”

  One day the executives of the students' union of my class came to my hostel and asked to borrow my lecture notes. I found them and handed them over, but they merely looked through the notes without taking them away. As soon as they left, however, the postman delivered a bulky envelope, and when I opened it, the first line read:

  “Repent!”

  This was probably a quotation from the New Testament, but it had recently been used by Tolstoy. It was then the time of the Russo-Japanese War, and Count Tolstoy wrote to both the Russian tsar and the Japanese mikado, opening his letter with this word. The Japanese papers denounced him roundly for his presumption; patriotic youths were most indignant too, though they had been influenced by him without knowing it. The rest of the letter was to the effect that the question for our anatomy test the previous year had been marked by Mr. Fujino on my lecture notes, and it was because I knew them beforehand that I was able to pass. The letter was unsigned.

  Then I recalled an incident a few days earlier. Because there was to be a meeting of our whole class, the students' executive had written an announcement on the blackboard, concluding with the words: “Please come without fail, and let there be no leakage.” The word “leakage” was underlined. Though I thought at the time that this underlining was funny, I paid no attention to it; now I realized it was directed against me too. Implying that I had got hold of the questions through some leakage on the part of our teacher.

  I reported this to Mr. Fujino. A few students who knew me well were indignant too, and we protested to the executives against their rudeness in examining my notes under another pretext, and demanded that they publish the results of their investigation. So finally the rumour died, the executives tried by every means to recover that anonymous letter, and in the end I returned them their Tolstoyan missive.

  China is a weak country, therefore the Chinese must be an inferior people, and for a Chinese to get more than sixty marks could not be due simply to his own efforts. No wonder they suspected me. But soon after this it was my fate to watch the execution of some Chinese. In our second year we had a new course, bacteriology. All the bacterial forms were shown in slides, and if we completed one section before it was time for the class to be dismissed, some news in slides would be shown. Naturally at that time they were all about the Japanese victories over the Russians. But in these
lantern slides there were also scenes of some Chinese who had acted as spies for Russians and were captured by the Japanese and shot, while other Chinese looked on. And there was I, too, in the classroom.

  “Banzai!” The students clapped their hands and cheered.

  They cheered everything we saw; but to me the cheering that day was unusually jarring to my ear. Later when I came back to China I saw idlers watching criminals being shot, who also cheered as if they were drunk. Alas, there is nothing one can do about it. At that time and in that place, however, it made me change my mind.

  At the end of my second year I called on Mr. Fujino to tell him I was going to stop studying medicine and leave Sendai. A shadow crossed his face and he seemed on the point of speaking, but then thought better of it.

  “I want to study biology, so what you have taught me, sir, will still be useful.” As a matter of fact, I had no intention of studying biology; but seeing he looked rather sad I told this lie to comfort him.

  “I fear subjects like the anatomy taught to medical students will not be of much help to you in the study of biology,” he said with a sigh.

  A few days before I left he called me to his house, gave me a photograph on the back of which he had written “Farewell,” and said he hoped I would give him one of mine. Since I had no photographs at that time, he told me to send him one later when I had taken one, and to write to him regularly to tell him how I was doing.

  After leaving Sendai I did not have a photograph taken for many years, and since there was nothing gratifying in my life and telling him would only disappoint him, I did not even dare write to him. As the months and years slipped by, there was so much to tell that I felt more perplexed for words; so though sometimes I wanted to write I found it hard to begin, and I have not yet written him a single letter nor sent him a photograph. As far as he is concerned, he must think I have disappeared for good.

  But somehow or other I still remember him from time to time, for of all those whom I consider as my teachers he is the one to whom I feel most grateful and who gave me the most encouragement. And I often think: the keen faith he had in me and his indefatigable help were in a limited sense for China, for he wanted China to have modern medical science; but in larger sense they were for science, for he wanted modern medical knowledge to spread to China. In my eyes he is a great man, and I feel this in my heart, though his name is not known to many people.

  I had the lecture notes he corrected bound into three thick volumes and kept them as a permanent souvenir. Unfortunately seven years ago when I was moving house, a case of books broken open on the road and half the contents were lost including these notes. I asked the transport company to make a search, but to no effect. So all I have left is his photograph which hangs on the east wall of my Peking lodging, opposite my desk. At night if I am tired and want to take it easy, when I look up and see his thin, dark face in the lamplight, as if about to speak in measured tones, my better nature asserts itself and my courage returns. Then I light a cigarette, and write some more of those articles so hated and detested by “just minds and gentlemen.”

  October 12

  ■ Fan Ainong

  In our lodgings in Tokyo, we usually read the papers as soon as we got up. Most students read the Asahi Shimbun and the Yomiuri Shimbun, while those with a passion for tittle-tattle read the Niroku Shimbun. One morning, the first thing our eyes lit on was a telegram from China, much as follows:

  “Enming, Governor of Anhui, has been assassinated by Jo Shiki Rin. The assassin has been captured.”

  After the initial shock, all the students brightened up and started chatting away. They also tried to work out who the assassin was, and what were the three Chinese characters translated as Jo Shiki Rin. But everyone from Shaoxing who read anything more than textbooks had understood at once. This was Xu Xilin who, after finishing his studies and returning to China, had been in charge of police administration as commissioner designate of Anhui—he was just in the position to assassinate the governor.

  Everybody went on to prophesy that he would receive the extreme penalty, and his whole clan would be involved. Not long after this, news also reached us that Miss Qiu Jin had been executed in Shaoxing, and Xu Xilin's heart had been torn out, fried and eaten by Enming's bodyguards. We were furious. Some of us held a secret meeting to raise passage money, for this was where a Japanese ronin would come in useful. When he was in a jovial mood, after tearing up cuttlefish to go with his wine, he set out to fetch Xu's family.

  As usual, we also held a meeting of fellow provincials to mourn for the revolutionary martyrs and abuse the Manzhu government. Then someone proposed sending a telegram to Peking to inveigh against the Manzhu government's inhumanity. At once the meeting divided into two camps: those in favour of sending a telegram, and those against it. I was in favour, but after I had expressed my opinion, a deep, gruff voice declared:

  “Those killed have been killed, those dead have died—what's the use of sending a stinking telegram?”

  The speaker was a tall, burly fellow with long hair and more white than black to his eyes, who always seemed to be looking at people contemptuously. Squatting on the mat, he opposed almost all I said. This had struck me before as strange, and I had my eyes on him, but only now did I ask:

  “Who was that last speaker, who's so cold?”

  Someone who knew him told me: “That's Fan Ainong, one of Xu Xilin's students.”

  This was outrageous—the fellow was simply not human! His teacher had been murdered, yet he did not even dare send a telegram. Thereupon I absolutely insisted on sending one, and began to argue with him. The result was that those in favour of sending a telegram were in the majority, and he had to give way. The next thing was to vote for someone to draft it.

  “Why bother to vote?” he asked. “Of course it should be the one who proposed sending a telegram.”

  I was sure this remark was also aimed at me, though it was not unreasonable. However, I declared it was essential that a composition of such a tragic nature be written by someone thoroughly familiar with the life of the martyr, for the fact that he had a closer relationship and felt more distressed and indignant than other people would certainly make his writing much more moving. So I began to argue with him again. The result was that neither he nor I drafted it. I forget who consented to draft it. The next thing was that everyone left except the man drawing up the telegram and one or two helpers who would send it off when it was written.

  After that I always found this Fan Ainong unnatural, and most detestable. I had formerly thought the most detestable people in the world were the Manzhus, but now I realized they were still secondary: the primary offender was Fan Ainong. If China had no revolution, no more need be said on the matter. If there was a revolution, the first thing to do was to root out Fan Ainong.

  Later, however, my views on this subject seem by degrees to have weakened, to be finally forgotten, and after that we never met again. Not till the year before the revolution, when I was teaching in my hometown. There at the end of the spring, I think, I suddenly saw a man in a friend's house whose face looked very familiar. After staring at each other for not more than two or three seconds, we both exclaimed:

  “Why, you're Fan Ainong!”

  “Why, you're Lu Xun!”

  I don't know why, but we both started laughing at that—laughing at ourselves and regretting the days that had gone. His eyes were still the same; but strangely enough, though only a few years had passed, he already had some white hairs. Or maybe his hair had been white all the time, only I had never noticed. Wearing a very old cloth jacket and worn-out cloth shoes, he looked extremely shabby. Speaking of his experiences, he told me he had run out of money later, so that he could not continue his studies but had to come home. After his return he had been despised, rejected and persecuted—virtually no place would have him. Now he was taking refuge in the country, making a meagre living by teaching a few small boys. But he sometimes felt so depressed that he took a boat to t
own.

  He told me also that he now liked drinking, so we drank. After that, whenever he came to town he would look me up, till we knew each other very well. In our cups we often said such crazy, senseless things that even my mother would laugh when she happened to hear us. One day I suddenly remembered that meeting of our fellow provincials in Tokyo.

  “Why did you do nothing but oppose me that day, as if deliberately?” I asked him.

  “Don't you know? I always disliked you—not just I, but all of us.”

  “Did you know who I was before that?”

  “Of course. When we arrived at Yokohama, didn't you come with Chen Ziying to meet us? You shook your head over us contemptuously—don't you remember that?”

  After a little thought I remembered, although it had happened seven or eight years ago. Chen Ziying had called for me, saying we must go to Yokohama to meet some fellow provincials who were coming to study in Japan. As soon as the steamer arrived I saw a large group of probably more than a dozen of them. Once ashore, they took their baggage to the customhouse, and while looking through their cases the customs officer suddenly found a pair of embroidered slippers for a woman with bound feet, and set aside his public duties to pick these up and examine them curiously. I was very annoyed, and thought: “What fools these fellows must be, to bring such things with them.” Without knowing what I was doing, I must have shaken my head disapprovingly. The inspection over, we sat for a short time in a hotel, then boarded the train. To my surprise, this flock of students started deferring to each other in the railway carriage. A wanted B to take this seat, B insisted on giving it up to C; and before they were through with this ceremonial the train started with a lurch, so that three or four of them promptly fell over. I was very annoyed again, and thought to myself: “Even the seats on trains they have to divide according to precedence....” Without knowing what I was doing, I must have shaken my head disapprovingly again. But one of that deferential group, I realized now, was Fan Ainong. And in addition to Fan, I am ashamed to say, were the revolutionary martyrs Chen Boping who was killed in battle in Anhui, and Ma Zonghan, who was murdered. There were one or two others as well, who were thrown into dark cells not to see the light of day till after the revolution, and who still bear the scars of their torture. But I did not know them; shaking my head I shipped them all to Tokyo. Though Xu Xilin had travelled on the same boat, he was not on this train, for he and his wife had landed at Kobe to go on by land.