The Real Story of Ah-Q and Other Tales of China

by Lu Xun

  Lu Xun’s own family life seems to have been inflected by a certain fin de siècle melancholy: the clan compounds scattered with lonely older wives neglected for younger concubines, and lethargic males – Lu Xun’s father included – stifled by failure in the fiercely competitive civil service examinations (the tests of Confucian orthodoxy that controlled the paths to wealth and social success). In the main courtyard of the mansion in which Lu Xun grew up, a mound of broken tiles commemorated the repairs made to the house after the fourteen-year-long Taiping Rebellion, the most serious of the nineteenth-century revolts that undermined Qing authority. Adjoining was the ‘ghost courtyard’, into which were sunk the graves of the many who had died during the appalling violence.

  In 1893 the gentility of Lu Xun’s early years faded into impoverished disgrace when his grandfather was imprisoned for seven years (on suspended death sentence) for attempting to suborn a civil service examiner. Over the following three years, as Lu Xun’s father destroyed his health through a weakness for liquor and opium, the costs of ruinously ineffective medical treatment – together with the bribes necessary to buy the grandfather a stay of execution – undid the family finances. In 1896, after ingesting a series of quack prescriptions from traditional Chinese doctors (sugar cane thrice exposed to frost, monogamous crickets, drum-skin, ink), Lu Xun’s father died of an asthma attack.

  By 1899, after a half-hearted attempt at the civil service examination, Lu Xun had turned his back on the Confucian system of education that seemed to have led China (and his family) into disaster, permitting the country to be ‘carved up like a melon’ by foreign imperialists. (A year before his father’s death, China had suffered the humiliation of military defeat against Japan, a country that the Middle Kingdom had always viewed as a cultural tributary.) Instead, he committed himself to Western learning – English, political science, natural sciences, geology and mineralogy – at new-style academies in Nanjing, one of the major east coast cities. His mother wept at his decision, he recalled, ‘which was natural enough, because back then a Confucian education was still the route to respectability. Only the utterly desperate, society deemed, stooped to studying Western sciences. By following the course I had fixed upon, I would be selling my soul to foreign devils, only intensifying the contempt in which we were already steeped’ (p. 16). A distant uncle of Lu Xun’s charged with keeping an eye on him in Nanjing even instructed him to change his name, presumably to avoid further disgracing the clan through his dubious career choice. In fact, for all their suspect veneer of foreign novelty, these institutions seem to have been rather restrained in their modernizing zeal: a swimming pool originally built to teach aspiring naval officers to swim was filled in and converted into a shrine to the God of War after one of the students drowned in it.

  Beginning the reading habits of a lifetime, Lu Xun immersed himself in the mass of translations generated by the late-Qing literary press – of novels (by Dickens, Rider Haggard and others), of Huxley’s Evolution and Ethics – and in the nationalist sermons of the leading reformist intellectuals of the day, Yan Fu and Liang Qichao. It was Yan and Liang’s sense of a modern, international world that threw late-imperial Confucianism into a provincial, complacent light, convincing Lu Xun and others like him that China was no longer the centre of the civilized world, but one nation among many struggling for survival in a global system dominated by the West. For the time being, Lu Xun replicated Liang’s utilitarian visions for saving China through science, technology and constitutional reform: ‘A glorious future unfurled in my mind,’ Lu Xun later recalled of his Nanjing years, ‘in which I would return to my homeland after graduation and set about medicating its suffering sick – people like my father, to whom Chinese doctors had denied a cure. In times of war, I would become an army doctor, all the while converting my fellow countrymen to the religion of political reform’ (p. 16).

  Dissatisfied with the training he had picked up at the Nanjing Academy (‘climbing a mast a few times did not qualify me as a sailor’2), Lu Xun, like many ambitious and patriotic young men of his generation, decided to leave China to study Western science overseas, enrolling in a Japanese medical school in rural Sendai. In 1906, at the close of a biology lecture in his second year, one of his teachers showed the class a slide depicting a scene from the Russo-Japanese War of 1904–5, part of which was fought on Chinese territory disputed by the two nations. A crowd of Chinese apathetically watched while one of their compatriots was beheaded by the Japanese as a Russian spy. ‘Though they were all of them perfectly sturdy physical specimens,’ Lu Xun later remembered in the Preface to his first short-story collection,

  every face was utterly, stupidly blank. The man tied up, the caption informed us, had been caught spying for the Russians and was about to be beheaded by the Japanese as a public example to the appreciative mob.

  …I no longer believed in the overwhelming importance of medical science. However rude a nation was in physical health, if its people were intellectually feeble, they would never become anything other than cannon fodder or gawping spectators, their loss to the world through illness no cause for regret. The first task was to change their spirit; and literature and the arts, I decided at the time, were the best means to this end. And so I reinvented myself as a crusader for cultural reform. (p. 17)

  A few months after this Damascene moment – the most famous conversion in modern Chinese literature – Lu Xun abandoned his medical studies and began a career as self-appointed literary physician of China’s spiritual ills.

  Lu Xun was not alone in identifying literary culture as the key to China’s survival. By 1902, the reformists Yan Fu and Liang Qichao had begun to prize vernacular fiction as an essential vehicle of political enlightenment. While bemoaning the degeneracy of Chinese writing – ‘Chinese novels teach us either robbery or lust’ – Liang commented that in Western countries ‘a newly published book could often influence and change the views and arguments of the whole nation. Indeed, political novels should be given the highest credit for being instrumental in the steady progress made in the political sphere in America, England, Germany, France, Austria, Italy, and Japan.’3 Why, Liang asked, were the Chinese at present superstitious, avaricious, obsequious, heartless and crafty? ‘All because of our fiction.’4 Traditionally scorned by scholarly elites as a disreputably popular form beyond the orthodox Confucian pale of classical history and poetry, vernacular fiction was now speedily promoted up the literary hierarchy. ‘If one intends to renovate the people of a nation,’ Liang enthused, ‘one must first renovate its fiction.’5 Previously the preserve of a small, overeducated elite, literature was now recast (by another small, overeducated elite) in a utilitarian, collective mould. Lu Xun’s vocational epiphany, with its powerful evocation of the lone, enlightened intellectual pledging to transform the benighted Chinese masses, was mired in the uncertainties of this new nationalist vision: in a combination of high-minded contempt and patriotic sympathy that he would later shape into a fictional oeuvre of ingenious moral ambiguity.

  For more than ten years, however, Lu Xun’s personal ambitions for regenerating China through writing foundered: a magazine, New Life, failed before it had produced its first issue; only forty-one copies were sold of a one thousand five hundred print-run of translations of new European fiction; and a Romantic manifesto proclaiming the writer a demonic midwife to a nation’s rebirth was read by almost no one.6 He discarded his first short story in 1911, too dissatisfied even to give it a name. It was his brother Zhou Zuoren (himself destined to become a celebrated essayist and literary scholar) who entitled it ‘Nostalgia’ and guided it towards publication two years later. After returning to China in 1909, Lu Xun meandered through a number of unsatisfactory teaching posts in his native province. Initially enthusiastic about the 1911 Revolution that brought to an end some two thousand years of imperial rule, he soon grew disillusioned with the warlord regime that swiftly took over local government, and escaped to a post in the new Ministry of Education in Be
ijing.

  Lu Xun would later write of these years as a search for ‘intellectual narcotics’ to soothe the disappointment of his radical hopes (p. 18). Returning to traditional literati pursuits, he bought old books, edited classical texts, researched pre-modern Chinese fiction and reconstructed ancient tombstone inscriptions. He also began drinking heavily, a habit that stayed with him for the rest of his life. But through the years of Lu Xun’s early failures and self-imposed exile from the world of cultural reform, the contradictory principles of his later literary personality emerged. Patriotism battled against his disgust for a diseased China; an early belief in the power of the crusading literary genius was corroded by a self-mockery at the futility of his own demagogic impulse; and an evolutionary hope for the future remained in thrall to the ghosts of the past.

  By 1916, the new Republic had regressed into authoritarianism, when the president (and former Qing-dynasty general), Yuan Shikai, tried to have himself crowned emperor. Following his death later that year, his subordinates divided the country into personal warlord enclaves and began battling each other for overall control. Taking advantage of China’s post-revolutionary chaos, the Japanese government had in 1915 served Yuan Shikai with their Twenty-One Demands, asserting greater Japanese economic and political sovereignty over areas of Manchuria and Mongolia; after a few months of negotiations, Yuan capitulated. Four years later, the British, French and Americans at Versailles rewarded Japanese naval assistance in the First World War with a large slice of north-east China. Indignant Chinese youth responded by plunging into the protest of the May Fourth Movement – a surge of nationalism named after the violent anti-imperialist demonstrations of 4 May 1919.

  The intellectual backdrop to the turmoil of 1919 was already in place by 1916, with the formation of a group of progressive scholars and writers at Beijing University and at the editorial board of New Youth, the flagship journal of May Fourth enlightenment. Abandoning the moderation of earlier reformers who had searched for a reconciliation between modern Western and traditional Chinese values, New Youth’s editor-in-chief, Chen Duxiu, and his associates challenged China to move in a radically new direction. The basic task, proclaimed Chen, was ‘to import the foundation of Western society – that is, the new belief in equality and human rights. We must be thoroughly aware of the incompatibility between Confucianism and the new belief, the new society, and the new state.’7 Their project was to clear out – by means of thoroughgoing westernization – the horrors of traditional China (‘hypocritical, conservative, passive, constrained, classicist, imitative, ugly, evil, belligerent, disorderly, lazy’) and replace them with the dream of a ‘sincere, progressive, activist, free, egalitarian, creative, beautiful, good, peaceful, cooperative, industrious’ new nation.8

  At the centre of this New Culture Movement lay far-reaching calls for a reformed literary style that would represent and speak directly to the masses. ‘Down with the ornate, obsequious literature of the aristocrats – up with the plain expressive literature of the people!’ shouted Chen Duxiu. ‘Down with the stale, ostentatious literature of the classics; up with the fresh, sincere literature of realism! Down with the pedantic, obscure literature of the recluse; up with the clear, popular literature of society!’9 The new literature was to be infused with individualism, paradoxically to serve the collective good: ‘What I would like most to see happen to you is a true and pure form of egocentrism,’ another celebrated reformer, Hu Shi, approvingly quoted Ibsen, ‘one that can sometimes give you the feeling that your own needs are the most important thing of all and that nothing else matters… If you wish to serve society, the best way to do it would be to put some effort into yourself.’10

  In 1917, Lu Xun was roused from his despondency by a request from Qian Xuantong, an old friend and one of Chen’s co-editors on New Youth, to produce something for the magazine. ‘ “Imagine an iron house:” ’ Lu Xun gloomily argued back, ‘ “without windows or doors, utterly indestructible, and full of sound sleepers – all about to suffocate to death. Let them die in their sleep, and they will feel nothing. Is it right to cry out, to rouse the light sleepers among them, causing them inconsolable agony before they die?” ’ ‘ “But even if we succeed in waking only the few,” ’ Qian replied, ‘ “there is still hope – hope that the iron house may one day be destroyed.” ’ ‘He was right;’ Lu Xun relented. ‘[H]owever hard I tried, I couldn’t quite obliterate my own sense of hope’ (p. 19). His first work of vernacular fiction, ‘Diary of a Madman’, resulted.

  In content alone, ‘Diary’ reads as a neat propaganda piece for the anti-Confucian rebellion of the 1910s and 1920s: a forceful attack on traditional China, constructed as the journal of a provincial who believes he has made a terrible discovery – that the Chinese have for centuries been ‘eating people’ – and who, as a result, has been confined as insane by his family. But the formal complexity of the story makes it far more than a work of agitprop. Through the claustrophobic surrealism of his premise, through labelling (in the diary’s pompous classical Chinese Preface) his visionary narrator a madman, Lu Xun produced a profoundly unsettling denunciation of China’s past and present: a howl of despair at a civilization incapable of diagnosing its own state of crisis.

  ‘Diary’ challenged norms in its use of language as well as in its form and message. Lu Xun’s short story now declared to readers that the new vernacular fiction could serve sophisticated and intensely serious purposes. (Though Lu Xun was an early advocate of literary reform, his first attempt at fiction was in classical Chinese, hovering between the traditionalism of its language and the modernism of its ironic first-person narrator.) A few years after being offered to an untutored reading public, the elliptical experimentalism of ‘Diary’ had helped win Lu Xun acclaim as one of the leading literary rebels of the New Culture Movement: with its assault on tradition, its foreign inspiration (derived from Gogol’s story of the same name), and its skilful manipulation of narrative voice.

  ‘Diary’ began a two-volume oeuvre of realist fiction, Outcry (1922) and Hesitation (1925), twenty-five stories that ranged across the central social, political and cultural issues of Lu Xun’s time, and created characters who swiftly rooted themselves in the national imagination. In both his fiction and essays (a form at which he also excelled), Lu Xun distinguished himself from less disciplined contemporaries through the controlled craftsmanship of his narratives, his critical intelligence, and the sardonic humour that overlays his recounting of even the blackest episodes. The traces of Lu Xun’s cosmopolitan reading habits (in Chinese, Japanese and German translations) are in evidence throughout: in a lofty command of satire picked up from the Polish Sienkiewicz; in an eerie symbolism refined by his translations of the Russian Andreev. ‘Read no Chinese books,’ he once advised China’s youth. ‘Or as few as you can. But read more foreign books.’11

  Lu Xun publicly regarded his fiction as a kind of cultural medicine, designed to draw the poison out of the Chinese national character. ‘As for why I wrote fiction,’ he reflected in 1933, ‘I still uphold the principle of “enlightenment” of more than a decade ago. I think it must “serve life” and furthermore reform life… Thus my subjects were often drawn from the unfortunates of this sick society; my aim was to expose the disease so as to draw attention to its cure.’12 And many of the stories collected in Outcry and Hesitation are, on one level, straightforwardly obsessed with China’s predicament. Lu Xun’s favoured narrative tone of supercilious irony appears designed to advance his stories’ therapeutic aspirations: distancing the reader from the people and events described, bolstering our faith in the objectivity of our literary doctor. Lu Xun’s early fiction is a search for subjects, situations and forms (character sketches, reminiscences, parodies, dense symbolic realism, melancholy nostalgia) by which to represent the national emergency.

  Ever-present – in the boorish inhumanity of the drinkers in the Universal Prosperity Tavern, for example, or the bestial gurning of the villagers in ‘Diary of a Madman’ – i
s the Crowd, a collective illustration of China’s moral bankruptcy. Within years of his creation, Ah-Q – Lu Xun’s most extended denunciation of the idiotic, able-bodied everyman – had begun to enter the language as expressive shorthand for every imaginable blemish on the national character: its obsession with face; its superiority complex; its servility before authority and cruelty towards the weak; its conceited delight in ignorance. (According to one account, Lu Xun chose the Roman letter of his hero’s name for its resemblance to a blank face with a pigtail – an all-purpose signifier for Chinese manhood.) Lu Xun’s mock-biography seems determined to channel the reader’s contempt at the abject Ah-Q: in the narrator’s facetious struggles to fit his subject into the parameters of respectable historiography; in the sardonic chapter headings; in the convolutions by which Ah-Q takes his ‘moral victories’.

  But Lu Xun’s complexity as a writer goes beyond the bitterness of his vision of China; beyond a self-righteous condemnation of the backward Chinese masses. At the heart of the catechisms of Outcry and Hesitation lies a string of unreliable narrators who transform his stories into shrewdly crafted vehicles for casting doubt on literature’s ability to shoulder the political burdens it had taken on at the start of the century.