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

by Lu Xun

  ‘Excellent, excellent, I’ll go over to the temple right now to tell the priests about our plan.’

  And so Yaozong left us, exclaiming with admiration at the advice he had received; though it was uncertain how much of it he had actually understood. People used to say that my teacher was the cleverest man in the town of Wushi – and with reason. He could have survived, unscarred, through any time, in any place. Since the great creator Pangu cleaved heaven and earth in two, unleashing tireless cycles of bloody chaos and orderly peace, dynasties have waxed and dynasties have waned. And yet, through it all, my teacher’s family – alone in the empire – seem never to have been doomed to political martyrdom or to lose their lives in following rebel causes, left to flourish in tranquillity up to the present day, to preach the wisdom of Confucius (who, let it not be forgotten, by the age of seventy could achieve his heart’s desire without breaking the bounds of social morality) to ungrateful wretches such as me. If one were to try to explain such a phenomenon in evolutionary terms, one might infer my teacher had inherited this mighty talent from his forefathers. I later came to believe, though, that he had picked it up from books. For how could Wang, Li and I – for all our own hereditary resources – possibly compete with the intellectual profundity that he had brought to bear on the afternoon’s dilemmas?

  Off Yaozong went, but class failed to resume. Looking rather troubled, my teacher now said he too was going back home, and that I could take the rest of the day off. I bounded joyously off to the parasol tree, undeterred by the summer sun overhead. For once, the territory beneath its canopy belonged to me, and me alone. Before long, I caught sight of my teacher hurrying off, a large bundle of clothes under his arm. In the usual run of things, he returned home only for special festivals or for the New Year, invariably taking with him his multivolume crammers on writing eight-legged civil service examination essays. Today, extraordinarily, he’d left the whole set standing solemn guard on his desk, taking instead the clothes and shoes he stored in his battered old trunk.

  Out along the road, I saw ant-like swarms of humanity on the move, their faces covered in terror and confusion – some burdened with possessions, others empty-handed, all running away, Wang told me; most of Hexu seemed to be heading for Wushi, and vice versa. He’d seen trouble like this before, Wang went on, there was no need for us to panic. Li, who had gone round to the Jins’ to ask for news, reported that next door’s servants hadn’t yet left, but that she’d seen a crowd of (she supposed) concubines gathering up powder, rouge, perfumes, silk fans and clothes into suitcases. To the concubines of the well-to-do, flight – it seemed – was a spring outing, for which lipstick and kohl were bare necessities. Being rather too busy just then to make further inquiries of the Long Hairs, I headed off to catch flies, which I subsequently used to tempt ants out of their mounds, trampling them first to death before pouring water into their nests to highlight the deficiencies of their flood defences. All too soon, the sun slipped behind the branches of the tree, and my amah called me to dinner. How had the time passed so quickly, I wondered. On a normal day, I would still have been suffering the torments of poetic consonance, as my teacher grimaced wearily at my efforts. After dinner, Li took me outside. There, as ever, was Wang, enjoying the cool evening air. Unusually, however, tonight he had a great crowd gathered open-mouthed about him, as if transfixed by some demonic creature. Under the bright moonlight, their exposed teeth looked like rows of decaying bone dice.

  ‘Back then,’ Wang pronounced, in between draws on his pipe, ‘the doorman here was an idiot by the name of Zhao – Fifth Uncle Zhao they all called him. Soon as he heard the Long Hairs were coming, the master told everyone to run away. “Once the master’s gone,” reasoned our man Zhao, “who’s going to protect the house from robbers if I don’t stay on?” ’

  ‘Fool!’ my amah interjected, forcefully demonstrating her contempt for the idiocies of our sage forefathers.

  ‘Old Mrs Wu, the cook, wouldn’t go either, over seventy she must have been – just holed herself up in the kitchen. For days, she heard nothing but the tramp of footsteps and dogs howling – she must have been scared out of her wits. Then even that stopped – the whole place was silent as the grave. One day, she just made out – still far off in the distance – the sound of a vast army approaching, till at last she heard them passing by the wall of the courtyard. In another while, several dozen Long Hairs burst into the kitchen, waving knives about, and dragged her outside. “Where’s the master, old woman?” they seemed to be shouting (she could barely make them out). “Where’s his money?” “Great king,” she replied, bowing, “my master has fled. I’ve eaten nothing for days – give me some food, I beg you. I don’t know anything about his money.” “Hungry, are you?” one Long Hair laughed. “Try this!” Then he hurled a round object at her, so matted with blood it took her a moment to realize it was Zhao’s head…’

  ‘Didn’t she die of fright?’ Li screeched again, as the rest of Wang’s wide-eyed audience let their jaws hang a few degrees wider.

  ‘When the Long Hairs knocked at the door, Zhao wouldn’t open up. “The master’s away!” he shouted back at them. “You just want to loot the place!” Then the Long – ’

  ‘Any more news yet?’ My teacher was back. After a moment of panic, I saw his expression had lost its usual note of severity, and dared to hold my ground. If the Long Hairs really did come, I now thought, they might throw his head at Li, freeing me from The Analects to dedicate myself to ant-drowning.

  ‘Nothing… After the Long Hairs destroyed the gate, Zhao came out and got a proper look at them – terrified he was, then they – ’

  ‘Mr Yangsheng! My servants are back!’ Yaozong shouted as he re-entered the compound.

  ‘And?’ my teacher asked as he walked up to him, his shortsighted eyes bulging unnervingly. Everyone turned towards Yaozong.

  ‘Mr San says it’s all lies about the Long Hairs, it’s just a few dozen refugees passing by Hexu. A refugee… a refugee’s like a beggar – like the sort of beggar my family gets all the time.’ Anxious his audience might not understand the term ‘refugee’, Yaozong exhausted his linguistic resources in attempting a definition – and barely filled a sentence in the process.

  ‘Refugees! Ha!’ My teacher burst into laughter, as if mocking the stupidity of his former panic, and sneering at the refugees’ deficient ability to inspire fear. Everyone else joined in – compelled by my teacher’s mirth.

  Having received Mr San’s intelligence, the gathered company scattered with a buzz of chatter. With Yaozong also gone, quiet returned to the parasol tree, leaving only Wang and a handful of others. ‘I must go and tell my family the good news,’ my teacher said, after pacing out a few circuits. ‘I’ll be back first thing tomorrow.’ And off he went, this time taking with him his essay-writing primer. ‘So your homework’s going to do itself, is it?’ were his parting words to me. ‘Back to your books! Stop wasting time, wicked boy.’ Feeling persecuted, I silently fixed my gaze on the light in Wang’s pipe. Its flickering glow – as Wang puffed away – reminded me of an autumn firefly sunk into grass. Busy remembering how last year I had stumbled into a pond of reeds while trying to catch one, I stopped worrying about my teacher.

  ‘All that fuss about the Long Hairs,’ Wang nodded, leaving off his pipe. ‘They were terrible to begin with, but they came to nothing in the end.’

  ‘Did you ever see them?’ Li quickly asked. ‘What were they like?’

  ‘Were you one?’ I wanted to know. When the Long Hairs were about to descend on us, my teacher had left; the Long Hairs, I therefore reasoned, were a force for good. And since Wang was always kind to me, I further deduced, he must have been a Long Hair himself.

  ‘Ha-ha! No, never… Mrs Li, how old would you have been back then? I must have been in my twenties.’

  ‘Only ten. And my mother took me off to hide in Pingtian, so I never saw them.’

  ‘I fled to Mount Huang… When the Long Hairs got to my village,
I happened to be away. My neighbour Niusi and two of my cousins weren’t so lucky. They got dragged out on to the Taiping Bridge, had their throats slit, then were pushed into the water and left to drown. Niusi was strong as an ox: he could carry nearly three hundred pounds of rice a quarter of a mile – they don’t make them like that any more. It was near twilight by the time I got to Mount Huang. Up at the summit, the sun was still caught on the treetops, but night was falling on the rice paddies at the foot of the mountain; it was getting dark. When I got to the foot of the mountain, I looked behind me and calmed down a bit as soon as I saw no one was coming after me. But there didn’t seem to be a soul on the mountain – it was lonely out there on my own. I pulled myself together a bit, but when it got properly dark, the whole place was silent as the grave – except for a kind of crrr-crrr-crrrr-wour-wour-wour sort of noise – ’

  ‘Wour-wour-wour?’ My question slipped, almost involuntarily, out. Mrs Li gripped my hand to stifle any further interruption from me – as if speaking my mystification aloud would bring calamity down on her.

  ‘Just a frog. And then an owl – sends a shiver down your spine, an owl’s hooting… In the dark, you know, Mrs Li, a tree looks a lot like a man… Look again, and it’s a tree, ha! When the Long Hairs were on the run, people from our village chased them out with spades and hoes. There were only about a dozen of us, against a hundred of them, but none of them stopped to put up a fight. After that, there was the daily treasure hunt – that’s how Mr San from Hexu made his pile.’

  ‘Treasure-hunting?’ Yet again, I was mystified.

  ‘Whenever we were about to catch them up, the Long Hairs would throw bits of gold, silver or the odd jewel back at us to slow us down – so that we’d stop and fight over them. I got myself a beautiful pearl, big as a broad bean, but before I had time to count my blessings, Niu’er came and bashed me over the head with a club and ran off with it. I’d have been a rich man, otherwise – though never as rich as Mr San. Around this time it was, Ho Goubao, Mr San’s father, went back home to Hexu and found a young Long Hair, his hair tied back in a queue, lying inside a broken closet – ’

  ‘Bedtime,’ Mrs Li ruled. ‘It’s starting to rain.’

  ‘Not yet!’ I protested. It was like being tantalized by a cliffhanger at a chapter’s end – I had to hear right through to the end of the story. My amah wasn’t having any of it.

  ‘Bedtime! Up late tomorrow and you’ll get a taste of your teacher’s ruler.’

  Fat drops of rain tapped down on the great leaves of the plantain tree in front of my window, like a crab pattering over the sand. I lay on my pillow, listening to the sound gradually fade away.

  ‘Ow! I’ll work harder, I promise…’

  ‘Bad dream? You woke me up from mine… What was yours about?’ Mrs Li was by my bedside, patting me on the back.

  ‘Oh… nothing… What about yours?’

  ‘About the Long Hairs… Tell you about it tomorrow – go back to sleep, it’s past midnight.’

  Winter 1911

  OUTCRY

  PREFACE

  When I was young, I too had many dreams, most of which I later forgot – and without the slightest regret. Although remembering the past can bring happiness, it can also bring a feeling of solitude; and where is the pleasure in clinging on to the memory of lonely times passed? My trouble is, though, that I find myself unable to forget, or at least unable to forget entirely. And it is this failure of amnesia that has brought Outcry into existence.

  For four years of my childhood life, I divided my time between the pawnshop and the pharmacy. Which four years it was, I forget – all I remember is that the top of my head reached exactly up to the counter in the pharmacy, while in the pawnshop it was twice my height. I would push clothes and jewellery across the latter, take the money contemptuously slid back at me, then make my way over to the former – to buy medicine for my chronically ill father. Back home, there was still work to be done, because our doctor seemed to have built his substantial local reputation on prescribing the most elusively exotic adjuvants: winter aloe root, sugar cane that had survived three years’ frosts, monogamous crickets, seeded ardisia… Most of them were excessively difficult to get hold of. And still my father went on sickening, day by day, until finally he died.

  I think it’s true to say that any once-comfortable family that falls on hard times sees soon enough what the world really thinks of it. And so I made up my mind to enrol in the Naval Academy in Nanjing: to go in search of different people, different paths. My mother was left no choice but to scrape together the eight dollars I needed to cover my travel costs. Though she said that I should do as I please, she still wept, 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. I was also imposing upon her long separation from her son. But I had no time for such misgivings. When finally I arrived at the Naval Academy, I made many new discoveries: natural sciences, mathematics, geography, history, drawing and physical education. Though physiology was not on the curriculum, we caught glimpses – as wood-block prints – of works such as A New Treatise on the Human Body and Essays on Chemistry and Hygiene. When I compared what I remembered of the diagnoses and prescriptions of our traditional doctors with what I had come to learn of modern medicine, it gradually dawned on me that practitioners of Chinese medicine are – intentionally or otherwise – conmen. I began also to feel a powerful sympathy for those they had deceived – both the sick and their families. The translated histories I read, meanwhile, informed me that much of the dynamism of the Meiji Restoration1 sprang from the introduction of Western medicine to Japan.

  Thanks to the rudimentary knowledge I picked up in Nanjing, I found my name subsequently fetching up on the register of a medical school in rural Japan. A glorious future unfurled in my mind, 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.

  I have no idea what progress has been made in the teaching of microbiology since my time, but back then we were shown the outlines of microbes as images on lantern slides. Because lectures sometimes finished early, the teacher would make up the remaining minutes by entertaining students with slides depicting picturesque landscapes or current affairs. As it so happened that the Russo-Japanese War2 was ongoing at the time, our lectures were often concluded by scenes from this conflict. In this classroom setting, I found myself obliged to echo – with my own claps and cheers – my classmates’ jubilation. There came a day, though, when I suddenly found myself staring at a great mass of my fellow Chinese – a people I had long been deprived the pleasure of encountering. One stood in the middle, tied up, surrounded by a crowd of his countrymen. Though they were all of them perfectly sturdy physical specimens, 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.

  Before the academic year was out, I had left for Tokyo. For 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. The majority of the Chinese students in Tokyo at that time were studying law, political science, physics, chemistry, policing or engineering; no one had any interest in the humanities. Nonetheless,
despite the prevailing apathy, I managed to search out a few comrades-in-arms. With a few other necessary associates about us, and after some discussion, we decided to begin by publishing a magazine. Since, back then, most of our compatriots had their faces still turned to the past, we were determined to take the forward-looking title New Life.

  But as publication approached, first those who had pledged to write for us, and then our capital, melted away, leaving only three of us, without a penny to our names. After such inauspicious beginnings, no one had any sympathy for us. Later still, fate scattered us three survivors too far from one another to meet to discuss our marvellous dreams for the future. And that is how our New Life ended in stillbirth.

  The experience filled me with entirely novel feelings of futility and failure. In the immediate aftermath of it all, I could not explain why things had worked out in this way. But as time went on, I came to think that a lone individual will be encouraged by support, and stimulated to struggle by criticism. But indifference – being left to shout into an abyss – generates something else: a peculiarly hollow sense of desolation. It was then I began to feel lonely.

  My loneliness grew with every day that passed, coiling itself like a great poisonous snake around my soul.

  And though I was unreasonable enough to feel the sorrow of it, I couldn’t stir myself to anger. Because the Tokyo fiasco forced me to reflect realistically on myself: that I was no hero, no demagogue capable of rousing the masses with a single battle-cry.

  But I had to do something about the loneliness, because it was causing me too much pain. So I tried all manner of opiates: attempting to merge into the massed ranks of my fellow countrymen, immersing myself in study of the classics. Later still, I experienced or witnessed things that intensified my feelings of loneliness and sorrow – things that I preferred not to remember, that I preferred to bury (alongside my head) deep in the sand. But my quest for intellectual narcotics had had some effect; I had succeeded in ridding myself of my youthful ideals.