by Lu Xun
Side by side they walked along, about two or three feet apart, Ah-wu making desultory attempts at conversation, most of which Mrs Shan chose to ignore. His gallant cravings quickly satisfied, Ah-wu soon handed the child back into his mother’s arms, muttering something about some lunch engagement made the day before. Fortunately, she was no longer far from home – she could see old Mrs Wang from over the way sitting at the side of the road.
‘How is he?’ Mrs Wang called out. ‘Have you seen the doctor?’
‘Just been. You must have seen a lot of this kind of thing over the years, Mrs Wang. Would you take a look at him for me?’
‘Hmmm.’
‘What d’you think?’
‘Hmmm.’ Mrs Wang took a long, hard look, nodded twice, then shook her head twice.
It was past noon by the time Bao’er had had his medicine. Mrs Shan studied his face, which now seemed much more peaceful. Early in the afternoon, he suddenly opened his eyes, cried out ‘Mama’, then closed them again, as if about to drop off to sleep. Not long after, seedpearls of sweat seeped through on to his forehead and the tip of his nose, sticking to Mrs Shan’s hand like glue. Frantically, she felt his chest and burst into uncontrollable sobs.
As Bao’er’s breathing steadied, then stopped, Mrs Shan’s sobs graduated into full-blown wails. A crowd of interested parties swiftly gathered: Mrs Wang, Ah-wu and a few others barged into the room, while the manager of the tavern loitered outside with Gong and company. Quickly assuming command, Mrs Wang gave orders for a chain of paper money to be burnt, then relieved Mrs Shan of two stools and five items of clothing, as security for borrowing two silver dollars – the funeral helpers were going to need feeding.
The first problem was the coffin. Mrs Shan handed over what jewellery remained to her – a pair of silver earrings and a gold-plated silver hairpin – to the manager of the Universal Prosperity as surety for a coffin, to be bought half with cash, half on credit. Ever willing to help, Ah-wu stuck out a hand, too, but Mrs Wang appointed him coffin-bearer instead, to which honour Ah-wu responded by scowling and swearing at her. The manager went off on his own, returning that evening to report that the coffin would have to be made specially, and wouldn’t be ready till dawn.
By seven o’clock, the hired help had finished their dinner and – Luzhen being an old-fashioned kind of a place – taken themselves off to bed, leaving only the usual hardcore of Ah-wu drinking at the bar, with Gong wailing his songs.
Mrs Shan was sitting on the edge of her bed, crying, Bao’er stretched out next to her; the spinning wheel stood silently by. When eventually her tears declared themselves spent, she stared perplexedly around her. How unreal it all was. It must be a dream, she was thinking to herself; just a dream. Tomorrow, she would wake up from a good, long rest, with Bao’er still fast asleep next to her. Then he would open his eyes, call out to her, and jump off the bed – full of life, ready to play.
Gong’s singing had stopped: lights out at the Universal Prosperity. Mrs Shan went on staring, still unable to take it all in. A cockerel crowed; over to the east the darkness began to pale, the silver-white gleam of dawn creeping in through a crack in the window.
The new light gradually turned crimson; the sun was now shining directly on to the roof beams. Mrs Shan went on sitting blankly. When the banging on the door began, she started up and ran over to open it. A strange man stood outside the door, an object on his back, Mrs Wang behind him.
It was the coffin.
Because Mrs Shan wouldn’t stop crying and wanting to take one last look at her son, because she refused to give up hope, the lid didn’t get nailed down until the afternoon. In the end, Mrs Wang mercifully lost patience with her and yanked her away, as a confusion of hands scrabbled to fasten the lid.
Mrs Shan did everything properly. On the day of the death itself, she had burnt a chain of paper money; the following morning, forty-nine scrolls of Buddhist incantations were consigned to the flames. Bao’er had been placed in the coffin wearing his newest clothes, with his favourite toys laid on the pillow next to him – a clay figurine, two small wooden bowls and two glass bottles. One by one, Mrs Wang ticked everything off on her fingers.
Since Ah-wu failed to show up, the manager of the Universal Prosperity hired two bearers – at a cost of two hundred and ten coppers each – on Mrs Shan’s behalf, to carry the coffin to its final resting place in a pauper’s grave. Mrs Wang then helped her prepare food for anyone who had moved a muscle or said a word in contribution. Slowly, the sun turned the colour it turned when it was about to slip behind the western hills, the diners all turned the colour they turned when bedtime approached, and went home to bed.
A terrible dizziness seized hold of Mrs Shan. A rest left her feeling steadier, but she couldn’t shake off a sense of the utter strangeness of it all. Something had happened to her that had never happened before, that should never have happened – and yet still had. The longer she thought, the more she noticed the curiously excessive silence of the room.
Getting up, she turned on the lamp. Now the room seemed even quieter. She closed the door and returned to the edge of the bed, as if in a trance, the spinning wheel standing silently by. She looked around her, unwilling either to sit or stand: the room was too quiet, too big, too empty – an enormous void enveloping her, bearing down on her, stifling the breath out of her.
Bao’er, she now realized, was dead. She blew out the lamp and lay down; she no longer wanted this room before her. She thought, as she wept: she thought about how Bao’er had sat next to her while she spun, eating aniseed beans, his eyes wide open, thinking things through. ‘Daddy used to sell dumplings, didn’t he?’ he had said. ‘So when I get bigger I’ll sell dumplings too. I’ll make lots of money and give it all to you.’ At that moment, every inch of cotton she was spinning had seemed almost alive with meaning. But now? Mrs Shan hadn’t even begun to think about what would happen now. She was a simple, uneducated sort of a woman – as I may have already mentioned. What could she think about? Only that this room of hers was too quiet, too big, too empty.
But however simple and uneducated Mrs Shan was, she knew that the dead cannot come back to life; that she would never see her Bao’er again. ‘Come back to me in a dream,’ she sighed to herself. ‘You can’t be far away.’ She closed her eyes, urging sleep upon herself, in the hope of catching sight of Bao’er. Her breathing rasped through the empty quiet around her.
But at last she drifted off to sleep; and the silence claimed the room. Gong and his red nose staggered out of the Universal Prosperity, working up to a shrill falsetto encore:
‘Oh, my darling!… Poor you… All alone…’
Ah-wu grabbed at Gong’s shoulder, and the two of them zigzagged off down the road, laughing and pushing at each other.
With Mrs Shan asleep, and Gong and his fellow drinkers gone, the Universal Prosperity locked its doors. Silence descended on Luzhen. Only the darkness remained, agitating to become tomorrow’s first light, concealing within itself the howls of the village dogs.
June 1920
A MINOR INCIDENT
Six years of my life have slipped by since I arrived in Beijing from the countryside. In that time, I’ve come to see and hear a good deal of what might be termed matters of national importance, yet none has made much impact on me. If you were to force me to declare their influence, I would suggest they succeeded only in further blackening my already black mood – in increasing my contempt for the people around me.
But there was one minor incident: a tiny thing that began to drag me out of my bad temper, the memory of which remains with me today.
It was the winter of 1917 – the sixth year of our new Republic – the north wind scouring the city in great, fierce gusts. Early each morning, in the interests of making a living, I would take myself on to the almost deserted streets of Beijing, flag down a rickshaw (no easy task, at that time of day) and direct it to S—Gate. That morning, not long after we got moving, the wind eased, leaving before u
s a wide, pale road blasted clean of loose dust, and my runner picked up speed. Just as we were nearing my destination, someone caught on the handlebar of the rickshaw, and toppled slowly to the ground.
A grey-haired old woman, in ragged clothes, had suddenly cut across our path from the side of the road. Though my man had swerved to avoid her, the tattered, unbuttoned waistcoat she was wearing had flapped open in the breeze, hooking itself around the rickshaw. It was lucky the puller began slowing down the moment he saw her, or she would have somersaulted over the bar and cracked her head open.
There she lay face down on the ground, the rickshaw-puller parked by her. Certain both that the old woman was unhurt, and that no one else had seen it happen, I felt only irritation at my runner for getting needlessly involved. He would make trouble for himself, and hold me up – quite unnecessarily.
‘She’s fine,’ I told him. ‘Let’s get on!’
Taking no notice – or perhaps he didn’t even hear me – the man laid down his rickshaw and helped the old woman slowly up, holding her arm as she found her feet.
‘How d’you feel?’
‘I think I’m hurt.’
You phoney, I thought. I saw you fall, no one ever came to any harm going down as slowly as that. But since the rickshaw-puller had got us into this mess, let him think of a way out of it.
Without a moment of hesitation, the man now began to inch her forward, keeping hold of her arm. Startled, I noticed a police station – its exterior deserted after the morning’s ferocious wind – a little way ahead. He was helping her on towards its main door.
In that brief moment, a curious sensation overtook me: his back, filthy with dust, 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.
There I sat, as if physically and mentally paralysed, until a policeman emerged from the station. I now stepped out of the carriage.
‘You’d better find yourself another rickshaw,’ he walked over to tell me. ‘This one’s out of commission.’
As if without thinking, I pulled a great handful of coins out of my coat pocket. ‘Make sure the driver gets these, will you?’ I asked, thrusting them at the policeman.
Now the wind had completely died away, the street was sunk in quiet. As I walked along, I was thinking – almost afraid I would turn my thoughts on myself. None of it had anything to do with me; so what had I meant by that handful of coins? Was it a reward? Did I have the right to pass such judgement? I could not answer my own questions.
Even now, I often think back to that morning. It fills me with discomfort – it forces me to look hard at myself. None of our country’s recent political or military achievements has any more meaning for me than the Confucian primers that tormented my boyhood. The only thing that has stayed with me is this minor incident, clearer in my memory than it was even in reality, shaming me, urging me to change, bolstering my sense of courage and hope.
July 1920
HAIR
Early one Sunday morning, I tore the previous day’s page off the calendar.
‘October Tenth – Double Tenth,’ I exclaimed, glancing at the new page. ‘Revolution Day.1 It’s not marked!’
And promptly succeeded in irritating one Mr N, an acquaintance a generation older than me, who happened to have stopped by for a chat.
‘Good for them!’ he snapped. ‘Why should you care, anyway?’
Now, this Mr N of mine was famed for the eccentricities of his mood: for his habit of flying into inexplicable tempers, or coming out with views some way out of step with conventional wisdom. Whenever this happened, I was careful not to offer any encouragement, leaving him to mutter it out of his system.
‘Oh, they know how to celebrate Double Tenth in Beijing. First thing, a policeman turns up and orders you to Fly the Flag! Yes, yes, officer, mumbles your model citizen, sleepwalking out to stick a faded old rag up. Then comes back out when it gets dark, takes it down and shuts up shop. Unless he forgets, of course, and leaves it up overnight. What does the Revolution mean to him? What does he mean to the Revolution? Not a thing.
‘I never celebrate October Tenth either. If I did, I’d start thinking back over everything that actually happened in 1911. I can’t bear it. All those old friends – young men, quietly finished off by bullets, after years of sacrifice. Or tortured in prison for weeks. Or just disappeared off the face of the earth, along with their hopes and ambitions, their corpses thrown who knows where… Mocked, abused, persecuted, their graves forgotten. No – I don’t want to remember any of that. Let’s try and dredge up some happy memories instead – things we can feel proud of.
‘You know what I’m proudest of?’ he now announced, suddenly smiling and rubbing his head. ‘Since the first Double Tenth, I haven’t once been laughed at or insulted in public.
‘Remember that for us Chinese, our hair is our pride and fall. How many pointless victims has it claimed over the millennia, I wonder? Let’s start with the ancients: now, they didn’t seem to concern themselves much about hair. Look at their penal codes: decapitation saved for the most hideous crimes; removal of sexual organs next. Shaving the head was right at the bottom of the list of punishments. Though I suppose we’ll never know how many lives have been ruined over the centuries by the stigma of baldness.
‘Before 1911, whenever we talked about revolution, we’d always go back over the massacres of the Manchu conquest in the middle of the seventeenth century, at Yangzhou and Jiading. But it was just rhetoric. Back then, the Chinese weren’t really fighting for the nation. They were fighting for the right not to scrape their hair back into queues and shave the fronts of their heads.
‘But once resistance had been stamped out, and the old guard had died, the queue became a great immovable. Until the Taiping Rebels came along, letting their pigtails loose. I remember my grandmother telling me about those times – about how bad they were. If you let your hair grow, the government soldiers killed you; if you didn’t, the Taipings did. What is hair? Dead protein. But how many Chinese have suffered, or even died because of it?’
N stared reflectively up at a beam across the ceiling.
‘And I’m one of them,’ he went on. ‘When I went abroad to study, I cut off my queue – just because I couldn’t be bothered with it. But the diehards among my classmates were furious – and the supervisor the government had sent to keep an eye on us. He told me he was going to stop my grant and send me back home. A few days later, of course, he’d had his own queue hacked off and fled back to China. I seem to remember Zou Rong (remember Zou Rong – author of The Revolutionary Army?2 Probably not) was one of the hairdressers involved. He was sent back to Shanghai for his pains, where he died in prison.
‘Within a few years, though, the family fortunes had gone to the wall. If I didn’t find myself a job, I was going to starve, so I came back. First thing I did when I got to Shanghai was buy myself a false queue – two dollars was the going rate at the time – then went on home. My mother somehow managed to keep her mouth shut about it, but the first thing anyone else I met did was to examine this new appendage of mine. And the minute they worked out it was false, they’d smirk and start plotting to turn me in to the authorities for immediate decapitation. A relative of mine would have informed on me, if he hadn’t been more afraid the Revolution might actually succeed.
‘Then I decided to come out into the open: to get rid of the thing and start going about in Western clothes. But I got insults wherever I went – idiot, fake foreign devil, etcetera, etcetera. I tried swapping my foreign clothes for a long gown, but it only made things worse. When I couldn’t stand it any longer, I added a walking stick to the ensemble. My persecutors gradually gave up after I began paying back their sartorial advice with a few sharp raps. Now, I only had problems whenever I went somewhere new – where my reputation didn’t precede me.
‘But the whole thing
made me miserable – still does, when I think back over it. When I was a student in Japan, I once read a newspaper article about the travels of a Dr Honda around the Malay states and China. As he couldn’t understand either Chinese or Malay, he was often asked how he got about. “This is the only language they understand!” he replied, picking up his stick. The whole thing put me in a fury for days – and then, years later, here I was speaking the same Esperanto. And being understood.
‘The year the last emperor came to the throne – 1909, that would be – I was in charge of student affairs at my local middle school. The other teachers treated me like a leper, while the local officials watched me like hawks. Every day I felt like I was stuck in an ice house, or waiting for my own execution. And just because I had no queue. One day, though, a handful of students suddenly turned up at my room and told me they wanted to cut their queues off. “You can’t!” I said. “Would you rather have a queue, then?” they asked. “Of course not.” “So why can’t we have ours off?” “It’s not worth the trouble, right now. Just wait a bit.” They flounced out, scowling, then went and cut them off, anyway.
‘What a nightmare that was. Everyone was talking about it, but I had to pretend I didn’t know a thing, just let them sit through my classes – the only crew-cuts in a sea of pigtails. But soon it began spreading like the plague: three days later, six students in the local teacher-training college cut theirs off, too, and were expelled that same evening. They had nowhere to go – couldn’t stay at school, couldn’t go home. Somehow, they got by until a month or so after the Revolution, when everyone finally stopped treating them like criminals.