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

by Lu Xun

  But as I take up my pen to begin this distinctly mortal work, the infinite difficulty of it again deters me. My first quandary is a title. As Confucius says: ‘If a name is not right, the words will not ring true.’ Wise words indeed. Lives are written in a myriad forms: as official biographies of the great and good (archived within our celestial empire’s dynastic histories), autobiographies, legends, unauthorized biographies, as footnotes, genealogies, biographical sketches… I have regretfully discarded them all. Allow me to dance down through the list, beginning at the beginning. What place could the life of the miserable Ah-Q have next to the glorious, official biographies of the rich and famous installed in our hallowed court histories? Autobiography? I am, incontrovertibly, not Ah-Q. If I were to call my account the stuff of legend, it could legitimately be objected that Ah-Q is no god. To ‘unauthorized biography’, I gave some thought: but where is the authorized version? No president has ever ordered his National Institute of Historical Research to create such a memorial to Ah-Q. True, our revered translators have rendered the great Conan Doyle’s Rodney Stone as Unauthorized Biographies of the Gamblers – though I am willing to bet no official counterpart exists in Britain’s National Archive. But while men of literary genius can take such licence, I have no comparable entitlement. Let us move swiftly on to genealogy: I know neither of any personal blood connection with Ah-Q nor of any request from his descendants to create such a document. ‘Biographical sketch’ again begs the question: where is the full-length version?

  This effort of mine, I can only conclude, is the standard, official biography of the man; and yet the debased vulgarity of its content and characters causes me to shy, appalled, from such presumption. So at last, I will fall back on the formulation so often used by our nation’s novelists – the very dregs of our glorious literary tradition – in their constant battle with digression: ‘Now back to the real story.’ There: The Real Story of Ah-Q it is. Any similarity between the present work and the unforgettable Real Story of Calligraphy, by Mr Feng Wu of the Qing dynasty, is entirely unintentional.

  My second difficulty lies in how to start. Your average biography generally begins something like this: ‘So-and-so – whose full name was such-and-such – was born in such-and-so.’ But I have no idea what Ah-Q’s surname was. True enough, at one point it was alleged to be Zhao; but the next day, the question became fraught with uncertainty once more. The whole business reared its head, as I recall, around the time that Mr Zhao’s son had romped through the lowest, county-level stage of the civil service examination. His stomach warmed by two bowls of rice wine, his ears buzzing with the triumphant beating of gongs through the village, Ah-Q jubilantly declared to a modest audience, who smartly began to eye him with new, cautious respect, that he was a direct relation of the great Mr Zhao, and senior to the local genius by a clear three generations.

  The following day, the local constable summoned Ah-Q to the Zhaos’.

  ‘You stupid bastard, Ah-Q!’ the honourable Mr Zhao roared, his face blotching crimson at the sight of him. ‘Did you, or did you not, say you were related to me?’

  Ah-Q said nothing.

  ‘How dare you!’ Mr Zhao bore furiously down on him. ‘When has anyone ever called you Zhao?’

  Still nothing from Ah-Q, who was starting to look very interested in the room’s escape routes. Mr Zhao charged forward again and slapped him round the face.

  ‘You scum! D’you look like a Zhao?’

  Preferring not to argue the toss on the issue, Ah-Q followed the constable out, rubbing his left cheek. Outside, he received a second, brisk rebuke from the man of the law, who concluded by extracting from him two hundred coppers as compensation. When news of the incident got about, everyone declared that this time Ah-Q had gone too far, that he had been asking for his beating. Likely as not, he was about as closely related to Mr Zhao as he was to the emperor. And even if they were related, he shouldn’t have shot his big mouth off about it. After this fiasco, the question of Ah-Q’s genealogy was never revisited; his surname, as a result, to this day remains a mystery to me.

  A third dilemma: I don’t even know how to write Ah-Q’s name. In his lifetime, he was generally referred to as ‘Ah-Quei’ (or that was what it sounded like, at least). After his death, when he was firmly consigned to the dustbin of history, no one called him Ah-Quei, or indeed anything at all. Since the present essay is the first attempt ever made to preserve the details of his life for posterity, the question of his name becomes a substantial and primary difficulty. After careful inquiry, I have discovered no Chinese character that corresponds exactly to the sound ‘Quei’. This Quei, then – I have induced – was it in fact gui? And, if so, was it the gui meaning ‘osmanthus flower’ or ‘noble’ ? Now, if his parents had had the foresight to give him a nom de plume, and that name had been ‘Moon Pavilion’, or if he had been born in the eighth lunar month, the gui of ‘osmanthus’ would have made abundant sense – for the Moon Festival falls on the eighth month, when the osmanthus blooms. But as, being illiterate and all, he had no nom de plume – or maybe he did, but no one knew what it was – and neither did he ever hint at the month of his birth by distributing party invitations, to settle upon osmanthus gui would again constitute irresponsible licence on the part of his biographer. Or again, if he had had a brother called Fu, ‘Prosperous’, then the gui of ‘noble’ would have had a strong parallel logic. But since no such sibling has ever been traced, such a spelling is unjustifiable. To be sure, there are other, more recherché characters pronounced gui – ‘boudoir’, ‘tortoise’, ‘salmon’, ‘juniper’, etcetera; but they all strike me as even less likely. I have consulted our local scholar and county examination laureate, the learned younger Zhao, on this question, but to my great surprise even this oracle had no light to shed on the matter, although he laid the blame for the confusion on the shoulders of westernizing intellectuals such as Chen Duxiu and his benighted journal New Youth.1 It was their advocacy of the Roman alphabet, he convincingly argued, that had brought the national essence into such terminal decline that no one could fix even on the spelling of Ah-Quei. My last, desperate course was to ask a fellow provincial of mine to trace Ah-Q through his criminal record. After eight long months I finally got a reply: no such individual – by the name of Ah-Quei, Ah-Gui, or anything like it – existed. Though I had no way of finding out whether this was indeed the case, or whether my acquaintance had even looked, neither did I have any other hope of verifying matters. All of which leaves me no choice but to transcribe the mysterious Quei into the English alphabet, abbreviating it for convenience’s sake, to Q: Ah-Q.2 Which compromise reduces me to the level of those reprobates in charge of New Youth. For this I am heartily ashamed of myself, but as the problem defeated even the younger Zhao, I fear I have no better option.

  The question of specifying Ah-Q’s place of birth is my fourth difficulty. If we could be sure his surname was Zhao, we could trace him back to the province from which the clan originated. A quick glance through our old school copy of the Hundred Surnames3 would leave him ‘A Native of Tianshui, Gansu Province’. But as we have no reliable information about his surname, neither can we fix on his birthplace. Although he spent most of his life in the village of Weizhuang, he was often to be found in other places, too, so to term him a native of Weizhuang would hardly be historically rigorous.

  My only consolation in this whole sorry business is that one syllable of his name at least – ‘Ah’* – can boast of an unimpugnable correctness. What remains to be known lies beyond the superficial capabilities of amateurs to unravel; and I can only hope that in future the disciples of a dedicated erudite such as Mr Hu Shi4 will hunt out new clues, in their relentless quest to further human knowledge, thoroughly obliterating what little achievement my Real Story of Ah-Q may constitute.

  That should do for a Preface.

  CHAPTER 2

  A Brief History of Ah-Q’s Victories

  It was not only Ah-Q’s name and place of origin that were shro
uded in mystery – but also the details of his early life. Because the good people of Weizhuang called upon him only to help out with odd jobs, or to serve as the butt of jokes, no one ever paid much attention to such niceties. Neither was Ah-Q himself particularly forthcoming on the subject, except when he got into arguments, viz.:

  ‘My ancestors were much richer than yours! Scum!’

  Ah-Q had no home of his own: in Weizhuang, he lodged in the Temple of the God of the Earth and the God of the Five Grains. Neither, as the village odd-job man, did he have a fixed profession. If someone was needed to harvest wheat, he harvested wheat; if called upon to husk rice, he husked rice; if a boat wanted poling, that’s what he did. If a job was likely to take a while, he lodged with his employer; but once it was over, he left. When people were in a hurry to get something done, therefore, they remembered Ah-Q – but only the odd jobs he could do for them, and not his life history. And as soon as they were no longer in such a hurry, Ah-Q – and his elusive biographical details – were quickly forgotten. ‘He puts his back into it, that Ah-Q!’ an old man once admiringly remarked, considering our hero’s bare, torpidly scrawny torso – that was the closest anyone ever got to constructing a personality profile of him. Those who overheard him couldn’t make out whether his eulogizer was being genuine or sarcastic; but Ah-Q, at least, was delighted.

  Ah-Q had a robust sense of his own self-worth, placing the rest of Weizhuang far beneath him in the social scale. Even the village’s two aspiring young scholars – the Zhao and Qian sons – he considered with haughty contempt. In time, they could both reasonably be expected to get through at least the lowest rung of the official examinations – the path to power and riches. Their fathers, the venerable Mr Zhao and Mr Qian, therefore received the village’s craven respect not just for their personal wealth, but also for their sons’ academic prospects. Only Ah-Q remained invulnerable to the glamour of their future promise: My son will be much richer than them! he thought to himself. A few trips into town further bolstered Ah-Q’s amour propre, adding townspeople to his already abundant store of subjects of scorn. People in town couldn’t get anything right: they said ‘narrow benches’ for the wooden trestles, three feet long by three inches wide, that the people of Weizhuang – him included – quite correctly called ‘long benches’. How stupid can people be! he thought. Or when frying fish, the people of Weizhuang cut their spring onions into half-inch lengths, while townspeople shredded them. How stupid can people be! he thought again. Though the people of Weizhuang, of course, were still village idiots: think of it – they didn’t even know how people fried fish in town!

  This Ah-Q of ours – with his wealthy forebears, his urban sophistication, his laudable application to his chosen career – would have been the embodiment of perfection, had it not been for his regrettable possession of a few constitutional defects. The most annoying of which was the perfidious emergence on his scalp of a number of gleaming ringworm scars. Although they were of his own revered body’s making, Ah-Q felt them unworthy of him and for this reason came to view as taboo the word ‘ringworm’, or anything that sounded like it. In time, the scope of this linguistic prohibition steadily broadened: first to ‘shiny’, then ‘bright’, extending a little later on to ‘lamp’ or ‘candle’. Any flaunting of the taboo – whether deliberate or accidental – provoked first the controversial scars to glow a furious red. Ah-Q would then size up his adversary: the dull-witted he would subject to a tongue-lashing; the weak he would punch in the nose. The curious thing, though, was how often – in fact, almost always – Ah-Q came off worse. In time, then, he pared his strategy down to an Angry Glare.

  Another curious thing: after Ah-Q began practising the Art of the Angry Glare, Weizhuang’s idlers took to provoking him with ever greater relish.

  ‘Bit bright, isn’t it?’ they would remark, in deliberate surprise, on encountering him.

  Cue the Angry Glare.

  ‘Oh… a lamp!’ they would shamelessly continue.

  Ah-Q struggled to find an appropriate riposte.

  ‘You’re not worth a…’ At moments such as these, Ah-Q’s ringworm suddenly struck him as a badge of honour for which no sacrifice was too great; far superior to your average, run-ofthe-mill dermatological defect. As has been amply demonstrated, however, Ah-Q was a man of exceptional prescience: sensing an imminent breaking of his cherished taboo, he said no more.

  But his interlocutors wouldn’t let it lie. On they went needling him, until the whole thing ended in blows, and Ah-Q’s formal submission: with the seizing of his sallow queue and the robust knocking of his head four or five times against a wall. After which, his adversaries would at last depart, their hearts fairly singing with the joys of victory. ‘Beaten again by that scum,’ Ah-Q would stand there, thinking to himself. ‘It’s like a father getting thrashed by his sons. What’s the world coming to…’ Then he, too, would jubilantly leave the scene of his triumph.

  In time, whenever something like this happened, Ah-Q began to say out loud what at first he had only thought. In this way, Ah-Q’s tormentors learnt of his habit of declaring moral victory over the ashes of defeat, and added their own revisions while yanking on his queue.

  ‘Think of it this way, Ah-Q. We’re not sons beating our father – we’re men beating an animal. Repeat after us: men beating an animal!’

  ‘Or how about,’ Ah-Q would twist his head back round, trying to protect the base of his queue, ‘a slug? I’m a slug! A slug! Now will you let me go?’

  They would not, and went on to give his head the time-honoured bashing against the nearest hard surface, before swinging off, their hearts again singing with the joys of victory, thinking this time their point had been well and truly made. And yet within ten seconds, Ah-Q had set jubilantly off on his own way. He was now the top self-abaser in China, and once you’d discarded the inconvenient ‘self-abaser’, you were left with ‘top’ – ‘top’ as in ‘top in the civil service examinations’. ‘Ha! Scum!’

  Once Ah-Q’s enemies had been trounced by such ingenious means, he would trot happily off to the tavern, down a few bowls of wine, crack a few jokes, start a few arguments and, victorious again, return happily to the Temple of Earth and Grain, where he would lay his head down and go straight to sleep. If he had money in his pocket, he would go off to gamble, sweatily squeezing his way in among a crowd of other chancers squatted down on the ground.

  ‘Four hundred on the Green Dragon!’ he would roar, louder than anyone else.

  ‘There… we… go!’ the banker would sing out, lifting the lid on his box, his face also swimming in sweat. ‘Heaven’s Gate wins… Evens on the Corner… Nothing on the Passage… Over here with Ah-Q’s stake!’

  ‘One hundred on the Passage – one hundred and fifty!’

  And so Ah-Q’s money was sung away into the pockets of others, their faces equally slippery with sweat, until there was nothing left for him to do but push his way back from the front line, and watch from the back, feeling anxious on other people’s behalf. When everyone else scattered he, too, would take himself reluctantly back to his temple, appearing for work the next day with puffy eyes.

  But every silver lining has its cloud, to paraphrase the proverb, and the one time that Ah-Q was unfortunate enough to win, he lost almost everything.

  It was the evening of Weizhuang’s Festival of the Gods. There was opera, as usual, with gambling stalls set up near the stage. The drums and gongs buzzed only faintly in Ah-Q’s ears, as if the musicians were miles away. All he could hear was the banker’s singsong. He won, and he won again, his coppers turning silver, his silver turning into dollars – a great pile of shiny dollars. He was dizzy with euphoria.

  ‘Two dollars on Heaven’s Gate!’

  He didn’t know who started the fighting, or why. The sounds of cursing, of blows, of footsteps blurred into a single confused roar; and when finally he clambered to his feet, stalls and gamblers had disappeared. His body seemed to hurt in various places, as if it had been hit or
kicked, and people were looking curiously at him. After taking himself back, rather nonplussed, to the Temple of Earth and Grain, he recovered his wits sufficiently to discover his pile of money was gone. How was he to get to the bottom of it? Most of the gamblers that night had come from outside the village.

  That shiny pile of silver dollars! Once it had been all his – but where was it now? He tried telling himself his son had stolen it; his discontent continued to simmer. He told himself he was a slug – still no peace of mind. Now, only now, did he feel the bitterness of defeat.

  And yet victory, as ever, was close at hand. His right hand soared upwards, to deliver one – two forceful slaps to the face. He then got up, his cheeks burning with pain, his good humour fully restored. Soon enough, he was perfectly convinced that he had hit someone else entirely – even though his cheeks continued to sting rather. He lay down, his heart easy with victory.

  And fell asleep.

  CHAPTER 3

  The Continuing Story of Ah-Q’s Victories

  In Ah-Q’s long and illustrious record of victories, it was the slap he had received from Mr Zhao that made his reputation.

  ‘What’s the world coming to?’ he fulminated to himself in bed, after paying off the constable. ‘Sons hitting their fathers…’ Now, if someone as rich and powerful as Mr Zhao was his son… Soon enough, feeling extremely pleased with himself again, he wandered off to the tavern, humming a few lines of opera to himself – The Young Widow at Her Husband’s Grave. Mr Zhao, Ah-Q was prepared to allow, was a cut above the rest of Weizhuang’s scum.

  The funny thing was that his fellow villagers did begin to treat him with a new respect. Ah-Q may have deluded himself into thinking it was because he actually was Mr Zhao’s father; the real reason was very different. In Weizhuang, public opinion went something like this: no one took any notice if any Li, Wang or Zhang began slapping each other about. It was only when a man of reputation like Mr Zhao got involved that such an imbroglio was singled out for public approbation, with the hittee sharing in the hitter’s glory. Ah-Q, it was of course universally accepted, had been in the wrong, because Mr Zhao was never wrong. How, then, to explain the new awe with which he was regarded? Perhaps – to hazard an unreliable guess at the matter – it all went back to Ah-Q’s claim of blood relation to Mr Zhao. Even though he had been soundly beaten for it, maybe everyone feared there might be some grain of truth to the allegation, and the safest thing would be to mind themselves around him a bit more. Or maybe Ah-Q became as untouchable as the sacrificial beef in Confucius’s ancestral temple – because the sage had once touched it with his sacred chopsticks, it acquired an aura of sanctity for his disciples.