by Lu Xun
When I was five, my daycare companions and I were escorted to watch a group of prisoners being denounced publicly before their execution. Afterwards, a teacher, who disliked me for my disobedience, put a hand in the shape of a handgun to my head. ‘If you don’t follow my words, you will end up as one of those criminals. Bang!’ she said, triggering her handgun and making her fellow teachers laugh. When I reread Lu Xun’s stories, a resonant moment occurs in ‘Medicine’ – Mr Kang, the executioner, recounts to an audience the last moments of a young revolutionary before his beheading. In retrospect, my teacher’s words had the same sense of contentedness and good humour as Mr Kang’s; in fact, they were both rather good at making a joke out of someone else’s grim life.
And they will continue doing so. The one who has the power over a fellow human being would not reform and become more honourable for Lu Xun, just as the onlookers would not become less fascinated by other people’s misfortune. Recently I read in a Chinese newspaper that a young woman was about to jump from the roof of a seventeen-storey building, and as she was hesitating and perhaps gathering her courage to commit the act, a large crowd gathered. Old people from the neighbourhood brought folding chairs so they could sit down and watch; a pedlar arrived in time to hawk binoculars; many raised their camera phones to record. What makes this crowd different from the crowd that witnessed the beheading of Ah-Q, I wonder. Perhaps literature, unlike what Lu Xun, or the older Chinese gentleman, hoped, will not change the world in any grand way; rather, it is what remains unchanged that will make literature live on, and it is perhaps for this reason that Lu Xun’s stories will still be read fifty or a hundred years from now.
Yiyun Li
* Lu Xun uses words (‘Hua’ and ‘Xia’) that can also mean ‘China’ for the surnames of both the old man and the revolutionary, infusing the story with an intense historical symbolism.
* An all-purpose Chinese prefix (indicating either affection or contempt) added to personal names, with a roughly diminutive effect; in the case of Ah-Q, one perhaps imagines his interlocutors cannot be bothered to say or remember his full name.
* Midnight on 4 November 1911.
* In Chinese, ‘freedom’, ziyou, sounds very much like ‘persimmon oil’, shiyou; an understandable error of hearing, therefore, by the good burghers of Weizhuang.
* Chinese semaphore for ‘shame on you’.
* A traditional literary appellation for Beijing.
* Or: 1 September 1924.
† In case the gentle reader is less benighted than Huang San: ‘Gorky’ is transliterated into Chinese as ‘Gao-er-ji’. With Chinese names, the surname (usually one syllable) precedes the given name (of one or two syllables). Regrettably deprived of expertise in the Russian language or in the sinicization of European names, our learned friend has imagined that ‘Gao’ was the great man’s surname, ‘Erji’ his given name. Setting himself modestly up as heir to the great Russian tradition of critical realism, our professor thus believes he has designed his own change of name as a close echo of the transliterated ‘Gorky’: Gao Erchu, to the original Gao Erji.
* The original Chinese writes ‘her’, but ‘him’ makes better sense in the context of Peijun’s later hallucinations.