The Real Story of Ah-Q and Other Tales of China
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Daruvala, Susan, Zhou Zuoren and an Alternative Chinese Response to Modernity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000). A study of Lu Xun’s brother, with incisive observations about the canonical status of Lu Xun.
Denton, Kirk, ed., Modern Chinese Literary Thought: Writings on Literature, 1893–1945 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996). An anthology of key essays and polemics of modern Chinese literature, including three pieces by Lu Xun and invaluable scholarly introductions by the editor.
Foster, Paul B., ‘The Ironic Inflation of Chinese National Character: Lu Xun’s International Reputation, Romain Rolland’s Critique of “The True Story of Ah Q” and the Nobel Prize’, Modern Chinese Literature and Culture 13.1 (Spring 2001), pp. 140–68.
Goldman, Merle, ed., Modern Chinese Literature in the May Fourth Era (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1977). A useful collection of essays on modern Chinese literature, including three articles on Lu Xun.
Hanan, Patrick, Chinese Fiction of the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004). Includes an important exploration of Lu Xun’s fictional technique and foreign influences.
Hsia, C. T., A History of Modern Chinese Fiction (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1971). For years after it was first published, the leading critical reference work on twentieth-century Chinese fiction.
Hsia, T. A., The Gate of Darkness: Studies on the Leftist Movement in China (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1968). A thorough account of, among other things, Lu Xun’s disputes with the literary left wing in the early 1930s.
Leo Ou-fan Lee, Voices from the Iron House: A Study of Lu Xun (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987). An intellectual biography of the writer.
——, ed., Lu Xun and His Legacy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985). A key collection of critical essays.
Liu, Lydia, Translingual Practice: Literature, National Culture and Translated Modernity – China, 1900–1937 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995), especially Chapter Two. An exploration of the ways in which modern Chinese writers and thinkers translated ideas about modernity, with an interesting discussion of Lu Xun and ‘The Real Story of Ah-Q’.
Lyell, William, Lu Xun’s Vision of Reality (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976). A colourful biography of the writer, with detailed discussion of his realist fiction.
McDougall, Bonnie S., Love-letters and Privacy in Modern China: The Intimate Lives of Lu Xun and Xu Guangping (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002). A highly informative insight into the private thoughts and emotions of Lu Xun and his common-law wife.
—— and Kam, Louie, eds., The Literature of China in the Twentieth Century (London: Hurst, 1997). An essential critical reference work on modern Chinese fiction, poetry and drama.
Pollard, David E., The True Story of Lu Xun (Hong Kong: The Chinese University Press, 2002). The most recent English-language biography of the writer.
Spence, Jonathan, The Gate of Heavenly Peace: The Chinese and Their Revolution 1895–1980 (New York: Viking, 1981). A very readable account of modern China’s intellectual and literary revolutionaries, with extensive discussion of Lu Xun.
Wang, David Der-wei, Fictional Realism in 20th Century China: Mao Dun, Lao She, Shen Congwen (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992). A wide-ranging survey of representative writers of modern Chinese realism, with an introduction focused on Lu Xun.
Yue, Gang, The Mouth That Begs: Hunger, Cannibalism, and the Politics of Eating in Modern China (Durham: Duke University Press, 1999). Features a chapter on Lu Xun and cannibalism.
Consult also the thorough primary and secondary bibliographies on Lu Xun at the online Modern Chinese Literature and Culture Resource Center, available at http://mclc.osu.edu/.
A Note on the Translation
The complete fiction of Lu Xun, as translated here, has been arranged by order of publication of collection, beginning with the stand-alone short story ‘Nostalgia’, and followed by Outcry, Hesitation and Old Stories Retold. Within each collection, I have followed the author’s original sequencing. Throughout, I have translated from the versions included in the 1982 Renmin wenxue edition of Lu Xun’s Complete Works (Lu Xun quanji; Beijing: Renmin wenxue chubanshe), as this version is widely accepted as having corrected the errors appearing in earlier editions, and is thoroughly and usefully footnoted by its editors.
In an attempt to enhance the fluency of the text, I have kept use of footnotes and endnotes to a minimum, and where background information that Chinese audiences would take for granted can be unobtrusively and economically worked into the main body of text, I have taken that option. A translation that, without compromising overall linguistic accuracy, avoids extensive interruption by footnotes and endnotes can, I feel, offer a more faithful recreation of the original reading experience than a version whose literal rendering of every point dictates frequent, disrupting consultation of extra references. Where I have judged that a fuller background explanation would be of help, however, I have included this in endnotes; I have used occasional footnotes to gloss specific questions of language.
In a very few places, where the density of cultural-linguistic reference is so great as to make prolonged explanations necessary in the English (such as the disquisition on traditional biography in ‘The Real Story of Ah-Q’, and the punning exchange in ‘Taming the Floods’ on Yu’s name and the composition of Chinese ideograms), I have slightly simplified a handful of lines in the original Chinese. I have also on occasion simplified the nomenclature used in the original: where more than one name is given for a single character (in accordance with the Chinese tradition of giving individuals extra, literary pseudonyms), I have tended to use only one name, to reduce readers’ confusion.
Chinese is, of course, very different from English, and to find literary equivalences for Lu Xun’s style and usages has been a constant challenge. One habit of his that has given me regular pause throughout the translation is his frequent, deliberate use of repetition; at times, I have judged that – due to the gap between English and Chinese literary conventions – to recreate a repetition precisely may strike the English reader as uncomfortable and inelegant, and I have therefore occasionally decided to reword. Throughout, I have aspired to produce a version of Lu Xun that tries to explain – to readers beyond the specialist circle of Chinese studies – his canonical status within China, and make a case for regarding him as a creative stylist and thinker whose ideas about literature can transcend the socio-political circumstances in which he wrote.
A Note on Chinese Names
and Pronunciation
In Chinese, the surname always precedes the given name: Lu Xun, therefore, has the surname Lu and Xun as his given name; his brother Zhou Zuoren has the surname Zhou and Zuoren as the given name.
According to the Hanyu Pinyin system (used in this translation, except for the surname ‘He’, which I have written as ‘Ho’ to reduce confusion in English), transliterated Chinese is pronounced much as in English, except for the following:
VOWELS
a (as the only letter following a consonant): a as in after
ai: I (or eye)
ao: ow as in how
e: uh
ei: ay as in say
en: on as in lemon
eng: ung as in sung
i (as the only letter following most consonants): e as in me
i (when following c, ch, s, sh, z, zh): er as in driver
ia: yah
ian: yen
ie: yeah
iu: yo as in yo-yo
o: o as in fork
ong: oong
ou: o as in no
u (when following most consonants): oo as in food
u (when following j, q, x, y): ü as the German ü
ua: wah
uai: why
uan: wu-an
uang: wu-ang
ui: way
uo: u-woah
yan: yen
yi: ee as in feed
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br /> CONSONANTS
c: ts as in its
g: g as in good
j: j as in job
q: ch as in chat
x: sh as in she
z: ds as in folds
zh: j as in job
NOSTALGIA
A green parasol tree, around thirty feet high, towered outside the gate to the family home, every year hanging heavy with large clusters of nuts. Hoping to bring them down, children would hurl stones into the branches, the occasional missile sailing through the canopy to land on my desk, at which point my teacher – whom I respectfully knew as Mr Bald – would stride out to give those responsible a scolding. A clear foot in diameter, the leaves would wilt in the summer sun before springing back – like a fist opening out – in the resuscitating night air. At this point in the day, after drawing water to scatter over the overheated ground, our family’s old gatekeeper, Wang, might gather up a battered old stool and head off with his pipe to swap stories with my amah, Li. And there they would sit and chat, deep into the night, the darkness interrupted only by sparks from his pipe.
While they were out there enjoying the cool of one particular evening, I remember, my teacher was enlightening me on the principles of verse composition – my task being to come up with a poetic match to a given subject. To his ‘Red Flower’, I tried ‘Green Tree’. Objecting that the tonal patterns were not consonant, he told me to go back to my seat and think again. Not yet nine years old at the time, I had not a clue what tonal patterns were; but since my teacher did not seem about to share his mature wisdom with me, I returned to my desk. After a long, fruitless ponder, I very slowly opened out my fist and slapped it resonantly against my thigh, as if I had swatted a mosquito, hoping to communicate to my instructor the extent of my mental discomfort, but he continued to take no notice. On and on I sat, until he at last drawled that I should approach – which I smartly did. He then wrote down the characters for Green Grass. ‘ “Red” and “flower” are level tones,’ he explained, ‘while “green” is falling and “grass” rising. Dismissed.’ I was bounding through the door before the word was out of his mouth. ‘No hopping and skipping about!’ he drawled again. I carried on my way, although more sedately.
The parasol tree was out of bounds. In the past, whenever I had made for Wang, badgering him for stories of the mountain people, my teacher (who, I may have already mentioned, was bald) would follow close on my heels. ‘Wicked child, stop wasting time!’ he would glower. ‘Had your supper? Then go back inside and finish your homework.’ A moment’s hesitation would bring his ruler down, hard, on my head the next day: ‘Wicked, lazy, stupid boy!’ Since my teacher was fond of settling scores in the classroom, in time I chose to avoid the tree. Experience had taught me that the next day would bring me little joy, unless it was a holiday. If only I could fall ill of a morning, then recover of an afternoon, thereby winning myself a half-day’s reprieve; or if my teacher could sicken and – ideally – die. But if neither of these optimal outcomes resulted, I would have no choice but to return to Confucius the following morning.
And there I found myself, the next day, suffering another lecture on The Analects, my teacher’s head swinging from side to side as he glossed each and every word. He was so shortsighted he was almost kissing the book, as if he wanted to gobble it up. I was always being accused of not looking after my books: of leaving them in a state of disastrous disrepair less than half a chapter in. Well, they didn’t stand a chance with my snorting, dribbling teacher – their chief instrument of destruction – blurring and mangling the pages far more efficiently than I ever could. ‘Confucius says,’ he was saying, ‘that at sixty his ears were obedient to the truth – that’s “ear” as in ear that you hear with. By seventy, he could achieve his heart’s desire without breaking the bounds of social morality…’ The exegesis was lost on me, because the characters were obscured by the shadow cast by his nose. I enjoyed only a privileged view of his radiantly bald head perched over the page – as a reflecting surface it had none of the clarity of the ancient pond in the back garden, offering me a blurred, bloated, clumsy image of my face.
As time dragged on, my teacher seemed to be deriving unholy enjoyment from the exercise, agitating his knees and giving huge nods of his head. My patience, by contrast, was wearing thin. Although the lustre of his pate succeeded in holding my interest a while, soon even that began to pall, and I began to wonder how much more I could stand.
‘Mr Yangsheng! Mr Yangsheng!’ A strange, blessed voice, shrill with desperation, came from outside the gate.
‘Is that Yaozong?… Come in, come in.’ Looking up from his disquisition on The Analects, my teacher walked out to greet his visitor.
I had initially been flummoxed by my teacher’s inexplicably respectful attitude towards this Yaozong – one of the Jins, our neighbours to the left. Though the family was very well-off, he went about in old, ragged clothes, and never ate anything but vegetables, so his face was brown and puffy as an out-of-season aubergine. While he always made a great fuss of me, Wang never made much effort with our miserly neighbour. ‘Hoarding money’s all he’s good for!’ he would often say. ‘And as we never see a penny of it, why should we waste our breath on him?’ It didn’t seem to bother Yaozong, though. He wasn’t half as quick as the old man: whenever Wang was telling his stories, Yaozong just mumbled vaguely in response; he never really understood what they were about. My amah told me his parents still kept him on a short leash, and never let him go out into society – so he could keep up with only the most vacuous conversation. If talk turned to rice, he would be able to grasp only that bald fact – he couldn’t distinguish between the glutinous and the non-glutinous varieties. If it then moved on to fish, he couldn’t distinguish between – say – bream and carp. When he didn’t understand something, you needed to add a great welter of footnotes, most of which he wouldn’t follow either, and which you’d then have to retranslate even more obscurely, generating yet more puzzlement. Since incomprehension was the inevitable result, making conversation with him was never particularly rewarding. To the astonishment of Wang and others, however, my teacher treated him with peculiar deference. I drew my own, private conclusions: I knew that, having failed to generate a son by the age of twenty, Yaozong had hurriedly acquired three concubines. It was around this time that my teacher became a staunch defender of Mencius’s dictum that there were three ways of betraying a parent – of which dying without descendants was the vilest – and promptly invested thirty-one pieces of gold in a wife for himself. His excessive respect for Yaozong was presumably down to the younger man’s virtuosic show of filial virtue. Wang’s unschooled intelligence was no match for my teacher’s bottomless erudition; small wonder he had not plumbed the depths of my learned friend’s thought-processes. I myself had settled upon this explanation only after days of bemused pondering.
‘Have you heard?’
‘Heard?… Heard what?’
‘The Long Hairs are coming!’
‘The Long Hairs?… Ha! Impossible.’
Yaozong’s Long Hairs were the Hairy Rebels to my teacher – the Taipings1 to the history books, perhaps. Wang called them Long Hairs, too – he told me he’d been twenty-nine when they came by these parts. As he was over seventy now, it must have been more than forty years ago, so even I knew it was impossible.
‘I heard it from Mr San at Hexu – any day now, he said…’
‘Mr San?’ My teacher – who worshipped the great Mr San as a god – paled and began pacing around his desk. ‘He must have got it from our revered magistrate. Perhaps we should be on our guard.’
‘Maybe eight hundred of them, they’re saying. I’ve sent one of my servants to make further inquiries at Hexu. To find out when they’re actually going to get here.’
‘Eight hundred? Impossible. Maybe they’re just bandits or local Red Turbans.’
My teacher’s power of reason had won out – he knew they couldn’t be Taipings. Though it hadn’t yet dawned on him that
Yaozong was incapable of distinguishing between different breeds of outlaw – bandits, pirates, White Hats or Red Turbans were all Long Hairs to him. So my teacher’s new hypothesis was entirely lost on Yaozong.
‘We should be ready to feed them. The guest hall in my house is too small to fit them all in, so I’ve asked to borrow the Zhang Suiyang Temple for the other half of them. Soon as their bellies are full, they’ll leave us alone.’ Despite his dimness, Yaozong had at least gleaned from his parents the art of welcoming invading armies with food and drink. Wang had told me that Yaozong’s father had met the Long Hairs: he had flung himself on to the ground and begged for his life, knocking a big red lump up on his forehead. But he managed to stay alive, at least – and ingratiated himself by running a kitchen to keep them fed, turning a healthy profit on the proceeds. After the Long Hairs were defeated, he managed to get away from them and return to Wushi, where he gradually succeeded in becoming comfortably off. Yaozong’s current plan – of winning them over with a single square meal – was nothing to his father’s ingenuity.
‘Rebels always come to a bad end,’ my teacher pronounced. ‘Look through The Simplified Outline and Mirror of History2 and see for yourself – they never get anywhere… Or hardly ever. Fine, give them something to eat. But, my dear Yaozong, don’t get your own hands dirty – let the village headman take care of it.’
‘Quite, quite! And could you write out an Obedient Subjects notice for us to paste on the gate?’
‘No hurry – there’ll be time and enough for that sort of thing if they do come. One more respectful piece of advice, my dear Yaozong. While you don’t want to get on the wrong side of people like this, you mustn’t get mixed up with them either. Back when the Hairy Rebels were up in arms, sticking up notices of submission didn’t guarantee anything, and after the bandits fled, anyone who had surrendered suffered at the hands of government soldiers. Let’s forget about it until they’re about to reach Wushi. Right now you should concentrate on finding somewhere safe for your family to hide – not too far away, though.’