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

by Lu Xun

  ‘Thousands of years ago, the royal cook Yi Ya steamed his own son for his king to eat. We all know it’s been going on – since the creation of the earth itself. That revolutionary, Xu Xilin, a few years back – didn’t they eat his heart and liver?3 Then there’s the Wolf Cub villagers; and last year, I heard that a consumptive ate a steamed roll dipped in the blood of an executed criminal.

  ‘And now it’s my turn to be eaten. I don’t expect you to fight on my behalf, alone against the rest of them. But do you have to join the conspiracy? They’ll do anything, eat anyone: me, you, each other. Pull back from them, change – and we will all live in peace. However long it’s been going on for, we can decide to stop today, we can! I know you can do it. Why, when that tenant of ours wanted his rent reduced the other day, to start with you said it was impossible.’

  As I began my speech, his lips curled back into a scornful smile. Then his eyes shone with a terrible, savage gleam. When I set to exposing their awful secrets the colour drained dreadfully from his face. A crowd gathered outside the gate, Mr Zhao and his dog among them, craning forward to listen in. Some faces remained only a blur, as if masked in gauze; on others, I saw the same bleached pallor, the same bared fangs as before – their lips distorted into smiles. I recognized all of them: the eaters of human flesh. But I knew they were divided in their thinking. Some believed that the eating of men must go on because it was how things had always been. Others recognized it for the sin it was, and yet still they ate, terrified of exposure. The more I said, the angrier they became, through their frozen smiles.

  My brother chose this moment to show his true, unrepentant colours.

  ‘Clear off!’ he roared ferociously at them. ‘Where’s the fun in gawping at a madman!’

  Another of their ingenious devices: to discredit me as insane. The plot was too well laid; they would never change. And when the moment arrived for me to be eaten, there would be not a murmur of opposition, only sympathy for my butchers. Death by character assassination – a method tried and tested by the farmers of Wolf Cub Village.

  Chen stormed in through the gate. Though they wanted to shut me up, I was not yet finished with my audience.

  ‘You can change! In your hearts! Soon there will be no place for cannibals in this world of ours. And if you don’t change, you will all be eaten. However many children you have, you will all be destroyed, like reptiles – by real humans, just as a hunter kills a wolf!’

  Chen chased the crowd away. My brother disappeared. Then Chen coaxed me back inside. A stifling darkness hung over the room; the beams and rafters shuddered, then began to swell – piling distendedly down on me.

  They pinned me to the ground; they meant me to die beneath them. But I struggled through my illusion, drenching myself in sweat.

  ‘Change, in your hearts!’ I gasped. ‘Soon there will be no place for cannibals in this world…’

  XI

  The sun will not come out, the door does not open; two meals, every day.

  As I held my chopsticks, I thought again of my brother. Now I know what happened to my sister. I can see her now, in all her heartbreaking vulnerability; only four years old when she left us. I remember my mother’s uncontrollable sobs, my brother’s efforts to stop her. He’d probably eaten her himself, and all the crying was making him uncomfortable. If he had any conscience left…

  I wonder if Mother knew.

  I think she must have known, even though she didn’t say a word about it as she wept – maybe she just accepted it. When I was three or four, I remember my brother telling me, as I sat in the courtyard enjoying the cool of a summer evening, that a filial son should cook a piece of his flesh for a sick parent. Mother said nothing to contradict him. If it’s all right to eat a piece of flesh, then why not a whole person? But the way she wept that day; the memory of it, even now, is painful. How inconsistent people are!

  XII

  Further thought is painful.

  I now realize I have unknowingly spent my life in a country that has been eating human flesh for four thousand years. My sister, I remember, died while my brother was managing the household. He probably fed her secretly to us, by mixing her into our food.

  I, too, may have unknowingly eaten my sister’s flesh. And now it’s my own turn…

  With the weight of four thousand years of cannibalism bearing down upon me, even if once I was innocent how can I now face real humans?

  XIII

  Are there children who have not yet eaten human flesh?

  Save the children…

  April 1918

  KONG YIJI

  The taverns in Luzhen were rather particular in their layout. Facing out to the street was a substantial bar, squared off at the corners, behind which hot water was always at the ready for warming up wine. Lunchtime or evening, when they got off work, the town’s labourers would drift in, each with their four coppers ready to buy a bowl of warmed wine (this was twenty years ago, remember; now it would cost them ten), then drink it at the bar, taking their ease. An extra copper would buy them a bowl of salted bamboo shoots, or of aniseed beans, to go with it. If their budgets stretched to ten coppers or more, a meat dish would be within their reach. But such extravagance was generally beyond the means of short-jacketed manual labourers. Only those dressed in the long scholar’s gowns that distinguished those who worked with their heads from those who worked with their hands made for a more sedate, inner room, to enjoy their wine and food sitting down.

  When I was eleven, I was taken on as assistant-barman at the Universal Prosperity, at the edge of town. But the manager said I looked too dull to wait on his prized long-gowned customers, and deployed me instead around the main bar. Though I found the regulars easy enough to talk to, they were also quite capable of making life difficult for me. They would insist on watching the yellow liquor being ladled out of its jar, checking for water in the bottom of their wine kettles, hawkishly scrutinizing the progress of the kettle as it was lowered into its warming surround of hot water. Supervision as exacting as this made watering down the wine something of a challenge, and after a few days, the manager retired me from this line of work, too. Fortunately, the connection who had wangled me the position was too powerful for the manager to sack me outright; all the same, he kept my duties as tediously simple as possible – warming the wine.

  All day, every day I spent behind the bar, devoting myself to this task – bored senseless, even though I never made any mistakes. The manager had a terrible temper, and our customers weren’t a particularly civil bunch either, so fun tended to be thin on the ground – except when Kong Yiji rolled up, which is why I still remember him.

  Kong Yiji was the only long-gowned drinker who took his wine standing up. He was a great lanky fellow, his peaky white face pitted with scars and wrinkles and fringed by an untidy grey beard. His gown was filthy and torn, as if it hadn’t been mended or washed for over a decade. His speech was so dusty with classical constructions you could barely understand him. Kong Yiji wasn’t even his real name: it was the first few characters – kong, yi, ji – in the old primer that children used for learning to write. Kong was his surname, all right, but someone somewhere must have once rattled humorously on with yi and ji and the nickname stuck. ‘Another scar, Kong Yiji?’ the assembled company would laugh the moment he arrived in the tavern. ‘Two bowls of wine, warm, and a plate of aniseed beans,’ he would order, ignoring his hecklers and lining nine coppers up on the bar. The provocatively raucous chorus would begin once more: ‘Stealing again?’ ‘Groundless calumny… unimpeachable virtue.’ Kong Yiji’s eyes would bulge with outrage. ‘Well, that’s funny, because just the day before yesterday I saw you getting strung up and beaten for stealing a book from the Hos.’ Kong’s face would flush scarlet, the veins on his forehead throbbing in the heat of discomfort. ‘Stealing books is no crime! Is scholarship theft?’ he would argue back, illustrating his point with a perplexing smatter of archaisms: ‘poverty and learning, oft twixt by jowl’, etcetera, etc
etera. At which everyone inside (and outside) the tavern would collapse with mirth. Kong Yiji truly brought with him the gift of laughter.

  Somewhere in the distant past, the story went, Kong Yiji had received a classical education, but it had never got him past even the lowest grade of the imperial civil service examination. Since he had no head for any other kind of business, he grew steadily poorer until he was on the point of having to beg for food. Fortunately, he had a good writing hand – he could have scraped by, copying out books. Unfortunately, he didn’t have the temperament for this, or indeed any work, preferring drinking to all other occupations. And after a few days at any one job, he would simply vanish – along with the books, paper, brush and ink. Once this had happened a few times, the copying work dried up, forcing Kong Yiji to fall back on periodic acts of theft as his only means of livelihood. All the same, his standing in the tavern was better than most – he never fell seriously into debt. Though occasionally he might turn up without ready money, his name would generally be wiped from the credit slate within a month.

  After half a bowl of wine, the flush had usually receded from Kong Yiji’s face, inviting bystanders to try something else: ‘Can you really read, Kong Yiji?’ A look of scorn from their victim. Next: ‘How come you never managed to pass an exam?’ This tended to hit home: his face would turn a defeated grey, as he launched into another incomprehensibly classical splutter. At which universal merriment would again prevail.

  I could join in the fun without fear of rebuke from the manager. In fact, whenever Kong Yiji turned up, the manager was often the one doing the asking, just to raise a laugh. Recognizing that he’d never get the better of them, Kong Yiji concentrated his conversational efforts on any minors he encountered about the premises. ‘Ever been to school?’ he once asked me. I gave a slight nod. ‘Hmmm… here’s a quick test. How do you write “aniseed”?’ What right did he – a beggar – have to test me, I thought. I turned away, ignoring him. ‘You don’t know?’ Kong Yiji persevered, after a long pause. ‘I’ll show you. Don’t forget it! When you get to be manager of this place, you’ll need it for your accounts.’ Personally, I thought I was a long way off becoming a manager; and anyway, the present incumbent never included aniseed beans in the accounts. The whole thing was ridiculous. ‘Keep your characters to yourself,’ I retorted sulkily. ‘Anyway, it’s just hui, the hui for “return”, with the grass radical on top, isn’t it?’ Kong Yiji euphorically tapped his overextended fingernails on the bar. ‘Just so, just so!’ he nodded. ‘Now, d’you know all four ways of writing hui?’ I walked off, scowling. Kong Yiji sighed – his fingernail already dipped in wine, ready to scrawl the characters across the bar – at my lamentable absence of academic zeal.

  Sometimes, hearing the sound of laughter, the local children would scurry over to watch the fun, gathering around Kong Yiji. He would present each with a single aniseed bean, which they would gulp down; they would then remain implacably rooted to the spot, eyes fixed on the dish. ‘Hardly any left,’ an unnerved Kong would stoop to tell them, his fingers sheltering the dish. Straightening up, he would glance back at the beans, shaking his head: ‘Hardly any! Are the beans multitudinous in abundance? Multitudinous in abundance they are not.’ At which his young audience would scatter hilariously.

  And so it was that Kong Yiji spread joy wherever he went; though when he wasn’t around, we barely missed him.

  ‘I haven’t seen Kong Yiji for ages,’ the manager pronounced one day, probably a little before the Mid-Autumn Festival, as he took down the slate to work slowly through the accounts. ‘He still owes me nineteen coppers!’ It now dawned on me, too, that we had long been deprived of the pleasure of Kong Yiji’s company. ‘How d’you expect him to drag himself over here?’ one customer said. ‘He’s had his legs broken.’ ‘Oh?’ ‘He was stealing, as usual. But he must have been out of his mind to try it on with Mr Ding, the magistrate. Just asking for trouble.’ ‘So what happened?’ ‘First they got a confession out of him, then they beat the hell out of him and broke his legs. Past midnight it went on.’ ‘Then what happened?’ ‘Well, his legs were broken.’ ‘I mean after that.’ ‘Oh… Who knows? Maybe he’s dead.’ No further questions; the manager went slowly back to his accounts.

  Mid-Autumn Festival went by, and the wind grew colder with every day that passed; winter, it seemed, was not far off. Every day I spent huddled up next to the fire, wrapped in my padded jacket. And there I was one afternoon, with no other customers about, all ready to doze off, when a muffled but familiar voice interrupted: ‘Warm me a bowl of wine.’ I looked up: no one in sight. But when I hauled myself to my feet, I spotted Kong Yiji sitting at the foot of the bar, facing the door. He looked terrible: his face grey, gaunt, a thin, ragged cotton jacket over his shoulders, his legs crossed beneath him, sitting on a rush sack that he kept in place with a straw rope. ‘Warm me a bowl of wine,’ he repeated when he caught sight of me. ‘Is that Kong Yiji?’ the manager craned forward. ‘You still owe me nineteen coppers!’ Kong Yiji looked despondently up at him. ‘I… I’ll bring it next time. I can pay cash today, so make it a drop of the good stuff.’ ‘Stealing again, Kong Yiji?’ the manager grinned, going through the usual motions. This time, however, Kong was capable of nothing but weak protest: ‘Don’t make fun of me!’ ‘It was your stealing that got your legs broken in the first place!’ ‘I had a bad fall… just a fall…’ Kong Yiji muttered, his eyes beseeching the manager to close the subject. But by this point, he had already acquired an audience. I warmed the wine, carried it out and placed it on the doorsill. Drawing four coppers out of a pocket in his tattered jacket, he placed them in my hand. His own hand, I saw, was filthy from dragging himself along the ground. Soon enough, he finished his wine and then, amid further laughter from the assembled company, dragged himself off again.

  After this, we were again bereft of Kong Yiji for an extended period of time. ‘Kong Yiji still owes me those nineteen coppers!’ the manager said, as the year neared its end, taking the slate down again. ‘Kong Yiji still owes me nineteen coppers!’ he repeated at the Dragon Boat Festival, in early summer the following year. At the Mid-Autumn Festival, he said nothing more about it; nor at the end of the year.

  I never saw him again – I suppose Kong Yiji really must have died.

  March 1919

  MEDICINE

  I

  The dark hours before an autumn dawn: the moon had sunk, but the sun had not yet risen, leaving an empty expanse of midnight-blue sky. All – except the creatures of the night – slept. Hua Shuan*suddenly sat up in bed. Striking a match, he lit the oil lamp, its body slick with grease; a greenish-white light flickered through the two rooms of the teahouse.

  ‘Are you off, then?’ an old woman’s voice asked. A coughing fit erupted inside the small back room.

  ‘Mmm,’ Shuan mumbled as he dressed, distracted by the noise next door. ‘Pass it over,’ he reached out.

  After an extended search beneath her pillow, Hua Dama handed a packet of silver dollars to the old man, who tucked it, with trembling hands, into his jacket pocket. Giving the bulge a couple of pats, he lit a paper lantern, blew out the lamp and went into the other room. A faint rustling sound was followed by another succession of coughs. ‘Don’t get up, son,’ Shuan whispered, when it subsided. ‘Your mother will see to the shop.’

  Guessing from his son’s silence that he had fallen back into a deep sleep, Shuan opened the door. Outside, the street was sunk in a heavy darkness that obscured everything except the ashen road before him. The lantern cast its light over his feet, illuminating their progress – one step after another. The occasional dog silently crossed his path. The air was much colder outside, but Shuan found the change in temperature refreshing: he felt like a young man again, striding further and faster, as if invigorated by a new life-force. The outlines of the road grew clearer as he walked, the sky brighter.

  Thus absorbed, he was startled by the sudden, clear sighting of a T-junction in the distance up ahead. He slu
nk back under the eaves of a shop, leaning against its bolted door. After a while, the cold crept up on him.

  ‘Look at that old man.’

  ‘What’s he so happy about…’

  Another shock: Shuan now noticed passers-by – one of them turning to glance back at him. Though the lines of the man’s face remained hazy in the fading darkness, Shuan caught a predatory, famished gleam in his eyes. Shuan glanced at the lantern; it had gone out. He patted his pocket again, to check for the robust presence of the silver. Looking back up, he now found himself among a great ghostly throng, wandering aimlessly about in twos and threes. But when he looked again, their shadowy strangeness seemed to fall away.

  Shortly after, he saw a few soldiers march towards and then past him, the large white circle on their chests and backs clearly visible even from a distance. As they passed him, he noted the dark red border on their uniforms. Then a rush of footsteps: the crowd surged forward, its units of twos and threes suddenly coalescing into a tremendous mass that pulled up and fanned out into a semicircle just before the junction.

  Shuan watched them, the view beyond blocked by the ranks of backs and extended necks – as if they were so many ducks, their heads stretched upwards by an invisible puppeteer. A moment’s silence, a slight noise, then they regained the power of motion. With a roar of movement, the mass of them pushed back towards Shuan, almost sweeping him over in the crush.

  ‘You there! Give me the money and you’ll get the goods!’ A man dressed in black stood before Shuan, who shrank back from his cutting glare. One enormous hand was thrust out, opened, before him; the other held, between finger and thumb, a crimson steamed bun, dripping red.