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

by Lu Xun

  But when she took her skirt to be dyed black the following day, Mrs Zou spread the word concerning the suspicions about Ah-Q’s character. Even though she made no direct mention of the village genius’s idea, the damage to Ah-Q’s reputation was done. First of all, the constable called on him to confiscate his door curtain, refusing to return it even when Ah-Q told him Mrs Zhao wanted to look at it, then demanding a monthly offering from him to demonstrate his respect for the agent of the law. Second, the villagers’ attitude towards him underwent an abrupt change: although they still did not dare provoke him as they once had, although the dread generated by his execution monologue had faded, they gave him a wide berth – kept a respectful distance, you might say.

  All except a handful of Weizhuang’s wastrels, that is, who were determined to get to the bottom of the business with Ah-Q. Delighted to crow about his exploits, Ah-Q proudly spilled the whole thing out. He’d been, they learnt, the pettiest of petty thieves: incapable not only of clambering over walls, but also of wriggling through holes. His sole talent was to stand outside the entry point to a house and take the goods as they were passed to him. One particular night, after only one bundle had emerged, a volley of shouts broke out when their ringleader returned inside, at which point he ran through the night, out of the town and all the way back to Weizhuang, his stomach for this line of work quite gone. This story did further damage to Ah-Q’s already fragile reputation. Those who up until then had kept a respectful distance for fear of making an enemy of him now discovered that he didn’t even deserve their fear – that he was a thief too spineless to steal.

  CHAPTER 7

  Revolution

  On the fourth stroke of the third watch of the night of the fourteenth day of the ninth month of the third year of Emperor Xuantong’s reign* 7 – the day on which Ah-Q sold his purse to Zhao Baiyan – a large boat with a black awning docked at the Zhaos’. It arrived under cover of darkness, unnoticed by the sleeping villagers, though its departure around dawn was widely noted. Persistent inquiry eventually traced its ownership back to none other than Mr Provincial Examination.

  The boat brought with it great disquiet to Weizhuang; by midday, the village was in the grip of a full-scale panic. Although the Zhaos were keeping very quiet about the reason behind the boat’s arrival, the gossips in the teahouse and tavern were saying that the city was about to fall to the Revolutionary Party, and Mr Provincial Examination had taken refuge in the village. Only Mrs Zou stoutly refuted this version of events, countering that the boat had contained nothing more than a few old trunks that the great scholar had wanted to store in Weizhuang, and that Mr Zhao had already sent back. Mr Provincial Examination and the younger Zhao – the proud possessor, you will recall, of a county-level degree – were not, in truth, on any kind of terms; they were unlikely to become foul-weather friends. And since Mrs Zou lived next door to the Zhaos, she probably had her ear closer to the ground on the question than most of Weizhuang.

  But still the rumours flourished: although the great man of learning had not come in person, it was reported, he had sent in his place a long letter tracing out a distant family connection with the Zhaos. After careful consideration, Mr Zhao decided it wouldn’t do him any harm to hold on to the trunks, and stowed them under his wife’s bed. The revolutionaries, others said, had entered the town that very night, dressed in white armour and helmets, in mourning for the last emperor of the Ming, whose suicide three and a half centuries earlier had left the imperial throne open to the invading Manchus.

  Revolutionaries were old news to Ah-Q: why, earlier that year, he had watched them being executed. Back then, he had had an intuition – why, he couldn’t say – that these revolutionaries were rebelling against the established order of things, and that rebellion would make his life difficult; and so he had conceived a violent hatred for them. But here they were, putting the wind up even Mr Provincial Examination – a man famous for a whole thirty miles around and about. This – taken in combination with the state of dread into which the villagers, now twittering like frightened birds, had been thrown – struck Ah-Q as all rather delicious.

  ‘Hurrah for revolution!’ Ah-Q thought. ‘It’ll do for the whole rotten lot of them!… I’m going over to the revolutionaries as soon as I get the chance.’

  His sense of grievance against the world sharpened first by the rather embarrassed circumstances in which he had recently found himself, and second by the two midday bowls of wine he had drunk on an empty stomach, Ah-Q floated ruminatively along his way. Suddenly – by virtue of some mental alchemy – it seemed to him as if he himself was the Revolutionary Party, and all Weizhuang his prisoner.

  ‘Rebel! Rebel!’ he began shouting jubilantly.

  The residents of Weizhuang looked fearfully at him, their newly abject terror as refreshing to Ah-Q as a mouthful of snow on a high-summer’s day.

  ‘Hurrah!’ he yelled again, his spirits soaring higher. ‘I take what I want, I spare who I like.’ It was high time for a few more lines of opera:

  ‘Tum-ti-tum, clang clang-clang!

  Alas! While in my cups, I killed my brother Zheng!

  Alas, alack, woe is me…

  Tum-ti-tum, clang clang-clang!

  I-I-I-I-I will thrash you, with my mace, yes, I will!’

  Zhao Senior and Zhao Junior stood at their gate with a couple of their relatives, discussing the Revolution. Head held high, Ah-Q swept obliviously past them, still singing at the top of his voice.

  ‘Q, my friend,’ Mr Zhao called timidly out to him.

  ‘Clang clang-clang,’ he sang on, too nonplussed by the word ‘friend’ to connect it with his own name, supposing he had misheard. ‘Tum, clang, clang-clang, clang-clang!’

  ‘Q, my friend.’

  ‘Woe is me…’

  ‘Ah-Q!’ The village genius tried a more direct approach.

  ‘What?’ Ah-Q asked, finally drawing to a halt and turning to face them.

  ‘So, Q, my friend, have you…’Mr Zhao faltered, ‘have you done well out of this business?’

  ‘Of course. I take what I want…’

  ‘Ah-… I mean, Q, my friend, I shouldn’t waste your time on people like us,’ Zhao Baiyan nervously ventured. ‘People like us – we haven’t a bean, you know.’

  ‘Haven’t a bean? You’ve always been richer than me,’ Ah-Q said, carrying on his way.

  A despondent silence fell over the group. Father and son went back inside, and the two of them talked the whole business over until it was time to light the evening lamps. Zhao Baiyan went home and gave his wife the purse from his belt to hide at the bottom of a chest.

  By the time Ah-Q had floated complacently back to the Temple of Earth and Grain, the effect of the wine had worn off. The temple’s old caretaker was abnormally polite to him that evening, inviting him in for a cup of tea. Taking the opportunity to cadge two pancakes off him, Ah-Q ate them and asked for a candlestick and a four-ounce candle, which he lit, then lay down alone in his own small room. As he wallowed in the joyous novelty of it all, the flame flashing and leaping as euphorically as the lights at New Year, his thoughts took flight.

  ‘Rebellion… Count me in!… When the Revolutionary Party comes by the temple, dressed in white, carrying broadswords, maces, bombs, guns, double-edged knives and hooked spears, calling me along, I’ll go with them like a shot.

  ‘That’ll be a sight, when they’re all kneeling before me, twittering with fear. “Have mercy, Ah-Q, have mercy!” No mercy for them, ha! D and Mr Zhao’ll get it first, then his son, then the Fake Foreign Devil… Should I spare any of them? I used to think hairy Wang was all right, but not any more…

  ‘What should I take… I’ll need to see what they’ve got in their chests – silver, gold, dollars, calico shirts… I’ll move the Ningbo bed that the village genius’s wife sleeps on into the temple, then I’ll go back for the Qians’ table and chairs – or maybe the Zhaos’. I won’t be doing the moving myself, of course, I’ll get D to do it. He’ll get
a slap around the face if he doesn’t look sharp about it. Zhao Sichen’s sister is ugly as sin. Mrs Zou’s daughter might be all right in a few years’ time. Hmm: the Fake Foreign Devil’s wife… any woman willing to sleep with a man without a queue must be a slut! The village genius’s wife’s got a birthmark on her eyelid… What’s happened to Mrs Wu, I haven’t seen her in ages… shame her feet are so big.’

  Before all his plans were properly laid, Ah-Q was snoring, the four-ounce candle barely burned down a half-inch, his cavernously open mouth bathed in its fiery red light.

  ‘Hmm? Hmm?’ he suddenly cried out, looking bewilderedly about him, then lying back down to sleep once he’d set eyes on the candle.

  The next day, he got up very late. Out on the street, everything looked much as it always did. After fruitlessly pondering for some while a solution to his hunger, an idea finally presented itself, and he slowly turned his steps – almost without conscious thought – towards the Convent of Quiet Cultivation.

  The convent was as peaceful as it had been back in the spring, its walls still white, its gate still black. He hesitated briefly, then knocked. Hearing a dog bark inside, he anxiously gathered up a few broken pieces of brick, then knocked again – harder. Eventually, after rapping out a series of dents in the black lacquer, he heard someone approach.

  Tightening his grip on the pieces of brick, Ah-Q adopted a martial posture, ready to do battle with the black dog. But the gate opened only a crack, unleashing no beast from within. He could see no one inside but the old nun.

  ‘What d’you want this time?’ she asked, startled by his reappearance.

  ‘Have you heard? There’s a revolution…’ Ah-Q observed, rather vaguely.

  ‘They’ve already been,’ the old nun retorted, her eyes red. ‘Now what d’you want?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘They’ve been and gone!’

  ‘Who?’ Ah-Q’s astonishment was growing at every revelation.

  ‘The Zhao son and the Foreign Devil!’

  Ah-Q froze, stupefied by the unexpectedness of it all. Seeing the wind had been taken out of his sails, the elderly nun shut the gate as quick as she could. When Ah-Q recovered himself enough to give it a shove, it refused to budge; when he tried knocking again, there was no answer.

  It had all happened that morning. The moment the village genius heard, through his own channels of communication, that the Revolutionary Party had taken the town during the night, he coiled his queue on to his head and, at first light, called on the Qian family’s Fake Foreign Devil. Although he’d never had anything to do with him in the past, this was a time for pooling talents and energies in the cause of Progress and Reform. A full and frank discussion ended in them declaring themselves comrades unto death and pledging to join the Revolution. After giving the matter some further thought, they remembered there was a tablet in the Convent of Quiet Cultivation wishing the emperor ‘Ten thousand thousand thousand thousand thousand years of life.’ Deciding, quite naturally, that this should be the first thing to go, off they rushed to revolutionize the convent. Because the old nun had tried to stop them, again quite naturally they identified her as representative of the discredited and deposed Manchu dynasty and gave her a reasonably substantial beating around the head with sticks and knuckles. After they’d gone, the nun came to, to discover the tablet in pieces on the ground, and a valuable Ming incense-burner, originally set in front of the statue of the goddess Guanyin, vanished.

  All this Ah-Q found out only some time after the fact. Kicking himself for having slept through it all, he also bitterly resented their not coming to fetch him first.

  ‘Don’t they know I’ve surrendered to the Revolutionary Party, too?’ he wondered to himself.

  CHAPTER 8

  Barred from the Revolution

  With each passing day, the people of Weizhuang grew easier in their hearts. Although the rumours flying about told them that the Revolutionary Party had taken the town, nothing else much had changed. The county magistrate hadn’t changed, even though his official title had. Mr Provincial Examination had hung on to an official post, too – though no one in Weizhuang knew exactly what it was – and the captain of militia was, well, still the captain of militia. The only source of disquiet in Weizhuang’s smooth, untroubled waters was the habit of certain, bad elements among the revolutionaries of cutting queues off – a troubling development that had begun the day after the Revolution came to town. They’d got their hands on Seven-Pounds, the boatman from a neighbouring village, who’d come out of it looking a perfect sight. Yet calm was, for the most part, preserved, because the residents of Weizhuang rarely, if ever, ventured into town; and even if they had been planning a trip, they swiftly changed their minds. Ah-Q had had an idea of going in, to look for an old friend of his, but abandoned it as soon as this piece of news reached him.

  But still it wouldn’t be fair to say there were absolutely no new developments in Weizhuang. Within a few days, increasing numbers of queues were coiled up on heads – the first belonging, as previously mentioned, to the village genius, swiftly followed by those of Zhao Sichen, Zhao Baiyan and finally Ah-Q. If it had been summer, such a coiffure would have been standard practice, and no one would have paid much attention. But shifting a summer convention into late autumn demonstrated considerable heroism on the part of the trend-setters – surely a sign that times were changing in Weizhuang.

  ‘Look at the revolutionary!’ exclaimed everyone who saw Zhao Sichen approach, the nape of his neck naked as the day he was born.

  Ah-Q raged with envy. Although the village genius’s decision to wind his queue round the top of his head was old news, it hadn’t occurred to him that he could copy him. Now, seeing Zhao Sichen doing the same, he realized that he, too, could follow suit, and resolved to do so. After tucking it up and securing it with a bamboo chopstick, and a further period of hesitation, he boldly set forth into the public domain.

  As he walked along, he attracted a few looks, but no comment. Soon, a feeling of niggling displeasure had evolved into a sense of serious grievance against the world at large. Lately, he had been suffering more and more from dyspepsia of the brain. His life at present was no more difficult than it had been before the Revolution: people were still tolerably civil to him, and shopkeepers never asked him to pay in cash. But Ah-Q was nagged by a sense of frustration: that things should be different, now there had been a revolution.

  It was his sighting, one day, of the ignoble D that brought his bad mood to boiling point. This D had not only coiled his queue on the top of his head, he had also – believe it if you will – had the nerve to secure it with a bamboo chopstick. Never, not even in his wildest imaginings, had Ah-Q dreamt that such effrontery – from such a wretch – was possible. No: he would not allow it! He felt a desperate urge to grab hold of it, snap the chopstick, let the queue hang back down and give him a few good slaps around the face. That would teach him to forget his place in the cosmic order of things, to call himself a revolutionary. In the end, however, he decided to let him off with an Angry Glare and a gob of spit.

  The only inhabitant of Weizhuang to chance going into town in recent days was the Fake Foreign Devil. On the pretext of the trunks he was giving house-room to, the Zhao family’s young gentleman of letters had thought of calling on Mr Provincial Examination, but desisted on account of the mortal risk to his queue. Instead, he penned an obsequiously ornate formal letter, and charged the Fake Foreign Devil first with delivering it to its intended recipient, and second with securing an introduction to the revolutionary Freedom Party. When this deputy returned, he collected four silver dollars from the village genius, in exchange for which the latter was presented with a silver peach, which he pinned to the lapel of his gown. This, it was put about with gasps of admiration, was the insignia of the Persimmon Oil Party.* Their local scholar was now equal in rank to a member of the imperial academy! Mr Zhao’s stock rose dramatically, higher even than when his son passed the county-level civil service exa
mination. Ah-Q now existed on a plane far below Mr Zhao’s arrogant notice.

  Ah-Q’s general sense of grievance, therefore, was compounded by his feeling of being left out of everything. As soon as he heard rumours about the silver peach, he guessed the reason for his cold-shouldering: it wasn’t enough to surrender to the revolutionaries, or even to coil your queue up on to your head. The key was to make contact with the Revolutionary Party itself. But he’d only ever encountered two revolutionaries: the first – the star of the execution he had witnessed – had long since been relieved of his head; which left only the Fake Foreign Devil. So there was nothing for it but to go and talk terms with the latter.

  The main gate to the Qian mansion happened to be standing open, and so Ah-Q timidly slunk in. Once inside, he was immediately startled by the sight of the Fake Foreign Devil – dressed in black, probably foreign clothes, another silver peach pinned to his chest – holding forth in the middle of the courtyard. He had unbraided his regrown, foot-long queue, allowing it to flow theatrically over his shoulders. His fingers were curled around the stick from which Ah-Q had in the past received such salutary instruction. Opposite, standing to rapt attention, were Zhao Baiyan and three other loafers.

  Approaching softly, Ah-Q took up position behind Zhao Baiyan, trying to think of the best way to get the great man’s attention. Fake Foreign Devil didn’t quite sound right any more; but neither did he think Foreigner or Revolutionary would do. Mr Foreigner, perhaps?