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

by Lu Xun

  Propping myself up, I watched on, without bothering with the water. I couldn’t have described what I was seeing: the performers’ faces began to blur curiously – until I was unable to distinguish one from the other. While the older members of our party chatted away, the younger ones started to yawn. Only when a clown in a scarlet shirt was tied to one of the pillars on the stage and whipped by an actor with a grey beard did everyone start to pay proper attention again – watching and laughing. It was definitely the best thing I saw all night.

  But then an actor dressed up as an old woman emerged – my least favourite of all the turns, particularly when they launched into one of those static, seated arias. I glanced around at the rest of our party: they were obviously as disappointed as I was. After an introit in which the singer kept moving up and down the stage, he sat down on a folding chair in the centre. As my sense of foreboding grew, Shuangxi and the others began muttering mutinously. And yet still I patiently waited, for what seemed like an eternity. At one point, when the singer raised his hands, I was convinced he was about to get up – but back down he went, and the aria continued as before. The boat was now a mass of yawning sighs, until Shuangxi – unable to bear any more – spoke out: ‘He might go on past dawn,’ he said. ‘Might as well go back now.’ Immediately agreeing, everyone became as animated as they’d been on the outward journey. Three or four boys made for the stern to pull up the pole, pushing back against the bank to turn about. With the sculls at the ready, we set off, cursing that agonizing old woman.

  The moon seemed to have hardly moved – as if we’d been watching the opera for no time at all – and once clear of Zhaozhuang, it beamed down with extraordinary brightness. When I turned to look back at the stage lights, the theatre looked just as it had done on our approach: rising hazily up from the river bank like an enchanted pavilion, enveloped in rosy mist. The music of bamboo flutes caressing our ears, I came to suspect the old woman had finally finished, but was too embarrassed to suggest we go back.

  Soon we had left the wood behind us, and were moving forward at a fair clip, through the dense, midnight darkness. Our rowers redoubled their efforts, even as they debated the opera – now complaining, now laughing. This time, the water lapped more vigorously against the prow, as the boat leapt through the spray, like a huge white fish carrying a crowd of children on its back. As we powered past them, a handful of old fishermen working the night stopped their skiffs to watch and cheer.

  Around half a mile from Pingqiao, the boat slowed, our rowers complaining of hunger and fatigue; it was hours since they had last eaten. Now it was Guisheng’s turn to have a bright idea: the broad beans were ready right now, he said, and there was plenty of firewood on board. Why shouldn’t we grab a few handfuls for a midnight snack? Everyone agreed, and the boat pulled up next to a dark field bristling with healthy bean plants.

  ‘Hey, Ah-fa,’ Shuangxi called out, jumping on to the bank and pointing at the fields. ‘These are your family’s, and those are Liu Yi’s. Which should we take?’

  We followed him on to the bank. ‘Hold on,’ Ah-fa replied. ‘Let me go and have a look… Take ours,’ he said, straightening up after a couple of minutes’ fieldwork. ‘They’re the biggest.’ With a shout of agreement, everyone scattered over Ah-fa’s field, tossing armfuls of pods into the boat. Ah-fa’s mother would throw a fit, Shuangxi reckoned, if we took any more. So everyone took another armful from old Mr Liu Yi’s field.

  A few of the older boys went slowly on with the rowing, while a few more built a fire towards the back of the boat, and the younger ones and I shelled the beans. The beans were quickly cooked, and the boat left floating on the water while we gathered round, wolfing them down in our fingers. Our meal finished, we started moving again, while those excused from rowing washed the pot and threw the pods into the river to destroy all evidence of our illicit feast. Shuangxi began to fret about having used his uncle’s salt and firewood: the old man kept careful accounts and was bound to scold him for it. But after we’d talked it through, he decided not to worry. If he started laying in to us, we’d tell him to give back the tallow branch he’d scavenged from the river bank last year; and tell him he had ringworm.

  ‘We’re back!’ Shuangxi suddenly sang out from the prow. ‘Safe and sound. Didn’t I say we’d be fine?’

  Looking ahead, I saw Pingqiao before me. Shuangxi was talking to someone waiting at the foot of the bridge – my mother. I moved to the front of the boat as it entered the village; once it was securely moored, we streamed off on to the bank. It was gone midnight, why were we back so late? Mother scolded, before smiling and inviting everyone back for fried rice.

  Explaining we’d already had a snack, and were tired out, everyone went back home to bed.

  It was almost noon before I got up the next day. As Shuangxi’s uncle didn’t seem to have challenged our appropriation of his firewood or salt, in the afternoon I went fishing for prawns as usual.

  ‘Shuangxi, did you and your gang of pirates steal my beans yesterday? You squashed as many as you picked.’ Looking up, I saw Liu Yi punting by, back from selling his beans, a large pile of them still in the belly of the boat.

  ‘Yup,’ Shuangxi cheerfully confessed. ‘We took yours because we needed a few extra – for our guest. Stop frightening my prawns!’

  Catching sight of me, Liu Yi rested his pole. ‘A guest?’ he said, smiling. ‘Ah, excellent – excellent. Enjoy the opera, Master Xun?’

  ‘Oh, yes,’ I nodded.

  ‘And the beans?’

  ‘Oh, yes,’ I nodded again.

  ‘Ha! Spoken like a true man of learning!’ Liu Yi gave a jubilant thumbs-up, becoming disconcertingly animated. ‘Those beans of mine, they’re grown from hand-picked seeds. People round here – they can’t tell the bad from the good. Some even say mine aren’t any better than other people’s. I’ll bring your mother a load more this afternoon…’He then picked up his pole and set off again.

  When Mother called me in to dinner, a large bowl of boiled broad beans was sitting on the table – a present to us from Liu Yi. He’d praised me to the skies, Mother reported: ‘Wise before his time – he’ll come top of the examinations, top of the empire. Mark my words.’ Somehow, though, they didn’t taste nearly as good as they had done the night before.

  Truly, I’ve never since eaten beans as delicious – or enjoyed an opera so much.

  October 1922

  HESITATION

  In the morning I started out from Mount Cangwu;

  Evening brought me to the Garden of Paradise.

  I would have lingered in its immortal confines,

  But the sun was fast sinking to the west.

  I ordered Xihe to stay the sun-steeds’ gallop,

  To stand watch, barring their entry into Mount Yanzi.

  Long, long had been my road and far, far the journey:

  I would go up and down to seek my heart’s desire.

  Qu Yuan,1 ‘Encountering Sorrow’

  NEW YEAR’S SACRIFICE

  It’s the end of the lunar year – the end told by the old and not the Western calendar – that brings a year to its proper close, as villages, towns, even heaven itself mark its approach. Flashes of lightning through heavy, grey evening clouds are answered by the dull explosions of firecrackers, bidding farewell to the Kitchen God as he departs for heaven to make his annual report on mankind. Close by, the blasts have an ear-splitting ferocity, the faint smell of gunpowder hanging in the air before the noise has died away. It was on one such night that I returned to the old place, to my home town: Luzhen. Since there was no real home left for me any more, I took up temporary lodging in the house of an old gentleman by the name of Mr Lu. As he was a distant relative of mine, the generation above me, I addressed him as Uncle. A diehard Neo-Confucian of the old Imperial College,1 he seemed barely changed: a touch older, that was all, and still beardless. After a little polite chit-chat and the observation that I had put on weight, he launched into a great tirade against reformis
t politics. Though I knew his ire was directed more at old liberals like Kang Youwei2 than at me specifically, as our conversation was not taking a particularly amicable direction, soon enough I found myself alone in the study.

  After a late start the following morning, I called on a number of friends and relatives after lunch; the next day followed the same pattern. Again, they seemed unchanged: a few years older, that was all. Every household was frantically preparing for the New Year’s Sacrifice – the elaborately reverent end-of-year ritual to welcome in the God of Fortune and to plead for good luck over the coming year. Geese and hens are slaughtered, pork bought – everything scrubbed and scoured until the women’s arms, some still enclosed in bracelets of twisted silver, are soaked red. When all the cooking is done, chopsticks are stuck into the offerings and, at dawn, the bowls of food are set out, the incense and candles lit, and the God of Fortune invited to come and enjoy the feast. Once the devotions – from which women are banned – have been made, the firecrackers are lit. So it is in every family, every year, as long as they can afford to buy food for the offerings and firecrackers; and so it was this year.

  That New Year’s Eve, an overcast sky began disintegrating into snowflakes as big as plum-blossom petals that mingled with the smoke and prevailing bustle, adding a kind of frenzied confusion to the town. By the time I took refuge again in my uncle’s study, the roof tiles were carpeted in white, brightening the interior of the room and the enormous vermilion rubbing on the wall – of the character for ‘Longevity’, written by the celebrated Daoist hermit Chen Tuan.3 A pair of couplets had once hung either side. One had fallen off and now lay, slackly rolled up, on a rectangular table; the other – an inscription by the great Neo-Confucian scholar Zhu Xi – remained in place: ‘When principles are grasped, the mind is at peace.’ Bored, under-occupied, I glanced through the piles of volumes on the table beneath the window, but found only a set – probably incomplete – of an early eighteenth-century dictionary, a collection of Neo-Confucian writings and a Qing exegesis of the four Confucian classics. I determined to leave the next day.

  In truth, it was recalling an encounter of the previous day with Xianglin’s wife that confirmed me in my anxiety to be off. That afternoon, I’d been visiting a friend in the east of the town and, as I left, I spotted her by the river. As she was staring straight at me, I knew she was heading in my direction. Of all the people I met on this visit to Luzhen, she was the most changed. Hair that five years ago had been grey was now completely white. Her ashen face gaunt with deprivation, she looked years, decades beyond her true age – around forty. The expression of haunting sadness she had once worn was gone, replaced by a kind of facial paralysis; only the occasional movement of her eyeballs indicated she remained a functioning organism. A bamboo basket in one hand contained a cracked, empty bowl; the other hand grasped a tall bamboo staff, split at the bottom. She had obviously become a beggar.

  I waited for her to ask me for money.

  ‘Back for New Year?’ she asked.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You’re just the person I’ve been looking for.’ A light suddenly entered her glassy eyes. ‘Someone who can read and write, who’s seen the world. I need to ask you something.’

  I stood still, perplexed by the turn the conversation was taking.

  ‘After a person’s died,’ she spoke with a soft, secretive urgency, coming a few steps closer, ‘after a person’s died – does their soul go on living?’

  Her eyes now fixed upon me: my back prickled with terror. No unexpected schoolroom interrogation had ever induced such blind panic in me. I’d never given the question of what happened to the soul after death a moment’s thought – but what was I to say to her now? Most people round here believe in ghosts, I thought, hesitating. But she seems to have her doubts. Or maybe it was hope – hope that there were ghosts, or hope that there weren’t. But which?… No point in making a person even more miserable at the end of a miserable life; just say yes.

  ‘Maybe… I-I think,’ I stammered out.

  ‘So there is a hell?’

  ‘Ah – hell?’ I backtracked, wrong-footed by her follow-up. ‘Hell… Well, yes, logically, there ought to be… And yet… does it really matter?’

  ‘When someone in your family’s died, will you get to see them after you die?’

  ‘So what you’re asking is, will you see them again…?’ I knew now that the full depths of my idiocy had been exposed; that none of my hesitations or subterfuges had been of the slightest use. ‘In truth,’ I recanted, my nerve broken, ‘I don’t really know, for sure… I don’t really know much about souls, either…’

  I fled back to my uncle’s house, taking immediate advantage of her failure to produce another question. I was deeply unsettled. Had I made things worse for her, I wondered, by replying in the way I did? Seeing everyone else busy with their own New Year’s Sacrifice probably made her all the more conscious of her own loneliness. But had she meant something else altogether? Had she had a premonition of some kind? If she had meant something else, and something happened because of what I’d said to her, then I would be responsible – to a degree – for whatever it was… But then I laughed at myself: it was just a random encounter, nothing more than that. And here I was, obsessively going back over it – no wonder certain educationalists have diagnosed me a neurotic. Anyway, I was perfectly insured with that last ‘I don’t really know.’ Even if something did now happen, it could have nothing to do with me.

  ‘I don’t really know’ – what a useful little phrase it is. Brave young idiots rush in to resolve other people’s doubts and uncertainties, fixing on physicians, then risking criticism if the results are less than ideal. But top everything off with ‘I don’t really know’, and you sail clear of any possible blame or reproach. Now, more than ever, I felt the indispensability of this phrase – even when my interlocutor was a beggar-woman.

  But still I felt unsettled, and kept returning to it in my thoughts all through the next day, as though it were some kind of ill omen. Tediously confined to my uncle’s study, beneath a sky gloomy with snow, my feelings of unease only grew. There was nothing for it but to leave for the city the next day. I wondered if the shark’s-fin soup served in one of my old haunts, the Fuxing – always outstanding value at a dollar a bowl – had gone up in price. Although none of my old crowd was around any more, I was determined to have myself a bowlful, even if I sat down to it alone… Whatever happened, I would leave the next day.

  Because things were never working out for me the way I wanted them to, I feared my encounter with Xianglin’s wife would prove no exception. And as usual I was cheated of my happy ending. Late that afternoon, I caught a few snatches of conversation in one of the inner rooms of the house. Presently, the voices fell quiet – leaving only my uncle fulminating as he strode away: ‘It had to be New Year, didn’t it… A bad lot!’

  I was first bewildered, then uneasy, as if this throwaway comment of his was in some way connected to me. Glancing out of the door, I could see no one about. When eventually the hired help came in to make tea before dinner, I took my chance to ask for information.

  ‘Who was my uncle angry with just now?’

  ‘Xianglin’s wife, of course!’ the servant bluntly replied.

  ‘Why, what’s wrong with her?’ I quickly pressed on.

  ‘She’s gone.’

  ‘Dead?’ I almost jumped out of my seat, feeling a sudden tightness in my chest. The colour must surely have drained from my face. But as he didn’t look up at me, not even once, he noticed nothing.

  ‘When did she die?’ I now asked, trying to steady myself.

  ‘Last night, or maybe this morning. I don’t know.’

  ‘What did she die of?’

  ‘Of poverty – what else?’ His verdict impassively delivered, he left, still without a glance at me.

  But my panic was transient. Soon, I realized the thing I had dreaded was now past; that I no longer needed to dwell obsessively on the bu
siness, on my ‘I don’t really know’ or his ‘of being poor’. I became steadily easier in my mind, troubled only by the occasional twinge of discomfort. Uncle was a solemn presence through dinner. I wanted to ask about the deceased, but I knew that, though he was supposed to take the Neo-Confucian view that ghosts and spirits spring from the duality of nature, he was a man ruled by superstition. Death and disease were taboo subjects so close to the New Year’s Sacrifice. If something unavoidably came up, you could pick your way round it with allusions and euphemisms. But such skill lay beyond me, and I had to bite back my questions. The grim set to his face made me suspect he thought I had deliberately chosen this difficult moment to torment him; that I, too, was a bad lot. To mollify him, I immediately told him of my plan to leave for the city the following day. He made no great effort to keep me. Dinner was wound up in oppressive silence.

  Another snowy winter’s night fell early over the town. Inside, all was hustle and bustle; outside, quiet reigned. The new flakes fell on to an already thick blanket of snow; if you listened out, you could even hear the rustle of their landing, sharpening the overwhelming sense of stillness. I sat alone beneath the yellow light of the vegetable-oil lamp, thinking about Xianglin’s wife, discarded by those she had lived alongside, like a useless plaything of which they had wearied. And yet she had left her mark: the people around her, leading their happy lives, had probably felt bewildered by her tenacious impulse to go on living. But now she had at last been swept tidily away. I didn’t know whether I believed in an afterlife or not; but if those with nothing to live for can stop living, removing their tiresome selves from the orbit of those who are sick of the sight of them, then death is an excellent expedient – both for the person concerned, and for those who have to put up with them. I listened quietly to the snowflakes whispering against my window and slowly began to relax, as the fragments of her life that I had seen or heard began to cohere.