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

  PENGUIN CLASSICS

  THE REAL STORY OF AH-Q AND OTHER TALES OF CHINA

  LU XUN is one of the paradigmatic figures of twentieth-century Chinese literature, celebrated during and since his lifetime for his powerful diagnoses of his nation’s social and political crisis, and for his contributions to reinventing the vernacular as a literary language. Born in 1881 into a scholar-gentry family in Shaoxing (south-east China), he was thoroughly schooled as a child in China’s classical literary heritage. After abandoning in 1899 the orthodox Confucian path of studying for the imperial civil service examinations, Lu Xun read widely in translations of foreign literature and applied himself to Western science, first in China and then in Japan, where he began training as a doctor. Intensely troubled by his country’s weakness in the face of foreign imperialism, at the age of twenty-five he decided to give up medicine for a career in literary and cultural reform. In 1918, the forceful iconoclasm of his first short story in vernacular Chinese, ‘Diary of a Madman’, helped propel him to the centre of the New Culture Movement of the late 1910s – modern China’s pivotal moment of westernizing cultural revolution. The two volumes of short fiction he produced between 1918 and 1925, Outcry and Hesitation, won broad acclaim for their highly crafted portrayals of a China in a state of spiritual emergency – of its superstition, backwardness, poverty and complacence. Like many radical intellectuals of his time, Lu Xun began to look leftwards after the rise to power of the repressively right-wing Nationalist Party in the late 1920s. Despite his public commitment to Marxist literary ideals and his posthumous canonization by Mao Zedong, Lu Xun’s final years were spent mired in squabbles with the Chinese Communist Party’s representatives of ideological orthodoxy. When he died of tuberculosis in 1936, he bequeathed to modern Chinese letters a contradictory legacy of cosmopolitan independence, polemical fractiousness and anxious patriotism that continues to resonate in Chinese intellectual life today.

  JULIA LOVELL has translated the novels I Love Dollars by Zhu Wen, Serve the People by Yan Lianke and A Dictionary of Maqiao by Han Shaogong. She has also edited and translated in part Lust, Caution, a collection of short stories by Eileen Chang. A lecturer in Chinese history at the University of London, she is the author of The Great Wall: China against the World, 1000 BC–AD 2000 and The Politics of Cultural Capital: China’s Quest for a Nobel Prize in Literature.

  YIYUN LI grew up in Beijing and moved to the United States in 1996. Her stories and essays have been published in the New Yorker, Best American Short Stories, O Henry Prize Stories and elsewhere. Her debut collection, A Thousand Years of Good Prayers, won the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award, PEN/Hemingway Award and Guardian First Book Award; it was also shortlisted for the Orange Prize for New Writers. She was selected by Granta as one of the twenty-one Best Young American Novelists under thirty-five. Her first novel, The Vagrants, was recently published.

  The Real Story of Ah-Q and

  Other Tales of China

  The Complete Fiction of Lu Xun

  Translated with an Introduction by

  JULIA LOVELL

  With an Afterword by

  YIYUN LI

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  PENGUIN CLASSICS

  Published by the Penguin Group

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  This translation first published in Penguin Classics 2009

  Translation and editorial material copyright © Julia Lovell, 2009

  Afterword copyright © Yiyun Li, 2009

  All rights reserved

  The moral right of the translator and editors has been asserted

  Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser

  ISBN: 978-0-14-119418-9

  Contents

  Acknowledgements

  Chronology

  Introduction

  Further Reading

  A Note on the Translation

  A Note on Chinese Names and Pronunciation

  Nostalgia

  OUTCRY

  Preface

  Diary of a Madman

  Kong Yiji

  Medicine

  Tomorrow

  A Minor Incident

  Hair

  A Passing Storm

  My Old Home

  The Real Story of Ah-Q

  Dragon Boat Festival

  The White Light

  A Cat among the Rabbits

  A Comedy of Ducks

  Village Opera

  HESITATION

  New Year’s Sacrifice

  Upstairs in the Tavern

  A Happy Family

  Soap

  The Lamp of Eternity

  A Public Example

  Our Learned Friend

  The Loner

  In Memoriam

  Brothers

  The Divorce

  OLD STORIES RETOLD

  Preface

  Mending Heaven

  Flight to the Moon

  Taming the Floods

  Gathering Ferns

  Forging the Swords

  Leaving the Pass

  Anti-Aggression

  Bringing Back the Dead

  Notes

  Afterword

  Acknowledgements

  I would like to thank particularly Bonnie S. McDougall for her meticulous reading of the Introduction and translation; the text has been enormously improved by her clear-sighted literary and linguistic revisions. I am extremely grateful to Vicki Yu-yun Chiu and Saiyin Sun for further invaluable recommendations and corrections; Saiyin Sun additionally made available her doctoral thesis on Lu Xun, which contained important new insights into Lu Xun’s personality and behaviour through the 1920s. I owe many additional thanks to Tommy McClellan for allowing access to teaching notes that shed invaluable light on important points of detail in stories such as ‘The Real Story of Ah-Q’. Sarah Coward carried out a superbly sharp-eyed copy-edit of the manuscript, of which I am most appreciative. I would like to thank also Robert Macfarlane and Thelma Lovell for their very helpful comments on the Introduction and translation. I have benefited greatly from access to earlier translations of Lu Xun’s work, especially the versions by Gladys Yang and Yang Xianyi and by William Lyell, both of which have frequently helped to clarify ambiguities in my understanding of the text. Both their translations tackle the stylistic and linguistic challenges of finding an English idio
m for Lu Xun with an admirable combination of rigour and creativity that I have tried hard to emulate. All errors and infelicities that remain are, of course, my own.

  Chronology

  1881 Born Zhou Shuren in Shaoxing, south-east China.

  1884 Following its defeat of the Chinese navy, France asserts control of Indo-China.

  1893 Grandfather imprisoned (on suspended death sentence) for corruption in the civil service examinations.

  1894–5 China defeated in first Sino-Japanese War.

  1896 Father dies after consistent misdiagnosis by Chinese doctors.

  1898 Leaves home to study at the Jiangnan Naval Academy in Nanjing. Returns briefly to pass the first, district level of the civil service examination.

  Influenced by reformist intellectuals such as Kang Youwei and Liang Qichao, the Guangxu emperor issues a series of radical, reforming edicts (the ‘Hundred Days’ Reforms’). The conservative empress dowager Cixi responds by putting the emperor under house arrest and executing some of the leaders of the reform movement.

  1899 Transfers to the School of Mines and Railways in Nanjing. Refuses to return to Shaoxing for the second and third levels of the civil service examination.

  1900 Foreign (mainly Japanese, Russian, British, American and French) troops enter Beijing and bring to an end the Boxer Rebels’ siege of the foreign legations. The Qing government agrees to an indemnity of 450 million taels of silver (c. £67 million).

  1902 Graduates and leaves China for Tokyo on a government scholarship; begins studying Japanese language.

  1903 Cuts off his queue – the long braid that the Manchu Qing dynasty forced all Chinese men to wear as a public symbol of their submission to Manchu rule after 1644. Completes his first translation, of Jules Verne’s De la terre à la lune (from Japanese).

  1904 Leaves Tokyo for medical school in rural Sendai.

  1905 The Qing government abolishes the old-style civil service examinations.

  1906 Abandons medical studies. Returns to Shaoxing to take part in a marriage arranged by his mother. Soon after, returns to Tokyo without his wife but with his younger brother Zhou Zuoren.

  1907 An attempt, with Zhou Zuoren, to launch a new literary magazine, New Life, fails.

  Qiu Jin, a female revolutionary, is arrested and executed in Shaoxing for an alleged plot against the Qing government.

  1908 Publishes ‘On the Power of Mara Poetry’, acclaiming the power of the individual literary genius to awaken a nation.

  1909 Translates with Zhou Zuoren and publishes a two-volume collection of foreign fiction, which barely sells. Returns to China and begins teaching physiology and chemistry at the south-eastern city of Hangzhou.

  1911 Writes his first short story, in classical Chinese, ‘Nostalgia’. The Qing dynasty is toppled by republican revolution.

  1912 Sun Yat-sen briefly becomes the first president of the new Republic before ceding leadership to Yuan Shikai, a former Qing general.

  Disappointed by the aftermath of the Revolution, Lu Xun leaves the south-east to take up a job in the new Ministry of Education in Nanjing, then Beijing, where he absorbs himself in antiquarian research.

  1913 ‘Nostalgia’ published in the journal Short Story Monthly.

  1915 The progressive journal New Youth is founded by Chen Duxiu. The Japanese government serves Yuan Shikai with their Twenty-One Demands, asserting greater Japanese economic and political sovereignty over areas of Manchuria and Mongolia.

  1916 Yuan Shikai dies, soon after widespread resistance to his attempt to declare himself emperor breaks out. Military and political control of China lapses into the hands of warlords. Cai Yuanpei becomes chancellor of Beijing University, assembling about him many of the key intellectual players in the New Culture Movement.

  1917 An attempt by Zhang Xun, a local military governor, to restore the Manchu dynasty is swiftly defeated by warlords.

  Qian Xuantong, an editor of New Youth, asks Lu Xun to write something for the journal.

  1918 His first vernacular short story, ‘Diary of a Madman’, published in New Youth under the pseudonym Lu Xun.

  1919 Sets up home in Beijing with his mother, his wife, his two brothers and their Japanese wives.

  On 4 May, violent anti-imperialist demonstrations and strikes break out in Beijing in protest against the decision at Versailles to award Japan territorial concessions in north-east China.

  1921 ‘The Real Story of Ah-Q’ serialized.

  The Chinese Communist Party is founded in Shanghai. Sun Yat-sen forms a Nationalist Party government in Guangzhou. The Beijing government establishes the vernacular as the national language for textbooks.

  1922 Completes his first collection of short fiction, Outcry (published the following year).

  1923–4 Publishes his pioneering Brief History of Chinese Fiction. Following estrangement from Zhou Zuoren, moves out to a separate residence with his mother and wife. Takes various teaching posts in Beijing colleges while still working at the Ministry of Education.

  Sun Yat-sen forms a United Front between the Nationalist Party and the Communist Party, in exchange for Soviet financial and military aid.

  1925 Publishes a collection of essays, Hot Air. Begins a love affair with Xu Guangping, a former student.

  Sun Yat-sen dies of liver cancer. Violent anti-imperialist protests break out across Chinese cities after British-directed police in Shanghai kill eleven demonstrators demanding the release of Chinese students imprisoned by the British. The Nationalist–Communist alliance launches the Northern Expedition, winning a series of victories against warlords in southern and eastern China. Major writers of the New Culture Movement begin to convert to Marxism.

  1926 Publishes his second collection of short fiction, Hesitation. Several of his students are shot and killed by Beijing’s warlord government in a peaceful demonstration. He leaves his job at the Ministry of Education after publicly attacking in print his minister. Lu Xun and Xu Guangping leave Beijing that summer to take up teaching posts in Xiamen (south-east China) and Guangzhou, respectively.

  1927 Joins Xu Guangping in Guangzhou; from there they move together to Shanghai. Publishes a volume of prose poetry, Wild Grass, and two further volumes of essays, Unlucky Star and Grave.

  Chiang Kai-shek, Sun Yat-sen’s successor as leader of the Nationalist Party, launches the White Terror against the Communist Party, beginning a nationwide purge of left-wing activists.

  1928 Publishes another volume of essays, That’s That, and a volume of reminiscences, Dawn Flowers Picked at Dusk. Begins reading and translating Marxist literary criticism. Quarrels publicly with members of the literary left.

  1929 Xu Guangping gives birth to Lu Xun’s only son, Zhou Haiying.

  Establishment of the Jiangxi Soviet in south-east China.

  1930 Makes inaugural speech at the founding of the League of Left-wing Writers, confirming his commitment to revolutionary, proletarian literature.

  Chiang Kai-shek launches his encirclement campaigns to destroy the Communists in Jiangxi.

  1931 The Nationalist government executes five Communist writers, one of whom is a friend of Lu Xun. As the prelude to the 1937 outbreak of the second Sino-Japanese War, the Japanese establish an independent state (Manchukuo) in north-east China.

  1932 Publishes two further collections of essays, Three Leisures and Two Hearts.

  1933 Publishes his correspondence with Xu Guangping, Letters between Two, and a further collection of essays, False Freedom.

  1934 Publishes two further collections of essays, Quasi-Romance and Mixed Accents.

  Eighty thousand Communist troops break out of Chiang Kai-shek’s encirclement of Jiangxi in the south-east, to embark on the Long March to Shaanxi in the north-west.

  1936 Publishes his last collection of fiction, Old Stories Retold, and a further collection of essays, Fringed Literature. Quarrels openly with the Communist literary leadership in Shanghai. Dies of tuberculosis in Shanghai.

  1937 Three-volume essay c
ollection, Pieces Written in a Semi-Concession, published posthumously. Mao Zedong proclaims Lu Xun the ‘saint of modern China’.

  Introduction

  Lu Xun (1881–1936) was born into the fading world of late-imperial China, his childhood spent within the high walls of a traditional Chinese compound – amid the courtyards, gardens, bridges and winding alleys typical of the mansions of provincial grandees. One of the better families of the humid south-eastern town of Shaoxing, his clan had for centuries prospered on the profits of landowning, pawnbroking and government; and through Lu Xun’s early years he and his elders staunchly upheld the social and intellectual orthodoxies of the empire. In 1871 his grandfather Zhou Fuqing had – to the beating of six gongs – received the honour of appointment by the ruling Qing dynasty to the Imperial Academy in Beijing, the pinnacle of the civil service. As befitted the son of a respectable gentry family, Lu Xun was schooled in the cultural archaisms of the Chinese classics. Near the start of his first short story, ‘Nostalgia’, he evoked the tedium of a teacher’s Confucian drone, allowing his schoolboy narrator to fantasize about his tutor falling ill and dying overnight – just to preserve him from another day spent reciting The Analects. In 1926, Lu Xun resentfully recounted from four decades’ distance how his father once forced him to recite from memory thirty lines of The Outline of History (a school primer of the ancient Chinese past) before he was allowed to sail off to watch a gaudy local temple procession: ‘To me, it was all so much gibberish,’ he remembered, contrasting the intellectual pedantry of the classroom with the liberating extravagance of China’s popular folk traditions: his illiterate nurse’s stories of ghosts and demons lurking in the back garden; the phantasmagoria of local operas; the bizarre, monstrous illustrations of the mythological compilation The Classic of Mountains and Seas.1

  His grandfather’s triumph notwithstanding, the young Lu Xun’s domestic landscape bore traces of the stagnation and decline broadly apparent through the society around him. Since the early years of the nineteenth century, the vast Qing imperium had been visibly showing the strains of rampant population growth (generating an acute land shortage, rural destitution and rising food prices) and endemic government corruption. A string of domestic rebellions ensued, which the overstretched state suppressed only by substantially decentralizing power and initiative to local elites and militias. The weakness of the ruling dynasty was in turn exploited, and compounded, by opportunistic European, American and Japanese imperialists. Since the defeat of the first Opium War of 1839–42, Chinese politicians had been struggling to make sense of a new world order in which the Qing’s cultural self-assurance was confidently challenged by alien aggressors scornful of Confucian civilization. Late-Qing China was a country in identity crisis, battling to reconcile the traditions of imperial government and society with the ways of gunboat diplomacy and the modern world.