The Real Story of Ah-Q (15 page)
Read The Real Story of Ah-Q Online
Authors: Lu Xun
Tags: #Lu; Xun, #Short Stories (Single Author), #Fiction, #General, #China, #Classics, #Short Stories, #China - Social life and customs
I asked how things were.
‘Hard.’ He shook his head. ‘Even though my sixth helps out now, there’s still never enough to eat… then there’s the fighting, and people always wanting money off you, you never know what’s coming next. The harvests have been bad, too. Whenever you try to sell any of it off, you pay so many taxes you end up losing money. But if you don’t sell, it’ll just rot.’
He went on shaking his head. None of his wrinkles ever moved – as if they were written on stone. He picked up his pipe and fell silently to smoking, perhaps overwhelmed by thoughts of his troubles.
In answer to Mother’s questions, he told us things were busy at home and that he had to head back tomorrow. When she learnt he had not had any lunch, she told him to go and get himself something in the kitchen.
Once he had gone out, Mother and I sighed over his situation together: too many children, famine, taxes, soldiers, bandits, officials, corrupt local potentates – they’d all taken their pound of flesh. Anything we didn’t need to take with us, Mother said, we should give him; he could take whatever he wanted.
That afternoon, he chose two rectangular tables, four chairs, an incense-burner and candlesticks and a large steelyard. He also said he’d take our straw ash (the stove in our kitchen burned rice straw, and its ashes were good for sandy soil). The day we left, he’d come back with the boat to take everything away.
We chatted again that evening, about nothing in particular. He went back the next morning, taking Shuisheng with him.
We set off nine days later. Runtu arrived early that morning, without Shuisheng but bringing with him this time a five-year-old daughter to keep an eye on the boat. There was no time to talk, what with the business of moving and a constant crowd of visitors – some come to say goodbye, some to take things away, some to do both. By the time we stepped on board that evening, the old house had been swept clean of its contents. Everything – regardless of its age, size, state of repair or desirability – was gone.
Our boat edged forward: deep blue in the descending dusk, the green mountains to either side slipped away behind us.
Hong’er and I stood by the cabin window, gazing into the twilight.
‘When will we be coming back, Uncle?’ he suddenly asked.
‘We haven’t even left yet! How come you’re already thinking of coming back?’
‘But Shuisheng invited me to his house…’ His dark eyes widened, fixated on the prospect.
Both rather saddened, Mother and I began speaking of Runtu again. While they’d been packing up the house, Mother reported, the Bean-Curd Beauty had been round every day. The day before yesterday, she had picked out from the pile of ashes a dozen dishes and bowls, which, she declared after some discussion, must have been buried by Runtu, to take back with him when he came. Exceptionally pleased with this discovery of hers, she flew out of the door, scooping up en route a wooden trough covered over by a grille that we’d once used to prevent dogs getting at chickenfeed. The gaps between the bars were wide enough for chickens to peck their beaks through to get at the grain inside, but too small for dogs, who could only look on, furious with frustration. How she managed to move so fast, on the steep inclines of those tiny bound feet, we neither of us could understand.
Even as we put more and more distance between us and the old place – its house, mountains, rivers – still I felt no nostalgia or regret. I was aware only of the high, suffocating, invisible walls of solitude. That cherished image – of a spirited little boy among the watermelons, with his silver chain – now blurred with sorrow.
Mother and Hong’er fell asleep.
I lay awake, listening to the water lapping against the side of the boat. I knew I was taking my own course in life. And even though Runtu and I were now completely estranged, Hong’er and Shuisheng were just like we used to be. I prayed they would turn out differently to us: I didn’t want them to drift like me, or to suffer numbly like Runtu – nor to anaesthetize themselves with self-indulgence, as others did… I wanted new, different lives for them, lives that we had not lived.
The instant my thoughts turned to hope, I grew fearful. When I saw Runtu take the incense-burner and candlesticks, I had secretly smiled at his worship of idols. But wasn’t my own weakness for hope an idol of my own making? His wishes were immediately material, while mine were distantly vague; that was the only difference between us.
An expanse of dark green seashore hazily unfolded before my mind’s eye, a full, golden moon hanging in a midnight-blue sky. Hope, I thought to myself, is an intangible presence that can neither be affirmed nor denied – a path that exists only where others have already passed.
January 1921
Preface
For some years now, I’ve been wanting to set down for posterity the story of Ah-Q, but time and again have quailed before the difficulty of the task – evidence enough that I am no seeker after literary fame. A biographer hungry for glory must find his own genius mirrored by the genius of his subject, both clinging to each other in the quest for immortality, until no one is sure whether the brilliance of the man is celebrated because of the brilliance of the biography, or vice versa. Contrast my own humble fixation – like that of a man possessed – on recording the life of Ah-Q.
But as I take up my pen to begin this distinctly mortal work, the infinite difficulty of it again deters me. My first quandary is a title. As Confucius says: ‘If a name is not right, the words will not ring true.’ Wise words indeed. Lives are written in a myriad forms: as official biographies of the great and good (archived within our celestial empire’s dynastic histories), autobiographies, legends, unauthorized biographies, as footnotes, genealogies, biographical sketches… I have regretfully discarded them all. Allow me to dance down through the list, beginning at the beginning. What place could the life of the miserable Ah-Q have next to the glorious, official biographies of the rich and famous installed in our hallowed court histories? Autobiography? I am, incontrovertibly, not Ah-Q. If I were to call my account the stuff of legend, it could legitimately be objected that Ah-Q is no god. To ‘unauthorized biography’, I gave some thought: but where is the authorized version? No president has ever ordered his National Institute of Historical Research to create such a memorial to Ah-Q. True, our revered translators have rendered the great Conan Doyle’s
Rodney Stone
as
Unauthorized Biographies of the Gamblers
– though I am willing to bet no official counterpart exists in Britain’s National Archive. But while men of literary genius can take such licence, I have no comparable entitlement. Let us move swiftly on to genealogy: I know neither of any personal blood connection with Ah-Q nor of any request from his descendants to create such a document. ‘Biographical sketch’ again begs the question: where is the full-length version?
This effort of mine, I can only conclude, is the standard, official biography of the man; and yet the debased vulgarity of its content and characters causes me to shy, appalled, from such presumption. So at last, I will fall back on the formulation so often used by our nation’s novelists – the very dregs of our glorious literary tradition – in their constant battle with digression: ‘Now back to the
real story
.’ There:
The Real Story of Ah-Q
it is. Any similarity between the present work and the unforgettable
Real Story of Calligraphy
, by Mr Feng Wu of the Qing dynasty, is entirely unintentional.
My second difficulty lies in how to start. Your average biography generally begins something like this: ‘So-and-so – whose full name was such-and-such – was born in such-and-so.’ But I have no idea what Ah-Q’s surname was. True enough, at one point it was alleged to be Zhao; but the next day, the question became fraught with uncertainty once more. The whole business reared its head, as I recall, around the time that Mr Zhao’s son had romped through the lowest, county-level stage of the civil service examination. His stomach warmed by two bowls of rice wine, his ears buzzing with the triumphant beating of gongs through the village, Ah-Q jubilantly declared to a modest audience, who smartly began to eye him with new, cautious respect, that he was a direct relation of the great Mr Zhao, and senior to the local genius by a clear three generations.
The following day, the local constable summoned Ah-Q to the Zhaos’.
‘You stupid bastard, Ah-Q!’ the honourable Mr Zhao roared, his face blotching crimson at the sight of him. ‘Did you, or did you not, say you were related to me?’
Ah-Q said nothing.
‘How dare you!’ Mr Zhao bore furiously down on him. ‘When has anyone ever called you Zhao?’
Still nothing from Ah-Q, who was starting to look very interested in the room’s escape routes. Mr Zhao charged forward again and slapped him round the face.
‘You scum! D’you look like a Zhao?’
Preferring not to argue the toss on the issue, Ah-Q followed the constable out, rubbing his left cheek. Outside, he received a second, brisk rebuke from the man of the law, who concluded by extracting from him two hundred coppers as compensation. When news of the incident got about, everyone declared that this time Ah-Q had gone too far, that he had been asking for his beating. Likely as not, he was about as closely related to Mr Zhao as he was to the emperor. And even if they
were
related, he shouldn’t have shot his big mouth off about it. After this fiasco, the question of Ah-Q’s genealogy was never revisited; his surname, as a result, to this day remains a mystery to me.
A third dilemma: I don’t even know how to write Ah-Q’s name. In his lifetime, he was generally referred to as ‘Ah-Quei’ (or that was what it sounded like, at least). After his death, when he was firmly consigned to the dustbin of history, no one called him Ah-Quei, or indeed anything at all. Since the present essay is the first attempt ever made to preserve the details of his life for posterity, the question of his name becomes a substantial and primary difficulty. After careful inquiry, I have discovered no Chinese character that corresponds exactly to the sound ‘Quei’. This Quei, then – I have induced – was it in fact
gui
? And, if so, was it the
gui
meaning ‘osmanthus flower’
or ‘noble’
? Now, if his parents had had the foresight to give him a nom de plume, and that name had been ‘Moon Pavilion’, or if he had been born in the eighth lunar month, the
gui
of ‘osmanthus’ would have made abundant sense – for the Moon Festival falls on the eighth month, when the osmanthus blooms. But as, being illiterate and all, he had no nom de plume – or maybe he did, but no one knew what it was – and neither did he ever hint at the month of his birth by distributing party invitations, to settle upon osmanthus
gui
would again constitute irresponsible licence on the part of his biographer. Or again, if he had had a brother called Fu, ‘Prosperous’, then the
gui
of ‘noble’ would have had a strong parallel logic. But since no such sibling has ever been traced, such a spelling is unjustifiable. To be sure, there are other, more recherché characters pronounced
gui
– ‘boudoir’, ‘tortoise’, ‘salmon’, ‘juniper’, etcetera; but they all strike me as even less likely. I have consulted our local scholar and county examination laureate, the learned younger Zhao, on this question, but to my great surprise even this oracle had no light to shed on the matter, although he laid the blame for the confusion on the shoulders of westernizing intellectuals such as Chen Duxiu and his benighted journal
New Youth
.
1
It was their advocacy of the Roman alphabet, he convincingly argued, that had brought the national essence into such terminal decline that no one could fix even on the spelling of Ah-Quei. My last, desperate course was to ask a fellow provincial of mine to trace Ah-Q through his criminal record. After eight long months I finally got a reply: no such individual – by the name of Ah-Quei, Ah-Gui, or anything like it – existed. Though I had no way of finding out whether this was indeed the case, or whether my acquaintance had even looked, neither did I have any other hope of verifying matters. All of which leaves me no choice but to transcribe the mysterious Quei into the English alphabet, abbreviating it for convenience’s sake, to Q: Ah-Q.
2
Which compromise reduces me to the level of those reprobates in charge of
New Youth
. For this I am heartily ashamed of myself, but as the problem defeated even the younger Zhao, I fear I have no better option.