The Real Story of Ah-Q (7 page)

A green parasol tree, around thirty feet high, towered outside the gate to the family home, every year hanging heavy with large clusters of nuts. Hoping to bring them down, children would hurl stones into the branches, the occasional missile sailing through the canopy to land on my desk, at which point my teacher – whom I respectfully knew as Mr Bald – would stride out to give those responsible a scolding. A clear foot in diameter, the leaves would wilt in the summer sun before springing back – like a fist opening out – in the resuscitating night air. At this point in the day, after drawing water to scatter over the overheated ground, our family’s old gatekeeper, Wang, might gather up a battered old stool and head off with his pipe to swap stories with my amah, Li. And there they would sit and chat, deep into the night, the darkness interrupted only by sparks from his pipe.

While they were out there enjoying the cool of one particular evening, I remember, my teacher was enlightening me on the principles of verse composition – my task being to come up with a poetic match to a given subject. To his ‘Red Flower’, I tried ‘Green Tree’. Objecting that the tonal patterns were not consonant, he told me to go back to my seat and think again. Not yet nine years old at the time, I had not a clue what tonal patterns were; but since my teacher did not seem about to share his mature wisdom with me, I returned to my desk. After a long, fruitless ponder, I very slowly opened out my fist and slapped it resonantly against my thigh, as if I had swatted a mosquito, hoping to communicate to my instructor the extent of my mental discomfort, but he continued to take no notice. On and on I sat, until he at last drawled that I should approach – which I smartly did. He then wrote down the characters for Green Grass. ‘ “Red” and “flower” are level tones,’ he explained, ‘while “green” is falling and “grass” rising. Dismissed.’ I was bounding through the door before the word was out of his mouth. ‘No hopping and skipping about!’ he drawled again. I carried on my way, although more sedately.

The parasol tree was out of bounds. In the past, whenever I had made for Wang, badgering him for stories of the mountain people, my teacher (who, I may have already mentioned, was bald) would follow close on my heels. ‘Wicked child, stop wasting time!’ he would glower. ‘Had your supper? Then go back inside and finish your homework.’ A moment’s hesitation would bring his ruler down, hard, on my head the next day: ‘Wicked, lazy, stupid boy!’ Since my teacher was fond of settling scores in the classroom, in time I chose to avoid the tree. Experience had taught me that the next day would bring me little joy, unless it was a holiday. If only I could fall ill of a morning, then recover of an afternoon, thereby winning myself a half-day’s reprieve; or if my teacher could sicken and – ideally – die. But if neither of these optimal outcomes resulted, I would have no choice but to return to Confucius the following morning.

And there I found myself, the next day, suffering another lecture on
The Analects
, my teacher’s head swinging from side to side as he glossed each and every word. He was so shortsighted he was almost kissing the book, as if he wanted to gobble it up. I was always being accused of not looking after my books: of leaving them in a state of disastrous disrepair less than half a chapter in. Well, they didn’t stand a chance with my snorting, dribbling teacher – their chief instrument of destruction – blurring and mangling the pages far more efficiently than I ever could. ‘Confucius says,’ he was saying, ‘that at sixty his ears were obedient to the truth – that’s “ear” as in ear that you hear with. By seventy, he could achieve his heart’s desire without breaking the bounds of social morality…’ The exegesis was lost on me, because the characters were obscured by the shadow cast by his nose. I enjoyed only a privileged view of his radiantly bald head perched over the page – as a reflecting surface it had none of the clarity of the ancient pond in the back garden, offering me a blurred, bloated, clumsy image of my face.

As time dragged on, my teacher seemed to be deriving unholy enjoyment from the exercise, agitating his knees and giving huge nods of his head. My patience, by contrast, was wearing thin. Although the lustre of his pate succeeded in holding my interest a while, soon even that began to pall, and I began to wonder how much more I could stand.

‘Mr Yangsheng! Mr Yangsheng!’ A strange, blessed voice, shrill with desperation, came from outside the gate.

‘Is that Yaozong?… Come in, come in.’ Looking up from his disquisition on
The Analects
, my teacher walked out to greet his visitor.

I had initially been flummoxed by my teacher’s inexplicably respectful attitude towards this Yaozong – one of the Jins, our neighbours to the left. Though the family was very well-off, he went about in old, ragged clothes, and never ate anything but vegetables, so his face was brown and puffy as an out-of-season aubergine. While he always made a great fuss of me, Wang never made much effort with our miserly neighbour. ‘Hoarding money’s all he’s good for!’ he would often say. ‘And as we never see a penny of it, why should we waste our breath on him?’ It didn’t seem to bother Yaozong, though. He wasn’t half as quick as the old man: whenever Wang was telling his stories, Yaozong just mumbled vaguely in response; he never really understood what they were about. My amah told me his parents still kept him on a short leash, and never let him go out into society – so he could keep up with only the most vacuous conversation. If talk turned to rice, he would be able to grasp only that bald fact – he couldn’t distinguish between the glutinous and the non-glutinous varieties. If it then moved on to fish, he couldn’t distinguish between – say – bream and carp. When he didn’t understand something, you needed to add a great welter of footnotes, most of which he wouldn’t follow either, and which you’d then have to retranslate even more obscurely, generating yet more puzzlement. Since incomprehension was the inevitable result, making conversation with him was never particularly rewarding. To the astonishment of Wang and others, however, my teacher treated him with peculiar deference. I drew my own, private conclusions: I knew that, having failed to generate a son by the age of twenty, Yaozong had hurriedly acquired three concubines. It was around this time that my teacher became a staunch defender of Mencius’s dictum that there were three ways of betraying a parent – of which dying without descendants was the vilest – and promptly invested thirty-one pieces of gold in a wife for himself. His excessive respect for Yaozong was presumably down to the younger man’s virtuosic show of filial virtue. Wang’s unschooled intelligence was no match for my teacher’s bottomless erudition; small wonder he had not plumbed the depths of my learned friend’s thought-processes. I myself had settled upon this explanation only after days of bemused pondering.

‘Have you heard?’

‘Heard?… Heard what?’

‘The Long Hairs are coming!’

‘The Long Hairs?… Ha! Impossible.’

Yaozong’s Long Hairs were the Hairy Rebels to my teacher – the Taipings
¹
to the history books, perhaps. Wang called them Long Hairs, too – he told me he’d been twenty-nine when they came by these parts. As he was over seventy now, it must have been more than forty years ago, so even I knew it was impossible.

‘I heard it from Mr San at Hexu – any day now, he said…’

‘Mr San?’ My teacher – who worshipped the great Mr San as a god – paled and began pacing around his desk. ‘He must have got it from our revered magistrate. Perhaps we should be on our guard.’

‘Maybe eight hundred of them, they’re saying. I’ve sent one of my servants to make further inquiries at Hexu. To find out when they’re actually going to get here.’

‘Eight hundred? Impossible. Maybe they’re just bandits or local Red Turbans.’

My teacher’s power of reason had won out – he knew they couldn’t be Taipings. Though it hadn’t yet dawned on him that Yaozong was incapable of distinguishing between different breeds of outlaw – bandits, pirates, White Hats or Red Turbans were all Long Hairs to him. So my teacher’s new hypothesis was entirely lost on Yaozong.

‘We should be ready to feed them. The guest hall in my house is too small to fit them all in, so I’ve asked to borrow the Zhang Suiyang Temple for the other half of them. Soon as their bellies are full, they’ll leave us alone.’ Despite his dimness, Yaozong had at least gleaned from his parents the art of welcoming invading armies with food and drink. Wang had told me that Yaozong’s father had met the Long Hairs: he had flung himself on to the ground and begged for his life, knocking a big red lump up on his forehead. But he managed to stay alive, at least – and ingratiated himself by running a kitchen to keep them fed, turning a healthy profit on the proceeds. After the Long Hairs were defeated, he managed to get away from them and return to Wushi, where he gradually succeeded in becoming comfortably off. Yaozong’s current plan – of winning them over with a single square meal – was nothing to his father’s ingenuity.

‘Rebels always come to a bad end,’ my teacher pronounced. ‘Look through
The Simplified Outline and Mirror of History
²
and see for yourself – they never get anywhere… Or hardly ever. Fine, give them something to eat. But, my dear Yaozong, don’t get your own hands dirty – let the village headman take care of it.’

‘Quite, quite! And could you write out an Obedient Subjects notice for us to paste on the gate?’

‘No hurry – there’ll be time and enough for that sort of thing if they do come. One more respectful piece of advice, my dear Yaozong. While you don’t want to get on the wrong side of people like this, you mustn’t get mixed up with them either. Back when the Hairy Rebels were up in arms, sticking up notices of submission didn’t guarantee anything, and after the bandits fled, anyone who had surrendered suffered at the hands of government soldiers. Let’s forget about it until they’re about to reach Wushi. Right now you should concentrate on finding somewhere safe for your family to hide – not too far away, though.’

‘Excellent, excellent, I’ll go over to the temple right now to tell the priests about our plan.’

And so Yaozong left us, exclaiming with admiration at the advice he had received; though it was uncertain how much of it he had actually understood. People used to say that my teacher was the cleverest man in the town of Wushi – and with reason. He could have survived, unscarred, through any time, in any place. Since the great creator Pangu cleaved heaven and earth in two, unleashing tireless cycles of bloody chaos and orderly peace, dynasties have waxed and dynasties have waned. And yet, through it all, my teacher’s family – alone in the empire – seem never to have been doomed to political martyrdom or to lose their lives in following rebel causes, left to flourish in tranquillity up to the present day, to preach the wisdom of Confucius (who, let it not be forgotten, by the age of seventy could achieve his heart’s desire without breaking the bounds of social morality) to ungrateful wretches such as me. If one were to try to explain such a phenomenon in evolutionary terms, one might infer my teacher had inherited this mighty talent from his forefathers. I later came to believe, though, that he had picked it up from books. For how could Wang, Li and I – for all our own hereditary resources – possibly compete with the intellectual profundity that he had brought to bear on the afternoon’s dilemmas?

Off Yaozong went, but class failed to resume. Looking rather troubled, my teacher now said he too was going back home, and that I could take the rest of the day off. I bounded joyously off to the parasol tree, undeterred by the summer sun overhead. For once, the territory beneath its canopy belonged to me, and me alone. Before long, I caught sight of my teacher hurrying off, a large bundle of clothes under his arm. In the usual run of things, he returned home only for special festivals or for the New Year, invariably taking with him his multivolume crammers on writing eight-legged civil service examination essays. Today, extraordinarily, he’d left the whole set standing solemn guard on his desk, taking instead the clothes and shoes he stored in his battered old trunk.

Out along the road, I saw ant-like swarms of humanity on the move, their faces covered in terror and confusion – some burdened with possessions, others empty-handed, all running away, Wang told me; most of Hexu seemed to be heading for Wushi, and vice versa. He’d seen trouble like this before, Wang went on, there was no need for us to panic. Li, who had gone round to the Jins’ to ask for news, reported that next door’s servants hadn’t yet left, but that she’d seen a crowd of (she supposed) concubines gathering up powder, rouge, perfumes, silk fans and clothes into suitcases. To the concubines of the well-to-do, flight – it seemed – was a spring outing, for which lipstick and kohl were bare necessities. Being rather too busy just then to make further inquiries of the Long Hairs, I headed off to catch flies, which I subsequently used to tempt ants out of their mounds, trampling them first to death before pouring water into their nests to highlight the deficiencies of their flood defences. All too soon, the sun slipped behind the branches of the tree, and my amah called me to dinner. How had the time passed so quickly, I wondered. On a normal day, I would still have been suffering the torments of poetic consonance, as my teacher grimaced wearily at my efforts. After dinner, Li took me outside. There, as ever, was Wang, enjoying the cool evening air. Unusually, however, tonight he had a great crowd gathered open-mouthed about him, as if transfixed by some demonic creature. Under the bright moonlight, their exposed teeth looked like rows of decaying bone dice.

‘Back then,’ Wang pronounced, in between draws on his pipe, ‘the doorman here was an idiot by the name of Zhao – Fifth Uncle Zhao they all called him. Soon as he heard the Long Hairs were coming, the master told everyone to run away. “Once the master’s gone,” reasoned our man Zhao, “who’s going to protect the house from robbers if I don’t stay on?” ’