“Through this classic study and other writings and talks, the Crooks provided a positive picture of China to the outside world at a time when Cold War simplifications were the norm.” — Delia Davin, The Guardian

“A seminal work, which has been bringing the achievements and challenges of the Chinese agrarian revolution to life for English-speaking readers since 1959.” — The Communist Party of Great Britain (Marxist-Leninist)

“Specialists may want to compare the nuances of "fan-shenning" (literally, "turning over") in Ten Mile Inn with the process in Long Bow, but Fanshen will suffice on the subject for most.” – Kirkus Reviews

Isabel Crook (1915-2023), née Brown, was a Canadian-British anthropologist and professor at Beijing Foreign Studies University (BFSU). Born to Canadian missionaries in Chengdu, she later studied anthropology at the University of Toronto. She returned to China to study the Yi people of Sichuan and then rural families in a village outside of Chongqing.

In 1942 she married David Crook (1910-2000) a British communist who had spent time in Spain with the International Brigades and Shanghai where he had been a spy for the NKVD. Both became sympathetic to the Chinese Communist Party and accepted jobs teaching at BFSU. During the Cultural Revolution, David was imprisoned for five years; Isabel maintained that she forgave his captors while he remained a committed Marxist. 

David died in Beijing in 2000. Isabel died in Beijing on 20 August 2023 at age 107. 

The Book in 150 words:

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Chen is uniquely qualified to write of life in Communist China. — Victor Wilson, El Paso Times

His narrative reveals how few of the joys of life Americans take for granted have been won by the Chinese farmers. Yet he makes a strong case for their betterment beginning with the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. — Floyd Logan, The Indianapolis News

Filled with detailed observations on, and about, his (Chen’s) experiences in Chinese communal living. — The Daily Times (Maryland)

Because this is a book filled with real village people it is filled with real human interest. It is a book for those who really want to know what it is like to live in 1970s rural China. — Maslyn Williams, The Liverpool Echo

Author Bio:

Jack Chen (1908-1995), alternatively Chen I-Wan and Chen Yifan, was the son of the Chinese Trinidadian lawyer and Republican-era Chinese foreign minister Eugene Chan (Chen Youren) and his French-Creole wife Aisy. Chen was a noted artist and cartoonist who spent time living in China, the UK, and the U.S. Chen lived a somewhat peripatetic early life — educated in London, later at Vhkutemas (the Russian state art and technical school), in Moscow before moving to Wuhan to work as a journalist and cartoonist in the mid-1930s. He was a talented artist, exhibiting cartoons, prints, and drawings in Europe and the U.S. to raise support for China in the War of Resistance against Japan. He served in the British military for part of World War II. In 1949 he returned to China, serving as a consultant to Peking Review and other pro-communist party publications in the 1950s. In addition to A Year in Upper Felicity, Chen wrote several other books, including Folk Arts of New China, The Sinkiang (Xinjiang) Story, and The Chinese of America. He died in Berkeley, California in 1995. 

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Fanshen is an extraordinary book. It will dispose of many myths, both those of the Left and of the Right. — C. P. Fitzgerald, The Nation

Fanshen is an important book… It is an arresting narrative [on] the agonizing story of rural China in turmoil… told with a remarkable evenness of temper and a rare understanding of human weaknesses and strengths. The lessons of Long Bow village, so movingly and compassionately recorded… should be studied and restudied by all. — C. T. Hsu, Saturday Review

A vivid and compelling 'grass-roots' account of life in the village precisely during the period in which the new Communist power was establishing itself… [A] unique contribution to our understanding of life in a northern Chinese village on the eve of the Communist takeover. —Benjamin Schwartz New York Times Book Review

One of the most important books about China which has been written since the Revolution… For anyone who wants to understand anything important about the Chinese revolution of our time, the reading of this book is an absolute necessity. — Joseph Needham, London Tribune 

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A modern Graham Greene... into this relatively quiet period for British fiction, someone remarkable and unexpected has emerged fully armed with a formidable, masterly grip on the British novel. At precisely the point where most novelists start to show signs of flagging, Osborne has hit his creative, fictional stride... and has arrived as a thrilling, exceptional talent in British fiction's landscape. — Sunday Times

A searing portrait of addiction and despair set in the glittering world of Macau’s casinos... the novel’s energetic portrait of the highs and lows of a gambler’s fortunes are as good as anything in the literature of addiction. Osborne’s intriguing Chinese milieu and exquisite prose mark this work as a standout. — Publisher's Weekly

The beauty of this novel is in the elegance and precision of its prose, which renders the glaring kitsch of Macau into a series of exquisite miniatures, and draws on Osborne's reserves as a travel writer. — The Guardian

With its ex-pat angst and debauched air of moral ambiguity set amid the sinister demi-monde of the Far East’s corrupt gambling dens, Osborne’s darkly introspective study of decline and decay conjures apt comparisons to Paul Bowles, Graham Greene, and V. S. Naipaul. — Booklist

Author Bio:

Born in England, Lawrence Osborne is the author of the critically acclaimed novels set in atmospheric locales: The Forgiven (Morocco), Hunters in the Dark (Phnom Penh), Beautiful Animals (Hydra), and The Glass Kingdom (Bangkok). He also wrote one of the first novels to be set during the Hong Kong protests, On Java Road. In 2022, The Forgiven was adapted as a movie in 202, starring Ralph Fiennes, Matt Smith and Jessica Chastain. Raymond Chandler’s literary estate commissioned him to write Only to Sleep, a new Philip Marlowe novel. His non-fiction ranges from memoir through travelogue to essay, including Bangkok Days, The Naked Tourist and The Wet and the Dry. His most recent book is a collection of short stories, including one set in Hong Kong, entitled Burning Angel and other Stories. Osborne lives in Bangkok.

The Book in 150 words:

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Easy and enjoyable to read, not conceived for academic purposes, but rather for an intelligent reader who might wish to learn the most important aspects of Macao’s history. A first-time reader might well be carried away by the easy flow of the prose, the witty remarks, the elegance of the author’s style. The ease with which Austin Coates recounted even the most dramatic events, as if holding a lively conversation, demonstrates that his narrative is, in fact, an exceptional history of the city. — César Guillén Nuñez

This magnificent novel brings to vibrant life an exceptional period in the evolution of a great Asian trading city, vividly evoking the unique hybrid culture that developed there.” — David Brookshaw, Professor of Portuguese, University of Bristol and translator of The Bewitched Braid and Visions of China

This is a beautifully written novel, focusing upon a largely forgotten world of shuttered passions and tragic alliances. Martha Merop is surely one of the great characters of fiction, rising above personal tragedy in her determination to send her name into the world.” — Brian Castro, author of Shanghai Dancing and The Garden Book

Austin Coates is an author with far more expertise than others who have tried to explore the history and customs of Hong Kong and Macau. City of Broken Promises is a well-paced and intuitive look at the real-life character, Martha Merop: a lively, gripping and enjoyable tale. — Justin Hill, author of The Drink and Dream Teahouse

Author Bio:

Austin Coates (1922–1997) was a former senior British civil servant in Hong Kong, Malaya, and Sarawak. His reports to the Hong Kong government and British colonial office of conditions, customs and life in the New Territories remain classic reading of the sympathetic and engaged colonial official. Coates left government service at age 40 to pursue a professional writing career. Widely regarded as the most distinguished English-language author in Hong Kong, Coates remained a long-time resident of the British colony and frequent visitor to the nearby Portuguese colony of Macao, dividing his time between Hong Kong and Portugal, where he died. The City of Broken Promises is a companion to his two other books on Macao: A Macao Narrative and Macao and the British. 

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“For the period and the place, there is nothing quite like it.” — South China Morning Post 

“‘Lights and Shadows of a Macao Life,’ the title chosen by Harriet Low for her journal, aptly describes the conflicting emotions of the first American woman to live in China. Making a rude transition from the tranquillity of Salem, Massachusetts into a world of sampans and sedan chairs, women with bound feet and men with queues, the lively young American records a detailed portrait of her life in Macao from 1829-1834” — The Bookseller

“I do not know if such an interesting and frank a record of a girl’s life and thoughts and feelings has been put forward in a published journal before.” — Boston Evening Transcript

“China and Macao through the perceptive eyes of 20-year-old Harriet Low is dazzling.” — Daily News Post (Monrovia, California)

Author Bio:

Harriett Low Hillard (1809-1877) was the second child of eleven of Seth Low, a merchant in Salem, Massachusetts, and his wife Mary Porter Low. At age 20, she accompanied her uncle and aunt, William Henry and Abigail Knapp Low, to China for five years to be her aunt's companion. Upon her return to the U.S. after years of foreign travel and adventure, she found it hard to settle down. In 1836, she married John Hillard, a banker 4 years her junior, and moved to London. A relatively happy marriage in the beginning produced five girls and three boys, including twins. Only the girls survived. Her husband was unsuccessful in business and in 1848, the family returned to the U.S. bankrupt. The disgrace of bankruptcy and her husband's alcoholism caused an estrangement in the marriage. John Hillard died in 1859 and Harriett Low Hillard spent the rest of her life in Brooklyn, New York, supported and surrounded by the Low family. She died in 1877. A bronze drinking fountain dedicated in memory of Harriet Low Hillard, commissioned by her granddaughter Elma Loines in 1910, stands in the Brooklyn Botanic Garden. 

The Book in 150 words:

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"A sharply observant and admirably crafted memoir… A truly original contribution to our understanding of modern China." Jonathan D Spence 

"A literary gem… Zhang deftly crafts the journey of a whole generation, desperately yearning to break away from the ropes of tradition and living to dream the impossible. It's a book to relish, a volume to cherish and mostly, a life to celebrate." — Da Chen, author of Colors of the Mountain

"A beautiful memoir… Our current China literature is heavy with victim memoirs, but this is a true tale of aspiration: a young woman coming of age in a nation desperately trying to do the same."  — Peter Hessler

"Beautiful.... A remarkable memoir... A notable historical document and a vivid, affecting portrait of a young woman's resolve."  — Kirkus

Author Bio:

Lijia Zhang was born in 1964 and raised in Nanjing. After working in a local factory at age 16 and teaching herself English she eventually became a journalist and writer. Her articles have appeared in many publications, including the South China Morning Post, Japan Times, the Independent (London), Washington Times, and Newsweek. She is a regular talking head on BBC Radio and NPR. Her debut novel Lotus, concerning prostitution in Shenzhen, was published in 2017. Since 2018 she has lived full time in London and has attended Goldsmiths, University of London studying creative writing.

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Author Bio:

An American journalist, Leslie T. Chang is a Harvard graduate and former decade-long correspondent for the Wall Street Journal in Beijing. She has also written for The New Yorker, National Geographic, and Condé Nast Traveler. As well as China she has worked as a journalist in the Czech Republic, Hong Kong, and Taiwan. Chang was born in New York the daughter of a physicist. She is married to the author of book #36 on the Ultimate China Bookshelf, Peter Hessler of River Town fame — the first couple to make our esteemed list! Factory Girls was awarded the PEN USA Literary Award for Research Nonfiction and was a New York Times Notable Book. 

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“Riveting; an extraordinary epic” — Mail on Sunday (UK)

“Everything about Wild Swans is extraordinary. It arouses all the emotions, such as pity and terror, that great tragedy is supposed to evoke, and also a complex mixture of admiration, despair and delight at seeing a luminous intelligence directed at the heart of darkness” — Minette Marrin, Sunday Telegraph (UK)

“Immensely moving and unsettling; an unforgettable portrait of the brain-death of a nation’” — J.G. Ballard, Sunday Times (UK)

“Wild Swans made me feel like a five-year-old. This is a family memoir that has the breadth of the most enduring social history” — Martin Amis, Independent on Sunday (UK)

“There has never been a book like this” — Edward Behr, Los Angeles Times

Author Bio:

Jung Chang ( 张戎 Zhāng Róng) was born in 1952 in Yibin, Sichuan Province to Communist Party official parents. She claims her parents came to oppose Mao’s policies during the Great Leap Forward. Chang chose to become a Red Guard at the age of 14. Her parents suffered at the hands of the Red Guards and were expelled from the Party and lost all their previous privileges. Chang, considering herself both a victim and beneficiary of the Cultural Revolution, attended Sichuan University in 1973 and became one of the so-called "Students of Workers, Peasants and Soldiers". When the universities closed she became a peasant, a barefoot doctor, and an unqualified steelworker and electrician.

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“A mesmerizing read... Like a character in a picaresque novel, Mr. Kang stumbles from one misadventure to the next, his big mouth and relaxed habits ensuring disaster at every turn... Mr. Kang serves as an extraordinary guide through an extraordinary period of Chinese history.” – New York Times

"A wonderful book, the detailed coming-of-age accounts will capture teens interested in Chinese history and culture.” – Booklist

“The author's rugged individualism takes his story beyond the usual narrative of persecution and hardship, making it an incisive, personal critique of China.” Publishers Weekly

"A haunting, frightening and ultimately inspiring story, told in sturdy, unadorned prose." –Kirkus

Author Bio:

Kāng Zhèngguǒ 康正果 was born in 1943. Despite the interruption to his education caused by the Cultural Revolution and his expulsion from university in 1965, Kang eventually gained an MA in 1987 from Shaanxi Teachers University. Kang is also the author of Lu Meng (Deer Dreams, 1999), Feminism and Literature (1994), and A Study of Classical Chinese Poetry on Women and by Women (1988) — all yet to be translated into English. Kang was involved in the Tiananmen protests of 1989 and eventually left China. He became a senior lector of Chinese at Yale University in 1984. He lives in New Haven, Connecticut.

The Book in 150 words:

An intimate memoir (translated by Susan Wilf) of everyday life and Communist power from the first days following the establishment of the PRC in 1949 through the Tiananmen Square protests and after. Kang Zhengguo, born into a professional family, grows up a free spirit finding himself drawn to literature. But in Mao's China, his background and interests are enough to condemn him at a young age to a fierce struggle session, expulsion from university, and a four-year term of hard labor in Xian's Number Two Brickyard. Kang then catalogs his extended internment in the Maoist prison camp system. At twenty-eight he is adopted by an aging bachelor in a peasant village, which enables him to start a new life. Rehabilitated after Mao's death, Kang finds himself still subject to the recurring nightmare of Party authority.

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An irrepressible, pugnacious young man, Ma Bo launched a campaign to convince the authorities to reopen his case. The upshot was a period of official ostracism and personal isolation; how he managed to cope with this while suffering the tortures of unrequited love forms a major portion of this compelling memoir. A huge bestseller in China, this richly detailed record is told with raw narrative power. — Publishers Weekly

The stoicism and black humor of Blood Red Sunset reflect the self-awareness of a people helpless before the gyrations of the state above them. The Communist Party had appropriated the Chinese imperial tradition of a lofty emperor on high and humble citizens below. — Ross Terrill, Los Angeles Times

Now, suddenly, a book like Blood-Red Sunset has burst upon the scene, written in a journalistic style (much of it is historical fact), with no stream-of-consciousness, no flashbacks, no magic or mysticism; it is simple, straight narrative, with so few signs of technical sophistication that the writing sometimes appears rough around the edges. That a book like this could set the nation on fire and spark such spectacular reactions is quite amazing. — Liu Binyan, New York Times

A sensationalist autobiographical account by a former Red Guard of his exile and victimization in Inner Mongolia during the last years of the Cultural Revolution. —Kirkus

Author Bio:

Born in 1947 Ma Bo, aka “Old Ghost (老鬼 Lǎo Guǐ)”, has lived most of his life in Beijing. Ma graduated from Beijing University with a degree in journalism. He was condemned as a counterrevolutionary in 1970 for defaming Mao’s wife, Jiang Qing. He wrote Blood Red Sunset in 1988 (published later in 1995), which sold over 400,000 copies in China and a further 15,000 on its first printing in English. Openly supporting the protestors in Tiananmen Square in 1989 he was forced to flee China, first to France, and then to the U.S. There he became a resident scholar at Brown University. Ma returned to China in 1995 to care for his sick mother and has remained in Beijing since then. 

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Qian Zhongshu’s Fortress Besieged is a leisurely picaresque novel, occupying a watershed position in 20th-century Chinese fiction. Drawing on traditional Chinese techniques of social satire and storytelling, the novel also displays the influences of Western modernism. — The Independent (UK)

Fortress Besieged was initially published in China in 1947 and is debatably considered one of the finest Chinese novels of last century and for good reason; it is that rare book that borders on the literary yet defines its goals without losing its readability. — Historical Novels Society Journal

Qian is widely held to be one of China's most significant modern writers, and this novel a landmark in Chinese fiction. But the tradition it works out of is less Chinese than English and comic — Fielding through Dickens — adventures of innocent young men, odd "character" characters, and the linear progression of bumbling one's way into knowledge. — Kirkus

My favorite Chinese novel: a highly amusing comedy of manners that conceals a powerful emotional charge. — Jung Chang, author of Wild Swans

Author Bio:

Qián Zhōngshū (钱锺书, Ch'ien Chung-shu, 1910-1998) was from a conservative Confucian family, his father a university professor in Shanghai and later Nanjing. Surprisingly little detail beyond the basic facts is known of Qian’s life. After a basic primary education in Wuxi he attended two English-language missionary schools in Suzhou and back in Wuxi. He enrolled in the Department of Foreign Languages of Tsinghua University in 1929 where he was taught by many prestigious professors including George Y Yeh (Yè Gōngchāo, 叶公超, Yeh Kungchao). In 1933, Qian was engaged to Yang Jiang, a successful playwright and translator. They married in 1935. Qian received a Boxer Indemnity Scholarship to further his studies abroad at Oxford and then in Paris. In 1939, Qian returned to Shanghai where he was trapped by the war.

After Japan's defeat, Qian worked in the National Central Library in Nanjing, editing its English-language publication, Philobiblon. He later worked as a translator at Peking University and on the translation team for Mao’s collected works. Qian was persecuted in the Cultural Revolution and forced to work as a janitor. After the Cultural Revolution, Qian returned to research, and from 1978 to 1980, he visited several universities in Italy, the United States, and Japan. His work underwent something of a revival in the late 1980s and early 1990s. He died in Beijing in 1998. 

The Book in 150 words:

First published in 1947, Fortress Besieged is a Chinese satirical novel written by Qian Zhongshu. Set on the eve of the Second Sino-Japanese War it is the story of hapless Fang Hung-chien. Returned from studying in Europe with a fake university degree, he meets two “beauties” and his life becomes problematically entangled with theirs. It is widely considered to be one of the masterpieces of twentieth-century Chinese literature. The novel is a humorous tale about middle-class Chinese society in the late 1930s. It has long remained popular in China (though may perhaps be due for a revival if permissible!) following a 1990s TV series and gained a worldwide reputation after it was translated into English in the 1980s. 

Your Free Takeaways:

Marriage is like a fortress besieged: those who are outside want to get in, and those who are inside want to get out. – French Proverb quoted at the start of Fortress Besieged

It is said that “girlfriend” is the scientific form for sweetheart, making it sound more dignified, just as the botanical name for rose is “rosaceae dicotyledonous”, or the legal term for divorcing one’s wife is“ negotiated separation by consent.” Only after Fang Hing-chien had escorted Miss Su around Hong Kong for a couple of days did he realize that a girlfriend and a sweetheart were actually two completely different things.

On his way home Fang Hung-chien mentally drafted the letter to Miss Su, convinced that it would be more appropriate to write it in classical style, since its ambiguity contained a terseness that would make it an excellent tool for glossing over or playing down an error. 

This quarrel was like a summer rainstorm — severe while it lasted but over very quickly. From then on, however, each determined to control himself and avoid saying anything that would start a conflict. 

Why This Book Should be on Your China Bookshelf:

This is a novel (translated into English by Jeanne Kelly and Nathan K Mao) that knows of what it speaks. Qian, who had studied abroad, began work on the book while living in occupied Shanghai during the Second Sino-Japanese War, looking back just a few years to the eve of the war. Within Fortress Besieged Qian encompasses so many character “types” and traits in pre-war Chinese bourgeois-intellectual society, and so many issues that commonly consumed this class. These include successfully studying abroad (Fang fakes his degree when he returns), children becoming leaches on the family purse and lacking sufficient filial piety, falling in with “loose women” and spending all their money on them to no good end, making a bad marriage (in Qian’s case with the alluring but not very suitable Sun Jou-chia). Fang commits just about every “sin” in the Chinese bourgeois family playbook. 

Fortress Besieged was at the time of its publication, and still is, much loved by readers. Partly this is due to its witty observations — comedies of manners novels were not overly common among the interwar Chinese literary community. They tended to be inspired by the Russians, or Left-wing politics, and so books (as we have seen with Mao Dun, Lu Xun, and Lao She in previous entries on the bookshelf) tended to be serious, highlighting the Republican era’s issues with corruption and nepotism, the wide social differences between rich and poor, urban and rural, as well as the iniquities of much of China being under colonial control. Not much room for comedy perhaps.

However, Qian Zhongshu’s novel is genuinely funny in its depictions of, not just the hapless Fang, but the wider calamities facing China and Chinese society. Perhaps we should not laugh, given the devastation and death of the war and all that followed, but it seems readers did indeed want to see, and recognize, the absurdity in their own society while many saw a plethora of revealing and oft-encountered characteristics displayed in Fang. 

Did Qian Zhongshu see elements of himself in Fang Hung-chien? Certainly Fang’s life follows a similar path to Qian’s at times — study abroad, arriving home to high expectations and a society in turmoil. Qian though made a long and very happy marriage with the writer and translator Yang Jiang. But he could obviously see how lucky he had been in that. 

Comedy writing, especially in English translation, is rare in Chinese literature. English readers coming to Chinese novels without having spent any time in the country might come to the conclusion that the Chinese are not a humorous people. Of course, this is not true (as Lin Yutang has shown us in another previous entry on the bookshelf), but humor rarely travels well and is often effectively untranslatable even from reasonably similar cultures. 

Yet Qian’s satire is of a universal nature. We do not have to be Chinese people in the Republican era to understand the high expectations people have of Fang nor his inability to reach them, of being trapped in an unhappy or unsatisfying marriage and the excruciating problem of extricating oneself from the relationship. Surely that is why Fortress Besieged proved so popular with Chinese readers, and, as the late, great Sinologist Jonathan Spence (who perhaps more than most Sinologists continually stressed the importance of reading novels to have a rounded understanding of China) wrote in a foreword to the most recent translation (from Penguin Classics): “Fortress Besieged may not be able to tell us where China is heading now, but it can certainly tell us what China went through on the way.”

Next Time:

Two out of the three novelists we’ve added to the Ultimate Bookshelf in the last few weeks were persecuted in the Cultural Revolution – Lao She driven to suicide; Qian Zhongshu made to do menial work. Who knows what would have happened to Lu Xun had he survived to an old age? The Cultural Revolution casts such a long shadow over modern Chinese history and society, even today. Who can discern how much his experiences in the Cultural Revolution have shaped Xi Jinping? So let’s look now at three very different memoirs of the Cultural Revolution. 

“The book could be considered the most significant Penguin Classic ever published...Lu Xun is critically regarded as the most accomplished modern writer of the most populous nation on earth, and a grasp of his work is thus extremely useful in forming an understanding of much of humanity.” Jeffrey Wasserstrom, Time 

“It is perhaps also not too far-fetched to suggest that the Marxist dogmatists perceived in The Real Story of Ah-Q a realism with sufficient power to undermine even their own adamant and much-vaunted belief in the imminent arrival of a Communist utopia; for not even the most foolhardy dogmatist could ignore the countless acts of political violence and betrayal taking place around him, borne variously of the ruthlessness, ambition, cynicism, fear and ignorance, in all, the darker side of the human condition that Lu Xun had portrayed so vividly… Gloria Davies, the author of The Problematic Modernity of Ah-Q

“Like many realist works written during the 1920s and 1930s, Lu Xun’s True Story of Ah Q has been read as a satire of Chinese national characteristics. The problem with interpreting the work as a social satire is that it tends to perpetuate the set of essentialist cultural myths that many Chinese authors used for self-representation. Upon close examination, Lu Xun's story, an attempt to indict Chinese traditions, is really mediated through such discourses as popular social Darwinism and Eurocentrism.” Rujie Wang, East Asia Journal

“The saint of modern China” Mao Zedong

Author Bio:

Born in 1881 into a scholar-gentry family in Shaoxing, Lu Xun 鲁迅 received a thorough classical education as a child. He resisted his family’s urging to undertake the grueling imperial examinations and began to read foreign literature in Chinese translation wherever he could find it. he studied in China and then Japan (medicine) but at age 25 gave up medicine for literature concerned at China’s weak international position. Inspired by Russian literature and the May 4^th Movement he published “Diary of a Madman” in 1918 as a short story.

After his initial success, Lu Xun concentrated on short story writing with volumes published in 1918 and 1925. Critical of superstition, tradition, and what he perceived as backwardness in Chinese society, he moved to the left and away from the right wing of the Nationalist Party. Though he was a member of the League of Left-Wing Writers and has been canonized by the Communist Party his final years were spent in a bitter spat with the CCP and its notion of ideological orthodoxy. He succumbed to tuberculosis in 1936. 

The Book in 150 words:

Lu Xun’s (Lu Hsun) The Real (or True) Story of Ah Q is looked upon as a masterpiece in modern Chinese literature, combining ideas, satire, and critique — a style of which Lu Xun was a forerunner. The episodic story was written in the later 1910s for the Beijing Morning News. Set in the China of 1911, it is the story of an idiotic, able-bodied everyman from the rural peasant class with little education and no definite occupation. He is a bully to the less fortunate but subservient to those who are above him in rank, strength, or power. He thinks himself superior, even as he is beaten down by tyranny and suppression, and even as the story comes to a climactic, tragic end.

Your Free Takeaways:

“For some years now I’ve been wanting to set down 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 ma is celebrated because of the brilliance of the biography, or vice versa.”  

“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. The captain of the militia was, well, still the captain of the militia.”

“Regrettably, Ah-Q lacked the funds to make good his indemnity. But as, by happy coincidence, it was spring, he was able to do without his cotton quilt, which he pawned for two thousand coppers, enabling him to fulfil the demands of the peace treaty.” 

“Public opinion in Weizhuang was undivided: of course Ah-Q was a villain – he wouldn’t have been shot otherwise.”

Why This Book Should be on Your China Bookshelf:

Choosing one piece of work from Lu Xun is not easy. But we’ve plumped for The Real Story of Ah-Q as perhaps his most famous and well known both in China and around the world. Arguments over what is his best work will rage as long as people argue about modern Chinese literature. I would suggest those unfamiliar with Lu Xun’s work and wanting an English source get hold of the Penguin Classics edition of The Real Story of Ah-Q and Other Tales of China: The Complete Fiction of Lu Xun (translated and with an introduction by Julia Lovell and published in 2009. 

Additionally, Ah-Q soon entered the Chinese national conversation as an expressive shorthand for every blemish on the Chinese national character in the republican period under a steadily more right-wing Nationalist Party and Chiang Kai-shek: the obsession with face, servility before authority — even corrupt authority — and the easy expression of cruelty towards the weak and less fortunate in society, all rooted in ignorance. To say that these social traits have all been eradicated in the 21st century would be foolish and so The Real Story of Ah-Q continues to resonate and be important. Lu Xun would have us mock and detest his character, finding his “moral victories” distasteful at best. But we are soon aware that Ah-Q is merely a product of the society that surrounds him: the bloated Confucian literary tradition, the blind obsequiousness to the literature of previous dynasties, the provincialism of his home town Weizhuang, the mindless reactions of the crowd. 

Throughout, Lu Xun is the narrator, almost becoming part of the crowd scenes and not himself always above and beyond the cultural relics of his fellow citizens. The story culminates in an execution, the ‘monstrous coalition of eyes, gnawing into his soul.’

This ability — not just in Ah-Q, but in many of his other stories — to be both insider narrator and participant point of view relator is a clever literary trick, especially in the short story format where the omniscient narrator’s position must be assumed rapidly. Some writers write instinctively with no thought to style or craft: it simply flows. Other writers, among them Lu Xun, are students of craft, literary critics, dissectors of other author’s works to see their clever tricks. Lu Xun read the Chinese classics and foreign modernists, as well as Dostoyevsky and Dickens. He studied woodcuts and formed a close friendship with the Japanese bookseller in Shanghai, Kanzo Uchiyama, to gain exposure to more work. He also regularly attended readings and exhibitions at the German- and Russian-run Zeitgeist (a pro-Communist) Bookstore along Suzhou Creek. Of course, he was a member of the League of Left-Wing Writers and deeply embedded in the East-West, modernistic hai-pai culture of treaty port Shanghai between the wars.

Lu’s reputation in China today remains, of course, massive: Mao Zedong even called him "the saint of modern China". Communist literary critics praised his work as communist though Lu Xun himself was in constant argument with the Party and all those close to him were purged. It is safe to assume had tuberculosis not taken him, he too would have been purged.

Yet, if we can strip the man of his canonization by the Party, look beyond the simple evaluations of his work by Party critics and “official” China Writers Association critiques, go back to the texts (and perhaps especially The Real Story of Ah-Q), then we can see a writer grappling with modern China, caught between the traditions and backwardness of earlier dynasties and trying to forge a new modern way forward, in literature, the arts and the wider society.   

Next Time:

Next week, our final novel for the time being (though we will be revisiting more Chinese and foreign novels that deserve space on the Ultimate China Bookshelf) is by a writer who (inspired partly by Lu Xun’s The Real Story of Ah-Q in style developed a satirical approach to Chinese society mocking the foibles of middle-class Chinese society in the late 1930s and writing on the cusp of a revolution.