The Ultimate China Bookshelf #44: Lu Xun’s The Real Story Story of Ah-Q
An Episodic Novel by China’s Greatest Modernist, published in 1921
“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 4th 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.