The Real Story of Ah-Q (2 page)

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.

Lu Xun’s own family life seems to have been inflected by a certain
fin de siècle
melancholy: the clan compounds scattered with lonely older wives neglected for younger concubines, and lethargic males – Lu Xun’s father included – stifled by failure in the fiercely competitive civil service examinations (the tests of Confucian orthodoxy that controlled the paths to wealth and social success). In the main courtyard of the mansion in which Lu Xun grew up, a mound of broken tiles commemorated the repairs made to the house after the fourteen-year-long Taiping Rebellion, the most serious of the nineteenth-century revolts that undermined Qing authority. Adjoining was the ‘ghost courtyard’, into which were sunk the graves of the many who had died during the appalling violence.

In 1893 the gentility of Lu Xun’s early years faded into impoverished disgrace when his grandfather was imprisoned for seven years (on suspended death sentence) for attempting to suborn a civil service examiner. Over the following three years, as Lu Xun’s father destroyed his health through a weakness for liquor and opium, the costs of ruinously ineffective medical treatment – together with the bribes necessary to buy the grandfather a stay of execution – undid the family finances. In 1896, after ingesting a series of quack prescriptions from traditional Chinese doctors (sugar cane thrice exposed to frost, monogamous crickets, drum-skin, ink), Lu Xun’s father died of an asthma attack.

By 1899, after a half-hearted attempt at the civil service examination, Lu Xun had turned his back on the Confucian system of education that seemed to have led China (and his family) into disaster, permitting the country to be ‘carved up like a melon’ by foreign imperialists. (A year before his father’s death, China had suffered the humiliation of military defeat against Japan, a country that the Middle Kingdom had always viewed as a cultural tributary.) Instead, he committed himself to Western learning – English, political science, natural sciences, geology and mineralogy – at new-style academies in Nanjing, one of the major east coast cities. His mother wept at his decision, he recalled, ‘which was natural enough, because back then a Confucian education was still the route to respectability. Only the utterly desperate, society deemed, stooped to studying Western sciences. By following the course I had fixed upon, I would be selling my soul to foreign devils, only intensifying the contempt in which we were already steeped’ (p.
16
). A distant uncle of Lu Xun’s charged with keeping an eye on him in Nanjing even instructed him to change his name, presumably to avoid further disgracing the clan through his dubious career choice. In fact, for all their suspect veneer of foreign novelty, these institutions seem to have been rather restrained in their modernizing zeal: a swimming pool originally built to teach aspiring naval officers to swim was filled in and converted into a shrine to the God of War after one of the students drowned in it.

Beginning the reading habits of a lifetime, Lu Xun immersed himself in the mass of translations generated by the late-Qing literary press – of novels (by Dickens, Rider Haggard and others), of Huxley’s
Evolution and Ethics
– and in the nationalist sermons of the leading reformist intellectuals of the day, Yan Fu and Liang Qichao. It was Yan and Liang’s sense of a modern, international world that threw late-imperial Confucianism into a provincial, complacent light, convincing Lu Xun and others like him that China was no longer the centre of the civilized world, but one nation among many struggling for survival in a global system dominated by the West. For the time being, Lu Xun replicated Liang’s utilitarian visions for saving China through science, technology and constitutional reform: ‘A glorious future unfurled in my mind,’ Lu Xun later recalled of his Nanjing years, ‘in which I would return to my homeland after graduation and set about medicating its suffering sick – people like my father, to whom Chinese doctors had denied a cure. In times of war, I would become an army doctor, all the while converting my fellow countrymen to the religion of political reform’ (p.
16
).

Dissatisfied with the training he had picked up at the Nanjing Academy (‘climbing a mast a few times did not qualify me as a sailor’
²
), Lu Xun, like many ambitious and patriotic young men of his generation, decided to leave China to study Western science overseas, enrolling in a Japanese medical school in rural Sendai. In 1906, at the close of a biology lecture in his second year, one of his teachers showed the class a slide depicting a scene from the Russo-Japanese War of 1904–5, part of which was fought on Chinese territory disputed by the two nations. A crowd of Chinese apathetically watched while one of their compatriots was beheaded by the Japanese as a Russian spy. ‘Though they were all of them perfectly sturdy physical specimens,’ Lu Xun later remembered in the Preface to his first short-story collection,

A few months after this Damascene moment – the most famous conversion in modern Chinese literature – Lu Xun abandoned his medical studies and began a career as self-appointed literary physician of China’s spiritual ills.

Lu Xun was not alone in identifying literary culture as the key to China’s survival. By 1902, the reformists Yan Fu and Liang Qichao had begun to prize vernacular fiction as an essential vehicle of political enlightenment. While bemoaning the degeneracy of Chinese writing – ‘Chinese novels teach us either robbery or lust’ – Liang commented that in Western countries ‘a newly published book could often influence and change the views and arguments of the whole nation. Indeed, political novels should be given the highest credit for being instrumental in the steady progress made in the political sphere in America, England, Germany, France, Austria, Italy, and Japan.’
³
Why, Liang asked, were the Chinese at present superstitious, avaricious, obsequious, heartless and crafty? ‘All because of our fiction.’
⁴
Traditionally scorned by scholarly elites as a disreputably popular form beyond the orthodox Confucian pale of classical history and poetry, vernacular fiction was now speedily promoted up the literary hierarchy. ‘If one intends to renovate the people of a nation,’ Liang enthused, ‘one must first renovate its fiction.’
⁵
Previously the preserve of a small, overeducated elite, literature was now recast (by another small, overeducated elite) in a utilitarian, collective mould. Lu Xun’s vocational epiphany, with its powerful evocation of the lone, enlightened intellectual pledging to transform the benighted Chinese masses, was mired in the uncertainties of this new nationalist vision: in a combination of high-minded contempt and patriotic sympathy that he would later shape into a fictional oeuvre of ingenious moral ambiguity.

For more than ten years, however, Lu Xun’s personal ambitions for regenerating China through writing foundered: a magazine,
New Life
, failed before it had produced its first issue; only forty-one copies were sold of a one thousand five hundred print-run of translations of new European fiction; and a Romantic manifesto proclaiming the writer a demonic midwife to a nation’s rebirth was read by almost no one.
⁶
He discarded his first short story in 1911, too dissatisfied even to give it a name. It was his brother Zhou Zuoren (himself destined to become a celebrated essayist and literary scholar) who entitled it ‘Nostalgia’ and guided it towards publication two years later. After returning to China in 1909, Lu Xun meandered through a number of unsatisfactory teaching posts in his native province. Initially enthusiastic about the 1911 Revolution that brought to an end some two thousand years of imperial rule, he soon grew disillusioned with the warlord regime that swiftly took over local government, and escaped to a post in the new Ministry of Education in Beijing.

Lu Xun would later write of these years as a search for ‘intellectual narcotics’ to soothe the disappointment of his radical hopes (p.
18
). Returning to traditional literati pursuits, he bought old books, edited classical texts, researched pre-modern Chinese fiction and reconstructed ancient tombstone inscriptions. He also began drinking heavily, a habit that stayed with him for the rest of his life. But through the years of Lu Xun’s early failures and self-imposed exile from the world of cultural reform, the contradictory principles of his later literary personality emerged. Patriotism battled against his disgust for a diseased China; an early belief in the power of the crusading literary genius was corroded by a self-mockery at the futility of his own demagogic impulse; and an evolutionary hope for the future remained in thrall to the ghosts of the past.

By 1916, the new Republic had regressed into authoritarianism, when the president (and former Qing-dynasty general), Yuan Shikai, tried to have himself crowned emperor. Following his death later that year, his subordinates divided the country into personal warlord enclaves and began battling each other for overall control. Taking advantage of China’s post-revolutionary chaos, the Japanese government had in 1915 served Yuan Shikai with their Twenty-One Demands, asserting greater Japanese economic and political sovereignty over areas of Manchuria and Mongolia; after a few months of negotiations, Yuan capitulated. Four years later, the British, French and Americans at Versailles rewarded Japanese naval assistance in the First World War with a large slice of north-east China. Indignant Chinese youth responded by plunging into the protest of the May Fourth Movement – a surge of nationalism named after the violent anti-imperialist demonstrations of 4 May 1919.

The intellectual backdrop to the turmoil of 1919 was already in place by 1916, with the formation of a group of progressive scholars and writers at Beijing University and at the editorial board of
New Youth
, the flagship journal of May Fourth enlightenment. Abandoning the moderation of earlier reformers who had searched for a reconciliation between modern Western and traditional Chinese values,
New Youth
’s editor-in-chief, Chen Duxiu, and his associates challenged China to move in a radically new direction. The basic task, proclaimed Chen, was ‘to import the foundation of Western society – that is, the new belief in equality and human rights. We must be thoroughly aware of the incompatibility between Confucianism and the new belief, the new society, and the new state.’
⁷
Their project was to clear out – by means of thoroughgoing westernization – the horrors of traditional China (‘hypocritical, conservative, passive, constrained, classicist, imitative, ugly, evil, belligerent, disorderly, lazy’) and replace them with the dream of a ‘sincere, progressive, activist, free, egalitarian, creative, beautiful, good, peaceful, cooperative, industrious’ new nation.
⁸