The Real Story of Ah-Q (57 page)

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Lu Xun uses words (‘Hua’ and ‘Xia’) that can also mean ‘China’ for the surnames of both the old man and the revolutionary, infusing the story with an intense historical symbolism.

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An all-purpose Chinese prefix (indicating either affection or contempt) added to personal names, with a roughly diminutive effect; in the case of Ah-Q, one perhaps imagines his interlocutors cannot be bothered to say or remember his full name.

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Chinese semaphore for ‘shame on you’.

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A traditional literary appellation for Beijing.

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Or: 1 September 1924.

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In case the gentle reader is less benighted than Huang San: ‘Gorky’ is transliterated into Chinese as ‘Gao-er-ji’. With Chinese names, the surname (usually one syllable) precedes the given name (of one or two syllables). Regrettably deprived of expertise in the Russian language or in the sinicization of European names, our learned friend has imagined that ‘Gao’ was the great man’s surname, ‘Erji’ his given name. Setting himself modestly up as heir to the great Russian tradition of critical realism, our professor thus believes he has designed his own change of name as a close echo of the transliterated ‘Gorky’: Gao Erchu, to the original Gao Erji.

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The original Chinese writes ‘her’, but ‘him’ makes better sense in the context of Peijun’s later hallucinations.