Ah Q and Others

Front matter

{| || ||

SELECTED STORIES OF Lusin

|}

Cloud over Luchen

sun gradually gathered up its yellow rays along the mud banks of the river, the scorched leaves of the tallow trees seemed to recover their breath and a few striped mosquitoes began to buzz underneath the trees. The smoke died out in the chimneys of the peasants' homes facing the river. Women and children sprinkled water on the dusty ground in front of their own houses and set out low tables and benches. It was supper time.

The old folks and the men sat on the low benches and chatted, wielding huge palm fans. The children ran about or squatted under the tallow trees and played with pebbles. The womenfolk carried out kan-ts'ai and brown rice, hot and steaming. A pleasure boat went by, carrying a party of literary aesthetes, who, watching the scenes along the banks, were inspired to poetic sentiment about the villagers, uttering, "Unreflecting and without a worry in their heads—this is truly Rural Bliss."

But the sentiments of these literary lights did not exactly accord with the truth, for they could not hear what old Mrs. Nine Pounds was saying. She was at that moment greatly put out by things in general: beating upon the leg of her stool with her frazzled palm fan for emphasis, she was saying,

"I have lived seventy-nine years and I have lived long enough. I do not want to see these signs of family decline. It is better that I died. In a moment we'll be eating supper, and yet she is eating toasted beans. She'll eat us poor!"

Her great-granddaughter Six Pounds, who was just then coming toward the supper table, thought better of it at the sight of the querulous woman. She ran to the river's edge and hid behind a tallow tree. Then she put out her little head adorned with two hornlike braids and said in a loud voice, "The old Would-Not-Die!"

Though old Mrs. Nine Pounds was of venerable age, she was not very deaf. However, she did not seem to have heard her granddaughter, and continued, "This proves that each generation is worse than the last!"

This village has a peculiar custom. When a baby is born, it is usually weighed and the weight in pounds becomes the milk name of the infant. After old Mrs. Nine Pounds had celebrated her fiftieth birthday she gradually became one of those who mourn for the good old times. When she was young, she said, the weather was not as hot as now, nor were the beans quite as hard. Her perpetual theme was that the world today is all wrong. Moreover, Six Pounds weighed three pounds less at birth than her great-grandfather, and one pound less than her father Seven Pounds. To the old lady these were indisputable proofs of her contention. Therefore she repeated with emphasis, "Truly, each generation is worse than the last!"

Her grand daughter-in-law Sister Seven Pounds came up with the rice basket as this sentiment was repeated and emphasized. She plumped down the basket on the table and said in a tone of vexation, "There you go again. When Six Pounds was born was she not actually six pounds and five ounces? Besides, your scales were specially made for you, with eighteen ounces to the pound. If a real sixteen-ounce scale had been used, our Six Pounds would have been over seven pounds. Come to think of it, grandfather and father might not have been actually nine or eight pounds. The scales used might have been only fourteen-ounce scales."

"Each generation worse than the last!"

Before Sister Seven Pounds answered, she suddenly espied her husband coming out of the lane. Thereupon she shifted the direction of her attack and shouted at him, "A fine time for you to be coming home, you dead corpse! Where did you hide off to die? You never care how long people hold up dinner for you, do you?"

Although Seven Pounds lived in the village, he was no ordinary peasant. Three generations, from his grandfather's time to his own, the men of his family had not touched the handle of a hoe. Like many other men of a more progressive nature, Seven Pounds made his living as a boatman. He made a round trip each day, in the morning from Luchen to the city and back to Luchen again by nightfall. Because of this he was well abreast of the times. For instance, he knew that at such and such a place the Thunder God struck dead a centipede monster, or that at such and such a place a maiden gave birth to a yaksha demon, and things of a like nature. He was, therefore, something of a personage in the village. However, in his family supper was still served without benefit of lamplight during the summer months, as was the custom of peasants, and he deserved a scolding for coming home so late.

Seven Pounds approached slowly, his head bowed, and sat down on a bench. In his hand he held a pipe with a brass bowl and an ivory mouthpiece and a stem of mottled bamboo more than six feet long. Six Pounds sneaked out from behind the tree and sat down beside him, greeting him, "dieh-dieh," but Seven Pounds paid no attention to her.

"Each generation worse than the last!" old Mrs. Nine Pounds said again.

Seven Pounds raised his head slowly and said with a sigh, "The Emperor has mounted the Dragon Throne."

For a moment Sister Seven Pounds was stupefied by the announcement, but then said with comprehension, "This is fine, for does it not mean that there will be general pardon by imperial grace?"

Seven Pounds sighed again and said, "I have no queue."

"Does the Emperor require queues?"

"The Emperor requires queues."

"How do you know?" Sister Seven Pounds asked, somewhat alarmed.

"Every one in the Hsien Heng wine shop says so."

Sister Seven Pounds began to feel that things looked black indeed for her husband, if they said so at the Hsien Heng wine shop, the chief source of news for the village. Glancing at her husband's shaven head, she could not suppress a mounting anger and resentment against him for having jeopardized his own safety. She almost hated him. In despair she filled a bowl with rice and thrust it in front of him and said, "You had better eat your rice. You will not grow a queue by pulling a long face!"

Imperceptibly the sun gathered up its last rays and the river recovered its coolness. The clatter of chopsticks and bowls echoed all over the open space and beads of sweat began to form on everyone's back. After finishing her third bowl of rice, Sister Seven Pounds glanced up and her heart began to beat violently when she saw fat, short Mr. Chao the Seventh coming toward them across the single-log bridge. What distressed her most was the fact that Mr. Chao was wearing his long gown of blue cotton cloth.

Mr. Chao was the proprietor of the Mao Yuan wine shop in the neighboring village and the most distinguished personage within a radius of thirty li. Because he was something of a scholar, he had about him the air of a man who had seen better days. He owned some ten odd volumes of the Romance of Three Kingdoms, with commentaries by Chin Sheng-t'an, and used to sit over them and read aloud word by word. The extent of his erudition was such that he not only knew the names of the Five Tiger Generals but also their derived names. He knew, for instance, that Chao Yun's derived name was Tzu-lung, Chang Fei's was Yi-te and so on. After the Revolution he coiled up his queue on top of his head, like a Taoist priest. He used to say with many a sigh that if Chao Tzu-lung were alive today, the world would not have come to such grief. Sister Seven Pounds had good eyes; she immediately noticed that Mr. Chao had not coiled his hair on top of his head like a Taoist priest but wore it in a queue with the familiar, closely shaven circle around it. From this she concluded that the Emperor must certainly have mounted the Dragon Throne, that wearing the queue was obligatory, and that Seven Pounds' position was most surely of a very precarious character. For Mr. Chao never wore that long gown of his except on special occasions. In the last three years he had worn it only twice, once when pockmarked Ah Ssu, with whom he once had a quarrel, fell ill, and again when Mr. Lu, who once wrecked his tavern, died. This was the third time and it could only mean that he was celebrating something lucky to himself but unlucky to his enemies.

Sister Seven Pounds remembered that two years earlier her husband had, under the influence of liquor, insulted Mr. Chao by declaring that he was born of a "cheap womb." Therefore she immediately feared for Seven Pounds and she could not still her pounding heart.

As Mr. Chao approached, those who were sitting stood up and said, pointing to their bowls with their chopsticks, "Mr. Seven, please join us!" Mr. Chao nodded and said, "Please go ahead, please go ahead. " He went straight to Seven Pounds' table, where he was greeted in the same fashion and returned the same answer. He looked at the fare of rice and steamed kan-ts'ai.

"How fragrant your kan-ts'ai is! Have you heard?" he asked, standing behind Seven Pounds and opposite Sister Seven Pounds.

"The Emperor has mounted the Dragon Throne," Seven Pounds said.

Sister Seven Pounds watched Mr. Chao's face and said with a placating smile, "Now that the Emperor has mounted the Dragon Throne, when are we going to have the general pardon by imperial grace?"

"General pardon by imperial grace? The general pardon will undoubtedly come in time," Mr. Chao said, and then continued with sudden severity, "But where's Seven Pounds' queue? Yes, the queue is an important matter. Do you know that during the Rebellion of the Longhairs it was a case of 'grow your hair and lose your head or shave your hair and save your head?

Seven Pounds and his wife had never had any book learning and so did not quite understand the allusion. But since the learned Mr. Chao said so, the situation must be very grave and unalterable. It was as if the death sentence had been pronounced. Seven Pounds was left speechless with a ringing in his ears.

"Each generation worse than the last," old Mrs. Nine Pounds took the opportunity to voice her grievance to Mr. Chao. "The rebels today only cut off people's queues, making them look like neither monk nor priest. But were the Longhair rebels like this? I have lived seventy-nine years and I have lived long enough. The Longhairs of the old days used whole bolts of red satin to wrap around their heads, with the loose ends hanging down as far as their feet. The Longhair kings used yellow satin, also dangling down to the feet. Yes, yellow satin and red satin, dangling down … I have lived long enough; I am seventy-nine years old."

Sister Seven Pounds stood up and murmured to herself, "What are we going to do? All of us, old and young, depend upon him for our living."

Mr. Chao shook his head and said, "That can't be helped. The punishment for not having queues is clearly written in the book. They don't take into account family circumstances."

When she heard that it was clearly written in the book, Sister Seven Pounds gave up all hope. She felt quite helpless and in her helplessness her resentment turned toward Seven Pounds. She pointed at the tip of his nose with her chopsticks and said, "He has brought all this upon himself, the dead corpse! When the rebellion started I told him that he should give up poling boats for the time being and should not go into the city. But he insisted on going into the city—on rolling into the city—and when he got there they got hold of him and cut off his queue. Formerly he had a nice, silky, black queue and now he looks like neither monk nor priest. It is all well and good for the jailbird to bring this upon himself, but what have we done? What are we going to do? You walking corpse of a jailbird!"

The villagers had by now hurried through their meal and were gathered around Seven Pounds' table. Conscious of the fact that he was something of a personage. Seven Pounds felt acutely the shame of being scolded by one's wife in public. He raised his head and gently remonstrated, "It is very well for you to say these things now, but, at the time, you …

"You walking corpse of a jailbird!"

Among the onlookers Sister Eighteen was the most kindhearted. With her two-year-old son in her arms—he was born after the death of her husband—she was standing beside Sister Seven Pounds. She felt sorry for Seven Pounds and tried to put in a word for him, saying, "Sister Seven Pounds, let him be. People are not gods, so who is to foresee what is to come? And did you not say at the time, Sister Seven Pounds, that it was not so bad, after all, to be without a queue? Besides, there has been no official proclamation by his honor the magistrate."

Before she had heard it all, Sister Seven Pounds was already red around the ears. She pointed her chopsticks at Sister Eighteen's nose and said, "What are you talking about, Sister Eighteen? As far as I can see I am the same person now as I was then, so how could I have said such a stupid thing? On the contrary, I cried for three days and three nights as everyone knows. Even Six Pounds, the little devil, cried."

Six Pounds had just finished her bowl of rice. She held out her empty bowl and asked for more. Whereupon, Sister Seven Pounds, who was looking for some object for her displeasure, brought down the points of her chopsticks on the child's head right between her hornlike queues and shouted, "Who told you to butt your snout into this, you men-keeping little widow!"

Crash, the empty bowl fell from Six Pounds' hand. It landed on the edge of a brick and a large piece broke off. Seven Pounds jumped to his feet, picked up the broken bowl, pieced it together, and examined it. "Your mother's 2" he shouted and with one slap knocked down Six Pounds, who lay there crying. Old Mrs. Nine Pounds took her hand, helped her up, and led her away, saying "Each generation worse than the last."

Sister Eighteen was also aroused, and said in a loud voice, "Sister Seven Pounds, you are 'pointing at the chicken while really cursing the dog.

Mr. Chao had been an onlooker until Sister Eighteen said "besides, there has been no official proclamation by his honor the magistrate." This angered him. Now he stepped forward and said, To point at the chicken while really cursing the dog' is a small matter at a time like this. The imperial troops will soon be here. Now you must know that the protector of the imperial equipage this time is Marshall Chang, a descendant of Chang Yi-te of Yen. With his eighteen-foot snake spear, he has the strength of ten thousand warriors. Who can stand up against him?" He grasped his hands into fists, as if holding an invisible snake spear, and lunged forward toward Sister Eighteen saying, "Can you stand up against him?"

Sister Eighteen, child in arms, was trembling with passion but she was nevertheless frightened to see Mr. Chao, his face full of grease and sweat, his eyes bulging, lunge at her. She did not dare answer, but turned around and walked away. Mr. Chao also walked off. The onlookers blamed Sister Eighteen for bringing this upon herself. They made way for Mr. Chao; several men without queues, who had been trying to rectify the lack by growing one, dodged behind others so as not to be seen by him. Mr. Chao did not try to search them out. He walked through the crowd and, as he turned behind the tallow trees, he repeated, "Can you stand up against him?" He stepped upon the single-log bridge and sauntered off.

The stupefied villagers all admitted to themselves that indeed no one of them was able to stand up against Chang Yi-te and that consequently Seven Pounds must forfeit his life. Since Seven Pounds had committed a crime against His Majesty's laws, he had no business to be so proud and self-satisfied as he related the news he had gathered on his daily trips to the city. Consequently they felt pleased at the fix that Seven Pounds found himself in. They wanted to express themselves on the point, but found they really had nothing to say.

The buzzing grew louder as the mosquitoes flew past the naked backs to hold converse among themselves under the tallow trees. The crowd slowly broke up; one by one the villagers went home, shut their gates and went to bed. Sister Seven Pounds did likewise, grumbling all the while as she gathered up the supper things and took away the table and benches.

Seven Pounds took the broken bowl home and sat upon his doorsill, smoking. But in his worry he forgot to puff at his pipe, and it went out. He knew that the situation was very critical, and he wished to think of some way out, some remedy, but his ideas were vague and disjointed and there was no way to connect them up. "Queue, queue, how about the queue… Eighteen-foot snake spear … Each generation worse than the last … The Emperor upon his Dragon Throne … The broken bowl must be taken to the city to be mended … Who can stand up against him… It is clearly written in the book … His mother's 2"

The next morning Seven Pounds poled the boat from Luchen to the city and returned in the evening as usual. At supper he told old Mrs. Nine Pounds that he had had the broken bowl mended in the city. The part broken off was very large and required sixteen brass clasps at three cash each, a total cost of forty-eight cash.

Old Mrs. Nine Pounds was dissatisfied as usual and said, "Each generation worse than the last. I have lived long enough. Three cash a clasp! But what sort of clasps are these? In the old days the clasps were different. I have lived seventy-nine years …

From then on, although Seven Pounds went to the city as usual, a certain gloom hung over his household. The villagers avoided him, no longer caring to come to him for news of the city. Sister Seven Pounds had no civil words for him and frequently called him "jailbird."

One evening about ten days later, Seven Pounds returned from the city to find his wife in good spirits. "Did you hear anything in the city?" she asked him.

"I heard nothing."

"Has the Emperor mounted the Dragon Throne?"

"They did not say."

"Didn't anyone at the Hsien Heng tavern say anything about it?"

"No one said anything there either."

"I think the Emperor is not going to mount the Dragon Throne after all. I passed by Mr. Chao's shop today and saw that he was reading his books again. His queue is again coiled up on top of his head and he did not wear his long gown."

"Mm …

"Don't you suppose that the Emperor is not going to mount the Dragon Throne after all?"

"I suppose, perhaps not."

Seven Pounds has long since recovered the respect of the villagers and of his wife and is treated by them with the consideration due to a person of his standing. Now as they are gathered in the open space before their respective gates for their summer meals, they again greet one another with good-natured laughter. Mrs. Nine Pounds celebrated her eighteenth birthday long ago, and is as disgruntled and strong as ever. The two hornlike queues of Six Pounds have now grown into one braid. Although she has just begun to bind her feet, she is still able to help Sister Seven Pounds with the household chores. She is seen hobbling about the open space along the river bank now, the bowl with sixteen brass clasps in her hand.

Introduction

the average American who gets his ideas about China from the movies and detective stories, China means Charlie Chan, Fu Manchu, and other nameless but equally familiar figures, it means chop suey, and Chinatown shop fronts covered with picturesque but meaningless hieroglyphics. Upon this fantastic hodgepodge of inventions and half-truths, sympathetic writers have in recent years superimposed a sentimental montage of a land where peace and tradition reign, where every earth-turning peasant is unobtrusively a philosopher. Now, sympathetic and flattering as this picture is, it has brought China no nearer to the American people and made China no more real. The fact is that there is no short cut to mutual respect and understanding between peoples any more than there is between individuals, the claims of the experts in how to perpetuate the honeymoon and how to win friends to the contrary notwithstanding.

One of the best ways of arriving at a real understanding of a country is undoubtedly through its literature, the richest, the most revealing and the most imperishable of national heritages. In these stories of Lusin, acclaimed the greatest of modern Chinese writers in his own country, the reader will be able to get glimpses of China through the eyes of one of its keenest and most original minds. Here he will find none of the considered sympathetic treatment at the bottom of which often lurks condescension; he will encounter no apologia that is invariably the earmark of Ah Q-ism and a sense of inferiority. Lusin was not constrained to be polite because he wrote primarily for a Chinese audience; he was not constrained to gloss over or to explain away China's sore spots or disguise her weaknesses because he had faith in China and was conscious of her strength.

The reader will find here not only the plainest speaking yet to come out of China, but some of the very plainest speaking anywhere since Swift hurled upon us the epithet of Yahoo and pronounced us the most despicable and unteachable of all God's creatures. Above all, he will find in Lusin, for the first time in all Chinese history, a full embodiment and expression of that quality of indignation and that spirit of revolt which we usually associate with the European temperament and without which it is impossible to achieve freedom and progress. At first glance it may seem far-fetched to link Lusin's indignation with the magnificent struggle for freedom that China has been carrying on against Japan. Nevertheless, just as the spirit of acceptance and resignation which until recently dominated China was responsible for her submission to the rule of alien dynasties in the past, so is the new spirit of indignation and revolt which found its fullest expression in Lusin responsible for her determination to carry on her battle for freedom.

Lusin was, indeed, the spiritual offspring of the West, though he had no first-hand contact with Western civilization. It was the spirit of revolt in Western literature that encouraged his rebel heart to speak out. It was the realistic and psychological fiction of the West that brought home to him that fiction could be made an instrument of social criticism and reform. It was, finally, by contrast with the Western temperament that he was able to see the weakness in the Chinese character and to apply to it the outspoken criticism it had so long needed. In him the modern spirit first matured in a Chinese mind and through him and others like him became the dominant spirit of the Chinese nation. In Lusin that spirit manifested itself in a revolt against and denunciation of "man-eating men"; in the Chinese people as a whole it manifested itself in the conception of nationalism. He represented the first real break from traditionalism that any Chinese has been able to achieve.

These stories of Lusin will not, therefore, interest those who think of China as a dead civilization with only a past to recommend it; they will interest even less those to whom China represents an idea and a perfection either because they happen to be enchanted with the grandeur and symmetry of the palace architecture of Peking or because they so thoroughly enjoyed what to them was the Chinese way of life during their stay in that land of idle and yet happy masters and of toiling and even happier coolies and servants. They may even shock and displease those Occidentals and Chinese who make it their profession to tell the Western world what a wonderful country China is (or was, if they happen to be those who pine for the olden times) and what a happy people the Chinese are in spite of their squalor and disease.

These translations are addressed, rather, to those whose interest in humanity goes deeper than its outward trappings and who are tired of the unreal and impersonal representations of life that the average admirer of China finds so charming in traditional Chinese literature and art. To them these stories of modern China will come like a breath of fresh air that sweeps across a putrid swamp, cleansing and revitalizing its atmosphere, and they will welcome Lusin as a symbol of China's awakening and as a promise that China will play its part, for better or for worse, in the unceasing drama of humanity.

Lusin's real name was Chou Shu-jen. He was born on September 25, 1881, in Shao-hsing (the "city of S2" in several of his stories), Chekiang province. At the time, China was very much as it had always been, self-satisfied and unwilling to learn in spite of the shocking revelations of the country's weakness in the debacles of Opium War in 1841 and the Anglo-French occupation of Peking in 1860. Attempts at reform along Western lines were sporadic and halfhearted: for example, in 1876 China sent abroad the first group of students to study Western methods of war and technology; at home, that same year, she reclaimed and destroyed a product of Western engineering—the country's first railroad, a ten-mile stretch between Shanghai and Woosung that had been built by British concessionaires. Throughout these years the country as a whole was as complacent as if nothing had happened; the Chinese took comfort in the Ah Q-ish delusion that though China was defeated in war she was nevertheless superior to the barbarians from the West and that in the end the superiority of her civilization would enable her to prevail by her famous process of assimilation.

Lusin belonged, therefore, to the older generation. During his early years, his family was well-to-do and he was prepared for the examinations as were most young men in similar circumstances. Family reverses, however, made it necessary for him to seek admission into one of those much despised "foreign" schools established by the government. These schools were not only free of tuition but also provided students with room and board and a small amount of spending money. In 1898 Lusin entered the Naval Academy at Nanking and later the College of Railway and Mines in the same city. Here for the first time he came into contact with Western learning. He was particularly excited by Yen Fu's translation of Huxley's Evolution and Ethics which appeared in 1898. Early in 1902 he went to Japan on a government scholarship, and after studying the Japanese language in a preparatory school in Tokyo, entered the Sendai Medical College in 1904. But he did not finish his medical course. The apathy of the Chinese in general toward the Russo-Japanese War (which was fought, it will be recalled, on Chinese soil) disgusted him and made him realize that it was just as important to stir a people out of its mental and spiritual lethargy as to cure its physical ills. He decided to give up the study of medicine and to devote his life to literature, which was, he was convinced, the best means of awakening the Chinese people.

His own preference had always been, as a matter of fact, literary matters. He was an omnivorous reader even as a child and had the industrious habit of the Chinese scholar of copying out extensive passages from the books he read, sometimes entire works that were not easily available or which he could not afford. After his arrival in Japan he devoted all his spare moments to reading Japanese translations of important European works, especially history, philosophy, and literature.

But he was, unfortunately, too far ahead of his time. His generation as a whole were still under the delusion that a new political window dressing was all that was necessary for the salvation of China, just as the generation before had labored under the delusion that China was superior to the West in everything but methods of warfare.

The students at Tokyo in those days were mostly interested in subjects that led to profitable jobs when they went back to China—in politics, law, police administration, and more rarely science and technology. They could not see why Lusin chose to follow so useless a pursuit as literature. His efforts to launch in Tokyo a literary magazine to be known as New Life ended in failure and his essays calling attention to the spiritual aspects of Western civilization went unnoticed.

Undoubtedly, however, these essays will be regarded as the most important documents in the history of the intellectual revolution in China. For here we have the first indication of a Chinese appreciation of the spiritual aspects of European civilization. The first essay was an exposition of the philosophy of Haeckel; the second a survey of the history of Western science. The third is perhaps the most important, because it furnishes a clue to Lusin's fundamental intellectual skepticism and sets forth at the same time Lusin's fundamental belief in the fostering and development of individual genius. Having outlined China's complacency in the past, due to her cultural isolation, and her rude awakening after defeat in the hands of the foreign powers, he goes on to point out that materialism, industrial development, and political democracy—panaceas recommended by reformers of the time—were by no means the ultimate or the currently accepted philosophies of the West, but only phases in its historical development. Since civilization is built upon the past, he argues, it is always in a state of flux and always subject to change and improvement. The materialistic character of nineteenth-century civilization in the West represented, he tells us, an extreme reaction to the life-denying tendencies of the Middle Ages which began with modern science, just as the rule of the majority was an extreme reaction toward the doctrine of the divine right of kings. These reactions, he declares, had gone too far, as reactions have a way of doing and must be rectified and remedied. In the course of his exposition he cites extensively Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, Ibsen, Stirner and other rebel spirits of the nineteenth century and cautioned the Chinese not to follow too blindly the superficial aspects of Western civilization.