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Ah Q-uestion of character
By Yang Guang (China Daily)
Updated: 2009-10-14 10:37
Hailed by Chairman Mao Zedong as "a great revolutionary", "the commander of China's cultural revolution" and "the saint of China", Lu Xun (1881-1936) and his legacy continue to resonate in Chinese intellectual life. A literary colossus, he was known for his incisive insights into the nation's social and political ills, and for his pioneering achievements in using the vernacular as a literary language. Recognizing Lu Xun's iconic place in China's literary canon, Penguin Books will launch The Real Story of Ah-Q and Other Tales of China - The Complete Fiction of Lu Xun (Complete Fiction) at the end of this month as part of its established Penguin Classics series. "For contemporary readers of English to understand China today, Lu Xun's fiction is a wonderful place to start," says Jo Lusby, general manager of Penguin China. "His writing speaks both to China's recent history and context, and to a present spirit and personality." Complete Fiction consists of all three collections of Lu Xun's short stories written between 1918 and 1935. Outcry (Nahan) (1922) and Hesitation (Panghuang) (1925) feature 25 stories that straddle the central social, political and cultural issues of Lu Xun's time, including the nation's superstition, backwardness, poverty and complacence. Old Stories Retold (Gushi Xinbian) (1935) is a compilation of eight ancient legends, told from a fresh perspective. It took translator Julia Lovell three years to complete work on the current edition. Lovell, a lecturer in Chinese history at the University of London, has previously translated the novels I Love Dollars (Wo Ai Meiyuan) by Zhu Wen, Serve the People (Wei Renmin Fuwu) by Yan Lianke, and A Dictionary of Maqiao (Maqiao Cidian) by Han Shaogong. She has also edited and translated in part Lust, Caution (Se Jie), a collection of short stories by Eileen Chang. A large part of Lu Xun's acclaim is derived from his analysis and criticism of the Chinese national character. For example, Ah-Q, the idler in Weizhuang, embodies perhaps Lu Xun's most penetrating denunciation of the national obsession with face, the superiority complex, the servility before authority and cruelty toward the weak, and the conceited delight in ignorance. For instance, Ah-Q would size up his adversary before taking a move: The dull-witted he would subject to a tongue-lashing; the weak he would punch in the nose. Whenever he came off worse, which was almost always, he pared his strategy down to an angry glare. When the whole incident ended in blows and Ah-Q's formal submission, he would stand there, thinking to himself, "Beaten again by that scum. It's like a father getting thrashed by his sons". Then he too would jubilantly leave the scene of what he deemed was his - moral - triumph. The term Ah-Q-ism was coined after Ah-Q to signify the Chinese penchant for referring to defeat as a "spiritual victory". Lu Xun once said, "I wrote The Real Story with the intention of exposing the weakness of my fellow citizens." According to one account, he chose the Roman letter Q as his hero's name because it resembles a blank face with a pigtail - a derisive hint at Chinese manhood back then. Lu Xun's feelings toward Ah-Q, and his compatriots at large, is perhaps best represented in the following sentence from one of his essays: "(He is) as saddened by the miseries of those people as (he is) infuriated by their reconciliation with their fate". Lu Xun's writings are excerpted in Chinese textbooks for primary and secondary school students, making him the nation's No 1 "must-read" writer. Students are required to learn some of his essays by rote, sometimes including punctuations. Thirty years on, Li Yiyun, an emerging novelist and essayist who grew up in Beijing and moved to the United States in 1996, still remembers the shiver she felt when she was first exposed to Lu Xun at the age of six. Her mother, a primary school teacher, had her memorize part of My Old Home (Gu Xiang), which was excerpted in the fifth-grade textbook. "The image of Runtu (the protagonist in My Old Home) was so engraved in my mind that I often forgot that neither the narrator nor I had seen Runtu on that seashore," Li writes in the afterword to the Complete Fiction. Reading Lovell's translations and rereading the original texts has once again made the stories' memorable characters come alive, she says, referring to Ah-Q knocking his knuckles on the shaven head of the young nun (The Real Story of Ah-Q), Kong Yiji's long fingernails tapping on the bar (Kong Yiji), and the Bean-Curd Beauty with her bound feet and sharp tongue (My Old Home). "It would not be a stretch to say that these characters have taken permanent residence in the collective memory of my generation and perhaps one or two generations before us," she says. But some of the younger writers of the 1990s' market economy and readers who grew up in the consumerist society say that Lu Xun has gone out of fashion. In 1998, the then 31-year-old writer Zhu Wen conducted a survey, polling the opinions of his generation of writers and published Rupture: One Questionnaire and Fifty-six Responses in the October issue of the journal Beijing Literature (Beijing Wenxue). In some responses, Lu Xun was contemptuously dismissed as "an old stone", and the prestigious literary prize named after him mocked. Before the new school semester began this September, a newspaper report, which pointed out that two pieces of Lu Xun's writings had been omitted from the revised textbooks published by People's Education Press, kindled a new round of debate on whether Lu Xun is outdated.
It died down only after experts on education and Chinese language and literature, in one voice, affirmed Lu Xun's pivotal position in China's literary landscape, and more than half the netizens voiced their opposition to the revision. Lovell sees Lu Xun's legacy - his "paradoxical brand of nationalism" (of passionate attachment to, yet disappointment with, the nation) - in the literary inquiry into the collective madness of the "cultural revolution" (1966-76) in the late 1970s and early 1980s; and even in the 2008 Beijing Olympics: "While the capital bubbled over with a desire to showcase the achievements of the post-Mao economic miracle, government and civilians alike worried about the city's 'spiritual civilization', waging mass education campaigns to eradicate bad public habits (spitting, littering, sloppy personal hygiene) that might offend sensitive foreigners," she writes in an in-depth introduction to Lu Xun. Lusby says she would love to see more works by Lu Xun made available from Penguin, but "we'll have to wait and see how people respond to this edition". |