Lu Xun and the True Story of Ah Q
When I played Devin an English audiobook rendition of Lu Xun’s short story, The True Story of Ah Q (1921), he found it interesting because there are very few pieces of literature whose message is just “normal people suck.” If you read Dickens or Steinbeck, it’s all about praising the average hardscrabble person who perseveres despite their circumstances. Very rarely does some intellectual come along and just write a story about how the average person is meritless. And that’s exactly what Lu Xun does in this story.
The True Story of Ah Q is perhaps more of a character sketch than a story. It creates an anonymous but recognizable character: he is laughable but not funny, pitiful but not sympathetic; he that bullies the weak but grovels to the strong and is so thoroughly repugnant that it perhaps motivated generations of Chinese people after those times to disavow any likeness to him. For many years, to describe another as an Ah Q was quite an insult, akin to calling someone a lazy complacent bum. In the more recent years, amidst the 996 work schedules in the tech industry and people dying from overwork and hyper-competition, there’s been a slight reversal of this trend, and there’s a phrase in internet slang “Let’s Ah Q a bit”, meaning “relax, take it easy.” I will not bore folks with a plot summary that can be found on Wikipedia, but basically the story follows Ah Q’s life from his days as an odd-job worker, to his bullying of a nun and attempt to rape the maidservant of a large family, to his days as a petty thief and then his execution for a “revolutionary” looting that he tried but failed to participate in.
So who is this Ah Q? Ah Q is an anonymous peasant who’s real name and land of origin is not known. He has no particular occupation, lives in an old abandoned temple, and gets by doing odd chores and thieving. His most notable characteristic is winning “spiritual victories” when after a humiliating encounter or defeat, he deludes himself into believing that he was actually the victor. For example, in Chapter 2, when he gets beaten up and loses his money in a gambling fight, he slaps himself. “After this slapping his heart felt lighter, for it seemed as if the one who had given the slap was himself, the one slapped some other self, and soon it was just as if he had beaten someone else — in spite of the fact that his face was still tingling. He lay down satisfied that he had gained the victory.” Ah Q lives a pathetic life and dies a pathetic death, obsessed with “saving face” and delusional spiritual victories. This was a condensation of everything wrong with China’s national character. In the author’s own words:
“My method is to make the reader unable to tell who this character can be apart from himself, so that he cannot back away to become a bystander but rather suspects that this is a portrait of himself as well as everyone [in China]. A road to self-examination may therefore be opened to him.”
It was a story extremely appropriate for its times. Lu Xun hated Confucianism and the elitism of traditional written Chinese. Arguably, Confucianism is a ruling philosophy that emphasized loyalty and obedience — subject should obey liege, wife should obey husband, son should obey father, and the illiterate should obey the intelligentsia. Essentially, by making literacy an extremely high bar and encouraging blind obedience and superstition in the masses, Confucianism made it easier for the royalty and ruling class of educated bureaucrats to govern the country. But the same guiding philosophy produced masses of illiterate, dogmatic, and hopelessly complacent people, which was bad news for a country facing colonialism by foreign powers.
So where does that leave us today? With all the 996 grinding going on today, China’s national spirit or character is far from “complacent”, rather people are characterized as hyper-competitive to the point of “involution” (内卷), a phenomenon people describe as hyper-competitiveness in an economy that does not lead to better outcomes for society. I wonder if a bit of this is due to a hyper competitive exam-based education system that teaches us to memorize correct answers rather than critically think about literature and history in context and teaches us that the most important thing is to test better than our peers rather than figure out how to find and add own our unique value to society. Perhaps, a better way to read Lu Xun, is not to memorize the correct answer on the middle school literature exam for what he’s “central thesis” was, but to think critically about the guiding philosophies and values promoted by various pieces of media (social or traditional), the design and purpose of the education we receive, the unquestioned assumptions in society values, and the effect it has on how we think, act, and live our lives.
Plot Summary: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_True_Story_of_Ah_Q
English Translation: https://www.marxists.org/archive/lu-xun/1921/12/ah-q/index.htm
