The True Story of Ah Q

Rating:
Summary: Beyond propaganda: The reality of village life in China
Review: The Chinese communist party likes to claim Lu Xun as a precursor to later social critics who wrote along party lines. He definitely does not belong in that category. The cover of the English translation, published by the Foreign Languages Press Beijing,(not this edition) claims that his story, set in the China of 1911, reflects "the sharp class contradictions and the peasant masses' demand for revolution". Nothing could be farther from the truth. There are no peasants in Lu Xun's story who demand a revolution. On the contrary, when revolution "arrives" in the towns, it is the officials of the crumbling Ming Dynasty in the village who try to jump on the new train first. The peasants are dumbfounded, but essentially, they do not care. Ah Q is a day laborer who lives on the odd jobs he gets from time to time in his small village. He is an optimistic, naive peasant inclined to turn his daily humiliations into imaginary "victories" When he commits the mistake of confessing his love to a lowly female employee in the household of a wealthy official by saying "sleep with me", he is ostracised by the whole village and forced to steal in order to survive. Finally, he leaves the village. He returns as a man with money, and suddenly gains the respect of the villagers and the local officials. Later, however, he commits another mistake. He tells that the gained the money by selling stolen goods. In the end, he is executed because the officials decide that he has robbed the house of an official.

Lu Xun tells the story in a very detached manner, never interfering with comments of his own. He is very sarcastic: the final chapter which tells of the execution of Ah Q is titled "The Grand Finale". Ah Q is depicted as a likeable fool, stumbling through life and thrown about by chance events and his own clumsiness. The world of the village is one of pettiness, slander, envy, opportunistic cowardness, intellectual tedium, and everyday muddling through. The revolution never has any meaning to the village, other than an interference of the balance of power, an external event to which the poor and the less poor have to adapt in order to survive. Ah Q seems to me to be a symbol for China in the early years of the 20th century: a naive peasant who dreams of great things but finally stumbles helplessly to a bitter end.

The cover text of the Chinese edition concludes that it "was the author's sincere hope that the broad masses of peasants, victims of feudal oppression and imperialist aggression, might be aroused and rise in resistance against them." My own overall impression of the atmosphere in Ah Q's village is one of stifling inertia where everyone was caught in a net of inhibiting relationships and only looked for his own (and his family's) improvement in social status. No masses, no arousal. A sad story, but a true one, I guess.