The Real Story of Ah-Q (16 page)

The question of specifying Ah-Q’s place of birth is my fourth difficulty. If we could be sure his surname was Zhao, we could trace him back to the province from which the clan originated. A quick glance through our old school copy of the
Hundred Surnames
³
would leave him ‘A Native of Tianshui, Gansu Province’. But as we have no reliable information about his surname, neither can we fix on his birthplace. Although he spent most of his life in the village of Weizhuang, he was often to be found in other places, too, so to term him a native of Weizhuang would hardly be historically rigorous.

My only consolation in this whole sorry business is that one syllable of his name at least – ‘Ah’
^*
– can boast of an unimpugnable correctness. What remains to be known lies beyond the superficial capabilities of amateurs to unravel; and I can only hope that in future the disciples of a dedicated erudite such as Mr Hu Shi
⁴
will hunt out new clues, in their relentless quest to further human knowledge, thoroughly obliterating what little achievement my
Real Story of Ah-Q
may constitute.

That should do for a Preface.

It was not only Ah-Q’s name and place of origin that were shrouded in mystery – but also the details of his early life. Because the good people of Weizhuang called upon him only to help out with odd jobs, or to serve as the butt of jokes, no one ever paid much attention to such niceties. Neither was Ah-Q himself particularly forthcoming on the subject, except when he got into arguments, viz.:

‘My ancestors were much richer than yours! Scum!’

Ah-Q had no home of his own: in Weizhuang, he lodged in the Temple of the God of the Earth and the God of the Five Grains. Neither, as the village odd-job man, did he have a fixed profession. If someone was needed to harvest wheat, he harvested wheat; if called upon to husk rice, he husked rice; if a boat wanted poling, that’s what he did. If a job was likely to take a while, he lodged with his employer; but once it was over, he left. When people were in a hurry to get something done, therefore, they remembered Ah-Q – but only the odd jobs he could do for them, and not his life history. And as soon as they were no longer in such a hurry, Ah-Q – and his elusive biographical details – were quickly forgotten. ‘He puts his back into it, that Ah-Q!’ an old man once admiringly remarked, considering our hero’s bare, torpidly scrawny torso – that was the closest anyone ever got to constructing a personality profile of him. Those who overheard him couldn’t make out whether his eulogizer was being genuine or sarcastic; but Ah-Q, at least, was delighted.

Ah-Q had a robust sense of his own self-worth, placing the rest of Weizhuang far beneath him in the social scale. Even the village’s two aspiring young scholars – the Zhao and Qian sons – he considered with haughty contempt. In time, they could both reasonably be expected to get through at least the lowest rung of the official examinations – the path to power and riches. Their fathers, the venerable Mr Zhao and Mr Qian, therefore received the village’s craven respect not just for their personal wealth, but also for their sons’ academic prospects. Only Ah-Q remained invulnerable to the glamour of their future promise: My son will be much richer than them! he thought to himself. A few trips into town further bolstered Ah-Q’s
amour propre
, adding townspeople to his already abundant store of subjects of scorn. People in town couldn’t get anything right: they said ‘narrow benches’ for the wooden trestles, three feet long by three inches wide, that the people of Weizhuang – him included – quite correctly called ‘long benches’. How stupid can people be! he thought. Or when frying fish, the people of Weizhuang cut their spring onions into half-inch lengths, while townspeople shredded them. How stupid can people be! he thought again. Though the people of Weizhuang, of course, were still village idiots: think of it – they didn’t even know how people fried fish in town!

This Ah-Q of ours – with his wealthy forebears, his urban sophistication, his laudable application to his chosen career – would have been the embodiment of perfection, had it not been for his regrettable possession of a few constitutional defects. The most annoying of which was the perfidious emergence on his scalp of a number of gleaming ringworm scars. Although they were of his own revered body’s making, Ah-Q felt them unworthy of him and for this reason came to view as taboo the word ‘ringworm’, or anything that sounded like it. In time, the scope of this linguistic prohibition steadily broadened: first to ‘shiny’, then ‘bright’, extending a little later on to ‘lamp’ or ‘candle’. Any flaunting of the taboo – whether deliberate or accidental – provoked first the controversial scars to glow a furious red. Ah-Q would then size up his adversary: the dull-witted he would subject to a tongue-lashing; the weak he would punch in the nose. The curious thing, though, was how often – in fact, almost always – Ah-Q came off worse. In time, then, he pared his strategy down to an Angry Glare.

Another curious thing: after Ah-Q began practising the Art of the Angry Glare, Weizhuang’s idlers took to provoking him with ever greater relish.

‘Bit bright, isn’t it?’ they would remark, in deliberate surprise, on encountering him.

Cue the Angry Glare.

‘Oh… a lamp!’ they would shamelessly continue.

Ah-Q struggled to find an appropriate riposte.

‘You’re not worth a…’ At moments such as these, Ah-Q’s ringworm suddenly struck him as a badge of honour for which no sacrifice was too great; far superior to your average, run-ofthe-mill dermatological defect. As has been amply demonstrated, however, Ah-Q was a man of exceptional prescience: sensing an imminent breaking of his cherished taboo, he said no more.

But his interlocutors wouldn’t let it lie. On they went needling him, until the whole thing ended in blows, and Ah-Q’s formal submission: with the seizing of his sallow queue and the robust knocking of his head four or five times against a wall. After which, his adversaries would at last depart, their hearts fairly singing with the joys of victory. ‘Beaten again by that scum,’ Ah-Q would stand there, thinking to himself. ‘It’s like a father getting thrashed by his sons. What’s the world coming to…’ Then he, too, would jubilantly leave the scene of his triumph.

In time, whenever something like this happened, Ah-Q began to say out loud what at first he had only thought. In this way, Ah-Q’s tormentors learnt of his habit of declaring moral victory over the ashes of defeat, and added their own revisions while yanking on his queue.

‘Think of it this way, Ah-Q. We’re not sons beating our father – we’re men beating an animal. Repeat after us: men beating an animal!’

‘Or how about,’ Ah-Q would twist his head back round, trying to protect the base of his queue, ‘a slug? I’m a slug! A slug! Now will you let me go?’

They would not, and went on to give his head the time-honoured bashing against the nearest hard surface, before swinging off, their hearts again singing with the joys of victory, thinking this time their point had been well and truly made. And yet within ten seconds, Ah-Q had set jubilantly off on his own way. He was now the top self-abaser in China, and once you’d discarded the inconvenient ‘self-abaser’, you were left with ‘top’ – ‘top’ as in ‘top in the civil service examinations’. ‘Ha! Scum!’

Once Ah-Q’s enemies had been trounced by such ingenious means, he would trot happily off to the tavern, down a few bowls of wine, crack a few jokes, start a few arguments and, victorious again, return happily to the Temple of Earth and Grain, where he would lay his head down and go straight to sleep. If he had money in his pocket, he would go off to gamble, sweatily squeezing his way in among a crowd of other chancers squatted down on the ground.

‘Four hundred on the Green Dragon!’ he would roar, louder than anyone else.

‘There… we… go!’ the banker would sing out, lifting the lid on his box, his face also swimming in sweat. ‘Heaven’s Gate wins… Evens on the Corner… Nothing on the Passage… Over here with Ah-Q’s stake!’

‘One hundred on the Passage – one hundred and fifty!’

And so Ah-Q’s money was sung away into the pockets of others, their faces equally slippery with sweat, until there was nothing left for him to do but push his way back from the front line, and watch from the back, feeling anxious on other people’s behalf. When everyone else scattered he, too, would take himself reluctantly back to his temple, appearing for work the next day with puffy eyes.

But every silver lining has its cloud, to paraphrase the proverb, and the one time that Ah-Q was unfortunate enough to win, he lost almost everything.

It was the evening of Weizhuang’s Festival of the Gods. There was opera, as usual, with gambling stalls set up near the stage. The drums and gongs buzzed only faintly in Ah-Q’s ears, as if the musicians were miles away. All he could hear was the banker’s singsong. He won, and he won again, his coppers turning silver, his silver turning into dollars – a great pile of shiny dollars. He was dizzy with euphoria.

‘Two dollars on Heaven’s Gate!’

He didn’t know who started the fighting, or why. The sounds of cursing, of blows, of footsteps blurred into a single confused roar; and when finally he clambered to his feet, stalls and gamblers had disappeared. His body seemed to hurt in various places, as if it had been hit or kicked, and people were looking curiously at him. After taking himself back, rather nonplussed, to the Temple of Earth and Grain, he recovered his wits sufficiently to discover his pile of money was gone. How was he to get to the bottom of it? Most of the gamblers that night had come from outside the village.

That shiny pile of silver dollars! Once it had been all his – but where was it now? He tried telling himself his son had stolen it; his discontent continued to simmer. He told himself he was a slug – still no peace of mind. Now, only now, did he feel the bitterness of defeat.

And yet victory, as ever, was close at hand. His right hand soared upwards, to deliver one – two forceful slaps to the face. He then got up, his cheeks burning with pain, his good humour fully restored. Soon enough, he was perfectly convinced that he had hit someone else entirely – even though his cheeks continued to sting rather. He lay down, his heart easy with victory.

And fell asleep.

In Ah-Q’s long and illustrious record of victories, it was the slap he had received from Mr Zhao that made his reputation.

‘What’s the world coming to?’ he fulminated to himself in bed, after paying off the constable. ‘Sons hitting their fathers…’ Now, if someone as rich and powerful as Mr Zhao was his son… Soon enough, feeling extremely pleased with himself again, he wandered off to the tavern, humming a few lines of opera to himself –
The Young Widow at Her Husband’s Grave
. Mr Zhao, Ah-Q was prepared to allow, was a cut above the rest of Weizhuang’s scum.

The funny thing was that his fellow villagers
did
begin to treat him with a new respect. Ah-Q may have deluded himself into thinking it was because he actually was Mr Zhao’s father; the real reason was very different. In Weizhuang, public opinion went something like this: no one took any notice if any Li, Wang or Zhang began slapping each other about. It was only when a man of reputation like Mr Zhao got involved that such an imbroglio was singled out for public approbation, with the hittee sharing in the hitter’s glory. Ah-Q, it was of course universally accepted, had been in the wrong, because Mr Zhao was never wrong. How, then, to explain the new awe with which he was regarded? Perhaps – to hazard an unreliable guess at the matter – it all went back to Ah-Q’s claim of blood relation to Mr Zhao. Even though he had been soundly beaten for it, maybe everyone feared there might be some grain of truth to the allegation, and the safest thing would be to mind themselves around him a bit more. Or maybe Ah-Q became as untouchable as the sacrificial beef in Confucius’s ancestral temple – because the sage had once touched it with his sacred chopsticks, it acquired an aura of sanctity for his disciples.

For Ah-Q, all this was a source of pride for many years to come.

Ambling drunkenly along one spring day, he came upon an individual by the name of Wang sitting in the sunlight at the foot of a wall, stripped to the waist, busily delousing. Ah-Q’s skin suddenly prickled all over. In tribute to his abundance of both facial hair and ringworm, the people of Weizhuang generally acclaimed this Wang as Hairy Ringwormed Wang. Now although – for his own delicate reasons – Ah-Q preferred not to bring up the subject of ringworm, this Wang still enjoyed his utter contempt. Ringworm, for Ah-Q, was nothing to be particularly ashamed of; it was the man’s excessively hairy chops that offered grounds for true scorn. He sat down alongside him. Ah-Q would not have dared sit so carelessly next to any other of Weizhuang’s idlers, but what did he have to fear from this scurvy hair-ball? That he was willing even to sit down next to him was, quite simply, an exalted honour for the wretch.

Ah-Q also took off his tattered jacket, turned it inside out and began checking it over for lice of his own. Perhaps because he had washed it too recently, or because he didn’t look hard enough, after expending much time and effort he succeeded in locating only three or four. He glanced across at Wang, catching one after another and popping them between his teeth.