The Real Story of Ah-Q and Other Tales

Lu Xun opens the collection with "A Madman's Diary," modern Chinese fiction's first major work written in vernacular baihua rather than classical wenyan, a formal break as deliberate as its content: a narrator convinced his own family and neighbors are secretly cannibals starts combing the Confucian classics for evidence and finds, scrawled between the printed lines of benevolence and virtue, the same two words repeated: eat people. Lu Xun, trained as a doctor in Japan before he decided fiction would do more for China than medicine, treats the narrator's paranoia as literal argument rather than figure of speech: Confucian tradition itself, the diary is suggesting, has spent centuries consuming the people it claims to civilize. It ends with the narrator restored to sanity and given a minor official post, an ending Lu Xun frames as the real horror, since recovery here means rejoining the very system he had, for one lucid stretch, correctly diagnosed.

Ah Q, a landless laborer in the fictional town of Weizhuang so marginal that even his surname is uncertain, survives every humiliation by narrating it internally as a win: beaten by the town's bullies, he tells himself it is as if his own son had struck him, an old man's consolation that costs him nothing and changes nothing. Lu Xun named the habit jingshen shengli fa, spiritual victory, and it escaped the novella almost immediately to become ordinary Chinese vocabulary for exactly this kind of self-deceiving rationalization, still current a century later. When word of the 1911 revolution reaches Weizhuang, Ah Q declares himself a revolutionary purely for the license to loot he assumes it grants him, only to watch the town's actual gentry co-opt the uprising for their own advantage and lock him out of it completely, the novella's clearest joke: even China's revolution is something that happens to Ah Q, never something he gets to join.

Writing fiction in the vernacular rather than classical Chinese was itself a political act in 1918, part of the broader May Fourth argument that a language only the educated could read was one more wall between China's intellectuals and the country they claimed to be saving, and Lu Xun's baihua prose, plain, fast, closer to speech than to scripture, is the formal proof underneath every story in the collection that the old written culture needed replacing along with the old political one.