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필사 모드: The True Story of Ah Q — A Portrait of Self-Deceiving Spiritual Victory

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Opening — The Loser Who Always Wins

Here is a man.

His surname is unclear, his given name uncertain, his age and birthplace unknown.

He owns not a single patch of land and lives day to day as a hired laborer, working other people's fields.

Everyone in the village looks down on him, and he is beaten at the slightest provocation.

And yet this man has never once lost.

At least, not inside his own head.

After a gang of louts has thrashed him, he thinks to himself as follows.

I was beaten by what amounts to my own son, so in truth I am the elder and he is the child.

Which means, in the end, that I am the winner.

In this way he swaps every humiliation for a victory in his own mind.

This is the character Lu Xun created, named Ah Q, and the technique he practices is called the spiritual victory method.

The True Story of Ah Q is a novella that Lu Xun, often called the father of modern Chinese literature, serialized in a newspaper from 1921 into the following year.

A century has passed since its publication, yet the portrait of this small, ridiculous man still pricks the reader coldly.

It makes us laugh, and then suddenly makes us look at ourselves.

In this piece we first trace Lu Xun the man and the upheaval of early twentieth-century China.

Then we look into the protagonist Ah Q and his spiritual victory method.

Next we examine the critique of a national character and the controversy it provoked, the 1911 Revolution that serves as backdrop, and Lu Xun's place in literary history.

Finally we think together about how to read a sharp satire aimed at one nation without flattening it across cultural boundaries.

Those who have not yet read it can follow comfortably.

1. Lu Xun and China at the Turn of the Century

To understand the work properly, we must first know the era in which it was born.

The China of the early 1920s, when The True Story of Ah Q was written, stood at the heart of a chaos in which an old order had collapsed and a new one had not yet been born.

The Fall of the Empire

China's imperial system, an order of rule by emperors that had lasted thousands of years, was drawing its last breath at the start of the twentieth century.

The Qing dynasty was beset by corruption and incompetence within, and by pressure from the Western powers and Japan without.

The humiliating defeats and unequal treaties that followed the Opium Wars left deep wounds in the pride of this once self-assured nation.

In 1911, the Xinhai Revolution finally broke out and the Qing dynasty fell.

The following year the Republic of China was founded, and an imperial system that had endured for more than two thousand years came to an end.

But the revolution only toppled the old dynasty; it did not transform people's hearts and lives.

Warlords carved up the country region by region, and the nation fell back into division and disorder.

It was in the air of exactly this in-between age that the character Ah Q was born.

The New Culture Movement and the Shift to Vernacular Baihua

Around this time, China's young intellectuals felt an urgent conviction that the country had to be changed from its very foundations.

That current became what is known as the New Culture Movement.

They criticized the old Confucian order and feudal customs, and called for embracing new values of science and democracy.

One of this movement's key weapons was changing the very language of writing.

Until then, China's official written language was classical literary Chinese, known as wenyan.

This written form differed greatly from everyday speech, so that only a small, long-educated elite could read and write it.

Knowledge was thus locked away as the privilege of a few.

Reformers argued for writing in a language closer to how people actually spoke, that is, in the vernacular known as baihua.

They believed that only a language anyone could read would let new ideas spread to the wider public.

Lu Xun was a pioneer who wrote his fiction in precisely this vernacular baihua.

From Doctor to Writer

Lu Xun's real name was Zhou Shuren, and he was born in 1881.

In his youth he believed that saving the nation meant becoming a doctor who healed sick bodies, and he set off to study medicine in Japan.

But during his studies, an incident occurred that overturned his thinking entirely.

It was a single lantern-slide image shown in class.

It showed a Chinese man being executed, surrounded by a crowd of fellow Chinese watching with blank faces.

Lu Xun later recalled realizing something there.

That what was truly sick was not the body but the spirit of the people.

That however sound the body, if the spirit was numb, a person would only become a meaningless onlooker, or the spectacle itself.

And so he set down the scalpel and took up the pen.

He turned toward a literature that would shake the spirit awake.

From this choice his writing, including The True Story of Ah Q, was born.

2. The Protagonist Ah Q — A Man Without Even a Name

The protagonist of The True Story of Ah Q stands at the opposite pole from the hero we usually picture.

Lu Xun makes this point with mock seriousness from the very first lines of the novella.

It is unclear even what this man's surname is.

He once boasted of sharing the surname Zhao with a distinguished family, only to be slapped by Mister Zhao and scolded that he had no right to claim it.

His given name is not accurately handed down either, so the narrator decides simply to call him Ah Q after its sound.

Here the final letter Q of the name is written as the Latin letter Q in all three languages.

This absurd opening is itself a piece of satire.

The biography, as a form, exists to honor the life of a great figure.

Yet Lu Xun borrows that grand form to write the story of a man of the lowest class, without name or lineage.

A Man in the Lowest Place

Ah Q is a hired laborer who lives on the margins of a small village called Weizhuang.

The only thing he owns is his own body, so he earns scraps of food by working others' fields and hulling their rice.

His place in the village is the very bottom.

The village louts tease and beat him whenever they are bored.

And the more this happens, the more Ah Q seeks out someone weaker to vent his anger upon.

Trampled by the strong and trampling the weak, this sorrowful cycle is his world.

The Ah Q that Lu Xun draws is by no means a pure victim.

He is cowardly, full of vanity, and cruel to those weaker than himself.

The author neither glorifies him nor pities him unconditionally.

That very coldness of distance is what keeps the novella from cheap tears.

3. The Spiritual Victory Method — Turning Humiliation into Triumph

The most famous concept The True Story of Ah Q left behind is the spiritual victory method.

This is a technique of self-deception that turns defeat and humiliation suffered in reality into an imagined triumph inside the head.

A Mind That Believes It Won Even in Defeat

Ah Q loses his fights almost every time.

But he never once admits that he has lost.

After a gang of louts has beaten him soundly, he mutters to himself as follows.

I have been beaten by what amounts to my own son.

What a sorry state the world is in these days, that a son should strike his father.

Once he has thought this, he becomes the victor and walks off satisfied.

At other times he slaps his own face.

Then he feels pleased, as though he were the one who had struck another.

By splitting himself into two people, the hand that struck and the other who was struck, he manufactures a victory.

However much reality tramples him, in his imagination he always stands on top.

This is the heart of the spiritual victory method.

Self-Deception as a Refuge

At first glance the spiritual victory method looks merely ridiculous.

But look a little closer and there is a cold truth inside it.

For a person with no power whatsoever to change reality, this self-deception is the one consolation that remains.

He cannot bear it unless he renames defeat as victory.

The problem is that this consolation ultimately changes nothing.

Drunk on spiritual victory, Ah Q never faces his own condition.

He neither examines the cause of his humiliation nor strives to change it.

He merely declares victory in his mind and falls asleep content.

This is exactly the point Lu Xun took aim at.

Self-deception eases the pain of the moment, but it binds a person to their place forever.

Because instead of changing reality, it makes one look away from it.

4. Satire of a National Character and Its Controversy

What Lu Xun sought to portray through Ah Q was not merely one pitiable individual.

He tried to pour into the character of Ah Q a certain sick spirit of the Chinese society of his day.

From One Man to One Nation

The spiritual victory method is not Ah Q's peculiar personal habit.

Lu Xun made it a metaphor for the situation China then faced.

The attitude of consoling oneself by reciting the superiority of an ancient culture, even after repeated defeats by the great powers.

The tendency to settle into spiritual self-satisfaction rather than face real humiliation and set about reform.

Lu Xun compressed the danger of such collective self-deception into the single character of Ah Q.

Ah Q is therefore at once one man and the portrait of an age.

The author, in effect, held up the most painful of mirrors to the homeland he loved.

He was asking whether this man you are laughing at is not, in fact, an image of yourselves.

A Criticism Born of Love

One misunderstanding needs to be cleared up here.

Lu Xun's satire was not meant to mock or despise his homeland.

It was quite the opposite.

Because he loved China deeply, he could not help but honestly reveal the places where it was sick.

When a doctor cuts away diseased tissue, it is not out of hatred for the patient.

It is out of a desperate wish to heal.

Beneath the sharpness of Lu Xun's pen lies exactly that kind of desperate affection.

Miss this point, and The True Story of Ah Q is easily read as nothing more than cynical mockery.

A Heated Debate

This satire aimed at a national character has stirred heated debate from the time of its publication down to today.

Some deeply agreed with Lu Xun's insight and received it as an occasion for awakening.

Others, by contrast, were uncomfortable.

Is it truly justified to fix the character of a whole nation's people into a single negative type?

Is the spiritual victory method really a trait unique to China, or is it a universal response of any human being placed in a position of powerlessness?

Such questions carried on for a long time.

Interestingly, the phrase spiritual victory method later became an everyday expression in Chinese.

It settled in as a phrase pointing to the attitude of looking away from one's situation and sinking into forced consolation.

It is a rare case of a single novella changing the language itself.

5. The 1911 Revolution as Backdrop and Ah Q's Fate

The latter half of The True Story of Ah Q overlaps with the actual history of the 1911 Xinhai Revolution.

It shows how that enormous event appeared to a small village called Weizhuang, and to a man at the very bottom named Ah Q.

A Man Who Misunderstands the Revolution

When rumor of the revolution reaches the village, Ah Q is seized by a strange excitement.

He has no idea whatever what the revolution is.

He only vaguely expects that by becoming a revolutionary he might stand above those who had looked down on him.

The revolution in his head is neither an idea nor a cause.

It is merely a fantasy of seizing the goods he had wanted and taking revenge on those he had hated.

Here Lu Xun's satire aims in two directions at once.

It takes aim at Ah Q, who misunderstands the revolution so crudely, and at the same time at the limits of a revolution that failed to awaken the very people at the bottom.

The village's powerful men quickly drape themselves in the clothes of the revolutionary party and go on enjoying their power.

The world has changed only in name, while the old order carries on just as before.

To a true have-not like Ah Q, the revolution brought nothing at all.

An Absurd End

From here we deal briefly with matters relating to the ending.

If you have not yet read it, you may skip this passage.

Ah Q's end is utterly hollow.

He is falsely accused of a robbery he did not commit and is arrested.

Without properly understanding why, he is put on trial and dragged off to the execution ground.

Even in the moment before his death, he never fully grasps his situation.

The crowd of onlookers surrounding him overlaps with that blank-faced crowd Lu Xun had once seen in the lantern slide.

Even as a human being is unjustly extinguished, the people merely watch it as an indifferent spectacle.

There is no heroic solemnity in Ah Q's death, no satisfying justice.

Only a cold meaninglessness and a bitter aftertaste remain.

It is precisely that meaninglessness that Lu Xun meant to engrave on the reader's heart.

6. Lu Xun, Father of Modern Chinese Literature

The True Story of Ah Q is hard to speak of apart from the standing of the writer Lu Xun.

He is commonly called the father of modern Chinese literature.

A Pioneer of Vernacular Fiction

With his earlier work A Madman's Diary, Lu Xun presented the first modern short story written in vernacular baihua.

Then, with The True Story of Ah Q, he pushed that achievement further, both broader and deeper.

Written in everyday language, these stories showed that literature could break free from being the exclusive property of a small intellectual class and be read widely.

At the same time they proved that such a language could still probe the deep places of the human spirit.

In this respect Lu Xun is regarded as the figure who opened the door to a new Chinese literature.

An Influence Beyond Literature

Lu Xun's influence reached far beyond the fence of literature.

His writing gave deep stimulus to the intellectuals and young people of China at the turn of the century.

His sharp criticism of old customs, his compassion for the weak, and his uncompromising honesty became a spiritual inheritance.

Even today, Lu Xun's works are widely read in China's schools.

A great many of his sentences and expressions have dissolved into everyday speech.

It is uncommon for a single writer to have defined a nation's spiritual self-portrait for so long.

It is worth remembering, of course, that his legacy has been interpreted in various ways across different eras, and at times put to political use.

For the greater the writer, the more surely their work is placed within the many readings of later generations.

7. A Sharp Edge and the Debate Over How to Read It

The True Story of Ah Q is by no means an easy novella to read.

The blade of its satire is so sharp that it makes the reader laugh and then, at once, grow uncomfortable.

The Chill Behind the Laughter

Following Ah Q's spiritual victory method, one laughs at first.

His forced logic is ridiculous.

But read a little further and the laughter dies down.

Because a question suddenly rises up.

Am I really so different from Ah Q?

Might some of the consolations I hold dear also be spiritual victories meant to look away from reality?

At this point Ah Q ceases to be a laughable man from a faraway land.

He becomes a portrait of a certain evasion that dwells within each of us.

The Debate Over How to Read

There have long been differing voices over how this work should be read.

One reads it as a historical satire aimed at the ills of a particular age and a particular society.

Another reads it as a story of a self-deception universal to human beings, one that crosses eras and borders.

The two readings are not mutually exclusive.

The strength of The True Story of Ah Q lies precisely in holding both these layers at once.

It is a concrete portrait of one age and, at the same time, a fable of a human psychology that outlasts the age.

A good classic can withstand many layers of reading like this.

8. How to Read a Pointed National Satire Across Cultures Without Flattening It

Here we must pause over a delicate problem.

The True Story of Ah Q is a sharp satire aimed at the national character of one particular country.

When a reader from another culture reads such a work, special care is needed.

[The Loop of Spiritual Victory]

  Suffer a real humiliation
        |
        v
  Swap it for a victory in the mind
        |
        v
  A brief satisfaction and comfort
        |
        v
  Reality unchanged, nothing altered
        |
        +------ back to humiliation (loop repeats)

Not Flattening It

The most common misreading is to freeze Ah Q into a fixed image of an entire people.

Lu Xun held up this mirror out of love for and desperation over his own homeland.

But to take this satire from outside and use it as a tool to belittle a particular people would turn the author's intention on its head.

An insider's painful self-criticism and an outsider's easy mockery are entirely different things.

The very same sentence can mean the opposite depending on who speaks it and in what spirit.

Turning the Mirror Toward Ourselves

So how, then, is a reader from another culture best to read this work?

The healthiest way is to turn the mirror back upon oneself.

The spiritual victory method belongs to no single nation.

The attitude of soothing oneself with forced consolation from a place of powerlessness exists in every society and in every individual.

Before the portrait of Ah Q, the question we should ask is not why are those people like that.

It is what spiritual victories do I, and do we, lean upon.

Read this way, The True Story of Ah Q becomes not an accusation against a particular people but a humble mirror of reflection turned toward all of humanity.

Reading It Together with Its Context

Finally, this work is richest when read together with the historical context in which it was born.

Once you know the backdrop of the fall of the empire, the repeated defeats, and the New Culture Movement, you can finally see where Lu Xun's sharpness came from.

Cut the satire loose from its context and quote only its phrases, and misunderstanding easily grows.

When we feel the weight of the age the work stands upon, we can take in this old satire fully, without flattening it.

Closing — Standing Before the Mirror

The True Story of Ah Q is a story about a ridiculous man.

But at the end of that laughter, we lose our laughter.

Because what is reflected there may be not a stranger but ourselves.

Lu Xun offers us no easy comfort.

Instead he holds up a mirror that is honest to the point of pain.

What humiliation are you renaming as victory right now, deceiving yourself?

Where does that self-deception hold you fast?

There is the story of a man who always lost his fights yet always won them inside his own head.

That story carries on, a century later, into the mirror inside each of us.

Just how hard it is to look at oneself honestly, this small novella quietly reminds us.

That is what makes The True Story of Ah Q a living classic still.

Questions to Ponder

  1. Do you too have moments when you rename a humiliation or a failure into something else inside your mind? Is that comfort, or is it evasion?
  2. Is the spiritual victory method a trait of one nation alone, or a universal response of any human being placed in powerlessness?
  3. Lu Xun's criticism was born of love for his homeland. How can love and criticism go together?
  4. When reading the self-critical satire of another culture, what must one take care of so as not to turn it into a tool of mockery?

References

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Here is a man.

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